I am often filled with doubt when it comes to the belief part of organized religion but I have absolute confidence in the wisdom of organized, ritualized milestone events to strengthen families. This weekend was one such event. My niece and nephew celebrated their B’nai-Mitzvah – the Jewish coming of age ceremony and all of my children and my parents trekked across the country to attend. Margot didn’t question missing her freshman year Dartmouth homecoming and Derek, Jess, Todd and Emmanuelle made the sacrifices to get ahead enough in their school work to take a weekend off the medical school and phd intensity to come home. There was no discussion of priorities – they were obvious and understood by everyone in the family.
I’m still on a high from the weekend. Being all together is such a special treat – especially appreciated now that most of the kids live on the east coast. I love seeing how they interact – sharing their experiences, advising each other. I think the highlight was watching Adam and Todd “review film” (a technical sports term I’m told) from the various football games of the season. They were/are both linemen and the grin on Adam’s face hearing his brother compliment his playing was priceless.
As with most childhod milestones, I think the adjustment to emptying nest and the excitement of reunions is universal to both stay-at-home and work-outside-the home-moms. So I know all my mom (and dad) friends can understand my excitement for Thanksgiving!
One of the things I enjoy about working in technology is that it is such an global phenomenon so international travel is part of my job. I love traveling for vacation with my family as a tourist but there is something special about going for business and working with the locals. We announced a major partnership with Orange (the former France Telecom) last June so we were back getting ready for the launch. It’s been great working with and getting to know their team and of course it doesn’t hurt ending the work day with dinner at a typical French bistro. From years of doing business internationally I am also lucky to have friends in many cities in the world and Paris is not exception. I went out to dinner with one of my former sales managers from Check Point – it was great to compare notes on the industry as well as catch up on kids and family – all over a great dinner. I got to sneak out between work and dinner for a gorgeous walk around the Tuileries and over to St Germain for a bit of shopping and galerie browsing. A work day that includes a walk down the Rue de Rivoli in the sunshine can’t be bad.
He brings up some interesting points on his women role models and positive experience with women entrepreneurs – so far so good. The problem was that I clicked on this link to an interview that Pemo Theodore did with him on the subject of women entrepreneurs. Talk about feeling punched in the stomach. I suggest readers take a look at the clip for themselves but the main thesis is that women have certain (positive) qualities that make them well suited to be entrepreneurs and managers. For instance he says that women are better bridge builders, are more organized and more efficient in their work.
What is the issue – after all these are good qualities? The issue is that these are stereotypes, albeit positive ones. Stereotypes are dangerous and inhibit progress. They allow people to hide behind generalizations to justify their decisions. As soon as one says “women typically are good at xyz” and xyz are the stereotypical positive female traits, there is the likelihood of the stereotypical negative traits being assumed by the listener. For instance those same efficient women bridge builders are not aggressive enough, unlikely to be able to raise capital, bad at numbers, etc. In fact these negative stereotypes later come out in the interview, for instance Suster said that women “need to learn to be more assertive in business development” and often stay home with their children during the prime entrepreneurial time in their life.
We will truly have equal opportunity for women entrepreneurs and, I’m convinced, many many more of them, when they are evaluated individually purely on their skills and ideas. What would a world without prejudice look like? Where we don’t apply group generalizations to someone just because they demographically happen to be a member of that group. Not all women are either good bridge-builders or bad negotiators. Not all men are good negotiators or bad people managers. Frankly, success is where all of this isn’t a big topic – where investors have invested in enough women-led companies where there are the normalized number of successes and failures so that the focus is on the opportunity. Where investors have worked with so many women who have successfully navigated their career through the child-bearing years that they have confidence it can be done. Where they can hire a woman executive without wondering “can I fire her”…that there are not so few that the firing would be questioned as chauvinism. Where it is not “safer” to hire a man.
Since we’re obviously not there yet – what (or who) will be the catalyst? Should there be a “Rooney Rule” (see below) to try to get more consideration of women entrepreneurs? I don’t favor this just as I don’t favor any sort of quota but continuing the football analogy I hope there are some renegades out there that will be among the early ones, like Al Davis to make bold counterculture moves and be rewarded. The Raiders were the first franchise in the modern era to have a Latino head coach (Tom Flores), a black head coach (Art Shell) and a female chief executive (Amy Trask). Sigma and DFJ gave me the opportunity. The ball is in our hands and we plan to….what else…Just Win Baby.
The Rooney Rule, established in 2003, requires NFL teams to interview minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation opportunities. The rule is named for Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the chairman of the league’s diversity committee, due to the Steelers’ long history of giving African Americans opportunities to serve in team leadership roles.
This evening we had the privilege of attending a screening of “Tapestries of Hope,” a powerful film made by Michealene Risley. The film tells the story of Betty Makoni who is the founder and leader of the “Girl Child Network” a multinational organization, started in Zimbabwe to champion the rights of girl children. There has been an epidemic of rape of young girls as traditonal healers have prescribed “rape of a young virgin” as a cure for HIV/AIDS. Girls as young as infants have been raped and killed outright and infected. During the discussion that ensued after the movie Michealene said an amazing statistic (which I verified at the site below) that more than 25% of girls in the US are sexually abused as children. I was blown away by this – we are a society of walking wounded. I found the approach GCN takes to healing – let it be child directed and encouraging communication, profoundly simple and something that can be applied anywhere in the world.
Michealene and Betty’s personal stories are fascinating and empowering, their bravery is admirable. More information on them and their organizations are on the websites listed below.
I suppose the lack of female high-tech C.E.O.’s seems like a less critical issue but it can’t help but cause me to think how deeply seated gender equality issues are in our society.
Rind, B; Tromovitch, P., & Bauserman, R. (1998). “A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse using college samples”. Psychological Bulletin124 (1): 22–53. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.124.1.22. PMID9670820.
Yesterday afternoon started as follows: “On behalf of JPMorgan Chase CIO, Guy Chiarello, and our Technology, Media and Telecom Investment Banking team, I would like to invite you to the 3rd annual J.P. Morgan Technology Innovation Symposium on Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at the Rosewood Sand Hill in Menlo Park, CA. This event provides a forum for leaders in the VC community, CEOs of emerging companies and JPMC technology and banking leaders to network and exchange ideas on technology innovation and trends”
How nice, to be included in this esteemed company. Here’s what the company looked like:
Sigh – besides the lovely ladies who handed me my badge when I arrived, other women were quite scarce – the typical VC Partner/High Tech CEO crowd. At least there was no line for the restroom.
PS – future posts to come on why and how we can change this – we clearly can’t just “wait on the world to change”
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!
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
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.
Classic working parent dilemma – important business meeting tomorrow morning in Minneapolis – back-to-school night tonight at my sophomore son’s high school. You know…the meeting where the teachers go over the syllabus, lay out their expectations for the year etc. Given that this is tenth grade of child number 4 I figure that between the two of us we have the equivalent of 49 nights of back-to-school night under our belt. My husband can definitely cover back-to-school night. When we had two in high-school we split up for the evening and each covered one. But…it’s never the same as if you hear it for yourself. More importantly, for Adam it’s his first (and hopefully only) Sophomore year. I may know Ms. Portman and her curriculum for world history but does it send the right message if I blow it off? With enough coffee, I can manage to be alert after a redeye. So the choice is school not sleep – I really didn’t need to think about it.
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.
Laura Yecies | The Kitchen Sync 