LadyGang - LG QUICKIE: Lauren Maillian

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Entrepreneur, author, and interim CEO of digitalundivided, Lauren Maillian, joins us to talk about The Do You Fund, being the youngest self made winery owner at 19 and finding ways to be a driving force for inclusion and innovation so that women can build their own brand. Thank you to our sponsors! Chomps – Order CHOMPS now at chomps.com/ladygang using the code ladygang and get 15% off your entire order. Home Depot – For a limited time, you can save even more on the styles you love when you use code LADYGANG10 at checkout when you shop at homedepot.com/decor.  Stamps – Start your 4 week trial with free postage and a free digital scale at stamps.com. Click th e microphone at the top of the homepage and enter code LADYGANG.   See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's time for a quickie. Podcast One presents The Lady Gang, The Hollywood Girl Posse with Lady Gang Quickie. Here's Kelty Knight, Becca Tobin, and Jack Vanek. Let's make this quick. Our guest today started her first brand when she was 19 years old, and it was wine. She wasn't even legal to drink,

and she thought, we need more wine in our lives, and that's why she's our gal. She's the interim CEO of Digital Undivided, and that company created the Dooney Fund. And you might've heard about the Dooney Fund because we are donating on behalf of our express collection right now. The Dooney Fund is so important because they make micro investments in black entrepreneurs. And this woman's story is incredible. After graduating with a degree in international trade and marketing from FIT, she has basically been all over the world as a marketer, as someone that major brands across

the globe have brought in to just humanize their brands and tell them what the people of the world actually want. And she also has a memoir. The book is called The Path Redefined, Getting to the Top on Your Own Terms. She's a mama to two babies, and we're so excited to welcome her into the Lady Gang today. You will be so inspired when you hear this woman's story. Please welcome to the Lady Gang, Lauren Myland. Welcome. Yay. That was amazing because I wrote it backwards. I thought I started at the bottom of my page and read back. I don't know. It's a COVID time. Hi. Hi, ladies. Was most of that right? You hit the nail on the head. Okay, good. Thank you. Thank you for the introduction and for having me on. I loved your spin on the story,

so I might even take a bit from your intro and use it for myself in the future. I think this is fun. Your story is so unreal. So first of all, let's talk about how we connected and then I want you to inspire all of our ladies. So talk to me about Digital Undivided and how you became a part of it and are running it and then how the Dooney Fund branched off just in the past few months. Yeah. So I have been, I guess, rewind almost 10 years now, which is when I started angel investing in the space. So soon after I sold my first business, um, the vineyard and winery that I had started that made me the youngest self-made winery owner in the country. I often joke that like watching grapes grow for years is not that exciting. So having the

opportunity to, um, get, get really involved in the tech startup ecosystem, um, making investments, advising, building things quickly, pivoting, scaling, all of the things that make innovation really fun were super attractive to me. So when we go back kind of that far is when I met the founder of our organization, Catherine Finney, in 2011 at the very first conference. So it did actually started as a conference. And I advised her from that point forward and the organization became super involved as an advisor and a mentor. And then ultimately in the last couple of years on the board of directors. When we were having our leadership transition, I was unanimously appointed into the role of CEO. The work that we do is so important. I'm so passionate about it,

especially now. And I joke, and I don't mean to be trite because it's not a ha-ha joke. It's more of a look at life and where sometimes life leads you and higher powers set you up to be places that you didn't expect to be, but you know that you need to be there. And this is that moment for me at Digital Undivided right now as CEO, which is I care so deeply about women creating their version of the path redefined. I wrote on that six years ago and helping women get to the top on their own terms. And then you take that a step further. And I care so much about helping women of color level up and succeed in new spaces, especially those that were not designed for them to succeed. And so to be able to be in the driver's seat right now at Digital Undivided,

where we work every day to catalyze the genius of Black and Latinx women in spaces of innovation and entrepreneurship, and to really shape the future of inclusion and innovation is an honor. And that's an understatement because I said yes in May, thinking that I was leading an organization going through the pandemic. And when I started officially on June 1, though I was doing a lot of work behind the scenes before that, we were in a different world and I was running a very different organization just given, you know, the racial reckoning and everything else that's happening. So again, you know, sometimes we look back and we're like, okay, you really want me here right now. And so those are the signs from the universe. And it's a wonderful time to be at

