Podcast appearances and mentions of lee well

Whooping. Spanking. Beating. Whatever you want to call it, corporal punishment was a central part of Lee's upbringing. Growing up, he was made to believe that it was a Black custom but as an adult he began wondering if it ended up doing more harm than good. In this episode, Lee speaks with Dr. Andrew Garner, a pediatrician who has studied the effects of corporal punishment on children, and how the nervous system is altered by it. Later, Lee speaks with Geoff Ward, a Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss how corporal punishment has extended beyond the home, and into schools.TranscriptWe wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse, and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org - listener discretion is advised.Hi - this is Lee Hawkins and we're about to dive into episode seven of What Happened in Alabama. This conversation is about corporal punishment in homes and schools. Beating, spanking, whooping, whatever you call it, that's what we'll be talking about. This is very personal to me because it's how I and so many of my peers were raised. We were taught that it was not only normal, but necessary. Today we're going to get into the short and long-term effects of corporal punishment on the physical, mental, and emotional development and well-being of children, often following them into adulthood. It's a heavy and important topic But you'll get a lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue - that'll give you some context for the series and this episode. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much. In February 2019, I had my final interview with my dad for this project. We talked for over 3 hrs. I had a deadline to hit, and because I had so many interviews already recorded I did one final interview with him, just to get specific questions answered without having to go back through all that tape. He did the final interview – and he answered some extremely difficult questions, with compassion, regret, and especially grace.Lee: And so how did you get into the whooping thing? Like you beating us with your belt? What made.. Like, where did you get that from?Lee Sr: That I can't say. I don't know, man. It was just a, some kind of a stress that I had, evidently. Lee Sr: it's hard to say how this shit went man.Asking my dad directly about this I realized that families often repeat certain patterns and cycles from generation to generation, without understanding why or where they come from. That four year process of interviewing my father about his upbringing in 1950-era Jim Crow Alabama shined a powerful light on why I was raised the way I was. But while I had gained a better understanding of some of the historical factors that shaped my upbringing, I still needed to understand the forces that prevented my father from breaking the cycle of belt whipping when we were kids. Lee: But what were the stresses that you were going through? Lee Sr: Things that I had seen my mom had to go through with people and shit and that was hard to push it. And so when I thought you guys did something, that was when I would, you know, get out of control like I did man, because that is out of control. I don't give a fuck how you put it. It was validating to hear Dad declare that hitting children with belts was wrong, and something that he profoundly regretted, and was genuinely sorry for, because I struggled for my whole life to understand the sentiment that Black children – especially – need to be beaten, even as I accepted it. I didn't need much more than to hear my dad acknowledge that no, we didn't deserve it – Black kids or not. Lee Sr: If it was up to me and the way I feel about things, I would've never done nothing like that. But I don't know how I got out of control like that. Something was back there in my life that did that and I know it.My mom told me that there were nights that my dad came to bed and cried after those interviews. Though I never saw those tears, it doesn't surprise me. Revisiting painful memories that led my father to try to whip us into perfection out of deep love and concern was obviously excruciating for him. Despite my belief in “honor thy mother and father” and occasionally unnecessary guilt, I didn't feel obligated to shield him from the pain he caused my sister Tiffany and me at times. I accepted that the burden of his actions was not mine to carry. Expecting a victim to accept the blame for a perpetrator's actions, fearing that a grown man might cry, just isn't fair.I was determined to lead my dad down the path to finally put these generational demons to rest, for both of us and for future generations of our family. If he cried, he cried. When I heard that dad cried, I saw it as a sign of empathy but not a reason to quit researching. As children, I wept, and Tiffany wept, through the hundreds of belt whippings we received. In fact, our mother would tell us: “Stop crying or I'll give you something to really cry about.” I now realize that perpetrators rarely recognize the extent of a victim's pain because they aren't the ones being beaten.My father's tears didn't change the reality of what they had done to us. His crying may have meant he finally grasped that his childhood impacted mine more profoundly than my parents had ever acknowledged. Our pain stung so much more than the feeling of a belt to the behind.Social justice activists talk so often about how violence impacts Black bodies, but my research, and my memories of my own childhood, have shown me that violence–including within the Black family and community– can also have potentially devastating effects on Black minds—especially the minds of children.With my mental health journalism training, I now understand why I was always on edge, like my parents. They feared the world, and I feared them. Sometimes I'd go to bed fully clothed, with three layers of clothing on for extra padding, preparing for the possibility of being pulled out of bed for a forgotten chore. This made me high-strung and hard to stay calm. Around age eight, I started blinking excessively when nervous. One Sunday in the choir stand, I couldn't stop blinking. After church, one of my Dad's friends mentioned it, "I think Lee Lee's got some kind of nervous tic." Dad dismissed it as teasing, ranting to my mom about it the whole ride home.But his friend was right. My nervous system was firing like crazy. Though I excelled in spelling and reading, I struggled in math that year. My parents thought I was clowning in class and believed more beatings would improve my scores. They'd yell, "You're being the class clown for all those white friends of yours." They didn't realize I needed extra help from a teacher or tutor. Instead of focusing on math, I'd sit at my desk and worry about the belt whipping I could get for writing down a wrong answer, which made me blink even more.Neither my father nor I connected my nervousness to the beatings. We saw the belt as temporary pain. But it hijacked my entire system. As an adult, I've dealt with stress, but nothing compares to the constant stress I carried as a child. I don't know how I never developed an ulcer. Imagine an adult experiencing the unpredictability of being overpowered and whipped several times a month, then having to perform at their best the next day. That's what I went through… as an eight-year-old.What broke my heart as a child was that my mother told me that she gave my teacher permission to hit me if she wanted to. My teacher never did, but she clearly knew I was getting the belt at home. That trend of many schools failing to protect students from violence, or even exacting violence themselves, impacted me in so many ways. One clear way was the reality that my Dad rarely if ever got hit by his parents, but he did get hit plenty of times at school, which, I believed normalized the idea of child beating in his mind at a young age.And today, Alabama is one of seventeen states that still allow corporal punishment in K-12 public schools, with the schools mostly striking Black children and those with disabilities. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the UCLA Center for Civil Rights Remedies reported that Black boys are nearly twice as likely to be hit compared to white boys, and Black girls are struck at over three times the rate of white girls. This, all despite the fact that Black students behave similarly to white ones. Today, hitting school children is legal and most prevalent in states where enslavement was legal. