Women on the Move Podcast

Blindish Latina founder talks smashing disability stigmas and making workplaces more inclusive

Catarina Rivera is on a mission to let people know it’s not just OK to talk about disability—it’s imperative to take action. Here she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss her journey as a person with a disability, a successful entrepreneur, a public speaker, and a DEI consultant.

Spreading awareness and smashing disability stigmas

Catarina tells Sam that she’s Cuban and Puerto Rican, and grew up in Maryland speaking Spanish as her first language. She started wearing hearing aids as a toddler and was diagnosed with progressive vision disability called Usher Syndrome at age 17. Using a white cane to help her navigate the world, she graduated from college and started her career with Teach for America as an elementary school teacher, teaching bilingual education. Later she moved into nutrition and public health, earning an MPH degree and transitioning into roles in nonprofit organizations throughout New York City, focusing on food justice work, community engagement, and capacity building.

In 2020, Catarina started her Instagram account @blindishlatina to share her story as a proud disabled Latina woman. “I started Blindish Latina because I wanted to see someone like me out there in the world,” she recalls. “I wanted to put myself out there as a professional, disabled Latina woman. I wanted to represent my story and create awareness among non-disabled people. It is said that knowing just one person of an identity group reduces prejudice and bias. So I wanted to be that disabled friend for people who don't have anyone in their life that's disabled.”

Catarina says her goal with Blindish Latina is to raise awareness and help everybody become a disability ally who knows how to take action on behalf of disability issues. “I want people to look at the world and realize that if they're nondisabled, their world is not my world,” she explains. “It's not the same world for disabled people and it's not okay to just leave it how it is. It needs to be accessible, whatever your capacity is. Whatever your scope of influence is, you can make a difference, whether that's at your place of worship or at work or in your family? How can you create more accessibility and inclusion for everybody?”

Inclusion in the workplace

As a DEI consultant, the workplace is one of Catarina’s prime focus. She’s invested in helping people understand that people with disabilities are invaluable additions to the workforce. For one, they have extensive life experience as problem solvers and innovators. “It takes a lot of energy to be disabled in a world that's not designed for us, not adapted to us,” she says.

Catarina has several simple suggestions for how to make the workplace more accessible. She tells Sam that her first goal is to make sure that a company is focusing on disability as part of diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Disability, she says, is absolutely a part of DEI, but it's not always seen that way, and it's not always prioritized. She notes that while there are more than a billion disabled people worldwide, 79 percent of disabled employees do not disclose their disabilities to HR. “There's a lot of people that are in the workforce and you don't know that they're disabled as well as another group of people who might not know themselves that they're disabled,” she ways. “All of this to say that in the workplace, disability needs to be talked about, there needs to be real inclusion built from the leadership standpoint.”

Often, she says, companies focus on accommodations—but that’s not enough. “That's actually the bare minimum,” she tells Sam. Catarina emphasizes that to her, disability inclusion is strong when an organization has thoughtfully built inclusion and accessibility into every stage of the employee and customer experience. “The work has been done and employees don't have to ask for everything that they need,” she notes. “This means building in a lot of flexibility and choice and designing with accessibility in mind from the beginning.” As an example, she says, organizations can offer different ways during the hiring process for candidates to demonstrate their abilities—not just verbal interviews, but also a live activity or actionable task.

She says she’s both hopeful for the future and has high expectations: “I would expect to see openly disabled executive leaders. I would expect there to be representation. I would also expect to see that accessibility is a mandatory part of all design processes, whether that's the design of an employee team-building experience or the design of a new product.”

 

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 October 13^th , 2022 and they may not materialize.”

 

Full transcript here 

Two Chase leaders talk building company culture amid accelerating change

What’s the key to successful leadership in times of fast-paced change? To Jen Piepszak and Marianne Lake, co-CEOs of Chase Consumer & Community Banking, it includes focusing on the customer and building and maintaining strong company culture. In this episode, the two leaders take the stage with Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein as part of the sixth annual WOTM Leadership Day.

As co-leaders, Marianne and Jen have split up the Consumer & Community Banking umbrella: Marianne runs consumer lending and connected commerce, and Jen heads up banking businesses and wealth management. Jen tells Sam that their successful partnership is built on a lengthy experience of mutual trust, respect, and friendship. And while they’ve split up the responsibilities, they spend a lot of time collaborating on issues that make all experiences easier for customers.

