Category Archives: Leadership

47 is the New 27

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You Can Be an Entrepreneur at Any Age

A friend sent me this Forbes article – 30 Under 30 – with the question – why the focus on youth?  It is a really good question.  My first thought when I read the article was where was I and what was I doing before I turned the dreaded 30, after which, implicitly in this article – one’s accomplishments become theoretically less impressive.

So let’s turn the clock back to just before 30.  December 1993 – I had three children (Adam was born when I was over the hill at 31) ages eight, five and six months.  I was working at Informix as a sales manager for the Central American, Caribbean and Andean regions of Latin America.   Steve had just bought two Miller beverage distributorships (in Watsonville) and was finishing law school at Berkeley.  We lived in a ranch house in a family-oriented neighborhood of Los Altos, CA.  The kids were doing well – the boys immersed in school, sports and music and Margot was thriving and, thankfully, sleeping through the night.  Life was great but “x” busy.  I put an “x” because even in synonym.com I can’t find a word that adequately qualifies busy.

The physical energy and lack of sleep required to keep up with three kids and a job with intensive travel is something that could be hard for me to maintain today.  However, the mental energy and stress of a startup is something that I would not want to have shared with my young children.  So for me I’m glad for the order in which the different stages of my family and the different stages of my career occurred.  More importantly, I always knew I wanted to have several (well actually four) children.  Waiting until one’s mid 30’s (or later) post entrepreneurial success to try to have a family is playing with fire and sadly I’ve seen many of my female colleagues get burned.  You can be an entrepreneur at any age.  You can’t get pregnant at any age. And BTW, one can maybe be a dad at any age but is that what you want?

In my case, however, I was not deliberately working in a big company rather than being an entrepreneur.  Frankly it didn’t occur to me to jump ship at that point.  I was on an incredibly exciting and steep leaning curve at work.  Learning sales (I had switched from marketing to carrying a quota), learning to do business internationally, learning fluency in Spanish and Portuguese (for more details on the logistics see here).  As long as the learning stayed steep and the company environment positive I was happy to stay (It turns out that I am using all of those skills today, but that was a previous post).  So while I am enjoying entrepreneurship more than big company life, those big company jobs were pretty exciting, I developed skills, networks and great friendships.

Our American society, not just in business, does glorify youth.  I probably will not be able to change this and anyhow, I must acknowledge that it is jaw-droppingly impressive what the 30 people under 30 in the article above have accomplished in such a short amount of time.   There may be some advantage to youth in their ability to imagine or identify major innovations. Perhaps because they have learned fewer limitations or perhaps there may be some innovation advantage to having lived only in the Internet-enabled world.

Nonetheless, here is what my personal value system says we should glorify for entrepreneurs.  It should be simply what they have done and how they did it – not how old they were whey they accomplished it.  Did they create a product or service that improved people’s lives?  Did they make a great return for their investors?  Did they treat their customers fairly and with respect?  Did they take care of their employees and support their personal and family goals?   I think the most important criteria is not how old or young you are or the color of your skin, religion or gender.  Did you build something of lasting value? Were you (and your team) mensches* in doing so.  That is my goal at SugarSync.

*Mensch (Yiddish: מענטש mentsh, from German: Mensch “human being”) means “a person of integrity and honor”

Good Old Fashioned Networking

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Last week was an interesting one in the “why aren’t there more” and “should there or shouldn’t there be more” women CEO’s. Lots of posts and a lot of anger on all sides and finally some humor. For a sampling see here:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/11/stop-telling-women-to-do-startups/ 😦
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/stop-telling-women-not-to-do-startups-in-paris
http://zachholman.com/posts/women-should-do-startups/
http://www.gothamgal.com/gotham_gal/2011/12/a-.html
http://birch.co/post/14117221851/stop-telling-cats-to-do-startups  🙂

I got super turned off by the anger and then fortunately a few rational posts were written and published so I decided to move on from this flurry. The fact that I had a super busy week was probably part of it. I spoke at a conference in Half Moon Bay and we are knee deep in 2012 planning at SugarSync.

