Julia Boorstin - CNBC’s Senior Media & Technology Reporter | When Women Lead

Welcome to success story the most useful podcasts in the world. I'm your host Scott D. Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network The HubSpot podcast network has other great podcasts like marketing made simple hosted by Dr. J. J. Peterson. Marketing made simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and more importantly make it work. Now if any of these topics sound interesting to you, you're going to love his show. How to write and deliver captivating speeches, how to market yourself into a new job, how design can help and potentially hurt your revenue and how to create a social media ad strategy that works. If these topics hit home and there are things that you want to learn about, go listen to marketing made simple wherever you get your podcasts. Today my guest is Julia Borsten. Now Julia is CNBC's senior media and tech correspondent and has been an on air reporter for the networks in 2006. She also played a central role on CNBC's by coastal tech focused program tech check delivering reporting analysis and CEO interviews with a focus on social media and the intersection of media and technology. In 2013 she created and launched the CNBC disruptor 50 an annual list she oversees highlighting private companies transforming the economy and challenging companies in established industries. She also helped launch the networks closing the gap initiative covering the people and companies closing gender and diversity gaps. A graduate of Princeton University, she has been a reporter for Fortune magazine as well as a contributor to CNN and CNN headline news. She also worked for Vice President Gore's domestic policy office. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons. So we spoke about the current state and the future state of equity in organizations. We spoke about groundbreaking and deeply reported narrative work incorporating interviews with leaders from companies such as Bumble, a hello sunshine and the biometrics company clear she conducted all these interviews for a book she wrote. We spoke about the counter intuitive approaches of women running some of the world's most innovative and successful companies and what we can learn from them and then we finally closed with how one VC firm eliminated bias through extreme self awareness and the model that they deployed and the learnings that we can take from how they did it right. I feel really lucky. I had amazingly supportive mentors and there was one day when I was a young reporter at Fortune magazine. I actually I remember I was 22 years old and I got a phone call from CNN. And they asked me to come on live television that day and I was freaked out. I never been on live TV before I was 22 years old. I didn't know anything and they asked me to go on live TV to talk about a story had written for Fortune magazine and this thing at this all the time. This is sort of how it worked. And I was like, I can't do that. They're going to ask me other questions about the stock market. And I had this mentor who went on to become editor chief of Fortune magazine and he said to me, just do it. You don't know how to do something until you do it. You can't get practice at live to live television unless you do it. You just have to say yes, if you fail, what's the worst that can happen. And I just remember hearing back what's the worst that can happen. I was like, maybe I embarrassed myself, but like, that's not too bad. What's the most embarrassing thing I could say. So I so I didn't and I feel like that set me off on a path of saying yes to things I was scared of, which had turned out to be a great advantage. That is a great advantage now. Talk to me. So that was that was one mentor that pushed you in that direction. But I feel like this book speaks the reason why you wanted to write this book probably has to do with helping people come overcome overcome a lot of imposter syndrome. So that was one point that sort of set you down that path. But walk me through your career, walk me through your upbringing, walk me through some of the guidance support you had way before this mentor. And then also some of the things that maybe you experienced in your career that were obviously compelling enough that got you to write a book about all the different struggles that women face in business. Because if you had an incredibly easy career with no problems whatsoever, I actually highly doubt that you would have been passionate enough about this topic to write an entire book on it. But nobody has an easy career. Everyone has ups and downs. There is no one who gets started on a career path and has a linear path. Everyone has to have challenges. Otherwise they never have anything to overcome. So I would say everyone's everyone's path has had some months long the way. So for me, I was so privileged. I grew up in Los Angeles with a hugely supportive family. But particularly when it came to this topic, my mom had sort of been, you know, she'd gone to an women's college and then she went to Berkeley and she had sort of she and my dad, you know, participate in the civil rights movement and and march for women rights and all these different things. And from their perspective, there was a lot of progress that had been made, but they believed that there would be this steady march of progress. And by the time I was in the workforce, things would be equal. And I would always get this encouragement from my parents and particularly my mom to just think about what I want to do when I grew up and don't worry you could do whatever you want by the time you grow up, everything will be different. By the time you grew up, things will be so different from when I was growing up and my mom would tell these stories about how she always felt her two choices for careers where if she even had a career, grant the 50s, she was told her career choices were teacher or nurse and that was it and she didn't have any other options. She was going to get married and if she had a job was going to be one of those two things. And so she said, you could do whatever you want, you are not going to be constrained by those things, you'll be a CEO, you'll be a senator, you'll be a rocket scientist, she had very grand plans, but mostly she didn't want me to feel constrained by gender roles and she didn't want me to feel constrained by the fact that women just did not hold those rules and big numbers. So I felt very optimistic about the world moving towards a more equitable place and I went off to college and I worked on the newspaper and I saw equity, there was equity in my classrooms, there was equity on the newspaper and on the all the different student organizations around campus. And I was very lucky to get a job at Fortune Magazine, it was 2000, I was the last person hired before the economic downturn and I was, you know, the market then crash and I showed up at work the first day and I was getting this informal orientation by one of the women who worked there. And she said something to me that I will never forget and she said, oh, don't worry, you know, we went through the regular orientation stuff, this is how you pitch a story, this is how you felt an expense report, this is how the meeting schedule works. This is where you should be tomorrow morning and she said, oh, and the good news is, as I was leaving the door, she said, oh, the good news is there was just a sexual harassment lawsuit. So everyone will be on the best behavior. And I was like, what are you talking about? Everyone will be on their best behavior, a sexual harassment lawsuit. So that's a good thing. And I