Women on the Move Podcast

Mentor Moment: How having a diverse team can make your pitch stronger

The question from our community of female founders is how can we use having a diverse team as an advantage during pitch meetings?

 

WOTM host, Sam Saperstein invites Pamela Aldsworth, Managing Director and Head of VC Coverage at JPMorgan Chase to share her take on using diverse teams to your advantage during pitch meetings and why it's important to have different opinions and voices in the room.

Promoting integrity, inclusion, and diversity in the water with the founders of Textured Wave

When Chelsea Woody, Danielle Black Lyons, and Martina Duran met online a few years ago, they had two things in common: they were all Black women, and they were all devoted to the sport of surfing. In this episode of Women on the Move, the three sit down with host Sam Saperstein to discuss their individual journeys toward surfing and how they all came together to found Textured Waves, a collective dedicated to promoting integrity, inclusion, and diversity in the water.

Finding their space in the surf world

Martine, Danielle, and Chelsea were all introduced to surfing as young adults, but they each had a different journey. Chelsea, a nurse, discovered surfing when she and her husband took a year off from their jobs in Seattle and traveled the world. During the trip, she learned to surf in Indonesia; once they returned home, they moved to California to more fully embrace the sport.

Danielle grew up in the bay area in a family of swimmers and water-lovers, but didn’t discover surfing until a college trip to Hawaii. Later she studied abroad in Costa Rica where she cemented her love for the sport.

Martina, from Florida, credits her parents enrolling her in a water-safety ocean program for her lifelong love of the water. She also didn’t surf until college, and took her first surfing lesson while studying abroad in Costa Rica.

In their 20s, the three pursued careers while each also embraced surfing. All three share that by then they had developed a deep emotional connection not just with surfing, but with the ocean and water itself. They also all shared a feeling of not quite belonging, as women of color, in a sport usually branded with a blond-haired, blue-eyed aesthetic.

“We all met each other online, just searching for our likeness,” Danielle recalls. “It’s hard to find other women of color in the water here in Southern California. Usually, I'm the only one who looks like me. So I think we were all looking for camaraderie and sisterhood and we found it in each other and on Instagram.”

Textured Waves

Once they met online, and eventually in person, the three women knew they wanted to share their experiences as women of color in surfing, and help other women feel more welcome in the surf community. Like the ocean, Black hair has both texture and waves, and so they settled on Textured Waves as the perfect name for their collective.

“We all felt like we can't be the only ones out here,” Chelsea adds. “And I think that was the drive to find other women that looked like us that had similar experiences, similar shared experiences, and then form a community. So others wouldn't have to navigate the space with such difficulty. We wanted to make it easier for the next generation and women, and for our age as well.”

The group is conscious of the history of the disadvantages experienced by the Black community and how segregation often kept Black Americans away from beaches and other water spaces. “I want to acknowledge that this is actually in our blood . . . when we came over from Africa we were coastal water people, and that has been lost through [racism and segregation],” Chelsea says. “There’s this stereotype that we aren't water people, and that's not true.”

Looking forward

In just a few years, Textured Waves has grown to be a force of change in the world of surfing. “I think the thing I'm most proud of is just when I see a Black woman or a Black girl enter the ocean for the first time and attempt surfing for the first time because they saw something on our page,” Martina says.

For the most part, they agree, the wider surfing community has been receptive to what they’re trying to do, especially after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. “I think what happened was a lot of people did some self-reflection of what it means to hold privilege in spaces and maybe how their privilege might unintentionally or intentionally have caused someone to be excluded,” Martina continues.

A partnership with Chase and Marriot Bonvoy Boundless credit card has helped Textured Waves to spread their message of inclusion to a wider audience—and it also allowed them to host their first retreat in Hawaii last year. This fall, the collective will head back to that surfers’ paradise to host a second retreat where they hope to introduce more women of color to the sport and continue normalizing their presence.

