I have been around golf my whole life without ever quite being inside the ropes. My sister Whitney and sister-in-law Ulrika played in college and then professionally for years. I spent part of my early career in sales at Golf Digest. I have walked more fairways and watched more rounds than I can count. And yet I have always stood slightly outside the ropes. Adjacent to the game, fluent in it, but never in it. This week I took my husband to the US Open at Shinnecock Hills for his 50th birthday. Three days walking the course. And somewhere around the back nine of Day 2, all of those worlds I have lived in separately, my sister, my sister-in-law, Golf Digest, and the companies I am building now in women's health, collided into a single thought. I wasn't just watching golf. I was watching a very honest metaphor for what it feels like to build in women's health. And the longer I walked, the more I realized it was the same metaphor for the thing so many of you are doing right now: looking for your next role, your next chapter, your way in. I started a list on my phone as we walked. By the end of the tournament it was two dozen deep. Here are the ones that stayed with me. You're always playing with incomplete informationAt Shinnecock there are holes where you can't see the slope of the green from the fairway. The course hides things from you on purpose. You commit to a shot knowing you don't have the full picture, and you adjust when reality shows up. That is women's health. We have been building companies and designing treatments on incomplete data since 1993, the year women were finally required to be included in NIH-funded clinical research. The funding gap created an information and systems gap, and we are all still playing the course as it was built. (Feels like we need a course renovation.) And it is every job search. You apply without seeing the real comp, the team dynamics, whether the role is what the description promised. You commit anyway, and you adjust when the truth shows up. Nobody hands you the full read. You play the shot regardless. When it's hard, limit the damage. When it's working, hit the gas.The man who won, Wyndham Clark, carried a six-stroke lead into the final round and nearly gave all of it back. By the turn, his lead was down to one. He didn't win because he played clean. He won because every time he got into trouble, he limited the damage. Bad lie in the fescue on 16, and he scrambled back into the fairway and made birdie anyway. His own father said if you look up resilience in the dictionary, you see his name. That is the whole game. Even the best players make double bogeys. So do the best founders. The difference is they contain them. They don't let one blow-up become four. And when the opening comes, they put their foot on the gas. Clark's birdie on 16 wasn't defense. That was him pressing the advantage at the exact moment it mattered. A job search is the purest version of this I know. It is mostly rejection management. The skill is not avoiding the no's, because they are coming. It is not letting one ghosted application or one interview that went sideways spiral into a lost month. And then, when something heats up, a warm intro, a recruiter leaning in, two conversations in the same week, you move fast. You press. Defense when it's hard, offense when it's working. Knowing which mode you're in is most of the game, whether you're building a company or building your next chapter. Visibility is not the same as viability. |
The economics are brutal, and the leaderboard isn't the fieldClark walked away with $4.5 million. But the leaderboard is not the sport. More than half the field went home after Friday, a record-low cut line at Shinnecock, and still dozens of professionals packing up and driving home, including former US Open winners. And those are the ones who made it onto the course in the first place. Below them is a whole tier of players eating peanut butter sandwiches and living out of their cars to chase a PGA Tour card. I watched my sister live this life for years until she made it to the US Open. Women's health works the same way. The names that get the coverage and the term sheets are the leaderboard. Most founders are the cut line, self-funding, grinding, doing the work whether or not anyone is watching. So does the job market. The hires you see are the "thrilled to announce" posts. What you don't see is everyone running a quiet, months-long search underneath: tailoring, following up, getting close and missing, going back out the next morning. If this is you, keep going. That is what I saw all week at Shinnecock. What you can control, and what it costs to get on the fieldNot the wind. Not the course setup. Not the pin position. The pros don't waste energy on what they can't control. They execute the shot in front of them and let the round take care of itself. In a search, you cannot control the hiring freeze, the internal candidate, who decides to respond. You can control the next application, the next follow-up, the next honest conversation. What is the next shot in front of you to hit? And before you hit any shot, you have to qualify. You have to earn the right to be there. In women's health, getting on the field, the meeting, the check, the seat at the table, is frequently harder than the building itself. In a search, getting the interview, the referral, the screen, is often harder than the job would be. The round doesn't start at the first tee. It starts long before. The reward is a sliver on top of an iceberg of unglamorous workWhat we saw on Sunday was Clark raising the trophy. What we didn't see is the thousands of swings, the 5am range sessions, the missed cuts, the self-funded years. The trophy is the visible tip. Everything underneath it is where the real work lives. The offer letter is raising the trophy. The networking, the tailoring, the prep, the rejection you metabolized and didn't post about, that's the iceberg. I think about this constantly, for our companies and for every person I watch in the middle of a search. I see you. I see the work you are doing, and I know it's there because I am doing it with you. The thread I didn't expectThis week was more than worlds colliding. Wyndham Clark lost his mother to breast cancer. Lise Clark died in 2013. She was the one who got him into golf, and before every tournament she told her son two words: play big. She told him to play for something bigger than himself. And his sister, Kaitlin Christine, is one of us. She is a breast cancer survivor and a women's health founder. She built Gabbi to help women catch breast cancer earlier than the system caught it in her own family. So the winner of the 2026 US Open is a man whose family carries the exact thing so many of us are building to fix. Golf and women's health weren't just a metaphor for the weekend. They were standing on the 18th green together. What it actually takesStrip it all down and you get the same short list golf, founding, and a job search share: patience, resilience, and the willingness to finish the hole even when you've missed the cut. You putt out. You keep swinging. You play the long game, 72 holes, not one heroic round. I came home from Shinnecock thinking about my husband turning 50, about my sister and sister-in-law who actually made it inside the ropes, about the years I spent at Golf Digest selling advertising around a game I loved from the edge of, and about how every one of those worlds was quietly teaching me how to build, and how to keep going even when the read on the green isn't clear. Incomplete information. Damage control. Foot on the gas when it's working. The unglamorous reps. The long game. Play big. So what: Whether you're building a company or looking for your next one, the job is the same. Play the shot in front of you, contain the bad holes, press the good ones, and finish the hole even after you've missed the cut. That sounds like every woman in this field I know. Congratulations to Wyndham, to Kaitlin, and the entire family. To everyone else grinding away today, building and looking for a job in women's health, keep going, play big, and keep it in the short grass. | 
