I run a successful company but I often feel that my colleagues wonder how the hell I accomplish this. Sadly, I sometimes wonder if they are right. I worry that I “made it” because I was propped up for being female.

If being a woman is all it takes to build a successful company then the world would be overflowing with female founders.

If you use the "woman in tech" angle for easy publicity -- good for you. It's no different from the "young energetic creative startup guys working on the next big thing from the garage" angle the rest of us use. Using charm to close a deal is no different from using the "let's go to the pub and get this deal done" guy's guy approach.

Did you get lucky? Yeah, probably. All of us with any amount of success did. Nobody chooses the family country or family they're born in. Nor our natural aptitudes and interests. Yet it's those things that largely determine where we end up in life, and it's pure chance. Not worth losing sleep over.

If that were the case, my minority woman founded company would be funded. The second you think anything less of your ability, it becomes that. This thought is destructive to both you and other women. We want to earn our place by having an awesome idea and strong business model. Sometimes it is a boys club where some men led companies will miss the pieces and still get funded, so it's not impossible for women to have the same... Either way, you don't see those guys saying they got propped up because they were guys. You were fortunate enough to find people to back you (regardless of what's between your legs), don't let them down and don't screw up. Be grateful. It's hard no matter who you are.

++++1 own ur shit. They r just jealous. Quite a few younger males in this business believe they "deserve" immediate success as soon as they churn out anything bc the media has glorified that image for years. They are stunned when they build mediocre product & not getting huge success overnight. People like you are updating that image to where tech is headed. If your product is good & useful, you have a shot no matter who you are.

Please stop those self-destructing thought immediately!!!

If you are the CEO of your company, you deserve it. Period. Do not take yourself down because you are female. I'm a man, white, i'm not gay or anything which could put me in any minority, and I'm also a startup CEO. I have nothing "different" except my personality. And I know perfectly how much hard it is to lead a company. You do not need to be a woman to discover it's hard. It's really hard for everybody.

You must realize something: most people think we are CEO or founder because of this or that. Maybe family, maybe because you come from a minority or because of your gender. It is not true. None of them will never found or lead a company. You do. The only thing you can do is encouraging them to create a startup and run it, like you did. Offer advices. Of course they will never do it. But they will shut up as soon as you will offer your help and advices to wannabe entrepreneurs.

Feelings aren't facts. Feeling like an imposter doesn't mean you are one. There is a whole psychological phenomenon around this - this sounds like a textbook case, just with a gender skin wrapped around it.

Think about it... you "wonder" if people think something critical then agree with the imagined discounts to your success? You are stuck in your own head.

Highly competent people usually feel the weight of everything they don't know - this occasionally causes soul crushing amounts of self doubt. But it's a hallucination of feeling, not real.

If your business is actually in good shape, the work you need to do is finding a way to live in your own head without picking on yourself.

you do realize that this kind of post solicits trolling, right? is this troll bait?

If you feel guilty because you might have been propped up just because you were a woman, spare a thought for all the other women who deserved to be propped up at some point, too, but weren't - just because they were women!

Most of us men in business have benefitted at some point in our careers from a break we aren't sure we totally deserved, but that's life, and it happens far more often to men than it ever does to women. Guys sometimes get propped up just because they were guys, but not many of us feel guilty about it. Embrace your good fortune and enjoy it, it doesn't happen often enough to women.