Speakers:
Samihah Azim / Product Designer / Lyft
Sukrutha Bhadouria / CTO & Co-Founder / Girl Geek X

Transcript

Sukrutha Bhadouria: [No audio 0:00-0:16] Hi, welcome everyone. I hope you’re having a good time with our conference so far. Welcome to Samihah, who is going to be our next speaker. She’s a Product Designer at Lyft, where she’s also the intersection of business calls and designing experiences impacting local communities. Prior to Lyft, she actually designed for a local commerce at Postmates and crafting high quality patient healthcare experiences at One Medical. Outside of design, she does a lot of cool things. She mentors for the State Department TechWomen program, enjoys power lifting, and also loves to cook. So, without further ado, I do want to say that these talks are going to be recorded and you will have access to the videos later after the conference, so go ahead, Samihah, thank you.

Samihah Azim: Thank you. Hello everyone, my name is Samihah as Sukrutha has said and I’m a product designer at Lyft. Thank you all for being here and Girl Geek X for having me and also, speaking of Lyft, shameless plug, we are hiring across the board. It is my favorite job. Prior to Lyft I was designing at Postmates, prior to that One Medical and today I’m going to talk about design as a powerful tool to scale products that have a core human to human experience. And, it can often be slower to scale these experiences and to get to that North Star vision for the products, but technology can be used to scale strategically and augment the human to human experience that’s happening outside of the software.

Samihah Azim: So, how does design add value when a product is scaling? Well, most products have a longer term North Star vision and if not the product, then certainly nearly every organization has a long-term North Star vision of what they imagine the future to be. But, it’s nearly impossible to get to that future today. You can’t go from zero to 100 unless you’re Drake and you’re on the catch up, but most of us are not Drake.

Samihah Azim: Designers, we’re very good at creating artifacts of what we imagine the future could look like. Where we can add value here is to really bridge that gap between today’s world here and our ideal world tomorrow. We can phase out what we have and what we need today, where we also add a tremendous amount of value is in using qualitative research that helps inform what our users need in each phase in order to come along the journey to our North Star vision. If you imagine that this the world here today and the North Star is up here. What is it that our users need in order to come up to this journey with us?

Samihah Azim: With design thinking, we’re really distilling a problem to understand how to solve it. Data helps to tell us and inform us in a lot of our decision making by telling us what’s happening. It doesn’t necessarily tell us why something is happening and that’s really where design adds a tremendous amount of value. We can help guide what we should test, if what we’re testing is the right thing to test and highlight if there are confounding factors that are potentially affecting the results.

Samihah Azim: When I worked at One Medical, we knew that a longer term goal was to make high quality affordable healthcare accessible to more people, but healthcare is a business, where that human to human or that human interaction component is still very important and technology isn’t something that will likely replace it but rather it would augment the experience. Brick and mortar is core to One Medical and technology augments the healthcare experience, so how do you scale a business where that human to human interaction is so core to everything but it also requires more operational resources that are often harder to scale. In short, it’s not easy.

Samihah Azim: When your product has a service that’s core, where humans are interacting with other humans, these are experiences that are happening outside of software but that will be associated with the product experience. This is where designers, we need to look at everything on a systems level and when I say systems level, I mean on the entire ecosystem and especially the business model and revenue streams. How does a company make money to further scale? I’m going to tell you a story from when I was working at One Medical and how I used design to learn how to scale human experiences.

Samihah Azim: In healthcare, medical practices make money through insurance billing codes and appointments are seen as inventories. Inventory is limited because doctors are limited, so how do you scale? Well, this is also where it’s important to look at what users need. Users that need to see a medical provider are booking appointments but not everyone that’s booking an appointment needs to be seen in person. There are acute issues. Issues such as flu or yeast infection, cough, nausea even getting an STD panel ordered that don’t require a physical visit to the doctor.

Samihah Azim: At One Medical, we knew that we wanted more patients to get the help that they needed by using virtual care products that we had built. I ran a design sprint with cross functional colleagues to understand the problem of why more people weren’t using care channels outside of the office visit. What we found is that people’s mental models today is that virtual care is something that, and specifically video visits, is something that is associated with travel or 2:00 a.m. emergencies. If it’s a 2:00 a.m. emergency, you should probably call 911.

Samihah Azim: One of the three projects that came out of the sprint that I had facilitated is a project that we called Integrated Booking Flow. Essentially, we wanted to test if educating users on virtual care and giving them what they needed today would get healthier patients to use virtual care in order for that to free up inventory for more sick patients that actually need it, and would that be something that the business could then scale and make high quality affordable healthcare accessible tomorrow.

Samihah Azim: The product manager on this project and I, we had really tight feedback loops, where we would meet regularly, multiple times a day and frequently we would also pair on both product management, as well as design. There’s a clinic next to the headquarters, so what we did is we would hop in there multiple times a day over a two-day period and test a bunch of paper prototypes as well as InVision prototypes. And, you can see on my screen, on the slides at the top, are the many prototypes … a sampling of the many sampling of the many prototypes that we had tested, the Guerrilla Usability Testing and what this helped us learn was what would work and what wouldn’t.

Samihah Azim: It was invaluable in not only helping us to learn that but also managing the many opinions of stakeholders and people who weren’t necessarily stakeholders but were involved in the projects. Essentially, this project was a test to see if integrating traditional equipment booking with video visits was further investing in and then, you can see on the screen on the bottom. That’s a sample of all of the feedback that we managed to capture and the action or inaction that we may or may not have taken, and the reasoning to that based on the usability testing that we had done.

Samihah Azim: When we rolled out the test, what ended up happening was that … Well, it was too successful. How often can you say that, right? We ended up having to turn it off because the virtual care providers were getting far too many requests and the SLA that we were communicating ended up being incorrect. We did validate that when mental models were gently guided towards this new shift in thinking, when users learned that video visits were for more than just travel and more than just emergencies, they adopted it for minor issues.

Samihah Azim: We didn’t spend weeks trying to perfect that most perfect V1, we shipped something that was good enough in order to learn and, in fact ,the screen on the slides, you’ll see the flow of integrated booking. Where a user goes to book an appointment and that middle screen was actually something that I had come up with by pairing with the data team to understand. We knew that a lot of the data was unstructured and so with their help, we were able to pull the top seven reasons why users are coming in for an appointment visit, which actually don’t require a physical visit but can be treated virtually.

Samihah Azim: Then, in that second to last screen is the alternate booking screen that users would see, patients would see if they chose one of those reasons, and we were gently guiding them towards and educating them that they could get care virtually for those issues and it would be much faster. If there’s one takeaway from this learning, it’s that it’s okay to move fast and ship an imperfect V1 in order to test and learn, so that you can iterate and ship that perfect V2.

Samihah Azim: This doesn’t mean shipping shoddy visual design. You can absolutely have pixel perfection without the V1 being in that ideal state. On the note of imperfect V1: sometimes when a product is scaling and especially with products that require that human to interact with another human, some team members might get a little too scope happy, scope cutting happy. I am that designer that cares a lot about things like client side load time and I’m also cutting scope or finding another way to solve a problem but there are times where you do have to introduce scope in order to have a viable product to test.

Samihah Azim: There was one company that I worked at, where we were working on an experiment and if successful, we would have further developed it, turned it into a core part of the feature in our products. But the product manager on the project was on this huge scope cutting spree. That by the end of it, it was barely a functioning test that made many of us question why anyone would use our product when competitors had far more basic functionality? And, we likely would have gotten a bad signal had we built it and tested it, where the … It came to a point where the term minimal viable product no longer applied. It was, the viable part got lost.

Samihah Azim: It’s important to ask questions because running experiments requires time and resources depending on your user set or what you’re testing, you have to wait until you get statistical significance, which can take a couple of weeks to a couple of months. You want to make sure you’re testing the right thing because you’re also using up engineering time, as well as design time and often times marketing time as well and you want to get a good signal.

Samihah Azim: That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a positive signal or a positive performance rather since you can learn a lot from negative performance but rather, what you want to learn are what is the metrics, what are they telling you? Is it something that you can learn from and does it fit into the overall product on a systems level?

Samihah Azim: If someone wants to test a popup flow at the point of user conversion, maybe there’s a good reason, ask why? But, it could also be that users are tapping on it because it’s a popup and it’s there and not necessarily because they find any value from it, so some questions … On that note, ask some questions. Some questions that I like to keep in my back pocket and ask are, “Why are we testing this, after this experiment what’s next, how do we know that the metric move this way because of this variant or XYZ confounding factor, did we even reach stat-sig, bro?” Well, maybe ask it a little less broy than that.

Samihah Azim: Why, and this is my favorite, why does it look like we’re p-hacking the data? Luckily at Lyft there is no p-hacking of any data. In a lot of organizations moving fast, growing, and scaling has the perception of being incompatible with staying true to your values. Designers, we want to feel like our work has a positive impact on the world. Sometimes when we’re so close to the data, it’s hard to have that perspective that work that grows an organization or a company that aims to do good with good intentions, is having an impact on the world.

Samihah Azim: Two of my favorite Lyft core values are uplift others and make it happen. At Lyft there’s actually an entire team that’s dedicated to growing the business, I am on that team. It is called the Growth Team, some creative naming there, but when we think about growth, we’re really looking to grow with intentionality so that we can continue to make a positive impact on the world. In fact, at the core of Lyft is tipping. It’s been a core part of the business and part of growing the business means initiatives that uplift our drivers.

Samihah Azim: Actually, recently this week, we actually got half a billion dollars in tips. Oops my apologies, I have the wrong data on there, it should be 2018. We actually raised … So, there were 250 million in tips in 2017 and just this week we hit half a billion. It took five years to get to quarter of a billion and then a matter of months to half a billion, and that really goes to show how growing a business can also help do good in the world as well. So, drivers are an important part of Lyft, so designing experiences that make a Lyft driver’s life easier, helps them earn more and that’s a design challenge where we’re doing good by one set of users and by doing good we can further scale, which helps us do even more good.

Samihah Azim: We also think about important causes and when we think about growing the business, it is also in the context of, how can we better benefit the society and without scaling, it’s hard to grow social giving. Last year in 2017, the team introduced a feature called Round Up & Donate, where Lyft passengers could round up their ride to the nearest whole dollar and that change would then go to a cause of their choosing, so 3.7 million dollars were donated to 14 causes. A lot of these causes were standing up for civil liberties, supporting service members, and investing in teaching members from underprivileged communities to code.

Samihah Azim: Now, I want to end on a couple of key points on what can designers do to be the most valuable team member possible? Well one, we can show value. The best way for design to show our value is to really to start caring about business goals and team metrics and then, being comfortable with an imperfect V1, so that we can test and learn to build that perfect V2 and move faster to that ideal North Star. Then also being really cognizant of what’s being tested when designing and what effect it has of other metrics, as well as what effect it has on other users or on users. I am not sure if we have time for Q&A but if you have any question, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, thank you so much, Samihah, this is great. We have time for one question and so, the one that’s gotten the most votes, “Could you share with us about a technical challenge that you are currently working on and what are the technologies, tools, and concepts that you are using?”

Samihah Azim: Unfortunately, I can’t talk about any products that have not been released yet, but I guess I could talk about it on a very high level, so there’s a project that I’m on, where I designed this, what we would consider the ideal V1 and there are some technical limitations on the engineering side, where we could get to that point but it would take about six weeks.

Samihah Azim: When I heard that I was like, “That is a really long time, how do we get there faster?” Because I think it’s also important to learn as quickly as you can. If we spend six weeks building that ideal V1 maybe it doesn’t perform that well, maybe there’s a lot of assumptions that we’ve made. What I then did is paired really closely with engineering, as well as the product manager on the project and we broke the different pieces down, and really understood what the scope of each part would be and how we can get to shipping the test faster.

Samihah Azim: We went from six weeks to three weeks, which is great because that means we can then … Once we ship that we can … once we hit statistical significance, we now have enough data to learn from that to then make adjustments to the idealized version. The benefit of that, the current, what we’re calling V1 now, which would take three weeks as well as having that idealized V1, which would now be V2, is that the backend engineers now understand what direction we want to go in, so that way they’re able to build in a way that’s scalable to the future where the client side engineers they … to them what’s more relevant is the immediate V1 that would take three weeks to build.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Samihah, we’re actually out of time. Thank you everyone.

Samihah Azim: Thank you and thank you for having me.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you.

Speakers:
Nicole Grinstead / Senior Security Software Engineer / Netflix
Angie Chang / CEO & Founder / Girl Geek X

Transcript

Angie Chang: Alright, we are live. Welcome. This is our 11:00 AM session. We have Nicole Grinstead, a senior software engineer at Netflix. A few things she’s focused on are things like corporate identity and access, applying user behavior analytics to threat detection, and user focused security. She’ll talk to us today about Netflix anomaly detection project [inaudible 00:00:44] and how it enables Netflix to find and act on high-risk corporate user behavior as threat detection is becoming increasingly valuable in today’s complicated corporate security landscape. Hand it off to you.

Nicole Grinstead: Great. Thank you. Thanks everyone for joining me virtually today, I’m really excited to be here. A huge thanks to the Girl Geek Elevate conference organizers for asking me to speak, and a huge thanks to the sponsors as well. Without further ado, I’m Nicole Grinstead and I work at Netflix as a senior security software engineer on our cloud security team, specifically on information security. Today I’ll be telling you a little bit about what we’re doing for advanced threat detection. Specifically, how we’re using statistical modeling and machine learning to detect malicious behavior.

Nicole Grinstead: Really quick, just to define user behavior analytics for everyone. Basically, what user behavior analytics are, it’s kind of the industry-wide term for what we’re doing here. It’s looking at what are users normally doing on a day-to-day basis, and then finding deviations from that normal behavior. When we see deviations from the normal behavior, they might be doing something a little different out of their ordinary, but it could also be indication that an account has been compromised, and that’s something that we as the security team want to look at. That’s kind of what it is.

Nicole Grinstead: Example, if you think about what a software engineer does, for example, on a day-to-day basis, you might look at your source code repository, you might look at some dashboards to look at your logs, some deployment tools. Then let’s say all of a sudden one day you look at an application that holds your company’s very sensitive financial data. That’s pretty weird and that’s something that we as security team might want to take a look at even though maybe you just were interested, that could also mean that someone has gained access to your credentials and is using them maliciously.

Nicole Grinstead: To give you another quick example, let’s say you’re maybe an HR or a PR employee and you spend most of your day working in documents. Let’s say we have a baseline of your normal amount of documents that you read or that you modify, and say that’s 20 on a normal day-to-day basis. If all of a sudden that shoots up and we see you downloading or touching a thousand documents, that looks pretty weird and it could look like data exfiltration. Again, that’s something that we might want to take a look at.

Nicole Grinstead: To take a quick step back why we think this is worth that kind of big investment. I mentioned at the beginning, we’re using machine learning, statistical modeling, that takes quite a bit of effort on our end. To give you some perspective, a 2017 study done by IBM security estimated that data breaches cost anywhere from around $3.6 million if a breach does not include any sensitive data, all the way to, on average, $141 million if that breach includes sensitive data.

Nicole Grinstead: These are top of mind things, data breaches have been in the news recently and it’s very costly. It can cost a company a lot of brand reputation and other very severe monetary consequences. One way that data breaches can occur are phishing attempts. This is really common. It’s estimated that on average, about one in 130 emails sent is a malicious phishing attempt, so not to say that one out of every 130 emails that makes it all the way to your inbox is a phishing email, but some of these things get pre filtered out.

Nicole Grinstead: They’re super prevalent and they’re very commonly used by organized hacker groups. About 70% of organized groups are using phishing emails as one of their modes for attack, and that’s because they’re very effective and successful. If you think back to some high profile data breaches that occurred recently, the 2016 DNC breach before the election partly was caused by a successful phishing attempt.

Nicole Grinstead: Also, the 2015 Anthem data breach, again, successful phishing attempt. Not to say that there aren’t other ways to mitigate phishing attacks and not to say that that’s the only way that accounts can be compromised or credentials can be compromised, but this is one really prevalent issue and really prevalent attack vector. Just to give you an example and demonstrate the kind of things that we are facing, the threat that we face and what we’re doing about it.