the helm of the organization. And, you know, a lot of my background and my expertise, as you mentioned, was and is in humanizing brands and storytelling and driving innovation and sometimes doing a little bit of disruption. And right now our space being the social impact space, you know, diversity and inclusion, the nonprofit sector needs and is so ripe for disruption and innovation right now. So I'm super excited to be able to put a spin on the work that we do at a time when the spin couldn't be more important. And part of that is the Dooney Fund. And we're actually in the process of renaming the Dooney Fund right now to the Do You Fund. Oh, cute. But it was named after a grandmother. It was, yeah. So it was named after Catherine Finney's grandma. So we started it when

I was on the board and Catherine was still in the seat as CEO, but there's obviously like a deeply personal connection there for grandma. And so in thinking about, you know, how important micro investing has now become to what we do as an organization going forward to making sure that women have quick, easy access to micro-investment capital to help them stay in the arena is super important to us. And knowing that women are going to continue needing those infusions of capital to kind of pinch hit moments where you feel like you have your back up against the wall. So the essence of the Juni Fund has always been to allow women to stay in the arena and to also women of color that we trust them with money. And often that is something that's a luxury in

many ways when women of color think about investment because they're not trusted with capital in the same way as white people are, quite frankly. So the essence of that is to do you. And we want to empower women to always do them and do and create pathways for progress and success that they feel are the right decisions to make. And sometimes you can't quantify your intuition. You can't ask anyone else to quantify their intuition. So I don't know why we have a different standard for women of color. We've been able to hear so many incredible success stories.

What is your all-time favorite? I think the success stories that I am most proud of are the ones where our research either helped a woman get funding because it put hard cold facts and figures behind what she was already trying to illustrate um but sometimes you also need like a third party to back you up right so even if she had the facts and figures it's still not enough because it's like oh well that's self dealing or oh that's just you know you're biased clearly well okay well let's have a third party come out with the data then what um and you know and our data and our work is co-signed by so many incredible institutions who back us so the amount of fact checking that we go through um i know that

we that that work helps validate a position for a woman of color who is fighting for her worth and at the core of our work is to create a world where all women own their work because we truly believe and we know that economic development is key to economic empowerment and that when you own your your work you're able to own your worth because you're in the driver's seat of you know you get to determine if you sink or swim once the playing field is level, which obviously it still is not. The other success stories I'm really proud of are like Azariah Scott Washington, who came through Digital Undivided and is a program alum with her app Canoodle, which was years ago, but that entrepreneurial experience, that startup experience of her own allowed her

to grow as an innovator and an entrepreneur and expose her to the technology ecosystem and startup ecosystem in a way that she would have never had had she been working through the bureaucracy of a large corporation or something and said, hey, I want to change lanes and be an innovator. They would have said, huh? And then they would have owned anything she innovated. Yes. Right. Then they own your IP. They always want to take your intellectual property with them. Yeah. And so I'm also super proud of the success stories where, you know what? It's like your entrepreneurial experience allowed you to stretch your muscles to become an innovator. And what we care about is creating and driving the shift for inclusion in innovation. It doesn't

mean you have to be an entrepreneur, but maybe your entrepreneurial experience is a stepping stone like it was for Zariah to go then be one of the first team members at Uber in Washington, DC. She left Uber as their general manager, ran and stood up their freight business. And now she's an SVP at Expedia. So look, check, check, check. Our mission is still accomplished. Whether you are an entrepreneur long-term or whether your curiosity and commitment to innovation leads you to become an entrepreneur because nobody else is willing to give you that shot that you have to create for yourself as a stepping stone for future opportunities. I love that. When we come back, Lauren is going to inspire you with her insane life. The Lady Gang. Okay, we're back. All right.

