VIDEO
Purpose-driven leaders from Manara, Nia Growth, and Snow Wealth discussing their startups, from innovative retirement planning for generational wealth to empowering female engineers in Palestine. Learn how these entrepreneurs create meaningful impact and how to contribute to the evolving landscape of social innovation.
In this ELEVATE session, purpose-driven leaders from Manara (CEO Iliana Montauk), Nia Growth (CEO Baat Enosh), and Snowball Wealth (CTO Pamela Martinez) discuss launching their startups, from innovative retirement planning for generational wealth to empowering female engineers in Palestine. Learn how these entrepreneurs create meaningful impact and how to contribute to the evolving landscape of social innovation.
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Transcript of ELEVATE Session:
S.K. Lee:
Hi everyone. Happy International Women’s Day! Also, want to welcome all the gender diverse identities that are maybe in the room. I’m a former founder, sold my first company in 2012, joined a second that grew from pre C to series B, became a VC. Today I’m an angel investor and a coach, particularly to female founders and what I call underestimated leaders around the world. I’m super excited for these badass women here in this room.
Did you know that 7.4% of all US engineering managers and 10.1% of senior engineering managers are female? Pretty incredible. I actually didn’t know that 8.4% of CTOs are women. Only 2.7% of venture capital dollars went towards female founded companies in 2019. It went down in 2021 to 1.1, just over 1%, folks, and yet the research says that companies with female founders performed 63% better than those of their male peers. What’s going on, folks?
With that, I would love for these women to introduce themselves and because we don’t have a ton of time, we’ve gone through a couple of questions with this. The intro, if you could, women on the panel, what is it that you do today and why? Iliana, if you could go first.
Iliana Montauk:
Sure. My name’s Iliana Montauk and I’m the founder of a startup called Manara. Manara means lighthouse in Arabic. The reason that I founded it is because I want to make incredibly huge change in the world. I want to leave this planet a much better place than I arrived to it, and I really believe that to do that, we need to leverage the innovation at the scale, the speed that comes with tech, but also with social impact at the core of the business.
Manara is a public benefit corporation. What we do is we connect the top tech talent in the Middle East and North Africa with the top jobs in the world, so we take that top one to 3% of talent and we accelerate their careers so that ultimately they can accelerate the careers of the entire ecosystem that they’re from. Our vision ultimately is to expand that globally.
S.K. Lee:
Alright, Baat.
Baat Enosh:
My name is Baat Enosh. I lead today Nia Growth. Our focus is to help freelancers and self-employed and anyone who sits under the non-traditional worker umbrella to say for retirement. It’s not a sexy topic, but it’s a topic that everyone should be thinking about if they’re not already. We work with people who are at the early stages of even thinking about, is retirement for me? Will I ever retire? We hear way too much, “I’ll never retire”. We give them tools and calculators and whatever it is they need an inspiration to start saving.
S.K. Lee:
Awesome. Pamela?
Pamela Martinez:
Hi everyone. I’m the CTO and co-founder of Snowball Wealth, and we’re a financial platform and app to help people manage and go from wealth that to wealth. Similar to what Baat was talking about, but a little bit earlier in the process, why I’m doing this.
I’m a first-gen immigrant here in the United States and learning how to manage my money, how to save for retirement, what to do about student loans was something that was really hard and challenging for me. Me and my co-founder, we thought that this could be done better and differently and we really focused on bringing a first-gen woman led perspective to the space. We are both/two Latina founders and we really do believe that the FinTech space needs to be a lot more inclusive of all of our backgrounds and perspectives.
S.K. Lee:
Awesome. There’s probably a lot of folks in the audience who are on the job seeking, job pivoting path, and so we’re going to ask a little bit about each of your backgrounds and how you got where you are and some of the experiences you might’ve had.
Iliana, really curious about your experience going through the YC accelerator program and what that was like. What was the biggest benefit? What was the biggest challenge and or surprise?