Nicole Grinstead: Basically, this is the fun part of the talk, I think. I’m going to explain at a high level what we’re doing at Netflix to detect that malicious behavior. The data is all there in our raw logs. We have SSL data of what users are logging into what applications, where they’re logging in from. We also have application specific logs, what users are doing within sensitive applications. Also Google drive data, for example, what types of actions people are doing, how many documents you’re accessing, that kind of thing. So we have all of that raw data and that’s really where we’re finding this information of where the deviations occur.

Nicole Grinstead: The first thing we do is clean that data up a bit. As you can imagine, it might not tell the full story, just one raw line and your logs. We make sure that we enhance that data and get kind of the originating IP address if, for instance, a user has come through VPN or something like that. That’s really the first step as we enhance our data, and make sure that we have everything that tells the full story about what action the user has taken.

Nicole Grinstead: Then we start to take those actions and model what their normal behavior is like. Just to give you an example of a few of the things that we think are interesting. If you think about what a user typically does, you know, they’ll come in, they might access the same types of applications, so that’s definitely one thing that we detect on is what type of applications does a user normally do versus what are they doing right now, and is that weird?

Nicole Grinstead: Another aspect is if you can think of a user probably normally logs in from the same device on the same browser. User agent is a really common thing that you can see in a log where we can tell what kind of machine they’re coming in from, and that usually doesn’t differ. Sometimes people get new machines, sometimes they upgrade their browsers, like we have some logic to dampen those upgrades or things like that. But if all of a sudden that changes, it might be a signal or an interesting thing to look at.

Nicole Grinstead: Additionally, location. People do go on vacation, but normally if you think about a user’s behavior, they’re probably either logging in from home or from their desk at work. These are all signals that we can look at and model out a user’s normal behavior and see when there’s deviations, that might be something that’s interesting to us.

Nicole Grinstead: As you can imagine then, just generating anomalies and figuring out where things are different doesn’t necessarily give us a full picture of when something is malicious or if something might be going wrong. That’s where the next step is on top of these raw anomalies that we’re generating. We apply some business logic to be a little bit smarter about what we think is important to investigate, because just seeing raw anomalies, it could be interesting but it also can be a little bit noisy. As you can imagine, people do deviate from their normal behavior sometimes.

Nicole Grinstead: This is then kind of the step where we try to figure out is that actually risky to our business if this action is occurring. As I mentioned in one of my first slides, if you think about accessing really sensitive financial data, that’s something that’s higher risk than maybe accessing our lunch menus. If I never accessed lunch menus for Netflix and then all of a sudden I do, well yes that was anomalous, but does the security team care if somebody is looking at lunch menus? No, we don’t care. There’s no sensitive data to be gleaned there and it’s not something that we want to spend our resources investigating. That’s one aspect.

Nicole Grinstead: Also, I think in all of our organizations, some users have access to more sensitive data than others. Also, if you think about executives, not only do they probably have access to more sensitive data than some other people in the organization might, but they also might be a larger target because they’re high profile and externally visible. We also kind of look at what type of user it is, and if it’s a certain type of user, they might be a little more or less risky. These are the types of things that we apply after the fact to weed out the noise a little bit and see what are the really high risk things that we should be focusing on and looking at.

Nicole Grinstead: The final step is when we’re actually going to display this to our security team of analysts. We are using Facebook’s open source technology graph QL to enhance that anomaly. [Audio drops from 12:05-00:12:44] Hey, hopefully everyone can hear me again. I’m not sure exactly what happened, dropped briefly. Okay, great. Yeah, then, that final step is where we get information from outside of just our anomaly generation and tie that up with other interesting data sources.

Nicole Grinstead: If we are looking at not just that interesting event, but then events around that. What does the user typically do, what kind of applications did they log into right before, what types of applications did they log into right after, that type of thing. Also, what organization they’re in, what type of job they do, so any other extra information, extra data that we can use to kind of enhance that and tell the whole picture of who this user is, what they typically do and why this was a weird behavior and if it’s risky.

Nicole Grinstead: That’s kind of at a high level what we’re doing. I really appreciate everyone joining today again. I think we have some time for questions.

Angie Chang: Thank you, that was excellent. Thank you for hanging on while we had minor technical difficulties. We do have some questions. First question we had from Carla is how do you handle and what steps do you take to keep it protected for a cust … How do you keep customer data protected and maybe used internally to diagnose a problem?

Nicole Grinstead: Actually, thanks a lot for the question, that’s a great question. We on the information security team are more focused on our corporate employee accounts. On the consumer facing side, if a consumer’s account is compromised, you won’t have access to intellectual property or financial data, stuff like that. On my team, that’s more explicitly what we’re focusing on with this particular project. Not to say that that’s also not a problem or an issue that we face or that we work on, but that’s not my area of expertise, I’ll say.

Angie Chang: Thank you. All right. Another question we have here is from Sukrutha, which is, how has your knowledge of security breaches and anomalies impacted your relationship with tech?

Nicole Grinstead: Yes, great question. I would say our relationship with … It definitely makes you think twice when you’re getting like a random email from someone that you’re not expecting or whatever. I’ve had a lot less, I guess base level trust in technology in general, maybe I’ll say. I shouldn’t say base level of trust, but just … I always have that hat on of someone could be doing something malicious here and there are a lot of malicious actors out there. It’s just something to be aware of.

Angie Chang: Okay. Thank you. Another question we have is how did you get into security?

Nicole Grinstead: Yes, that’s a great question. I just kind of fell into it. It was one of those things. I just started working on an identity and access project previous to Netflix when I was at Yahoo, and you just kind of ended up being a gatekeeper for sensitive information, you have to be very security aware. I just kind of found that it was super interesting being on the defending side of trying to keep things safe, so just delved in more from there.

Angie Chang: Cool. Let’s see. A question we had from Andreas is, how do you determine what a normal behavior is?

Nicole Grinstead: That’s a great question. Basically, this is where we’re using statistical modeling to build a baseline of what a user is normally doing. We’re looking at our logs and seeing these are the normal behaviors over time, and then seeing if this current action or if you can think about this current log that we’re looking at, if that deviates significantly from what a user is doing on a day-to-day basis. We’re using that log history over time to figure out what a user’s normally doing.

Angie Chang: We have a question here about, does the assignment of risk level happened manually or is it automated by machine learning system?

Nicole Grinstead: That’s automated, I wouldn’t say that it’s necessarily machine learning at that part, we’re using more just business logic to assign risk level. We know where our sensitive data is, we know which systems and which applications hold that data. For instance, one level where we say if this thing that was anomalous is a risky system, that risk level is overall little bit higher.

Angie Chang: Does the system alert you when outlier behaviors happen?

Nicole Grinstead: It does.

Angie Chang: Okay. One last question, quick question, what does working as a security engineer at Netflix like?

Nicole Grinstead: Sorry, could you repeat that? It cut out a little bit for me.

Angie Chang: How is working as a security engineer at Netflix like?

Nicole Grinstead: It’s great, it’s really rewarding. I’ll say that there’s just tons of interesting problems to solve, I think in the security space in general. More specifically at Netflix, one of the great things about the culture here is that there’s a lot of freedom to … Where we see opportunity, anyone at any level is able to call that out and drive that forward. It’s a little different from other organizations I’ve worked in where it might be a little more resource constrained and you’re kind of a little more maybe, you work a little bit more in a specific role. I’ve had the ability here to do a lot of different things that I’ve found interesting. I’d say it’s really exciting and fast-paced, fun place to work.

Angie Chang: Thank you. That’s awesome. Thank you Nicole for joining us and pulling through. We have ran out of time, but thank you so much for joining us from Netflix today and people are tweeting, so feel free to answer the tweets and we will for next week. Thank you.

Nicole Grinstead: Great. Thanks so much everyone.

Angie Chang: Bye.

Speakers:
Leah McGowen-Hare / Senior Director, Developer Evangelism / Salesforce
Sukrutha Bhadouria / CTO & Co-Founder / Girl Geek X

Transcript:

Sukrutha Bhadouria: [inaudible] some people making popcorn and pouring the wine. While we get ready, we had a little bit of a technical difficulty, but we’re all set and ready to get started. So introducing the senior director of developer evangelism at Salesforce. She has over 20 years of experience in technology, mastering a variety of roles including consultant, developer, manager, and technical trainer. I can tell you from my own personal experience, she was the best technical trainer I had. Her career reflects the evolution of computing technology. She uses her knowledge and experience to demystify and make technology more accessible to youth, girls, communities of color, and that’s through organizations such as Black Girls Code, Technovation, Girls who Code, and Vetforce. Thank you so much for making time for us today. I can’t wait to hear what you have to share with us. So go ahead and get started.

Leah McGowen-Hare: Yes. First of all, I’m Leah and I always start with the forward looking statements. Now, I’m not sure that I’m going to be speaking about some products, but if I do, I need to cover my backside. So I want to make sure that any purchasing, implementation decisions are made based on what’s currently available, and not anything that I might speak about that’s in the future, but I really want to start with this. I want to start saying thank you. I want to thank you, Angie, I want to thank you Sukrutha for first of all, having the vision for something like this. This is amazing, and taking that vision and creating it. And I believe you guys started with like the Girl Geek Dinners 10 years ago, and now you’re revamping this. This is amazing. And you two are trailblazers, so I thank you for your vision, your tenacity, and creating this platform and allowing me to be a part of it and share my story. So thank you.

Leah McGowen-Hare: Yes. So as Sukrutha had mentioned, a lot of people know me from different things. They may know me from the classroom. Here, I’m teaching at a hands on training at Dreamforce, probably apex class. I’ve taught Visualforce classes, or you had my week long classes, learning admin tool one, or you may have seen me delivering keynotes for TDX, TrailheaDX, or doing interviews and pre-shows or the Dreamforce keynote. So I often tell people, you see my glory. People who are like, “Oh, you just sashay up there. You just get up there, and you do this,” and I go, “But what you don’t know is my story.” And everybody has a story. And I think while it’s wonderful, and it’s amazing to be on these stages, and sharing and inspiring, really knowing sort of a piece of the story behind the scenes has a lot more power from my perspective.

Leah McGowen-Hare:  I’m going to share with you very little bit about my story, and I share this because people often go, “Leah, I have questions about branding and my branding,” and I’m often like, don’t focus on your branding, focus on the value you add, and everything else will begin to fall in place. And it’s really easy to get caught up in that branding piece, particularly with social media and all of this good stuff. And I’m always like, “Well, let’s take a step back and what is your story? What are you trying to build? What is the story you’re trying to create?”

Leah McGowen-Hare: With my story, I started developing coding when I was really young. You can see my little picture. I was busting the collar up, I was very fashionable, and that’s a Commodore PET, where if you see it, there was no memory stick, there were no CDs. It was a cassette tape that you actually had to push play, and that’s how the computer started turning. That was me back in the day coding, when I was much younger, but I did not have visions of myself working at technology because, for twofold, first of all, nobody was really doing that then. It wasn’t a widely known field.

Leah McGowen-Hare: And two, it definitely was not representative of females or African American females at that matter. I was more inclined to go to, I wanted to be a dancer. I loved Fame. Probably many may not know Fame. Fame, Flashdance, I wanted to be a dancer, and Alvin Ailey, I wanted to dance. So I went off to college at UMass Amherst, and I started my career as a dance major.

Leah McGowen-Hare: And my father, who was a professor, who was just really gracious about it, he said, “Leah, you’re multifaceted, you have many gifts, many talents, and I don’t want you ignoring one completely, such as your ability to really problem solve, coding, math, and science. You have a real innate gift for that.” And I said, “Yeah, whatever, Daddy.” And I twirled away with my leg warmers and headband. But he allowed me to explore that side of me. So every summer, I would go to New York City, and I would do the whole starving artist thing. And one summer, I was there living in New York, I was a waitress, and I was working at a restaurant called Honeysuckle and there was this other waitress there.

Leah McGowen-Hare: And at that time, I’m maybe 19, 20, 21 I should be because they had alcohol, but she was working there, and she too was a starving artist and she was 30, and I thought, “Oh my goodness, this woman is 30.” And that felt ancient to me at the time. Right? And I was like, “And she’s still trying to make it? Oh no.” I went right back to school and I changed my major from dance to computer science, and I was like, “Oh no, I’m not trying to do that.” I went off, and I was grounded in computer science, and let’s see where this is going to take me. Once I graduated, I worked for a company called Andersen Consulting, which is now Accenture, and that was out in New York City, and I worked on a lot of the older systems, mainframe, batch programming. We’ll talk a little bit about that.

Leah McGowen-Hare: Then I moved from Andersen. I moved out from New York office to San Fran, and I started working for a company called Peoplesoft as a developer. And I did a lot of development there. And after doing development for a while I realized, “I’m good at this, I’m okay, I’m good.” But there was a piece missing for me, and that was the interaction with other people. I really liked interacting with people, even talking about technology. My manager, who was really nice, at the time, said, “Leah, when you’re in the office, morale goes up, but productivity goes down,” and I was like, “What?” She goes, “You get this, but I think there’s something more you can do. I think there’s something different, a different path that you should look at.” And while she wasn’t saying I didn’t want you in my group, she was just saying, “I just don’t think this is serving your innate talents well.”

Leah McGowen-Hare: She said, “What about there’s, this position, be a trainer, training developers how to code using the Peoplesoft tools.” And I was like, “Trainer? No way, that’s too close to my parents. My father’s a professor, my mother’s a teacher. I’m not trying to become my parents.” She was like, “Just give it a go and see what it’s like. Just go ahead and try it.” I went in and tried out, tried out because you actually had to do a test teach for this position, a little begrudgingly. And I did it, and I then soon quickly realized I actually loved it. It mixed the two things that I loved, which was technology and talking to people. So I was helping people understand technology, and it was almost like a game to me, like how can I explain these really complex concepts in a way that people can understand it.

Leah McGowen-Hare: From explaining things like polymorphism of objects, or being object oriented languages, how do you break that down in a way that’s consumable by those that may never have heard this before? I had room of Cobol programmers learning how to code in People code, which was object based. It was a challenge, but I was up for the challenge.  I did that. It was amazing, I traveled the world. I really stepped out on faith and was like, “Okay, I’m going to try something that I didn’t think was for me.” And it turned out it was, so much so that I went and got my masters in education and technology because I really wanted to take it a step further, and really see what are the different ways that I can help people learn very complex technological concepts. So I went off and I got my masters in that, and after I got my masters I had my company, this was while I was getting my master’s.

Leah McGowen-Hare: I was working full time in my own company, and I was a grad school student full time, and I was a single parent at the time, just doing it all, making it happen, just grinding it out. And it was an amazing time for me. It was challenging, but I really surprised myself with how I rose to the occasion.

Leah McGowen-Hare: And then I went on and came to Salesforce, and I started, at the time it was called Salesforce University, and I started training here as a developer trainer, training on Apex, Visualforce, the system admin journey helping people get sysadmin certified. It was amazing, and did that for seven years. And then in the last year, it hasn’t even been a year, but I left SFU and came over to TMP, and I was working for a organization called TPL under Lisa Marshall, and then recently, I think it’s as of August, have joined the Trailhead team, which has just been amazing. 

Leah McGowen-Hare: My story has lots of curves and turns and downward turns, upward turns. It’s just been amazing, and it’s been lots of learning that I’ve truly embraced, and I’ve just learned to be open to opportunities that I may not initially see for myself, but allowing myself to at least try and go out and take a risk. So if you notice on the slide, I have the trail still going because who knows what’s going to be next.

Leah McGowen-Hare:  I wanted to kind of hone in a little bit about, talk about my development journey going through this. So in developing, I started off in mainframe. Now I wasn’t coding in the 80s. I mean I wasn’t working full time in the eighties. I’m not that old, but when I did start, it was on mainframe, writing in Cobol, JCL, and that’s a time when customers built everything in house. They would build their own systems. You had a slew of developers, huge organizations, huge server rooms, just everything in house. Everything was custom built, and so you would go there and work on these different clients. I worked on so many different clients, modifying their information, debugging their Cobol batch programs, or if you were one of the cool kids, you got to work on the online portion called CICS, which was just the terminal online intermediate transactional system.

