I never thought about writing a post like this, but I can't think of much else to do in this moment so ... here goes.
Yesterday, another DFW entrepreneur pointed me to this heartbreaking post on LinkedIn sharing the news that Carri Craver passed away last weekend.
I met Carri at a BigDOCC (Big D (Dallas) open coffee club) Meetup, a meeting for entrepreneurs in North Texas. She was welcoming and excited to hear about different entrepreneurs and their journeys. Eventually I described what Jemurai does and some of the ideas around product direction that we were considering. What Carri said was transformational for us:
Who are you are hero to?
Carri Craver
This question spurred us to think about customers we were working with and really triggered us building the https://securityprogram.io platform.
When we got started, Carri was instrumental in Jemurai adopting a design system - which we hadn't even heard of prior to working with her.
Carri helped us to think through the initial scope of our MVP and using her mockups (below) and design system, we were on the path to building a cool application.
Now because Carri was never full time at Jemurai, it is confusing to think about how deeply to weave her into our origin story. You may note she has a mention, which I am updating to call her out by name. But as much for her memory as for our growing team members' awareness, I wanted to call her out and talk about what a big difference she made for us with our product and for me getting settled into a new community of small businesses.
Carri helped us a ton and we all had fun through the process. We remember her warmly.