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Women on the Move is JPMorgan Chase’s commitment to fuel female ambition and advance financial equality.
Episodes
Thursday Sep 07, 2023
Thursday Sep 07, 2023
In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, host Sam Saperstein is joined by Jamie Kramer, head of the Alternative Solutions Group for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, and Ali Rosenthal, founder and managing partner of Leadout Capital. Jamie and Ali connected after Jamie's team invested in Ali's Venture Capital fund. Here they discuss their career journeys and why they both believe asset management is a great career for women.
The story behind Project Spark
In more than 30 years at J.P. Morgan, Jamie’s career has spanned both Asset and Wealth Management, with roles across public and private investments. Five years ago, she was named head of Alternative Solutions at the firm, where she’s responsible for insights, analytics, and cross alternatives investment solutions. She’s also the CEO of Global Hedge Fund and Alternative Credit Solutions business.
Jamie recalls when she met a woman who was struggling to raise funds for her own venture fund in 2020. “I couldn't really understand why she wasn't as successful raising these assets,” she says. “And so I approached our CEO and asked on behalf of Asset Management if we could give her some capital.”
That initial investment led to the creation of Project Spark, an effort aimed at providing capital to funds managed by diverse, emerging alternative managers, including minority-led and women-led venture capital funds and other private funds. “I'm really excited that the 33 managers that we've invested in and the $140 million has helped accelerate well over a billion in fundraising,” Jamie says. “And Ali is one of those managers.”
Leadout Capital
After a stint as a professional women’s cyclist, Ali began her career in operating roles at consumer technology businesses (she was an early employee at Facebook) and in investment banking as both an angel investor and an institutional investor. “I got Leadout going because I saw a gap in the market with respect to who got access to capital,” she tells Sam and Jamie. “I believe today the numbers are still that fewer than 3 percent of companies are invested in by the venture capital community. And I thought that was really compelling.”
Leadout’s focus has been on women, underrepresented minorities, and people who according to data are less likely to receive venture capital funding. As Ali says, these are founders who “had great ideas, great momentum, but oftentimes were overlooked because they didn't fit pattern recognition. And so I wanted to use my platform, my network, my experience to back them and to connect them via bridge for them to other sources of capital, not only monetary capital but network capital and social capital and people and experts who could really help them go from zero to one.”
“We really pursue what we call a founder market fit–driven thesis,” Ali says. “So we look for founders who themselves are customer segment experts, people who have lived a problem in a market that they know well either because they care enough about that market to embed with the customer, become a customer themselves, really understand the pain point that a customer is having and solve it with software.”
“A great career for women”
Ali and Jamie agree that asset management can be a great career fit for women. Jamie notes that the field is both relationship-driven and problem-solving oriented, two skills that women tend to excel at. It affords good life balance, she says, with relatively predictable hours. And she cites research that shows that although there aren't enough women in asset management, they tend to be successful in the field. In addition, it offers an opportunity for women to do well financially which in turn allows them to give back, which research shows women gravitate toward.
“And something that Ali said, which is that asset management is not transactional,” she adds. “It's extremely relationship driven. No matter what aspect you're in, you are managing money as a fiduciary on behalf of someone helping corporations meet their goals. You're helping individuals retire.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of September 7th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Aug 24, 2023
Thursday Aug 24, 2023
In this Founder’s Feature, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein interviews Jennie Nwokoye, founder of Clafiya, a company with a mission to increase access to primary healthcare for communities in Nigeria and beyond. Jenny shares her journey as an entrepreneur and how her personal experiences motivated her to create a community-based approach to healthcare in Africa.
Jenny reflects on her own upbringing, moving from the United States to Nigeria and experiencing the challenges of accessing healthcare firsthand. She explains how her father's entrepreneurial spirit inspired her to become an entrepreneur, emphasizing the resilience and persistence required to succeed in this field.
She also shares how through the Techstars Founder Catalyst program, she learned to refine her storytelling skills, leading to success in raising funds for Clafiya. She shares valuable tips for other entrepreneurs, focusing on maintaining good health and well-being, leveraging storytelling to connect with investors, and not hesitating to seek help and support from their network.