just remember thinking, oh, my God, what is happening here? This is the real world, my mom was wrong, I was wrong to believe my mom. And the world has is so far from equal, there are so many challenges for women, if it's good news for me as a 21 year old straight out of college that there was a sexual harassment suit because people are going to be better behaved than like, I don't even know what I'm talking about. So I had a sort of reckoning that maybe the world was not going to be as equitable as I had hoped. And I also saw in the business world at Fortune Magazine at the time the management was very male dominated. It is not the case now. Now there's a female editor in chief who was named to that role while I was writing this book, but you know, there were plenty of women. It's just that the higher you got up the ladder, the fewer women there were. And that is very much the case in business as a whole. And in 2000, that was the case on Wall Street. That was the case all across corporate America. There are plenty of women and there, but there's more gender equity at the bottom of the wrongs and the higher up you get women just don't make it to the very top of the ladder or they do in smaller numbers. So like take it now, women are about eight and a half percent of CEOs of the Fortune 500. That is an all time high. And we're talking about eight and a half percent. So there has been progress, but I think it was a real wake up call for me to realize like, okay, there are challenges. Some of it's going to be structural. Some of it's going to be like cultural things like maybe sexual harassment is just like not something people think about or mine that much. And I have to figure out how to live in this world and be successful here. So if we're talking about 2022, obviously still a lot of issues and that eight and a half percent of the Fortune 500, that we're talking about still like Fortune 500. We're not I guess looking at say like even like the Fortune 1000 or companies that are massive that aren't included on the Fortune 500 globally and we're living in a. We would consider to be a relatively progressive part of the world, all things considered so where are we at in terms of equity? So what is the reality for somebody going into the workforce now and then trying to move up? What are the problems and the struggles that perhaps we think are gone but are still there? What what do we have to deal with? So what's interesting is that you know women actually graduate from college in higher numbers than men do women go to more grad school than men do I think the numbers are pretty close to equal when it comes to business will these numbers change all the time but there's no there it's not like men are getting more education than women do. But there've been a lot of studies trying to figure out why women may start in jobs at the same numbers as men but don't end up at the top of companies in the same numbers as men. And one of the key theories and this was something that was sort of articulated by a lean in McKinsey study is this idea of a broken wrong women get promoted at the lower levels but then there's a sort of a leap to more of a management level where often women just don't get those promotions. And interestingly it doesn't necessarily seem to have anything to do with performance it can have to do with how much women are pushing for promotions or maybe they are sort of inadvertently penalized for taking time off from work for you know for maternity leave et cetera. So there are so many different reasons but one thing that I really focus on in this book is I look at the tech industry in particular because the tech industry has more of a gap in venture capital funding than in any other industry you'll see in terms of representation. So we all know that tech companies are incredibly powerful they impact the way we live our lives the way we travel with companies like Uber the way we you know order every product to our house with Amazon like there's no company tech their tech companies have massive influence over everything and tech companies are funded by venture capital whether it's Facebook or Airbnb all these company Google all these companies exist. Because venture capital fuel them and allow them to grow massively while they were still losing money so I wanted to look at this sector because this is the sector with the craziest gender gap women on average female founders have gotten 3% or less of all venture capital funding in the past 10 years. So if you look at billions of dollars in in venture capital like 30 billion dollars last year 3% of it actually 2021 it was 2% 3% or so of that money goes to companies of female founders that's absolutely insane so that's the reason why that doesn't really make sense. So I really want to focus on that world just because the gap was so crazy that I wanted to understand a why that was happening and B how the women who had defined the odds and had managed to get that tiny piece of enter capital funding how they had done it I wanted to know their secrets because I thought these women are by definition exceptional and I really want to learn from them. So so we'll unpack why some women did receive VC funding but that's a really interesting stat so I would have actually assumed that in yeah of course you think of tech is like oh there's all you know the tech bros and whatnot and there's like sort of like a negative connotation with the tech bro sf startup but the numbers that tech is worse than some other legacy industries is absolutely insane. If 3% of it's 3% of female founders are getting VC money is very obvious why there's no actually it's actually slightly more complicated 3% of VC dollars go to companies with female founders but it's 6% of deals and what's interesting is because you know each deals like the check that's written what that means is that women's checks are smaller than the checks that men are getting if they're getting 6% of deals and only 3% of dollars it means the checks are on average smaller. That's a huge problem to solve for right there. It's another problem too so there's so much in here and I just want to be clear I'm not pointing fingers at anyone I think what's really interesting about this is I don't think there's one group one person no no one group or organizations to blame for any of this this is layers upon layers of structural historical societal patterns that have established this system and it's very hard to break them. What I was most interested in and press to learn in my research is just this concept of pattern matching is hugely powerful pattern matching is this idea that if you're VC and you want to make an investment in a in a founder your instinct and the data would indicate that you should invest in someone who matches a pattern you should invest in someone whose company is similar to another company founded. Maybe you have a habit or a pattern of investing in people who were engineers at an Ivy League school and then founded an enterprise software company which they sold and now you want to invest in these as second time founders if you're looking at that subset of of founder you're going to be looking mostly at men. So it becomes this feedback loop where people does invest in more and more of the same types of people part of it is that if you're a venture investor you're making some big bets and you want to control every factor you can control so if someone reminds you of Mark Zuckerberg back at influence you there's some crazy quotes in my book. I think it's just this instinct to go with the familiar and also when you're an investor you're going to be spending a lot of time with