My career began with the privilege of advising audacious entrepreneurs - visionaries eager to dent the world. Each Wednesday, I met with two to three founders and challenged their ideas. Over time, I would hear echoes of the same concepts “Airbnb for parking spaces” or “An app to check wait times at bars”.

In Waterloo, Canada - a small university town dense with STEM talent, entrepreneurs tackled a shared set of problems with a shared set of solutions. But innovation rarely flourishes in echo chambers. Humans exist in cohorts, inheriting and reinforcing their collective systems, each with distinct strengths and blind spots. In Waterloo, the dominant entrepreneurial blueprint was - we solve [student woes] with [an app].

The most transformative innovators I’ve encountered share one trait - they are the bridge between disparate worlds. They are the conduits. Rare nodes connecting fragmented networks. Within homogenous groups, most obvious problems have been addressed through readily accessible solutions. True breakthroughs occur at the intersection of unlikely connections, where ideas cross-pollinate between distant cohorts. Hidden in these intersections lie untapped opportunities for those willing to venture beyond the familiar.

Women’s efficiency challenges are often overlooked, perhaps for the same reason men’s emotional challenges are systemically ignored. The PMU industry is a testament to this oversight. It is composed of fiercely independent, full-stack entrepreneurs. Women who are both the talent and the management, the artist and the therapist. Yet, they are rarely technologists or engineers. They learned to make it work with the solutions they perceive to be available.

Since founding Fleek, I’ve met women who have told me, “I had a similar idea, but I didn’t know how to build it.” Others ask, “Why don’t we have the same level of innovation as Uber or Tesla?”

At Fleek, we intend to change this. Our mission is to pioneer AI, AR, and hardware-driven solutions tailored to the PMU industry. We are the conduit between beauty’s inefficiencies and the technological advancements that can solve them. More than inventing category-defining products, we aim to ignite a movement. One that bridges beauty and technology, accelerating access to STEM-enabled resources for female entrepreneurs. In doing so, we catalyze a more integrated, holistic humanity.

We are living through a pivotal moment in human evolution - an era where AI and emerging technologies permeate every facet of our existence. To navigate this transformation without fear, we must look backward as much as we look forward. We must reach for the primal, the elemental, the deeply human. Innovation, at its best, is not about severing ties with the past but about synthesizing progress with wisdom.

Honoring metamorphosis means recognizing the alchemy of opposing forces - that true transformation is not a zero-sum game. The fusion of AI with ancestral intuition yields technology that honors our humanity. The integration of beauty with efficiency tools extends beauty beyond the external, refining it from the inside out.

Each metamorphosis expands the space in which we exist, allowing us to become more. As we stand at the precipice of this new space, we must ask - Which seeds do we wish to plant?

- Marylin X. Ma 💛