This is part two of a three-part essay series, Female Founder Mode, where I share observations and insights about my first year as a founder. In part one (which you can read here), I wrote about how the power of AI no-code technology upends the norms of the tech industry, making way for a new type of builder. In this part, I’ll share why it’s more possible now build horizontally across many parts of our lives all at once.

If you’ve ever tried to accomplish anything ambitious while raising young kids, you understand what it’s like to –

“MOM! I’M TRYING TO GO TO SLEEP BUT SYDNEY HIT ME!”

– structure a complete thought without a single –

“SISSY GROWLED AND HISSED AT ME AND WON’T STOP!”

– interruption.

As I’ve learned over the past five-and-three-quarters years as a mom, parenting is the ultimate infinite game. There are no time outs, the rules change constantly, and it seems like there’s always another “boss mode” or “gotcha” hiding around the corner.

It turns out that starting a company is pretty similar.

Whether it was the best idea or the worst to embark into “founder mode” with two young kids still in diapers, I’ll never know. But it’s a good thing I did. Because by the time I was ready to start something on my own, I had to figure out how to do it with kids in tow and actively sought out ways to integrate this new texture into my work-life composite.

As a result of this focus on whole-life integration, I haven’t exactly been following the typical “go narrow and go deep” startup playbook I’d been coached on for most of my career. Instead, I’ve been building from a different lens altogether. Less single-lane pursuit and more clustered triad that can actually hold my whole life (including all those messy mom moments).

And I’ve started to notice that this isn’t unique to me. I see this tendency toward cohesion among some of the most ambitious women I know, and in anyone who sees themselves as a community-builder, a connector, a network-weaver. People who don’t move in straight lines but in overlapping layers.

You might be doing this too, even if you haven’t named it yet. It’s a style of structuring your work in a way that feels a lot less like climbing a single corporate ladder and more like composing harmonies, with multiple lines unfolding at once. That word is: polyphonic.

What makes this interesting is that I’m applying the same digital enablement strategy across three different areas at once. And it’s starting to pay off.

There were obvious benefits to this model. Companies developed specialist-level expertise. Individuals built domain-specific authority. And the career path ahead was linear and clear: Do your job well enough to eventually replace the person above you.

But the trouble with working in a single lane is that nothing ever bumps into anything else. And without those collisions, you miss the kind of originality that only emerges at the intersections.

In my four years working fractionally across a dozen different projects, my biggest value wasn’t in the tasks I completed. It came from surfacing operational patterns and carrying them from one team to the next. This not only accelerated my own learning curve (I got better and faster by being embedded across environments), but it also helped other teams see insights that were invisible from the inside.

While most people on the job market still follow the traditional 9-5 life, this structure has been breaking down at the edges, accelerated by the pandemic’s work-from-home culture and by a growing appetite for multi-faceted, “gig economy” careers across nearly every sector.

We’ve all encountered actors who babysit on weekdays or Uber drivers who bartend on weekends. But increasingly, more of my talented tech-industry peers are opting for these cross-pollinator paths too. The adjunct professor who’s also a fractional CTO and firefighter. The tech exec who sells sourdoughs at the farmer’s market every weekend. The podcaster turned crypto-founder and community convener. And no, these aren’t AI-generated composites. They’re very real people with wildly cool career clusters.

Thanks to technology, you no longer need superhuman speed (or a time turner) to work on two jobs once across multiple domains. You just need to know how to use the right tools at the right moments.

Because as it turns out, once you have even a little more time and flexibility, all those seemingly contradictory parts of your life start rising to the surface. And you begin to wonder: What if I built a life that let me express all my skills and all my values at once?

As it turns out, you can do this. You just have to build in across horizontal layers vs. deep verticals.

When you first arrive with all of your boxes, the initial phase of unpacking is downright wild. Despite your best efforts, it’s impossible to contain your work to a single room. You open a box labeled “kitchen” and find something that clearly belongs in the dining room. You place a side table in the living room only to migrate it to the entryway half an hour later.

