Women on the Move Podcast

Ballet, banking, and the innovation economy, with JP Morgan’s Melissa Smith

As head of specialized industries at middle market banking at J.P. Morgan, Melissa Smith is focused on helping female and diverse founders grow and scale over time. She sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss the innovation economy, her passion for supporting women in business, and how her early life as a ballerina prepared her for a banking career.

From ballerina to banker

Melissa says she developed early skills in discipline, commitment, and focus from her classical ballet training. She began studying ballet at age 4, and by the seventh grade, her mother was driving her 120 miles a day to train in Washington D.C. Between her determination, her family’s support, and the willingness of teachers to re-arrange her high school schedule so she could finish classes by noon, Melissa ended up graduating high school a year early and starting a professional ballet career. 

By her early 20s, Melissa made the decision to give up dancing in order to go to college full time, eventually earning her master’s in public policy from the University of Chicago. Straight out of that program, she joined JPMorgan Chase in public finance. “For me, the public finance role was a great way to leverage the quantitative skills I had acquired at school with my interest in the public sector,” she tells Sam.

From the associate program, Melissa moved to the debt capital markets team, where she got to experience the fast-paced trading floor. “I just loved the pace and the energy level and the phones ringing all the time and the noise,” she recalls. She also loved the opportunity to be up close with senior leaders on the trading floor, learning by observing everything from how to lead effectively to how to manage complicated client needs.

Focus on the innovation economy

After 16 years on the Investment Banking side of the firm, Melissa switched to the Commercial Banking side where she now leads the industry coverage teams within the Middle Market Banking business. Today, she’s focused on building an ecosystem around the innovation economy.

Melissa describes the innovation economy as high growth, disruptive companies across a variety of industries—primarily technology, consumer retail, and healthcare payments. She shares examples of how innovative companies have changed how we live and work in recent years: online fitness, food delivery, and streaming services.

Of particular interest to Melissa is supporting the gender and racial diversity of those founders, their employees, and their boards. She notes that while progress has been made, female and diverse founders continue to receive a much smaller percentage of venture dollars than companies founded by men. One reason for that, she says, is that female founders often don’t have access to the same networks for seeking funding that their male counterparts do. Another is that often their companies have products targeted to diverse markets, making it harder to capture the attention of mainstream funders. Both of these are issues that Melissa’s team aims to help female founders navigate.

Another area of focus for Melissa and her team is increasing female representation on boards. “Internal appointments on VC backed boards are actually part of the reason boards have become more diverse,” she notes.

Empowering other women: coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring

Melissa tells Sam that some of the most inspiring work she’s done is coaching women and their businesses. She also discusses her own experiences and what she’s gained from mentors and sponsors. She says she’s gained the most from mentors who are honest with their feedback and help women process the constructive feedback they get from other sources, such as performance reviews.

Melissa believes that sponsorships are invaluable to women. She defines a sponsor as someone “helping to make sure you have the visibility and network internally that you need to get a promotion [etc.].” She says that she was helped the most by a sponsor who was more prescriptive and helped her develop a list of people to meet with each month.

Today, she continues to devote energy to helping other women. “The thing that I very much learned in watching these more senior women who were mentors or sponsors was what a difference it made, and the passion that they had around it,” she tells Sam. “And I consider that so much a part of my day job. And it's really one of the most rewarding things that any of us can do – to help somebody else, give back and help them advance their career.”

Mentor Moment: Finding a sponsor to help enhance your career

How do you develop more relationships with sponsors? I want to prepare for a promotion in the next two years and would love any guidance.

 

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, discusses what it takes to develop sponsorships to help boost your career, in today’s Mentorship Moment.

 

Transcript here

* You can access Sam’s recent article on sponsorship here

Skintelligent leaders talk AI’s potential to change the face of skincare

Can artificial intelligence and deep learning improve both cosmetic and medical skincare? Absolutely, say two women immersed in the effort. Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein learns more as she sits down with Eleanor Jones, CEO and Founder of Skintelligent, and Dr. Meenal Kheterpal, dermatologist and scientific advisor for the company. Sam, Eleanor, and Dr. Kheterpal discuss their background and motivations, how they believe AI will drive innovation in skincare, and how new technology must address equitable health outcomes for all.

 

Uniting an interest in skincare, a business background, and medical expertise

Skintelligent, the skincare company that Eleanor founded in 2019, aims to be the global leader in developing intelligent AI skin health solutions. Meeting that goal requires expertise in business, dermatology, and deep learning. As a veteran of the corporate world (she spent 10 years with the Coca-Cola Corporation), Eleanor brough plenty of business smarts to her company. She also brought a deep interest in skincare dating from her struggles with teenage acne.

