June 11, 2025 • 45 mins
Margot Blouin is the founder of Cadstrom, a rising tech company whose success is deeply rooted in her personal journey. In this special Pride Month episode, Margot shares how embracing her identity as a transgender woman wasn’t a detour from her professional path — it was the key to unlocking her full potential. For years, she hid her truth while building her career, fearing that authenticity might cost her everything. But when her body and spirit could no longer bear the weight, she chose to transition — a decision that not only changed her life but became the foundation for her company’s growth. Margot’s story is a powerful reminder that living authentically isn’t just courageous — it’s transformative.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Margot Blouin (00:00):
Welcome back to She Pivots. I'm Margot Blewin.
Emily Tisch Sussman (00:12):
Welcome back to She Pivots, the podcast where we talk
with women who dare to pivot out of one career
and into something new and explore how their personal lives
impacts these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. There
are certain stories that stay with you, not just because
(00:35):
they're powerful, but because they remind you of what's possible
when we stop trying to separate the personal from the professional,
and Margot Bluin's story is exactly that. In recognition of
Pride Month, I'm honored to have Margo join us to
talk about how her transition into becoming a woman was
(00:55):
integral to the success and growth of her company, Cadstrum.
For Margo carried the weight of a truth she wasn't
sure she could live out loud. The internal battle of
whether or pow to transition wasn't just a personal decision.
It touched everything her relationships, her work, her identity, and
(01:17):
for a long time she thought she had to choose
between authenticity and ambition. As she rose through the ranks
in the tech world, she decided to start her own company,
identifying as a man at the time, but her body
started to respond to the truth that Margo kept pushing
deeper and deeper, and eventually her body broke. She looked
(01:39):
inward and accepted her identity that was always knocking at
her door. In the end, it was because she embraced
her identity that she was able to truly grow her company.
Transitioning wasn't a detour, it was the foundation, and what
she once feared would be seen as a weakness became
her greatest strength. Margo is a true representation of how
(02:03):
the personal and the professional are always intertwined. Her story
reminds us that stepping into your truth isn't just brave,
it's essential.
So, without further ado, Margo Blouin.
Margot Blouin (02:22):
I'm Margo Bluin and I'm the founder and CEO of Cadstrom,
we help electrical engineers build printed circuit boards that make
up electronic devices that work right the first time. So,
as it turns out, if you are trying to build
an electronic device, most of the time people can't get
that to work. And it's not because they don't know
(02:43):
what they're doing. It's because they don't have the tools
to be successful. And so you can kind of think
of us like spellcheck for circuits. We go in, we
build a tool that looks at the circuit and tells
the engineer, Hey, if you plug this in, it's going
to explode, and you might not want that. So tell
us about your childhood. Where are you from, what's your
family like? Yeah, so I grew up in Grand Prairie, Alberta,
(03:07):
in Canada, which is pretty far north. Actually, I moved
to Seattle a little later in life, and I would
joke to satellites that Grand Prairie was closer to the
Arctic Circle than it was to Seattle. So I had
actually a really happy childhood despite it being pretty chilly
most of the time. You know, it's kind of funny.
When I came out eventually, my mother said to me, look,
(03:29):
you never really demonstrated being that girly as a child
or having very feminine interests. Where did this come from?
And I said, Mom, look in the mirror. My mother
grew up on a farm and all of her stories
from childhood involve farm animals and playing the dirt and
being outside and doing all of these quote unquote like
(03:50):
non feminine things. And I inherited a love for that.
So I would go out and I would play, and
I think the two things that really really came to
me when I was was music and building. I would always,
you know, create these fantastical drawings of things that I
could build and that.
Unknown (04:08):
Sort of thing.
Margot Blouin (04:09):
So I had actually a really really happy childhood like that.
So while my parents grew up on farms, my dad
went through a number of different careers. You know, he
became a carpenter, and then he was a car salesman,
and then he bought a business. And for a large
part of my childhood, the business played a massive part
because he was spending every single day working on that
(04:29):
business and I would barely see him, and he would
come home and he would pass out. And so, you know,
I started helping him out and working there, and I
think I got a lot of my work ethic from that.
But by the time I was ready to graduate from
high school, I needed out. I needed distance, and I
had known that there was parts of me that were
kind of waiting to develop, and I was so excited
(04:52):
to do that. So I made a feeline out of
town to the University of Alberta, which is where I
went tochool. I studied computer hardware engineering, and in my
second year, I actually got recruited by a recruiter at Microsoft,
and so I went down and I started spending my
summers in Seattle, and I would come back for the
(05:14):
school year and study, and it just became a race
to like, I want to get to Seattle. It's a
beautiful place. This career is so exciting, and I couldn't
finish fast enough.
Emily Tisch Sussman (05:26):
Did you feel rooted there, like, did you find social
grounding there in any way or was it just like
drop in, drop out, get back to Seattle?
Margot Blouin (05:37):
It was pretty much drop and drop out. I had
a great group of friends. I'd say that my little
group of engineers, we were pretty close knit. I met
my roommates through school, and I met my now husband
actually in university, and so I definitely had a group.
But I would say, like I fit really well with
(05:57):
these people that I had shared intros with and some commonality.
But I never really fit into the city. I never
really fit into the environment, the larger environment, right, But
I guess, you know, to put it another way, I
think in every environment, I have been able to find
people that I connect with, and it has largely been
queer people. For some reason, you know, and I didn't
(06:20):
really understand this myself, but for some reason, I'd always
fit in with queer people and felt so comfortable around them.
Were you identifying as queer at the time. It took
me a little while to get there. It took me
a little while to get there. I definitely showed up
to university thinking I was straight, really not thinking too
hard about some crushes that I had on some boys,
and that developed quickly in university. And the farther I
(06:45):
got from my roots, just the freeer I felt to
explore all of these things. And you know, for such
a long time, I stopped myself from investigating, from like
doing that like internal reflection, because it felt dangerous. When
I was a kid, actually my first memory of gender dysphoria,
(07:07):
I was five years old, and I was at my babysitters.
All the other kids had gone upstairs to play, and
I was sitting in the basement and I took a
quiet moment to myself And as I was sitting there reflecting,
I just I can't even say that I wanted to
be a woman. I just felt like a girl. And
(07:27):
as I sat there, just this feeling of peace flooded
through me and it just felt so happy. But at
the same time, one I didn't realize as a child
that you could be transgender, like I just as an idea.
I just didn't know. You know, in that community in
northern Alberta, there wasn't a lot of queer role models
(07:51):
that were visible to me. The extent of it was
often you know, if you look back at nineties television,
there's tons of shows that I love, but the man
in the dress quote unquote was often the butt of
the joke. And so I was able to establish from
a young age that that wasn't a good thing to be,
and so I avoided it. I avoided it at every
(08:12):
moment that that came up in my life. And I
guess being queer was kind of like that.
Emily Tisch Sussman (08:17):
Do you remember where there was a moment if you
did identify a person or a role model or a
character and you're like, oh, wait, that's me. I think
they're saying what I feel.
Margot Blouin (08:30):
There's a pretty famous show I'm in queer folks on
Netflix called Sense8.
Emily Tisch Sussman (08:35):
It had a wildly diverse cast, fluid sexuality.
Unknown (08:39):
It filmed all over the world.
And cost millions to make and was just so good.
But let's back up because some of you may not
know the freaking, amazing magicalness that is sense sact and
I'm sorry for you.
Margot Blouin (08:52):
You should go watch.
Unknown (08:53):
It because Sense8 is a show about connection. The series
centers upon a group of eight strangers from around the globe.
The Hacker, the German gangster Wolfgang, the melodramatic Mexican actor Leado,
the Chicago cop will kick ass warrior Son, the inspiring
bus driver Kafiis, the DJ Riley, and the devout Hindu
dealing with the expectations of an arranged marriage.
Margot Blouin (09:11):
One of the lead characters is a transgender woman and
actually we shared the same dead name, and what a trip.
What a trip, And watching that was so complicated for
me because I could connect and I could feel so
much about what she was feeling. This was all before
I transitioned, and like it wasn't just like I wasn't
(09:33):
just sitting there enjoying the story. I was connecting at
a deeper level. And it almost put me off the
show of just like, oh, something about this feels way
too deep to be just a show on TV.
Emily Tisch Sussman (09:45):
Was that the first time that you considered that that
may be your future Journey.
Margot Blouin (09:51):
Around that time. Yes, actually, so this was in my
mid twenties and I was living and working in Seattle
at Microsoft, and as I was starting to engage a
lot more with this type of queer media and this
show in particular, where you could see this transgender woman,
I would have these days and nights where I would
(10:14):
feel so lost in my body. And it felt like
over the years these moments and they were really dark,
and they were really difficult. They would get worse and
they kept getting worse. And I remember like weekends where
I would come home from work and just drop everything
(10:36):
and be like, oh my god, just existing in the
world hurts and it doesn't feel right and it's draining me.
