Women Leadership: My favorite Top10 Role Models in 2018 (March 8)
It has now been 2 years and a half since I moved to San Francisco and I’ve been lucky enough to travel and meet people from different cultures and backgrounds. So I’d like to share with you 10 portraits of amazing Women. We met in very diverse situations : work, meetups, or thru friends. All of them triggered ‘sparkles in my eyes’ when we had the chance to chat, giving me the desire to be at my best and to give back to others.
This post is dedicated to all women, regardless of their background, their age, where they live or come from. I am pretty sure you’re one of them : You are INSPIRING others, thank you to be a role model!
Engaged women who fight for parity & diversity
Sukhinder Singh is the Founder and CEO Joyus, as well as Founder TheBoardList. When I arrived in the Silicon Valley end 2015, she was already raising her voice in conferences helping male VC friends and founders become aware that we need them for more diversity in Boards and executives teams, thus being role models in the tech industry and being even more innovative and self-aware. Her platform is a great solution to find women candidates. As a Board member, I’ve had the opportunity to endorse 50+ women as you can see on the platform. I wish they find the company they would love to help, from early stage to listed ones. We need you!
Nolwenn Godard works at Paypal and has lived in the Bay area for over 10 years. Nolwenn is very engaged in the life of our community in San Francisco, truly believing in our role as a Sanctuary city, defending non profit work for the homeless when foreigners are surprised by what they see in Tenderloin and Civic Center. She’s a mentor for young women in Tech. Being a French native, she has also written a report for the French government, trying to have an action plan to tackle the impact of Artificial Intelligence. I support our recommendation : we need to educate more women in computer science to avoid cognitive biases when we teach machine to learn. Let’s embrace AI impact on health, education, transportation, wealth management… Yes, go girls!
Nyna Pais Caputi Founder The Expatriate Women. She leads amazing events : speed meeting between mentees and tech executives, female investors having conversation with female founders, panels on how to prepare to be a Board member or about changes in life… She welcomes people from around the world : China, Korea, India, Europe, Latin America… And you hear at least forty different accents when you network after the talks. ‘Learning together for life, and help each other’ is her motto. It’s not just words, it’s day after day, connecting people. I’m happy to be a speaker in the investor panel at her next event March 13th, and March 24th: Empowered Women’s Leadership Summit. Come and join us!
Fierce founders/leaders for whom people matter first
Ursula Mead is the Founder of InHerSight and built a tech platform, that is the « Glassdoor for women ». I love what she does, as she comes back to fact and figures to help companies and theirs leaders to improve the performance of their companies. Let’s talk about scorecards and ratings for the best, and add your voice in this important discussion.
Athena Karp is the Founder of HiredScore, which tackles the resume pile and candidate sourcing problem with data science and workforce intelligence. I met Athena in France in the beautiful Annecy Lake where she often comes (thanks to my friend Stephane Kasriel CEO Upwork). She lives in NY and her startup is all about tech… and people.
Both of them are assertive women, poised and articulate. I always feel so good after meeting them, wiser and stronger. I’m happy I learn from them each time we meet. I admire them for being daring and bold.
Katie Stanton has been a successful executive at Twitter, engaged in our democracy and helping people to understand how to best use the tool, from San Francisco to Paris where she has lived. She’s not only the proud mother of beautiful children, but also a mentor and a business angel for many female entrepreneurs. She has also chosen carefully our new company Colorgenomics, helping people in dealing with their health with predictive analytics. By the way, I did my test for female cancers which could be linked to my DNA, I recommend it to all my friends !
Oana Elisa Olteanu is a brilliant woman in Tech. She works for SAP. She’s the one to convince great people such as TM Ravi (Hive Data) to have only female speakers to talk about chatbot and personal assistants. There were 250 attendees happy to listen to great leaders from Slack, Google, Cisco… Just by saying to the top management of each company to send someone they thought was an expert and also a female leader, she changed the conversation, and we all learnt a lot that day. We’re grateful for that.
Accomplished women who give back
Françoise Brougher is now COO Pinterest. I was lucky enough to met her while at Orange, as she led the strategy for Google. Then she welcome me, being in the Silicon Valley for more than 15 years as the « French new comer », while she was a busy C-suite level executive at Square. Not only she’s a Board Member for public companies, and committed to grow rising companies to scale globally, but she still take the time to mentor young leaders’ career. I had the opportunity to meet a few of them, speaking highly about her as she was helping others to find perspective and take care of their life. All of this with a lot of humility — inspiring us.
Perla Servan Schreiber has been a succesful entrepreneur launching new media and inventive content helping us to connect with ourselves. At 73, she’s now a writter. Please discover her book ‘Ce que la vie m’a appris’ (What I’ve learnt with life). You will learn how not be perfect (yes, she’s right that’ our issue), a few Moroccan recipes and how to listen to people : understanding their human complexity and simplifying your life. She’s wise and Millennials get it, they’re all big fans of her. You’ll love her book and I’m so proud to be one of her friends.
And I said 10 role models? Let’s invite a guy if you agree
Temi Ojo lives in Los Angeles and has spent years in San Francisco. He has written a movie about the Silicon Valley and sexual harassment and discrimination many months before any media was covering the topic. I was honoured by his trust and had the chance to read the script. It’s a great movie with charismatic characters.
We always have a lovely time talking with Temi, about what’s going on, thinking about what we experience, excited about the future, grateful about what happened to us.
Thanks Temi for our chats and to make me more aware. I wish you the best for financing and producing your movie, you deserve the best.
When I look at you, I’m also the proud mother of two boys, and I’m convinced your generation and theirs will move things forward. Yes, we also need you guys!
Odile