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas represent over 70% of all corporal punishment in U.S. public schools, according to the SPLC. Children at some schools are hit nearly twice a month. Notably, during the 2015–16 school year, one Mississippi school reported 871 instances affecting 57 students, averaging 15 times per student. Another school in the same state noted 60 instances for just four students, also averaging 15 times per student. A few years back, before my dad died, my Dad and his sister, Aunt Toopie, talked about the beatings they received at school while growing up in Jim Crow AlabamaLee: Did they whoop the kids in school, was it a strict thing?Lee Sr: Yeah, we got our ass kicked every time we were late, I know that. Aunt Toopie: And stand in the corner.Lee Sr: And when you did something in class you got your ass kicked.Aunt Toopie: They had belts in school in them days.Lee Sr: They had that board of education. If I was late for school, you'd go right to the principal's office, and he'd tell your ass up about three times with that paddle, with holes in it. That paddle was a piece of oak wood, and it had varnish on it and it had holes. They had drills holes in it. It was custom made. It said board of education and he'd have you bend over and man, that thing, them holes in that thing, would leave little dots on your ass.” Being hit at school burned a permanent memory in my dad's brain - he normalized it when he became a father, handing down the Alabama-born anxiety to another generation, to me. After the conversation with my dad where he apologized for whipping my sisters and me, I tried to have a similar one with my mom. But it went very differently. "We didn't beat you,” she said. “We spanked you."I was disappointed to hear her deny how severely she and my dad beat my sister Tiffany and me. But I also understood why she would say what she did. There's almost a collective agreement in society that so-called spanking is supposedly lighter than a beating…kinder and gentler and never abusive or harmful. It's much easier to stomach the narrative that there are acceptable forms of violence to use against children; even though that same violence would never be acceptable to use against an adult. Which is why I give my dad so much credit for being honest and not trying to minimize what they did.My dad finally understood the full spectrum of damage the American whip had caused generations of our family. We often think the worst of corporal punishment are the welts and physical pain. But through my own experience and my research, I know the real pain is from the belt's access to the victim's mind. My parents didn't know these beatings and the mental stress of having to constantly look out for danger all around me, made it harder for me to focus, triggering my nervous system into fight or flight, causing bouts of anxiety that followed me into adulthood. This led me to find experts on the effects of corporal punishment on the body and mind.Dr. Garner: The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. Their brain, their physiology is still under development. And so what happens in childhood doesn't stay in childhood. That's Doctor Andrew Garner. He's a primary care pediatrician in Ohio who has studied the effect of corporal punishment on children. I wanted to talk to Dr. Garner to understand the physiological changes that occur in children when they are hit. Whether you hit them with your hand, a belt, a paddle, regardless of how hard or how often you hit them, it's all corporal punishment. I'm someone who refuses to get nostalgic about the beatings of my childhood. I would never high-five my friends and say I needed it, I loved it, or credit it as the reason I stayed out of trouble or became a productive citizen. It's not funny to me, mainly because it took me years to rewire my system. But I don't want to unfairly judge people either, especially those who don't have the information. Once I delved into history, I gained a deeper and clearer understanding of why so many people I've known—especially Black and white people from the South—have often celebrated and even laughed fondly about the use of corporal punishment. Many have no idea that, when we really look closely at America's historical foundation, hitting children is akin to setting up a system of white supremacy or a mini plantation in their living room. Later in this episode, I speak with Professor Geoff Ward, a Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss how corporal punishment has extended beyond the home into schools across the South, mainly the states and counties where slavery was legal and lynching was most prevalent. We talk about the institutionalized use of corporal punishment and how deeply ingrained it is in our history. But for now, let's get back to Dr. Garner.The conversation mentions violence and abuse against children, sensitive listeners please take care. [break]Lee: I think there are many people who believe, well, if I just hit the kid a few times on the butt with my hand, that's a spanking. If I hit a kid with a belt that's a beating, or if I don't if I hit a kid with a belt, but I don't hit them hard..as hard as the guy up the street who's hitting his kid with the extension cord, then that's not a beating. Dr. Garner: That's all violence. Right. So, you know, corporal punishment is a negative consequence, for unwanted behavior. But that negative consequence is the use of force and is intended to cause pain or discomfort. So that's violence. So, you know, whether or not you're trying to split hairs between, a spanking or a beating, it's still the use of violence to coerce, and control and modify another person's behavior. And we know that in order to continue changing that behavior, the violence needs to escalate over time. So it's a slippery slope. I can recognize this slippery slope in my own life. My parents started out with a few hits when I was little and over the years it escalated to something much more serious, to the point where getting hit with a leather belt for five minutes was normalized. In fact, their punishment increased to slaps across the face and attacks that were even more severe. And this was from two parents, who, like most of the parents we knew, felt like, if they truly loved their children, they needed to kick it into high gear and show us that life wasn't going to be fair and that nobody was coming to save us, especially because we were Black. I can see how this happens. Dr. Garner: You may think that in the short term, you're doing a good service to your child because you're trying to teach them something. But in the long run, we know the outcomes are worse. There's clear data, you know, increased risk of child abuse, because you have to eventually increase the negative stimuli to try and change the behavior. Part of the problem with corporal punishment, it's a double whammy. In addition to the anticipation, like you're saying what bad thing is going to happen to me? There's also the loss of safety, because one of the things that the the one of the ways that we buffer adversity is through relationships. And now there's, there can be a loss of trust, in the, in the relationship. And that to me is really interesting that, it's not just the, the, the fear of the pain as you were talking about. It's also the loss of trust that when is this going to happen. Where when am I safe? When am I safe? Lee: Well, never. I was never really 100% safe in my home or outside in the world. Never. There was never a time that I felt safe. And I also feel like my parents did that by design. I don't think they wanted me to ever feel safe, because I don't think they believed that a Black person in America is ever safe. So I believe that they wanted me to feel the hyper vigilance and the hyper cautiousness that they, in the generations before them, felt because they didn't believe enough in the system of America. Another thing is that when you said you have to increase the punishment if you're going to use this system, that's exactly what happened to me. And I know my dad. I know that he…lost control and did not know what he was doing. And I think at that time he got to a point where he realized, what have I done? What have I become? Dr. Garner: I think where we break down sometimes is trying to decide what's more important, you know, is it the connection or is it the structure? Well, they're both important. You need to have connection. So kids trust the instruction you're giving them. But the way I think about it is it's a lot easier to teach a kid what they should do than to keep from doing something you don't want them to do. Lee: But it's also forcing us to understand that children are multiple times smaller than adults. And so we if we apply some empathy here, we have to understand that even if you're hitting a child once or twice, you're still multiple times larger than the child, and the child may not have a bruise. Or the bruise may go away. But it's really this person who's supposed to be taking care of me, who is the only thing in this world I love, and this person who is providing meals and food and shelter for me is hitting me. Oh, he's going to hit me again. But for