Many years ago now, I stood in front of an audience of founders I idolized, my heart pounding. The original speaker for the exclusive founders-only lunch-and-learn had bailed and I was a last-minute fill-in (someone grabbed me from the hallway). Surely this was a mistake. What could I possibly teach them? They know everything.

 
I wrote "How to experiment" across the smudged whiteboard as someone dimmed the overheads. Voice cracking, I introduced myself as the lead marketer at one of the startups at the DMZ accelerator in Toronto. I outlined the agenda and braced for humiliation that never came. Instead, the audience cracked their notebooks open. People leaned in and side conversations stopped, so I kept going. Something in the room's energy shifted. 
 

Topic by topic, the walls I had put up started to drop. We covered strategy, team structure, experiment examples and even tackled some tricky math. Someone shushed a loud talker outside in the hallway. When Q&A began, they elbowed each other to ask specific questions like their growth strategy depended on it. A planned 30 minute lunch turned into 90, and I finally accepted an idea that had been true all along—I actually had valuable knowledge to share. Me.
 

At the door, every founder shook my hand and asked about me. Many wrote down my email and I remember two of them circled it. That was a Wednesday for them. For me, it was the first day of brand-new purpose.