these companies you're writing big checks to and so you want to make sure this is someone you like and don't mind spending hours upon hours with so there's also this instinct to invest in people who feel like your friends maybe they went to your same fraternity you know for same college we're in your same fraternity. So I think a lot of that is this sort of it's a pattern matching which is a symptom of unconscious bias and the more we could just recognize it the more there's a huge opportunity to break the pattern and there's financial opportunity and breaking the pattern. There's a VC I interviewed for the book named Josh couple men from first round capital it's a fund in Philadelphia he had a very successful fund and after 10 years he said let's do a study and let's find out like what has been working with our companies they invested in early stage companies in early stage is when there's the most opportunity for bias because you're not investing in a company based on a five year track record you're investing in a company based on the idea and the founder. So he went back and looked at the results of his investments over the years he found that the female founded investments which weren't there weren't very many of them they tended to perform better he thought this is crazy if the female founders their companies are doing better why are we investing in more of them. So you sort of took a step back and realized that there were systems they could put in place to make sure they weren't just you know investing in the in the obvious thing based on the pattern so they before used to only have investors who had had a successful company that they had invested in that limited the pool and they said why do we only have to hire people we've invested in their company let's you know let's brought in the pool so they started hiring different kinds of investors more women and women are twice as likely to invest in a female founded startup than men are so they all the sudden got this different pool of companies who are coming to them with their ideas because they diversified who they're who their venture partners were basically and then interestingly they put these systems in place in their meetings to make sure that they're getting rid of bias they'd hear a pitch and then instead of just opening you know having that founder leave and they open the floor for conversation this is something that happens in meetings no matter what type of company you're in they would have a hear a pitch like that. You could hear a presentation but they'd have everyone write down what they thought about the company then they'd have a conversation that way you didn't have one very loud charismatic person railroad everyone else into listening to their opinion and then ever going to be like okay fine this guy's loud we should do what he wants to do this way you could get people who are maybe more introverted maybe maybe more women who are less likely to want to go out on a limb in a male dominated room and you could just let everyone share their opinion without you know without it having to be a public performance and he found that the outcomes of implementing this system were really really powerful so I think there's so much upside to recognizing and stripping out the pattern matching and unconscious bias. So it's going to take these VC firms an incredible amount of self awareness to do with this one VC did which is absolutely incredible curious about your thoughts and I know it's not going to be an absolute answer that we can solve for right now but do you think it would be easier if we teach over some of the things the awareness that we're going to talk about in a second about female founders that have done exceptional things and sort of broadcast that message out to the world or alternatively second potential strategy if we try to get more women. We've found it female founded VC funds that would hopefully start off on the right foot what do you think is more realistic. I think you need all of the above ultimately the venture capital industry is very large and very entrenched they get money from all sorts of different sources. The only way you're really going to see massive change in terms of who's getting funding is if you have some of the biggest funds of billions and billions of dollars if you get them to identify the value the financial value this is not about helping the world this is about they will make more money if they invest in a more diverse set of companies I think once you have that piece. That's when you're going to see more systemic change otherwise it just you know plenty of women are starting funds and that's great but that alone is not going to drive meaningful change to the numbers if you're talking about coming from a place where women founders have never drawn more than 3% of VC dollars in any given year. It's a sad but incredible stat so let's let's break down that 3% I mean that's what you did right you broke down you went into the 3% you found out why why these people got the money what was the what was the differentiator between all the other women founders that weren't successful and then it's also talk about the results because the results are also incredible. I know that some of the people that you interviewed they're like on my list of people that like I definitely want to interview like they're like fucking badass like they're awesome. So let's let's first we can take it whichever way do you want to talk about the results first or do you want to talk about why these people were successful and raising capital in the first place. What do you mean by the results you mean like the incredible companies they built and why there's a financial incentive to diversify your portfolio based on some of the people that you spoke to. Yeah I mean look there's a lot of powerful data I mean I should back up and say I started this book because I was so impressed by the female founders I was meeting and I thought they're approaching different from this kind of stereotype of what leaders are supposed to look like and be like and lead like. And I kept on coming back to this idea that leadership doesn't have to just be one thing this you know this archetype of male aggressive top down hierarchical management like that is really not the way things work certainly not anymore and we're seeing women lead in so many different ways. And I think it's really empowering to realize like all these different things work maybe I have a piece of that in myself maybe there's something there that I can I can try to grow in myself and it's okay that I don't look like that like that bro you know the tech grows you put it or the guy in the suit that's our that's our stereotype. So I first start off wanting to tell these amazing stories because as you said you guys have to read my book it's so much fun these stories are so surprising and inspiring. But behind the stories I thought each of these stories is driven by different characteristics what what this woman is doing trying to form the healthcare system what this woman is doing trying to navigate the pandemic of the peak of the crisis for the company that by all other measures should have gone out of business and instead has gone on to Magnet you know Magnet. Magnet Magnet is in heights what they're doing is a leadership trait or strategy that we can break out and I can find research on so I started with the stories and then I just started reading so many academic studies about management leadership and I I was really impressed by these studies it's amazing what business school professors have been up to but also to learn that some of these traits. You