some reason, children have a different standing in society. They're the most vulnerable in the society, but they have the least protection. Dr. Garner: Yeah. It's crazy. The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. We know if there is significant adversity, and there aren't opportunities to turn off the body's stress response that can result in a thing called toxic stress. Right. So toxic stress is this inability to turn off the stress response. And it can literally change who we are at the behavioral, at the cellular, even at the molecular levels. We know that adversity can sort of become biologically embedded and and changing the way our genomes work. Lee: And this is just even with just hitting a child once or twice occasionally. Right? Dr. Garner: Absolutely. I mean, that's the point, is that we have to understand the way brains develop. Brain development is an experience driven event. It's the experiences that happen that drive brain development. And so the question is, what are those experiences in childhood, are they adverse in the sense that they're leading to expectancies of bad things and always being on edge, or are they nurturing to the extent that people get me? I have agency and things are going to be positive in the future. So those early experiences are truly foundational and they can influence the way we see ourselves and the way we see other people and the way we see our future.For me, belt whipping taught me not to ever trust anyone, including and especially my parents. I loved them, but I never fully trusted them and rarely confided in them. And that turned me into an adult who simply refused to trust another human being. Despite the active social life I've always had, my childhood groomed me to be a rugged individualist, putting all my trust in God and myself. I never put even an ounce of faith in the idea that another person would not be capable of betraying or letting me down. And in relationships with girlfriends -– especially if they wronged me in any way – I developed the very unfortunate ability to be able to walk away from them and never look back and never miss them. And I often wanted to be able to be vulnerable and feel some level of paralysis or regret, but I always could just keep going.The beatings also made me perfectionistic. My mantra became, “if you want something done right, do as much as you can by yourself, because most people will almost always fall short and disappoint.”At a very young age, I just adopted the posture that I was on my own, and that I should not count on anyone or expect anyone to come up with a net and try to catch me if I fell. And also I also believed that you should always keep people out of your personal business, because in most cases, they'll take your plans, your confiding in them about your most vulnerable feelings or moments, or the smallest mistakes and weaponize them to try and hurt you. And that's how my father was. And yes, he came from a family of Jim Crow survivors and had family members murdered, but I believe a lot of this view of the world I've seen in my family, especially in my case, came from being beaten as children. These beatings – and yes, I have finally given myself permission to call them abuse – just wreaked havoc on my capacity to receive love without skepticism. Even now, I mean, speaking this, I'm wondering if this revelation will somehow be used against me by somebody down the line. But at least I can recognize it now. My new mantra is, “I'm free and I'm safe.” And to be fair, I'm a lot better than I used to be, and I can't say that the skepticism hasn't helped me a great deal – especially in the media business – but I wouldn't wish that level of steel-heartedness on anyone. I asked Dr. Garner to break down what happens to a child's nervous system when they get hit or know there's a possibility they're about to get hit. He said there are three biological pathways. Dr. Garner: The most simplest and the most evolutionarily, primitive is freeze, right? So you may see that the deer in the headlights type thing. Right. And so the first temptation is to freeze, if I be small and don't move, maybe the threat will go away.The second, which you might recognize, is fight or flight. Dr. Garner: And that's where you have a release of all kinds of biological mediators. Cortisol and epinephrine, that basically make your blood pressure high, make you ready to fight or run away. Those hormones are very useful in the short term. So if you see a bear, you can run away fast. But if that if that stress response isn't turned off through the presence of safe, stable, nurturing relationships and that constant bathing in those physiologic mediators of stress is there that results in changes. Changes at the molecular level, changes at the cellular level changes the behavior that really can change who we are. And we call that toxic stress. The third response is to affiliate, that means our ability to collaborate with others, to seek help when there's a threat. It's part of the reason humans have existed so long as a species. But Tiffany and I didn't have that support. There was no escaping the belt. Dr. Garner: Where are my friends? Who's going to help me through this? The problem is, for a young child, the friend is the person who's beating you. So you've really sort of lost that that ability to turn off the stress response from an affiliate response. You're really stuck in flight or flight, and if you're constantly bed with those hormones, again, that's going to lead to a child who's going to be more defiant, more aggressive. Not be able to think things through, not be able to think about the broad perspective because you're. Constantly in fight or flight mode. You're constantly in survival mode instead of relational mode. Lee: Right? Yeah. And if you can think about this to bring some empathy in here for people to understand, if you were hitting a dog and a dog who depends on you for everything, is experiencing this toxicity in this toxic environment, you can actually see a lot of times when dogs are abused because you'll go to pet them and they kind of squirm. Sometimes they might bark, sometimes they might even try to bite you. And that's because they've been abused. Children are the same, right? I mean, children can have some of the same effects that we see, in dogs, that we empathize with. Children who are treated the same way in their home. Can have that same impact. Dr. Garner: But here's the good news. And this is the really fascinates me, is that the more we learn about the biology of adversity, the more we learn about toxic stress and how adverse experiences become biologically embedded and really affect life course trajectories. That same biology underlies how positive experiences get embedded. Right? And that that is the good news, right? So adversity is not destiny in any way, shape or form. In the last few years, there's been a really interesting thing called biobehavioral synchrony, which is a big phrase, but what it means is in those moments of magical connection that you have with another being in particularly between parent and child, there's literally an alignment of the brain waves of the autonomic functions of hormone levels and behavior. Right. And so we sort of know this intuitively that emotions can be contagious. Right? So, if a child's crying, the sibling mates are crying and specters may join an angry mob so it can go in the negative way, but can also go in a positive way, in a sense that engaged and trusted caregivers, they literally have the ability to hack in remotely and turn off the child stress response. Dr. Garner explained that you can see this in action if you look up the still face experiment on Youtube. It's a famous psychological study that was first conducted in 1975 by the psychologist Edward Tronick. Dr. Garner: Basically they take a young child about a year old, and usually it's a mother, and they bring him into the laboratory and they have three two minute blocks. The first two minute block is engaging, so they're just playing back and forth. It literally they call it serve and return - the baby coos the mom responds. And it's really this biobehavioral synchrony. You can literally see it happening for you. And then they tell the mom to turn away and then turn back and to not engage for two minutes. And if you watch the video it is viscerally painful because the child noticed there's a rupture in the synchrony and does everything they can to try and get back engaged, everything they can to get back engaged. And then they tell their mom to turn back again, and now to start to repair. And it's palpable. The children's relief immediately. Oh, we're back again. You're back again? I'm safe. You got me. The important thing is, is there repair, right? And the most recent evidence suggests that it's the latency to repair that's associated