Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Decoding Disruptors: Theresia Gouw, Founding Partner at Acrew Capital

Episode Date: March 28, 2020

Welcome to Decoding Disruptors, a special edition of the Finding Mastery podcast presented without interruption by Microsoft.Decoding Disruptors takes a deep dive into the minds of extraordinary women who have disrupted the narrative in their businesses, industries, and communities. Every conversation was filmed and is currently available at decodingdisruptors.com.This conversation is with Theresia Gouw, a founder and partner at Acrew Capital and one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world.During her career, Theresia has helped finance and support some of the most successful companies of our time, being an early investor in Facebook, Trulia, Hotel Tonight, Forescout, and Imperva, among others.Time Magazine named her one of the 40 most influential minds in tech. Equally impressive, Theresia helped break the gender barrier in Silicon Valley.She was often the only woman in the room when she arrived in America’s tech capital…Her focus on the elements she could control, like preparation and hard work, and her ability to gracefully reframe situations were keys to shifting the gender narrative inside the industry._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Finding Mastery is brought to you by Remarkable. In a world that's full of distractions, focused thinking is becoming a rare skill and a massive competitive advantage. That's why I've been using the Remarkable Paper Pro, a digital notebook designed to help you think clearly and work deliberately. It's not another device filled with notifications or apps.

It's intentionally built for deep work. So there's no social media, no email, no noise. The writing experience, it feels just like pen on paper. I love it. And it has the intelligence of digital tools like converting your handwriting to text, organizing your notes, tagging files, and using productivity templates

to help you be more effective. It is sleek, minimal. It's incredibly lightweight. It feels really good. I take it with me anywhere from meetings to travel without missing a beat. What I love most is that it doesn't try to do everything. It just helps me do one very important thing really well,

stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. Okay, welcome to Decoding Disruptors, a special edition of the Finding Mastery podcast. And it's presented without interruption by Microsoft. And so Microsoft has radically transformed under the CEO, Satya Nadella, and with his emphasis on building a culture around mindset, inclusion, and diversity, and the mission to empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. It's radical what they've done. I mean, radical.

And this organization, I've had an upfront view of them for the last handful of years with Compete to Create. They're an organization that truly cares about people and the psychological skills that they need to flourish. And I couldn't be more excited to partner with Microsoft in bringing this series to life. Okay. So Decoding Disruptors, what we're doing here is we're taking a deep dive into the minds of extraordinary women who have disrupted the narrative in their businesses, their industries, their communities. And it starts with how they disrupt the narrative within. And I had the chance to interview nine amazing women for this series. All the conversations were filmed and

they're available at decodingdisruptors.com. We've organized the clips so that you can jump straight to the mindset skills that you're most interested in, like clips from the nine women on confidence and purpose and mindfulness. And I just love how this project pulled together the finding mastery approach to celebrate and understand the genius of these women, how eloquently it fits with Microsoft's culture and their mission and how how Compete to Create is able to distill the mindset principles. And then we've also showed you how to put them into action so that you can train them. I love the spirit of this project. So this conversation is with

Teresia Gao, a founder and partner at Accru Capital and one of the most successful venture capitalists in the world. During her career, Teresia has helped finance and support some of the most successful companies of our time, being an early investor in Facebook, how about it? Hotel Tonight, Trulia, and Impervia, among others. And Time Magazine named her one of the 40 most influential minds in tech. Equally impressive is that Teresia helped break the gender barrier in Silicon Valley. She was often the only woman in the room when she arrived in America's tech capital. And her focus on the elements she could control, like preparation and hard work, and her ability to gracefully reframe situations, were some of the keys to shifting the gender narrative

inside the industry. And with that, let's jump right into this Decoding Disruptors episode with Teresia Gao. Teresia, how are you? It's great to meet you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited for this. I'm really excited to understand how you have shaped the narrative of Silicon Valley. And so, before we get into the psychology of how you've done that, can you give a context and some understanding of how venture capital works in our world?

Sure. So, venture capital is, as the name sounds, it is investing, but it's also really being, I think, the business growth and business development partner for founders, for entrepreneurs. So in the tech space specifically, where I focus is at the very, very first investor, so what we call the series A. And it's interesting because actually in this room that we're sitting in right now, which happens to be my office currently for my venture fund, but this was the room where myself and a couple of my partners walked down the street to give Mark Zuckerberg his Series A term sheet. So maybe that's a perfect example of what is venture capital. That's exactly it. Facebook, a company probably people have heard of before.