So here's my question. You're 19 years old. You have this idea. I want to fast forward past this. And then you went, so you sold the company. You're like, I'm 21 years old and I'm a, you know, finished selling my first business while I was like getting drunk in the corner of a club in New York city. Um, and I'm just checking all of them, which, which one wasn't I at, uh, uh, you know, dark cranberry vodka phase. Um, and then you go back to school. No. So, um, this is actually the funny part. And I talk about this a lot because it is so interesting to me how the expectations of men, the assumptions related to what people expect of men are so different from what they expect of women. So oftentimes people will say

to me, hey, Lauren, you did all of this. So you didn't go to college though, right? And I'm like, no, I did. So the timeline is that at 18, I purchased the property. At 19, I turned it into a vineyard. I sold grapes to other wineries that were making gold, double gold wine out of my fruit for the first two years from the time I was 19 to 21. I was a vineyard owner. Then as there was a bidding war for my fruit because it was that good, who knew? I said, I know it's like so random, like you want my fruit? Like, I mean, imagine you're like, this is my biggest asset, my grapes over here. It sounds so crazy to say now, but it was, and it's a thing and it's a crop and it's a commodity and it's important and it powers

is an entire industry. We know it's important. Every night I know it's important. But so from 19 to 21, I was a grape grower and then broke ground on the facility, opened the facility when I was 22. At this point, I was also pregnant in my last trimester with my first child. So this is summer of 2007. We opened to the public August of 2007. I graduated FIT December of 2007. I actually took what a year. It was a crazy quarter. It was a crazy year and an absolute crazy Q4. Um, so I, I opened to the public August of 07, had my son Jaden, um, December 15 of 07. And I took my very last exam, um, December 12th of 2007. Were you born this way? Did you train yourself? Like, have you been a go-getter? Were you like

organizing the whatever in first grade, like, is this who you are innately? Or is this something you can teach? This is who I am innately. And it is something that I have learned to be able to teach. So during, during quarantine, in the very beginning of our kind of worldwide mandated stay at home order in March, I was getting so many messages from women saying, Lauren, what about my personal brand? What am I doing? Where am I going from here? How are they going to remember me when, you know, I'm not in an office and they don't see me every day. I'm not prominent on social. I'm not prepared for this digital world. I'm not prepared to look for jobs or even, you know, I don't, I don't even look attractive to get hired for a job because I'm not as digitally

present as I should be. And so I actually created through my women's community straight up and successful online, which has always housed my community and programs for women. And I have a course on the path redefined, but then it straight up and successful. I said, I have to do something for women right now. And so we very quickly created and I built out a robust curriculum around a personal branding bootcamp that has grown like wild, especially during this time. So I do think it's possible to teach. And what I think is possible to teach, I'll say it this way what is innate is the ability to hustle multitask and execute right so some of that can be learned some but a lot of it is is innate because you can you can learn it but can

you sustain it if you learn it if you if you don't really have the innate ability to do so I don't know I've been doing this a long time now I've been doing this almost 16 years So I think you're either built for it or you're not. But what can absolutely be taught and be learned is how women can confidently share their skills and build and create a personal brand. And so I'm super passionate in general about making sure that women are equipped to level up and that they have the resources available to them to do so. And I think personal branding is the start for sure. And so many women who come into the personal branding bootcamp that's straight up and successful are saying, okay, great, but I work corporate and they're going to look at me like, who do I think I am? And it's like, no, it depends on how you position yourself, right? If you position yourself as, you know, I want to have this edge and this air to me that is off-putting, then it'll be off-putting, right? But if you position it as, here's my experience and I just want to let you know that this is who I am and this is how you can leverage me and this is additional value that I bring

to the table, then it's also received as such. And so I think we as women for so long have downplayed our accomplishments, you know, allowed other people to put us in boxes. We don't even say what we're best at because people always say, Oh, I think you should do. And you dare say, well, no, I can also do something else, but there's a way to communicate it. And there's a way to, yeah, and there's a way to, there's a way to say, to garner the respect and the recognition that so many women want and deserve. And I'm really, I'm super, super, super passionate about that. We watch men all the time get opportunities from merely confidence mixed with some arrogance.

And we always have girls writing in a lot of questions about how do I build my personal brand? How do I make people believe in me the way that I believe in myself? And it's like, well, clearly you're not showing that you're believing in yourself. Because if you were a man, you'd have like this opportunity times six because there's such- By default. By default.