And I didn't understand. And then I would almost guiltily
sit back and imagine a life where I was a woman,
and I would kind of fantasize just about like, man,
(10:58):
what if I could just live like that? That would
be so, you know, And I wasn't necessarily fantasizing about
the gender, but just life, if you know. I wanted
to just do regular things. I wanted to, you know,
go out and exist and be in the world and
be perceived like that. And it wasn't anything in particular,
but that brought me so much joy. And then I
would go and just tuck that away, and I'd show
(11:21):
up on Monday in a colored shirt and do my job,
and again trying really hard not to think about that,
because if there's one thing that's really really clear today
more than ever, that's a difficult thing to be and
that's a difficult route to go on. It was such
a safe space for me to imagine myself in a
world where this was me. I was already me, but
(11:42):
the path there was absolutely terrifying, and I knew it
was so hard, like I could. I did not have
the mental energy to even consider going that route. That
was too much, so I just put it aside.
Emily Tisch Sussman (11:58):
Daydreaming about her life a woman. Life was going full
steam ahead for Margo, barely giving her a moment to
address her deeper feelings about her gender. She had a
dream job in the booming tech industry and got married
to her college sweetheart.
Margot Blouin (12:12):
We got married in twenty sixteen, so that was the
year that we graduated, and we got married actually on
paper because he needed that to have a spousal visa
so that he could visit me and be with me
when he came to the US, and so that was
a big reason for why we married at that specific moment.
(12:34):
We didn't have a ceremony. It was just kind of
a quaint little thing with a couple of friends and
family and a minister.
Emily Tisch Sussman (12:42):
Did it feel almost logistical or was it?
Or were you like, we know that we're going to
be together forevers, we might as well just make it official.
Margot Blouin (12:49):
The moment felt logistical. But I had proposed to him
about nine months before. At this point, we've been together
for five years. I knew that he was my person
and I wanted to spend my life with him, and
you know, I proposed to him. Oh my god, it's
so terrible that I proposed at the university in kind
of like one of our favorite like fields and like
(13:09):
green areas. And then I forgot to tell him to
take his backpack off because I was so excited about
proposing to him. And so I had a friend kind
of like in the bushes, like taking pictures, and we're
there with our backpack looking nerdy, but we had much
nicer pictures taken.
Emily Tisch Sussman (13:25):
Like So, did you have a long distance relationship when
you were going back and forth to Microsoft?
Margot Blouin (13:31):
Yes, and that was so difficult even when I when
I started working full time and they moved me to
see how the visa that I was on would not
allow my spouse to work. And my husband's actually a
mining engineer, so he works in any kind of mine
and he's since specialized in water resource management and land
reclamation and that sort of stuff. But it meant that
(13:53):
he had to work at a mine, and surprisingly there's
really none in Washington, or there's not very many, And
there's a vast difference in the types of minds between
the US and Canada, largely because of like population centers.
So that meant that he wasn't allowed to work in
the US, and so he had to live in Canada
and come down and visit me. So for a long time,
(14:14):
about five or six years, we were a voute.
Emily Tisch Sussman (14:17):
What were you thinking would be your future professionally and
your future with your spouse, Like, did you guys think
that you would be able to end up in the
same country. Were you making professional decisions try to make
that happen.
Margot Blouin (14:31):
It's a good question. We wanted to find a way
to end up in the same place. And he was
a mining engineer, and he thought that perhaps he could
come to Seattle and study and get a master's degree
in water management or utilities or something like that, because Seattle,
of course has a lot of water, and so we
thought that that could be a good path. But you
(14:53):
asked the question. The reason that I paused is yes,
did I think about the future, And the answer was
really no. Spent that whole time being so myopic, focused
on what is the next thing. I don't care about
the big picture, what's the next thing? And part of
that was I couldn't imagine myself five years down the road.
(15:13):
I couldn't imagine myself ten years down the road because
I didn't want to. That wasn't exciting, that wasn't interesting,
And so much of that I see now looking back,
was really tied.
Emily Tisch Sussman (15:25):
In my identity, stuck in the present. Margot didn't take
the time to truly think about her identity. She kept
pushing her needs deeper and deeper, and eventually her body rebelled,
telling her loud and clear what her mind would not
let her.
Margot Blouin (15:43):
I had an amazing career. I got to move around
and I got to do so many different things. I
worked on Xbox, and I was thriving, was there wasn't
a year that I didn't get promoted. We acquired a
startup and started building a live streaming platform within the
gaming organization, and that was a wild ride. And then
(16:05):
when that culminated, I went off and said, Hey, I'm
going to do something completely different, and I went and
worked on quantum computers and I founded the Quantum Computing team,
bringing quantm computers to the cloud at Microsoft and letting
access to the world's first quantum computers through the Usher
cloud and building that team, and that was such a
tremendous change because I had no background in that talk
(16:29):
about imposter syndrome, but it was phenomenal. And all of
this was contrasted with my personal life right because I
would go and I would go to work, and I
would put all of my energy in and I would
come home and I would feel trained. And what I
didn't understand at the time was that I felt drained,
(16:49):
not just because I was putting a lot of effort,
but because of how I was having to show up
in the world. And so it was just such a
contrast in my life of like light and dark.
Emily Tisch Sussman (16:58):
Margo's true I didity was banging at the door asking
to be let in When we come back, she talks
through what eventually led her decision to officially transition. During COVID,
(17:19):
Margo and her husband moved to Montreal, a place for
them to build a life in a queer friendly city.
But Margo's body continued to hold onto the negative feelings
and she was getting sicker and sicker, to the point
where she knew she had to confront her gender dysphoria.
Margot Blouin (17:36):
So we moved.
We left Seattle in August of twenty twenty. We moved
during the middle of the pandemic, during shutdown borders. It
was a wild experience. We got here. We had bought
an old one hundred and ten year old house and
we spent the next year renovating at I had a
career change. I went from Microsoft to Strike and then
(17:56):
I had this period of about a month in twenty
two twenty two and I was not doing well. I
had thrown my back out working out. I then got
a gum infection as I was healing from my back,
and then I got straped throat, and then that turned
into scarlet fever, and long story short, I spent a
(18:19):
month in so much pain, just hiding in our basement,
just really unhappy. And at this point, my gender dysphoria
was really getting to me. I couldn't look in the mirror,
I couldn't think about myself. I didn't want to come out.
I was horribly unhappy at my job. I ended up
being a really bad fit for that company. And I
(18:42):
was sitting there in the dark and I said, you
know what, I don't know what this part of me
that wants to explore more feminine side is, but I'm
not ignoring it anymore.
I need to change that.
And I came out of that and I said, Okay,
I'm going to allow myself to think about this thing
scares me because it feels like I have to do
(19:03):
this because I don't think I can survive if I
don't do this. And so I got a therapist and
I started exploring this and every time she would guide
me through visualization exercises and thinking and experimenting with you know,
different ways of dressing or playing with makeup or whatever,
(19:25):
and every time I would have this moment of clee
and of joy and of happiness, connecting with my body
in a way that I never had before. And then
it just felt like the light like the lights would
turn off and I would look in the mirror and
I would see a man staring back and it was
(19:47):
like the glass shattering. It just was so difficult, and
so I would have these moments of like elation, exploring
this sound inside of me, and I would come back
to being a man, and it would just destroy me
because I want to desperately for there to be another way.
Perhaps I could just be a little bit more flamboyantly gay,
a little bit more feminine in how I wear myself
(20:07):
in the world. But that wasn't the right answer for me.
Emily Tisch Sussman (20:11):
Was there something in particular that you were afraid of?
Or was everything everything? It's a mountain, it's social rejection.
It's knowing that you were going to lose people in
your life. You are going to lose family, and you
are going to lose friends. Transgender people have been a
conversation a little surprising to me. I can't say I
(20:32):
get it, but we've been a conversation for a long time,
and I didn't want to be part of that conversation.
As a transgender person. I was so comfortable advocating for
and being close to, but actually being transgender was and
is a difficult thing to be, and it meant giving
up parts of my life that I liked. It meant
(20:54):
giving up, you know, going through world as a man,
which is a nice easy thing to do. Comparatively, you're
allowed to show up in a completely different way. A
huge part of this show is interweaving the personal and
the professional, and that could be more true for Margo.
While she was coming to terms with her identity, she
(21:14):
also decided to start her own company.
Margot Blouin (21:19):
So I founded my company about So I had that
really difficult moment back in August of twenty twenty two,
and I founded my company in March of twenty twenty three.
So this was actually kind of like early as I
was exploring my own gender transition. But I also knew
that I needed to do something that meant something to me.
I needed to have an impact in the world that
(21:40):
it didn't feel like I was having in my day job.
And I had actually been a researching the topic of
my company, how we can help electrical engineers build circuit boards.