But by the way, I'll go into how it's also relevant to the broader economy. So we invest in entrepreneurs who are looking for both capital and board members to help them grow and shape their companies at the very early stages. Hopefully some of the ones that are very successful, like Microsoft and Facebook and Google, end up becoming large public companies. And that's essentially what we do.

And we stay on their boards for five, 10, however many years until they get to that point where they become public companies and that's essentially what we do and we stay on their boards for five ten however many years until they get to that point where they become public companies okay so there's a ambitious part about making money that's part of the business world and you've also got something else that really sets you apart from many vc funds and so can you walk through your unique position in the vc world yeah so, so for me, I hope and I think it's making money for our investors, of course, is the goal because we take money from university endowments and foundations and invest in these companies with the promise to give them a return. So, of course, that's important. But for me, the real reason to do it, and I think for all great entrepreneurs,

is because we want to help them build something that we think is going to make impact in the world. Obviously Microsoft, actually the five largest companies in the United States all received early-stage venture capital backing. So even though we invest a small amount of money compared to other parts of the economy, the impact to the to the US and global economy is really large. And for me and Accru and my partners at Accru Fund, the other angle of it that's really important is, you know, we ourselves are a very diverse team, something that isn't necessarily commonly found in Silicon Valley. And by diverse, I mean along a bunch of different dimensions, obviously,

gender, ethnicity, but also other, our work experiences, the experiences that we've had. And as a result, while we have no specific diversity mandate in our investments, it turns out that almost half of our founders, unlike most venture capital and Silicon Valley backed companies, are diverse founders. That compares to about 4% of venture capital dollars going to women founded companies and maybe about and unfortunately less than that in terms of other underrepresented groups. So 45 versus 4 to 5 we think we're doing pretty good. That and that is your position that we want

to help that segment. We want to back the best founders doing big ideas whether it's in my day job which is in technology or in personal investing whether that's in education or athletics philanthropy so that we don't have a diversity mandate per se because we think the best entrepreneurs are the best entrepreneurs and they want to get money because they're the best at what they do. It happens to be that we have a much more diverse set of founders that we invest in. And we think that's just a reflection of who we are because my founding team at Accru is very diverse. And that's a it's a it's a great expression we also think it's a competitive advantage for us right so it can't possibly be that only

if we just use gender as an example because that's easier to track that 4% of the best entrepreneurs in the world are female as a data person I find that statistically hard to accept as a truth. And so it turns out that our diversity as a founding team at Accru leads us to a more diverse set of people that we encounter and great entrepreneurs that we think are probably being overlooked by the rest of the venture capital community. Okay, so take me back. Now let's get into the psychology and the unique experiences that you've had and how you've navigated those experiences to put you in the position now to impact the world and also impact people that have a unique perspective and diversity

to do that towards that aim. Your parents were Chinese, you were raised in Indonesia, and you came to America at an early age. Can you walk through how that was for you and what you've learned from those experiences? Yeah, so my family is ethnically Chinese, and I was born in Indonesia, came to the United States when I was very young. Grew up mostly in a small town outside of Buffalo, New York, population 2,000. Very different than Silicon Valley. Grew up mostly in a small town outside of Buffalo, New York, population 2,000. Very different than Silicon Valley. And so I think that what that shaped for me is a few things.

So one is I'm pretty used to being the only person in the room who is different from a lot of the other people. So I grew up in a small farming town. We were the only Asian family for miles around. So used to being the only person in the schoolroom, in the community that visibly looked different. So we were immigrants and it was pretty clear that we were immigrants or at least very clear that we weren't from that small town. Can I interrupt? What was that like for you? If you go back to what age are we talking about? So I came to the States when I was three or four and we moved to this small town when I was in first grade. I remember that very specifically because before that we, my dad was, came to the States. He was, my dad was a dentist in Indonesia and my mom was a nurse. When we first came here, like many immigrants, they had to start over.

My dad first worked as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant and my mom was the hostess in that Chinese restaurant until he could get accepted to graduate school in the United States to get recertified as a dentist. So when we did that, we were living in a university town. We were living in Buffalo, but very close to the State University of New York at Buffalo, which is the largest campus there. So it was a much more diverse population. But when we moved to this small town after my dad earned his degree,

and he had always aspired to be, he grew up himself in a small town in Indonesia, and he always wanted to be sort of like the town dentist town dentist where he could know all of his patients so moving there was quite different how did your dad manage that pivot because as a young girl you saw a professional parent professional parents they had white collar jobs or whatever that saying is and then you saw them say okay we're coming to a new country to a new way and're going to do something that they were more skilled. Yeah. You know, they had other skills that were more skilled.