Her passion for her mission shines through, and our listeners are encouraged to visit clafiya.com to learn more about the company's impactful work.
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of August 24th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Aug 17, 2023
Thursday Aug 17, 2023
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein got the chance to sit down with Diana Marrero, Vice President of Strategic Development for Foreign Policy Magazine. Diana talked about her Cuban-American background and how that influenced her career journey, and she discussed her work at the magazine around educating readers on the geopolitical landscape and expanding the offerings across channels.
From Miami to Davos (via Capitol Hill)
Born in Cuba but raised in Hialeah—a Miami suburb with the highest Cuban-American population of any U.S. city—Diana says it was hard to not to be interested in geopolitics and politics. Her father had been a political prisoner in Cuba before she was born. “There's a very personal relationship with Cuba and politics and really understanding what the breakdown of democracy can do to communities and to populations,” she tells Sam.
She gravitated to journalism early, serving as editor-in-chief of her college newspaper as well as working for the Miami Herald before graduating. She headed to Washington, D.C., as a congressional reporter in the mid-2000s, just as newspapers were experiencing a sharp decline in revenue. “I was starting to feel those declines as a daily news reporter and looking around and thinking, This is the industry that I love. What can I do and how do I make an impact?" she recalls. She ended up getting an MBA at Georgetown with a goal of “saving journalism” by finding new revenue models.
Spotlight on the Hispanic community
Diana says she’s always taken pride in her Hispanic background and heritage, and while in D.C. she launched and directed The Hill Latino with the aim of covering the issues that are important to the Hispanic community.
“One in five Americans right now are Hispanic,” she notes. “It’s important to really understand the issues that they're grappling with, to cover these trends and shifts in the population and what it means for politics, what it means for the economy, for businesses. It was so gratifying and validating to the U.S. Hispanic community to have a publication that covered Congress and that covered the highest forms of leadership and political debate in the country, and to have that publication say Hispanics matter so much that we are going to devote resources specifically to covering them.”
Today, she says, The Hill Latino lead reporter Rafael Bernal is “doing incredible work.” She’s proud of how the outlet originally put a spotlight on the Hispanic community for politicians who weren't Hispanic and weren't necessarily thinking about the Hispanic community in such a nuanced way, and she’s thrilled that the work continues today. “You might see a lot of members of Congress who equate being Hispanic and thinking about Hispanic issues with immigration and that's it. And so thinking about what the community is interested in, how to serve the community better, I'm really proud of the impact that we've had,” she tells Sam.
Foreign Policy Magazine
Diana made the move to Foreign Policy Magazine in 2018. Today, she serves as Senior Vice President for Strategic Partnerships, and leads a team working with partners from both the private and public sector on a range of projects. “We work with a huge variety of partners on topics from healthcare to technology to gender equality, so it's a really varied group of topics and partners,” she says. “From events at Davos and other major global convenings to really very cool podcasts, but also research and analytics.”
Foreign Policy Magazine has been in circulation for 50 years. “So it's a very well-established, reputable magazine that covers global affairs and geopolitics,” Diana notes. “Our mission really is to explain the world to our readers, to bring the world to them, to really go a lot deeper than the typical headlines that you'll see in most major news organizations.”
Today, she says, the magazine is much more than a news outlet. “We've really diversified our offerings to be a multi-component multimedia publication, really leaning into digital media, but also convenings, bringing people together, bringing the world's foremost experts and leaders together to have really important conversations about what's happening in the world and bringing all of those assets that we have at our disposal together, so leveraging our analytics department and our podcast studios and the journalists that do incredible reporting day in and day out.”
You can check out the magazine’s podcast, HERO: The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women, here: https://foreignpolicy.com/podcasts/hidden-economics-of-remarkable-women-hero/
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of August 17th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Transcript here
Thursday Aug 10, 2023
Thursday Aug 10, 2023
In this exciting new episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, hosted by Sam Saperstein, listeners are introduced to the new "Founder’s Feature" segment. This biweekly addition showcases founders who participated in the Techstars Founder Catalyst program. These inspiring short episodes shed light on entrepreneurs refining their business models, perfecting their pitches, and building networks to take their ventures to the next level.