Iliana Montauk
For me, when I applied to Y Combinator, it was like a dream, it felt very inaccessible. It felt like if I got to that dream that I will have achieved it all. Little did I know that that’s just the beginning!
When my co-founder, Laila Abudahi and I applied, we applied the first time thinking, we just need to learn how to apply. We’ll apply once and we’ll see, learn about the application process so that then the next time we apply, we might actually have a chance to get in.
We actually ended up getting in the first time. And yeah, it blew our minds. A big part of what surprised me and was beneficial was first of all just the application process itself. They really make you think very strategically, and YC – Y Combinator – feels like this kind of elite and accessible community until you start the application process, and then immediately it’s this very warm community that wants to help you.
And so you receive tons of advice as you’re applying. It really elevates your thinking. When we first applied, we were thinking maybe if we’re successful, we’ll do this for a year, because really we’re on other career paths and this social impact startup that we’re working on is maybe just the side thing.
By the end of the application process, we were so invested, we knew that this is really what we wanted to go build, so YC had that impact on us: it really helped us feel confident first through the application process, but also then with the funding, it gave us that confidence that we could actually pursue that.
The biggest benefit was the ability to raise money quickly. We raised very, very easily during a time when the market was high, but there’s no way we would’ve raised that much funding that easily without YC and just the joy of being in such a focused environment for the three months, even though it was during COVID, it was all online, it reminded me of being in university where everyone’s working on something that they’re super passionate about, and it was like the Zoom calls were meeting in the dining hall at midnight with other random people and all just helping each other. That was the best part.
The part that surprised me the most was, or kind of disappointed me was how uninclusive it is, from so many different ways. I think that there were just very few women. For example, when I went to events, often I was the only woman there, YC founder events, or myself and my co-founder were the only women there.
These days, I know that we’ve been feeling a little bit isolated, especially my co-founders from Gaza. There’s only two Gazans in YC, and we just feel like nobody’s really reached out to try to even ask how we’re doing, and the community hasn’t felt really supportive even though her family’s lives were in danger at the beginning, and everyone knew us, and so it felt weird that nobody reached out. But other than that, I would say that I would definitely do it again, strongly recommend it. I’m happy to help any woman or anyone from diverse background who is applying improve their application, and I strongly recommend going to any kind of focus program like that to get you started, I think is a good idea.
S.K. Lee:
Super helpful. A lot of folks don’t know that YC does work with a lot of social impact companies that come in through the pipe it’s not sort of the majority certainly, but it does happen. I’m really curious, Baat and Pamela, you both started companies, why the non accelerator path or how did you choose to launch just really quickly?
Pamela Martinez:
Yeah, I mean, I would say for us, I mean we did go through different accelerator programs, so we didn’t necessarily go through YC. We went through StartX, which is a Stanford affiliated accelerator program, and that one’s a community focused accelerator program, so they don’t take equity, which was something that we really cared about, and then we also did Google for Startups.
We actually did apply to YC and didn’t get in, so it’s not like we didn’t try, so definitely highly recommend joining any startup community or accelerator program if that’s something that you’re looking into. And also, know that just because you don’t get into the top one that you want, it doesn’t really mean that it’s the end of the world.
You can still build your company and you can still make a lot of progress. And there’s other accelerator programs out there as well.
S.K. Lee:
Yes, shout out to Alchemist accelerator, Techstars, and a couple of other that I, Bronze Valley for BIPOC founders that I work with. Anyway, sorry, but really quickly. Yeah.
Baat Enosh:
No, I’ll go. Everything Pamela said, I’m a fan of accelerators. I even was a part of one many years ago as an organizer, and I think starting on your own today just doesn’t make a lot of sense without any… There’s a big, I think in the last decade we created a huge infrastructure to help startups happen, and it doesn’t make sense to just think you’re going to go at it alone.