To top off this busy week I had committed to attend an event sponsored by Dell, the “Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network (DWEN).” They had invited me to a big event they organized in Brazil last spring. Although typically eager for a chance to go back to Brazil I couldn’t make that trip work in my schedule. Last weeks event was logistically easier – a cocktail party in San Francisco, but I must say by Thursday evening, I was pretty tired and the idea of a networking event where I knew nobody seemed a stretch.  Fortunately I HATE the idea of cancelling last minute so I didn’t.

Dell’s VP of Corporate Marketing, Kelly McGinnis, hosted the networking event at her home. There were probably about 30-40 women there. Well, first off, it was an incredibly friendly group. Plus, it turns out that when nobody at the party knows each other it’s very easy to meet people and strike up conversation. It seemed like each person I met was nicer and even more interesting than the last person. Many good business connections were being made all over the place. I talked to several potential partners on the business development side, agencies, and several of the women’s companies were even interested in SugarSync for Business accounts. The women there were at all stages of growing their companies and their families and lots of advice was shared on both topics ☺. Dell is organizing the next major DWEN event in India and expecting the quality of the attendees to be as good as this event I really look forward to attending.

Kudos to Dell who is an important business partner of ours for sponsoring this program.  Lots of business was getting done which certainly in a small way and possibly in a large way helped the women entrepreneurs and their companies. Most importantly, this event was a good reminder to focus on doing not whining – better results happen and it’s a lot more fun!

Got Ambition?

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“Got Ambition?” as first appeared in http://www.womenonbusiness.com December 13, 2011  Preview here: http://www.womenonbusiness.com/got-ambition/

I recently stumbled upon a women and workplace survey from MORE magazine which raises the question of the ambition of women, and lays out data from the survey related to what we really want from our careers. A few stats especially caught my eye, including “When asked point-blank, 43 percent of women described themselves as less ambitious now than they were 10 years ago; only 15 percent reported feeling more ambitious.”

I discussed this with a fellow (woman) colleague and we both reached the conclusion that from our experience woman are not less ambitious, just giving voice to our conflicted emotions while we seek the ideal work-life balance for our stage in life.

Read more here: http://www.womenonbusiness.com/got-ambition/

The Rise Of The Female CEO And The Folly Of Men Who Just Don’t Get It

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“The Rise of The Female CEO And The Folly of Men Who Just Don’t Get It” copyright Forbes 2011 as first appeared in “The Forbes Women Files”, November 15, 2011. Preview here: http://preview.tinyurl.com/7cpg4s4

By Laura Yecies

On Monday last week I woke up a bit before my 5:45 alarm (yes, quite amazing how one can actually adjust to a new schedule) so had a few minutes to scan email and the online news before my hike and came across the headline “Why Most Women Will Never Become CEO.” Gene Marks, the author, is a Forbes contributor.  My first thought when I read that headline was how silly it was. After all, “Most anyone won’t be CEO.”  You can put pretty name your group for the “anyone” place – most men won’t be CEO, most New Yorkers won’t be CEO, even most Harvard MBAs, though they hate to admit it, won’t be CEO.

Then I read on and was irked. And admittedly, while obviously very curious, I had to set the article aside for a few days to temper my reaction. The article starts with a description of some negative teenage behavior (both boys and girls actually) and then a projection (without any evidence) that the silly “high school girl drama” exhibited by the author’s teenage daughters is typical of professional women.

After reading this, I should have just abandoned the article – “Reason #1” was enough to make this article not credible. But my curiosity got the best of me.

The next point is that men are incapable of taking women seriously in the office and are only focused on women’s appearance. I find this to be an insult to the many serious, professional men I have worked with over the last 23 years. Not that I am naïve to human nature and a bit of normal banter (and by the way women occasionally notice men’s hot or not-so-hot appearance) but I do believe we’ve been mostly past this for years. And to the extent it is present, we should treat this behavior as an unacceptable aberration not to be accepted.