with secure attachments and distress tolerance, that ability to say the goodness is coming. We're going to get back together again. It's really, really important. And so, again, that's great news for parents. We're not going to be perfect. We're all going to make mistakes as parents. We can't always be perfectly engaged. The important thing is it's all about repair. It's the ability to come back and become back engaged and basically be saying that, child, your perspective is important to me. The relationship's important to me. And it's way more important for me to be kind than right. Lee: Yeah. And I think that that's one of the challenges for me as part of people from the African-American community who had my experience. For me, knowing that my parents loved me and knowing that that love could be shown, but then the next minute I could be being beaten with the belt. And then they're loving me again. And then I'm beaten with the bel,t going back and forth. I do wonder…I do believe that there were there were some kind of protection outcomes that came from the love that was shown, but the unpredictability of it was, was very difficult because the relationship to violence was weird. Like it because violence was almost framed as love. Dr. Garner: Yeah. That's one of the one of the big paradoxes, I think, of corporal punishment is that having been a victim of corporal punishment, that increases your risk of being a victim of other physical violence down the line, which is sort of counterintuitive. But I think it gets at what you were saying there is that leads to what those expectations of what love are.And throughout my research, I found disturbing instances where enslavers used Bible verses to justify corporal punishment and enslavement. This deeply troubled me as both a Christian and a Black man. I've often heard the phrase "Spare the rod, spoil the child," which, contrary to widespread belief, isn't even in the Bible. And even still, this metaphorical use emphasizes guidance and care rather than punishment. Dr Garner's wife is a Methodist pastor, and I talked to him about how people have often manipulated and weaponized scriptures and proverbs to justify and advance slavery, whipping, and their own agendas. As a result, generations of people have come to believe that it is moral, righteous, and holy to beat children. Dr. Garner: I think it's very upsetting when, these scriptures are being used in a way to propagate violence, when clearly that is not what Christ's intention was. He said, bring the children to me. Bring the children to me. Right. He didn't say, bring them to me so I can whip them. Right. Said, be like a child. Be be like a child. Be empathic. Be full of wonder. Right. And somehow we sort of lost that. So, discipline, you know, comes from the Latin word to teach. Right? So it doesn't mean to punish. Right. And of course there are multiple types of punishment, which actually runs the spectrum right from, a loss of privileges, right. So, you know, if you, you lose your driver's license, if you speed too much, right, to possible incarceration and then all the way to physical harm and even even death. Right? So punishment is the, are those negative consequences. They're imposed for undesired behavior. But punishment is only one form of discipline. And the more we know about it, the more we know it's actually not as effective in the long term and actually can cause potential harm. Lee: And what I love about this research that you've done in everything that you're sharing with us today, is that you're showing that a child's brain is being wired as we go, right, that we're creating the future adult every day when we're working with that child. What do stress toxins do to the body in terms of health? Dr. Garner: Toxic stress, which can be precipitated by any number of different forms of adversity, is associated with basically all of the leading causes of death. Right? So if you want to look at, asthma, you want to look at cancer, do you want to look at suicide and mental health issues. You want to look at obesity. You want to look at substance abuse. Right. So I mean, there's no doubt that, when we are programmed to expect adversity, that we're going to find ways to try and cope. And so if you think about it, you know, people overeat and abuse substances and, are promiscuous for a reason. In the short term, they turn off the stress response. But in the long term, the worse health outcomes down the line. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, I think your point, though, that the brain is, is being made over time is really important, and so are the relationships. And so one way I think to try and frame all of this is affect regulation, how we handle our emotions. Because if you have an angry parent who's spanking a child, the message to the child is when you get angry, it's okay to hit right. And so, that's not what we really want for our kids in the long run. We actually want them, to learn that it's okay to have strong emotions. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be frustrated. But when you have those emotions, what can we do with them? How can we channel them? Dr. Garner has worked with parents and treated children as a Primary Care Pediatrician for more than two decades. He co-authored the book "Thinking Developmentally: Nurturing Wellness in Childhood to Promote Lifelong Health" and the American Academy of Pediatrics' Policy Statement on Preventing Childhood Toxic Stress and Promoting Relational Health. As a speaker, he focuses on early brain and child development, preventing childhood toxic stress, and promoting early relational health, and he considers himself to be an advocate for all children and their families. Lee: And what do you tell parents when they bring their children in to be treated about corporal punishment? Dr. Garner: One, to heal any wounds that they've had as a parent? Because we've talked before, parents tend to parent the way they were parented. So, I'm going to want to know, what the stressors are in their life with, what the stressors were when they were kids. What a good question often is, what, did your parents do that you want to make sure you do for your kids? But then also, what are the things your parents did that you want to make sure you never do for your kids? As kids get older, I'm going to help them understand, that it's really not the behavior you want to focus on. That a child's behavior is always telling us there's something they need or something they want. And what we need to do is trying to interpret it and help them figure out a better way to have that behavior met. And so this starts really early, you know, with temper tantrums in 3 or 4 year olds. It's really not about the behavior. It's the emotion that's driving the behavior. And if we can help parents understand that, then we can help parents help their child say, look, you're allowed to be angry. You're allowed to be frustrated, allowed to be disappointed. But when that happens, we're not going to yell and scream. We're going to do the things that bring us joy. We're going to try and, spend some time doing some Legos or some coloring, teach them how to cope instead of just saying stop. The problem with, with corporal punishment and all punishments is it's basically saying, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. And then the child, then in, in sort of in their own mind, thinks there's something wrong with me. Because I feel this way and the message needs to be, you're allowed to feel that way, but when you feel that way, do this instead. If the parent is able to say, I'm so sorry I lost it, I'm so sorry I used those harsh words. I'm so sorry I was demeaning. I'm going to try better and we're going to work together to build this relationship. Then that's what those kids are going to do someday, right? I mean, I tell kids that empathy is a superpower. It is an absolute superpower. Not everyone has it, but we can teach it. And when you have it that allows you to repair, that allows you to have relationships. After speaking with Dr. Garner I want to believe that if more well-meaning parents knew hitting their children can also harm their brains and emotional health as opposed to just being temporarily painful, fewer would do it. However, in a country where hitting children is part of a centuries-long pattern of violence, and amid a system that offers the smallest people the least protection, I understand why many believe hitting children is beneficial, especially for Black children.But now that I'm out of that situation, I do view it as abuse and a legacy of my country's legal system and culture, and the enslavement and torture of my people. And it's not just in the home - in 17 states across the U.S. corporal punishment is legal in public schools. Most of these states allow educators to hit students three