Leah McGowen-Hare:  I did that. And then when I moved on over to Peoplesoft, I went from mainframe technology to client server technology. And that’s when a shift started happening in the marketplace where people were beginning to not buy the software. When they buy the software, it still was on premise, meaning it was in house, all of their servers, everything they maintained from their database servers and app servers or web servers. Everything was in house. The infrastructure wasn’t that much of a shift, you still had in terms of everything was on premise, but now with client server, you have these new pieces, you had your web server, you had your app server, these other pieces that you had to integrate and work with as well. I had to learn that, that was a little bit of a shift. The big jump is when I jumped from client server into cloud computing.

Leah McGowen-Hare: And here, now it’s more subscription based model, and this is where customers are, it’s no longer on premise, it’s in the cloud, and of course, there’s some hybrid ones and things like that. But I’m talking straight cloud technology and subscription based. That was a huge jump for me from a development standpoint, and I was reflecting on that and what that looked like for me. I wanted to share what that transition was for me from moving from an on premise to a cloud based technology, particularly multitenancy, which is very different than a non multitenancy.

Leah McGowen-Hare: From on premise standpoint, when you do that, some of the costs and expenses that occur, not necessarily development, but tying capital expenses, you have a lot of things in pieces that you have to purchase from licensing fees and maintaining, and if you have your app servers, your web servers, new releases that now require new upgrades and slow product releases, things did not happen quickly ’cause, “Okay, now we got to do the product release, we have to upgrade our app server, but that isn’t compatible with this database server that might not be compatible with this web server.” So there was a lot of checks and balances that went in place across that, and it took a little bit of time. So it was also longer to proof of concepts. You couldn’t quickly and easily spin up a proof of concept like, this is what the system would look like, or here’s what the flow would look like. And slower time to market. But that was what I was used to working in.

Leah McGowen-Hare: Then, jump on over into the cloud. Here, if you look at some of the cost things, you have lower total cost of ownership because at this point, it’s subscription based And it’s interesting because I had a conversation with someone who is looking to go over from on premise to cloud, and they go, “I don’t like the fact that,” and this is a while ago. They’re like, “The cloud will have all my data, and what if I don’t like it? I’m stuck because my data stuck in the cloud.” I go, “Let’s look at this picture. What would it look like if you go with this on premise system? You’ve got to purchase all of the different hardware pieces, all of the infrastructure, everything there. Then you install the software and guess what? Now you don’t like it. Well, guess what? You’re stuck with it because you moved it into your home. You’re stuck with it. Whereas if you’re in the cloud, you can extract your data and keep it moving. It’s less baggage.”

Leah McGowen-Hare: They hadn’t thought about that perspective before, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s true.” There’s a lower barrier for entry. You can actually try, and many of you know, for those that back in the day before Trailhead, you could go and create a DE org, and go and play in the DE org, and it did not cost anything. Now with Trailhead, you can definitely get in there and start playing around and be like, “Oh, this is what it looks like. This is how I can customize it. These are the kinds of things that I’d need to know to change the process or make it more conformed to look like my processes, rapid development cycles.” And because there’s a lower barrier for entry, you have more people coming in there playing, and you don’t necessarily have to be with a company that’s using Salesforce.

Leah McGowen-Hare: You can go out there and just start learning it for yourself with Trailhead, and that creates a larger community, a larger developer community, a larger user community, so you have a larger support group. And this is a little bit more detail, but this is more personal for me, was coming from an on premise to cloud development, particularly multitenancy, it made me a better developer. Now what does that mean? So when I, on premise, from my standpoint, I have infinite resources. I can write code the way I want. If I get an infinite loop, I call the DBA and be like, “Oops, did something, can you kill that for me?” And for those out there that know SQL, there’s this thing called SELECT *, where you select every single field that you want.

Leah McGowen-Hare: And then, I admit I’ve done this in the past, long time ago, where I would say SELECT * and it pull in 500 fields into memory, and then I may only end up using five or 10. Now that’s not being very efficient. Well, when I’m developing here on the platform, I have to be very explicit about the fields that I want. There is no SELECT * in your sock or SQL statements. You must select the particular fields that you have to explicitly state the fields that you want, which causes you to be very mindful about how you develop your code. So it makes you think through things in a more efficient way. You use your memory space. You use as much or as little as you need, but you’re a green coder.

Leah McGowen-Hare: You’re not wasteful with that virtual shared memory space because for anybody who knows works in Apex, all of our code runs in the same memory space, hence the reason we place limits so that everybody has equal performance, so I can’t go in there and create an infinite loop because it would impact somebody else’s performance, and those safeguards are to ensure that everybody is getting good performance. So, really changing my mindset when I moved from an on premise to a cloud development really shifted a lot of the different ways that I thought, and that was just one of the examples. But I know we’re short on time, and I just wanted to sort of talk about, you’ve seen some part of my story, and then I wanted to kind of hone in a little bit more detailed, and see what my development story looked like because I know they wanted, Angie requested something a little bit more technical. And at this point I would, Angie and Sukrutha, if you guys are open to question and answers.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. So like you said, we want to be a little bit mindful of the next session that’s going to be happening soon, but we’re sorry for the minor technicality that we had at the start. This was such an informative session, and Leah, you’re such an inspiration. Thank you so much. The questions that we’re getting, we’ll have them answered via Twitter with the Hashtag. So use the hashtag, everyone, GirlGeekXElevate, and we’ll get you all the answers that you need. And seeing so many amazing comments like, “Leah, you’re the real deal! Such an inspiration!” And other amazing comments like, “I remember you in that gown at Dreamforce.”

Leah McGowen-Hare: It was a great time. It was a good time. This is an amazing community. I have never come across anything like what I see with the Salesforce community. It really is a reflection of all that is good and inspirational.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yes. So thank you. With that, thank you so much, Leah.

Leah McGowen-Hare: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you.

Leah McGowen-Hare: Okay.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Bye.

Leah McGowen-Hare: Bye.

Panelists:
Shanea King-Roberson / Senior Technical Product Manager / eBay
Claire Vo / VP,  Product / Optimizely
Selina Tobaccowala / CEO & Founder / Gixo/Evite
Sarah Allen / Founder / RailsBridge & Engineering Manager / Google

Transcript

Shanea King-Roberson: Okay, I think we’re live everyone. So I’ll get started since we’re running a little bit late.

Shanea King-Roberson: Hi. My name is Shanea. I’m going to be the moderator today for, “What Happens After Your Startup Gets Acquired?” And since we’re running a little short on time, I’d love to have each one of our panelists take 30 seconds to introduce themselves, let everybody know what the company they had acquired is, and what they’re doing now.

Claire Vo: I’m Clair Vo. I am currently the VP of Product at Optimizely and I was the CEO and co-founder of a company called Experiment Engine that was acquired a year and one day ago, by Optimizely. We at Experiment Engine built solutions for enterprise customers to scale and manage their experimentation programs and that has been recently, as of January, re-released as part of the Optimizely platform as Optimizely Program Management, which top enterprises use to collaborate, manage, and report on their high velocity experimentation programs.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome. Thanks, Claire. Next.

Selina Tobaccowala: Hi, I’m Selina Tobaccowala. I’m the CEO and Co-founder of Gixo. We do live coach fitness classes right from your phone. In terms of previous startups, I had started Evite, with actually the same co-founder from Gixo, about two decades ago. So, the only reason you don’t see gray hair is ’cause it’s been dyed. But, we got acquired by Interactive Corp.

Selina Tobaccowala: And then on the other side of the table, I was at Ticketmaster and did about ten acquisitions and was the President and CTO at SurveyMonkey and also did a number of acquisitions there. So I have experiences both sides of the table.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome.

Sarah Allen: So my name is Sarah Allen. The first company I co-founded was straight out of school, was The Company of Science and Art, which was acquired … created After Effects was acquired by Aldus in ’93, then subsequently by Adobe in ’94. And then more recently I founded Blazing Cloud, which was a consultancy founded in 2009 and it was acqu-hired by Indiegogo in 2013. So the team joined Indiegogo.

Sarah Allen: I’m now at Google as an engineering manager, leading some teams doing server list events for serverless compute and a security policy.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome. And I guess I should probably go, too.

Shanea King-Roberson: I currently today am a senior technical product manager at Ebay and before that I was a product manager at Google and I started a digital marketing agency doing digital marketing and web development for women entrepreneurs, experts, and authors that I sold my half of the company to a different partner. So, I’m happy to be here. And we can jump right in.

Shanea King-Roberson: So, I’d love to quickly go over the types of acquisitions. So what are kind of the buckets in which an acquisition could fall on, or why you would like to get acquired.

Shanea King-Roberson: Let’s do that.

Selina Tobaccowala: Sure. Did you want one of us to start, or-

Shanea King-Roberson: Yes. Yes.

Selina Tobaccowala: Okay, sure, I can walk through in terms of … So, there’re different reasons, especially as an acquiring company, why you might want to acquire a company. I mean, the first is an acquihire, where you really wanna get the talent and that’s one type of acquisition.

Selina Tobaccowala: The second is when it’s what called accretive, which is where either the revenue is growing faster, the user growth is growing faster, than the core company, and so that’s where you essentially are buying it for the financial or business value.

Selina Tobaccowala: And a third situation is really if it’s like a strategic option for a product area or product advancement that you want to, essentially, go do. Which is, you’re sort of a small business and now you’re bringing somebody in who’s giving you enterprise experience. Or there’s different strategic tie-ins or fit-ins.

Selina Tobaccowala: And those will generally be the main sort of, philosophies around acquisitions.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome. That’s great.

Shanea King-Roberson: So what I’d love to do is if anyone on the line as any questions, feel free to put them in and we can have about ten minutes of Q&A at the end. But, I’m going to ask, starting from pre-acquisition.

Shanea King-Roberson: So there are people on the line that are in different stages of their careers and founding of their companies, so what are some of the ways that you can be prepared to be acquired before you’re ready? What are some of the things that entrepreneurs on the line should be thinking about, before they ever start to get acquired?

Shanea King-Roberson: How about Claire, you take this one.

Claire Vo: Yeah, so I think … Actually, somebody asked me that question a while ago. Like, “What should you do if you want to sell your company?” And I was like, “If you want to sell your company, you’re not in a great place to sell your company.” So, almost, if you are preparing to be acquired before you’re, quote, unquote, “ready,” you’re probably not focused on the right things.

Claire Vo: So what I would say is, the best preparation for an acquisition is a highly functional, value-generating, company. And so, the thing that you should do is try to maximize the value of your business by focusing on customers, growing revenue, reducing friction in whatever marketing or sales funnels you have, and ultimately building a valuable asset that somebody would want to acquire.

Claire Vo: I think the things that lead to a good business are going to lead to healthy acquisitions, and so you actually … I don’t recommend you do anything special, if you’re not intending to be acquired or aren’t ready to be acquired, that you wouldn’t already do to make your business valuable.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome.

Sarah Allen: So yeah, I wanted to-

Selina Tobaccowala: I would absolutely plus one that, with kind of the one exception being, trying to really make sure that way before you get acquired, you have a conversation with your co founder, if you have any, about what is either that number or what is that situation that you want to be acquired? Because it’s very different in the heat of the moment when people are coming to you and really making sure that you have sort of that baseline understanding with your founders of, are we trying to build this into a multi billion dollar company? If we get an offer for … If somebody comes in tomorrow … For a hundred million dollars, would we take it? Or, is it 15 million dollars? And having that conversation upfront, because what you don’t want to do is when something … If somebody approaches you, be on very different pages with your founding team.

Sarah Allen: Yeah, I was gonna chime in. Can you hear me?

Shanea King-Roberson: Mm-hmm (affirmative). We can hear you.

Sarah Allen: I was gonna chime in on that too. I think that people who are founding their company for the first time, don’t necessarily think through all the different things that might happen, and while you might be starting to be an independent company that IPOs, having a frank conversation with your co founders is like, “Well, what if it’s year five, and we expected to have this big outcome in year three, how are we going to feel about it? How are we gonna value what we’re doing? How will we handle that situation together? Because having that pre-conversation, like you mentioned, is where you can have a really healthy discourse around that, rather than waiting until your co founder is burned out, and they’re ready to quit and then you’re stuck with a company that is maybe on the verge of profitability but not doing everything you want. You want to be doing it together.

Sarah Allen: And of course, the best way to get sold is to … Or the best way to go into any of these situations, is to be in a great situation. But sometimes, just to be honest, people sell their companies when things aren’t going so well.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome. Those are really, really, great answers. Thanks.

Shanea King-Roberson: Since we’re kind of in this pre-acquisition conversation, I would love to take the flip side of this. So, what does the acquiring company look for that entrepreneurs today should be aware of?

Shanea King-Roberson: So if I’m a company and I want to acquire another company, what are some of those things? What are they looking for? What are some of the big ticket items that an entrepreneur should be building for?

Claire Vo: I think they’re reflected in the types of acquisitions that were described at the beginning of this session, which is actually like, will acquiring this company net us ROI positive in terms of revenue? Will it add strategic value to my product portfolio or my company portfolio, or does it add talent that’s otherwise difficult or expensive to acquire and retain?

Claire Vo: I think those are pretty simple. They’re looking for money. They’re looking for strategic advantage and they’re looking for talent. I can actually … There’s no like secret sauce [inaudible 00:09:05] a company’s looking for, other than to generate value for shareholders, and so those are the three things that can do that most directly.

Sarah Allen: Well I think to … There is another nuance to it. What you say is absolutely correct. The other thing is, they want to have … They’re looking for a company that’s gonna be successful in bringing that value to the new entity. And so, one of the things that both sides need to know is what’s the culture of the company that’s being acquired? Is it where the bigger company wants to go, or is it substantially different in a way that the acquired team is gonna have to adapt?

Sarah Allen: And that’s something where … Nobody acquires a company because they think it’s going to not go well, yet, a lot of times, the goals of the acquisition aren’t met, right? Or it doesn’t quite live up to its hopes, and I’ve sort of been in bigger companies where teams have been acquired and then their product gets canceled when that wasn’t really the goal.

Sarah Allen: Sometimes that it expected and just matching expectations upfront and if you are bringing your culture to the company and they’re really excited about that, how are you going to infuse the company in that culture, with that culture. Or, if your culture is very like, “We’re a little, tiny startup and we’re excited about that,” how are you gonna survive in this giant company? How are you gonna make that a positive experience for the company and for your team?

Sarah Allen: And so, I think that they’re looking for, how is this going to transition into a success?

Shanea King-Roberson: Yeah, that’s a really great point. So I think it’s actually a segue into kind of, conflicts of acquisitions and some of the challenges that can come with after you’ve been acquired and the actual negotiation process. So, I’d like to dig a little bit more into that.

Shanea King-Roberson: So, let’s say that I receive an offer for an acquisition. What are some of the basic negotiation tactics when you’re negotiating an acquisition if you are the starting founder?

Sarah Allen: I can chime in there.

Sarah Allen: By the time you receive … I haven’t had ton … I mean, I don’t know. Some people have had like eight companies acquired. From my data points and from the people that I know, by the time you receive an offer, you’ve pretty much already negotiated everything. That’s not where you start negotiating. On your first meeting with the acquiring company, is the beginning of the negotiation, and so what I found that was really a discovery process in … When I was looking at having Blazing Cloud acquired, that was … There were way more things that were negotiable than I ever thought to negotiate. And I really learned that because we were approached by a company which then sort of triggered me to sort of think about, “Is this the company we want to be acquired by?”

Sarah Allen: And then, by talking to a number of different companies, I realized how different the situations were for my team, and then I was like, “Oh, well maybe this other company would offer this thing,” and I had to really think about, “Does the team want to stay together or are they super happy just joining the new company as like individuals?” … So this is what they call an acquihire, so it was really just the team transitioning into a bigger company.

Sarah Allen: And so I think that there’re all sorts of value that the company can give to you and that your team can bring to the company, that aren’t dollars and shares.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome. Did anybody else have any tips on negotiation?

Claire Vo: Yeah, I think this was said a little bit before, on you need to get in alignment with your co founder on what would be the outcomes or the situations on which you consider an acquisition. I think you also need to have, as a leadership team, whether your co founder or part of your board or whatever that is, your priorities in terms of the things you negotiate.

Claire Vo: You can’t negotiate to every end on every thing and get like the perfect deal done, so you really have to stack order what’s important to you. Is it the financial outcomes? Is it the outcomes for the team? Is it the structure of the deal? Is it the title that you’re coming in on? Is it what happens to your product? There’s a whole bunch of things that aren’t just dollars, and you really need to prioritize kind of, your give-to-gets. If I can get the financial thing, I’m okay taking a lower title or my team being broken up, or whatever those things are. And if you have clarity on it, it makes the negotiation a lot easier.