So what did you learn from that experience? So what I learned from that experience was a few things. You know, one is the incredible value of hard work and the willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve your dreams. I mean, I don't think my parents would have said this then, now they know, but like essentially I view my parents as the embodiment of the American dream. And they sort of, they did that because their dreams were for me and my younger sister to have the opportunity to be in the U.S. where if we worked hard enough, believed in education, got good grades in school, then we could do and be whatever we wanted, right? Because in particular, at the time when they,

when we, it's obviously their decision, when we left Indonesia, you know, the Chinese are an ethnic minority in Indonesia during times of political upheaval and in the late 60s, a major regime change., oftentimes the minority is heavily persecuted. And so they kind of grew up in an environment where they knew while they had great educations and white collar jobs, they saw how quickly things could turn if you were in a place that was not as politically welcoming and open to others as the United States was. So that was why they were like, we're getting there.

If we have to restart over again, we're going to make sure that our kids get to grow up in a place where they can work really hard and it won't just be sort of turned upside down if there's major political regime change. So that really kind of embodied that in me. So the fact that, yeah know that they they gave up everything in order to do that it very much sits with you as a child as a person right so like my parents are literally moving halfway across the earth and restarting their lives so that they can give me and my sister a better

shot at achieving what we want to do when we when we're adults. Well in many ways that is what you're doing for many founders. Well I mean look it does put it into context I think that you know the risks that I'm taking in backing founders is minuscule compared to what my parents did right but it does it does help me because it gives me context for that risk right you know we invest in very early stage companies. I talked about some of the ones that have been very big and successful that people might know about. And the fact is a lot of them don't work out. But it gives me that context of, you know what, if you give me context in two ways, one is that risk is a monetary risk and it's people's time and that's obviously very valuable

but the reality is that's very small compared to the risk that a lot like a lot of people not just my parents take every day when they uproot their families in order to pursue you know their version of the American dream but it's also taught me something really important which helps me in my investing life so one is to put risk into context but the other is that fundamentally you're backing people. Yes, it's about the technology, yes it's about the ideas and the markets but it's about the people and you're betting on them to take what is something pretty small to

begin with and grow in that same way parallel to like children, right? Like I view an IPO event, I always think about it this way, as it's not the end, it's the beginning of the next phase. So you kind of think about it like if you think about it as children, it's like we invest in companies when they're still babies or toddlers. Entrepreneurs won't like that analogy,

but just stick with me on this one. And you know, and as they go through, but you know, becoming a public company isn't the end of their journey, it's the beginning of the next phase so I think of it it's like it's like college or grad school graduation right you move from being a student to being in the professional world so you move from being a private company to being a public company but hopefully you know you're continuing to

grow continuing to hire more people build great products for your customers and employ a lot of people and be an engine for growth in the US economy. So it's not the end, it's the beginning of the next phase. Feel safe when you say it that way, right? Because the baby analogy, giving birth to the baby, is much of the heavy lifting at the early phase and then to have it go public feels scary for many people, but that's obviously one of the aims. But before we pull on the business piece of this I am more interested in what it is

what was it like and what is it like two parts of this question what was it like to be a minority as a as a child what did you learn from that as you are operating is this fair to say as a minority in the world of Silicon Valley and certainly in venture capital? So what are the lessons learned? So I think the lessons learned as a child were that two things. One is always always be prepared, always work hard, always, you know, my parents showed this to me, they never said it to me, but what I internalize it is, you know what, you might need to work twice as hard and be twice as prepared as the next person because you, you are different,

you have either a different background or you look different, whatever that then, then what people are used to seeing in whatever context that is, whether that's school or the business world. But you know what? That's not a burden. That's an opportunity because it's an opportunity that we've given you that we didn't have, right? So we took you from a place where, you know, now, yes, you are a minority, but you have the opportunity to work twice as hard and achieve the same as anybody else. And that was always positioned to me as an opportunity as opposed to a burden. So I guess that helps me. I don't view it as a burden. I view it as an opportunity. The other thing which I came to learn later as I came to Silicon Valley and first was an entrepreneur and then became a venture capitalist and, again,

was often the only woman in the room in this case, I viewed it as I took that same approach to, like, you know, I'm going to make sure sometimes people in business and in technology think and assume that people who look different than what they see in Silicon Valley, I use that in air quotes like on the TV show or just what they think, and if you don't look like that, if you're not a white dude in a hoodie, you're maybe not as technical or not as quantitative or not as analytical. And so I just always took that upon myself as a reason to be twice as prepared going into any meeting and to know all

of that information so that when appropriate, I could ask the right questions that would show that I actually had deeply understood their business model and their technology and what was going on. What is that relationship? So there's a, I'm trying to triangulate your relationship between being an immigrant daughter and the responsibility to that we hear from any immigrant saying I feel this family responsibility right that piece and the work ethic instilled that you learn but also you came to understand that hey I might need to be double as prepared I'm whatever that metric is what was that like while you were doing that work?