“Be the CEO of whatever you’re running”

When Sam asks Marianne about the traits she looks for in leaders and managers, Marianne shares that for her, this includes putting the customer first and communicating clearly with the team every step of the way. She says that being the CEO of whatever you’re working on includes understanding and focusing obsessively on customer needs and putting the customer—internal or external—at the center of all decision-making. “Oftentimes the best way you can obsess about the competition is obsessing about the customer,” she says.

Once a leader has clarified their focus, Marianne says communication is key. “Whatever you have defined as success for your business or endeavor, you need to communicate it clearly, consistently, and often because people in the team can get behind what they understand,” she tells Sam. 

After that, she says, a keen attention to the data analytics is necessary: She recommends being very disciplined about showing data-driven decisions that people can understand. “Jamie [Dimon, JPMorgan Chase CEO] has said often and I agree with him: data analyze, rinse, repeat,” she says. “It takes the emotion out of decisions.”

Building and maintaining culture

Jen and Marianne discussed one of the largest changes they’ve managed over the past 18 months—the sudden move to remote and then hybrid work, which the company continues to pilot and test. Jen says that there’s a difference between the initial fast-paced move to remote work versus what flexibility will ultimately look like going forward. She notes that the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on women and that the flexibility coming out of it will likely have a disproportionately positive impact on women as well.

“I think it was extraordinary what we were able to do in a weekend really, turn our entire workforce into a remote workforce,” she says. “I do think that we have proven that you can maintain culture in a remote environment. We have yet to prove that you can build culture in a remote environment. And so I think having an office-based culture is incredibly important to this company for a very, very good reason.”

Jen and Marianne both agree that while remote work offers valuable flexibility, the in-person experience is critical to establishing team relationships and ultimately building culture and trust. “And I think that is a huge motivating factor for anyone,” Jen says. “In person, you have that opportunity to build that culture. And yes, you also have that opportunity to take a little bit more time to work through an issue or solve a problem, or run next door to Marianne's office and say, what do you think about this?”

Full transcript here 

Mentor Moment: Getting the most from a hybrid work model

This year most of my colleagues operated in a hybrid work environment, and that's how we'll continue into next year. I want to stay on track for a promotion and increased responsibility. How do I do that in a remote and in an in-person world?

 

WOTM host, Sam Saperstein, gives advice on how to make the most of a hybrid work environment and showing up when and where it matters.

 

Full transcript here

On a mission to recognize and support Latino success, with JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Head of Advancing Hispanics & Latinos

Silvana Montenegro was a college student in Brazil when she applied for an internship in human resources at JPMorgan Chase & Co. She had no idea what human resources even meant, but she knew she wanted to see the world, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. seemed like a good first step. It’s 25 years later, and today she’s the firm’s Global Head of Advancing Hispanics & Latinos, and was recently named by Latino Leaders magazine as one of the country’s top 100 Latinas. In this episode, Silvana sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss her career, the importance of being curious and creating personal connections, and her thoughts on the future of the Hispanic and Latino community.

Growing up in Brazil, Silvana was influenced by a father who wanted his children to see the world and appreciate history, and a social activist grandmother. She says she always dreamed of an international career, so she jumped at the chance to intern at JPMorgan Chase & Co. And although she started out knowing nothing about human resources, she was quickly drawn in when she realized it was all about lifting people up. “And because of my family background, I have always been very curious,” she tells Sam. “I went to university to study psychology. So the way I learn and I relate to the world is by learning about people's stories over the years, it gave me an appreciation of how can I be most impactful to lift people up.”

Changing the narrative

Silvana describes her role today as centered around creating access and opportunities for the Hispanic and Latino community. One critical factor to that mission, she says, is helping to change the narrative of how the community is perceived in the United States today. “I think we're probably better known for some of the barriers that we face and continue to face as well as the culture, right?” she notes. “When we see Latinos on TV, they're not presented in the most positive ones. I want to see more movies and more TV shows that actually portray the families as they are. The Latinos from the most affluent to those who actually face significant barriers.”

She notes that she knows her team’s mission and the journey ahead is important, but for now it starts by portraying a more holistic narrative of the community. One key part of the narrative that she wants to emphasize is the Latino impact on the U.S. economy. She notes that Latinos make up nearly 20 percent of the U.S. population, and are also the youngest demographic.