Selina Tobaccowala: I think there’s also, similarly, aligning those things in terms of, why you’re being acquired and what the company’s actually looking for. So, if your negotiating on financials, as an example, there’s a question of how much of your financial equity will you take now, and how much are you willing to take depending upon certain or specifics targets. And then it’s an interesting way to sometimes look at structure.

Shanea King-Roberson: Is Selina frozen?

Sarah Allen: She looks good to me.

Claire Vo: Nope. I can hear her.

Shanea King-Roberson: Oh, there you are. Hi.

Selina Tobaccowala: Hi.

Shanea King-Roberson: Sorry, you froze for me. But everyone heard her, right? Yes? Okay, good.

Selina Tobaccowala: Sorry about that.

Shanea King-Roberson: So, one of the things a few of you have mentioned is managing employee expectations. You’ve mentioned your teams, you mentioned the other people involved in the company. Does anyone want to talk about managing the expectations of your team and your employees through an acquisition, if some people are excited about the acquisition and some people are not?

Sarah Allen: I’ll speak to that first. I think that it’s … Particularly in my most recent situation in acquihire, the team’s the whole thing and so if knowing going into it, that these two people out of these 12 are just not into it, then … In our case, we were just super open about it. Okay, they’re not going.

Sarah Allen: And then in one case, I had somebody who was on my leadership team who was very skeptical about the acquisition. Just in general. She was like, “I don’t know if I want to do this thing.” And so then I was just upfront with the people we were talking to. I was like, “Well, depending on what type of a situation you provide, you may or may not get my whole leadership team.”

Sarah Allen: And I think with a small team … I’d be interested in the people who might have had bigger teams … Being open about it was really good. The other thing is, often with an acquisition these days … This didn’t use to be true in the early 90’s … But, now they want to interview all the engineers and that’s kind of a weird thing, interviewing for your own job. But, we ended up doing that together. We did practice interviews together, then we went and interviewed at a bunch of different companies together, and it was this real bonding thing, which was kind of fun and unexpected.

Sarah Allen: So, whenever you can, have fun with it, because it’s … The uncertainty of an acquisition is incredibly stressful to your folks, because they’re not in a decision-making position. And it’s incredibly stressful for you, but if you’re negotiating and you have the power and you’re the final decision-maker, or at least on the decision-making team, it’s a whole different situation. So, think about ways that you can make it good for them, and fun for them, and make it clear, if it’s true, that they’re … That you’re taking their situation into account.

Claire Vo: I’ll add an alternate point of view, which is, I took full-on, mama bear, protectionist mode when we did our acquisition, and essentially shielded the entire team from the acquisition process, because ultimately we needed to build a valuable business either way, and I saw the potential for the acquisition to be just kind of like, a point one percent thing that was gonna like … We’re gonna negotiate to something that we liked and even if we did, were we gonna get through all the legal stuff. And then we get through the legal stuff, we get to the appointment stuff and then we sign a deal and it all happens and it’s happy, I just … You can ask my team … Up until the point the acquisition happened, I was like, there’s a point five percent chance this is gonna happen, so let’s act as business as normal.

Claire Vo: And part of that was exactly what you said. I didn’t want my team interviewed for jobs that they already had. I went to the leadership team of the company that acquired my team and I said, “I have credibility. You can interview me all day and night, but I hired a great team that built a great product and if you don’t trust me, that they can add value to our team, that’s a big problem for me.”

Claire Vo: So, I actually took a more proactive stance, in term of isolating the team from the acquisition, because it was so distracting at the scale we were at, that I didn’t see necessarily the up side. And I think you would talk to my team and they would say that I very much protected their personal and employment interests in that thing, so I didn’t put them in situations that were bad, but I also didn’t bring that stress and uncertainty into our business that we were still running day to day.

Selina Tobaccowala: And I think there’re various scenarios. There’s one scenario, which is the acquihire scenario, where as an acquiring company, if you’re acquiring the talent, that’s what you’re buying and you want to actually interview the talent and so, you have to bring your employees along, but at that point, presumably, you’ve been transparent with the team with why you’re in an acquihire situation.

Selina Tobaccowala: And then there’s the strategic, sort of product … Where you’re helping us enter a new space, and in those acquisition scenarios, normally you can keep the team fairly intact, but the difficult part in those scenarios is you have to figure out if your culture that you’ve been building as a company, is aligned with this culture of the acquiring company. Because you have to expect there’s gonna be a certain amount of turnover in your own employee base after you get acquired, if there’s a culture mismatch with the parent company essentially.

Selina Tobaccowala: And then there’s a third scenario, where it’s like they’re buying your revenue and potentially your customer base and often in those scenarios, there is a document which shows synergies between the two companies, which essentially means, cutting of staff. And so, you have to understand, when you’re the CEO and the founder of the company, what is that sort of intention of the company you’re acquiring and in the third scenario, how are you protecting the downside of people that are gonna get made redundant or let go or whatever, because there is that scenario.

Selina Tobaccowala: And as Claire said, how can you elevate that in a negotiation conversation at the beginning, if that’s important to you, in terms of your gives and your gets.

Selina Tobaccowala: And so it really depends on the type of acquisition, in terms of what the team is gonna … Is gonna happen, but I don’t think that … I’ve seen very few acquisitions where 12, 24 months on … Especially off the retention packages are 12 to 24 months on … You don’t see a certain amount of turnover from the team that has been acquired, and so … I mean, ’cause there will be change, and I think being able to be honest with your team saying, “There is going to be change after an acquisition. There’s no way it can stay exactly the same.” You can do your best to keep a lot the same, but it is impossible to keep everything the same.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome.

Shanea King-Roberson: So I think we talked a lot about post-acquisition, so I’d like to get to that in a minute. But how do you juggle multiple opportunities and when do you know to turn down an acquisition? What are some of those red flags?

Selina Tobaccowala: I mean, I think one of the biggest red flags is if you don’t … Again, it’s a little bit of that culture, which is, if you want to … You know, there’s always the pure financial outcome, where it’s like … Where people are gonna get their financials, and maybe that’s all that matters in the scenario, but if you’re trying to have your product live on and, or you’re trying to have your … Essentially, the employee side, I think it is important to understand what is the incentive of the acquiring company, and are we aligned to that strategy. Is that strategy something that we actually want to do?

Selina Tobaccowala: And so I do think that a red flag from your perspective is if you don’t feel like you’re able to get that openness with the acquiring company. And that’s true … If you think of it as a new job, as if you’re interviewing for a new manager … ‘Cause that’s essentially what you’re doing … You need to make sure there’s mission alignment, culture alignment, and transparency. And it’s your doing backdoor references on that acquiring company, is your responsibility as the CEO.

Sarah Allen: Yeah, I think that value and goal alignment is really important and I’m glad you mentioned the sort of backdoor references, because you want to know … You want to get a sense of, “Am I going to … Is this going to be successful?” And if you get indicators that they’re not being genuine with you, that they’re not being upfront … Which could be unintentional. It could be a mismatch of how you communicate, or any number of things … Then, especially if you’re anticipating that there’s a payout … Usually there’s like, “Okay, after a year you get this. And two years, and three years,” … If you’re not gonna be able to hit those milestones, then just walk, because then it’s just not worth it.

Selina Tobaccowala: And some people who are good to talk to are previous founders who have been acquired by that organization.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome. Claire, did you anything to add?

Sarah Allen: And the investors of previous founders who have been acquired.

Claire Vo: We were lucky. We shared investors with our acquiring companies. We’ve had a good inside tract.

Sarah Allen: Yeah, that helps.

Sarah Allen: Yeah, and I think that’s worth mentioning. So with Blazing Cloud I never took any money, because I didn’t want to be beholden to investors, and then I realized when we were … Because I never anticipated … I didn’t know that you could actually get acquired as a consulting company. It never even crossed my mind that that was an option, and then all of the sudden I was like, “Oh, it’s a thing,” and so I talked to a lot of other people who’d been acquired and gone through these acquihire things, and then I discovered that for many of them, their investors did the negotiation and knew the people on the other side of the table and then it … I was like, “Wow, I’d love for somebody to do this for me.”

Sarah Allen: So I mean, there’s two sides to that, because sometimes the investors have things that are goals that are different than yours, but it’s just I hadn’t really thought through how positive it can be to have an investor in going through changes in your company.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome.

Shanea King-Roberson: So, we’re starting to get some questions in and we will take those in a few more minutes, so if you have any more questions, please put them in to ask the question.

Shanea King-Roberson: I’d like to get into the post-acquisition. One thing that we really want to think about is, what was that transition like for each of you, from CEO to now, employee of a large corporation or midsize corporation? What was the best thing about that and then, the worst thing about that?

Claire Vo: So I can start. The transition was super easy. I’ve worked at companies of all size and I was never a CEO that started a company because I didn’t want a boss. That wasn’t my motivation and I used to joke I took venture capital so, I had bosses and they were a little bit more intense than the ones I had at a corporate job. So, the actual transition back to the quote, unquote “corporate world” was very easy for me; very comfortable in at-scale companies and I think my background added a lot of value immediately to the company in terms of management strategy and operations and things that we needed at the size of the company that we’re at now. So, my personal transition was easy.

Claire Vo: I think the hardest part has been emotionally letting go of my product. I mean, my product is integrated into our ecosystem. It’s part of the platform. I have a product manager that works on my team that runs my product, and I still have that CEO … Like, “Oh, we should and how do you …,” and I actually had to pull him aside in a meeting the other day and be like, “Look, I just love this thing, but this is your baby now and you do what’s right with from a product perspective and I’ll be super excited about it, but ultimately it’s yours to own.” And so, you really do have to let go, especially if you were brought in to take on a much broader role across the organization and not just baby your product for years and years on end at the expense of the overall success of the company.

Selina Tobaccowala: I’d say for me, it was such a long time ago that I was first acquired as [inaudible 00:26:20], but I was kind of in the opposite situation where I had never seen a company at scale. I was a first-time founder and that was my first job right out of college, was doing Evite, and so it was a big transition for me, to suddenly like be in a company and even things like … You know, little things, but it was like expense reports or doing big Power Point decks and stuff like that, that I had never really had experience in.

Selina Tobaccowala: And so it was a pretty big transition, and the biggest thing that was supportive to me, was I was … In the acquiring company, that’s what I was saying, is the person who became my boss was an amazing mentor to me. His name’s Sean Moriarty and he’s now the CEO of Leaf Group, but that was a really important thing for me because I didn’t, unlike Claire, I wasn’t walking in with experience, and so I do think if you’re a founder and it’s your first startup and you really haven’t kind of … I was 24 years old, I think when we got acquired, and so I think who is gonna be that manager and how are they gonna be able to help guide you through, is pretty important, depending upon where you are in your career cycle.

Sarah Allen: Yeah, when my first startup was acquired … CoSA was acquired by Aldus … We were all like in our early 20s and we were … And I think building those alliances, like Enrique Goodrow managed the acquisition from the Aldus side, and he remains a friend to this day and he just helped us navigate this corporate world.

Sarah Allen: And I think the one thing that is kind of a counterpoint to what Claire was saying, is that sometimes you know your domain better than the acquiring company. In that case, they really acquired After Effects so that they … That was gonna be the cornerstone of their digital media group, and then less than a year later, all of this was acquired by Adobe, which had Premier. And so, they stacked up the products that had some redundancy between Adobe and Aldus, because there was like Freehand and Illustrator and these different … But mostly it was complimentary and they looked at After Effects and Premier and they said, “Okay, we’re gonna have to cancel After Effects,” and so the team did … So our product managers, but we all participated in really sketching out that the video space was broader and educating them that there’s post production and special effects and there are these different parts of the market and then there were some other products that we put into this two by two matrix.

Sarah Allen: So to really focus on what is … Your little company is no longer a thing. You are doing what’s best for this big entity. And sometimes, you have to let go and sometimes you have to hold on to what’s right because you understand this … You were acquired because you understand some part of the world better than the acquiring company and you have to explain that.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome. That’s a really great segue into like … Getting into post-acquisition. So after you’ve been acquired, how do you foster inclusion and retain your culture of being a smaller startup inside this larger company, and, or what are some of the things you’re thinking about when you’re trying to merge with a new culture?

Claire Vo: So this is a really tacticall thing, just make sure that you have culture specific emojis set up in Slack, so … We’re from Texas, so the first things that got set up were like our old logo, the Texas flag, the hook ’em horns, because I’m a Longhorn, and a taco emoji. So immediately we infused the communications culture at Optimizely with very important cultural touchstones.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome.

Claire Vo: But I think part of that is like, what can … You know, you don’t have to drink the Kool-Aid. You don’t have to come in and say, “You have to do everything the way you’ve always done.” You’re bringing something, you’re bringing a really special team into a company and in that first year in particular, you’re at a point where people celebrate that and they want to be excited about it and they want to know what your team brings to the office. And so, just kind of introducing the personality of your team, introducing the personalities of the people on your team, and really giving company-wide platforms for displaying that so it can be infused across the entire organization.

Claire Vo: I found it has just fostered a lot of friendships, fostered a lot of excitement around the acquisition, that has made the product and team much more successful. So, it sounds really simple, but I do think … You know, what are those list of like, inside jokes and priorities that you had at your old startup? Bring those in and show them to people, ’cause that’s a fun part of your team, too.

Sarah Allen: Yeah, I think having rituals. My startups were acquired before Slack was a thing … Like, with After Effects, I think because we were just … Maybe we were a little naïve, maybe we were insulated, I don’t remember there being a lot of challenges to how we did things. And we just kept doing the things that we were doing. And we had a very strong beta group, where had very good relationships with the post houses that used our software, and we continued to have that community that spanned our customers and our team throughout basically two big mergers.

Sarah Allen: And I’ve seen that with … I now work at Google and work with a team that was Firebase, and they were acquired and they have like team lunches every Wednesday and Friday, that they had before Google and they have after Google and they have certain things that they do, that they’ve always done, and they adjusted things a little bit, but then they just kept doing the things that make them who they are, that aren’t like … None of these kinds of things are like, “Oh, yeah, my company doesn’t do that.” But, you’ll hear that.

Sarah Allen: Sometimes you’ll be in a big company and they’ll be like, “Oh yeah, but we don’t do that here.” And I think that you want to, in a nice way … Like, not say, “No, we’re going to do something completely different from what you’re asking me to do,” but practice the, “Yes, and,”. “Great idea, I’m going to interpret it this way.”

Sarah Allen: And then I also wanted to acknowledge with Blazing Cloud, I didn’t go with the acquisition. I didn’t even realize that one could do that, but it turned out, one can. And so, that’s just … All the things don’t have to be the way that you might hear about them being done.

Claire Vo: Yeah, and I wanna kind of just rip off one thing that you said, which is, also, as the leader and the founder or the CEO coming in, you have to be a leader for things that are gonna change. Like, you have to be the person that says, “Yeah, I know. We used to do things that way and it was super easy and fast and chill, and now there’s a four-step process and that’s life.” And you know, you have to know your movable objects and I think as kind of the leader, the team, whether they get dispersed to different departments or report to you or not, are gonna look to you to set the tone. And so, you have to be clear about the things that are gonna change and the things that aren’t gonna change. Keep your rituals that are really powerful and important, but also, say when something’s not serving us anymore in this new context, you need to let it go and move on to bigger and better things.

Shanea King-Roberson: Absolutely. Awesome.

Shanea King-Roberson: So we have about 13 minutes left and there’s about four questions, so for managers at acquiring companies, how can they support the [inaudible 00:34:10]

Shanea King-Roberson: Can you hear me?

Selina Tobaccowala: No, you-

Sarah Allen: [crosstalk 00:34:18].

Selina Tobaccowala: I think you were asking a manager how you can support the acquisition?

Shanea King-Roberson: Yeah, for managers at acquiring companies, how can they support the transition or what should they not do?