Unfortunately, it’s less available in some other countries. I mean, the US I think has the biggest concentration, but if you’re planning on starting a company, definitely find either the startup scene, the startup ecosystem, or an accelerator or anything to join that will help you — it accelerates everything.
S.K. Lee:
Totally. Okay, Baat, I wanted to stay with you for a second. You spent some time, I think it was six or more years at Intuit, and I’m really curious, gigantic corporation. What’s the one thing, the lesson or habit that you learned there that you still use in your kind of founder playbook today?
Baat Enosh:
I know there’s a lot of people on this call who are in their job searching world, and also I have now a kid who’s starting their career, and I always have this dilemma – startup or corporate, startup or corporate. I’m a big believer that the corporate teaches you things that you’ll never learn elsewhere. I’m a believer that to succeed, you really have to understand what systems are currently in place, and how do you become a part of these systems, what makes them go, what makes them move? I think the corporate world is an incredible place to learn that. I’m a big advocate.
That being said, it’s not just Intuit. I spent over seven years at Intuit and at EY and another big corporate, and I think that it requires a stamina that is different from entrepreneurship mainly because there’s constantly competing.
At the end of the day, even in a corporate environment, in a startup, you’re competing, but you can make sure your own voice dictates how you compete. Whereas I think in a corporate, it kind of gets dictated for you, so the things I learned the most, and Intuit, by the way, is a wonderful corporate to be a part of if anyone has a chance to. Our CEO back then had a lot of sentences, my favorite one was “don’t confuse our kindness with weakness” which, up until I heard that, I had this idea that whatever it is you do in the career, you have to have your machete ready to show your strength. And I think at the end, you can do things in a nice, pleasant way, pleasant, transparent, employee-first way and still come on top. That’s kind of my biggest learning.
S.K. Lee:
Yeah, it’s a topic I come across a lot, how to be powerful and also authentic to your values and have high integrity and kindness. Pamela, you started out as an engineer, perhaps many of the people in this audience. I’m really curious, what was your biggest learning and or advice to people who are shifting from individual contributor to managing a team? What was the hardest?
Pamela Martinez:
One of the things that I like to talk about, when it comes to switching from an individual contributor (IC) role to an engineering management (EM) role is I think a lot of times people think that look, okay, well, if I’m an engineer and I switch into an engineering manager, I can never go back or role switching is really hard. I actually started my career as a product manager (PM), so I started on in product and then I switched into a software engineering role at an early stage startup.
Then I went to an earlier stage startup after that, and I would say for me, joining some of these early stage companies gave me the opportunity to try some of these different roles that I think would’ve been really hard for me if I had gone to a more established company. I was able to become an engineering manager just like two-ish years after being a software engineer, which is pretty quickly, I would say.
Now that I’m a founder and I switched back into a CTO role, I ended up doing a lot of coding again. I started doing a lot of engineering work again. In terms of what is the hardest thing when you’re switching from being an IC to an engineering role or an engineering manager role or management role, the biggest thing is about thinking about the impact that you’re making as an individual. When you’re an IC, it’s all about the work that you’re doing. And when you transition into a management role or a leadership role, it’s all about how you empower your team to really hit and accomplish those goals.
One of the biggest learnings for me is that no matter what role you’re in, even if you’re an IC, having that mentality is really powerful. That’s something that kind of enabled me to jump into a management role earlier on, was really thinking about how do I empower my peers? How do I make sure that I’m effective as an IC? And really focusing on some of the quote soft skills like communication, goal alignment, and really thinking about the impact that you’re making because it’s not just about writing code.
S.K. Lee:
Awesome. Couldn’t have said that myself at all. Iliana, I’m really curious. You’re now focused on helping underrepresented underestimated talent also, but particularly focused on the Middle East and North Africa. I am just curious, what do you see that’s different there than what you’ve experienced here in the us, particularly with women in tech?
Iliana Montauk:
Manara focuses on all the Arabic speaking countries, and the reason for that is that when I had the chance to go live in Gaza and work there for two years, I was running a startup incubator.