Read more here: http://tinyurl.com/7cpg4s4

You’re the Top

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I was excited to see the news today of the selection of Virginia Rometty to CEO of IBM.  The breaking of IBM’s glass ceiling is notable, particularly coming on the heels of Meg Whitman’s appointment.  While the number of women CEO’s in the fortune 500 is still ridiculously low (16) it’s interesting that 3 are in the tech field – including Ursula Burns of Xerox.  These are visible, powerful, and important positions

I believe tech is a great field for women.  While there may be fewer women employees (due to the low number of female engineers) I think the rapid pace of change gives women a chance to shine.

The more examples of women leaders in tech the more our unrecognized biases can start to change.

It’s A Family Affair

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Last Saturday was the SugarSync company picnic.  That event was a great reminder that one of my favorite parts of building the SugarSync team is getting to know the extended team.  I love getting to meet the partners, children, parents and friends of our employees, investors and consultants.  Our team is so talented it’s no surprise their partners are equally bright, talented and interesting. I love to hear about their jobs and backgrounds – where they come from (we are truly a global team) and what they do which has a side benefit of helping me get to know the employees better.  My favorite is meeting the children.  I must say that we have an awfully cute bunch of kids in the SugarSync world ranging from newborns to teens (see pictures below).   Certainly the cutest, I’m sure, of any company in the personal cloud space!

More importantly, as anyone in a startup knows, it is an intense experience with long hours.  The families and friends of our employees, by picking up the slack are so important to our success.   This event and others we do during the year aim to be a small token of appreciation for that support.   We’ve also done an intro to SugarSync event with babysitting for the younger kids and a demo and example “pitch” for the teens and adults.  I got the idea for this latter event from a conversation with Diane Green – it was 2009 and many of my employees were telling me that their families were nervous about them working at a very small startup.  I knew we needed to make not only the employees but the families as excited as we were about our future.

When possible I like to host these family events (and other offsite meetings) at my home – it’s a way for the team to get to know me and my family better and – while we did have a caterer for the big items it’s a chance to put a bit more personal effort into the appreciation aspect.  While I’ll be very excited for SugarSync to be too big to fit in our yard I’ll definitely miss that element!

If it’s important do it in the morning

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Wake me up when September Ends – Green Day

I am not a religious person in the strict sense of belief in god but religion has always been a big part of my identity and family life and I believe it offers many important life lessons.  When at a recent family event, the Rabbi gave a sermon about being in a hurry to do “Mitzvot” (translated as commandments and/or good deeds).  His point was, if something is really important, you should move with alacrity to do it.  More specifically you should do the most important things first, if possible, in the morning.

This lesson applies to so many aspects of life.   It is one of the foundational principles of the agile development process (scrum) that we use here at SugarSync and I work on it with my children (homework before video games).  Work in priority order even if it’s tempting to “knock off” lower priority quicker tasks.

I have found a recent application of this principle in my personal life.  I have always been a regular weekend exerciser but despite many New Year’s resolutions and some fits and starts of after-work workouts, I never became a regular weekday exerciser.   The research is very clear, however, that morning exercisers are more consistent.  I knew this and my excuse had been that I am not a morning person – I have been a night owl since childhood.  At the same time I know that if I need to get up early I do – be it for work, a flight, a child needing me – I can do it, I just don’t like to.  So really the morning exercise excuse was question of prioritization.  I finally made up my mind that it was enough of a priority to set my alarm get up early.  I’m 4 months into this new routine (at least 3 weekdays per week) and I’m glad to be doing it.   At least once I get going J

Performance or Potential

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Potential – General Ozzy

I had the privilege of participating in the WSJ conference on Women in the Economy http://online.wsj.com/public/page/women-04112011.html last April.  There was a very interesting observation in the McKinsey report presented there.  “Women are promoted based on performance, men based on potential”.  This speaks to the insidious barriers women face imbedded in institutional and individual mindsets.