 

Full transcript here 

Mentor Moment: Transferring skills to help pivot your career

After graduation, I began my career because it was the first job offer I received and was in the industry I was interested in. Since then I've continued to build my skills and career,  but I'm more interested in a different role. How do I begin to make a switch and show the transferable skills that I have? Is there a right way to rebrand myself for this new trajectory?

 

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares how she pivoted her career from journalism to business, and how you can do the same by advancing your education or transferring your core skills to the desired role.

 

Full transcript here 

Instant Teams founders on remote work opportunities, tapping underserved talent pools

What happens when two military spouses—a software developer and an entrepreneur—combine forces? In this episode of Women on the Move, host Sam Saperstein finds out, as she talks with Instant Teams founders Liza Rodewald and Erica McMannes.

“Instant Teams is a remote team marketplace that builds remote workforces by tapping technology and the largest database of military connected workers in the industry,” Sam explains. “They are challenging the status quo and building a unique way for companies to diversify their workforce.”

Common challenges

Erica McMannes has been a military spouse for more than 20 years, moving 12 times in those two decades. Along the way, she experienced the challenges shared by military spouses in trying to build their own career amidst frequent moves. She eventually landed in “the Silicon Valley space” and put her varied experience to work launching start-ups.

Liza Rodewald, meanwhile, had a career as a software developer before her husband decided to return to active duty military service. Like Erica, she soon understood the common challenges faced by her peers. “Every single military spouse I would meet would ask me the same questions,” she tells Sam. “How are you working from home? How have you maintained your career? And can you help me do the same?”

Erica and Liza met and developed a relationship via a Facebook group, and only lived in the same place—Fort Lee, Virginia—briefly. But they kept up with each other, and when Erica came up with the basic idea of Instant Teams, she reached out Liza: “Am I crazy?” she wrote. “Is this an actual thing we could do?”

Liza, who had always been a solo entrepreneur and was in the final stages of launching another business, didn’t take long to get excited about Erica’s idea. “It was just really clear to me that I wanted a partnership and to really do something for this [military spouse] community in the remote workspace,” she recalls. Within months, working remotely before the pandemic had made it the norm, the two were making the VC rounds and launching Instant Teams.

A two-sided marketplace

Liza and Erica talk about how, as a talent marketplace, they serve two clients and solve two problems: that of employers and that of employees. By focusing on skills-based hiring rather than the standard chronological résumé system, Instant Teams offers career opportunities to the military spouse community who often get overlooked because of résumé gaps and other byproducts of the military lifestyle. Employers get direct access to a pool of candidates without having to post jobs and screen candidates themselves.

As a side benefit, skills-based hiring naturally promotes diversity in workplaces. “You're not just getting the same flavor of people when you're trying to hire, but you actually have diverse pipelines built in,” Liza says.

Pioneering a remote work culture

Erica and Liza founded Instant Teams with a focus on remote career opportunities before the pandemic even hit. As military spouses, they were both familiar with the benefits and challenges of working remotely. “I was doing gymnastics basically to try to create quiet spaces for myself, and closed one deal while I was in my car because my house was being packed up at the time,” Liza recalls. But once the pandemic normalized working from home, she says she began to realize she didn’t need to be so hard on herself for every little interruption. “We all have families,” she says. “We all have doorbells that ring or a dog that barks, and to see people as humans in the workforce I think was a really positive thing that came out of the pandemic.”

Erica emphasizes that fostering a positive remote work environment was also paramount at Instant Teams. “One of the first documents we ever created was called our Ethos to Remote Communication,” she says. “And this was pre-pandemic, and I look back and I think, wow, we were like pioneers, like look at us, charging ahead with remote communication.”

Today, they say, they’re proud of the work they’ve done to promote remote work opportunities to talented military spouses and others, as well as the opportunities they offer to employers to have a curated recruiting pipeline experience. “What we're building towards is something greater, not even just for the organization or for our teams or for our customers, but in a bigger sense of women in business and women in leadership,” Erica says.