times in the rear with a long wooden board. And in all states except for just a few, corporal punishment is allowed in private schools.To help me understand it more I reached out to Professor Geoff Ward at Washington University in St Louis. He's a historical sociologist and the director of the Washington Slavery Project. Some of his work connects the dots between the history of lynching in southern states with the modern usage of corporal punishment in schools today. I've had a couple conversations with Professor Ward, the first time was about 2020. I spoke to him again more recently to learn more about the logic of racial violence, how it intersects with our judicial system and how we can break the cycles of racial violence. Lee: You know, before when we talked, we talked a lot about racialized social control. Can you give us a definition, to hold on to here? Prof. Ward: I think a good place to start would be is to recognize that we live in a racialized social system, a society where rewards are allocated along racial lines, where meaning is constructed along racial lines, things like, you know, reliability or, beauty, or intelligence, morality, are riddled with racial logic because we live in a society where race has sort of been infused in the way we relate to and understand each other, the way the society has been organized. And in that context, social control becomes racialized. And social control generally describes the definition and enforcement of norms. And social control can be informal, you know, a sideways glance or a disapproving look. But we also have systems of formal control. And that brings in the State. And our regulatory systems, our courts, our criminal legal system and so forth that are part of the system of social control. And, you know, all of that complex is racialized.I remember reading Professor Ward's work and being shocked by his citation of a 1901 Alabama constitutional debate over the legality of whipping prisoners, in which a county official remarked that “everybody knows the character of a Negro and knows that there is no punishment in the world that can take the place of the lash with him.” And he noted, that juvenile court records from 1930s-era North Carolina reveal that court-ordered whippings were reserved almost exclusively for Black boys and girls, given “widespread feelings among white county juvenile court judges that whipping is the most effective way of handling delinquent Negros."Another court official noted a common diversionary practice of “sendingdelinquent Black boys downstairs with a big police officer to have themflogged” prior to release.Prof. Ward: So this was a an example we, we used from the historical record in the article I mentioned where we examined how histories of racist violence, particularly lynching, relate to patterns of corporal punishment in contemporary public schools. Where we found that, that net of other factors, every additional lynching in the history of a county increased significantly the odds that a child would be corporally punished in a school in that county. This was after accounting for things like how, the funding of the school, the racial makeup of the school, whether it's urban or rural, how experienced the teachers are, how religiously conservative the residents of the county are, and so forth. And in that article, we used the story you're referring to to provide some context for how this relationship could come to exist. How is it that contemporary schools, likelihood of using violent strategies of school discipline has anything to do with the history of slavery or lynching in in that county? What is the story there? What are the mechanisms that connect the past to the present? And we cited that example because it speaks to the racial logic of corporal punishment, the idea that African-Americans are not fully human, are not sentient beings, can cannot be, influenced through, you know, appeals to things like morality or decency or logic, you know, white supremacism historically asserted that that Black people could not think deeply about anything. And so you and so this what this judge is saying in this case and we found numerous examples of this, judges, legislators, you know, rationalizing corporal punishment. And was saying that, you have to appeal, you have to reach, you have to address African-Americans through pain. Lee: Yeah. Prof. Ward: Because, because the you can't reach them through the brain. Lee: Yes. And and what I love about your research is that you've really just blown the doors off of this and shown that the public record is full of governmental rationalizations of violence against Blacks, even after emancipation. you show that African-Americans have always been framed as warranting more violent control strategies. And this is deeply rooted in the idea that we are not fully human. Is that something that you just have seen all through your research? Prof. Ward: Well, yeah, it is, I know it has to also be said that that, you know, racialized social systems are contested. You know, this this idea, this attempt to dehumanize African Americans, never actually fully succeeded. It resulted in a tremendous amount of oppression and pain and violence and death and so forth. But, simultaneously, you know, my research is also showing that Black communities and their allies are countering these measures. But even with respect to the juvenile justice system in my book, ‘The Black Child-Savers' is mostly about how generations of Black women organized, beginning in the 1890s, to dismantle this Jim Crow juvenile justice system. And, they were fundamentally motivated by their own recognition that Black children and people were, in fact, fully human and fully capable of realizing the benefits of a more enlightened approach to social control. One that focused on, on child welfare and development. You know, the system that was being developed for white kids, who were not being subject as much to this, yeah, this brutality. And so they did create, you know, other kinds of institutions and practices that also have to be kept in mind as we think about the sort of how this history unfolded. Lee: You talk about the connection between corporal punishment and the history of lynching, which is really an incredible contribution to this body of work. Lee: Are you still seeing the trend in which, historical areas where lynching was the most prevalent tend to correspond to the amount of corporal punishment that's being done in a particular school district? Prof. Ward: There certainly have been study after study showing that that that histories, area histories of lynching and other racialized violence, predict contemporary patterns of of conflict and violence and inequality. Things like, Black victim homicide rates today and, patterns of vote suppression and white supremacist mobilization, you know, and, white political conservativism, things like Black infant mortality or racially disparate infant mortality, differences in heart disease. I mean, all kinds of contemporary outcomes have been shown by social scientists to be associated with histories of racial violence in, in specific areas. So I would I would imagine that, you know, that that the relationships we saw with respect to corporal punishment in schools, have not suddenly gone away. Understanding how governmental institutions have historically ensured that Black children are subjected to corporal punishment, including in schools, helps me see why my parents feared they had to use violence to protect me. They were conditioned by a system of legal white supremacy to equate violence with love. Like agents of the state, they and generations of Black parents saw violence as a necessity, convinced that nonviolent reasoning wouldn't work with a Black boy.As a result, while my parents were opposed to police violence, they turned our living room into a whipping station, becoming indirect agents of the very police brutality our people protested. Each generation in my family had a hypervisible white police officer who symbolized the need to beat Black children. For my father's generation, it was Birmingham's white supremacist "Commissioner of Public Safety" Bull Connor. In my generation, it was the officers who brutalized Rodney King, and epithet using Officer Mark Fuhrman from the O.J. Simpson trial. For Millennials and Gen Z, it's Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd. It felt as if my parents unconsciously partnered with America's most racist police elements to enforce violence and keep their Black son in line.As I delved deeper, I saw similar patterns among some Black educators and religious leaders. Despite the disproportionate use of corporal punishment against Black children, many administrators and school board members advocated for its use. Legendary psychiatry professor Alvin Pouissaint once told me he once traveled