 

As a dermatologist, Dr. Kheterpal had long been fascinated with deep learning and AI, and its implications for skin cancer diagnosis and other medical uses. Eleanor describes “chasing” Dr. Kheterpal when she was starting Skintelligent. And Dr. Kheterpal recalls feeling that the pair were a match made in heaven. “She just had this clear vision, and I felt we agreed on so many different levels as far as the potential for AI, and some of the work that she had already done was just so impressive,” she says of Eleanor. “I was so impressed with Eleanor's passion, direction, and purpose.”

 

Innovations in both cosmetic and medical skincare

Eleanor and Dr. Kheterpal agree that AI has the capacity to impact skincare in both the retail world and the healthcare world. Eleanor explains that the retail world of beauty and skincare is easier because, unlike healthcare, it’s an unregulated market. Machine learning and AI can be used to give consumers information about their skin and offer interactive product recommendations. “I think within a retail space in five years [we] will be walking down the aisles of Target, Walmart, and there’ll be a kiosk with a camera that allows you to take your skin and then port you over to the most suited product recommendations within that space,” she predicts.

 

As for medical skincare, the potential is great, but so are the hurdles. Eleanor and Dr. Kheterpal agree that AI can play a huge role in assisting dermatologists by automating some of the more routine tasks they now perform. One big potential is in telehealth, giving patients the ability to get diagnosed for skin conditions remotely. “I think we see ourselves as a part of an omnichannel healthcare plan, where we could potentially play triage,” Eleanor explains.

 

Technology as equalizer

An aspect that Eleanor and Dr. Kheterpal are particularly passionate about is the potential for reducing inequities in healthcare. One application of that is in the ability for rural and other underserved communities to access dermatology care. “There are healthcare deserts and flyover regions that are very, very underserved medically,” Eleanor says. “So you can think about a teenager in rural Tennessee, where there's no dermatologists, dealing with severe acne. The idea of having either a telehealth solution or potentially AI offers an access point in a service that was not previously available to them.”

 

Another area of great potential is in the area of racial equality. Currently, much dermatology research is based on European skin tone. “So a lot of our data that we use to train [AI] models is largely not equal,” Dr. Kheterpal explains. “There is a dearth of images with patients of skin of color, or various ethnicities. And this is where I have to give Eleanor a lot of the credit. She has been able to source an incredible amount of data where we are able to source images that we use to train a lot of the models in-house.”

 

Both women agree that the future of Skintelligent, and of AI in skincare, is bright. AI is already changing the way women buy beauty and skincare products. And with legislative changes underway in terms of healthcare regulation—especially regarding state line issues—they believe AI will only come to play a bigger role in healthcare. “My dream in the next five years is if you are a North Carolina resident, and you have a lesion of concern, you should be able to get a diagnosis from any remote corner of North Carolina, with the help of virtual care and the models that we are focusing on building,” Dr. Kheterpal says.

 

Transcript here

 

**Disclaimer: This podcast may contain general information about medical tests and treatments. The information is not advice, and should not be treated as such. JPMorgan Chase is not responsible for views expressed other than our own.

 

Mentor Moment: Mapping out your career journey with your manager

"I found a new role that I'm very interested in, but I'm nervous to tell my manager I'm interested in mobility. How should I handle tough conversations with my manager?

 

In today’s mentorship moment, host Sam Saperstein gives advice on how to talk with your manager about your career roadmap.

 

Transcript here

Highlighting Black tech innovations, with The Plug founder and CEO

Sherrell Dorsey has long been fascinated by the tech innovations coming out of Black and Brown communities across the United States. In this episode of Women on the Move, the founder and CEO of The Plug—a subscription-based digital news platform covering the Black innovation economy—sits down with host Sam Saperstein to discuss her background in marketing and technology, her journey with The Plug, and her new book.

Early tech immersion

Sherrell tells Sam that it was her technophile grandfather who first nurtured her love for technology by insisting that she and her sister spend an hour a day on Mavis Beacon typing courses. That early foray into tech, she says, paved the way for her to take part in a program called the Technology Access Foundation, which taught kids of color in the inner city about technology, computers, and programming languages—and helped prepare Sherrell for high-school internships at Microsoft.