Providing the tools and services for community success

A second component of Silvana’s goal is to do more to support Hispanics and Latinos to have the tools they need to grow and thrive. She says she sees opportunities in several areas. One is simple talent mobility and helping Latinos succeed at work. Another is promoting financial health education, particularly on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, with so many people working in the United States to provide for families in Mexico. “How can we think about cross-border products so that we can support the need?” she asks. “From the U.S. side, I think it's doing more to demonstrate to the community that we’re the bank for Hispanics. And it's the little things. It's being in the community, partnering with organizations that have trust in the community so that they can see and feel that we're there for them.”

One product where Silvana sees big growth potential is digital account opening. “Because Latinos are very digital and that's how they engage,” she tells Sam. “And they tend to go to untraditional financial places to actually send money to their families. And the fees that they're paying are very high. So how can we help them send money to their families and do that banking seamlessly and not as expensively?”

Looking forward, Silvana’s excited to build on the success of initiatives already underway both internally at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and with external partners such as the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “The funding that we provide actually enables the local chambers to provide coaching to the small businesses there,” she notes. “And we also have the opportunity to connect these businesses with our local business consultants. It's a very holistic approach. And right now we are in 11 markets, we're reaching 5,000 businesses, and we're making real change, giving them the tools they need to grow and thrive.”

 

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 September 16, 2022 and they may not materialize.”

 

Transcript here 

Mentor Moment: How to get involved with Web3

How would you advise people to get involved in Web3? What's the best way to get started?

 

WOTM host, Sam Saperstein invites Jaime Schmidt, founder of Schmidt’s Naturals and co-founder of BFF, to share her thoughts on how to get involved and navigate the new Web3 space. 

 

Full transcript here 

Schmidt’s Naturals founder talks taking her product from kitchen sink to global brand

Jaime Schmidt began making natural care products in her kitchen, and in just seven years scaled her brand into 30,000+ stores and sold it to consumer goods giant Unilever. In this episode of Women on the Move, she sits down with host Sam Saperstein to discuss that journey as well as her newer interest in Web3 and blockchain.

From kitchen sink to multinational

Jaime says she was living in Portland and newly pregnant when she started being extra mindful of the products she was using on her skin. She was also searching for a new creative twist in her career path, but she didn’t know those two interests would collide at first. “I decided to make my own [products] because it was cheap and it was the cleanest way to do it—but not quite realizing the business potential in that and what my future would hold there,” she tells Sam.

She started off making lotions, sunscreens, deodorants, and shampoos and selling them at farmers’ markets. “I started to get a lot of really positive feedback and realized, you know what, there's something here and I could maybe make a little money off it,” she recalls. The face-to-face interactions at those markets made her feel vulnerable but also helped her learn what was working, and what she needed to change.

But Jaime had larger aspirations for her brand, Schmidt’s Naturals. Flash forward a few years and she was on the shelves at Target, CVS, and Walmart, “those distribution channels where you might not expect to find a handcrafted natural deodorant made by a woman in her kitchen,” she summarizes for Sam. “Those were the channels I was most excited to get into because I saw big opportunity there, because no other natural deodorant brands were going after these channels.” Her vision paid off, and in 2017 she sold Schmidt’s to industry giant Unilever.

Moving forward in the Web3 space

Jaime says she was thrilled to have Unilever acquire Shnmidt’s, but she didn’t want to step away form the company; in fact she remains involved with creative decisions. “Any time a brand gets acquired, there's the biggest fear of any founders—what are they going to change?” she tells Sam. “What was important for me to maintain was just the creative energy of the brand. I was a maker at heart, and I had stayed so close to the product throughout the growth. You know, our brand had fun energy that I wanted to make sure didn't go stale.”

Meanwhile, Jaime has moved on to a variety of other interests including investment funds, crypto, NFTs, and even writing book. One of her goals is to help other women succeed—in the entrepreneurial space but also in the new Web3 space. Toward that end, she co-founded Blockchain Friends Forever (BFF) with the idea of opening up this new online world of investing to women and non-binary people.

“When we had the idea to create BFF, we knew that the first thing we wanted to do was have this big kickoff, introduce people to everything we thought they needed to know on the most basic level, like what is an NFT? What is the blockchain?” she explains to Sam. They put together an introductory online event to introduce new audiences to the ideas of NFTs and blockchain, and they expected maybe 5,000 participants. When they got more than 20,000, they knew they were filling a need.