The spotlight of this episode falls on Marnee Goodroad, the founder of ReBLDing, a company dedicated to supporting homeowners, contractors, and insurance companies working to rebuild homes after catastrophic events. Marnee aims to streamline the process of restoration and repairs, benefiting all parties involved and addressing the challenges faced by the industry. She describes her ambitions to help as many people as possible, making the rebuilding process easier and more transparent for homeowners and contractors alike.
Throughout the conversation, Marnee discusses the challenges she has encountered as a small business owner and the importance of perseverance. She also expresses gratitude for the Techstars Founder Catalyst program, which empowered her and provided invaluable mentorship, helping her secure a place in the Global Insurance Accelerator.
To learn more about ReBLDing and its innovative approach to rebuilding communities after disasters, visit reblding.com.
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of August 10th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Aug 03, 2023
Thursday Aug 03, 2023
Ceci Kurzman, board director, investor, and entrepreneur is on a mission to change the haircare industry to better meet the needs of multicultural consumers. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein and shares insights on her life as a senior executive in the music industry, her extensive corporate board experience, and the launch of her businesses, Nexus Management Group and OurX.
From executive to founder
After years of experience as a music industry executive, Ceci founded Nexus Management Group in 2004, initially as a talent management company. “My first client was Shakira,” she tells Sam. “I had just left Sony Music where I'd been an executive for many years. I really felt like it was time to do something sort of entrepreneurial in the business. There were no women managing artists and no female-led management companies at the time that I could identify.”
Ceci says she originally formed Nexus to handle talent, but what she identified as her point of differentiation was to ensure that artists had second acts. “Most artists like athletes and other cultural icons, they have these very, very bright careers that reach a peak and then eventually have the slide in their career due to natural organic relevance erosion,” she explains. “There are very few artists in that career class who are at their apex throughout their entire lives. The idea was how do you maintain the earning potential for that artist once they're no longer at their peak in terms of cultural relevance?”
Over time, Ceci navigated Nexus to become more of an investment firm. She says it was a combination of changes in her personal life—having children and wanting be at home more and working less around-the-clock as talent management requires—along with an increasing interest in the investments side of her business. “It felt like a very natural thing,” she says. “And it was very stimulating intellectually and in terms of building a network of people beyond the entertainment industry.”
A natural shift to board directorships
Beginning to serve on boards was a natural next step for Ceci. “Having worked with a lot of these management teams and investors over time, the natural evolution was being asked to serve on various boards, and it was a continuation of the learning and career and professional evolution to be honored to be asked to serve on some of these boards,” she tells Sam.
For several years, when she started serving boards, she says she stayed away from entertainment companies because it felt important to step away from that industry in order to gain perspective in the long run. “I only came back into Warner Music and UTA [United Talent Agency] relatively recently in the past few years because I did want to specifically explore industries that might have been tangential to but not squarely aligned with the entertainment and media business,” she says.
Meanwhile, she served on boards of beauty-related companies including Revlon and Johnson Publishing. She says it was there that she started looking at the unique needs of multicultural beauty. She soon found herself intent on identifying who exactly the multicultural consumer is, and where they've been underserved. She says the last bastion of segregation she identified in the beauty business was haircare: “While all these business model innovations had [thrived], none of that had reached the multicultural haircare world.”
Haircare entrepreneur
Based on her experience on boards like Revlon, when Ceci decided to enter the haircare business as an entrepreneur, she started by diving into market research of the multicultural consumer. She founded OurX with the mission of merging technology with the needs of the textured hair community. She says it was the research-driven approach that helped her stand out. She describes OurX as less of a product company and more of a Noom for textured hair. “It's a personalized system that takes an individual's data and creates a customized plan for them and shapes it through product and one-to-one coaching and a personalized content feed that stays sort of with you day in, day out,” she says.
