Too Direct with Stella Garber

Stella Garber has been told her whole life that she is too direct. Too bossy. Too aggressive. She heard it as a kid. She heard it as a young manager. She’s heard it her entire career. And she’s spent years wondering whether she’d be getting that feedback at all if she were a man. Her answer: absolutely not.Stella is a repeat founder and the co-founder and CEO of Hoop, an AI customer support agent for e-commerce brands. She’s also Eastern European, a self-described high D on the DISC profile, and someone who has figured out - through years of managing remote teams, navigating co-founder relationships, and doing a lot of internal work - how to stop softening herself and start channeling her directness more effectively instead.In this episode, she talks about what it actually took to get there: the DISC framework she runs with every team she builds, the Claude project where she stores her co-founders’ profiles to prep for hard conversations, and why she thinks the real work of building a company - the seven-to-ten-year stretch after launch that nobody talks about - depends entirely on who you choose to do it with.What you’ll learn:Why “don’t be so direct” feedback - however well-intentioned - is often gendered, and what Stella thinks would happen if a man got the same noteThe one context where Stella thinks directness actually did need calibrating, and how she learned to root it in relationship firstHow she uses DISC profiles across her founding team, and why she keeps them loaded in a Claude project for sensitive conversationsWhat it sounds like when a high-D founder talks to a C co-founder: fewer claims, more metrics, and a much better outcomeWhy self-awareness is a double-edged sword for founders, and what you gain and lose at each stage of the journeyThe values exercise Stella and her co-founders did before they had a product, a raise, or even a company name, and why she thinks it’s the single biggest thing that makes co-founder relationships lastWhy who you partner with is the most important determinant of your long-term success as a founderWhat the real timeline of company building actually looks like, and why the emphasis on launching gets it completely backwardsAbout Stella GarberStella Garber is a repeat founder and the co-founder and CEO of Hoop, an AI customer support agent built for e-commerce brands. She has spent essentially her entire career working remotely, and has built and led distributed teams long before it became standard practice. Stella has co-founded with the same partners twice, first working alongside them, then building with them, and is a strong believer that the foundation of any company is the values conversation you have before you write a single line of code. She is a high-D DISC profile, an Eastern European who has heard “too direct” more times than she can count, and a founder who has turned that feedback into a leadership philosophy: know yourself deeply, build in the counterbalance, and find the people who bring out your best.This episode is for anyone who has been told to soften their edges, and is starting to wonder if the problem isn’t them, it’s the framing.📩 Subscribe to the newsletter: lindsaytjepkema.substack.com 🔗 Follow Lindsay on LinkedIn🔗 Follow Stella on LinkedIn🤖 Learn more about Hoop: hoop.app