Selina Tobaccowala: So I think that exactly what Claire was saying, which was making sure that you have that open communication with the leader of the team … Of the person who you’ve acquired and making sure you’re collecting feedback from them often, so that if there are things that are minor that are important to people, you can help make those changes. So, whether that’s the … You know, you hear that story of Jet and Walmart, where Jet had happy hours and Walmart said, “We don’t do alcohol.” And the Jet leader said, “Well, we’re gonna keep doing happy hours and it’s an important part of our culture.”

Selina Tobaccowala: And so it’s like, which of those things that are important enough to the leader that on the organization that when they’re pushing back on you, you can really take that try to make the change, and which of the things you have to say is, “Hey look, we’re not gonna be able to change on this issue and here’s why.” Like, here’s the thing that is important.

Selina Tobaccowala: And the other thing is, is people during an acquisition, it is a big change for them, and so the more you can communicate about, here’s our company, here’s our culture, here’s how we plan to operate things, but we’re open to feedback; we’re open to change.

Selina Tobaccowala: Obviously, I’m a little biased, having spent so many years at SurveyMonkey, but it’s collecting that feedback, whether through surveys or through talking to people, but making sure that you’re keeping that sort of employee engagement understanding of the company that you’ve acquired, I think is extremely important. Because if you don’t get those employees engaged and at least for 12 to 24 months, the integration into your platform’s nearly impossible.

Claire Vo: Yeah. I would say continually evaluate the talent that you’ve brought in from an acquisition on a regular and frequent basis, because even if you go through, let’s say, a formal interview process, you just never … You just don’t know until people land into the acquisition and start performing how they’re gonna do.

Claire Vo: I’ve been really proud that every team member that we brought into the acquisition has been … Done really, really well and has been super successful. No one’s quit. Some people have been promoted. But the acquiring company took the time and effort to continually evaluate performance and say, “Wow, we really underestimated you because we didn’t have tons of visibility into what you were doing, but now that you’re here, you’re a total rockstar,” really helped keep employees engaged, which meant that we go the product integrated very quickly, which means that we got it in the hands of customers and started driving value.

Claire Vo: So, I don’t think there’s … There are very few things that are as expensive from a time and money perspective, as a failed acquisition, so it’s worth the investment to continue to make sure that that’s successful.

Selina Tobaccowala: And I think added to that is that making sure that what the integration plan and strategy is very clear and laid out very quickly. So, you’ve had a lot of time with the company to start having the conversation. In most cases, the team is unaware of the acquisition until it happens, and so … But making sure that you’re not just talking about the deal, but that you’re strategically aligned with, what are you gonna do with that product after, so that within a 60 or 90 day window, you can very quickly come out with, what is the integration plan from a product and technology and sales team perspective. The quicker you can show people what your integration plan and strategy is, the better off it’s gonna be. And that plan could say, “For 12 months, we’re gonna do nothing.” But at least, coming up with a clear communication plan.

Sarah Allen: Yeah, I think … Well at this point, all those points are really great. I think also, from the technical side, especially these days, it’s really important … The techs [inaudible 00:38:05] are never the same and usually the big Co has something that’s like horrible from a startup-founder perspective, and sometimes they love it over there … Or sometimes they acknowledge that it’s horrible and that’s just how … We don’t have time to fix it. We need to integrate your stuff. And sometimes they have some super awesome thing that you would never find if you’re not in “the know.” So I think it’s really important for acquisitions that involve engineers, to find key senior engineers and make … In the acquiring company … And make them responsible for the success of the acquisition and partner them with individual senior talent who is … So they can learn from each other and really position it, if I you can, in a collaborative way.

Sarah Allen: Because that knowledge transfer is so important and these days it is … Just I’ve seen a lot of friends go through this, and companies goes through this, and in all different big corps, and it’s just a little culture shock. “Oh, I used to just deploy five times a day from my machine and now there’s like this process and I have to … Maybe I have to use a different language.” Maybe, they’re using three versions ago thing that they can’t upgrade until 2020 and you’re like, “What?” And that’s very hard on engineers, and so there has to be this social … Like the professional social connections where they can kind of hack the system together.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome.

Shanea King-Roberson: So, do any one of you have any regrets or things you would do differently if you could do you acquisition over again?

Claire Vo: I would have mama-beared slightly less and let my team be interviewed, because some of them were I think undervalued at the point of acquisition, and they were very quickly corrected and we could have skipped that whole cycle if I had just not been like, “My team. Back off.” And so I think that’s one thing I would have managed slightly differently. I still like insulating the team, but I think I could have done it in a more effective way.

Sarah Allen: I think I would have more proactively assessed … Like, had more confidence myself in my understanding of what the other company needed. In some cases I just … Like, I deferred to them. Like, “Oh, you want x, y, z, and don’t want a, b, c. Okay. Let’s work with that.” And took that as a fact, instead of realizing that I actually really understood their business and there were things that happened after the fact that I was like, “Oh, I was right and I should have taken the time to really talk through that with them and present more of my ideas of how this could play out.” I mean it was a good outcome from my perspective, but there was details where I was like, kind of a missed opportunity there.

Selina Tobaccowala: I would say, from my perspective, it wasn’t necessarily the regret of the acquisition, but is what led you to get acquired. So in the sense of, we took for Evite, far too much capital, and so it put us in a position where to get the investor return, meant we had to essentially make a revenue base that was so high that the better path for us was acquisition.

Selina Tobaccowala: So I think there’s this question of like, “Why would you ever get acquired. Why wouldn’t you just build your business to be great?” And those are various different instances. One is because it’s actually the best financial outcome for your investors and yourselves. Another is because you see that when you look at the strategic window, you actually see that this may be a better home, to be part of that larger organization or larger strategic approach, versus just trying to go at it on your own.

Selina Tobaccowala: So I don’t think we have regrets around the acquisition. I think when you looked at, especially for us, Evite is one of the few platforms that’s still around from that era of the dot com bust.

Shanea King-Roberson: You actually answered one of the questions that was already in our queue, which was, why would a startup want to acquired as opposed to [inaudible 00:42:24], so thanks for that. And I think we have time for one more question, so from the employee perspective, if they don’t want to be a part of an acquisition or an acquihire, at what stage would be the founder or CEO would like them to voice their opinion? Would it be better for them to just leave as soon as they realize you’re heading in a direction they don’t want to go? Would you rather they wait until they see a little bit? What’s your perspective on that?

Claire Vo: Well, no one’s ever gonna force you to take a job. No one can put a gun to your head and force you to take a job, so you’re never stuck. So I think my advice is know your priority. I mean, we’ve said this multiple times. Know your priorities as a CEO, know your priorities as a company, know your priorities as an employee. And if you’re going into an early stage startup that has … Particularly one that may have taken capital, being acqui-hired is an option and you need to be straight with your leadership team. “Hey I’m in it. I love early stage, but if we get on the path of an acquihire, I just might not be part of it.”

Claire Vo: I think that’s really fair. I don’t think you’re ever going to be contractually stuck in an employment situation you don’t want to be in. So, I think the risk there is fairly low, to just kind of see what your options are and play it out as you want.

Selina Tobaccowala: And I think there’s also … There’s not much risk either to … Especially if you’re never been in a situation that is scaled, is to see if you like it. There’s often times you go into that situation and you know, when I got acquired, my father said, “Do it for a year and then make a decision if you like being at a scaled company or a startup company. You’ve never seen the other side.” And in the end, I learned a ton from being in that type of environment.

Selina Tobaccowala: Eventually, obviously, I’ve gotten to start something from scratch again and love that more, but I think you don’t know what you’re gonna learn, so it’s hard to take that position really strong upfront. I would just say, try to think about the flexibility around it.

Sarah Allen: I think that’s a really good point. I think as a manager and a CEO, I always appreciated it when my employees were upfront. But I love this perspective of like, go for the ride. I feel like, in my career I’ve had the opportunity to like … Silicon Valley tech tourism. If you haven’t been through an acquisition, you’ve missed out on something really kind of interesting, even if it’s horrible, the stories are incredible that you can’t tell publicly, but like over drinks.

Sarah Allen: It makes you stronger person to understand both sides and to understand how the industry works. And you’re always, even as an individual contributor, you’re exposed to this business side, that normally you don’t get to see as an individual contributor. So yeah, I think that … I would encourage everybody to go along for the ride, and to just take a deep breath and experience it. Give it time. Not infinite time. Like, don’t check out and say this is sucky, but just be in it, but don’t get caught up in it, because it’ll change every three months and you know, I like the idea of riding it out for a year and see what happens. You can always quit.

Claire Vo: And rarely do people get paid less. We’ve never really seen that happen, where people are like, “Oh man, we did this acquihire and I’m making way less.” That’s not usually what happens.

Sarah Allen: Yeah, I’ve never seen that happen, either, so there’s an up side no matter what.

Claire Vo: Yeah.

Shanea King-Roberson: So, in our final minute, what is the one last piece of advice you’d like to give all of your entrepreneurs on the line?

Claire Vo: Think that [crosstalk 00:46:23].

Selina Tobaccowala: Oh, sorry, I was just gonna say-

Claire Vo: No, you go first.

Selina Tobaccowala: Don’t build your business ever for acquisition. Just build a … Try to focus on building a big business that has good financial structure and pillars and then acquisition may be a possibility in front of you, but don’t walk in thinking about that as kind of the goal.

Claire Vo: Okay, I regret letting you go first because you stole mine, which is don’t build your company, looking to be acquired. Don’t go seeking an acquisition. Build something awesome and an exit will come, but that’s not really [inaudible 00:47:02] engineer, you can only engineer a great company, so that’s what I would focus on.

Sarah Allen: Yeah, I think I agree with those things. I ran a consulting company knowing that I wouldn’t do it forever and it was sort of a happy exit of like, “Oh, wow, I can get acquired. Great.” But I think build relationships with people at other companies, so your partners, the people who buy your software … Knowing other CEOs, whether they’re a company you’re doing business with or just a peer company, will teach you so many things you didn’t even need to know; you didn’t know you needed to know. And then having those relationships, if suddenly you’re put in a situation where somebody makes you an offer and you didn’t expect it and you didn’t plan for it, having those relationships built already so you can talk to friends who’ve been in the situation before, is invaluable.

Shanea King-Roberson: Awesome. Well, I think we’re all done.

Selina Tobaccowala: Thank you so much.

Shanea King-Roberson: Thank you so much. It’s such a pleasure. I’m sure we’ve all learned so much from all of you ladies and invaluable experiences.

Claire Vo: Thanks ladies. Bye.

Sarah Allen: Bye. Thank you.

Shanea King-Roberson: Bye.

Speakers:
Minji Wong / Founder / At Her Best
Angie Chang / CEO & Founder / Girl Geek X

[Transcript of “It’s Not Them, It’s You: Self-Awareness & Ego”: Minji Wong on Unleashing Your Power to Lead]

Angie Chang: Hi. Welcome back to Girl Geek X Elevate. I have with us Minji Wong. She is the founder of At Her Best, a workplace movement to empower high-performing employees to transition into parenthood and return, thriving, to the workplace. She has 13 years of Fortune 500 experience, including a Fortune #1, among the leading tech companies like Facebook and Ebay, empowering leaders to realize their potential.

She’s worked with people at different pivot points in life, ranging from senior executives to stay at home parents and specializes in millennial leaders and working parents. She’s a board member at Girls On The Run, a national nonprofit organization committed to empowering girls to develop leadership skills through running their first 5K. Today, we’re really privileged and happy to have her join us. Minji?

Minji Wong: Thank you so much for the introduction, Angie, and hello everyone from across the world and here in the States. My name is Minji Wong, and I’m the founder of At Her Best. I’m super excited to be here and develop community and connection with you over the next few moments. But more importantly, what I’d like to focus on are the crucial transitions and pivot points that we all experience in our careers.

And so those transitions could include an increase in roles and responsibilities as our scopes. It could be the transition from an individual contributor to a people manager or even a people manager to an executive. There are those pivots, too. It could be that career change, it could be a re-org, it could be a layoff, it could also include a life change, becoming a mother. So there’s a lot of different things that happen in our entire careers and it’s what we do in these small spaces that make the biggest impact.

So where I’m going to focus today is around drawing self-awareness and reflection into being and becoming your best self One thing that I really wanted to share and just really hit home is when we think about our career path and our career direction, it is never something that’s just super straightforward and super easy. In fact, the reality is we have those transitions and pivots. We have those setbacks. We have the two steps forward, one step back. We might even have obstacles along the way, and it’s important to be equipped with the specific skills and competencies to be able to get through those and drive through those.

What I wanted to do today was introduce a very, very simple and pretty straightforward framework in order for you to achieve and encounter any obstacle in your way with a strategic mindset. So it starts with the importance of thinking about more, better, and different, but most importantly, the core of all of that is having a growth mindset. Many of you might be familiar with Carol Dweck’s work. She’s a researcher at Stanford and she focuses on the importance of growth mindset, which is really continuous learning.

It’s the ability to overcome setbacks. It’s for you to learn from your mistakes, build resilience and grit, versus the other side, which is a fixed mindset which is more of the victim approach in terms of, ah this happened to me. This is just where I am. This is who I am. I can’t change and I won’t change. And I underscore this importance because in order for you to drive and be able to move forward, you have to change your attitude. Your attitudes and beliefs change your behaviors, which changes your actions, and eventually the outcomes in your entire career.

The first area that I wanted to focus on was around thinking about more. So ask yourself right now, what are your specific values in life and, specifically, in your career, and are you living those values as we speak? Don’t worry. Many people don’t necessarily know or have those top five values in mind, but it’s super important for you to really, really be true to yourself and understand what those priorities might be right now.

The second area to focus on is around your strengths, and you might be familiar with Marcus Buckingham’s work around StrengthsFinder and several of the books that he’s published, but the importance of strengths is what helps us excel in our careers. You know, one of his quotes was that focusing on strengths is the surest way for job satisfaction, team performance, and org excellence. What are you doing right now in your day job and in your life to actually focus on those strengths?

Bringing everything together is the importance of having a vision statement. I know initially when I heard a vision statement, I thought okay, it’s something about work, right? But it’s also about us, and it’s being able to collect not only our priorities through our values and our strengths, but being able to have an end goal in mind for us to be able to achieve because we can’t start and commence any journey without really knowing where we want to go.

The second area that I wanted to focus on was around thinking better. I’d like to introduce a very simple framework in terms of thinking about goals and thinking about where you want to be in terms of beginning with the end in mind. And it’s the GROW Model.

In my 13 plus years of experience, having worked at various tech companies, e-commerce companies, retail, and various industries and sectors, I’ve managed several leadership programs and experiences with high performing individuals. And in my conversations with them…now, what do you want to do? What do you want to be? Oftentimes the response I’d get is, “I just want to develop these specific skills” or “I want to be able to explore, kind of learn and develop myself in my career”. I never, not never, but I rarely actually had a response that that would let me know, hey, this is who I want to be and this is where I want to go.

It’s super important to realize that and recognize that because if you don’t have that end goal or that end destination, anything and everything you do may not necessarily contribute to that end goal. Now I realize nothing is ever static. In fact, things are dynamic. Things can change tomorrow or even yesterday. But again, highlighting the importance of having an end in mind, knowing that that can change is very important. That’s the goal.

The second piece of the GROW Model is, what’s your reality? What are your current circumstances right now? Where are you? I think a big piece of knowing where really you may be is around getting feedback from your peers and colleagues. We’re going to dive deeper into the feedback piece, but really asking people whom you trust, not necessarily your friends, to really give you a real assessment around where you might be in terms of your skills and in terms of your capabilities to get you to where you need to go.

The third piece is around options. So it’s super important to be able to throw as many options as blue sky, as out of this world, as realistic, but also as dreamy as possible in terms of really thinking and having as many to be able to choose from. The fourth piece is your way forward. So it’s really putting it all together. It’s that action plan.

It’s okay, now that I know where I am, where I want to go, and my reality, what are the things I have to do and put in place as I experience those obstacles and resilience and as I apply that growth mindset to where I need to be? So for example, if I’m a domain expert and I have incredible technical expertise and knowledge, and I’ve shared an interest into becoming a people manager, what can I do now and what are the specific skills that I need to learn and know that go beyond domain expertise that focus around people and leadership, and how can I discover and explore the specific skills to be able to reach those specific goals?