Ceci’s long-term goal is to be able to open more access to investment for entrepreneurs who want to serve multicultural consumers. “I would actually love to challenge the beauty industry to fold those categories and move everybody into what is universally a general market so that there is this value exchange,” she explains. “And I think it's happened in all the other categories—this is sort of the last one, and I think [the industry] needs to see this category and this consumer differently.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of August 3rd, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Jul 27, 2023
Thursday Jul 27, 2023
In this episode, Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein sits down with Dr. Wendy Borlabi, Director of Mental Performance and Health for the Chicago Bulls. Wendy discusses the personal philosophy and authenticity she draws on to support athletes, young women, and even herself to help optimize performance and become mentally tough. The pair also discuss Wendy’s commitment to bringing other women along in the sports psychology field, and how she strives to be a role model in success and failure for both her own kids.
Commitment to authenticity
Wendy followed her own authenticity to her current role with the Bulls. After earning her undergrad degree in psychology, she worked as a psychologist for several years in Oklahoma, helping support adults with depression and schizophrenia. Being an athlete herself (she had once aspired to play in the WNBA) and remembering a conference on sports psychology that she had attended earlier with a friend, she started thinking about moving into that area.
She soon started the master’s program in sports psychology at Georgia Southern, and describes a pivotal moment in her life: her advisor warned her that the sports psychology field was full of men who may not be welcoming to a woman of color. “He wanted to prepare me that this was not gonna be an easy thing,” she tells Sam. At first, she says, she was upset by his message, but she soon had a realization: “I needed to be me authentically. I couldn't change who I was in order to get a position.”
Since then, she says, being true to herself has served her well. “I just remember my first year so much,” she recalls to Sam. “I just got to see when I was myself, my goofy regular self, they gravitated to me. And when I tried to be somebody else, it didn't work again. I don’t know if I would've thought of that if he wouldn't have said that to me.”
Commitment to other women
In her role with the Bulls, Wendy works with players, coaches, trainers, and “anybody in basketball operations” to help them perform better mentally. “If you think about a strength and conditioning coach or a nutritionist or a physical therapist, they get you back in different pieces of your body to help you perform,” she describes. “And what I do is on the brain, to help you be able to tackle some of those things that can possibly prevent you from performing your best at your job.”
But, she says, there aren’t a lot of women in the sports psychology field and it can be a difficult space for women to maneuver in. She hopes to see a big increase in the number of women across the entire male-dominated sports industry: bringing other women along, who in turn inspire more women is a personal goal.
To that end, Wendy founded a nonprofit called Wisdom Knot, which is dedicated to educating disadvantaged youth about careers in sports other than being an athlete. The more women that girls see doing these jobs, the more girls will be inspired, she says. But she also notes it’s just as important that men in the field are welcoming to women and make active statements like “A woman could do this job.”
In addition to the nonprofit, Wendy also founded Borlabi Consulting, focused specifically on women in sports psychology. Recognizing that there aren’t a lot of avenues into the field of sports psychology, she wanted to spread the word and provide more opportunities for women. She hires interns who get experience working with an NBA team or another institution, but also learn directly from Wendy about being a sports psychologist. The foundation also provides a platform for Wendy to do podcasts, presentations, and other outreach.
Wendy has a message for listeners working toward their own goals, which comes from a John Gordon Book called How to Be a Coffee Bean. “It talks about the fact that if you take hot water and you put an egg in it, that the egg becomes hard and you don't want to be a hard person to work with or deal with. If you put a carrot in the hot water, it becomes mushy and you don't want to be that person either. However, if you put a coffee bean in the hot water, what happens? They come together, they work together, they develop something magical: coffee. So I want you to be a coffee bean. I want you to come together with the things in your life and develop something magical. And that can be anything in your corner of the world.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July 28th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Jul 20, 2023
Thursday Jul 20, 2023
As Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer at The Atlantic, Alice McKown is always on the lookout for new ways to work with clients and deliver the magazine’s brand. “What's unique about The Atlantic is that we are known for our influence on the cutting edge of conversation,” she says.
In this episode of Women on the Move, Alice sits down with host Sam Saperstein while at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The two discuss Alice’s two-plus decades in the magazine business, and how having a solid support system has helped her navigate change.
From coast to coast in the magazine world
At The Atlantic, Alice oversees all commercial revenue and partnerships related to the magazine, events, website, social media, mobile channels, and the branded content agency, as well as the brand’s new film and TV business. She tells Sam that it was her 20 years of magazine experience under the Conde Nast umbrella that prepared her for her current role.