Four hours in, the place might look messier than ever to an outsider. But you know the truth: Once the boxes are open, the piles become intentional. They’re no longer just clutter; they’re wayfinding. And deep down, you know (even if your new neighbors don’t) that in a few more hours everything will be sorted, tucked away, and coherent. In other words: Things have to get messier before they make sense.

It’s messy and non-linear, but the payoff is that you’re not just arranging one room: You’re quietly setting up an entire house.

When I look back on my year, that’s exactly what it felt like. Messy, iterative, and ultimately expansive. In the end, I didn’t wind up with one polished project. Instead, I started three seemingly disparate workstreams, each with its own hum of activity. They included:

• Relaunching a block association and became its President, securing our first grant and running our first community-wide activation.

• Catalyzing an AI upskilling business that teaches non-technical teams how to build real tools without code.

• Building and shipping two kid-focused learning apps, complete with pilot partnerships in elementary schools.

I’m not sharing this as a report card or victory lap. But I want to show how wildly different these projects look on paper… and yet, how much I’ve been able to move the needle on all of them in just one year.

The way that I can so much is by intentionally applying the same new technology across all three areas at once. AI helps me write drafts, shape websites, and generate business plans. But it also enables me to build apps, learn about new industries, and write classroom pilot curriculum materials. I use it to figure out what to cook for my kids on the weekends and I use it to refactor my life’s work of blog posts into interesting new formats. And most important for my life as a new founder: I use it as my shared “second brain” to help me find patterns and meaning across all of the things that matter the most to me.

It’s thanks to AI that I’m able to work ahead of myself and make a horizontal dent in three areas at once. It’s been there for me anytime of day or night – at the edges before 8 a.m. and long after the kids are in bed, at 11 p.m. I’ve built in the margins of what’s possible in my life as a parent, and I’ve done it with the near-constant chatter of a predictive technology that’s always available and ready for my next idea.

Notably, none of my projects is an overnight success. Not even close. But I wasn’t building for “one hit wonders” – I am building for a future work-life composite that matches my unique needs. And what keeps me going on all three is how they consistently play off each other in ways I never could have predicted.

For instance:

1. My learning apps get better when I teach adults how to build their own.

2. My teaching gets better when I share publicly and invite people into the process.

3. My public work fuels my block stewardship, where AI collapses weeks of civic admin into hours.

4. And block work pushes me to spin up tiny AI tools in minutes, which quietly reinforce everything else I build.

This is what it feels like to build in synchrony. This is what you can only achieve if you let go of the single-lane script.

While I’d never identified as an engineer, after a year of building apps (and a five-year-old who helped me build them), I realized it was time to show up. Together, we introduced Scribblins to her entire kindergarten class. She beamed. Her best friend in class is not only the app’s top user, but her mom is actively championing AI workflow training on my behalf at her company.

This is what my polyphonic career cluster looks like: When these tiny collisions of learning, working, and community-building all intersect and play off each other in a way that feels complete. Whole. Harmonic.

While you might carry pieces of your work and life identities in different jobs, it’s hard to fully express it all inside someone else’s calendar or priorities. Even harder to see what those multiple paths might be when you’re stuck in the forest of those early years of parenting. But I expect to see more cross-pollinators in the years ahead, who lean heavily into the time and cost-savings that AI no-code building invites for all of us.

I’d be lying if I said this year didn’t cost me anything. Like any new small business owner, it came with a financial hit. But what stands out to me is how much I didn’t need. Even while starting several tech-powered ideas in tandem, none of it required millions in outside capital to get going.

In other words: The limiting factor wasn’t money. It was time, coupled with the courage to learn how to use technology in ways that made all this work actually possible. Which means — it’s something that you can do, too.

In the final segment of this series, I’ll share explicit examples about how AI has shaped so many of my cross-functional, cross-portfolio workflows to power my horizontal building engine (and how you can design one for yourself).