I've been researching that privately in my own time and
thinking about new techniques to do it at ways to
solve some of the problems that they faced. And so
I finally decided, Okay, this is the moment I'm going
(22:01):
to do it. I'm absolutely unhappy in my life. There's
so many things and I'm changing that. So I decided
to found it. And I was a solo founder. I
was completely alone, just building off of what I had
learned and what I had researched. And so my husband
was doing a master's at the time at McGill. We
didn't have any money coming in. So I went and
(22:23):
applied to a government program that gave a grant to
start a small business, and I thought, you know, some
minimum wage pay through that to support us. And I
started looking at what we could do by combining, you know,
some of these new circuit analysis techniques that I built
with AI and everything that was happening, And of course
we've all heard about CHATGBT and stuff like that, and
(22:46):
I realized that if I put these two things together
and they met in the middle, we can build some
really incredible things and really help electrical engineers be orders
of magnitude more productive than they could be otherwise. And
so I saw, okay, well I needed to do that.
But I'm not a researcher. I don't really know AI
have built some products with it at Microsoft, and so
(23:07):
I needed to bolster that part of the company. I
applied to an incubator in Seattle founded by Paul Allen,
one of the founders of Microsoft, and it's called the
Allen Institute for AI, and I sought them out because
I needed a partner that was strong in AI, and
over the summer we negotiated the agreement. They had never
(23:29):
worked with the Canadian company before, so they loved the idea,
they loved what I was doing, they loved my background,
and we just had to work through a lot of
those details. And as it turns out, I took my
first pill of estrogen on my first official day in
the incubator and it just felt like this moment of okay,
(23:51):
life has changed. And that was just a year after
I was locked in my basement for a month in
pain and so unhappy. As just this incredible moment of like, wow,
look at where I am. Yeah.
Emily Tisch Sussman (24:05):
Oh, I got chills thinking about that day for you're like,
this is it day one? Like it all starts today? Really,
it was day one in so many ways, and it
also wasn't because nobody in the world knew, aside from
my husband and a few close friends.
Margot Blouin (24:21):
Nobody in the world knew I was transitioning. I guess
everybody in the world knew about my business, but nobody
knew I was transitioning. And so everybody was like, hey,
was that an exciting day? And I was like, you
don't even know the half of it.
Emily Tisch Sussman (24:35):
Exciting, but things were still complicated for Margo. She was
trying to build a company and get funding, and not
just any company, a company at the intersection of AI
tech and electronics, not a place where you can find
a plethora of queer people. After the break, Margo talks
about how her transition both helped and hindered her while
(24:57):
building cadstrom In the early days of CADSTRM, Margo conducted
customer discovery exercises, a typical phase for any new company
to figure out product market fit. It was during this
phase when Margo met a man named Scott, a previous
(25:20):
founder who was exactly the right client for a company
like Cadstrum. After a few meetings, it was clear that
he could be the perfect co founder.
Margot Blouin (25:30):
A couple months later, I flew down to Seattle for
the first time to meet him in person, and we agreed, Yeah,
we're going to do this. But it was such a
scary trip, actually that trip, because that was I guess
three four months into taking hormones, and so I was
well on my way. My body had started changing. I
(25:50):
could not wear a lot of my old men's shirts
without some things really not looking right. And I was thinking, like,
do I tell him? And I was terrified. I was
anxious about coming out to the world and I wasn't ready,
and I had this picture in my head of just
complete and utter failure. I was terrified of coming out
(26:11):
to the world because I was picturing that half the
people weren't going to accept me because I was transgender
and they didn't like that, or they weren't certain about that.
Why would you invest in a company with a transgender founder.
That's such a big question mark. And then I was
worred the other half wouldn't take me seriously because I
was a woman, and between the two, I was paralyzed.
(26:35):
I couldn't do it, and so I decided not to.
So I bought a binder and I wore that every
day working at the incubator because I just wasn't ready
to tell the world. I wasn't ready to tell Scott
and you know what, I know now that things would
have turned out different, but I'm thankful that I didn't.
I've learned to trust my gut and do things when
I'm genuinely ready to do that. And you know, it
(26:58):
was interesting because so we ended up pitching in March.
We started pitching in March, and so you know, if
you've never pitched before, you're going and you're doing meeting
after meeting after meeting, and I think we pitched seventy
times to different firms over the course of the next
four to six weeks, and two weeks in on March fourteenth,
(27:20):
twenty twenty four, I had a gender affirming surgery. I
had my atoms apple taken out because every time I
looked in the mirror I hated what I saw. I
wanted to crawl out of my skin, and so I
somehow needed to navigate. Okay, I've had my atoms apple
taken out. I'm having these meetings with investors. My co
(27:42):
founder sees me going through this. Hey, I have to
take some time off for surgery, but no, I'm not
going to tell you what it's for. And so you know,
like this whole time it was went through. But the
logic the thinking was one I was worried about what
would happen if I was trying to navigate this as
a trans woman openly. But I was also worried about
the other flip side of that of perhaps you're accepting,
(28:04):
but if you look at a transperson going through this journey,
you might say to yourself, as an investor, that's such
a question mark. I'm worried that they're not going to
be focused on the business because they're so focused on themselves.
And so my whole strategy was to come out pretty
much when I was very far into my transition, and
(28:26):
I could say, you don't need to worry about my
focus because our entire relationship has been me transitioning. You
have seen me going through it, you just didn't know it.
And I am more here and I am more present
than I have ever been and being able to say
that with confidence, and so that was a big part
of that. And by the way, I think that that
opinion is completely wrong because it discounts the experience of
(28:51):
every entrepreneur, not just my story, but everyone. Every single
entrepreneur exists in any social content. You have dates, or
you have parents, you have children. So many entrepreneurs I
know have gone through big life experiences while they're founding
(29:11):
their companies. Life doesn't stop because you are starting a company.
In some ways, it feels like it intensifies. And so
you got to see the world can see my personal
and social struggle. But I don't think that my experience
is so unique when you remember that everybody has a
(29:33):
personal life that they're dealing with and stuff that they're
dealing with.
Emily Tisch Sussman (29:37):
So then at what point did you come out to
Scott and what was that conversation.
Margot Blouin (29:42):
So a few weeks after that surgery, we got a
term sheet, which is really exciting because you get this
offer to invest in your company. It's millions of dollars,
more money than I've ever handled, and you have to
say yes pretty quickly because they go away. And so
we accepted, and we spend a couple of weeks negotiating,
and I flew to Seattle to have dinner with the
(30:04):
investor and meet the investors, and Scott lives in Seattle,
so we went for dinner with Tom from Bison Ventures,
who was our lead investor, and we had this great
dinner and then afterwards we separated and Scott and I
went our own ways and we took a walk around
the neighborhood and it was this beautiful, nice night, and
we had this moment of I can't believe we met
(30:27):
like eight months ago, and here we are. We just
raised millions of dollars for this company. What a wild ride.
And I felt so safe and strong, and I'd gotten
to know him deeply and he's such a caring person.
And I said, Scott, I have something I need to
(30:47):
tell you. And I told him. I blurted it out,
and he was He was surprised, and not surprised. He's
a very perceptive person. He'd seen lot about me changing.
He had obviously noticed me going for surgery, and he
(31:07):
immediately accepted me and supported me. And the best thing
was actually so we ended the conversation pretty quickly. After that,
he went home, he talked to his wife, who'd already met.
Came in the next morning and he said, by the way,
I told Margaret, his wife. I told Margaret, and her
first response was well, yeah, which was just amazing. It
(31:30):
was like the people that love you come out with
such a fantastic response, or come back to you with
such a fantastic response, and He's been nothing about supportive
and encouraging. He supported and encouraged me through coming out
to investors, through coming out to the world, and he
has been an ally for me in so many different ways.
(31:51):
And I'm just incredibly thankful.
Emily Tisch Sussman (31:53):
And what was that conversation that you had with your husband,
with your family and at what point?
Margot Blouin (32:00):
So the conversation with my husband took a long time.
It took a long time. My journey, and there's other
people that have gone through this. My journey was I
had started questioning my gender, and I started questioning what
does my gender mean? And there's you know, new gender
identities beyond the binary, and I started thinking, okay, well
(32:21):
maybe I'm not binary, maybe I am somewhere in between
men and women. And you know, this was kind of
a way of just making the idea of a full transition,
which was terrifying a little bit more approachable, but also
kind of a way of like testing the waters with
my husband of like what if I dress a little
bit differently sometimes, what if I look a little bit differently,
(32:42):
What if I changed my name and it was you know,
I won't pretty up. It was really difficult because he
was in so many ways losing his partner, and he
was grieving that loss and he had to go through
and you know, we both did a ton of therapy
(33:02):
trying to figure out what does this mean for him?
Because he's gay, he likes man, and I wasn't going
to be that anymore. And ultimately we settled on he's
my person, I'm his, and you know, we're still working
through it to this day, but we've made it work.
We started that conversation a couple of years before I
(33:23):
ever brought it up with my family.
Emily Tisch Sussman (33:26):
What was that conversation with your family? Were they surprised
or they could see a difference already and had some idea.
It's such a slow, subtle process that most people that
know you will never pick up on the difference, because
it's like, especially somebody that you see frequently. It's such
a slow, gradual change. And then I told them, and
(33:48):
they were so surprised. I'd been terrified of telling them
for so long. I didn't know what it meant.