Sherrell says she loved her experiences at Microsoft, learning about building tech products and also realizing she could have a place at the tech table. But after high school, with her family expecting she’d go to college for computer science, she tacked in a different direction and studied fashion merchandising at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “I got to study the business of marketing within the fashion world, a multi-billion-dollar industry, and [one that] really encompasses so much technology from textile selection and forecasting to the building of an e-commerce business and brand.”

Taking those marketing skills with her, Sherrell worked at both Uber and Google Fiber. But while she loved her day jobs, she found herself more and more drawn to understanding the tech world from the vantage point of Black and Brown communities. “I would keep up on industry literature and read about these great profiles of, you know, the Gates’ and the Musks and the Zuckerbergs,” she tells Sam. “But I did not see the folks that I was interacting with and engaging with on a daily basis profiled or quoted. And the journalism to me just felt very one-sided. It did not identify genius as looking like, sounding like, feeling like, or coming from communities that looked like mine, but those were the people that I was inspired by.”

Transition to journalist and author

Sherrell remembers getting up early before heading to her job at Uber or Google Fiber and curating articles about “folks who I find really fascinating.” She was soon writing about Black and Brown tech innovations and submitting stories to publications like Fast Company. “And just trying to show the robustness of communities of innovation coming up with really cool ideas to solve specific challenges that they were facing that were being left out of this mainstream sort of noise,” she says. “Like sure robots are space. [But] here's a guy who's creating an app to exchange vegetables and fruits with neighbors on a more human level.”

Soon The Plug was born—with a $10 domain registration and a free MailChimp account. Sherrell built up subscribers one at a time based on her solid reputation as the tech journalist who covered Black and Brown start-ups. “It's just about being consistent,” she tells Sam. “It's about serving my audience well, and beyond that, it was every subscriber truly earned through this sense of trust and through this sense of representative storytelling, and care and adoration, and sometimes, you know, harsh honesty.” Sometimes, she shares, she had to be the one to say, “Hey, maybe this company isn't as exciting as I thought it was gonna be.” That kind of honestly, she says, helped solidify her reputation and that of The Plug.

Sherrell’s most recent venture is her new book, Upper Hand: The Future of Work for the Rest of Us, just published in January 2022. She describes it as a love letter to her grandfather. Drawing on his experience of moving from Birmingham, Alabama, to Detroit and finally to Seattle where “there weren’t a lot of folks who looked like him,” Sherrell wanted to illustrate her own experience along with Seattle’s changes, and how that was replicated across the country in a way that left many communities behind.

As far as the future, Sherrell says she’s excited to have The Plug become “the intelligent source for an inclusive business future.”

 

Transcript here

Mentor Moment: Expanding your role to further your career

What are some ways to expand your platform within your existing department or function in order to further your career?

 

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares ways to navigate the guardrails of your job to showcase new skills, in today’s Mentorship Moment.

 

Transcript here.

Rise Above the Story founder Karena Kilcoyne talks reframing our personal narratives

Rise Above the Story founder and author Karena Kilcoyne experienced more tumultuousness in her childhood and early adulthood than most experience in a lifetime. But rather than get trapped by her story, she forged a path to rise above it. Here she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss the progression of her career from criminal defense lawyer to author and how she's using her own experiences to help others reframe their personal narratives.

A tumultuous beginning

Karena describes the challenges of her early years with clarity: a childhood spent finding solace in books, her father convicted of mail fraud and sent to a federal penitentiary when she was 12, and teen years spent taking care of younger siblings as her mother struggled with debilitating depression and anxiety. “I put myself through school with scholarships and working,” she says, “and I put myself through college and law school. I ended up practicing law for many years, and these days I say that I am a recovering lawyer because I have stopped practicing law and I am focused back on my childhood dream, which was writing books.”

Karena tells Sam that she originally chose to go into law partly because she was so familiar with the world of criminal law from her father’s experience, and partly because she needed a stable career at age 24 when her mother died and she adopted her nine-year-old brother. “And there was also this call in me that I wanted to help other families that were going through what I went through,” she explains. She started as a criminal defense lawyer and later switched gears to take on the challenging role of in-house council for a $6 billion publicly traded company.

Changing her narrative

Although she found success as a lawyer, Karena tells Sam that she found herself searching for fulfilment. She was successful—but she still had that childhood dream of being a writer, or a storyteller of some sort.

Making the shift form lawyer to writer was scary, Karena recalls, but she took the plunge. To ease into it and begin her learning curve, she started a lifestyle blog. “I figured just some way to get me writing multiple times a week and to make me feel more comfortable with it,” she tells Sam. The blog, Carousing.com, was flirty and fun, and, she says, definitely ignited her passions.