When I would talk to women about the stigma that women face in STEM fields, the reaction I got consistently was, “what stigma are you talking about? We know we’re better.” And I was like, “oh, we know we’re better. All right, this is great. Tell me more. This is such a good starting point.”
What I learned was that, this region is the only region in the world where girls outperform boys in high school math, and in a lot of the countries, the percentage of women studying technical fields or scientific fields, whether physics, electrical engineering, mechanical, computer science, et cetera, is equal to or higher than men.
For instance, in Tunisia, 62% of computer science grads are women. In Palestine, 52%. And then also from my experience in the region, I saw that it is one of the youngest populations in the world, the youngest, so growing faster in terms of a potential talent pool than any other region.
It’s had huge investments in education in the last 15 years, more than OECD countries. So, you also have just more people graduating from university. Soon, there’s going to be more computer engineers in this region than in Europe for instance, or the United States.
I come from Poland. I remember a time in Poland where there were no jobs, and we never imagined how quickly that would change. I lived there in 2001 and people thought I was crazy as a Polish American to come to Poland. Now, fast forward, they cannot fill all the roles. All the major tech companies have hubs and offices in Poland now, and they just can’t fill jobs, and they’re importing people from Manara, from the Middle East and North Africa to work in these roles.
The fact that there is this really strong pipeline of female tech talent was what got me super interested in spending more time in this region. I was working at Upwork at the time. We had the largest talent marketplace in the world, we could hire from anywhere, and we still struggled to find number one, good engineering talent with, Pamela, the soft skills that you spoke about, because good engineers to really solve problems need to have those skills. And that was so hard to find.
And number two, we had goals around hiring women, and it was just impossible to fill them even though we had all of these profiles at our fingertips. And so I was like, well, I know where these women live, and I think I know a little bit about the challenges, but really that’s where my co-founder jumped in. So Leila had gone from Gaza to becoming a tech lead at Nvidia in Silicon Valley, running the autonomous driving system. Always the only woman on her team, always struggling to hire talent once she was in the hiring talent role, but also remembered the amount of friction she had been through along the way.
That was why what got us so interesting in the region when I talked to companies now Connect.
Manara alumni are mostly at places like Google Meta, Amazon. About half have relocated for their jobs and half have stayed locally.
We want to support people with whatever their dreams are, but we’re looking for more partners in the Middle East, north Africa, and places like Dubai, Saudi, Egypt.
Often, when I talk to companies there and I just kind of get into the mode of pitching Manara the way I do to other companies in the US or Europe, and I’m like, and “we have such a high percentage of women”, they’re like, “duh, so do we!”
And at the leadership level. And so it’s a region that I think really is ahead of us in that way, and I think it’s just super humbling and a good reminder that we don’t have everything figured out in the United States.
S.K. Lee:
Do we not? (sarcastic/laughing) Pamela, I’m curious. On that note, it’s so enlightening and we certainly do have a lot to learn. What is it like to be a technical founder? What do you think was your biggest challenge? Is your biggest challenge? What do you see there? I’m just curious.
Pamela Martinez:
When you listed out some of the thoughts, I was like, oh, I don’t actually know that only 8.4% of CTOs are women.
One, it is kind of lonely. I feel like every time I am in, even through all of these accelerators, I’ve been through a lot of them. I actually can’t think of a single one where there was another CTO who was a woman, or at least, in my cohort or in my group. It’s very difficult to find other peers who are also CTOs. there’s kind of that challenge. Throughout my career. I mean, for better or for worse, I’ve gotten used to being the only woman in the room, the only Latina in the room, and over time I’ve learned how to operate in these environments, and that’s a really valuable skill to have, unfortunately.
In terms of the reality, putting that aside, for me and in general, when it comes to being a founder, a lot of it ends up being around what is it that you’re building, what problem are you solving, and how do you get to your desired result? When I first became a founder, I was coming from an EM and engineering background, so I had a very technical focus.