 

Full transcript here

Mentor Moment: Networking as a student vs. a professional

As a student, we learn the ways of networking to get a job and initiate our career. But how does networking change once you've begun your career? What are the differences and tips to ensure you're always building a network as a professional?

 

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, talks about how networking is a long-term job and gives you tips on building relationships once school ends and your career begins.

 

Full transcript here

Unleashing the power of female founders with Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet

When Maëlle Gavet became CEO of Techstars last year, she brought a background in both entrepreneurship and consulting—and a commitment to diversifying tech funding. One of the largest seed investors in the world, Techstars has nearly 3000 companies in their portfolio this year, and Maëlle says the plan is to add up to 650 more. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about Techstar’s approach, her commitment to supporting female and other founders, and her partnership with Women on the Move.

An ecosystem approach

Maëlle says she thinks about Techstar’s approach as an ecosystem, built on a framework of accelerators, or bootcamps, for entrepreneurs. “Young entrepreneurs join us, and for three months work with us to take their company to the next level,” she explains. “We also do a lot to build an entire environment around the entrepreneurs. We have things like startup weekends or catalyst programs where we basically help activate communities all around the world, bring wannabe entrepreneurs and mentors and alumni of our programs and potential investors and corporate partners and government institutions. So basically we really try to get a stronger ecosystem because no one succeeds alone.”

An integral part of Techstar’s approach is the diverse founders they serve. Shying away from typical Silicon Valley start-ups, Maëlle says that Techstar regularly invests in women, in people of color, in people with disabilities, and in the LGBTQ community. This year Techstar will have 52 programs in 18 countries. They also have shorter catalyst programs in more than 50 countries. “The underlying philosophy is that talent and ambitions are distributed equally around the world, but opportunities are not,” she tells Sam.

The power of sisterhood

Maëlle says the power of sisterhood is phenomenal—making investing in their business endeavors a no-brainer. “I think women are strong,” she says. “Women are smart. Women have run the world for as long as I know—they've just done it in the back rooms rather than at the forefront. To me, this is more about unleashing and supporting existing potential than anything else.”

She notes three key elements that Techstar’s programs can help unleash in the women they support. The first is helping with imposter syndrome. “It saddens me that it still exists, but the reality is we still have a lot of women who are not 100 percent sure that they’re worth it, that they can do it, that they have what it takes and going through these programs helps increase that confidence,” she tells Sam.

The second element is an understanding that nobody succeeds alone. She notes: “Your chances of success increase proportionally to the network that you have, whether it's the network to find the first people you're going to hire, or the first customers that you're going to sign, or the mentors that you're going to surround yourself [with] or bring to your board, or ultimately the investors.”

The final key element to building strong female entrepreneurs, Maëlle says, is simply money. “Ultimately it all comes down to money,” she notes. “Are you going to find a way to invest in this woman? And so I think for me, these programs are about making sure that these women are being funded, are being put in touch with the right investors.”

Partnership with JP Morgan

Maëlle and Sam talk about the importance of networking in getting women in touch with the investors they need. And they describe how a partnership between Techstar and Women on the Move is helping foster those relationships. A few months ago, J.P. Morgan announced an 80 billion fund that they’ll use to partner with Techstar and set up accelerator programs in several cities, as part of their commitment to racial equity in those areas of the United States.

Sam mentioned that only 2 percent of venture capital money goes into female founders, and the two women talk about their commitment to moving that stat. “There is so much potential,” Maëlle asserts. “And so many things that can be done to unleash all this potential. As I say, talent and ambitions are equally distributed, but opportunities are not. And the partnership that we're doing with [J.P. Morgan] is basically trying to make this opportunity more equally distributed.”