“But what was really interesting was that when I would write deeper, when I would get vulnerable and I would share some of these life stories, I would get such a great response from that,” she recalls. “My whole life, I had kind of shunned where I came from and shunned who I was, and I was ashamed of that. I started to really excavate who I was and what I was willing to show people, and it got really interesting as I started to write more of that.”

Just as she was exploring this new passion, Karena says, her beloved dog was diagnosed with cancer, and she spent two months nursing him before his death—coincidentally, the same two calendar months she had spent 20 years earlier caring for her mother as she died of cancer. After a “watershed of grief” caused her to reprocess much of her earlier trauma, she ended up writing a memoir.

It was an empowering experience. “I suddenly started to realize that if I could do what I did and rise above that story, there are so many people out there that could benefit from that,” she explains. It was the beginning of her journey with Rise Above the Story.

Rising above the story

“Rising above the story is understanding and acknowledging your story and then figuring out how you're going to change that story, rewrite that story so that you can rise above it and get out of those limitations,” Karena says. Today she spreads the word via her website, writings, podcasts, videos, and a special Rise Above The Story Acknowledgment Guide.

Karena tells Sam that she has big plans for 2022. “The biggest thing, my biggest dream of all is that I have this Rise Above the Story book written, Making My Dream a Reality, and I'm really, really proud of the book, the brand, the site,” she shares. She’s also focused on continuing to spread her message of empowerment through her social platforms, her website, and her newsletters.

 

Full transcript here 

Mentor Moment: Building a family while climbing the corporate ladder.

I've worked very hard to advance in my career over the last several years, but now it's time to advance in my personal life by starting a family. What advice can you give to new or aspiring parents on how to confidently transition to this phase of life while maintaining their careers?

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares advice on how to navigate your career and start a family, in today’s Mentorship Moment.

 

Transcript here.

Year-end lessons on business, the pandemic, and women, with Magnet Media CEO

In this final episode of the Women On The Move Podcast for 2021, host Sam Saperstein sits down with Megan Cunningham, CEO of Magnet Media, the podcast’s production partner. They talk about Megan's journey as a female founder, the impact of COVID-19 on the business, and the power of mentorship, all while discussing some of the wonderful lessons that WOTM guests have shared all year.

Telling stories that matter

Megan took an unconventional path to becoming a female founder and CEO: She started out producing “guerilla activist films” in college, later worked in a corporate environment making films that were broadcast on PBS and HBO. From the beginning, she says, she realized that she wanted to focus her career on telling stories that matter, but she quickly found that the corporate environment wasn’t a fit for her or her personality.

It was a lunch with a respected mentor that helped her see what was unique about herself. She recalls him saying, "Megan, you're really smart, and hardworking, and creative. However, you're in an environment where everyone is those things. Everyone is smart, everyone is hard working, everyone is creative, and the thing that really makes you unique is that you're good at computers." As a liberal arts major with a desire for storytelling, Megan was taken aback at first.

“But I took a cue from that conversation and left the production world temporarily to join [a start-up] as employee number two,” she recalls. After positioning that start-up for success, Megan applied that experience to founding Magnet Media, a company dedicated to using storytelling and data together to drive business results. As she tells Sam, “I think Magnet's aspiration is to really look at the storytelling qualities, the craftsmanship that is put into that type of storytelling, and apply that to brand storytelling because in my view, that's where everything's headed.”

Pandemic impacts

Sam and Megan also discuss the challenges brought about by the pandemic. As a business leader, Megan indicated that navigating the pandemic was easily one of the hardest challenges of her career. “And that's saying a lot, right?” she notes. “I've been in a scenario where we had to evacuate our offices at 9/11. I've been in a scenario where people were freezing their payments to us during the mortgage crisis. However, this was by far and away the most difficult part because it affected everyone personally, and it affected everyone's family and their friends, their loved ones.”

Early on in the pandemic, Megan says she focused on figuring out how Magnet could leverage their best work in this new environment. “And most importantly, starting with our people, how do we take care of our people and set them up for success?” she recalls.

At the same time, Megan tells Sam, she was cognizant that some of the worst impacts of the pandemic were being felt by women. Sam and Megan discuss many of these themes that were highlighted by other 2021 Women on the Move guests such as Katica Roy, Fatima Goss Graves, and Rebecca Minkoff. “A lot's been written on the she-cession, so to speak, of 2020, and how deeply disturbing it is that women have been inordinately affected and impacted by this period, by the pandemic, and continue to be,” Megan says. “And I think as leaders, it's upon all of us to look in the mirror and see what we can be doing to better support the women on our team, to recruit more women, to create policies that are favorable to attracting female candidates, and to really support them as the company grows.”