“I got incredibly lucky,” she recalls. “I moved to San Francisco after college. It was the internet heyday. I had some friends who worked at Wired magazine, who had just gotten bought by Conde Nast, and I jumped into the magazine business. I jumped into a marketing role and really grew at Wired. It was at a time when there was tremendous growth with the internet exploding, and we were just an ideas machine and we launched some amazing things.”
She eventually made the move to New York, where she worked on other Conde Nast products such Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair. “And what was incredible is I was there for 20 years, but I had so many unique different opportunities and different bosses,” she tells Sam. “I jumped from marketing into digital operations into sales. And I think that was a big moment for me, was sort of moving from marketing into sales.”
She says she’d always thought of herself as a marketer, as someone creative, until a friend suggested she think about sales. “And I was like, I don't know clients, I don't know how to sell,” she recalls. “And they're like, you're creative, you've got big ideas, don't worry. That's what the clients want to hear. So I jumped into being an associate publisher and managed a very senior sales team and I was terrified. But then I realized as you started having these conversations around partnerships, it really was about solving people's problems, big ideas, what could you do together creatively?”
Leveraging teamwork and a support network
Alice says she realized early in her career that people work best when they work together and allow their skills to complement each other. Another key lesson? Letting her team members shine. The best salespeople, she says, are like “heat-seeking missiles.” When something works for them, they keep coming back to it. “And so that's how I found both my relationships with them, and [with] their clients,” she tells Sam. “It's like, Working with Alice is really working for me and my business. And so I didn't come at it as, I'm your boss. I came at it as, Let's figure out how you do you and I do me and one plus one is three.”
Coming to The Atlantic to head up a new team—many of whom had been working together for a long time—was a challenge that Alice says she was prepared for. “It's tricky and I think you want to kind of listen and hear, but you also want to remember what you know and what you know that works, right?” she says. “And so I think some of it is thinking about who are the people within the organization that I know will get on board with how I'm thinking, right? And really lean into those folks, have them help you kind of spread that change too.”
During her earlier career moves, Alice says she learned to make sure she had one or two people with her who knew her well. “Whether that was a boss or a colleague, but knowing that I could show up in a new place [and] I knew I had a person or two that knew me, knew what I was capable of,” she says.
As far as the future, Allice says she continues to be inspired by the work she does and is excited about managing and motivating a great team: “I am so excited about the year ahead and how we can work with our partners, how we can make The Atlantic brand stand out even more in new and surprising ways.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July 20th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Jul 13, 2023
Thursday Jul 13, 2023
Sabrina Horn believes that we’re all the director and lead actor in our own movie—and therefore we control our destiny. “You have one life to live and it's yours,” she says. “You have to push every day. You have to fight, and when you get shot down, you have to get up the next day and try it again.”
In this episode, the longtime CEO, C-suite advisor, professor and bestselling author sits down with Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein to discuss this philosophy and her own career journey. Sabrina founded a PR company in the tech industry in 1991 when she was just 29—and she ran it for 24 years before selling it. At that point, she made a decision: “I decided that rather than doing public relations for companies and putting companies on the map, I wanted to switch to really helping individuals like CEOs and founders, entrepreneurs, students as well, people who run teams in corporations, individuals who want to become leaders and help give them the tools to get over certain challenges that they have,” she tells Sam.
Starting out as a 29-year-old female CEO in 1991 was a bold move, and Sabrina says one of the reasons for her success was the fearlessness that people have in their 20s. “I would say 98 percent of the executives I worked with were almost twice my age, and they were all male,” she recalls. “I felt like as long as I've done my homework and I'm really intelligent about the advice I'm giving them, there's no reason to be worried about my gender, and if they don't want to work with me because I'm a woman, then there's plenty of other fish in the sea to work with.”
PR as strategy
Sabrina says a common misperception about public relations work is that it’s all about the message and the hype. “It was never just about putting out press releases,” she clarifies. “It was about helping them think through what those strategies might be, what move are you making today in anticipation of this move you're going to make tomorrow and the day after tomorrow so that it's strategic, it's a plan. It can't just be tactical.”
