45. Discovering her ADHD Kryptonite while building a successful security startup

The Wild Feather

Leigh has more than a decade of experience in computer security incident response. Prior to co-founding Tall Poppy, she was a Technology Fellow at the ACLU's Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology. Her industry career included running security incident response at Slack,protecting infrastructure running a million apps at Salesforce.com, shipping patches for billions of computers on a monthly basis at Microsoft, and analyzing malware at Symantec. Leigh has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto where she majored in Computer Science and Equity Studies, and is a frequent keynote speaker at security and software conferences around the world.

Leigh talks about building Tall Poppy, investors, pitch decks, her experience in accelerators, hiring smarter people, the value of delegating, being diagnosed with ADHD after she became a founder and her challenges as a kid with undiagnosed ADHD.

Had I known how many of the challenges of running a startup were like, specifically like ADHD kryptonite, I probably would have tried to figure out my brain a little bit better first, would it change the order of operations there a little bit, maybe stuck with having like a regular job for a little while.

I've learned like other coping tactics aside from medication are essential. essential, I think, for treating ADHD for the vast majority of people. But it's super corny, like exercising every day, it really like it makes a big difference. And I did not understand meditation. Like I was like, you want me to sit still and like not think what? That's not that's actually like physiologically impossible for me. Once I started taking medication, meditation became a real important part of my self care practice.