Margot Blouin (33:55):
My parents are lovely and caring, but they're older, they're
from another generation, and I didn't know what this meant.
And I was scared of losing them, and so I
told them and I called them late one night. I'd
been out for a walk with the dog thinking about this,
and I'd had this breakthrough moment where I realized, you
know what, I know that my dad's going to have
(34:16):
so much trouble accepting this. And it took me the
longest time to figure out that that's because he's going
to be worried about me. That's because he sees what's
happening in the world, and he's gonna just not want
his child to be in danger, his child to be
going through something difficult. And as soon as I realized
(34:37):
that's the problem that he's going to have with it,
I was ready and I had to tell him. So
I got home and I called him, and I didn't
have a plan. I just blurted it out. I said, Mom, Dad,
I'm transgender. I identify as a woman. And it was
actually pretty short conversation. They were shell shocked. And then
the next day my mom called me and said, so
(34:57):
that call that you gave us last night, we have
some questions. And we spent a period of time just
kind of spending so much time talking and going through
this and sharing, and I told them about all of
these experiences throughout my life from the age of five
all the way to where I am now, of feeling
so strongly than the oaths of meat and then pushing
(35:19):
it back because I was scared of that. And today
I am so thankful because they accept me and they
care for me, and it has been so difficult. It
was so difficult for them, and they said, we cannot
imagine losing a child, choosing to lose a child over this,
and so they put in the work so that they
(35:40):
didn't have to. Do you think that they've clearly gone
through their own journey? Like do you think that I'm
going to presume that if they live in a place
that is very world but it's less accepting. Yeah, do
you think that have they gone through their own journey
of acceptance?
Emily Tisch Sussman (35:58):
Like what has that been for them?
Margot Blouin (36:00):
They've definitely gone through their own journey of acceptance. They
live in Grand Prairie, which is I think about sixty
thousand people. Now. The rest of my extended family is
a lot of farmers. At is a lot of rural people.
It's more conservative and they're very religious, and so I
know that they've had to confront this from you know,
like a political conservative perspective, but also a religious perspective
(36:24):
and understand what it meant for them to still love
and care for their child despite really having to do
a ton of learning. And you know, my dad's in
his late seventies and so he has gone through so
many cultural shifts. This wasn't easy for him either, but
he did it. And I'm so thankful because I get
(36:47):
to see them and I have had a better relationship
than I have ever had with my parents because for
the first time, it feels like we're actually talking and
I can actually tell them. You know, for a good
eight years, so if you asked me how I was doing,
you were not getting a real answer. Now I can
tell them here's how I'm doing. I think that's so
(37:08):
beautiful that you have empathy for them. Of course, that
it can just there can be a learning curve. I
think that that's been something that's kind of been missing
in a lot of this conversation, like it's okay, they
don't get it, like it wasn't discussed. They have to adjust,
And they were worried for you. They were so worried
(37:28):
for me, and rightly so. Look at the world that
we live in. It is not a good thing to
be a transgender woman, it's such a difficult path and
for them, they're like, why are you choosing this? And
I was like, well, as hard as this is, it's
better than the alternative for me. And people don't need
to be perfect immediately. They have their own girlth journey.
(37:52):
It took me years. It took me thirty two years
to accept my own identity. I could give them some
time too, and we did. And if you've been really
close with the transgender person has come out, especially a
little bit later in life, but at any stage, I
think it's very common to go through a period where
you are crieving the loss of somebody you had, and
(38:15):
that I think can be genuinely said, but it's offset
because you're going to see this person develop and grow
and shine, And we said they never have before. And
when they look at what I'm doing now, starting my
company and being successful and being out and advocating for
my community and doing all of these things, they're so
proud of me. And I'm just happy to be able
(38:37):
to share that with them.
Emily Tisch Sussman (38:39):
You've said that you don't think you would be as
professionally successful right now had you not come out. Can
you tell us more about that?
Margot Blouin (38:49):
I think that before I came out, I wasn't very
effective at connecting with people, and I told myself all
kinds of stories. I said, Oh, you're an intropurt, Oh
you're really focused on things, just not as great with people.
And looking back, I'm amazed that I connected with anybody
at all, because I wasn't connected with myself. I was
(39:10):
anything that was a difficult emotion for me, I would
just push it away, not focus on it, because so
many of the things related to my identity were difficult
to process. So I didn't. And then I spent a
couple of years doing very intense therapy and really working
on myself and connecting and developing empathy not just for myself,
(39:32):
but my ability to empathize with my parents, with people
around me, with my husband. It has grown so substantially,
just because I care for myself now in a way
that I never did before. And so when people that
I'm working with, my employees, come in. Everybody wears a
mask at work, and my job's not to take the
(39:53):
mask away. Like we wear our masks. They serve a
good purpose for us. But at the same time, I
want to connect with the person find that mask. I
want you to know that you can trust me, that
I'm going to do the best for us and for
this company that I can possibly do.
Emily Tisch Sussman (40:09):
Oh that's so beautiful. What do you think the future holds?
Margot Blouin (40:14):
We are at an inflection point, and that much is clear.
I'm no longer scared of thinking about the future from
my own personal perspective, but I'm scared about the world.
There's a lot happening. I'm Canadian, I'm still Canadian, and
so there's a lot happening between our countries right now.
There's a lot happening towards trans people right now, and
(40:36):
there's a lot of question works. I'm terrified that we
are taking a step back from a really prosperous place
as a continent, you know, as a society of people
beyond countries, and that so much of the great work
that's been happening the last one or thirty years is
being done. I'm an optimist and I am out you
(40:59):
know my story that I'm out building my company because
I believe that I have an active part to play
in making the world better. My role is I am
a builder. That is the one thing that has always
come naturally to me. And I'm going to continue to
build and I want those I want our inventions, I
want our efforts to go into making the world a
(41:20):
better place. So what does the future hold? It holds
a lot of question marks, but you had better bet
that I am going to be here doing everything that
I can to make it better for my community and
for my company, and to the stuff that I can
for my country.
Emily Tisch Sussman (41:37):
Is there something It can be something we've covered, or
can be something different. Is there something that at the
time felt like a real low point for you, but
now in retrospect you see it as having really launched you.
Margot Blouin (41:49):
I told you about deciding not to ignore the feminine
side of me in August of twenty twenty two. In
November of twenty twenty two, I was laid off from
my job. I woke up one morning too an email
that I thought i'd never get. I had always been
a top performer and here I was laid off and
suddenly without work. And it was such a difficult moment
(42:13):
because I was burnt out. I couldn't fare to touch
a computer, and this was something that I had gravitated
towards my entire life. But I couldn't even bear to
play a game at a computer. I couldn't sit at
my desk, I couldn't do anything, and I felt so
fundamentally broken. And at the same time, I was contemplating
(42:35):
my own gender, and it just felt like, I think
I've lost everything. I've lost my identity, I've lost my career,
which was a big part of my identity. What is left?
And that was probably the darkest, most difficult moment in
my life. And it took me a good couple months
(42:57):
to just be able to sit and just do a
few of work at my computer, and slowly but surely
I started working again. And the only thing that felt
right was to work on this idea and to work
on this company, and to transition. And so I started
doing both of these things at once. I started exploring
(43:18):
my identity. I started exploring new names. I looked into
getting hormone replacement therapy, which takes quite a while to get,
takes many months or years in some places. And I said,
you know what, in that moment, I went from thinking
I could I might just kill myself over this, to
(43:40):
I'm not accepting that. I am not accepting this terrible
offer that I've been given. I am going to change
myself and I'm going to change what I'm doing and
I'm going to come out the other side way stronger.
And today I know that I am the person I
meant to be and I am doing the thing that
(44:00):
I am meant to do.
Unknown (44:09):
Thank you so much, Margo, Thank you.
Margot Blouin (44:11):
So much, Emily, and just thank you for reaching out.
Has really meant so much.
Emily Tisch Sussman (44:18):
Margo still lives in Montreal with her husband and is
growing Cadstrom, So if you ever want to build a
piece of electronics, you know where to go. I'm so
grateful to Margo for coming on to share her story
so openly, especially during a time when trans writes are
being attacked. The thesis of this show is to share
stories so we can all see ourselves reflected in them
(44:39):
and be inspired. Marco's story is no different. While the
details of her story might be unusual, we can all
relate to it in some way. There are a few
organizations linked on our causes page of the she Pivots website.
If you have the means, please consider donating. This issue
is bigger than we know and it will take all
of us and our voices to defend the trans community.
(45:00):
Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for listening to
this episode of she Pivots.
Unknown (45:06):
I hope you Enjoyed it, and if you did, leave
us a rating and tell your friends about us. To
learn more about our guests, follow us on Instagram at
she pivots the Podcast, or sign up for our newsletter,
where you can get exclusive behind the scenes content on
our website at she pivots thepodcast dot com. Special thanks
(45:29):
to the she pivots team, Executive producer Emily Edavlosk, Associate
producer and social media connoisseur Hannah Cousins, Research director Christine Dickinson,
Events and Logistics coordinator Madeline Sonoviak, and audio editor and
mixer Nina Pollock.