In terms of helping companies grow strategically, Sabrina says being authentic and not being intimidated or backing down is important for leadership: “This is where standing true to what you believe, if you really have done your homework and you really have done your research and you know in your heart that the direction that they're going in is not going to help them, I would always say, Look, you can do that. You can do whatever you want. But I'm here. You ask me to come here to give you my advice. So if you go down this path, here's what can happen and if you go down this other path, here's what can happen here.”
Why “Fake it ‘til you make it” is the worst business advice
On the surface, she says, there’s nothing wrong with this common adage. “If you are doing cognitive behavioral therapy to practice certain behaviors that you wish you could exude, like more confidence, and you practice that and you visualize what that might look like or you wear a certain color to a meeting because it makes you feel more confident or as Amy Cuddy did over a decade now ago in a TED talk about power posing where you stretch your arms out, that was how fake it till you make it got started and it's okay because you're just helping yourself,” she says. “It’s self-help.”
The problem with the phrase, she says, is that it’s mutated over the years to become an excuse to lie and exaggerate the truth at the expense of others for personal good. “It was like an excuse for bad leadership,” she tells Sam. “But the problem is that the truth always comes out. The investor will do her due diligence, the customer will use the product and it won't work as prescribed. Then you expose yourself, you set yourself back, you embarrass yourself and your team. You ruin your credibility.”
Rather than go down that dangerous route, Sabrina encourages people to be authentic at every turn. “It’s about looking at yourself in the mirror every day and saying, this is what I stand for,” she says. “These are my values. This is what my company stands for. This is what we don't stand for, and committing every day to that. And surrounding yourself with people who will call you on that when you don't stay true to that.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July13th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Jul 06, 2023
Thursday Jul 06, 2023
Diana Markaki spent 22 years in a successful corporate career before founding the Boardroom, an organization dedicated to preparing women who aspire to be board members. Here she sits down with Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she built a rigorous approach for helping executive women get on boards.
Diana grew up with what she calls a strong sense of justice and a desire to address the big problems of the world. She left her native Greece for New York as a 21-year-old and began a career as an international lawyer. It was when she received her first public board appointment, at 36, that the idea for the Boardroom started simmering. “I was the only woman on the board, by far the youngest,” she tells Sam. “And obviously the last thing I wanted was for my older male peers to challenge my credentials. I wanted to be the best board member anyone had ever met. So immediately, I started looking at the different things that I had to do in order to be a successful board member, then I built a solution for myself.”
As an MBA student at Harvard Business School at the time, she got the opportunity to put that solution into an actual business case, and she quickly realized that many women had the same problem she had. She decided to share the solution with the world, and the Boardroom was born.
Four pillars
Diana formally founded the Boardroom in Switzerland in 2021, as the world’s first private club for women executives who aspire to be board members. It’s an in-person focused organization, with a villa in the center of Zurich which members go to daily. “We developed what we call the holistic approach to board readiness, in the sense that we identified everything that an executive needs for the next step in our career, then we brought everything together in a one-stop shop approach,” she tells Sam.
The Boardroom has four organizing pillars. The first pillar is executive education for aspiring board members, for which they developed a proprietary five-module curriculum based on extensive market research. The second pillar is called the inner circle program, which is a combination of leadership development and peer learning. The third pillar is strategic networking, and the fourth is what Diana calls “the inspiration, the role models, and the representation in the sense that you cannot be what you cannot see.”
Disrupting the “boys’ club” culture in the workplace
Although the Boardroom is for women, Diana stresses that she was very intentional about including men, since they dominate the corporate board space and lead many board appointments. “You go through these informal networks that are dominated by men. Someone is a guy that knows a guy that played golf together, were in the Army together, and that's how it goes. That's why we bring the male supporters.”
The men recruited by the Boardroom are senior level executives who support senior female talent retention and board diversity. Diana notes that they don’t do coaching or mentoring “because we believe that our women are just as good and qualified as the men.”
Instead, the men who are supporters commit to bringing more women on their executive committees and boards. “When they have an opening and they want to affiliate with an amazing executive, then immediately they tap into the community of the boardroom and then we make nominations and referrals to make sure that we place the right people in the right positions,” she explains.