to the South to lobby for the repeal of corporal punishment, only to find that Black educators and leaders were some of its most vocal proponents. One of the school board members who once adamantly advocated for corporal punishment in Mississippi was also a prominent pastor in the Black church. He was one of the many people I'd studied who used the Bible to justify their pro corporal punishment stance Prof. Ward: I think one of the issues here, which relates to what we're talking about in terms of Black religious leaders, is there's an issue here of a kind of sovereignty where local community figures in a context of generally diminished power, economic power, political power, are holding on to a form of power that they do have, which is in the home, through the church, and saying, look, don't, let this, you know, social research fool you. And don't listen to these people who aren't from here and don't know our ways and aren't part of our church. We know what works, we've been whipped and we're fine, and listen to me, and I think there is a fair amount of, you know, manipulation on this issue that is about really about power. About holding on to power, holding onto power in community context, but also asserting power, as you mentioned, in the context of the home. In a society where, you know, there is so much humiliation and alienation, and and refusal of influence on things like, policy and practice and so forth. We commemorated Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and I was part of an event at my university where we specifically focused on his theme - beloved community. And, our conversation is making me think about, you know, some of the basic, you know, fundamental, tenets of this concept of beloved community, which include that we are stuck in a society marked by, you know, a chain of violence, you know, where we're just in this situation where violence is seemingly a constant. It's almost how we communicate. He talked about how our society is organized by fear and resentment and that fear, you know, the politics of fear and resentment... We for good reason often in that in that context, think about, you know, white reactionary politics. But but our conversation today is also about how fear and resentment contribute to other communities and, and their politics and that are, that are part of this larger chain of violence. If we're ever going to realize this idea of a beloved community, you know, that is a community organized by mutual understanding and universal goodwill. And King, King stressed that to get there, we'd have to reckon with these realities of how our politics of difference breed violence, breed fear and resentment. We'd have to get to a place of mutual understanding and goodwill and, and, you know, for example, to see our to see how, we have common interests in an issue like corporal punishment, whether it affects us directly or not, we have interest in creating a society where we aren't, reifying a culture of violence starting in the high chair, or assuming that there is also going to be an electric chair. How do we get to that place where we collectively disavow, violence as a means of social organization? Lee: Geoff Ward, thank you so much. This has been powerful. And we'll keep the dialog going. But thank you for the wonderful work that you're doing. Fabulous. Keep up the good work. Prof. Ward: Thank you. Lee, it's great to talk to you again. Lee: All right, brother.For years, I had an inner voice that told me, "My parents hate me." So much around us in America, from Black comedians who entertain and electrify crowds with their jokes about beating Black kids, tells us that there is often great contempt for Black children – that they hold the lowest standing in society and therefore should be violently punished with impunity. It takes a countercultural, conscious Black parent to see that every Black child deserves life, liberty, happiness, and positive reinforcement every day.These interviews helped me understand that the first step towards breaking this toxic belief—that violence with Black children is a necessity—is recognizing that they possess bodily integrity and innate intelligence and are neither superhuman nor subhuman, even if the broader society doesn't always see them in that light. We must be careful about internalizing the historical belief that Black children are built differently than white children and can endure more pain. The reams of science proving that corporal punishment has harmful long-term effects apply to them too. I believe that my parents and others unconsciously internalized these classically American beliefs about Black children. We have experienced every facet of America, from its deepest injustices to its greatest achievements. Because of that, it is easy to embrace the prevailing philosophies of this country that we played a heavy hand in building—we are deeply interwoven with its history and its belief system. But those who continue to advocate violence against Black children in homes and schools must reject those racist beliefs and instead embrace a new paradigm that sees and nurtures the full potential and worth of our children.There's a gospel song that says, “He saw the best in me when everyone else around could only see the worst in me.” We need more Black parents and communities to take the lead in seeing the best in our children. I hope that, armed with information about the generational and ongoing cycle of governmentally codified violence against our children, combined with the ever-evolving neuroscience showing that even the anticipation of being beaten can trigger the brain in ways that lead to anxiety in adulthood, more parents—Black and of all races—and school administrators will make a conscious decision to retire the hand, tree branch, belt, and wooden boards of the slavery and Jim Crow eras. We need to breathe life and affirmation into all children, ensuring they grow up with the support and validation they need to thrive, both at home and in society.If corporal punishment was designed to protect Black children, did it really help when it came to growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood? Black kids and the American Dream - that's the next episode of What Happened In Alabama…CREDITSWhat Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening.

When Lee got the results back from his DNA test, he was stunned to discover that he had pages and pages of white cousins. All his life he'd been under the impression that 95% of his DNA traced to West Africa. This discovery opened up a new historical pathway, one that traces all the way back to 17th century Wales. In this episode, Lee takes us on the journey to discover his white ancestry. Later, Lee sits down with two newly-found white cousins to understand how differently history shaped the Black and White sides of one family. TranscriptLee Hawkins (host): We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website whathappenedinalabama.org. Listener discretion is advised.My name is Lee Hawkins, and this is What Happened In Alabama.[intro music starts]Back in 2015, I took a DNA test and found out some pretty shocking information. I always thought that I was 95% West African but it turned out that nearly 20% of my DNA was European. This revelation raised so many questions for me and led to years of research that would change my understanding of my own upbringing forever. Today I'll share that with you. We're going to go all the way back to 17th century Wales to uncover the path my ancestors took from Europe to the American South and how that, through slavery, led to me.I'll talk with experts and newly discovered white cousins to explore the history that connects the two sides. I want to find out how my family's experiences on the opposite ends of slavery and Jim Crow shaped our beliefs and our understanding of American history. But you'll get a whole lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prologue first – that'll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thanks so much. In many ways, the seeds for this project were planted in 1991, during the first trip I remember taking to Alabama.