 

Full transcript here

Mentor Moment: Taking the confusion out of mid-year reviews

Feedback is important to growth and the formal, mid and annual review process can be confusing. Could you speak to appropriate preparation for these reviews? What should you expect from each and what is the appropriate planning to do?
 
Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, stars how to make sense of your formal employee reviews, and how managers should also consider giving real-time feedback throughout the year.

 

Full transcript here

Crypto, NFTs, and the wave of the future, from a marketing pioneer

Avery Akkineni wants you to know: It’s not too late, and you didn’t miss the boat. As president of VaynerNFT, Avery is a leader in the emerging NFT space. In this conversation with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein, she breaks down the NFT market, Web 3, and the ongoing opportunity for consumers and brands to participate in this fast-moving space.

A marketing pioneer with a mission to bring other women along

Avery began her career right out of college at Target Corp., but within a year or so she moved to Google, still a relatively new company in 2012. At Google she worked on products including AdWords, YouTube, Hardware Products, and Double Click, and she also learned about Vayner Media when Gary Vaynerchuk gave a motivational talk to her team. “I was incredibly impressed with how different Gary's perspective was, and about his passion around social media,” she recalled. “At the time, I didn’t know too much about social media. So, I thought I’m going to learn all about social from the guys who know it best at Vayner.”

She joined Vayner in 2018 as a Vice President on the media team—her first experience of the agency side of marketing. “So, it was a totally new experience of learning a different side of the marketing coin,” she tells Sam. “And I learned a lot really quickly. Had the opportunity to help build out some teams. I then had the opportunity to actually go and start Vayner Media's presence in the Asia Pacific region.”

By 2019, she moved to Singapore to start Vayner Media there. She soon opened offices in Tokyo, Bangkok, Sydney, and Hong Kong as well—all during the pandemic. “It was a very different type of working environment, where we were all pretty much remote and working across borders digitally,” she recalled.

One benefit of working through the height of the pandemic was that she got to explore new ways of building teams, as well as new ways of thinking about technology. “We thought something very interesting might be happening in this world of NFTs,” she says. “At the time, I didn’t even know what that meant, what it was.” By July of 2021, she was heading up the new VaynerNFT, which she describes as “a Web 3 consultancy focused on helping enterprises navigate all things Web 3 and NFT.”

Immersed in this new world, on thing struck Avery: Her colleagues and Web 3 leaders were mostly male. “Right now the community who's super active is very heavily men,” she tells Sam. “And I'm super passionate about helping to bring women into this space.”

Breaking down NFTs for the uninitiated

As an early leader in the world of NFTs and related Web 3 activities, Avery is skilled at de-mystifying the concept for others. She breaks it down for listeners: “What NFTs, non-fungible tokens, represent is really digital asset ownership. It can be a piece of art. It can be a ticket. It can be a utility. But fundamentally, that represents a digital asset that you own that is provable on the blockchain.”

And while there’s currently a small community of people who are active in the NFT world, Avery says she believes there’s a place for everyone. She encourages small business owners and individuals—especially women—to get involved. And she offers three pieces of advice for those interested.

First, she says, get started by jumping in in a hands-on way. “Get yourself a Discord and Twitter, and understand what's happening,” she advises. “I think really spending the time to shape your own perspective is incredibly important.”

Next, she advises all business owners to figure out how they can develop something that would be interesting to their existing consumers. “I would maybe look into loyalty as an NFT mechanism, and finding a way to reward people who already come to your dry cleaner, or to your daycare, or whatever it is,” she offers.

Her third piece of advice is to consider expanding your business’s payment options to include accepting crypto. “I think as a small business, you actually can move much quicker and navigate this world of Web 3 in a really cool way,” she adds. “And being able to operate without a ton of bureaucracies can be a huge advantage.”

As for her goals for VaynerNFT, she’s looking forward to continuing work that’s game-changing, interesting, and long term: “I think our goals are really to help enterprises enter this Web 3 world in an authentic way that builds value for their communities and builds value for them.”