I'm trying to understand, was there freedom? Was there excitement? Was it like, oh God, why, you know, why do I have to do all this work this way? It's not fair. And maybe it's all of those things. I don't want to pin you into a box, but can you walk through what that was like as you're actually doing the work? So again, I was definitely a geeky kid so I didn't... Wait, hold on, hold on. You were a geek? Oh yeah. Okay, what ages are you talking about? Oh, well all through elementary school, you know, getting into middle school and then of course once you get to middle school and high school, you don't want to be known as geeks. And then you, you hide your inner geek.

So you try to, you try to present to be sort of, you know, cool. But, but when I say geek, I mean, like, I was, I was a bookworm. I loved reading. I couldn't get enough of it. You know, math. I just, you know, I loved learning. So I guess I I know honestly I never felt it was a burden like it was to me like I said I have my parents whatever they did they kind of infused it right like it felt like all right that's great I should always you know my parents like you should all you know extra credit is not extra optional for you you must do it right so it's just kind of just that's just what you do and you just think that that's normal so I never felt that that was a burden, partially too because, like I said, I love learning.

So I think it was fun. It was fun. The only time when I ever felt it was a burden was a little bit like when we talked about how maybe sometimes people have perceptions of you, right? So a classic unconscious bias, right? Because you don't look the way they think an engineering student should look or an entrepreneur or a venture capitalist, I use those just because those are the things that I've been over my life, that other people will perceive you to be less capable, less prepared, less competent. So that would bother me. And it wasn't because I was unhappy doing the extra work in preparation

because I love learning but it would still you know that those are the times if there was ever a discomfort it's then when like I feel like just because of the way I appear when I walk into a room there will be people in the room who will make certain assumptions about my capabilities or lack thereof right right? So when, as a first year engineering student and my best friend who also is female and actually a brilliant, not just engineering student, she is now a biomedical engineering professor at MIT,

so she's pretty smart, a lot smarter than I am actually, but we couldn't get any of the guys to accept us into their study groups because they assumed that we would bring down the quality of the group work because we didn't look like 90% of the other people in our class. So it was a very, and frankly, I struggled my freshman year. I ended up doing okay by the time I graduated, but freshman year was rough for me because I came from not great high school preparation.

But I remember distinctly after that happened going to our first engineering exams where they do a force curve and they plot all of the scores on a little chart and it wasn't me. I was very much in the bottom part of the blob. My friend, Sangeeta, was the dot that was, you know, two standard deviations to the right who literally set the curve and got the highest grade in class. And I remember a couple of the guys who had turned us down before, they were there and they saw that and they don't put the names but she would then this grades and then so she was like, oh wow that that's me and she saw that and they don't put the names but she would then this grades and then so she was like oh wow that that's me and she said that to me and she's too modest she

wouldn't say anything but I am I can sometimes be petty when people don't treat us well and I remember I turned to my left I turned to one of the guys I said you guys didn't want us in your study group big mistake huge mistake that's a good for you. It was a good moment for me. I was riding off of my friend's genius, not mine, but that's okay. Okay, so is it that you have a little bit of a chip on your shoulder, or is it more subtle? Is there something else in the way that you operate? I like to think that as I've gotten older, it's become more subtle, but it's definitely true that I am I am I I'm a fairly competitive person and used to being underestimated for a bunch of different reasons and so I think I am in the right subtle way now not so much in

your face like that last example I was you know whatever I was 18 years old at the time now it would be much more, you know, I do take pleasure internally, keeping it internally, when I'm able to do things or say things or make things happen that maybe disrupt people's stereotypes or their unconscious biases about things, right? So that is part of what drives me. So I think it's more subtle and not so much, you know, like the battery guy on the shoulder, but I think it is definitely something that drives me. And then what is the subtle narrative that you experience? How do the biases, how do you pick up the biases? Is it eye rolls?