Now as I’ve evolved, I’ve learned that building a company is a lot more than just building the product. I’ve had to learn how to hop on calls with investors on calls with customers, doing partnerships and sales, running a team. As a founder, you do have to wear a lot of hats and your relationship with your team. If you have a co-founder, it’s also really valuable to know that you’re coming in and you’re supporting them and helping grow the company and not looking at it just from the technical lens.
Expanding your viewpoint and worldview, it’s really important when you’re a technical founder so that you don’t get stuck in, I’m only thinking about the tech, I’m only thinking about the product. You have to think about the business as a whole, and I would say my biggest growth and learning, and obviously you still have to do the tech and build the product, so that’s still really important and valuable., and having that bigger view and thinking about the company overall, and thinking about the business case for things, is something that’s really applicable to every engineer and anyone who’s in a technical role as well.
S.K. Lee:
Yeah. Gosh, we could talk about being a female founder for days and days. I wish I could interview each of you more, but I’m going to move us to kind of rapid fire as we get to the last few minutes of our time. It’s a series of quick questions and what I’m looking for so we can get as much as possible for this group here is just one or two sentence answers or moments of brilliance. Number one for all of you, and we’ll start with Baat, what advice would you give yourself your pre pandemic self? 2019 ish, what would you say?
Baat Enosh:
In 2019 and further on, I was a huge fan of working from home. I’ll tell you, for me, it’s a personal opinion. It is really hard to start a startup that is fully remote. I am becoming more conservative as the time goes by and it’s really hard to, especially to onboard people, remotely.
S.K. Lee:
Got it.
Baat Enosh:
There’s a time and a place for working remote, and I’ll tell you in a startup, it’s hard.
S.K. Lee:
Pamela, pre pandemic self.
Pamela Martinez:
Invest in figuring out how to build relationships remotely, because when we started working remotely, I was like, okay, this is going to be a three month thing, and then it turned into a multi-year thing, which turned into now we’re all very much fully remote. Learn and invest in building relationships and networking in a remote setting.
S.K. Lee:
Iliana.
Iliana Montauk:
If you’re compulsive about something, if you find yourself doing it in your free time and you just can’t stop yourself, it’s supposed to be your job and go figure out a way to make that your job.
S.K. Lee:
I love that. That is brilliant. Okay, second round. What is one prediction that you each have for the startup tech ecosystem for 2024 from your perspective?
Baat Enosh:
Okay, so I’ll take that one. We are no longer in ZIRP, which I just learned is an acronym for zero interest rate policy, so the world is definitely changing. Anyone who’s dealing with money, which is every startup, is understanding the implications of what it means to be when money is not free flowing on the street, whether through investments, whether through business models, everything the world is changing as we speak.
S.K. Lee:
That’s a big, big shift for founders raising capital for sure. It’s a really different perspective from the VC side of things.
Baat Enosh:
And FinTech as well. Me and Pamela, I think we’re feeling it with business models. It’s very different than 2021.
S.K. Lee:
That’s super interesting. Pamela, what’s your prediction?
Pamela Martinez:
Over the last few years, we went from consumer to B2B. In this next phase, we’re going to need to figure out how to make consumer work. Old business models for consumer didn’t work. Everyone’s been pivoting into B2B. Consumers are still out there and we still need to figure that out. My big prediction is hopefully we’ll see something new evolving for how to make a consumer business model work
S.K. Lee:
Interesting, new consumer models. Okay, Iliana,
Iliana Montauk:
I think things are going to pick up faster than people expected. I think we’re going to go from this phase where companies we’re really tightening their belt and they had been hiring a lot. They stopped hiring, they started getting really conservative, and I think things are going to swing back to hiring and feeling positive faster than we anticipated, but that it’s going to be done in ways that are very budget oriented, so it might not immediately lead to lots of new job opportunities in places like the United States.
instead, a lot of that might be in places like Eastern Europe, the Middle East, but that companies will suddenly start needing to hire again, and that when they do, suddenly, DEI is going to be important again, because it’s not when they’re not hiring, and suddenly they’re going to realize they need talent pipelines and they need to look attractive to people that they might not look attractive to.