know that that maybe we don't associate with leadership or business success are actually hugely valuable and we should just throw out the stereotypes of what a leader looks like because it has nothing to do with what in reality actually works 100% okay so let's so let's do some case studies let's let's walk through some of the people that you covered like. What they accomplished what the trade is why it was successful because I want people to take from this episode away like different ways that they can go to their team tomorrow or their business tomorrow and maybe look at leadership in a slightly different context and also tell some stories of some incredible people. So I mean you've interviewed everyone from if I'm not mistaken like Whitney Wolf heard is like awesome she's super silly she's amazing I mean you have Jennifer Herman yes exactly a founder bumble which IP that was an incredible IPO you have Carolyn Childers Lindsey Kaplan. Yeah whoever who do you want to go into and you can like sort of break down a couple stories of people that you spoke to well you know maybe I should tell the story of clear people are probably familiar with clear clear is the biometrics company that helps people it was known originally for helping people get through the airport quickly right you do is clear you could get through security faster you board your flight. When you think about the companies that should have gone out of business in the early days of the pandemic when travel declined by 90% clear is pretty high up there right all of their revenue with contingent on airplane travel and it all came to a screeching halt. The fact that the CEO of that company Karen Simon Becker managed to use the pandemic as a crazy growth opportunity and in the pandemic took her company public and now is it has a diversified company to me as an example of remarkable management and crisis and I just was blown away by her story and it all goes back to her world view she I so when I was so curious to learn how she did this because I had interviewed her for CNBC for CNBC's disruptor 50 list. Back when clear is a kind of a straightforward biometrics company for airplane travel and I said like how did you how did you prepare or how did you end up being prepared for the pandemic because the story of what happened in the pandemic is they developed this technology that maybe many of your listeners have used called health pass. So if you want to go into many office buildings if you want to go to a conference you have to download health pass and links to your at originally would link to your COVID test results now links to your vaccination card and it basically acts as your vaccine or your health passport to get around the world they also have health travel stuff. So I said how did how did you end up in a position where a your travel business didn't crush you and B you now have this healthcare business where did that even come from and she said she is sort of the queen of over preparedness. She always thought of life is wanting to go through with belts belt and suspenders like double preparedness and you know she she told us this funny story now I mean now it's funny but how at the beginning of the pandemic she was on an airplane on a train ride she got a call from someone saying this is you know is February they said New York is going to shut down this is going to be crazy you got to prepare and everyone around her was like oh it's February it's going to be fine. You know no one really could tell you how bad it was going to be but she was like ordering groceries packing her freezer like preparing likes you know backup plans like she's always been a planner but her key characteristic is an adaptability quotient we talk about IQ we talked about we talk about EQ a lot EQ is the new thing but a Q adaptability quotient is really something that people should be focused on. There is this instinct and a lot of occasions to once you make a plan you stick with it you invest in a plan everyone's agreed on the plan maybe you put a lot of money into a plan and change course would be expensive and a pain and nobody wants to figure out what the new plan is going to be her story told me that you need to be willing to pivot instantaneously and not look back I think this was the case with a lot of companies that succeeded during the pandemic but what's interesting about clears they not only kept their travel business alive but they built this whole other health business so she had had the sort of seedlings of this idea about creating a health passport and because they'd already been through this FDA process the day that she started worrying about the you know COVID becoming a pandemic or becoming deemed a pandemic they started building out health technology and in April of 2020 well before a vaccine was even conceived of they started thinking about what they were doing. So I was thinking to vaccine vaccine status so she her whole thing is like plan way far ahead and then be willing to pivot pivot pivot pivot they offer their tools to the NHL and NFL bubbles they figured out how to use it to get people in and out of office buildings but she her whole thing was just don't get stuck in anyone plan if you're already prepared and then ready to pivot you can only create newer and newer opportunities and I think it was just amazing to see the way she she grew her business in the meantime. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now they don't call it the sales destination it's a sales journey and on that journey you want the best tools and support to keep you and your customers connected every step of the way HubSpot is an all in one CRM platform that is impossible to grow and ridiculously easy to use meaning you never have to worry about slowing you down that's because HubSpot is purpose-built for real sales people with real customers and real problems to solve with customizable hubs and tools that you can add and subtract as you grow and an interface it's just as easy to use. If you're a team of one or one thousand HubSpot is built for you and your customers to grow together wherever the journey takes you learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. I'm going to say like that that that ability quotient I love that because I think that I've seen a lot of business leaders that you're right they don't pivot and that's that's how they die they it's like my way or the highway I'm not deviating I'm sure this will work out eventually I'm going to burn through cash and people and my own energy until I figure it out and there's times when sometimes that'll work but it's not the smartest way to do business and it's definitely not the most cost effective way to do business by any means. So that that ability quotient is incredibly important and that's something that she had intuitively she was born with that raised with that that's how she's probably always been. How would you suggest a leader that's listening to this they look at that example they're like wow my business is in a less precarious industry and we should have survived code we didn't and and this this leader was able to keep the business of float through COVID even though I had to do with air travel okay I want to I want to sort of upskill myself with adaptability quotient I don't I don't know where I'd even start. Well yeah I think there are a couple of things and one is the power of data and we talk about data all the time all the time every company in this book every company in the world benefits from reading the data you don't want to be there and there are some studies in the books book about how women tend to make decisions more based