I was reminded of this mindset just last week reading the news of my friend Meg Whitman’s appointment as CEO of Hewlett Packard.  Several articles commented that perhaps she didn’t have the appropriate experience for the job.  After all, she left Ebay when it had a mere 15,000 employees, 1/20th the size of HP.  The fact that she grew it to 15,000 from 30 didn’t seem to be as important.  I can’t think of a better example of this potential v. performance conundrum.  How much more potential needs to be demonstrated to get over these barriers?  Not to mention the fact that there doesn’t seem to be an oversupply of executives who have run 320,000 person businesses that sell software and hardware to both consumers and businesses – there is nobody to hire based on performance.

This is a hard job and it needs to be filled by someone with potential based on leadership, team-building, analytical skills and decision-making capabilities.  I can’t think of a better choice then Meg and wish her every success on the road ahead.

Bubble Women

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Last week New York Magazine published an article http://nymag.com/news/features/silicon-valley-2011-9/ the subhead is “Out in Silicon Valley, the last bastion of full employment, the Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerbergs of the future are staying up all night writing code in dorms”. The premise of the article is that entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley is the Mark Zuckerberg demographic and story.  Be conceived with the Y chromosome in your DNA, go to a prestigious university, major in computer science, write a really cool viral application, have VC’s fight to invest in your new app/company, grow very quickly and become a billionaire.  I don’t mean to imply that there isn’t tremendous blood sweat and tears by the entrepreneur and his team on the road to success.  Nothing is really as easy as the movie or article makes it seem.

The point I want to make is that there are alternative stories here in Silicon Valley.

I’m incredibly impressed by those who know enough about business and technology at age 20 to start and build a successful company.  I certainly didn’t.  I also didn’t major in computer science.  I did take a programming class but I found it less interesting than the Economics, French and Political Science classes I chose to focus on.

I worked for 20 years before becoming an entrepreneur.  I spent most of that time in marketing but also worked as a quota-carrying sales rep.  I opened offices overseas and grew businesses in the US.  I ran a large engineering organization at Netscape/AOL and then returned to my focus on marketing, online sales and partnerships.  I’ve worked for and learned from several C.E.O’s.  In all of those experiences there were successes and failures. I think back to these experiences often when facing challenges here at SugarSync.

It was also during these experiences when I developed my passion around the type of service that SugarSync would become.  I proposed an internet-based (before they were called cloud) service called “AOL Collections.”  While working on ZoneAlarm I became convinced that what was important to customers was securing and maintaining access to their data, more so than their computers.  I also developed my ideas about the type of company I liked to work in and therefore wanted to build.  A company that builds excellent product, respects and takes care of its customers and employees and, hopefully, improves their lives through those experiences.  The time and place was right at the end of 2008 and I joined SugarSync.

Well it turns out that I’m not the only first-time CEO in her 40s who wanted a few years of experience first.  Some of my role models were late bloomers by Bubble Boy standards – Meg Whitman, Diane Greene.  Even Donna Dubinsky had over 10 years of work experience prior to co-founding Palm.  I love that Sandra Kurtzig is starting a new company.  Men too can be successful CEO’s late in life 🙂 Jim Barksdale was nearly 50 when he took the helm of McCaw Cellular. I had the privilege of working for Jim while at Netscape and I know I am not alone in seeing him as a truly exceptional leader.  Interestingly these executives were also not technical founders nor even (except for Diane) of technical backgrounds.

BTW I’ve also worked for and admire CEO’s who were more akin to the Bubble Boys – Gil Shwed, Roger Sippl, Jerry Yang.  Clearly this model can be successful but my point is that others of us are alive, kicking, hiring and growing companies here in the valley – even though we might be female, sales and marketing types and older than 27.