I endorse she pivots
Welcome back to She Pivots. I'm Margot Blewin.
Emily Tisch Sussman (00:12):
Welcome back to She Pivots, the podcast where we talk
with women who dare to pivot out of one career
and into something new and explore how their personal lives
impacts these decisions. I'm your host, Emily Tish Sussman. There
are certain stories that stay with you, not just because
(00:35):
they're powerful, but because they remind you of what's possible
when we stop trying to separate the personal from the professional,
and Margot Bluin's story is exactly that. In recognition of
Pride Month, I'm honored to have Margo join us to
talk about how her transition into becoming a woman was
(00:55):
integral to the success and growth of her company, Cadstrum.
For Margo carried the weight of a truth she wasn't
sure she could live out loud. The internal battle of
whether or pow to transition wasn't just a personal decision.
It touched everything her relationships, her work, her identity, and
(01:17):
for a long time she thought she had to choose
between authenticity and ambition. As she rose through the ranks
in the tech world, she decided to start her own company,
identifying as a man at the time, but her body
started to respond to the truth that Margo kept pushing
deeper and deeper, and eventually her body broke. She looked
(01:39):
inward and accepted her identity that was always knocking at
her door. In the end, it was because she embraced
her identity that she was able to truly grow her company.
Transitioning wasn't a detour, it was the foundation, and what
she once feared would be seen as a weakness became
her greatest strength. Margo is a true representation of how
(02:03):
the personal and the professional are always intertwined. Her story
reminds us that stepping into your truth isn't just brave,
it's essential.
So, without further ado, Margo Blouin.
Margot Blouin (02:22):
I'm Margo Bluin and I'm the founder and CEO of Cadstrom,
we help electrical engineers build printed circuit boards that make
up electronic devices that work right the first time. So,
as it turns out, if you are trying to build
an electronic device, most of the time people can't get
that to work. And it's not because they don't know
(02:43):
what they're doing. It's because they don't have the tools
to be successful. And so you can kind of think
of us like spellcheck for circuits. We go in, we
build a tool that looks at the circuit and tells
the engineer, Hey, if you plug this in, it's going
to explode, and you might not want that. So tell
us about your childhood. Where are you from, what's your
family like? Yeah, so I grew up in Grand Prairie, Alberta,
(03:07):
in Canada, which is pretty far north. Actually, I moved
to Seattle a little later in life, and I would
joke to satellites that Grand Prairie was closer to the
Arctic Circle than it was to Seattle. So I had
actually a really happy childhood despite it being pretty chilly
most of the time. You know, it's kind of funny.
When I came out eventually, my mother said to me, look,
(03:29):
you never really demonstrated being that girly as a child
or having very feminine interests. Where did this come from?
And I said, Mom, look in the mirror. My mother
grew up on a farm and all of her stories
from childhood involve farm animals and playing the dirt and
being outside and doing all of these quote unquote like
(03:50):
non feminine things. And I inherited a love for that.
So I would go out and I would play, and
I think the two things that really really came to
me when I was was music and building. I would always,
you know, create these fantastical drawings of things that I
could build and that.
Unknown (04:08):
Sort of thing.
Margot Blouin (04:09):
So I had actually a really really happy childhood like that.
So while my parents grew up on farms, my dad
went through a number of different careers. You know, he
became a carpenter, and then he was a car salesman,
and then he bought a business. And for a large
part of my childhood, the business played a massive part
because he was spending every single day working on that
(04:29):
business and I would barely see him, and he would
come home and he would pass out. And so, you know,
I started helping him out and working there, and I
think I got a lot of my work ethic from that.
But by the time I was ready to graduate from
high school, I needed out. I needed distance, and I
had known that there was parts of me that were
kind of waiting to develop, and I was so excited
(04:52):
to do that. So I made a feeline out of
town to the University of Alberta, which is where I
went tochool. I studied computer hardware engineering, and in my
second year, I actually got recruited by a recruiter at Microsoft,
and so I went down and I started spending my
summers in Seattle, and I would come back for the
(05:14):
school year and study, and it just became a race
to like, I want to get to Seattle. It's a
beautiful place. This career is so exciting, and I couldn't
finish fast enough.
Emily Tisch Sussman (05:26):
Did you feel rooted there, like, did you find social
grounding there in any way or was it just like
drop in, drop out, get back to Seattle?
Margot Blouin (05:37):
It was pretty much drop and drop out. I had
a great group of friends. I'd say that my little
group of engineers, we were pretty close knit. I met
my roommates through school, and I met my now husband
actually in university, and so I definitely had a group.
But I would say, like I fit really well with
(05:57):
these people that I had shared intros with and some commonality.
But I never really fit into the city. I never
really fit into the environment, the larger environment, right, But
I guess, you know, to put it another way, I
think in every environment, I have been able to find
people that I connect with, and it has largely been
queer people. For some reason, you know, and I didn't
(06:20):
really understand this myself, but for some reason, I'd always
fit in with queer people and felt so comfortable around them.
Were you identifying as queer at the time. It took
me a little while to get there. It took me
a little while to get there. I definitely showed up
to university thinking I was straight, really not thinking too
hard about some crushes that I had on some boys,
and that developed quickly in university. And the farther I
(06:45):
got from my roots, just the freeer I felt to
explore all of these things. And you know, for such
a long time, I stopped myself from investigating, from like
doing that like internal reflection, because it felt dangerous. When
I was a kid, actually my first memory of gender dysphoria,
(07:07):
I was five years old, and I was at my babysitters.
All the other kids had gone upstairs to play, and
I was sitting in the basement and I took a
quiet moment to myself And as I was sitting there reflecting,
I just I can't even say that I wanted to
be a woman. I just felt like a girl. And
(07:27):
as I sat there, just this feeling of peace flooded
through me and it just felt so happy. But at
the same time, one I didn't realize as a child
that you could be transgender, like I just as an idea.
I just didn't know. You know, in that community in
northern Alberta, there wasn't a lot of queer role models
(07:51):
that were visible to me. The extent of it was
often you know, if you look back at nineties television,
there's tons of shows that I love, but the man
in the dress quote unquote was often the butt of
the joke. And so I was able to establish from
a young age that that wasn't a good thing to be,
and so I avoided it. I avoided it at every
(08:12):
moment that that came up in my life. And I
guess being queer was kind of like that.
Emily Tisch Sussman (08:17):
Do you remember where there was a moment if you
did identify a person or a role model or a
character and you're like, oh, wait, that's me. I think
they're saying what I feel.
Margot Blouin (08:30):
There's a pretty famous show I'm in queer folks on
Netflix called Sense8.
Emily Tisch Sussman (08:35):
It had a wildly diverse cast, fluid sexuality.
Unknown (08:39):
It filmed all over the world.
And cost millions to make and was just so good.
But let's back up because some of you may not
know the freaking, amazing magicalness that is sense sact and
I'm sorry for you.
Margot Blouin (08:52):
You should go watch.
Unknown (08:53):
It because Sense8 is a show about connection. The series
centers upon a group of eight strangers from around the globe.
The Hacker, the German gangster Wolfgang, the melodramatic Mexican actor Leado,
the Chicago cop will kick ass warrior Son, the inspiring
bus driver Kafiis, the DJ Riley, and the devout Hindu
dealing with the expectations of an arranged marriage.
Margot Blouin (09:11):
One of the lead characters is a transgender woman and
actually we shared the same dead name, and what a trip.
What a trip, And watching that was so complicated for
me because I could connect and I could feel so
much about what she was feeling. This was all before
I transitioned, and like it wasn't just like I wasn't
(09:33):
just sitting there enjoying the story. I was connecting at
a deeper level. And it almost put me off the
show of just like, oh, something about this feels way
too deep to be just a show on TV.
Emily Tisch Sussman (09:45):
Was that the first time that you considered that that
may be your future Journey.
Margot Blouin (09:51):
Around that time. Yes, actually, so this was in my
mid twenties and I was living and working in Seattle
at Microsoft, and as I was starting to engage a
lot more with this type of queer media and this
show in particular, where you could see this transgender woman,
I would have these days and nights where I would
(10:14):
feel so lost in my body. And it felt like
over the years these moments and they were really dark,
and they were really difficult. They would get worse and
they kept getting worse. And I remember like weekends where
I would come home from work and just drop everything
(10:36):
and be like, oh my god, just existing in the
world hurts and it doesn't feel right and it's draining me.