like I watched my husband on phone calls and God bless him. Like he's, he's successful, but you know, a lot of that is just a really good cocktail of confidence and arrogance and a little bit of knowledge. It's so true. It's, it's, it's so true. I have a question. So there, I mean, we're obviously in a super weird time and a lot of girls have lost their jobs. And I feel like a lot of women are trying to start side hustles or trying to start a brand and that is overwhelming in itself. and then, you know, starting a brand as a woman of color or a black woman, you have all these extra obstacles. So what would be like one piece of advice for the beginning steps of a woman that's trying to start her own thing, especially kind of in the COVID times? I think that other than

personal branding bootcamp, what women can do is to make sure that they are looking at their network with more intention. And I think that especially for younger women, what I'm seeing is that, um, and I say younger as if I don't consider myself young, which sounds so silly because I do, but I also realized that people are calling me an OG in the space recently. And I'm like, Ooh, I don't know if I want to be an OG, but okay. I guess so. Um, and also- They call us that in the podcasting space too. And I'm like, does that mean we're old? Like, yeah, it's like, I don't really, I don't want to be an OG, but I know you mean it in a respectful way. But I think that there needs to be more intentionality. And especially with younger

women, younger people who are being told, well, this is how you network. To them, it's like racking up LinkedIn connections. But if you have that LinkedIn connection who accepted just because they're your first degree connection does not mean that they are in your network or that they are a resource. And the other thing too, is realizing and being really, really hyper aware of even though you're connected to someone who has access to something, do not expect that they will be your connection to that resource. Right. And I was having this conversation with a longtime girlfriend of mine, woman of color, big time marketer as well. And, and she said, somebody gave her an introduction to a big, big CMO somewhere who needs help. And she goes, do you know how many people

I am connected to on LinkedIn who know this same person, but this one person is the one who made the intro. These other people were not willing to share that resource with me. So it's like, It's two things. It's don't assume that the connection is a real connection just because it's a social media connection. Like actually make the attempt before you even think you need that person to cultivate a relationship so that there is reciprocal value there, right? Like I believe in two-way conversations, two-way value building, two-way relationships always. And then take it a step further and say, just because this person has XYZ connection, recognize that they might not be the person. Maybe that's not their strongest connection. Maybe that is their deepest

connection. They don't want to share it, but don't make the assumption, oh, I'm connected to so-and-so and they're connected to such-and-such and they're going to introduce me. Yeah. Probably not. And I think that particular example with my conversation with my girlfriend was so important because she was literally like, I have a hundred and something mutuals with this person, with this CMO. Like when you look at their, they were her second degree connection. And out of those hundred plus like 105 people, I think it was one person said, I'm going to open my, my network to you and make this connection. Right. I love this. Um, well we need to have you back like every week. Cause I'm so inspired. I'm like, I gotta go get my grapes cooking. Um, you guys, if you want to follow

Lauren, which I know you do, I recommend her Instagram. It's just Lauren Milan, but Milan is M-A-I-L-L-I-A-N. We're going to link it in our socials. But if you go on her link tree, everything she talked about today is here. You can sign up for the personal branding bootcamp. You can sign up for her live camp. You can get the book. You can link to Digital Undivided. Everyone get out of your pajamas and do something today like Lauren, okay? Can I ask a quick question just because of my own curiosity? Your donations, do you find that it's mostly women uh donating and making those financial commitments to you guys i do so what's interesting is that um because of this moment in time there are more there's a spotlight on us as

an organization and our work and what i'm also finding is that especially for women-led you know small, medium size businesses, even early stage startups. I mean, because to be frank, the super early stage startups are saying, Hey, look, we might not have cash, but we want to do something special and give you donation of proceeds. And then when they see what is interesting is that again, what's been said for a long time is now being illustrated in action, which is that when you align yourself with diverse initiatives, it's also good for business. It's not just like a do good, look good, feel good, it is actually good for business. So some of the smaller companies that are women-led who don't have the capital to give upfront have said, hey,

how about a percentage of proceeds deal or proceeds or what have you? And then they write back and say, oh my God, when we announced this partnership, we had the gangbuster on sales. And we got all these notes about how excited people were to also do good with their purchase. awesome you're amazing we're coming over for wine and banana bread next time we're in new york please do and i'm coming to you when i'm in la as soon as i'm hopping on a plane again yes please please amazing well we weren't here for a long time but we were here for a good time thanks for listening and make sure to rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcast we have new episodes of lady gang every tuesday and thursday follow us on social media at the

lady gang uh follow us personally at kelty most importantly at becca and at jack banik the lady gang network is produced by will sterling steve delamater kirsten woodward and elizabeth beckwet thanks for rating and reviewing wherever you get your podcasts and tune in for new episodes every single week