Another thing that I wanted to mention around that is for you to think about a very simple, SMART acronym, which many of you are familiar with. When you think about those goals, how specific is it? How can I measureit? How can I really attain it within this specific amount of time? Is this even relevant to where I want to go? And for many of you who work at companies that have performance management cycles, they can either occur on one year, six month, or even quarterly, OKRs. So when you think about that, those cycles, keep that in mind in terms of what goals you can actually set and what you can actually attain within these specific cycles.

When we think about this learning journey oftentimes, and in my background, having spent 13 plus years in leadership development and learning and organizational development, I oftentimes hear people say, “Oh, I need to develop the skill. Let me go to this training and then I’ll be cured and I’ll be healed.”

The reality is a lot of our learning, 70 percent of our learning occurs on the job and that’s through those stretch assignments, that’s through the cross functional work, that’s through being thrown a new project that you have very little experience having really managed through and learning literally in the trenches.

Twenty percent of learning actually occurs through conferences like this where we can hear from amazing and incredible women in the field and where we can learn and develop community and connection from each other. It’s also through coaching and mentoring. So my question to you is, do you have a coach and do you have a mentor? And if you don’t, what are you doing to get to where you need to be. Even if there is no mentoring initiative in place or if there isn’t any formalized coaching program at your company, what can you do to get …

There is this incredible poem — specifically a quote that I love from Maya Angelou who talks about, basically you can say you anything, you can do anything, but what people remember is how you make them feel.

How do you make other people feel, and what experience do you leave them with? Some of those behaviors include your energy levels, your interests, your emotional intelligence, the ability to become reflective and self-aware of your own behaviors and how you show up.

I was working with a leader who has an incredible brand presence via social media. She’s strong, she’s to the point, she’s powerful, and she’s just on top of it. And when I actually met her in person, my initial experience of her was very different. She appeared to be more shy, a little more meager, didn’t necessarily focus on eye contact. When I gave her a handshake, it was more of a limp handshake. These signals and these behaviors weren’t consistent to the persona that I had seen behind the screen in terms of social media.

So my question to you is, while we have the intent to be a certain way,what kind of impact do we actually leave with other people?

The second P is actually a product — so it’s what brought you here. It’s your technical expertise, it’s your acumen, it’s what makes you awesome and badass. And at the same time, those behaviors include those leadership skills and innovative thinking.

For those of you who are people managers or who are interested in becoming people managers, typically early in your career, the focus and the emphasis is around your expertise, your ability to execute and focus on the product itself.

As you become a people manager, and a manager of managers, and eventually leading the organization, there is a seismic shift in how you see yourself, not just from your product knowledge but to the persona, specifically the experience you create for other people and how you make other people feel in terms of wanting to work for you and wanting to work and really believe in this vision statement.

New managers who have recently been promoted from an individual contributor can still fall into that specific trap of having that domain expertise, and wanting to do it all, and wanting to help their team, and focus so much on the work, and we all know that sometimes those are micromanaging behaviors that may not necessarily give the specific coaching and support that a team member might need.

The third P is around permission, and it’s really owning your seat. It’s not just bringing your seat to the table but having a point of view. So it’s really taking action and not necessarily asking for permission. It also involves specific risk taking as well. So I love Yoda’s quote, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

The fourth is around packaging, so it’s your visual manifestation or it’s just literally what someone who is sitting here could actually watch and see of you. So it’s not just your physical appearance, it’s your behavior, it’s your environment. So how does your desk area look like? Is it completely messy? And if so, that’s fine because Albert Einstein wrote, “A messy desk is a sign of genius,” and at the same time it could also show you might not necessarily be on top of things.

Are you always late to meetings? Are you always five, 10 minutes late to meetings? What kind of impression do you necessarily share and show to other people? Especially for those of you who are interested in becoming a senior leader, it’s super important to dress the part as well. So again, each company and each environment has their own norms. Look at what other people are doing, especially people whom you admire and people whom you want to become.

When we think about communication, 93 percent of it is nonverbal. So it’s not even the words that I say because most people think that that’s communication. It’s my body language. So 55 percent of it is, how am I standing? Am I just totally just tired, low energy? Do I have my arms crossed, looking and appearing to be more closed off? Or am I open? Then 38 percent is the actual vocal tones. Am I super excited to be here or am I super excited to be here? And then the actual seven percent is the actual words itself. So my question to you is, again, how are you showing up in ways that you may not necessarily intend with impact that you actually have?

The fifth P is around promotion and so the promotion is really being able to seek out specific people and really share what you’re doing and highlight what you’re doing. It’s becoming strategic about what you’re doing and your specific message.

I know that these five P’s are things that we have various muscles in. So my call to action for you is to… [no audio 16:21–16:42] Who you are, what are the consequences of people not necessarily knowing and being able to see or hear if you’re intense? If people can’t see it or hear it, it may not… or to the consequences that you are actually not looking forward to.

In summary, everything begins with a growth mindset. Really learning from those mistakes, learning from and becoming more resilient, always finding new ways and new approaches to learn.

Being open is the groundwork and the foundation for you to become a strategic person in terms of learning. What can you do more of? So again, focus on those values. If you already are halfway there, of five values, think about those five values that matter to you right now. Again, they’re dynamic. They can change, but it’s important for you to have that North Star.

And again, what is your strength? What are the things that you do in your day-to-day job that brings you joy and brings you flow? It might appear to be like the hardest thing ever, but for you, you just nail it. Again, we want you to focus more on your values and strengths. Create a vision statement out of it so that you have that end goal on where you want to be.

The second area is to think better. So again, through very simple goal setting, I introduced the GROW Model. There’s other goal setting models out there in terms of having a strategic mindset be able to think differently using those tools.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Minji. We have a lot of questions for you, actually.

Minji Wong: Okay. I’ll try my best.

Angie Chang: So we have a question here. What we’d love to hear more and learn about the StrengthsFinder, and is it free to test out for individuals?

Minji Wong: Yeah, there’s actually a lot out there in terms of for StrengthsFinders. There’s actually, if you buy the book, you can actually get the assessment from the book, but even if you do a quick Google search to even just type in “strengthsfinder assessment,” you can actually find something that’s pretty straightforward and helps you focus on strengths.

During my time at Facebook, there was an initial emphasis around StrengthsFinder and I think it moved out or moved forward towards standout. So that could be another area and aspect that we focus on as well. And I think even if it’s just having a simple conversation with yourself, with your peers, colleagues, or even with your team, it could be a really great opportunity for you to just target, you know, in my day-to-day, what brings me flow? What do I find joy in?

Strength is what you do well in. There’s an activity, again, it’s pretty simple and it’s something that you might be able to deploy right now, actually. It’s called love it, loathe it. And what I’ve done over one week is you keep this either at your bedside table, which is what I’ve done, or even at your desk, or if you have some collaboration doc, just add it, kind of break it down to a T chart. So you focus on the activities and things that you really enjoyed and loved and actually found flow in, and things that just like you really detested and just things that you’d rather not do. Write those behaviors down. You’d be surprised at how many behaviors probably fall in the loathe and how there are certain things that might become reoccurring themes and they loved it.

So if you’re an extrovert and you love being in front of people, and you love and find so much energy just around being able to influence other people, standing up in front of other people and just really being with people, well that might show a lot about you in terms of perhaps the field or a specific area of work that you do. On the other hand, if you don’t necessarily like being that analytical or that technical, or if you don’t like details, again, there are certain parts of your day that you might be able to hack in ways that that might benefit you.

Angie Chang: We have another question that asks for you to talk a little bit more about the strategies on how to take maternity leave and still advocate for a promotion.

Minji Wong: Wow. Where do we begin? I think this will take another half day. Well, do you have another half day? Do you have like another half year?

Angie Chang: Elisa is coming back from leave, right? As a promotion cycle, discussions are starting, so she wants to make sure she’s included.

Minji Wong: Yeah, so thank you for addressing that question and this is a big emphasis on what I’m doing in my current role with At Her Best. I think it actually starts with phase zero, so taking a step back. Phase zero is before you leave. Once you become pregnant, before you even announce things, what is your game plan? What can you do to set yourself up such that when you have that conversation with your manager and your team, it’s not going to be end all be all.

Specifically, when thinking about the work that you’re doing during phase zero, before you even have any conversation with people, what can you do? Take an overall inventory of the stuff that you’re doing. What can you do that you can probably wrap up over the course of the next few months? If this is something that is ongoing, which oftentimes is the case for many projects, who are the people that you work with right now that might be able to take on more responsibility or be able to help you during that time and during that leave?

It’s also inquiry in terms of, what is the culture and what are the current HR policies around maternity leave? There are big companies, so my husband works or he recently left Google, and he actually … At Google and that many big companies, there’s generous maternity and paternity leaves, but the reality is that may not necessarily be the case for smaller companies or even startups as well.

So the point that I’m trying to make is get a good idea of what the actual leave of absence might look like. What are the benefits and policies that are there? There are some companies that are really starting to listen to the importance of advocacy and the importance of returning back so that you can hit the ground running. They might actually offer you some transitional forms of working part time, or even being able to be paired with a coach, or being able to get additional supports and resources.

So that said, do all the housework phase zero. I think phase one is then when you do share the news, the exciting news, with your team, really expressing your commitment on what you’re doing and how that isn’t going to change in terms of how you actually get work done. I think the reality is when you do return, it’s super important for you to line up and think about all the important things that come with having, now, a party of three.

Before, it used to be you and your partner or even just as a single parent, you, but now there is another person. There’s the plus one. And the reality is that person’s going to need childcare. So unless you have a full time nanny or daycare or preschool, there’s going to be some implications around pickup and drop off.

Going back to the five P’s, it’s important for you to actually share your intent with other people because it’s a change curve and it takes time. So when you have a conversation with someone, it’s not going to happen overnight, which takes months, maybe even years, hopefully not. So knowing that, what can you do to get ahead of it?

Angie Chang: Great. I think we have time for maybe one more question.

Minji Wong: Okay.

Angie Chang: Can you offer some strategies for setting meaningful stretch goals? From Sarah Sherman. Sorry about that, folks. Technical difficulties. We have one more minute until the next speaker is due. So I will just … Yes, we have the recordings. We will have them for you after this day. They’ll be available at elevate.girlgeek.io, so you can go check them out. We will ask Minji these questions in a blog post and make sure they’re answered for you. Feel free to tweet questions to #ggxelevate and we will have Minji answer them as well. Thank you.

Transcript:

Speaker:
Cindy Alvarez / Director, UX / Microsoft

Transcript

Cindy Alvarez: I’m Cindy Alvarez, and right now I’m on a flight heading back from Johannesburg, so you get a pre-recorded talk from me. I’m going to talk today about why the customer is not always right. First of all, I want to start off by saying where did this thing even come from? Where did we start with the phrase, “The customer’s always right?” What does that mean? Why is that important to us?

It primarily comes down to the fact that we want our customers to come back and buy more things from us. We want them to like us, and that makes me realize that customers are not just external people who buy our products, they’re also people that we work with every day. There’s a lot of things you can do to make those relationships better, whether they’re talking to customers who are external to you, or the people who are next to you every day. Let’s dive right in.

First of all, let’s think about what’s our desired outcome. I think when we say things like this, we tend to think of things like units sold, or increasing usage, but fundamentally, we want to understand the underlying problems that customers have — whether that’s the one buying our product, or our coworkers because understanding is the only way we can hope to solve their problems.

We really, let’s be honest, want our customers to like us, we want our coworkers to like us, and we want to find the best possible solution for the problems that we’re facing.

That best possible solution isn’t always obvious. What do we do with that?

Most of us have been through the scenario where a customer came to us, they asked for something, we built it, we delivered it, and then it didn’t actually solve their problem. We’ve wasted time on something, and we have to support something that didn’t really meet their needs.

When people ask for solutions, they’re asking for their assumption of what the solution to their problem is. A lot of times, they haven’t really thought about the problem they’re really trying to solve, and honestly that’s not their job.

It’s our job as product people to think about how we’re going to come up with solutions.

For example, let’s say we had a customer who came to us and said, “I need to rent a car.” Now, on the face of it the best possible customer service would be to rush right out, and get that person into a car rental agency, and put them in a car as quickly as possible.

If we’re bound by things like SLA metrics and we have to respond to customers within a certain number of hours, or we have to respond to every single user voice, or every single email query, then we tend to game-ify ourselves into these non-optimal solutions.

Let’s think about why that person asked for a car. It could be that they’re about to go shopping, they don’t own a car, they’re going to buy a lot of groceries, and they don’t want to take them home on the bus. It could be that they’re having a vacation, and they want to drive along PCH and take in the scenery. It could be that they have a lot of relatives in town, and they won’t all fit into their tiny Prius.

For each of those scenarios, there are different solutions that may make more sense.

In one case, it may make more sense for someone to grab a Lyft, in some cases maybe you need to actually rent a van, and in some cases maybe you can borrow a car from a friend. If you’re actually out on a vacation and you want to take that drive along the coast, then sure, you do need to rent a car… but in that situation, you probably want to rent a fun to drive car. You don’t want to rent a beater or an SUV.

If we just rush someone straight to the car rental agency, we’d end up with that subpar solution.

As customer-oriented product people, we have to take a step back and ask “why?”

This is something that we also need to do internally, and I find this happens even less often internally because we assume that we understand the why’s.

As soon as we’re working in an office with someone, in a team with someone, we assume a shared context that doesn’t usually exist. There are people that I have literally sat across from for weeks on end, and yet we’ll still have underlying assumptions that are different from each other.

The “why” is always more interesting, it’s more useful, it’s more actionable, and it’s more trust building than the “what.”

That last one’s a little bit interesting because people think that asking “why?” sounds almost a little accusatory. If you have a small child, you know it can actually get pretty annoying when people keep asking why.

We need to add a little padding around it, but fundamentally when people ask why, what they’re actually saying is, “I want to know more about this. I am interested in you, I care about what you have to say.” As opposed to what, which has this whiff of, “how quickly can I get you out of my hair?” That’s not how we want to build these relationships.

Let’s think about it: someone comes to you, they have a request. It could be the customer who says, “I need to rent a car,” or, “You need to build this feature,” “You need to support this use case.” It could be your boss who has given you a task, “You need to do this thing. You need to manually sort through this data. You need to write this spec.”

The first question we really have is: “What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?” That can be pretty tricky to ask because if your boss says, “Do this,” and you ask, “Well, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve?” your boss might just say, you know, “Get on it. Let’s do it.”

Again, we need some padding, and so we want to say, “Okay, just to make sure I understand it seems like the outcome you’re looking for is X, is that correct?”

If your boss says, “Manually sort this data,” what they probably want is clean data. If someone says, “Get me a drill, “ they probably want quarter inch holes, but you need to validate that.

The best way to do it is give that, “Just to be sure I’m clear, this is the outcome you’re looking for, is that correct? Am I missing anything?”

This gives people the opportunity to step in and say, “Actually, this is the thing I needed,” or, “Actually, here’s some more information that I assumed that you knew, but you probably didn’t.” Or, “I’m sure I’ve told you this a billion times.”

Having been someone who’s managed teams, I have always had things that I’m pretty sure I said a billion times, and yet either I didn’t, or people didn’t hear me. It doesn’t really matter because the outcome was the same, and they weren’t privy to that information, and that meant they weren’t going to do as good a job as if they had the information they needed.

We want to ask why. Why do you need that done? What’s the outcome you’re hoping for?

A lot of us, when we’re interacting with customers, what we hear is basically a demand for features, and it’s hard to ask why because what they really want to get to is when. When are you going to build this thing?

It’s useful to take that step back. I like to announce it as such, and say, “You know what? Let’s talk about delivery deadlines sometime in the future, in a few minutes, right? But just a second. I want to be sure I understand something. It sounds like you’re asking for this feature. Just to be sure I understand, if we had already built it, what would it allow you to do? Essentially, how would it make your life better if you had this thing?”

The thing that I found surprising is that when you ask people some polite version of “how would it make your life better?” a lot of times you get a non-answer.

You’ll get an answer like, “Well, it would just be nice to have.”

We don’t have time for building things that are nice to have.

How would it make your life better? What would it allow you to do? When someone really needs something, they’ll have a story for you.

“Uh, you know, it would take me half the time to sort my data. Oh, I wouldn’t have to waste head count on this position. We could start coding tomorrow.” When people have a story, that’s something worth doing.