 

Full Transcript here 

 

The podcast is not intended to provide legal, tax, or financial advice or to indicate the availability or suitability of any JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. product or service.   JPMorgan Chase is not responsible for views expressed other than our own.

 

 

Mentor Moment: Taking on more responsibility at work to advance your career

How do I go about taking on more responsibility at work?

 

In today’s Mentor Moment, Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein shares how to take on more responsibility at work without causing your current role & responsibilities to suffer.

 

Transcript here

Melissa and Doug co-founder talks discovering her true self and finding joy

About two years ago Melissa Bernstein, co-founder of Melissa and Doug Toys, began a journey of self-discovery that eventually led her to a diagnosis of existential angst—and a commitment to uncovering her true self. In this episode of Women on the Move, the world-famous toy entrepreneur sits down with host Sam Saperstein to discuss that experience and how it led her to co-found LifeLines, her new company focused on wellbeing.

Melissa says she knew she was different—and struggled intensely with life—since she was a child. “From my earliest recollection, I struggled with asking . . . Why am I here? What is the meaning of life?” she recalls. “And when I asked those around me these deep dark questions, people didn't really want to hear that from a little child.” She recalls being told that she was too deep, too emotional, and that she should go outside and play. Ultimately, her response was to bury herself in introversion, perfectionism, and creativity—three ingredients that helped create magic when she co-founded Melissa and Doug in her 20s.

Toy Story

Melissa recalls how she and her now-husband Doug, both working in finance at the time, decided that they would start a company. Both the children of educators, they initially honed in on something for children. After considering and rejecting the idea of opening an alternative school, they decided on the toy business. Melissa describes Melissa and Doug Toys as “open-ended” toys because they are aimed to be 90 percent about the child and 10 percent about the toy. In the first years of the business, Melissa says they “faced every single hurdle you could ever imagine.” They persevered to establish one of the most iconic toy companies.

The success and creativity she found through the business allowed her to channel the darkness she still felt inside. “It was dark into light through Melissa and Doug in making these toys,” she tells Sam. “[But] ultimately about two years ago, that cry of my own soul to be seen authentically grew so loud. It was deafening. And I started to see that even though creating toys for 33 years had been like my salvation, my lifeline, and my reason for being, it was almost [a] façade I had created.”

Channeling angst into lifelines

Receiving a diagnosis of existential angst and coming to terms with her own truth was life-changing. She came to realize that there's a deep connection between those who have existential angst and those who are extra creative. “Because the very qualities that lead us to ponder these deep dark realities also lead us to experience the beauty and the joy and the wonder of the world,” she describes. “I always say both the beauty and the pain of the world are unbearable for me. I could vacillate between the profound highs and the devastating lows in a minute.”

 

It was this journey of discovery that inspired Melissa to co-found LifeLines two years ago. The company is dedicated to her daily Practice, which she developed and continues to refine to help keep her grounded in the face of the extreme highs and lows she experiences.

 

She describes three core tenets she learned in her journey and focused LifeLines on. First, that she isn’t alone anymore, after years of denying the truth of how she felt. After “coming out” with her diagnosis and her own truth, she heard from thousands who felt the same way. Her second tenet is a commitment to helping others who suffer from existential angst to unearth their unique form of self-expression or creativity to make meaning in their own lives. And third is recognizing that she needed help. The end result is accepting “that Melissa Bernstein is the full emotional spectrum from the lowest of lows . . . to the highest of highs, like unbounding limitless joy.”

 

Melissa wraps up with one piece of advice for listeners: “We all have the ability to make meaning in our lives if we take responsibility for doing so. And that responsibility is a choice. So I think what I always want people to know is they may choose not to do it. They may choose to stay stuck and remain a victim, but it is a choice. And as long as they know that they have a choice to think differently and they have a choice to grab life by the horns and savor all there is to savor, then I feel like I've done my job.”

 

Transcript here