Through BFF, she’s continuing to provide guidance and resources to people entering the world of Web3. “We're constantly looking at ways to keep the community engaged and to teach and to help connect and do some fun things too,” she says. 

“I think people need to understand what it is they want out of Web3 and this new technology,” she explains. “And so that's the first step—recognizing for yourself, what are the opportunities for me and what really resonates and gets me excited?”

For more traditional emerging entrepreneurs, Jaime wrote her book Supermaker: Crafting Business on Your Own Terms. In it, she tells her story of founding Schmidt’s and growing it into a global brand, and sharing tips for launching and executing a successful business plan. “There's such a holistic culture right now. And the brands that are most sustainable are the ones that truly start from a solid foundation,” she says. “And then also just keeping an open mind to shifting gears when you need to, because not everything will go as you think it will.”

 

Full transcript here 

Mentor Moment: Finding balance between work and home life

The question from our community of female founders is how do you balance being a founder and a caretaker or someone with other responsibilities outside of work?

WOTM host, Sam Saperstein invites Pamela Aldsworth, Managing Director and Head of VC Coverage at JPMorgan Chase to discuss why there’s no such thing as work-life balance and how to get over the guilt of being a working mom.

 

Full transcript here 

Hair and skincare entrepreneur talks honoring the authentic middle-aged woman

Hair and skincare entrepreneur talks honoring the authentic middle-aged woman

Angel Cornelius was 57 when she left her lifelong career in healthcare management to start her own premium beauty products company. Here, the founder and CEO of Maison 276 discusses how she built her business as a middle-age Black woman—and shares her dream that soon all women will come to appreciate the benefits of midlife rather than feel pressured to re-capture their youth. 

Angel tells Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein that she wasn’t looking to become an entrepreneur when she started inventing beauty products—she was just looking for something that would work better for her than the commercial products she kept cycling through. “Honestly, I was solving for personal pain points,” she says. When her hair turned grey early she soon got fed up with moving between “purple” products to make her hair more “vibrant” and other products to tone down that vibrancy. 

She started mixing her own hair products at home in her sink. “What I wanted was just one system, one set of products to just wash my hair, adding no unwanted color and also solving for the fact that our hair is just like our skin,” she recalls. “It changes as we mature and women often think there's something wrong and no, there's absolutely nothing wrong. It's just different hair.” Before long she was using her leftover haircare ingredients to make similar skincare products. And not too long after that she started sharing her products with friends and family and soon had to open an Etsy store to keep up with demand.

Big breaks in the beauty biz

Angel tells Sam that her first big break came when she was discovered by ESSENCE through one of her son’s friends, an original employee of the beauty subscription company Birchbox; they wanted to include one of her homemade beauty butters in a package. Angel said yes before she realized that they would need at least 10,000 units to start. “I tell people all the time, it's a good thing we didn't have zoom back then because the words coming out of my mouth did not match the look on my face because I knew that was not going to happen in my kitchen,” she jokes. Before she knew it, she was exploring the world of manufacturers (and learning that they “won't turn their machines on for less than 50,000 units”).

Angel learned on the fly about formulations, white label products, boutique manufactures, and other ins and outs of the industry. Before long, Angel had branched out from skincare and was scaling up her original innovation: haircare products. That led to her next big break when a home shopping network called TJC invited her to showcase her three-step system for silver and blonde hair. The appearance was so successful, she was asked to appear again six hours later. Angel parlayed that success into winning a competition on QVC and suddenly her brand—Maison 276, an homage to her New Orleans roots—was erupting.

A focus on authenticity for middle-aged women

Angel says she’s always kept the needs of middle-aged women at the forefront of what she does at Maison 276. When she first started going to trade shows, she realized she was often the only older face behind a booth. “And so women would crowd around my table and yes, they loved the skincare moisturizers, but they were asking me questions all across the spectrum about beauty. They wanted to know about my hair. How did I keep it so white? How did I keep it so healthy?” she recalls. Today, she says, she’s focused on building the leading beauty brand for a diverse group of middle-aged women who want to embrace the naturally occurring changes that take place in their bodies with clean and innovative products while also celebrating the beauty and vibrancy of their lives.

