Candace Nelson

Lovely.

Those kind words.

I really appreciate it.

I wrote the book because after we scaled Sprinkles to 11 locations, eight years later, Charles and I made the decision to step away operationally from Sprinkles.

We sold a majority stake in the business.

And at that time, with that sort of successful exit, so to speak, I had women approaching me who wanted advice.

They wanted mentorship.

They needed funding for their startups.

And I realized I'd learned a lesson or two.

I'd learned a thing or two.

And I was so excited to be able to finally give back and pour into that next generation of founders and changemakers.

But as we know, there's only so many hours in the day.

And so I started mentoring some, investing some, but I really wanted to help women at scale.

And what's the best way to do that?

I mean, you can do a course, of course, but for me, I wanted to sit down and write a book and really reflect on this wild journey that I had just had, the lessons I learned, the failures, so I could share those with people.

We do a terrible job in this society of just sort of sweeping failure under the rug and then shining a spotlight on the success at the end of the day.

And we also do a terrible job of glamorizing the wrong type of entrepreneurs.

You know, there's a spectrum to entrepreneurship.

And all we ever hear about are these dudes that are like building rockets into space and have just, you know, lost hundreds of millions of dollars and they're raising hundreds of millions of dollars more.

It's like I built a really big business out of something that anyone could do.