Pitching a Startup While Pregnant

Pitching a business to outside investors is a high-stakes, high-anxiety proposition, but doing it while keeping an early stage pregnancy under wraps is particularly difficult, says Melissa Miranda. She didn’t announce that she was pregnant when she presented her Silicon Valley tech startup, Tiny Post, to investors in January 2012.

“It wasn’t something we were trying to hide. We figured if anybody asked, we’d tell them,” recalls Miranda, who was in her first trimester and who raised the $325,000 in seed-stage money she needed without the topic coming up. The photo-sharing app she founded with her husband was acquired by TripAdvisor in March.