Is it talking over you? Is it giving you their back? Like walk me through maybe a board setting when you're walking into a room and include maybe what it feels like to walk into those rooms, let's call it seven, eight, nine years ago. And give me a sense of what is that like? Because I really do want to understand what you do internally to be able to meet that challenge. Yeah so I'll start actually with the new company pitch and then we'll move to a board meeting because those are the two major ways that venture capitalists spend their day right. So earlier in my career when you go to a new company meeting it could be sometimes subtle and not so subtle. So

sometimes in the not so subtle even before the meeting you know literally it could be walking down the hallway and having an entrepreneur ask you know either when is the you know can you you know can you help me with getting my slides to work on the on the story you're the tech because yeah Yeah, you're an assistant. So you can show me where things are and how to connect things together sometimes. Okay, so let's stay there. How do you, what did you do?

That's probably a moment for you. What did you do in that moment? So what I always do for all of these is I've learned that people, if you take the point of view, people are inherently good. they're not out to try to make anybody feel uncomfortable or bad, so you don't need to call people out on that. And I found that, so assume it's an honest mistake and use a little bit of humor to disarm

people and just be like, oh, you know what, I don't really know how to do that, but I'm happy to get one of the assistants who does know how to use the conference room right and so it's not like making Michael feel bad I'm just sort of I'm finding a solution and you know and sometimes if they look uncomfortable I'll even laugh I'll be like don't worry I take it as a compliment that you think I'm young enough to be an assistant or young enough to be an intern because I also would sometimes get that like oh are you you college intern so I turn it around is like it's a positive like don't worry I think I think it's a you know now in meetings

when it's more serious sometimes what would happen is people would either if I was in a room with one of my colleagues could be somebody even junior to me not even somebody who was up here. A lot of times entrepreneurs would direct all of their presentation. They would look at this person, not at me. And not you. Or they would direct their questions. So then you're fighting for attention. Yeah.

Do you fight for the attention? So what I learned early on, right two things. One is you know what you can do for yourself is you know engage in the conversation early. This is where sort of being prepared helps right. So like I actually you know one or two slides and I already know what the general pitch is about. I've already got some questions in mind, some things to engage with. So as soon as you do that, obviously when you ask a question, the person needs to turn their attention to you and they need to engage with you.

So that's something that you can do for yourself. But I also think that there's a lot that our allies can do with this. So when I knew this would happen, I would talk, a lot of my partners are great guys and allies in this and they would notice when this would happen and they would they would actually turn to me and so to make the other person uh look at me as well right so they would turn to me and they'd be like teresa what do you think about this right so if i had not already you

know there's you would yourself can engage but your partner your allies can engage you in the conversation and then that way it kind of breaks it up so it stops being sort of michael what are you doing what are you thinking to you know addressing both of us and is that pre-planned is that part of strategy or is that part of the social eq that's taking place where your allies and colleagues will open up to include you in um maybe now hopefully it just happens but um before it was something that i would definitely yeah it was something that one of my first, one of, when I was a management consultant, one of my first vice presidents who was female

shared that bit of advice with me. So then I kind of took that with me wherever I went and one did for myself, but then second, yeah, like would talk to him, like we're going into this meeting. If this, you know, you don't have to say it once, like they're pretty up, you know, hey, Mike, we're going to this meeting. If this, you know, you don't have to say it once, like they're pretty up, you know, hey, if we're ever in a meeting and it turns out that the person is directing all of their comments and questions to you, can you please just make sure

to like turn to me, ask me a question, engage me in it so that it's not awkward. Right. Beautiful. Okay. So your response is really grounded in a gracefulness, a dignity of the other person. So you're not trying to get bigger and take up space and demand or command something. There is a gracefulness to the way you respond when you notice the bias. I mean, I try. Again, you've learned over time, right? I think you get much further that way when you include everyone in the process and have a better meeting that way trying to talk louder stand taller which wouldn't have worked for me anyway then everybody else in the room frankly a wouldn't have

worked for me but B I've seen it backfire for other people right especially again as a venture capitalist in this business right like the entrepreneur is sort of the person right we? We are there to be, the analogy would be the coach, right? They're the player, they're the star. So I think that doesn't work in general, personally. I don't think that works in general for a venture capitalist, male or female, but certainly I don't, would have worked for me personally.

So part of it is just for everybody, you know, find what works for you. And yes, what worked for me was really to be much more subtle about it, pull people in. And then if something really, you know, something that you feel you have to comment on, you would make light of it, right, as a joke,

instead of making people feel bad. I think people want to have things run in the best way and be as inclusive as possible. And sometimes we all, you know, make mistakes. And calling people out on it, I haven't found that that was particularly successful, at least for me. So there have got to be other ways around it. But humor almost always seems to work. How do you navigate that inner dialogue to help you build confidence or to be confident?

