Founder Amy Nelson was wildly pulling a pandemic pivot when...the FBI showed up at her doorstep with guns, seized her money and told her husband he was the target of a criminal investigation

It's 5am on December 9, 2020, and Amy Nelson is on Zoom in a green camo hoodie, ready for battle.

Courtesy of Amy Nelson

A week earlier, she had sent an intriguing email: "Between us," she wrote wrote, "By February, I'll have a story of achieving the world's most incredible pivot...or my company will be at the end of its journey. What a hell of a six month. Dumpster fire is appropriate ."

Amy founded The Riveter, which runs coworking spaces for women across the country. At least, that's what he used to do, before the pandemic emptied offices everywhere. In her girlbosseratti days, she was the lawyer-turned-founder — the mother with warm Midwestern ferocity — lifting law books and diapers, running through airports in heels to speak on another panel. There, she deftly juxtaposes macabre issues into precise, debate-worthy points. (“The school system runs on the agrarian calendar, not our work system,” she told a Wall Street Journal video interviewer regarding corporate America's treatment of mothers.) Now, like many founders, she was trying to swing her business into a U-turn as Covid shattered her carefully laid plans.

Amy wasn't looking for a reporter to cover her pivot - not in her messy early days, anyway. We had connected on something else. But when I got his email, it occurred to me that people usually only hear about a kingpin after after the fact. What would it look like to chronicle it as it happens? How could others benefit from seeing this unfold in real, raw time? I suggested we hit base every week so I could ride a shotgun. There might be a story. Maybe not.

She replied, "When should we talk?"

Now that we're on Zoom, she's telling me a bit more. "I have four little girls - one, three, four and six. So it's been a little crazy." Along with her husband, Carl Nelson, they were all crammed into a 1,100-square-foot condo in Hawaii — a far cry from Seattle, where they lived in a comfortable home almost three times the size. As to why they moved? "I haven't talked about it on social media and won't for a long time," she said grimly.

Related: 5 Effective Ways Entrepreneurs Can Pivot Better When Things Go Wrong

During that first meeting, there were a lot of things she had trouble talking about. But over the course of our conversations - for two weeks, twelve weeks, twelve months, a year and a half - Amy revealed that she was in fact in the midst of twin crises.

Eight months earlier, in April 2020, the FBI showed up at her Seattle home with firearms, informed her husband that he was the target of a federal criminal investigation, and seized all of their savings. Since then, she had been trying to get her life out of the death spiral. And what was about to unfold would be much more difficult, longer and more complex than she could have imagined.

But on that first Zoom call, she just insinuated it all. Clearly, she said, "Just get out of bed, take care of your kids, and try to save your business."

The Nelsons in Hawaii last year. Amy and Carl worked to protect (left to right) Holland, Sloane, Merritt and Reese from their ordeals.

Image credit: Courtesy of Amy Nelson

"The first time I saw Amy was at the top of an escalator in her office building," Carl says, "and of course she was dressed to kill. My business partner, who had walked with me, looked at her and said, "That's way too girly for you bro," and he was right."

They had been arranged for a blind date. Six months later, they were living together in Seattle.

Amy was 31 and a lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney. She had grown up in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, with a public school teacher mother and a lawyer father. Amy also became a lawyer and spent over four years as a litigator at a top firm on Wall Street before moving west. (She wanted to get into international politics, but when you owe $150,000 in student loans — and that was without...