And I didn't understand. And then I would almost guiltily
sit back and imagine a life where I was a woman,
and I would kind of fantasize just about like, man,
(10:58):
what if I could just live like that? That would
be so, you know, And I wasn't necessarily fantasizing about
the gender, but just life, if you know. I wanted
to just do regular things. I wanted to, you know,
go out and exist and be in the world and
be perceived like that. And it wasn't anything in particular,
but that brought me so much joy. And then I
would go and just tuck that away, and I'd show
(11:21):
up on Monday in a colored shirt and do my job,
and again trying really hard not to think about that,
because if there's one thing that's really really clear today
more than ever, that's a difficult thing to be and
that's a difficult route to go on. It was such
a safe space for me to imagine myself in a
world where this was me. I was already me, but
(11:42):
the path there was absolutely terrifying, and I knew it
was so hard, like I could. I did not have
the mental energy to even consider going that route. That
was too much, so I just put it aside.
Emily Tisch Sussman (11:58):
Daydreaming about her life a woman. Life was going full
steam ahead for Margo, barely giving her a moment to
address her deeper feelings about her gender. She had a
dream job in the booming tech industry and got married
to her college sweetheart.
Margot Blouin (12:12):
We got married in twenty sixteen, so that was the
year that we graduated, and we got married actually on
paper because he needed that to have a spousal visa
so that he could visit me and be with me
when he came to the US, and so that was
a big reason for why we married at that specific moment.
(12:34):
We didn't have a ceremony. It was just kind of
a quaint little thing with a couple of friends and
family and a minister.
Emily Tisch Sussman (12:42):
Did it feel almost logistical or was it?
Or were you like, we know that we're going to
be together forevers, we might as well just make it official.
Margot Blouin (12:49):
The moment felt logistical. But I had proposed to him
about nine months before. At this point, we've been together
for five years. I knew that he was my person
and I wanted to spend my life with him, and
you know, I proposed to him. Oh my god, it's
so terrible that I proposed at the university in kind
of like one of our favorite like fields and like
(13:09):
green areas. And then I forgot to tell him to
take his backpack off because I was so excited about
proposing to him. And so I had a friend kind
of like in the bushes, like taking pictures, and we're
there with our backpack looking nerdy, but we had much
nicer pictures taken.
Emily Tisch Sussman (13:25):
Like So, did you have a long distance relationship when
you were going back and forth to Microsoft?
Margot Blouin (13:31):
Yes, and that was so difficult even when I when
I started working full time and they moved me to
see how the visa that I was on would not
allow my spouse to work. And my husband's actually a
mining engineer, so he works in any kind of mine
and he's since specialized in water resource management and land
reclamation and that sort of stuff. But it meant that
(13:53):
he had to work at a mine, and surprisingly there's
really none in Washington, or there's not very many, And
there's a vast difference in the types of minds between
the US and Canada, largely because of like population centers.
So that meant that he wasn't allowed to work in
the US, and so he had to live in Canada
and come down and visit me. So for a long time,
(14:14):
about five or six years, we were a voute.
Emily Tisch Sussman (14:17):
What were you thinking would be your future professionally and
your future with your spouse, Like, did you guys think
that you would be able to end up in the
same country. Were you making professional decisions try to make
that happen.
Margot Blouin (14:31):
It's a good question. We wanted to find a way
to end up in the same place. And he was
a mining engineer, and he thought that perhaps he could
come to Seattle and study and get a master's degree
in water management or utilities or something like that, because Seattle,
of course has a lot of water, and so we
thought that that could be a good path. But you
(14:53):
asked the question. The reason that I paused is yes,
did I think about the future, And the answer was
really no. Spent that whole time being so myopic, focused
on what is the next thing. I don't care about
the big picture, what's the next thing? And part of
that was I couldn't imagine myself five years down the road.
(15:13):
I couldn't imagine myself ten years down the road because
I didn't want to. That wasn't exciting, that wasn't interesting,
And so much of that I see now looking back,
was really tied.
Emily Tisch Sussman (15:25):
In my identity, stuck in the present. Margot didn't take
the time to truly think about her identity. She kept
pushing her needs deeper and deeper, and eventually her body rebelled,
telling her loud and clear what her mind would not
let her.
Margot Blouin (15:43):
I had an amazing career. I got to move around
and I got to do so many different things. I
worked on Xbox, and I was thriving, was there wasn't
a year that I didn't get promoted. We acquired a
startup and started building a live streaming platform within the
gaming organization, and that was a wild ride. And then
(16:05):
when that culminated, I went off and said, Hey, I'm
going to do something completely different, and I went and
worked on quantum computers and I founded the Quantum Computing team,
bringing quantm computers to the cloud at Microsoft and letting
access to the world's first quantum computers through the Usher
cloud and building that team, and that was such a
tremendous change because I had no background in that talk
(16:29):
about imposter syndrome, but it was phenomenal. And all of
this was contrasted with my personal life right because I
would go and I would go to work, and I
would put all of my energy in and I would
come home and I would feel trained. And what I
didn't understand at the time was that I felt drained,
(16:49):
not just because I was putting a lot of effort,
but because of how I was having to show up
in the world. And so it was just such a
contrast in my life of like light and dark.
Emily Tisch Sussman (16:58):
Margo's true I didity was banging at the door asking
to be let in When we come back, she talks
through what eventually led her decision to officially transition. During COVID,
(17:19):
Margo and her husband moved to Montreal, a place for
them to build a life in a queer friendly city.
But Margo's body continued to hold onto the negative feelings
and she was getting sicker and sicker, to the point
where she knew she had to confront her gender dysphoria.
Margot Blouin (17:36):
So we moved.
We left Seattle in August of twenty twenty. We moved
during the middle of the pandemic, during shutdown borders. It
was a wild experience. We got here. We had bought
an old one hundred and ten year old house and
we spent the next year renovating at I had a
career change. I went from Microsoft to Strike and then
(17:56):
I had this period of about a month in twenty
two twenty two and I was not doing well. I
had thrown my back out working out. I then got
a gum infection as I was healing from my back,
and then I got straped throat, and then that turned
into scarlet fever, and long story short, I spent a
(18:19):
month in so much pain, just hiding in our basement,
just really unhappy. And at this point, my gender dysphoria
was really getting to me. I couldn't look in the mirror,
I couldn't think about myself. I didn't want to come out.
I was horribly unhappy at my job. I ended up
being a really bad fit for that company. And I
(18:42):
was sitting there in the dark and I said, you
know what, I don't know what this part of me
that wants to explore more feminine side is, but I'm
not ignoring it anymore.
I need to change that.
And I came out of that and I said, Okay,
I'm going to allow myself to think about this thing
scares me because it feels like I have to do
(19:03):
this because I don't think I can survive if I
don't do this. And so I got a therapist and
I started exploring this and every time she would guide
me through visualization exercises and thinking and experimenting with you know,
different ways of dressing or playing with makeup or whatever,
(19:25):
and every time I would have this moment of clee
and of joy and of happiness, connecting with my body
in a way that I never had before. And then
it just felt like the light like the lights would
turn off and I would look in the mirror and
I would see a man staring back and it was
(19:47):
like the glass shattering. It just was so difficult, and
so I would have these moments of like elation, exploring
this sound inside of me, and I would come back
to being a man, and it would just destroy me
because I want to desperately for there to be another way.
Perhaps I could just be a little bit more flamboyantly gay,
a little bit more feminine in how I wear myself
(20:07):
in the world. But that wasn't the right answer for me.
Emily Tisch Sussman (20:11):
Was there something in particular that you were afraid of?
Or was everything everything? It's a mountain, it's social rejection.
It's knowing that you were going to lose people in
your life. You are going to lose family, and you
are going to lose friends. Transgender people have been a
conversation a little surprising to me. I can't say I
(20:32):
get it, but we've been a conversation for a long time,
and I didn't want to be part of that conversation.
As a transgender person. I was so comfortable advocating for
and being close to, but actually being transgender was and
is a difficult thing to be, and it meant giving
up parts of my life that I liked. It meant
(20:54):
giving up, you know, going through world as a man,
which is a nice easy thing to do. Comparatively, you're
allowed to show up in a completely different way. A
huge part of this show is interweaving the personal and
the professional, and that could be more true for Margo.
While she was coming to terms with her identity, she
(21:14):
also decided to start her own company.
Margot Blouin (21:19):
So I founded my company about So I had that
really difficult moment back in August of twenty twenty two,
and I founded my company in March of twenty twenty three.
So this was actually kind of like early as I
was exploring my own gender transition. But I also knew
that I needed to do something that meant something to me.
I needed to have an impact in the world that
(21:40):
it didn't feel like I was having in my day job.
And I had actually been a researching the topic of
my company, how we can help electrical engineers build circuit boards.
I've been researching that privately in my own time and
thinking about new techniques to do it at ways to
solve some of the problems that they faced. And so
I finally decided, Okay, this is the moment I'm going
(22:01):
to do it. I'm absolutely unhappy in my life. There's
so many things and I'm changing that. So I decided
to found it. And I was a solo founder. I
was completely alone, just building off of what I had
learned and what I had researched. And so my husband
was doing a master's at the time at McGill. We
didn't have any money coming in. So I went and
(22:23):
applied to a government program that gave a grant to
start a small business, and I thought, you know, some
minimum wage pay through that to support us. And I
started looking at what we could do by combining, you know,
some of these new circuit analysis techniques that I built
with AI and everything that was happening, And of course
we've all heard about CHATGBT and stuff like that, and
(22:46):
I realized that if I put these two things together
and they met in the middle, we can build some
really incredible things and really help electrical engineers be orders
of magnitude more productive than they could be otherwise. And
so I saw, okay, well I needed to do that.