[cassette tape turning over, music starts] Tiffany: He would play an album on repeat. That's my sister, Tiffany. I call her Tiff. It's 1991, she's sitting in the backseat of our family's car, driving from Minnesota to Alabama. Tiffany: Dad used to like still stay up to date on, you know, pop culture, current music. There were certain songs that he would be like, “Oh, I like that,” you know, like Tony! Toni! Toné! It Feels Good. And things like that.My dad hated flying. He'd seen too much in his life, and he related flying to so many of the musicians he loved: Otis Redding, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Buddy Holly. They were all his contemporaries, and they all died in air crashes. So instead, we drove.I was 19 years old, and I was attending college at the University of Wisconsin Madison. At that time, I had just really gotten into the school newspaper. I was thinking about becoming a journalist or maybe a lawyer, but at that point, writing was more intriguing to me. I was excited about this family trip to Alabama, and I had no idea what was coming.Tiffany: Yeah, so Alabama, it's been kinda a, a mystery for me throughout my life because I wasn't able to ask questions that anyone would ask when you're wanting to know things about your parent.One of the big reasons my dad wanted to go to Alabama was to interview my great-Uncle Ike. He was the eldest patriarch of the family in Alabama, and he owned a farm near Greenville, dad's boyhood town. But most importantly, because he was in his 90s, he knew a lot about family history. And Dad had a lot of questions. I remember getting to Uncle Ike's and sitting in the living room, and across from me sat a caramel-skinned, white-haired man. For me, his reflection was like looking into a mirror and adding 70 years.Uncle Ike was in his early 90s, but those high cheekbones and blemish-free skin made it harder for me to believe that he was a day past 75. It was also hard to believe we were actually in Alabama, with Dad finally standing before his legendary, long-lost uncle, with a tape recorder in his hand. It was a trip we'd been talking about for months. Dad wanted to learn as much as possible about the Alabama family he left behind. Lee Sr.: Well, it's definitely, it's been a blessing to get to see you. As interested as I was in journalism, I was far from having the experience and interview skills to feel confident taking the lead. Plus, I knew that Dad needed this, so I deferred to him. The fact that he grew up there meant his questions would be far better than anything I could just randomly think of. But hearing his questions and how basic they were showed me just how far he'd strayed from his Alabama roots. Lee Sr.: Let me see, um, you were telling me about my father Lum. Now, how many brothers and sisters did he have? Most of the conversation was going over family tree details. Simple things like, how many siblings did my father have? And what were their names? We sat in that living room and asked Uncle Ike questions for just over an hour.Uncle Ike: I understand that all of them were named [unclear].Lee Sr.: Oh, we had a aunt, uh –Uncle Ike: Colby…When Uncle Ike answered, I struggled to catch every word of his southern accent. It was so thick, I thought it might even be a regional dialect, one that was unique to what my dad always humorously called, “LA,” Lower Alabama. I marveled at how quickly Uncle Ike started reciting family members. Even at his age, his recall, it was as swift as a rooster's crow at dawn! Lee Sr.: Oh yeah, Aunt Jem. I remember her…As we talked, my eyes began to drift to the fireplace, which was decorated with family photos. There, I saw a framed, weathered photo of a white man looking like he'd been plucked from a vintage Field and Stream ad. He appeared part outlaw, part GQ model. He was in hunting attire. There were hounds at his heels, and it looked like he was gripping a musket. Why, I thought, would Uncle Ike have a picture of some random white man hanging over his fireplace? Lee Sr.: Now this, what's this guy's name? Is this George Pugh up here on this picture? Uncle Ike: No, that's Isaac Pugh. Lee Sr.: That's your father? Uncle Ike: Yeah. They called him Ike, but his real name was Isaac. That made him my great-grandfather, Isaac Pugh Senior. I looked closer at the photo, into his eyes. His gaze was a determined one, as if he was daring me to look into the records and find out more. Who was this white man?[music starts]That day was more than 30 years ago. Since then, I've learned so much more about our family history. Seeing that picture of Isaac Pugh Senior on the mantel opened up an entirely new branch of my family tree – a white branch – that I had no idea existed. Digging through the records and existing research, I was able to trace that line all the way back to 17th century Wales.I recognized that I couldn't fully understand my family's experiences in America without uncovering the history of our white blood relatives on the other side of enslavement and Jim Crow. I had so many questions. Why did they come to America? What did they do when they got here? And most importantly, how were they connected to me? [sounds of a boat on water, sea gulls]In 1695, a man named Lewis Pugh boarded a boat near his hometown in Northwest Wales to sail for what was then called, “The New World.” The journey was long and grueling. Many people didn't survive. But the ones that did held on by a combination of luck and faith. Faith that the land that they were headed towards would help them prosper. He landed in Virginia, likely as an indentured servant. Several years later, he met and married a woman named Anne. The couple purchased land in Richmond County. They built a home, had seven kids, and many more grandchildren. Two of their great-grandchildren, the brothers Jesse and Lewis Pugh, decided to move south to Alabama at the start of the 19th century. The first thing they had to do was to get land. And to achieve that, they had to overcome one major obstacle. Chris: Well, it's important to remember that whites wanted Indian land from the moment they first stepped into the Americas. And so Indians have been removed since 1492, of course. This is Chris Haveman.Chris: Let me just talk briefly about terminology and the use of the word “Indian.” I've interviewed dozens and dozens of Native people throughout my career, and prior to talking to them, I always asked how they would prefer to be identified, and almost universally they say “Indian” or “American Indian.” Now, these folks tended to be a bit older, and as the younger generations come of age, the term seems to be falling out of favor, and when it does, historians including myself will adapt and adjust accordingly.He's an author of two books on the removal of Indigenous peoples from Alabama and Georgia to present-day Oklahoma, and a professor at the University of West Alabama.I've come to Professor Haveman to help me get a lay of the land in 19th century Alabama, when Jesse and Lewis Pugh arrived in the state around 1810.When the brothers got to Alabama, they were in Muscogee territory. The Muscogee were a loose union of multiple Indigenous groups, and they had millions of acres. Tribal leaders also use the name “Muscogee Nation.”Chris: Really, the story begins after the War of 1812, when whites decided that they really wanted that, that nice, nutrient rich soil in central Alabama. Over the years, throughout the 17 and early 1800s, this land was whittled away through treaties.The federal government started sending commissioners down to remove the Muscogee – and to do this, they had to coerce them into signing treaties first. This was done all over the American South and the rest of the country – and by the time the removal really got going, the Muscogee nation had already lost a large part of their land. But they were resisting. Chris: Commissioners were sent out, and Indians did not want to give up their land. And so a lot of times they resorted to threats, they resorted to some other shady tactics. And you had whites streaming into the Creek Land and they would, you know, just establish their farmstead illegally in the Creek Nation. Sometimes it would just overrun a Creek homestead and kick the family out and commandeer their crops for their, as their own. A lot of times they would get Creeks hooked on alcohol and uh, sell them merchandise on credit, get them indebted to them, and then they'd force them to give up their property as collateral. And things get really, really bad. Lee: What was the philosophy that was used to justify that? Chris: Conquest. The whites wanted it, and they were gonna take it regardless. There was no real justification, moral justification for it other than whites had the racist premise that they were civilized and the Indians were “savages” and that the whites could make better use of the land than Indians.Jesse and Lewis Pugh became landowners, both running plantations. They founded a church in Troy, Alabama, called Beulah Primitive Baptist Church. It still stands today. In my research, I found an article honoring the church. The paper hailed the brothers as “those daring ones, who braving the perils of the wilderness, came here and reclaimed this fair land from the planted savage.” The “planted savage,” I now know, refers to the Indigenous people who lived on the lands across the American South and beyond.Professor Haveman told me that on top of forced removal, there was a great deal of Muscogee land ceded by the tribe, but the conditions of these transactions make it hard to say how voluntary