When a customer comes to you and you say, “What would it allow you to,” sometimes you get the non-answer of, “But your competitor has it.” That’s actually just pushing the can down the road a bit, and what you say to that is to say, “Okay, I understand. You’re right, our competitor does have that feature. I’m curious if you were using that feature with Google, Facebook, et cetera, what would it allow you to do?”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had customers who say, “Well, it would just be nice to have.”

If the reason that you’re going to lose a feature sale is because of a checkbox feature that someone’s not even going to use if they go to your competitor, that’s not something we should be trying to win on.

You may lose a sale in the short-term, but you’re going to have someone who isn’t really having their needs met, and they’re ripe to be plucked back in a year or two.

We ask, “How would it make your life better?” Maybe we hear that it really wouldn’t, and then we proceed.

Sometimes you’ll hear a variation like, “It might be useful in the future,” and, again, kicking the can down the road a little bit, and you got to ask one more question which is, “Okay, I’m curious how do you see your organization changing in the future?”

“What?”

“Well, you said it might be useful in the future. I’m curious how are things going to change such that this might be useful in the future?”

You want to be very polite and smiley, you’re very nice about this, but the point is if you don’t know how the future’s going to change, and I don’t mean the next five years because no one knows that. I mean the next six months.

If someone can’t give you an answer, then it’s not a real need.

It’s a wish, or maybe it’s leverage to try and get a deal. Or maybe it’s just someone who’s trying to look smart in a meeting, and I think we all know the people who are in meetings trying to look smart, being loud, man-splaining you, et cetera. “How will it make your life better? What do you anticipate changing in the future?”

The other thing is that when we jump in trying to understand problems, or provide solutions, a lot of times it’s useful to know what people are already doing, and how they feel about it. That sounds so incredibly simple as to be obvious and dumb, and yet I have been surprised by the number of times I’m in meetings where we really don’t know. Sometimes it’s, “Hey, could you take a step back? I’m just curious, could you walk me through what you’re doing today? I mean, I know high level, but I’d love to see the details.”

When someone walks through a process for something, you might see exactly where their pain point is. Maybe they asked for this feature that’s a widget, but you can see that actually they’re having a hard time with this other area, and the widget might be one solution, but as a product person you can see it’s actually a poor solution. Or it’s something that will be applicable to this customer and no others.

In a meeting, a lot of times, where there’s a debate between people who think that one side’s doing it right, and the other side’s doing it wrong, a lot of times that comes down to an assumption about what each side is actually trying to do.

“Could you walk me through what you’re trying to do,” is a good way to defuse that, and let people say, “Look, this is just what I want,” because that’s, at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do.

We’re trying to help people get what they want done.

If we do that, we will seem amazingly smart, and helpful, and kind, and everything else. It’s a really good hack.

“Could you walk me through what we’re doing today?”

This is also really great advice when you get put into a new role. Let’s say you got promoted to manager. Congratulations! You can’t just step in, of course, and say, “This is how we do things now.” You can try, but you’re going to get a mutiny.

If you join a new company, a new role, people have established practices. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, and if you don’t know the history of why people are doing one of them, you don’t have a lot of position to say, “Let’s do things differently.”

If you can go into a new organization, or a new customer, and say, “You know, walk me through what you’re doing today. Okay, that’s interesting. Okay, you know, how did that happen in the past? Do you have a sense for how that decision was made ? How’s that going? You know, if you could change anything about it what would it be?” This kind of conversational approach gets people to trust you, and it gets you a lot more insights than you would ordinarily have.

Now, I’ll note one thing here, is that taking that step back and asking supposedly “dumb” questions can be particularly tough if you’re a woman, and if you’re in a meeting where you think people are just a little too quick to think that you are asking dumb questions. This is where it’s useful to borrow a new person. This might genuinely be someone who’s new on your team, or you could literally just grab one of your coworkers and ask them to come into a meeting, this doesn’t work internally but it works well with customers, “Come into this meeting pretend to be the new guy, new gal.”

The new person has a lot more freedom to say, “Hey, I bet everyone in the room already knows this,” — hint: they don’t — “But could you walk me through what you’re doing today?”

You will get a ton of insight out of that, and the customer won’t actually mind getting to repeat history, and probably halfway through their diatribe they’ll be like, “You know what? We didn’t even tell you that our entire back end system changed in the last year, did we? (haha).” Yeah, that’s probably something that you should’ve known.

“What are you doing today? How is that going?”

Once they’ve finished talking about that, then you’re going to reiterate. This is active listening. This is the thing that makes you feel a little bit like a kindergarten teacher, but trust me, it works. I wouldn’t tell you this if it didn’t.

“It sounds like you need to do X, and Y, and Z. It sounds to me, like you’d be happier if magically these things were fixed. Is that accurate? Am I missing something?”

Give them that option to correct you, or to add things.

Now, there’s a magic thing that happens once you’ve reiterated back, which is that you have absorbed like 80% to 90% of people’s anger at this point, even if you don’t actually solve their problem. They’re amazingly happier that you took the time to understand it in the first place. There are studies to back this up. Stanford has been doing some research with doctors and malpractice, and they found with a control and experiment group, that surgeons who made a mistake, and apologized were much more likely to not have suits brought against them, or if there were, they settled for much less money. Essentially, if someone sewed a sponge in you by mistake… you really want to hear that person say sorry. If they don’t, you’re going to take them to court for all they’re worth, so we can do that.

That leads to my next point, which is — apologies are free.

Any woman who’s ever worked for me knows that I always tell them, don’t apologize. For your ideas, don’t apologize. Don’t say I’m sorry about this idea, or I’m sorry that I want to do something a new way.

But when it comes to a customer who is feeling wronged, who is feeling like, I’m already upset, go ahead and apologize because that de-fangs even the angriest customer.

If someone comes in and they’re furious, “I can’t believe that you’ve lost my data. I’m going to quit your account right now, this is ridiculous,” and you say, “I’m really sorry. We did that, we lost your data. That’s really awful, and I don’t want that to ever happen again. Let’s see what we can do about it.” Those are magic words.

It’s very hard for someone to hear something that is humble and accepting of responsibility, and keep yelling at you. They trail off, “Well, you better see what you can do.”

Give them out, apologies are free.

It doesn’t matter if it’s not your fault, if someone lost their data through something that was user error, it doesn’t matter. You’re not going to talk them into that. Telling people that’s the way the feature was designed has never made anyone happy ever, so apologize. You can do that.

Apologies are free. They’re also rare, especially good ones.

Follow-ups are also rare.

Even if you didn’t provide the answer someone wants, just the fact that you reach back out to a customer, or a coworker a couple weeks later to give them an update, “Hey, I looked into that solution. It turns out we’re not going to be able to address it. I’m really sorry, I just wanted to let you know,” people are amazingly happy about that because they never hear it.

The traditional vendor/buyer relationship is, “We’ll put it on the roadmap,” and then it’s on the roadmap, and it’s on the roadmap, and they never actually get the feature.

Internally, when people have suggestions, “Oh, we’ll consider it. Oh, put it in the suggestion box,” and there’s never any closure.

That’s the final thing I have to talk about: people like closure.

As humans, closure makes us feel satisfied. We like to know that something is going to happen even if it’s not the thing that we expect.

Customers and teammates don’t have to agree with your decisions, but they need to know why you made them. They don’t even need to understand why. It’s just that they need to know that you didn’t have malicious, or stupid reasons for making your choice.

“Based on these reasons, I am making the decision to do X.”

Someone may disagree, but they’ll grumble, “Well, I guess I understand why you’re doing it. I still don’t agree with you, though.”

That’s okay, customers in that scenario are going to be a lot happier.

In this case, someone’s come to us, they’ve demanded a feature, we basically talked them out of it, we’ve explained why, and yet they’re still not furious at the end. In fact, a lot of these customers end up being incredibly loyal because even though they’re not getting what they want, they know that you understand what they need. This works both internally and externally, and it’s been tremendously useful in my career.

The bar is really low for honest communication, and for digging in to find out what the underlying problem is.

We can do better, and it’s an amazing hack that most of the people around us don’t know about, so we should take advantage.

The customer is not always right, to be honest, no one is always right, but you can, and should control your own narrative. That means taking in what you’re hearing, and reflecting on it, and asking questions, and redirecting it to something that is more positive, and something that you can control.

I’m sorry am not able to take questions live, but I really do answer them.

I’m @cindyalvarez on Twitter or cindy@cindyalvarez.com. If you have questions, feel free to shoot them over to me. And that’s my last piece of advice: when people say it’s okay to ask questions, they mean it — take advantage. Enjoy the rest of your conference everyone!

Speakers:
Cathy Polinsky / CTO / Stitch Fix
Angie Chang / CEO & Founder / Girl Geek X
Sukrutha Bhadouria / CTO & Co-Founder Girl Geek X
Gretchen DeKnikker / COO Girl Geek X

Transcript:

Angie Chang: Hi! Welcome to Girl Geek X Elevate, our first virtual event for the Girl Geek Dinner community. My name is Angie Chang, CEO and founder of Girl Geek X, and this is Sukrutha Bhadouria. We wanted to say “thank you” for joining us this Wednesday morning for our Girl Geek X Elevate. We have been hosting Girl Geek dinners here in the Bay Area for over 10 years — we’ve hosted over 170 dinners at 100 companies, over 100 companies — and we are excited to be able to expand and have world domination. When we thought about 10 years of Girl Geek Dinners, we wanted to rebrand and say…

X is for the community, our community of 15,000 women. It is not just dinners — it’s events and podcasts and webinars and different formats that can help us reach more women globally. Our community of women has grown over the last 10 years, and we’ve heard lots of feedback from women that want to tune in to last night’s dinner by podcast, on their drive to work, or whether they want to tune in from where they are, which is not necessarily where we are in San Francisco. We’ve also taken this chance — and this opportunity to partner with mission-aligned companies, and today we’re grateful to have the support of fantastic mission-aligned sponsored like Mozilla, The U.S. Digital Service, PayPal, SalesForce, Intel AI, Clever, Quantcast, and interviewing.io.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Is that me now, Ms. Angie?

Angie Chang: Yes.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, hi everybody. I’m Gretchen DeKnikker, COO here. To build on what Angie was saying about how we are looking to change things going forward, and expand. We’re very excited, that we’ve worked very, very hard to have our speakers from a wide range of backgrounds today. 70% are women of color, and 40% are black and Latina. And we had a very special focus on that. We wanted to make sure that we’re bringing underrepresented voices to the table. The whole thing was to create opportunity for women to gain visibility and recognition and to share with the community. I think at this particular time in history, it’s really important as we get a seat at the table as women that we pull up another chair and that we be very mindful of the limitations that are greater than just being a woman, and the challenges. So just being more supportive there.

We do want to have more voices at our table. We’d like to invite in ideas on bringing more women of color into the fold, your guys’s ideas on how do we partner and bring more male allies in. These are all things we’re gonna be focusing on now that we’re on the other side of this event. Part of wanting to do this particular event was, like Angie said, to reach more people. But also to … Another thing that we’ve heard is mid- to senior-level career women aren’t necessarily represented strongly at the events, which is understandable. People have other things to do in the evenings.

We wanted to create this opportunity because as you grow in your career, the theme today is growing from a manager to a leader. So what happens when you become a manager of managers. In every stage of your career, the job is different. We have some great sessions today to help everybody on that journey.

We’ve got one on self-awareness and ego with Minji Wong. We have one on the art of the interview, especially around the candidates interviewing you with Aline Lerner from interviewing.io. We’ll talk about delegation and empowerment and advocacy with Arquay coming up just after Cathy. And planning and goals and finding those metrics that matter. How do you lead by metrics when you’re not doing the work yourself, and you’re not in there every single day. And I think we’ll get into that a little bit at the engineering panel at the end of the day. So, Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, hi. I’m actually so excited because I’m seeing people dial in from everywhere all over the world, how cool. I saw people dialed in from San Francisco, Florida, and I also saw someone comment on our shared earbuds. For me, why we’ve been wanting to do this, especially have technical women give talks, not just about leadership, but about … because there’s more important things to talk about. Then we have talks about security, team learning, and just keeping yourself up to date in terms of your technical skills.

Why is this important is because you and I got into women on stage talking about what it’s like to be in technology beyond just what it’s like to be a women in tech.

So we have speakers from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Salesforce who are going to be providing their insights, their experiences. And hopefully you all have, not just lessons learned, but you also leave with inspiration today to keep at it, going forward with it. So with that, I’m super excited to introduce Cathy, whose our first speaker, so who’s going to be speaking next.

Cathy Polinsky: Good morning, everyone.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So really quickly I wanted to introduce Cathy. Cathy is the CTO of Stitch Fix, which is awesome. Cathy and I first met when Cathy was working at Salesforce as an SVP. She’s going to talk about her journey. What I really definitely want to call out is right now she leads the engineering team at Stitch Fix, and supports the company’s efforts to deliver services that meet the clients’ needs. Cathy has been working in great companies like Yahoo!, and Amazon, and of course Salesforce where we met. So Cathy, go ahead. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Cathy Polinsky: Fantastic, thanks. And thanks for this opportunity. I just really appreciate having an opportunity to network and talk with other women. I just got back from a board effect meeting two weeks ago where we were talking about needing more women representation on boards, and more women representation in the industry. As many of you all know, we’ve come really far, we’re seeing a lot more women in the industry. But as the numbers come back, they can be kind of depressing that even though the number of women in software, in technology organizations has grown, the percentages haven’t changed that dramatically over the last decade.

I hope we can work together to build a more inclusive community and support system. I wanted to share my story of how I got to be from a kid who grew up in Pittsburgh, work my way through to be a software developer, and now to a CTO at Stitch Fix.

It’s hard not to be able to see everyone here. I’m not sure how many of you know of Stitch Fix. I’m hoping that there’s a lot of clients out there, but I’m sure there’s many of you who have maybe heard of Stitch Fix, but don’t quite know what we do. So let me just start a little bit with that so you can get a sense of what I do on a day to day basis.

Stitch Fix is really disrupting how people can find clothes and items they love, and look and feel their best every single day. So as many of you probably have shifted your buying behaviors to online, I’m the same way. I hate going shopping. Before I even learned about Stitch Fix, almost all of my purchasing was done online. I never really go to the store, and yet when I’ve tried to buy clothes online, it’s a really broken experience. There’s so much that goes in your head when you walk into a store. What items you think that look good for you and match your style preferences. And there’s so many things that go in your head when you walk into a dressing room to figure out whether something looks good on you, your complexion, your body type. There’s a lot that goes into thinking about your wallet and your price preferences for whether you’ll take that item and spend that money to go to check out.

When you go online and try to buy something, you get a flat image, you may get a review, but you won’t really know if that person is like you, if they have the same style preferences that you may have, or the same body type. So Stitch Fix really disrupting that business. You fill out a detailed style profile. It’s kind of like a dating profile. Everything that goes in your mind for what you do when you’re walking into a store, and what things generally work for you, and what things don’t. And then you get paired up with a personal stylist who takes that information, paired with tons and tons of algorithms and data science with detailed recommendations that are tailored exactly for you to pick items that will work for you. You get a box delivered to your door, you don’t know what’s gonna show up in that box. You open it, try it on at home. Hopefully find things that you love. But easily return things back that you don’t. You only pay for what you keep.

This was just so disruptive when I really got behind the scenes to learn about this business model and what it was doing and how we’re impacting clients lives that I was really excited to join this group, and now I’m the CTO. My role expands across engineering, IT, product management, and security. So it’s a pretty expansive role, and every day I get to do something different, and I’m learning new things as well.

I just feel very fortunate to have this job and to work with such amazing women here at the company. But I wanted to talk to you about my path to get here. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve had a lot of support along the way. I wanted to talk to you about things that I’ve learned along that path, and support systems that I have really benefited from that we can also help others along the way, as well. So I mentioned I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was in elementary school in the early 80s, and no one had computers at home. Personal computers were just spinning up and the Apple 2s were starting to make an entrance into elementary schools. What’s amazing is that Apple really wanted to nurture that community. They were giving grants out to schools, and donating computers to elementary schools. I heard they even had a surplus of Apple 2s when they launched the Macintosh and say they were really thinking about how they could use that for good. And I was one of the beneficiaries of that. My school took advantage of those programs and created a computer lab, and my teachers loved it. Every week we had a computer lab time where we got to go to the lab and learn computer programming.