S.K. Lee:
Great. I hope that happens too, and if I have anything to do with it, more female founders! Last question. Who was the most impactful coach, mentor in your life, or what piece of advice would you share with the audience that they gave to you and you still sort of really resonate with anyone?
Iliana Montauk
I can jump in first. Well, but unless Baat, you have something you wanted to jump in. Yeah, go for it. Okay. I have a coach that I work with right now who’s a coach for founders from diverse backgrounds working on social impact startups. She’s amazing. If anyone wants to work with her, her name is Christina Sass, and she runs this organization called Dive in Labs.
The key thing is to realize, as a founder, especially to design your job around yourself, accept yourself the way you are, just radically, radically accept who you are. Realize that there are many different forms of being a leader, a CTO, a CEO. You don’t have to be a specific version that you imagine that to be. Really understand yourself and your business goals and how to shape your organization around yourself so that you can reach your goals.
S.K. Lee:
I love that radical acceptance of the self. Yeah.
Pamela Martinez:
I’ve had a lot of different coaches and mentors. A tip would be find different people who can help you throughout different aspects of your life. For me, a few tidbits that have been helpful for me, a coach from one of my accelerators told, we were trying to figure out what to do about student loan shutdowns, and they were like, figure out what to do now. Don’t think about, okay, in three months things are going to change, which was really great advice given that student loan costs lasted for three years.
Another one of my mentors for anyone who’s in management, his number one tip for me was, when you’re first becoming a manager, make sure you give feedback and give it often
S.K. Lee:
Great advice. It’s harder to do for most early managers than expected. Baat, advice
Baat Enosh:
Between the balance of execution and creating an enrolled environment, at least I had a bias towards execution and run fast without bringing everyone along. And I’ll give a shout out to my ex-boss, Eileen Fagan, who is the one who taught me how to make sure everyone is along to the ride, otherwise execution’s going to fall in its face.
S.K. Lee:
I love it. Love it, love it. Okay. My one piece of advice is surround yourself with brilliant women like this who both inspire and also challenge the way that you think about the world. I’m S.K. You can find me on LinkedIn or my website in my profile. And just really quickly, can we iterate that your names and your companies,
Iliana Montauk:
Ileana Montauk from Manara, and our website is www.manara.tech.
Pamela Martinez
Pamela Martinez, Snowball Wealth. Our website is www.snowballwealth.com.
Baat Enosh:
I’m Baat Enosh from Nia Growth and our website is www.niagrowth.com.
Angie Chang:
I’m curious, what is the one thing that we could do as fans of your companies to help support you, or your business?
Iliana Montauk:
Follow us on social media and re-share some of the things that you see there that inspire you.
Angie Chang:
And what’s your social / Twitter handle?
Iliana Montauk:
I’ll post it. Actually, LinkedIn works best for us, so I’ll share that.
S.K. Lee:
Any asks?
Baat Enosh:
I saw we had some questions, but,
S.K. Lee:
Oh, do we have some questions? Let me see.
Baat Enosh:
Yes, there were three.
S.K. Lee:
Okay. Baat, if you have it off the top of your head, can you repeat the question that you find?
Baat Enosh:
What early setbacks in your career later gave you an advantage?
S.K. Lee:
Great. What early setbacks in your career leader gave you an advantage as a leader? Awesome qestion. One of you want to tackle that.
Iliana Montauk:
I can jump in and just say that I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I switched jobs every seven months for the first few years of my career, I went to Google, it wasn’t the right fit for me. I couldn’t see myself there.