But I'm not a researcher. I don't really know AI
have built some products with it at Microsoft, and so
(23:07):
I needed to bolster that part of the company. I
applied to an incubator in Seattle founded by Paul Allen,
one of the founders of Microsoft, and it's called the
Allen Institute for AI, and I sought them out because
I needed a partner that was strong in AI, and
over the summer we negotiated the agreement. They had never
(23:29):
worked with the Canadian company before, so they loved the idea,
they loved what I was doing, they loved my background,
and we just had to work through a lot of
those details. And as it turns out, I took my
first pill of estrogen on my first official day in
the incubator and it just felt like this moment of okay,
(23:51):
life has changed. And that was just a year after
I was locked in my basement for a month in
pain and so unhappy. As just this incredible moment of like, wow,
look at where I am. Yeah.
Emily Tisch Sussman (24:05):
Oh, I got chills thinking about that day for you're like,
this is it day one? Like it all starts today? Really,
it was day one in so many ways, and it
also wasn't because nobody in the world knew, aside from
my husband and a few close friends.
Margot Blouin (24:21):
Nobody in the world knew I was transitioning. I guess
everybody in the world knew about my business, but nobody
knew I was transitioning. And so everybody was like, hey,
was that an exciting day? And I was like, you
don't even know the half of it.
Emily Tisch Sussman (24:35):
Exciting, but things were still complicated for Margo. She was
trying to build a company and get funding, and not
just any company, a company at the intersection of AI
tech and electronics, not a place where you can find
a plethora of queer people. After the break, Margo talks
about how her transition both helped and hindered her while
(24:57):
building cadstrom In the early days of CADSTRM, Margo conducted
customer discovery exercises, a typical phase for any new company
to figure out product market fit. It was during this
phase when Margo met a man named Scott, a previous
(25:20):
founder who was exactly the right client for a company
like Cadstrum. After a few meetings, it was clear that
he could be the perfect co founder.
Margot Blouin (25:30):
A couple months later, I flew down to Seattle for
the first time to meet him in person, and we agreed, Yeah,
we're going to do this. But it was such a
scary trip, actually that trip, because that was I guess
three four months into taking hormones, and so I was
well on my way. My body had started changing. I
(25:50):
could not wear a lot of my old men's shirts
without some things really not looking right. And I was thinking, like,
do I tell him? And I was terrified. I was
anxious about coming out to the world and I wasn't ready,
and I had this picture in my head of just
complete and utter failure. I was terrified of coming out
(26:11):
to the world because I was picturing that half the
people weren't going to accept me because I was transgender
and they didn't like that, or they weren't certain about that.
Why would you invest in a company with a transgender founder.
That's such a big question mark. And then I was
worred the other half wouldn't take me seriously because I
was a woman, and between the two, I was paralyzed.
(26:35):
I couldn't do it, and so I decided not to.
So I bought a binder and I wore that every
day working at the incubator because I just wasn't ready
to tell the world. I wasn't ready to tell Scott
and you know what, I know now that things would
have turned out different, but I'm thankful that I didn't.
I've learned to trust my gut and do things when
I'm genuinely ready to do that. And you know, it
(26:58):
was interesting because so we ended up pitching in March.
We started pitching in March, and so you know, if
you've never pitched before, you're going and you're doing meeting
after meeting after meeting, and I think we pitched seventy
times to different firms over the course of the next
four to six weeks, and two weeks in on March fourteenth,
(27:20):
twenty twenty four, I had a gender affirming surgery. I
had my atoms apple taken out because every time I
looked in the mirror I hated what I saw. I
wanted to crawl out of my skin, and so I
somehow needed to navigate. Okay, I've had my atoms apple
taken out. I'm having these meetings with investors. My co
(27:42):
founder sees me going through this. Hey, I have to
take some time off for surgery, but no, I'm not
going to tell you what it's for. And so you know,
like this whole time it was went through. But the
logic the thinking was one I was worried about what
would happen if I was trying to navigate this as
a trans woman openly. But I was also worried about
the other flip side of that of perhaps you're accepting,
(28:04):
but if you look at a transperson going through this journey,
you might say to yourself, as an investor, that's such
a question mark. I'm worried that they're not going to
be focused on the business because they're so focused on themselves.
And so my whole strategy was to come out pretty
much when I was very far into my transition, and
(28:26):
I could say, you don't need to worry about my
focus because our entire relationship has been me transitioning. You
have seen me going through it, you just didn't know it.
And I am more here and I am more present
than I have ever been and being able to say
that with confidence, and so that was a big part
of that. And by the way, I think that that
opinion is completely wrong because it discounts the experience of
(28:51):
every entrepreneur, not just my story, but everyone. Every single
entrepreneur exists in any social content. You have dates, or
you have parents, you have children. So many entrepreneurs I
know have gone through big life experiences while they're founding
(29:11):
their companies. Life doesn't stop because you are starting a company.
In some ways, it feels like it intensifies. And so
you got to see the world can see my personal
and social struggle. But I don't think that my experience
is so unique when you remember that everybody has a
(29:33):
personal life that they're dealing with and stuff that they're
dealing with.
Emily Tisch Sussman (29:37):
So then at what point did you come out to
Scott and what was that conversation.
Margot Blouin (29:42):
So a few weeks after that surgery, we got a
term sheet, which is really exciting because you get this
offer to invest in your company. It's millions of dollars,
more money than I've ever handled, and you have to
say yes pretty quickly because they go away. And so
we accepted, and we spend a couple of weeks negotiating,
and I flew to Seattle to have dinner with the
(30:04):
investor and meet the investors, and Scott lives in Seattle,
so we went for dinner with Tom from Bison Ventures,
who was our lead investor, and we had this great
dinner and then afterwards we separated and Scott and I
went our own ways and we took a walk around
the neighborhood and it was this beautiful, nice night, and
we had this moment of I can't believe we met
(30:27):
like eight months ago, and here we are. We just
raised millions of dollars for this company. What a wild ride.
And I felt so safe and strong, and I'd gotten
to know him deeply and he's such a caring person.
And I said, Scott, I have something I need to
(30:47):
tell you. And I told him. I blurted it out,
and he was He was surprised, and not surprised. He's
a very perceptive person. He'd seen lot about me changing.
He had obviously noticed me going for surgery, and he
(31:07):
immediately accepted me and supported me. And the best thing
was actually so we ended the conversation pretty quickly. After that,
he went home, he talked to his wife, who'd already met.
Came in the next morning and he said, by the way,
I told Margaret, his wife. I told Margaret, and her
first response was well, yeah, which was just amazing. It
(31:30):
was like the people that love you come out with
such a fantastic response, or come back to you with
such a fantastic response, and He's been nothing about supportive
and encouraging. He supported and encouraged me through coming out
to investors, through coming out to the world, and he
has been an ally for me in so many different ways.
(31:51):
And I'm just incredibly thankful.
Emily Tisch Sussman (31:53):
And what was that conversation that you had with your husband,
with your family and at what point?
Margot Blouin (32:00):
So the conversation with my husband took a long time.
It took a long time. My journey, and there's other
people that have gone through this. My journey was I
had started questioning my gender, and I started questioning what
does my gender mean? And there's you know, new gender
identities beyond the binary, and I started thinking, okay, well
(32:21):
maybe I'm not binary, maybe I am somewhere in between
men and women. And you know, this was kind of
a way of just making the idea of a full transition,
which was terrifying a little bit more approachable, but also
kind of a way of like testing the waters with
my husband of like what if I dress a little
bit differently sometimes, what if I look a little bit differently,
(32:42):
What if I changed my name and it was you know,
I won't pretty up. It was really difficult because he
was in so many ways losing his partner, and he
was grieving that loss and he had to go through
and you know, we both did a ton of therapy
(33:02):
trying to figure out what does this mean for him?
Because he's gay, he likes man, and I wasn't going
to be that anymore. And ultimately we settled on he's
my person, I'm his, and you know, we're still working
through it to this day, but we've made it work.
We started that conversation a couple of years before I
(33:23):
ever brought it up with my family.
Emily Tisch Sussman (33:26):
What was that conversation with your family? Were they surprised
or they could see a difference already and had some idea.
It's such a slow, subtle process that most people that
know you will never pick up on the difference, because
it's like, especially somebody that you see frequently. It's such
a slow, gradual change. And then I told them, and
(33:48):
they were so surprised. I'd been terrified of telling them
for so long. I didn't know what it meant.
Margot Blouin (33:55):
My parents are lovely and caring, but they're older, they're
from another generation, and I didn't know what this meant.