on data and less based on ego and and instinct and this idea that if you really are relying on the data and it's not about your ego then you're not going to be distracted by. You're not going to be distracted by like your feelings about the plan you made you're going to be like well this is what the data says we have to do and I think focusing on the data can help eliminate the ego and all the the complications that can come come from that so I think that's part of it but I also think there's something I heard a lot about in the book and I think this comes back to humility also and this is talking to the people on the ground you know Karen Simon Becker was locked in her apartment in New York when she was trying to make some of these tough decisions. But she knew that by talking to people who are like maybe starting to work on the healthcare the health pass or maybe talking to some companies who might need a health pass to get employees in and out it was it's by doing sort of the broadest information gathering possible and talking to the people closest to the problem that's where you're going to get the best insights. There was some other women I profiled in my chapter on on managing in crisis including Claire Bavino Fontino who runs feeding America and also Michelle Nun who runs care USA which actually runs the care programs in 69 countries around the world. They had always offered aid all around the world and she had this amazing moment where they have the pandemic they're operating in 69 countries everything's chaos they come up with a plan that involves like shipping soap and hand sanitizer and they're doing the things that the CDC recommends and they feel like they're doing everything right and then they got this message from women on the ground. We can't eat soap we don't want hand sanitizer we need you to help us figure out a way to make money when we can't leave our homes and so there was this revelation that if she had just gone by the book she would have let all of these people down all around the world. But by going into these different groups that they had helped organize these lending groups they can find out actually what people wanted because it's one thing to have the CEO say I know I know what we should do and it's another thing to say okay let's go talk to people let's actually let's gather the data back to the data because. Maybe your ideas totally wrong in an in an crazy unprecedented situation like the pandemic or by the way like a new kind of economic downturn new kind of inflation every situation is different and there's an and you will only benefit by being humble as you as you gather information. It's it's ultimately like what I what I'm sort of seeing as you go through these different stories it's an exercise in like empathy removing any sort of ego from business decisions operating based off data. And like you said like EQ IQ like just like being a better person when it comes to conducting business but it's not like you it's not like you're aren't being less effective it's not like you're doing things for yes of course you want to you want to listen to your customers if your customers are people around the world that. Don't have money to buy food for the families that's the person that you have to listen to if your customers are well any anyone really if you're not listening to them and you're in your bull headed in your strategy you're going to be an effective right. There's a strategy called I'm servant leadership and this is something that male CEOs have talked about doing. The founder of Starbucks you know Fred Smith the founder FedEx these are guys who have talked about how they use servant leadership and what certainly leadership is defined as is really putting your customers and your employees first thinking about what is going to be best for these groups of people. And it's a I mean there have been books written on it this whole management theory but it's something that's really about sort of diminishing the leader's role in the organization because they're trying to elevate the needs and the and the impact of all these other people and there is and there's a woman interview in the book named Shavani Saroya and she's a CEO of a company called Tala and she leads with servant leadership Tala is a micro lending. Organization that lends money in a couple of countries i'm in emerging markets so what's interesting is she was doing she came up with this idea when she was in India and some and some countries in Africa doing research and she noticed that so many people. In these in these communities could not borrow money there was no way for her for them to borrow money from the bank they didn't have any credit history they have small businesses but no credit history. So she thought this is a crazy opportunity so she would lend them money just personally and everyone always paid her back so she created this system at Tala and this is a for profit business at Tala where they lend money based on your cell phone data so they can tell based on your cell phone if you're going to be able to repay alone they're wrong sometimes. But the only penalty if you don't repay the loan is that you don't get to borrow money again but the ability to borrow money is so valuable in these markets because people don't have access to micro loans otherwise but what she said to me was so powerful she said. That radical trust is the way she wants to leave because your customers are not going to trust you unless you trust them entirely so she created the system where she said we are going to lend you money within five minutes on your cell phone you'll be able to get money for your vegetable business or your laundry business that you're doing your only technologies your is your cell phone but we will trust you entirely and then they trust her and she saw this when she was starting to just lend money one on one. But she said there's something so valuable about that because in your customers become so passionate about your relationship and they they want to work with you because you have given them that radical trust and look it doesn't always make sense but it's a really interesting concept of like what can be gained if you have radical trust with your with your customers and also your employees. It's a more humanistic approach to business for sure because if we think about like the way we do business in the US at least I mean how many checks and balances and due diligence and underwriting and contracts before a dollar is exchanged if you look at it. If you look at and maybe one business opportunity is missed I mean if she has the data and the algorithms to tell people are going to pay her back and by the way you pay her back but 90% of the time she gets her from tall against payback it's amazing so pretty amazing data about the financial upside there. Okay the other the other thing I wanted to tap into what I thought was incredibly interesting is a community building so you brought two examples forward in the book that I thought we could touch on so you have. Chief run by by Carolyn Childers and Lindsey Kaplan then you also have the crew by Tiffany Dufu if I'm pronouncing that correctly so both of those leverage community were those pandemic initiatives or were those pre pandemic or what. They both existed before the pandemic on so both of these are organizations designed to help professional women in their work lives this is not a social group this is a professional network and what's interesting is all of this data finds that women often feel a little uncomfortable asking other people for professional help they're helping to give the help but they're not