I went to management consulting. I was gone within six months, I actually almost got fired, ended up not getting fired, but by then had thought it was going in that direction. I had realized it wasn’t for me, but I think when that happens, you just have to trust that ultimately your resume is telling a story, and it doesn’t mean that you aren’t an incredibly capable person. It just means that you haven’t quite yet found the fit, and maybe you’re forcing yourself to go down a path that you thought you were supposed to go down, but that wasn’t really meant for you.
Pamela Martinez:
Yeah. I can go quickly. I quit my first job out of school. I was a PM and I was in this weird spot of, I had too little experience to get hired as a PM somewhere else, so I had to switch back into engineering role, and I’m so happy that I did that. At the time, I was really stressed about making the switch, but not being able to get that PM job kind of led me to where I am today.
S.K. Lee:
Pamela, one thing that you said earlier that was really resonant with me is, “I was always the kind of youngest or only woman in the room quite often” and all those many years of trying to own that space, find power in that space, helped me to be able to hold space later on as a leader in a way that I could feel confident in a really non-diverse or diverse room, and then be able to recognize it when that was happening around me.
Years of feeling like the odd woman out, a weirdo, a whatever, actually became a really important part of my leadership style later on. All right. I don’t want to go over time. Angie, how are we doing? I think we ran over
Angie Chang:
We ran over time, but it’s okay. We’re starting network now in the lounge. It’s okay. You have the time to sit here and chat and answer questions. We can do that.
S.K. Lee:
Okay, great. Yeah, I have a few more minutes if anyone has questions. I don’t see any yet in the group. I’m going to go ahead. Oh, did you pop another question up?
Angie Chang:
I didn’t do that.
S.K. Lee:
What tips do you have on building relationships remotely? Okay, great. Yeah, Pamela, you mentioned that earlier that you had to learn how to do that, and also you too, Baat, what did you learn that does actually work in this sort of remote world?
Baat Enosh:
Pamela, you go.
Pamela Martinez:
I would say going beyond the small talk is valuable and also being proactive, setting up, especially if you’re at a company, setting up one-on-ones with people reaching out to people, trying to get to know them on a more genuine level. If where these people live and you happen to travel there or be in a nearby setting as them making the effort to try to meet them in person if you can.
baat Enosh:
Absolutely. I don’t have much more of that than that, but it’s yet to be cracked fully. It’s hard, especially with new people.
Iliana Montauk:
I’ll share a few more. We did iterate if you’d like to and if we have time..
One thing I would say is view this as anything else that you’re doing as an entrepreneur. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Don’t think you’re going to nail it the first time, but also don’t give up when you don’t nail it. For instance, at Manara, we’ve iterated on the cadences of various things we have tried and we’ve landed for instance on a 30 minute, once a month fun all hands that we kind of expect everyone to be at. And we have my EA running it because I never have time think through what the agenda’s going to be and how we’re going to actually have fun together. But we do that now and that’s after five different iterations.
We do an offsite in Istanbul at least once a year, and we found that it’s incredibly valuable and it just has to happen, and once you finally have done it once, then you know how to do it and you can replicate it easily.
S.K. Lee:
Intentional design of in-person time. I’ve seen a lot of my founders and leaders do one minute of connection or humor at the start of a call, one minute reflection at the end, and it’s literally two minutes on in total for a meeting, a team meeting that can make a huge difference, centered around three things – movement, music, or mindfulness. It’s like a one minute meditation, dance, music. Anyway, there’s lots of creative things you can do that make a big difference.
Angie Chang:
Well, thank you so much all for being on the panel. I love entrepreneurship. I wish we had more of this entrepreneurship content, but most of the day it was engineering and product. This is my favorite. I’m like, yes, companies, small businesses, women starting them. Thank you so much for being here and being the one non-engineering session, but I was really happy to have you and yeah, we will follow you on social media and support however we can. Thank you.
S.K. Lee:
Alright, good luck everyone. Wonderful to see you. Thank you.
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