How far can my sex education company get?
The question that guides my life...
About three years ago, I started prototyping Learn Mobo with one of my best friends, Morgan, and her twin brother, Nathan.
Back then we called it Intimate, before we ultimately decided that the term “Intimate” insinuated a side of sexuality that didn’t quite fit into the neutral sex education that we ultimately wanted to sell to schools.
At first, we built a silly product called CherryAI (…I know, same problem as “Intimate”) after the OpenAI API was first released. I trained it on a small dataset of public sex education materials that I had collected locally on my computer.
It started with all of the same core ideas: it’s hard to talk about these things, the internet is filled with untrustworthy information, and there are cascading consequences that plague the rest of our lives, because we never built that initial foundation that allowed us to really understand ourselves.
We even applied to YC! At the time, we got into the early startup accelerator, Antler.
But quickly, as OpenAI shifted from being a non-profit to a for-profit, and the AI Race started to take on a new face that none of us had anticipated, it became increasingly clear to me that AI was not the solution here.
If AI was trained on the internet, and the internet was filled with misinformation…then it was baked into the backbone of our product that eventually it would serve bad information.
If AI was trained to be sycophantic, and we were trying to educate young people on how to navigate friction in your relationships…then our product would be fundamentally flawed.
If AI regulation was so far behind, and we were clear about how we wanted to protect child privacy and sensitive data…then we would be hypocrites.
So we pivoted.
And “we” quickly turned into “I”, as my friends moved on with their lives, and I continued to prototype using Canva before eventually vibe-coding.
I started making full lesson plans and courting it around town with sex educators and researchers that I had connected with to get their feedback. I started talking to teachers and schools, trying to answer the question “What was so hard about teaching sex education?”
Well, teaching it, I learned.
And during this period of time, while I continued to build out what was becoming Learn Mobo, I was also working a full-time job at a remote startup.
I originally thought that remote work would give me more flexibility and time to build Learn Mobo. Alas, being young and dumb means thinking joining a startup would be easy.
And so, during this time, I started to feel the way anyone bootstrapping their own passion project while working at a high-growth Series B startup would feel…bad.
At the end of 2024, I wrote this in a journal I kept:
I feel this weird sense of burn out.
My body feels physically exhausted. Like I’m hungover or spent too much time in a sauna or I’m jetlagged and somehow existing on the opposite time frame that I’m living in.
A feeling of dehydration. I can’t think straight. I keep losing my train of thought. My eyes feel heavy and I keep having a feeling where I need to pop my ears…
...I feel deeply depressed, but I’m not depressed. Like I’m sick, but I’m not sick.
The most attractive thing in the world to me is the idea that I can just spend the entire day in bed.
Did I do this to myself? Did I try to do too many things and run out of gas? Will I get over this in a week?
And yet I said this to myself:
Am I going to regret never having been brave enough to do this?
At the beginning of 2025, at the top of some Google Doc draft I wrote: "Would I remember these moments?”
Will I remember how badly I felt about myself? Like a kid who built a stupid project in class and was trying to overly explain to my parents what everything meant as their eyes glazed over, nodding, pretending to see me?
…I feel like I’m just some kid. With dreams too big for my head. Living in a fake world.
And tomorrow, I’d have to pack up and I’d have to go back to my job, and I’d buckle in and do my best.
And yet I also wrote this:
I’d rather die than not even try.
I kept moving… I kept growing…
I grew my career at this startup as I continued to build Learn Mobo. Beta pilots sign ups started to accelerate, my network continued to grow. I started talking to investors just to see if what I was doing was valid.
I wrote this in the midst of it:
Most of the time you feel like an idiot. Like why do you think this would ever go anywhere? You get rejected by grants, by accelerators — you endlessly cold outreach to people, and most of the time it’s rejection.
And you can’t help but stare at your pitch deck and think to yourself, “is this just all in my head?”
But then, seemingly out of nowhere, maybe every 3-6 months, you meet someone that you were nervous to meet, someone with power or money or all of the connections. And they see you.
They hear you.
And they decide, of their own free will and expertise, that they want to hop on whatever insane ride you feel like you’re on.