And I was scared of losing them, and so I
told them and I called them late one night. I'd
been out for a walk with the dog thinking about this,
and I'd had this breakthrough moment where I realized, you
know what, I know that my dad's going to have
(34:16):
so much trouble accepting this. And it took me the
longest time to figure out that that's because he's going
to be worried about me. That's because he sees what's
happening in the world, and he's gonna just not want
his child to be in danger, his child to be
going through something difficult. And as soon as I realized
(34:37):
that's the problem that he's going to have with it,
I was ready and I had to tell him. So
I got home and I called him, and I didn't
have a plan. I just blurted it out. I said, Mom, Dad,
I'm transgender. I identify as a woman. And it was
actually pretty short conversation. They were shell shocked. And then
the next day my mom called me and said, so
(34:57):
that call that you gave us last night, we have
some questions. And we spent a period of time just
kind of spending so much time talking and going through
this and sharing, and I told them about all of
these experiences throughout my life from the age of five
all the way to where I am now, of feeling
so strongly than the oaths of meat and then pushing
(35:19):
it back because I was scared of that. And today
I am so thankful because they accept me and they
care for me, and it has been so difficult. It
was so difficult for them, and they said, we cannot
imagine losing a child, choosing to lose a child over this,
and so they put in the work so that they
(35:40):
didn't have to. Do you think that they've clearly gone
through their own journey? Like do you think that I'm
going to presume that if they live in a place
that is very world but it's less accepting. Yeah, do
you think that have they gone through their own journey
of acceptance?
Emily Tisch Sussman (35:58):
Like what has that been for them?
Margot Blouin (36:00):
They've definitely gone through their own journey of acceptance. They
live in Grand Prairie, which is I think about sixty
thousand people. Now. The rest of my extended family is
a lot of farmers. At is a lot of rural people.
It's more conservative and they're very religious, and so I
know that they've had to confront this from you know,
like a political conservative perspective, but also a religious perspective
(36:24):
and understand what it meant for them to still love
and care for their child despite really having to do
a ton of learning. And you know, my dad's in
his late seventies and so he has gone through so
many cultural shifts. This wasn't easy for him either, but
he did it. And I'm so thankful because I get
(36:47):
to see them and I have had a better relationship
than I have ever had with my parents because for
the first time, it feels like we're actually talking and
I can actually tell them. You know, for a good
eight years, so if you asked me how I was doing,
you were not getting a real answer. Now I can
tell them here's how I'm doing. I think that's so
(37:08):
beautiful that you have empathy for them. Of course, that
it can just there can be a learning curve. I
think that that's been something that's kind of been missing
in a lot of this conversation, like it's okay, they
don't get it, like it wasn't discussed. They have to adjust,
And they were worried for you. They were so worried
(37:28):
for me, and rightly so. Look at the world that
we live in. It is not a good thing to
be a transgender woman, it's such a difficult path and
for them, they're like, why are you choosing this? And
I was like, well, as hard as this is, it's
better than the alternative for me. And people don't need
to be perfect immediately. They have their own girlth journey.
(37:52):
It took me years. It took me thirty two years
to accept my own identity. I could give them some
time too, and we did. And if you've been really
close with the transgender person has come out, especially a
little bit later in life, but at any stage, I
think it's very common to go through a period where
you are crieving the loss of somebody you had, and
(38:15):
that I think can be genuinely said, but it's offset
because you're going to see this person develop and grow
and shine, And we said they never have before. And
when they look at what I'm doing now, starting my
company and being successful and being out and advocating for
my community and doing all of these things, they're so
proud of me. And I'm just happy to be able
(38:37):
to share that with them.
Emily Tisch Sussman (38:39):
You've said that you don't think you would be as
professionally successful right now had you not come out. Can
you tell us more about that?
Margot Blouin (38:49):
I think that before I came out, I wasn't very
effective at connecting with people, and I told myself all
kinds of stories. I said, Oh, you're an intropurt, Oh
you're really focused on things, just not as great with people.
And looking back, I'm amazed that I connected with anybody
at all, because I wasn't connected with myself. I was
(39:10):
anything that was a difficult emotion for me, I would
just push it away, not focus on it, because so
many of the things related to my identity were difficult
to process. So I didn't. And then I spent a
couple of years doing very intense therapy and really working
on myself and connecting and developing empathy not just for myself,
(39:32):
but my ability to empathize with my parents, with people
around me, with my husband. It has grown so substantially,
just because I care for myself now in a way
that I never did before. And so when people that
I'm working with, my employees, come in. Everybody wears a
mask at work, and my job's not to take the
(39:53):
mask away. Like we wear our masks. They serve a
good purpose for us. But at the same time, I
want to connect with the person find that mask. I
want you to know that you can trust me, that
I'm going to do the best for us and for
this company that I can possibly do.
Emily Tisch Sussman (40:09):
Oh that's so beautiful. What do you think the future holds?
Margot Blouin (40:14):
We are at an inflection point, and that much is clear.
I'm no longer scared of thinking about the future from
my own personal perspective, but I'm scared about the world.
There's a lot happening. I'm Canadian, I'm still Canadian, and
so there's a lot happening between our countries right now.
There's a lot happening towards trans people right now, and
(40:36):
there's a lot of question works. I'm terrified that we
are taking a step back from a really prosperous place
as a continent, you know, as a society of people
beyond countries, and that so much of the great work
that's been happening the last one or thirty years is
being done. I'm an optimist and I am out you
(40:59):
know my story that I'm out building my company because
I believe that I have an active part to play
in making the world better. My role is I am
a builder. That is the one thing that has always
come naturally to me. And I'm going to continue to
build and I want those I want our inventions, I
want our efforts to go into making the world a
(41:20):
better place. So what does the future hold? It holds
a lot of question marks, but you had better bet
that I am going to be here doing everything that
I can to make it better for my community and
for my company, and to the stuff that I can
for my country.
Emily Tisch Sussman (41:37):
Is there something It can be something we've covered, or
can be something different. Is there something that at the
time felt like a real low point for you, but
now in retrospect you see it as having really launched you.
Margot Blouin (41:49):
I told you about deciding not to ignore the feminine
side of me in August of twenty twenty two. In
November of twenty twenty two, I was laid off from
my job. I woke up one morning too an email
that I thought i'd never get. I had always been
a top performer and here I was laid off and
suddenly without work. And it was such a difficult moment
(42:13):
because I was burnt out. I couldn't fare to touch
a computer, and this was something that I had gravitated
towards my entire life. But I couldn't even bear to
play a game at a computer. I couldn't sit at
my desk, I couldn't do anything, and I felt so
fundamentally broken. And at the same time, I was contemplating
(42:35):
my own gender, and it just felt like, I think
I've lost everything. I've lost my identity, I've lost my career,
which was a big part of my identity. What is left?
And that was probably the darkest, most difficult moment in
my life. And it took me a good couple months
(42:57):
to just be able to sit and just do a
few of work at my computer, and slowly but surely
I started working again. And the only thing that felt
right was to work on this idea and to work
on this company, and to transition. And so I started
doing both of these things at once. I started exploring
(43:18):
my identity. I started exploring new names. I looked into
getting hormone replacement therapy, which takes quite a while to get,
takes many months or years in some places. And I said,
you know what, in that moment, I went from thinking
I could I might just kill myself over this, to
(43:40):
I'm not accepting that. I am not accepting this terrible
offer that I've been given. I am going to change
myself and I'm going to change what I'm doing and
I'm going to come out the other side way stronger.
And today I know that I am the person I
meant to be and I am doing the thing that
(44:00):
I am meant to do.
Unknown (44:09):
Thank you so much, Margo, Thank you.
Margot Blouin (44:11):
So much, Emily, and just thank you for reaching out.
Has really meant so much.
Emily Tisch Sussman (44:18):
Margo still lives in Montreal with her husband and is
growing Cadstrom, So if you ever want to build a
piece of electronics, you know where to go. I'm so
grateful to Margo for coming on to share her story
so openly, especially during a time when trans writes are
being attacked. The thesis of this show is to share
stories so we can all see ourselves reflected in them
(44:39):
and be inspired. Marco's story is no different. While the
details of her story might be unusual, we can all
relate to it in some way. There are a few
organizations linked on our causes page of the she Pivots website.
If you have the means, please consider donating. This issue
is bigger than we know and it will take all
of us and our voices to defend the trans community.
(45:00):
Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for listening to
this episode of she Pivots.
Unknown (45:06):
I hope you Enjoyed it, and if you did, leave
us a rating and tell your friends about us. To
learn more about our guests, follow us on Instagram at
she pivots the Podcast, or sign up for our newsletter,
where you can get exclusive behind the scenes content on
our website at she pivots thepodcast dot com. Special thanks
(45:29):
to the she pivots team, Executive producer Emily Edavlosk, Associate
producer and social media connoisseur Hannah Cousins, Research director Christine Dickinson,
Events and Logistics coordinator Madeline Sonoviak, and audio editor and
mixer Nina Pollock.
I endorse she pivots
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