Founder Reflection: Authorship Is Ownership

For a long time, I introduced myself as the Chief Creative Officer and owner of PinMe 1913.

Then one day, I changed one word.

I stopped saying “owner.”

I started saying “founder.”

To some, it may seem like a small distinction. To me, it changed everything.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being an owner. Owners build incredible businesses every day. But I realized that “owner” didn’t fully capture my relationship to this work.

An owner can purchase a business.

An owner can inherit a business.

An owner can invest in a business that someone else imagined.

But PinMe 1913 wasn’t something I acquired.

It began as an idea.

An idea that became sketches. Collections. Products. Stories. Systems. Thousands of decisions. Countless late nights. More lessons than I could have imagined.

Everything you see today first existed in my mind.

As an artist, I’ve spent my life creating.

My training as an actor taught me to imagine entire worlds from words on a page. It taught me to ask deeper questions, see possibilities others might overlook, and trust my creative instincts.

Long before PinMe 1913 existed, my mother gave me another gift. She never boxed my creativity in. She allowed me to explore, experiment, and discover who I was becoming.

Looking back, I realize those experiences shaped the way I build.

When I begin developing a collection, I rarely see one piece.

I see ten.

I see how they relate to one another.

I see the story before the first design is complete.

I see the possibilities long before they exist.

I’ve come to understand that not everyone thinks this way.

And that’s okay.

Because that way of seeing is part of what made me a founder.

One of the core ideas in The Actor as Architect  (my recent publication) is this:

Authorship is ownership.

Those three words have come to mean more to me with every passing year.

Authorship is taking responsibility for what you create.

It’s recognizing that before you can own the outcome, you must first author the vision.

When I changed my title from owner to founder, I wasn’t trying to sound more important.

I was finally choosing language that reflected the truth.

PinMe 1913 is more than a business I own.

It is a company I imagined before it existed.

It is the product of my creativity, my training, my experiences, my failures, my persistence, and my willingness to continue building even when the path wasn’t clear.

The title didn’t make me a founder.

The work did.

The title simply caught up to the truth.