“The middle-aged woman is the most powerful consumer group in this country and in fact in the world, but she's also the most ignored, misunderstood, and the most misrepresented,” Angel says. “And when they do pay attention to us, it's often from a point of age correction, anti-aging wrinkle reduction, medications like incontinence products, like it's their mission to fix everything that they think is wrong with us. And I reject that as a woman and as an entrepreneur. Maison 276 really has been built by the power of community because we represent middle-aged women in a way that is beautiful, vibrant, energetic, and that's authentic to how she lives her life. She is super excited about this stage and really believes that she's in the prime of her life. And that is what we reflect, not only in our innovative products, but also in our messaging, in our representation.”

 

Full transcript here 

Mentor Moment: Staying motivated while in a male dominated field

How do you stay motivated when venture capital is full of mostly men?

 

WOTM host, Sam Saperstein invites Pamela Aldsworth, Managing Director and Head of VC Coverage at JPMorgan Chase to discuss how after being in the tech industry for over 20 years she remains motivated, and how women inventors and entrepreneurs are changing the game.

 

Full transcript here 

Beyond the Billion founder talks the importance of funding female entrepreneurs

When Shelly Porges learned in 2017 that women were only receiving 2.7 percent of global venture capital, she started thinking about what she could do to change that. By 2018, she had co-founded the Billion Dollar Fund for Women (now Beyond the Billion), and within a year more than $1 billion was committed from over 80 funds globally. In this episode of Women on the Move, Shelly sits down with host Sam Saperstein to discuss her multisector background, why she’s so passionate about connecting funders with women, and how Beyond the Billion achieved success beyond her expectations.

Multisector experience

Shelly tells Sam that her varied experience across the corporate, government, and entrepreneurial sectors has been invaluable. “Each sector has its own rewards and its own challenges, things that you learned that you wouldn't have learned maybe doing the last thing you did,” she says.

Starting out in the corporate sector, Shelly worked 10 years at American Express before spending three years at Bank of America as Chief Marketing Officer during an historic turnaround. She went on to found not one but six companies in the Bay Area. By 2005, she had moved to Washington, DC and become involved with Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. “I wasn’t doing it for money,” she tells Sam. I was doing it because I really believed in her as a candidate and her as a leader. And then I had the opportunity to join her at the state department as her senior advisor for global entrepreneurship.”

Shelly is now working in her fifth sector, venture capital, having launched the Billion Dollar Fund for Women in 2018.

Raising a billion for women

Shelly says the inspiration for the Billion Dollar Fund for Women was the many female founders she worked with over the years at the Cartier Women’s Initiative, the largest women's business plan competition in the world. “I would see women from all over the world, innovating amazing technology or tech-enabled businesses that were helping people in the healthcare sector or any number of things, saving lives, educating more and more young people,” she says. “And then afterwards I would try to help get them funded. And so I knew those companies intimately and not being able to find them funding would drive me nuts.”

Back in the private sector after the 2016 election, Shelly knew she wanted to focus on helping women entrepreneurs raise money. She found her path forward when a friend, a prominent Asian businesswoman, told her the World Bank was holding its annual meetings in Bali in 2018. The friend was working to mobilize a blended finance forum around the 17 UN sustainable development goals—but she couldn’t find a project partner for Goal #5: Gender Equality. 

“I said, well, send me your parameters and I'll see what I can do,” Shelly recalls. “I know a lot of people. And meanwhile I started getting obsessed with this notion. What if I offered to promote these venture funds to limited partner investors who would invest in them in exchange for which they would make a pledge to invest more into female founders? And that's where it all started.”

“So now she had a project partner for number five and we were up and running,” she tells Sam. “By the time we got to the World Bank meetings, we had over $460 million pledged from initially at 23 funds. So [it was] the beginning of what we call our global consortium of funds; in under nine months we achieved and then surpassed the billion dollars.”

Getting results

Since then, Beyond the Billion has continued to exceed expectations. Shelly says that’s partly a reflection of the untapped value of women entrepreneurs; data shows that women are consistently getting better results than men.“Whereas when we invest in men, it's a normal carbon. It's the very definition of the normal curve because they represent the total universe practically of who gets invested in.”

As far as advice to female entrepreneurs, Shelly is straightforward: “Do your homework, know who you're reaching out to,” she says. By doing your research upfront you can find the subset of funds that might be a good match for you in terms of stage, geography, mission, and other criteria, she notes.

 

Full transcript here