Future growth
Since its birth in Zurich at the beginning of the pandemic, the Boardroom has expanded to Athens, London, Paris, and Brussels, with plans for six more European sites next year. And while for now, the organization is focused on enrolling women who are already senior level executives, in the future Diana says they plan to expand their membership. “Once we create the critical mass that's needed at the board level, these women together with the support of the boardroom structure are going to build the pipeline and then we go to the next generation of leaders that will be able to join boards,” she tells Sam. “But it is time critical to create that critical mass, and that's why we focus only to very senior women executives that are determined to put in the time and effort to become a successful board member.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July 6th, 2023 and they may not materialize.
Full transcript here
Thursday Jun 29, 2023
Thursday Jun 29, 2023
Continuing her conversations with global leaders at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein sits down with Sara Kehaulani Goo, Editor in Chief of Axios. They discuss the organization’s newsletter approach to expand into more local markets—and how Sarah is committed to Axios reporters understanding their community and building trust with readers across the political spectrum.
With a background in reporting, Sara says she moved her way across the country working at local newspapers, eventually landing at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post before moving to Axios a few years ago. “I loved being a reporter,” she tells Sam. “I loved breaking news, and over time I realized that there was an opportunity for me to shape the news in a bigger way at a time when our digital forces were changing how people consume news.”
News that is trusted, and locally responsive
Sara says that the premise at Axios is that while people increasingly don’t have time to read the news, they still want to be informed about the news. “So we came up with something called Smart Brevity,” she says. “It really distills the news to the most important essential elements of what you need to know, why it matters.” Axios uses a newsletter format to deliver brief summaries—written by experienced journalists—on major news topics. Readers can get what they need to know from the newsletter, and they can visit the website for deeper dives.
Earning readers’ trust is a key goal at Axios. “We know that people really need information, but we're operating at a time when people don't have a lot of trust,” Sara says. “They don't have trust in a lot of institutions, but in news it's become very polarized. So what we've tried to do is really be transparent with our audience and say [that] we are going to be clinical in our reporting and facts and delivery, and be not right or left. We don't have an opinion page. We want to attract an audience of all political stripes, of all backgrounds and interests, and give you the news that's essential for you to feel like you've got what you need.”
In addition to the trust gap, Sara says there is a growing gap in local news coverage—and filling that void is one of her top goals for the year. “There is an opportunity to rebuild trust,” she tells Sam. “So it's not just politics, but what's going on in my community, how do I understand the issues that I'm going to be voting on?”
To that end, Sara says Axios has expanded the newsletter approach and hired local journalists in 26 different cities to do targeted newsletters. “The goal there is to figure out both the business model and the journalism model to make sure that we become an essential trusted source of news,” she adds.
Representation matters
One key to earning readers’ trust is making sure that Axios staff are reflective of those readers. Sara says she’s committed to ensuring that women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and other historically underrepresented people have a spot at the table. “When I was first entering the news business, there weren't very many women at the top of the newspaper,” she recalls. “And why that matters is because that's who makes decision on what you cover.”
“I think it is making sure that we have journalists and editors who can cover the story with real authenticity and experience in relatability,” she says. “And the topics that they're covering matters. So immigration for example, or wage gap issues. And if they don't know, they have to be comfortable asking and getting out of their comfort zone. I mean, that's the essence of every reporter. So to me, I think about: it’s issues around race, it's issues around gender, LGBTQ, when you have issues come up around anti-trans hate or harassment going on, we have to have people on staff who can speak to that.”
Keeping with this year’s focus on the theme of ambition, Sara tells Sam that she feels like she’s always been ambitious, and for her, that’s gone hand-in-hand with a natural curiosity. “What's great about that is that it's really an unending curiosity,” she explains. “So how do you get the story? What's happening next? How do I get the interview? How can I tell the world first about what's happening, how I help them understand the story to then how do we run this newsroom in a different way? To me, those are all fun versions of the same curiosity. So I think I just love the challenge of it. It's not just a job. Journalism is essential to this country, to how we live to our lives, and I feel very responsible for that.”
Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of June 29th , 2023 and they may not materialize.
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