Matchmaking CEO Talia Goldstein Admits Hiding Pregnancy In Order to Be Taken Seriously

— -- Talia Goldstein was a successful 33-year-old CEO isolated by a secret.

“I felt ashamed ... alone ... upset .. scared,” said Goldstein, the CEO of matchmaking company Three Day Rule.

“I was pregnant,” she added.

Goldstein found out she was pregnant in 2012, the same year she began start up fundraising for Three Day Rule. In an essay published this month in Fortune magazine, Goldstein shared a journal entry from April 2012.

“It’s awful knowing that the second I reveal that I am pregnant, investors will suddenly second guess whether I am capable enough to run a company. So, I am going to hide my pregnancy as long as I can,” Goldstein wrote in her journal.

Goldstein, who lives in Los Angeles, told ABC News that she worried investors would not take a pregnant CEO seriously so she covered up.

“In one meeting it was 80 degrees outside and I wore a trench coat,” she recalled. “But I thought, better off looking ridiculous than looking pregnant.”

Goldstein took the measures to cover up even though she and her husband, Aaron Goldstein, say they were thrilled to be expecting their first child.

“It’s sad that she had to hide it,” Aaron Goldstein, a lawyer, said of his wife. “You should be able to wear your pregnancy proudly, I guess.”

Goldstein says she felt the need to hide her pregnancy even more after calling “a bunch” of her advisers and asking them if they would invest in a pregnant CEO, all without telling them that she herself was pregnant.

“They all, very openly, told me they would not…it’s a huge red flag,” Goldstein said. “I felt like it was the only decision that I had and I didn’t want to sabotage our company.”

Once her pregnancy became common knowledge, Goldstein wrote that she was “shocked” by her colleagues’ reactions.

“Instead of congratulating me, as they would for a woman in a different career, they expressed confusion about why I wanted to continue to work hard and grow the company,” she wrote in Fortune.

Goldstein went on to deliver her son, Max, while also raising enough funding to turn Three Day Rule from “a pipedream to a powerhouse.”

The company is now about to embark on a new expansion plan, and Goldstein is pregnant again, due to deliver a girl in November.

“I’m going to wear tight clothes and show it off and we’ll see what happens,” Goldstein told ABC News of her new approach with this pregnancy.