What is that inner dialogue for you? You know, that has probably been the hardest part. So who's my worst critic? Me. Who's hardest on themselves? Me. I think a lot of people probably feel that way. What do you say to yourself that is critical? Like what are those statements that you feel comfortable sharing? Well, for a long time, I was very focused on being perfect. Of course, nobody's perfect, but right. So like as much as possible, everything had to go

exactly. I like to plan. I'm a planner, so things should go as I plan. If I do enough preparation and work hard enough, it should, you know, A should be B, then F. And for me anyway, the biggest lesson to getting rid of, and I still have some of my OCD perfectionism, but letting go of some of that was actually becoming a parent, becoming a mom. You learn very quickly that you actually have very little control over these tiny creatures, and less so as they grow. And so you

can't plan for everything. You can't control everything. Things can't all be sort of planned out and perfect. So part of it is my own, when I start to feel that inside, I talk to myself and I think of an example where, you know what, it's turned out that you just have to let go. This is gonna be what it's gonna be. You have to try to work hard and shape it as much as you can, but you can't control it. Just like, I say literally inside my,

I can no more control this company, this founder, this situation, this meeting, because there are multiple people any more than I was ever able to control either of my children when they were young. Are you better, is one of your internal crown jewels reframing situations to match your philosophy? Is that how you work?

Let me take it a step further. When you see something that isn't quite the way that you would hope. Yeah. It's not necessarily according to plan, but it's like, this doesn't feel right. It seems to me that you have this ability to reframe it. Yeah, I never thought of it that way before. But, yeah, I mean, I guess I do that in my own mind, and I try to think about, you know, what the positives are, what things are

working, you know, and focus on that. Not to ignore the things that are challenges, but, you know, try to have that right balance of not just focusing on the things that aren't working. So I don't know if it's a complete reframing, but it's more like in my own mind I do sort of a plus minus, and I try to make sure that I don't lose sight of the things that are going according to plan or that are working well, and just focus on the things that are not, right? To have that appropriate balance. Okay. As you have disrupted the narrative in Venture Capital and Silicon Valley, what does it sound like in your own self, your own mind? What are the things you say to yourself that are like,

when I say these things, I feel great. What is that narrative? What are those words and phrases and sentences that help you feel that you are your best? I think that when, to me it's always about the interaction with the other person, so not just what I say, but how we're interacting together. I'm very much a people person. I think if I think about sort of what's and it's actually one of the key things I think in venture is being able

to read people understand what motivates them and and therefore also help them to achieve their goals. And so to me when I feel like wow this has been a really good day or a really great meeting because by the way I never think about like I'm reshaping the day. I don't know i just i feel like you know i'm doing my day job i happen to really love it and i enjoy the people that i work with both my partners at my firm as well as the entrepreneurs that i work with and a really great interaction is the following it's like you know we're having a discussion about could be a board meeting or just a one-on-one about something about the business whatever is top of mind for the entrepreneur.

And I ask a question or make an observation or a suggestion, and the response is, that's really helpful. It helped me think about something. You know, I was, you know, they don't necessarily say these words. But essentially, it's like, this has been a great dialogue because I've been, I've been going over and over like how to solve X or Y, like trying to figure out what the right decision points were for the product roadmap, or, you know, what's the right nugget in our go-to-market strategy, or who are the right business development partners for us. And by having this dialogue, like, this is like, okay, like okay I got it now this is this is what we're gonna do and I feel like that's that's a that's a really great day and those are the interactions that I love

and what is it that you say to yourself about yourself that helps you feel big that helps you feel strong that helps you feel most animated in life? What are those specific statements? That I say to myself internally? About yourself. I guess that I really enjoy partnering with people and helping them take their ideas and make them into either reality and or bigger. Like I love, I love, I love growth. I love change. You know, I love technology, right? But not for the sake of

technology. I love it for the ability to, it's like nothing gets me more excited than the idea, like I can meet somebody and it's like, it's an idea or still very, very early and then, you know, a year later it's a product that's out in the market and two or three years later now it's like the biggest thing in its market, right? And maybe five to ten years later, you know, where they're ready to graduate from college and they're ringing the bell at NASDAQ or NYSE. Those are, you know, and it's, but there's a lot of smaller moments along the way, which are the prior conversation we just had, which is just like feeling like you're a part of it, right? Like by having the dialogue, you introduce an idea

or a question that helps the other person make that next progress. But of course, the milestones are super exciting. Would you mind if I take a moment to try to connect some dots about how I'm understanding you? Okay. Okay. So at your core you are optimistic about what could become. The fundamental belief that the future is bright and people are good is the evidence of how you see the world and others. You started this life with understanding risk. You watched your parents work through risk.