My first language was Logo, which was a little tiny triangle on a screen, kind of like the predated Scratch, and you can draw little pictures. You can draw boxes and houses and make simple commands. But it was a real programming language. You could do loops and you can do procedures. It really started that spark for me of what technology could be. I carried that forward for quite some time, even though, after elementary school there were no real programs for me. Our middle school and our high school really didn’t have many computer classes. In high school, I was told about a program at Carnegie Mellon, which was near where I lived in Pittsburgh for a summer program for computer science. And I applied and got accepted into the program, and it was amazing. The morning was taught by a computer science professor at CMU. It was about algorithms and data structures. And the afternoon was special projects where I go to see an arm and try to program an arm robot to make knots and do some object orient programming to make and solve mazes.

After that summer, I really thought that this was something I was interested in and I’d want to pursue. And I had a lot of encouragement in a way through the professor that I got to meet at CMU who talked to me about colleges and talked to me about studying computer science going forward. That spark that I had through both teachers and professors really carried me a long way to thinking about this field because frankly a lot of people of my generation, a lot of women in my generation are only here because of having that spark from someone else, generally a family member. There’s generally someone, a dad, an uncle, even a mom who was a scientist, or someone in that field, but I didn’t have that. But the teachers and the professors that I did engage with really were my spark to enter in the field.

Fast forward, I went to a small liberal arts school in Philadelphia, Swarthmore College and studied computer science. Had a lot of support there for programs around women in technology. And then when I graduated in ’99, it was the peak of the dot com boom, and off I went to Seattle to work at Amazon.com. It was quite an amazing ride, and just every month we were launching new stores. The growth was pretty crazy. The company growth was amazing as well.

It was not easy as I was one of the few women, certainly on my first team, I was the only woman. But I did find my little support group. I had friends that I got to meet, people who helped me through that way as I was trying to figure out a team that worked for me, and I’m forever grateful for that.

I was also there during the rocky bubble burst of the dot com industry, and I had thought that I had missed the interesting times at Amazon, and I wanted to leave and go see what it was like to work at an early stage start up. So I left Amazon, came down to the Bay Area, worked for a small start up, saw it go up and down, and realized it’s not fun to work on software that doesn’t get used. And I swung to much bigger companies since. I went to Oracle right after, which was probably a little bit of an overcompensation. But it was there that I really was starting to do team leading and thinking about being an engineering manager.

A piece of … I have a fun story about that, of I just happened to be meeting with an old friend, and was telling him that I was interested in being an engineering manager, and that I was thinking that I might transition to doing that within the next couple of quarters, it wasn’t gonna happen immediately, but I didn’t think anything of it. And then three weeks alter he calls me up and says, “Hey, there’s a position open for an engineering manager at Yahoo! that I think you’d be a great fit for, you should apply.”

And that just really surprised me. I never thought that another company would consider me for an engineering manager since I had never been an engineer manager. And it never would’ve happened if I hadn’t shared that story and spark with the friend of mine.

Advice that I give a lot of people is to be really free in sharing what your passions and interests are. You never know what opportunities are out there, and people will see you in a different light when you share those aspirations. So figure out things you want to try. Figure out things that you might want to do, and then tell people. It might be a different technology that you want to try, or a new project that hasn’t even been spun up for your company, but your manager or your colleagues may look at you in a different light when those opportunities come out and think of you as a perfect person for that fit.

Fast forward, I went to Yahoo!. It was the most trafficked site on the internet when I was there, ahead of Google. It was a pretty vibrant time when I first arrived. It kind of got rocky. I had my first baby there, and it was … I was working on a really tough project as we were revamping our ad network and really trying to figure out what was coming next for the business. I’d say one of my lowest points of my career happened there where I came back full force after maternity leave, I was excited to be back, I was excited to work on new projects. I even raised my hand to work on this brand new project that was revamping this architecture. Several months after that, I was realizing things just weren’t working. I was really unhappy. I was not feeling like I was being a good employee, not feeling like I was being a good mom. I’ve always felt like I was just chasing to get home in time to relieve the baby sitter, and my baby had stopped eating… I was breast feeding and pumping at work. Even though I had a good enough supply, she was gradually drinking less and less milk every single day. So I felt like this just isn’t working, I need to figure something else out because I don’t feel like I’m doing either job well, from being a great engineering leader, or a great mom. And so I quit — I went in, I went to my boss and I said I was gonna be quitting, and I made up some story about doing some other project.

To my surprise, they all tried to convince me not to leave.

So my boss really asked me a lot of questions. I hadn’t really felt like I was doing that good of a job, so it was really surprising to me at first that they would make all of these overtures to keep me to stay. Other peers and leaders also came to talk to me. And then finally the VP of the business came to talk to me. It was someone I hadn’t engaged with that often. He asked a lot of insightful questions, and I was really trying not to go into details or trying to make it into a way that they would convince me to stay. But he got to a point, and he said, “Cathy, I don’t feel like you’re asking for what you want, or what you need” and that really struck me.

And then he paused and he said, “I don’t know if I can give you what you want or you need, but you’re not even giving me the chance. So if you can think about what it would take to for you to be happy and successful, let us know and give us a chance to make that right.” And that was just such a powerful moment for me. And I was like, “Wow.”

It was the same advice someone had given me before about sharing things that I need and want for transitioning into being an engineering manager. But it was that same advice in a very different context for me when I was going through a difficult time in my job. So I really took a step back and said, “I’m trying to do too many things. I’m trying to be this amazing engineering leader and get the next promotion. I’m also trying to figure things out with my baby. I’m trying to travel to the different sites for these leaders. And I just need to figure out sequencing and not try to do too much at once.”

So I pared things back, I said I’m not gonna do these travel trips for the next 3 months. I also flew my mom out and she helped me with my baby while I looked for a new childcare provider. I got through those next three months, and I decided to stay. What happened after that is I got into this groove, things were doing much better for my baby, things were much easier for my job. I figured out how to do both of them a different way than I was doing it in the past. It really helped, potentially even saved me to stay in the industry at a time that was pretty difficult. It was really thanks to that VP Sandeep who had that conversation with me and made me look at things a different way.

Fast forward, I then went … Yahoo! had a lot of difficult times. I was looking for what’s next, and I had my eyes set on Salesforce. I came into Salesforce and I got to work on a lot of different really great initiatives, but I also got to see a different company that was really focused on giving back. It made me think about that time at Apple, how they influenced specific education and schools and students studying computers where Marc Benioff, the CEO over at Salesforce really wanted to think about how he could give back by not just being a company that makes a lot of money, but also is really successful in helping the community at large. So he created a 1–1–1 model, 1% of time, 1% of equity, 1% of the products were given to non-profits.

I think this is something we can all think about how we can use the power of the institutions that we work for to make a different in our broader community, helping to support other girls, helping women in technology, persons of color, helping with diversity and equality is something I feel like I been it for and I would like to roll forward to others.

I learned a lot working there, and I also feel like I had a lot of advantages working for a company who really cared about equality. So Marc had a program when I was there. He had a quarterly leadership meeting, it was called ECOM at the time. He would bring in his leaders and go business by business and go through the financials of the company. At one point he looked around the room and said, “Where are all the women?” And there may have been a chuckle or two. But after that he said, “No, we need to fix this. I want 30% of the room for all of my meetings to have women in them.”

It didn’t mean that the people who normally would’ve been invited didn’t get to come, it meant that another seat was pulled up to the table. I really liked what Gretchen was saying about just pulling up another chair is really what gives people different opportunities and advantages. I got that opportunity at Salesforce. I was invited to some meetings with really high level leaders at the company, and I got to listen in and engage and learn how the company was operating at that level, and that really helped prepare me for this role as a CTO. And I think that’s something that we can all think about is how can we pull up another seat to the table to give people an opportunity to see what’s going on in your meetings, to see what’s going on in your company, and to have broader access in this industry.

So fastfoward, I’m now at Stitch Fix. It is an amazing job, it’s great to be in this role. It’s something that I’ve always aspired to do and to be. But what I never aspired, and had hoped to work for as a company, that has such high gender diversity. Stitch Fix is 84% women, which is just amazing. Every day I walk into rooms that I’m completely surrounded by such amazing women. That’s something that was so difficult than any other company that I had ever worked. I had been used to being one of the only women in the room where I’ve gone and done the count and said, “Wow, what percentage of women are here today,” and I’ve stopped doing that. After being in a room with 60% women and 70% and 45% women, you don’t really need to do the count anymore. And what I found what’s amazing when you have that level of gender diversity is you really can be your authentic self. I remember early on in my career just wanting to fit in and be one of the guys. I wore T-shirts and jeans and wanted to kind of be appreciated for my technology, and not stand out as different than anyone else.

And now I get to wear dresses every day, I get to be myself, I don’t have to think about how I’m phrasing things or to couch my thought process or argument in a different way to fit in with the culture of the company. I feel like when you have a broader diversity group, everybody can just be themselves and focus on the business, focus on the clients, focus on how to make a difference. And that’s what’s exciting to me.

I love working at big scale companies, I love working at growing teams, growing technology, growing architecture, shipping software, and that’s what I get to do every day here. We’re in this amazing growth phase at Stitch Fix where we’re launching new business lines, where we’re growing our business. And it’s the technology that you see on the website, but it’s also everything that goes underneath it to power it from tools to run our warehouse to tools for our styling organization. Tools also for merchandise, of how we pick and buy and plan and allocate the right inventory for our business. I love wearing T-shirts and jeans sometimes too, and I love wearing dresses, and I love that I can choose. My aspiration going forth in this industry is that we can all be our authentic selves at work, that we can be recognized for what we do.

I hope that I’m seen as a great CTO, as a great technology leader, and not just a female CTO. And that my aspiration is that there are many more of you who rise to these levels as well, and that we can form a great community and support network. I think that that’s essentially my story that I wanted to share today. I think Sukrutha, we may have wanted to open things up for some questions? If anyone has any questions, and you want to type them in, feel free. Oh, there you are, hello.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, I was looking at everybody’s comments. A lot of people were talking about how they’re loving your story and the honesty with which you’re sharing it. I see a question asking about who your current inspiration is.

Cathy Polinsky: I have to say my biggest inspiration right now is my CEO Katrina Lake. Katrina was a young CEO founder who came up with this idea while she was in business school. She was fascinated by eCommerce disruptions and the sense that the apparel industry was one of the few industries that had not reached double digit online sales, even six or seven years ago. And the sense of the reason is because the model was broken and she had an idea for a different way and a different model. It has not been easy for her. As a young female CEO going to Sand Hill to raise money was not a cake walk. So she really focused on how she could get to profitability as fast as possible so she wasn’t dependent on that industry. And the thing about her is she is just such an authentic leader — she is so smart and savvy, but does not put on airs and is really someone that I’ve watched her, as she’s had her first baby, and navigated the world of pumping and nursing and things that I hid behind. I remember one of my stories of pumping while I’m eating, and having a one on one and someone saying, “What’s that noise in the background?” I’m like, “What noise? I don’t hear any noise,” and not really being that authentic about what was going on and what I needed, really just trying to hide what was going on. And that’s something I don’t think she even thought twice about hiding anything about. She’s not trying to be a role model as much as just authentically is navigating that aspect of being a mom and being an amazing CEO.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s awesome. Someone also pointed out about the fact that there was a podcast where Katrina shared her story. But I do see a lot of questions speaking to your story about Marc Benioff noticing not enough gender diversity and then trying to make a difference. How does one who is not in that level of influence… How would somebody else who would get impacted by a change like that… How would they bring about the influence when they’re not in the seat of power? What advice would you have for people like that?

Cathy Polinsky: I think we could all try to help at whatever level that we’re in — really raising this as an issue to your boss, or thinking about ideas about how you could help, whether it’s the community, or a local university that’s near you. Maybe it’s letting people shadow you in your job and bringing a seat to the table. And then it’s also the opposite of asking — asking, “Can I come to this meeting?” I think that people … It may not always work out for you, but it will never work out if you don’t ask. So really being able to assert yourself and to see if another seat could be brought to that table.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s awesome. And next question, and I am seeing a lot of people asking similar questions, so I’m just summarizing the next question. It seems like a lot of people want to know how do you identify when is the right time to jump at an opportunity, or navigate towards a specific opportunity to grow in your career?

Cathy Polinsky: I’d say the thing I’ve always done is try to look at what are the big opportunities out there that no one is going after, and being open to them. I was going to talk a little bit about managing up. The aspect that has worked for me both as a manager, but also as a strong number two to other of my leaders is to really open myself up to understanding what are the big challenges that my boss is having at any given time, and see how I can make a difference —

What are the big chargers, what are the big opportunities that we’re going after. What are the gaps that we see and how can I lean in to make myself available when there’s challenges. I feel like that’s always helped me, whether it’s a brand new initiative that got spun up, or someone’s leaving the company, someone’s moving to a new role and there’s a gap in the organization. Really saying, “Hey, how can I help? Is there something that I could be doing here? I’d love to take a shot at helping on these projects.”

The way that I’ve always been able to do that is to build a great team. I love to delegate and hire the best people that I can and load them up as much as possible in the same way. And that gives me the space and the capacity to take on more when I am in a growing opportunity that needs more help.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: One quick comment I do want to add is that people are asking for all of your questions to be posted in the ask a question list. So just in case you’ve been posting them in the chat but not in the ask a question list, if you put it there people can vote. Next is actually one of my favorite questions. There are nine and counting votes for people who want to hear more about the differences in responsibilities and duties of being a software developer, an individual contributor, versus a CTO. How did you transition between those roles, what is the main differentiator do you think? Or the biggest challenges.

Cathy Polinsky: Let’s just talk about software developer versus manager because it is this really interesting thing that the things that help you be most successful as an engineer are not necessarily the things that you need to do once you’re an engineering manager. And that’s something that we’re not sure … We talk about that a lot at my staff meeting of if that’s true for a lot of other fields. I get the impression that that dynamic is not always as clear as it is in software development. When you’re focusing a lot on how you’re working on coding and projects and building up your technology skills, those things are great and important to lean on so you understand the projects are going on track, but there’s a whole other aspect of how you’re managing people and projects and initiatives that you don’t necessarily always get to do as an individual contributor.

It was a very challenging and different experience for me, but one that I really loved. I feel like as a software developer, you get these CS highs — You solve some problem, you are excited about getting to a solution that works, and that you can push out and deploy, and that’s just exciting that you get to see that solution, you get to see people using it, and you get to see the difference that you’re making.

When you’re a manager, and you’re not actually writing the hands-on code and influencing through people, things take longer. You can’t always see the, “Hey, I’m trying to give people advice and coaching them in this way. Am I getting through to them? Is this working? Am I shifting the team to be better or not?” It’s not that you can see that on a day to day basis, but that your impact is much broader, and if you can stick through it and realize it’s not the same as that every day, every hour, continuous feedback loop that you find other ways to see your impact, and that you can be really proud of the people and lives that you can influence.

That’s what I really love about the job is that I can have a broader influence and every day is different, as I mentioned. I’m working on a lot of different types of projects, a lot of different types of focus. And I think that’s the thing that also changes as you take on more and more teams, as you go from being a manager to a manager of managers, or a CTO. I was saying as I was making that shift, things when you’re a software developer can go quite fast. You can have a great day, and then you can have a bad day. Depending on the big challenge or bug or issue that you’re dealing with, things are a little slower as an engineering manager. You see the challenges and you’re working towards fixing them, or you’re seeing things working really well, and they stay pretty well for quite some time.

But when you have a larger scope of influence with teams that suddenly don’t have much commonality between them, you can go from one meeting and think, “Wow, things are finally coming together for this group and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and things are going great.” And then you go into a whole different meeting and you go, “Oh, now I have this other problem that I have been neglecting that I really need to help nurture.” It’s just a different pacing, and just being open to those shifts are really important — and to finding different people to get advice from because this job changed quite dramatically.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah, totally. I can’t totally relate because I’m going through that as well myself. Thank you so much Cathy, I wanted to thank you from the bottom of our heart to get started with what’s our first ever virtual conference. Your talk was so inspiring, we see it through the comments, and we feel it too. All of the questions that came in, thank you for asking those questions.

Cathy Polinsky: Thank you for organizing this and thank you for inviting me. It’s great to be here.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you. Over to Gretchen [for our next session] …