socialized to think that asking friends for favors professional favors is something that you're supposed to do it feels kind of yucky literally the word yucky was with use. Some of these studies but men feel very comfortable saying hey buddy can you help me out with the work thing I need I need a favor or can you introduce me to this person but there isn't as much of a sort of socialized idea that women should be asking each other for professional introductions or favors so these two organizations. They say you're coming together to get to know each other and to offer each other professional health and to be each other's business network there's fascinating data showing that people who have a tight knit but diverse network of people people who don't necessarily work in their own company or in their own industry but a diverse network of people. Those are the people who are most successful in business because they can get diverse ideas they can pull in other things from outside their own little their own little world so so what's interesting is that there's all this data and chief and the crew both are designed as if they were designed based on all this data I mean they weren't and a lot of these studies have been done since but both these organizations gather women in small groups and they either are coach or they are trained on how to coach each other for professional development. And a lot of that is how to set goals how to hold yourself accountable and how to learn how to ask for the right kinds of favors the data about the power of female networks is so overwhelming there's one study which shows that if women are given told about a stereotype that women are say bad at taking math tests and then they're asked to take a math test those women are going to do less well in the math test than if they had not been reminded about stereotypes stereotypes can be really damaging. But if they are put in a small group of other women and they're like okay you guys are all here together we're going to tell you the stereotype they're told the stereotype stereotype had no impact on their results so there's something about groups of women that can eliminate the negative power of stereotypes that are bad for women. We talk so much about the negative piece of how how damaging stereotypes and bias are but I love the idea that just getting together with a group of women even when you're not close friends with it maybe professional contacts I love that that can battle the bad things in the world. What do you think about like leveraging this model within a company or within a cohort of like a VC investment portfolio like this kind of that's why there are all these groups you know within companies I mean it's interesting because you you kind of need every kind of group right you need the small group that supports women and then you also need groups that are men and women so men and women can support each other I mean I firmly believe that women should have male mentors and the only reason I've had so much success is I've been lucky to have men. The male mentors along the way but I do think that you need both things there's some amazing organizations in Silicon Valley that are designed to help build these networks of women but then also build bridges into the establishment the power structures of the male dominated groups. One of them is called the hashtag angels and they're focused on helping get women to invest in startups to help change all those numbers we were talking about earlier. Another of them is called all raise and this is an amazing nonprofit that helps coach women and helps them grow their companies and then they practice pitching their startups and they have this amazing network of successful women in the industry and then people starting off in the industry women and people of color this is really designed to help level the playing field and that is a perfect example of an organization that does the nurturing of the of the small group environment and then bridges and gives these women access. So we have so there's there's like you mentioned before there's so many different like there's so many different issues we have to tackle but also levers that we can pull right so we have so many reasons to be optimistic and so optimistic even in these crazy times. No you should be you 100% should be like you can see you can see all the pieces when you see like a VC firm that's self aware when you see community groups that remove social stigmas that can impede your performance when you talk about all these founders that have been exceptionally successful even though they only represent whatever 6% of 3% like there's obviously a lot of positive points. However it's not where it should be in 2022 so how do we move like a little bit quicker how do we get towards equity maybe not in the next 50 years right. Oh gosh I hope in the next 50 years come on I hope things speed up I'm telling I'm being honest I'm being I'm saying how do we get it moving quicker right like we thought that we farther along in 2022. I am optimistic that the business world will move towards equity and become more diverse both in terms of gender and in terms of race and in terms of ability and in terms of everything because there are so many studies showing that diversity is better for business. It's it's better for product development is better for understanding your customers it's better for for management I mean there are all these stories about diverse management teams have better retention you know they they are more empathetic so I can go on and on about all the academic studies but I think that I think that's why there's reason to be optimistic and then there's just this day to day thing like how are we all supposed to navigate the world. Especially if anyone anyone feels like they're facing bias or they're facing stereotypes or there there's a ceiling of how far people like them have gone in their organization and I think that's sort of the day to day like big picture yes we can be optimistic but we all have to get up and go to work the next day. And when I was writing the chapter on how people are judge more you know women and people of color judge more harshly I was really depressed by the data this is the chapter I actually wrote last because I was so dreading getting dragged down by the negativity of all the ways women are judge more harshly women are judge more harshly if they use humor in the workforce women are more judge more harshly they use anger if they give feedback to their employees it's critical they're judge more harshly I mean it's like a laundry list. And I was losing my mind reading this data but I found a way to make it practical and constructive and it was this I realize that if you understand what you're up against and you understand what these challenges are that actually have nothing to do with you and your performance you can navigate around them. There's a woman I a woman I interviewed named Ayah Badeer and she founded a kids tech company called Little Bits which she then sold and she's Lebanese and she's a female founder and when she was raising money she said she faced the craziest kind of stereotypes and bias and we've got the rudest questions and she was telling me not some of these comments she heard I was like gosh how do you not get so discouraged that you gave up. What did she deal with like give us an example. Yeah, I'm just going to make room comments her you know there were some women I interviewed one of them said she was an Indian immigrant and someone asked her like when are you going to hire a white male co-founder like you're obviously not going to do this your own