And so you have a deep appreciation as a businesswoman in a risk-taking venture about what real risk is. So you've got a beautiful calibration between those two. You've done the hard work. And it's not that you just grind. You found something that you become animated in that learning process. And then as you move through worlds, whatever rooms those are, you are aware of the biases. You're aware of the criticalness or the dismissiveness that might happen, but you don't become burdened by it. It's like

you work with it and you've figured out social strategies from others and within yourself to eloquently adjust to the unfortunate bias that we hold. And in that frame it sounds to me and it feels to me that you've got an animation for life that you really want to see beautiful things take place, and that is much of your true north. And so what sounds and feels like to me is you've got a strong sense of confidence. You've figured out how to be eloquent and have your arousal levels and activation levels match the environment so that you can pick up the right cues. Your social IQ is high, your EQ is high high and you use both of those to discern risk

and strategy and the magic for you is engaging with people to understand what they want to do and how you can be a supporting mechanism for them i think that's said very beautifully much better than i could have said myself but i think it's definitely spot on. Like I fundamentally, I get very energized by being around people. I love what I do. So it doesn't feel like work. So even kind of going back to the early, early days, like you said, like the reason why it's like, did it feel like a burden to have to like do twice as much homework? No, I loved it. It was, you know, again, I didn't want to tell anybody in high school that, but it was energizing to me. So I think, yeah, fundamentally, I think if you find, for me anyway, if you find something that you truly enjoy doing, and for me that definitely has to be around sort of working with other people.

I could never be someone who had an avocation, a vocation that was more solitary. It's just not my personality. And so I feel very lucky to be in the job that I'm at and doing what I'm doing because I get to work every day, both with the people that I choose to invest in, but even the people just that I meet. They all are incredibly bright, ambitious, energetic, and they all believe that what they're doing is going to meaningfully impact the world in some way. They don't always make those huge value statements, but I know that at their heart, the true entrepreneurs, that's why they're doing what they're doing. So I feel like it's a privilege to get to work with people like that. I think the impact of not having diverse

voices and technology is that a lot of times both the products that get created are created for the creators and sometimes you can think of funny examples like the original the original iphone didn't have any female engineers on it so the touch screen didn't work if you had long fingernails which many women do so they had to rework it. But sometimes it can have, obviously, less humorous consequences, like what we've been reading about with artificial intelligence and facial recognition. So I think the consequences are real.

And the only way to fix it is to actually have more diverse people at the table, whether that's the product table building things or the people coming up with the business plans and the models and who they're selling to. What do you say to parents who their daughters have a rich understanding and appreciation for math and they want to go the STEM route but the system is not quite designed to keep them in the STEM system. So what do you say to parents, to those daughters? So I think for parents whose children are interested in STEM but they don't fit the

current stereotype of who that is, whether that's you know they're female or they're underrepresented, I would just say the biggest thing that you can do for your children whether it's STEM or anything else is if they find something that they genuinely enjoy doing and studying and learning about encourage it because they're going to be good at it and then what we can do is try to find them role models that look more like them and the power of role models is is real and important I'm involved in a couple of not-for-profits that are doing things like that.

So one is DonorsChoose with the I See Me program, and it's proven time and again that there's nothing more powerful for a child than having teachers where they can see themselves in it. And the other thing is, you know, there is huge dropout in STEM fields at various ages, both in middle and high school, and then again at the university level and a lot of times

the role model piece isn't just like seeing obviously that's great but just seeing what you can do with that education so if it was my friend who is a doctor said if nobody knew what a doctor was we would have much higher dropout rate in organic chemistry because the connection between what does this have to do with being a doctor and so the challenge is you know many children don't know a computer scientist or a mathematician or an engineer so when they're going through freshman physics and it's not so fun so that's why I think if they're interested in something try to find someone who they can see what you, what could they do with that if they continue studying that.

What could they do in the real world? And that has proven to be one of the most powerful things that keeps students of all backgrounds in that field. So I believe that culture in the context of businesses, because that's where I operate every day, is critically important. So I won't quote all the numbers and studies because I'm sure most people have seen them, but I feel like it's so important because fundamentally, I believe businesses are about people. And so the people who work with you, if you have a shared culture, that really pulls the team together and allows you to achieve much greater goals. People need to feel like they have a shared belief in what they're doing above and beyond just the dollars and cents or the bits and bytes.