The power of mentorship

One consistent theme throughout Megan’s career has been mentoring other women. As someone who benefitted from amazing mentors in her own career, Megan’s been deliberate about giving back and supporting other women. She mentions three broad groups she focuses on helping: female filmmakers, female founders, and women at all levels within Magnet.

Megan describes her belief in the need for improving gender balance throughout media and other industries. At Magnet, she says they’ve only gotten sharper about metrics and measurement over the years, doubling down on tracking how many female crew members, how many people of color, how many people with diverse abilities are represented on the team.

Megan says she recognized that the pandemic had impeded her and others’ ability to be good mentors. “So that's something that I'm taking note of as we start to reopen and do more in terms of face-to-face meetups [and virtually],” she says. “As we think through the future, really committing to intentionally mentoring and making time for women on my team is something that is my 2022 commitment.”

Redefining the medical testing industry with Everly Health founder and CEO

Personal frustrations with the healthcare system led a Harvard Business School grad to found an at-home diagnostic firm nearly seven years ago. Then along came COVID, highlighting the need for improved access to low-cost home testing, and Julia Cheek, founder and CEO of Everly Health, rose to the challenge. Julia sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about the origins of Everly Health, its remarkable role in the pandemic response, and Julia’s hopes for the future of women’s health.

Finding the fit she could be passionate about

Julia was in her late 20s and working a corporate job when the idea for Everly Health crystallized. After a series of unexplained health symptoms led her through an array of medical tests and doctor visits, not to mention the copays and deductibles that come with them, she was left frustrated and discouraged by the overall experience. “I ended up paying, I think, over a couple thousand dollars out of pocket for this assortment of tests, none of which were really brought together to tell a story about my health,” she says.

It was an a-ha moment for a would-be founder in search of a great idea. “I knew that there were many, many women who face similar challenges in the healthcare system like me,” she tells Sam. “I knew there were ways we could innovate on it using existing proven methods and science.”

Julia also knew she wanted to found a company. “I had really been working on different business plans, brainstorming with friends on co-founding different companies, advising companies for free in my weekend time for the four or five years prior,” she recalls. She also tells Sam that she knew that this company would most likely fail and that it would be years, if not decades, of work. That meant it had to be something that she was driven and compelled enough by to be passionate about. “Making a difference in the world would make that likely failure worth it,” she says.

Riding the pandemic wave

When Julia, with a few early backers and advisors, launched Everly Health (then Everlywell) in 2014, she aimed to address the lack of access to easy, affordable, results-oriented lab testing in America. “I think it's important to recognize how radical this concept was just even five years prior to COVID-19,” she notes. Along with providing the convenience of at-home testing, Everly well was also committed to providing transparency in pricing, with a goal that most tests would be priced at less than a typical co-pay.

The idea was transformative to many early clients. “You could have physicians involved throughout the process, but you didn't actually have to go physically see them,” Julia tells Sam. “They could review your data, your health history, and your lab records and determine if you should get that test and then what your results would mean from that. And you could do this on your own time and at a price point that was transparent with you.”

Everlywell took off in its first few years. A November 2017 appearance by Julia on Shark Tank only served to expedite that growth. And when COVID hit, the company was poised to take on the challenge of helping the U.S. healthcare system ramp up at-home testing capacity. “I think it's such an important lesson that small, nimble companies can play such an important role in moments of crisis, because we were actually able to move so quickly,” she says.

In fact, Everly Health was the first company authorized by the FDA for an umbrella COVID-19 self-collection test. That meant that any lab in the country could use their data to become authorized, or to run testing using a kit from Everly Health. That huge success only led to more growth for the company. “In the early days (of COVID), we really shepherded all our resources towards scaling COVID, but very quickly, behavior shifted more broadly around home testing,” she tells Julia.  “And so we began experiencing a significant growth in all areas of our business, which then meant we had to be able to also scale at that capacity across all facets.”

Julia also shares her enthusiasm and optimism for continuing to innovate and provide more convenient, more targeted, and more transparent healthcare to the public—especially, she says, to women, who have long been sidelined in healthcare. “We envision that people will be able to do hundreds of tests from the home over the next several years,” she says. “And we want to be a big part in helping to commercialize that for Americans.”

 

Disclaimer: This podcast may contain general information about medical tests and treatments. The information is not advice, and should not be treated as such. JPMorgan Chase is not responsible for views expressed other than our own.