It’s About Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage, Arlan Hamilton & Rachel L. Nelson

Description

It’s About Damn Time
by Arlan Hamilton and Rachel L. Nelson
Hardcover | May 5, 2020

What if being underestimated isn’t a weakness—but your greatest advantage?

In It’s About Damn Time, Arlan Hamilton delivers a fierce, funny, and deeply personal manifesto for anyone who has ever been shut out, overlooked, or told they didn’t belong. A Black, gay woman who broke into the overwhelmingly white, male world of Silicon Valley venture capital, Hamilton traces her improbable path from living on food stamps and sleeping on the floor of the San Francisco airport to founding a venture capital firm that invests in women, LGBTQ founders, and people of color.

Hamilton doesn’t pretend the odds were fair. She had no connections, no finance background, and no college degree. What she did have was clarity of purpose, resilience, and the ability to recognize opportunity where others saw rejection. Drawing on her lived experience as an investor and founder, she reframes underrepresentation as hidden upside: when you’re underestimated, you have room to surprise, outgrow expectations, and sprint ahead once the playing field levels out.

Blending memoir with practical insight, the book offers sharp, memorable lessons on ambition, self-worth, and navigating systems not built for you. Hamilton challenges hustle culture myths, critiques Silicon Valley’s fake meritocracy, and argues that success does not require privilege, pedigree, or permission—only persistence, self-trust, and a willingness to take up space.

Warm, blunt, and unapologetically honest, It’s About Damn Time is both a rallying cry and a guide for anyone determined to build a future on their own terms.

This title is a remainder, offered at half the original cover price. Remainder copies are new and unread, but may show minor shelf wear.