What is the culture that you're trying to build in your companies? So the culture that I'm trying to build both at my firm, Accru Capital, and in our companies is very much, maybe hopefully not a surprise with our name, Accru, which is C-R-E-W, is all around team and the power of teams. You know, in Silicon Valley, a lot of the narrative is the story of, it's sort of like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the solo hero founder. When you look in reality, right, Microsoft, yes, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. So the reality is it's usually about teams, and yes, the founders, and then the team that they create around them. So at the core, we believe in teams, we believe in a team approach to how we both partner with our entrepreneurs and our companies, but also how we work together as partners within a crew. What makes a great teammate?

I think what makes a great teammate is someone who is as passionate and driven as you are about the cause, whether that's an athletic team or a business team, but also someone who literally thinks about what's best for the team before they think about what's best for them as an individual. You know, I know there's the hokey, there's no I in team, but I think it's pretty true. So my advice for women or other, you know, non-majority groups going into domains where clearly it's mostly other than what they are, you know, the question of, you know, non-majority groups going into domains where clearly it's mostly other than what they are. You know, the question of, you know, do you fit in or do you fly, you know, stand out and be yourself?

Look, personally, I think that's a very personal decision for each person. And I've also seen it change over time. So I'll just give the answer of like what worked for me, realizing that, you know, it's now 20 plus years later. So for me, what worked was entering in, whether that was engineering or startups or in venture capital, it was mostly to fit in, meaning be, you know, be very, very excellent at the things that people want that role to be excellent at. In the beginning, I actually even thought that meant I needed to fit into the dress code, which today would be jeans and hoodies.

But in the late 90s, during the first internet wave, it was khakis and button-down shirts. So those of you who know me now know that is definitely not the way I would dress, but I went out and bought a whole bunch of light blue and navy blue button-down shirts from Banana Republic and some really horrible khaki pants so that I would look like all the other male VCs. I would not advise that again. But anyway, but as I became more confident in myself and my investing career and had, you know, more companies that were doing well.

Then I felt that, you know what, this is really, like, I feel I've, I felt confident enough that I'd proven I can do the things that people expect me to do well, and then now I can be myself. And that was in everything from literally the way I dressed, which was mostly dresses and high heels, very different than the khakis, but also then kind of using that as an advantage, right? So realizing that, you know what, if I'm in a boardroom, and I do this sometimes, and I counted around the table between board members and management team members, there were 17 people in the room. I was the only female in the room. You could take that and say, wow, this is terrible.

Or you could take that and say, look, I've been here long enough. They know what I can do. If I have something to say, I'm just going to say it. I'm going to say it the way I would say it, not necessarily the way a guy would say it. I'm not going to pound my fist on the table or stand up. It's not me. They would probably laugh at me. So be yourself.

And I think that whenever you feel that confidence, for me, it took me some time. But if you feel perfectly confident the first time you walk into that room, I say go for it. How do you operate without a map? So I would, for those who are interested in a longer story about that, I would point to a book called Alpha Girls, of which I'm one of four women who are portrayed in it. All four of us are successful venture capitalists and or entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. None of us came from here. None of us obviously had a map.

The short answer is, you know, I think that there are always maps, but you need to look, you need to find, you need to connect your own dots is what I would say so look for the people or the things that you relate to and or where you want to go to and then make it your own right so yeah there were no female venture capitalists around the table when I joined the my firm but there were certainly other successful venture capitalists and so I could and everyone had a different style so I would take you know the learnings from you know this partner or that partner or that partner and what were the things that felt like okay those are things that play to my strengths things

that I can do things that I'd like to achieve and build my own map by connecting my own dots disruptors are people who are following their passions and not afraid to take some calculated risks to get to their goals. You're a gift. Thank you for this time. Thank you for what you're doing and what you represent in the world of business and humanity. And I'm honored to spend the time with you. So thank you. Oh, thank you. It's been a pleasure. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're

listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously. And the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love newsletter to sign up. The show wouldn't be possible without our sponsors and we take our recommendations seriously. And the team is very thoughtful about making sure we love and endorse every product you hear on the show. If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com slash sponsors. And remember,

no one does it alone. The door here here at finding mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same so join our community share your favorite episode with a friend and let us know how we can continue to show up for you lastly as a quick reminder information in this podcast and from any material on the finding mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your healthcare providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening.

Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.