like no one's going to ever like you run a company unless you hire a white man to go with you like just things like that that just are so discouraged. That's really messed up actually that somebody would say that happens all the time it happens all the time and so I just wanted to know like I might have given up after that you know I don't know how you keep going and I got this interesting message from a number of women and what they said is once you identify that this bias is like not about you you just like figure out how to go around it. So I have a deer said I thought of it like remembering to bring a jacket when it's cold out you know it's going to be cold you know you're going to be uncomfortable but if you prepare yourself you put on the armor of a jacket you just don't let it bother you. So she said I would go into the meetings I would listen to the feedback some of the comments would be constructive and things that could make my company better and someone would be rude and useless and if I could figure out how to separate the ones that were rude and useless then I could actually learn and get value from the ones that were constructive. And then I wouldn't let the negative stuff get me down and I think there's this idea of once you have and I put it this way in this book like once you can understand the contours of something that's going to be like an impediment to your growth you can better figure out your way around it. And so that's something I like to think about a lot like okay you know maybe I can't change this thing like I used to say like oh my god I want to hear about it if I can't control it if I can't change it like it's not my I'm not even going to waste my time on it but actually it's good to know what the what the challenges are maybe it's good to know do research and find out if your company you know is and you know what what the pay gap is in your company that's valuable research maybe that will empower you to negotiate for more. I just think that again data data data but also using data to not be brought down by something that's challenging and to help forge your own path to success. Another option that's sort of more of a career focused option but if you're looking to raise money you may I guess research the fund or the firm and see who else they've invested. I mean yeah you can find out what other if you're if you're raising money what firms have invested in and then there's you can get information from organizations like like all raise or hashtag angels to make sure you're not giving way too much of your company at a lower you know and getting less for it so it's interesting because it shows a women hold fewer shares of startups even that they've founded and that means that they're not negotiating for as much so it's like a better deal when they're getting those investment checks and part of that is just a lack of transparency. If everyone has more data about how things work how much people are likely to get paid then you're going to have things end up more fair and more equitable. There's some companies that are starting to offer be very clear about what their salary ranges are and especially for entry level jobs. Why let people negotiate and have the people who don't bother negotiate get paid much less they're saying this is our starting you know this is our starting level paid check and this is what it's going to be and so later will will promote you based on performance but they create these very clear systems to strip out any buys and there's some amazing companies such as PayPal and Salesforce that have really led the way I'm using data to eliminate bias from hiring and promotion. I think that to your point before like I also agree that it's not going to be another 50 years I think a flywheel has started and I think that the more data the more exposure that we have the better people will be but it's about educating them and also getting people to also help themselves I think that's a big piece of it. So it's not always it's not always rainbows and unicorns when you go into these situations because not we're not 100% perfect like businesses are not 100% perfect. So like you said you arm yourself you arm yourself you put on the jacket figure what you need to have the jacket that's going to protect you from the situation. But you earlier in the conversation you mentioned you know these women who are so exceptional you know how did they get the 3% of easy dollars and when I started this project I was like you know what I'm going to find that these women just came out. Came out of the womb more one thing or another they came out of the womb more more you know empathetic or more insightful or better and managing people I just thought this is going to be a born trait right that I mean I'm not I'm not a leader you know. But there must be these ingrained traits that some people are more likely to have and the thing that was true across the board is that none of these traits are born. All of these things are developed and the most successful leaders are the ones that fail and learn from their success and get better and figure out what traits they want to develop and build themselves. Karen Simon Becker may have been more likely to be over prepared from the time she was a kid she talked about how you know her grandfather had escaped the Holocaust and so she always had this idea of like belts and suspenders always be prepared to maybe that was like a familial thing that was in her head. But she also had all these successes and failures along the way you know she she watched what happened in we know with 9 11 and that got her thinking about airplane safety she watched what happened with the 2008 2009 financial crash and she lost a lot of money for her clients then and she learned from it. So there's amazing data about how people who do sports in like serious sports in high school and college are more likely to be leaders that is true of men and women I'm not an athlete I was not an athlete in high school or college. But I was really interested in this data why is that do I have to go into a time machine and have been an athlete in high school to benefit from these from from that statistic. And of course that's not possible unfortunately but what I found is there's actually this thing about athletes that is really wildly portable and that's this athletes study their failures when you get off the field you say what went wrong there is this amazing woman in the book named Christine Hunziger she runs a tech company the retail space called castle. And she said after any work situation anything anything any negotiation anything they do a sort of a post event analysis they don't call it post post mortems she's like nobody died we don't have to make this negative let's just analyze what happened and she was a very serious athlete like in high school she did all this board she she played field hockey and in college and rugby she was an amazing athlete. And she she said you just have to analyze everything and what she taught me about the value of athletics is that is all about measuring yourself against your own benchmarks I think about athletics is like people competing against each other. But in business and in life that is not what you want to do you want to say I need as an athlete and Christine did this I need to push myself to be my best version of myself I'm not going to be a good teammate and we're not going to win. Unless I do my part and figure out where I'm now and where I want to go so none of these women came out as amazing leaders no one ever does but it's about figuring out your starting point and then creating benchmarks to create