They look at you and they say, “hey, you really have something here.”
And then after months of feeling like an utter loser, you remember…you’re not an idiot.
You know exactly what you’re doing.
Ashley became one of those people.
Ashley was an engineer I worked with at a Robot Farm that eventually failed (we can talk about that another time), and I had reached out to her because I was hitting a technical wall with Learn Mobo.
And after we talked, a few weeks later, she reached out and she said, of her own free will and expertise, that she wanted to join me.
At first, numbed by rejection and people who said they would help me and then never did, I didn’t hold out a lot of hope. Ashley was moving to go work on a farm for the summer and would be off grid, so I figured she’d come back totally at peace with herself and determine that her life was meant to be one with nature (which didn’t leave any room to be developing a sex education digital platform).
But she went to that farm, she came back, and she said the same thing.
I want to join you.
So she did.
But what if we walked away?
The more we worked on Learn Mobo, the more I thought to myself, "I just want to be able to do this for as long as possible.”
Ashley was already working full-time, and eventually, after saving up a year of personal runway, I decided I would, too.
I started applying for other jobs just to give myself the last piece of validation that I would be fine even if I quit to go do my own thing for a bit.
I got a few great jobs at the end of my tenure at that remote startup, some of them I used to give me an extra salary boost in the months leading up to my departure.
But one of them I got, I almost really took.
It was a company I had admired for a while and had built relationships with over the last year. They offered me a lot of money, and told me I’d have a direct career path to General Manager.
And for a moment, I could see that whole life play out for me.
I could see myself apart of the team that had interviewed me. I could see myself commuting to their nice office in Brooklyn, bringing my dog Champ.
I could see myself growing and learning eventually becoming General Manager. Going to conferences and speaking on panels. I could see myself building a career, growing my finances, my savings, maybe I’d get lucky and my equity would play out for me. I’d probably have kids in the next few years, my husband and I would upgrade to a 2-bedroom in Tribeca. I’d go to the spa, get fancy dinners, never worry about money.
But would I regret leaving behind Learn Mobo? Would I be able to pursue it in the future once I’ve built more financial freedom for myself? Once I’ve had kids? Would I be okay if Learn Mobo ultimately and completely failed, when I could’ve been a 30-year-old GM at a unicorn startup?
And in times of mental unrest like this, there was only one thing I could ever do. I turned to Cheryl Strayed.
And I re-read her Dear Sugar piece that I’ve read probably 20 different times at different decision points in my life: The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us.
And at the very end of her beautiful exploration of the different paths of our lives we’ll never live, she writes:
I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
So, how far can we get?
All throughout the last few years, there have been many times I thought I’d walk away. Many times I struggled through, feeling badly about myself.
And over and over again, I’ve told myself that it would hurt me more to not even try.
And now, I know, that what I chose was the correct decision for me. I don’t know what the future holds for me, but I know that I’m going to try to do this for as long as I possibly can.
I will answer the question: how far can we get?
And in 6 months from now, Learn Mobo will be different. I’ll be different. And that alone is one of the most exciting feelings I’ve ever felt in my life.
I don’t believe Learn Mobo will fail because it isn’t trying to solve a real problem… because people don’t agree that sex education matters, that people aren’t willing to pay for it, that parents and teachers don’t struggle with this, and actually we were wrong sex education IS super easy and convenient and everyone ALREADY KNOWS everything they need to about their bodies and anatomy, navigating AI and social media’s impact on how they form relationships ,understanding consent, what all of the different STIs are, what the difference between a diaphragm and a female condom is, and how pregnancy works!
See how ludicrous that sounds?
Learn Mobo will fail only because we give up on it. Only because we run out of runway, and we don’t have any more steam left. Because it was too hard.
But I will only give up on it if I have given absolutely all of myself to it. If I have truly, from the bottom of my soul, felt that I have tried the hardest I possibly can.
But at that point… why would it fail?
If this resonated, please consider helping us with the next phase of Learn Mobo by backing or sharing our crowdfunding campaign. Everything we do, we do to better sex education for everyone.