a path to success that's something we can all do I love that okay I want to do I want to do a couple rabbit far to close this out before before I pivot. Final thoughts you want to give over to the audience and then also where's your social your website when's the book coming out all the all the good stuff. Final thoughts I think there's so many fun stories in here my book is full of data and practical takeaways but there are stories in here that I think will make they make me laugh and make me cry a little bit just you know really crazy stories of people overcoming the odds and building amazing businesses so the stories are fun and the takeaways are practical and I think that whether you're just an employee in a company trying to figure out how to get your next your next promotion or whether you have a startup that you want to get off the ground. You can all find paths to leverage our own skills what I always call our own superpowers because we all have them whether we realize it or not so that's my that's my that's my pitch for the book and why it's a fun read and you can find me online my website is julia borsten dot com and the book is called when women lead and it's on Amazon it's at your local book seller and I recorded a version for audible which is really good. You do it yourself and you can find it everywhere did you do it myself really hard recording an audio book is hard but really fun I've heard that it's very I've never written the book but I've heard it's exceptionally hard good for you for doing it yourself it was kind of awesome though all right let's do a couple rapid fire sure biggest challenge you've overcome in your own personal life in my personal life well I'm a mom with two boys. And husband and I think it's figuring out that's the same things I've been figuring out how to balance wanting to be everything for everybody and do a great job and be a great mom and be a great wife and not having all the time in the world and figuring out which things to let go and how to do that without making myself crazy how do you how do you do that how do you balance exceptional career great family what's the what's the seat maybe you don't have a secret maybe it's just trying to figure it out everything. It's a constant process I think you know actually the pandemic really helps sort of strip away all the other stuff and just figure out what are the things I really want to do and that's why I wrote this book during the pandemic I thought this is actually something that's really important it's worth waking up at five on a saturday morning and getting in three hours of writing before my kids wake up so I think just trying to be intentional about how I spend my time my husband and I have a joint calendar that we fill out every Sunday and I think that is really forced me to be like okay what is my family time and when I'm with my family. Can I make sure I'm not distracted on my phone and what is my book time and what is my TV time and I think just trying to be intentional and the planning helps me stick to that when I'm when I'm in the moment and I get distracted. Good okay what keeps you up at night. Oh everything global warming you name it I think that there's so much I want to do and I think it is hard to just to fit it all in but I worry about all the the normal stuff that I'm worried about you know global warming and world peace and all that. If you had to choose one person that I know control over which is why that's not by the way that's not a good thing to worry about but I get it but it's still not a healthy thing to worry about you're going to stress yourself out. If you had to choose one person obviously there's been many but pick one person has been an incredible influence impact mentor in your life who is that person what do they teach you. Well I think I'd have to say my mom because you told me I could do whatever I wanted when I grew up and I think believing that even if it wasn't necessarily true was a great a great boost for me. But I feel like I try to learn from every person I interview and that was one reason I wanted to write this book is because I love asking questions and you never know what you're going to learn from someone and people just surprise you. And I like to ask people the question you asked me of sort of who inspires you or do you have a role model and and I think now people are you know my mom taught me how to ask questions and I think now people are even more willing than ever to really answer things honestly. Again back to the pandemic I think it kind of stripped out some of the the fancy image that people like to put out there and when you're sitting down and talking with someone you just ask questions and my mom can go up to anyone until make friends and elevators. I mean I was actually going to an elevator on the other side to have a new friend but she just believes always that if you really ask someone a question you look them in the eye it will give you great respect for that and I think it's totally true. I love that if you had to pick a book podcast audible something that's impacted your life what would you recommend somebody go check out. I'm going to recommend two books for my friend Ypres ski she's an amazing writer I don't know if you read her stuff and she is two books one is called fair play back to. It's about balancing at work life stuff and it's about how couples can divide the invisible labor not the picking up the kids at school but all the other stuff that people don't talk about and it's a really amazing book that I find actually very practically helpful she wrote another book called unicorn space. I came out more recently and that's about the value of having creative time and I think it's so easy to get caught up and family and work and forget that you're supposed to do things for yourself and that there's actual value in finding creative time for yourself and unicorn space has a ton of data on that so I recommend that one as well. Amazing if you could tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be. You're going to have an amazing career and have more fun than you could have ever imagined that's good I love that okay last question then what does success mean to you wait actually time we do that answer you can totally redo that answer yeah yeah. My 20 year old cell I would say don't be afraid of anything don't hesitate don't wait until you're ready. Nobody actually knows what they're doing even the people who think you think they know what they're doing in reality everyone's all just making it till they make it and then they figure it out and so just try stuff and don't hold back pitch the story you know call the CEO do what it takes to really push yourself out of your comfort zone it took me a while to feel okay pushing myself out of my comfort zone and I wish I done it earlier and more often good answer both of them are good answers by the way they're both very very very valid okay then last. Okay then last question what the success mean to you success I mean what is like what is success to me it interpret the question however you want to interpret the question okay I think success to me is doing something that I am proud of and and is is add some value to the world my job as a journalist is so outward facing sometimes I feel selfish that I get to do stuff that is so interesting to me but I feel like success is something that I enjoy that also has some value and I feel lucky that I get to have both those things something I can tell my kids about and feel good about and and also it's fun for me to do that success that's when you feel you feel good and excited when you wake up in the morning.