these handovers actually were. Chris: In 1832, the federal government gives a proposition to the Creek Indians, and they say, ‘Look, if you cede the rest of your land to us, we will allow each head of family to take 320-acre plots of land.' And this is where everything really goes downhill for the Creek Indians, because they gave up their sovereignty, uh, in exchange for a title or a deed. But what it does is basically, and I think you have to ask, it was so one-sided in favor of the federal government. You have to ask yourself, ‘Why would the Creek Indians agree to this?' And I think that they agreed to this because whites had illegally trespassed on their land so much between 1827 and 1832 that they realized that you know, whites usually liked a deed or a, you know, a title to their land, a piece of paper, something you could say, “This is my land.” And I think the Creeks tried to adopt that in order to stave off this encroachment that whites were giving on their land.So they, they had this deed and this title, and they thought that that would prevent whites from streaming onto their land, but it didn't. It actually, it just opened up massive amounts of fraud for them. And so you had 5 million acres of land in the Creek Nation in 1832. When this was ceded, all 5 million acres of land went to the federal government, and then parcels of 320 acres were then given to each Creek family. If you add up the over 6,000 families times 320 acres, it only comes out to like 2.1 million acres. And so almost 3 million acres of land will now be opened up for white settlement. And so the thing that they were trying to prevent – whites from encroaching on their land – is now gonna become legal.[music]On a January evening in 1837, Lewis Pugh was in his plantation fields in Alabama with his overseer. By this point, he owned land and enslaved people. That night, a man quietly snuck onto the roof of a house that overlooked the Pugh family cemetery on the plantation. The man fired a rifle from the top of the house, killing the overseer. Immediately afterwards, a swarm of 60 Muscogee swooped down on the plantation field. They killed Lewis, one of his sons, and an enslaved baby, who was in his mother's arms. Four enslaved men tried to defend themselves, the women, and the plantation. The Muscogee killed them too. The story captured the country. Lee: It was in every major newspaper across the country, uh, that Lewis Pugh, a prominent white settler, had been killed, um, and murdered by the Creek Indians. Why do you think it was so important that it be framed in that way? Chris: It made national news because the thing whites feared the most was an Indian uprising. And it's one of the reasons that whites who, um, had no means to become large-scale cotton planters still wanted the Indians gone because they were constantly terrified that Indians would rise up and attack them. Uh, and they had, you know, somewhat of a legitimate reason to be scared because whites treated the Indians so terribly and stole their land and, you know, created all these problems for them.It's clear that the Muscogee didn't just fold and concede their land. They retaliated, determined to defend it. And I can't help but think about it from the perspective of those enslaved people who died, fighting alongside their enslaver, to protect his life and his land – that's how closely their lives were intertwined. I'm still very curious about them, because they, too, might've been my relatives. Not long after I took that DNA test and first found out about the Pughs, I found a last will and testament belonging to Jesse Pugh, the brother of Lewis Pugh, the man who was murdered by the Muscogee in Alabama. In the will, it stated that Jesse enslaved a young girl named Charity, who was kept in bondage by the family into her adult years. Not long before Emancipation, she gave birth to a biracial son who she named Isaac Pugh. That was the white-looking man whose photo I saw on the mantel at great-Uncle Ike's house. Isaac Pugh, my great-grandfather. Doing my DNA test couldn't have been any simpler. I went online and ordered the $100 test, and the next day, I got a small box in the mail. Inside, I found a vial, and returned my saliva sample the following day. In just a few weeks, I got an email with my DNA results. It shows you who your cousins are, from first, all the way to distant. I had pages and pages of cousins, including many who were very, very white. I'm talking blond with blue eyes. There were a lot of Pughs in there. I was stunned by the sheer volume. One genealogist told me he had never seen anybody with so many pages of cousins who had also taken DNA tests. At that point, I had more than 216 fourth cousins or closer. One of the descendants was a man in his late 80s named Lloyd Pugh. We both descend from Ann and Lewis Pugh, but our relation wasn't close enough to show up on my DNA chart.Lloyd lives in Petersburg, Virginia, and last year I went to his house to meet him with my producer, Kyana. You'll sometimes hear her in the background throughout the interview.Lee: It's a nice, quaint neighborhood with a lot of brick homes in a colonial-style design typical of Virginia, I think. I met Lloyd through a man named Jim Pugh, another newly discovered cousin, but coincidentally, I've known Jim for 30 years through my early work as a journalist, back in Wisconsin. He was a PR guy for the state chamber of commerce. Every month, I called him for a comment on the employment rates. I wouldn't say we were friends back then, but we definitely liked each other. And then, through an odd twist of fate, I found out that we were related. Jim: When you reached out to me and say, “I think we're cousins,” I was like, “What?!” Let's do a call.I'd always noted that he had the same last name as my Grandma Opie, but it was only through an exchange on Facebook after I'd taken the DNA test, that Jim and I compared notes and figured out that we were both tied to the Pughs of Wales. Once Jim and I reconnected, he told me he had an elder cousin who was a family historian of sorts. That person was Lloyd Pugh.Lee: Oh, he has, okay, an American flag on his house and one on his car. [laughs] And here we are. [seat belts unbuckling] Let's go get started. Lloyd has worked on this long before genealogy exploded in the mainstream. His research is in the archives of the Library of Virginia. He has binders full of information he's gathered over the years on the Pughs. Lloyd: That book right there is one that's on the early, early Pughs. Lloyd is 88 years old. He's a tall, lean, active guy, full of warmth and southern charm. He was born and raised in Petersburg, a city known for being the site of a nine-month siege back beginning in 1864 that ended up costing the Confederacy the Civil War. Lloyd is absolutely fascinated with the Civil War, especially the Confederate side. He has tons of relics in his home, everything from swords and rifles to cannons, decommissioned bomb heads, and bullets. He also has a huge painting of General Robert E. Lee, hanging right above his couch. Lee: Why do you have a picture of General Lee in your front room? Lloyd: Because it's a part of my heritage. It has nothing to do with being anti-Black or slavery. It's just part of my heritage in that I had three grandfathers that served under Lee. [music starts]Lloyd and I couldn't be more polar opposite in our views about the Confederacy. But I didn't go to Virginia to condemn or to convert him. I went to his house to talk to him about history, our shared history. And he was interested in talking about it too. So he and his daughters invited Jim and I over, and we had a conversation that helped me understand how the white Pughs would come to shape the Black side of my family for generations. [music]Lee: Well, thank you everybody. Um, the man of the hour is Lloyd. Because Lloyd has done a tremendous amount of work around the Pugh family history. And really, I want to thank you, Lloyd, for opening up your home and showing us this museum of incredible Civil War history that you have, and also helping me gain a better understanding of my own history.Um, it's, uh, it's bittersweet to understand how we're connected, but it's also, the power of it is that I wouldn't know this history if we hadn't worked together to understand it and to identify it, and part of my goal in doing this work is to inspire other people across racial lines to do this work. Um, and it is hard, but we both love it, right? Lloyd: Right. Lee: Okay, so, uh, you've done a tremendous amount of work on the Civil War, and we'll get into that, but you've also done a lot around the Pugh family, and I think it's important to talk first about how the Pugh family got to America.Lloyd: There were actually three migrations. One migration of Pughs went to Norfolk, and from Norfolk, they went down through North Carolina, South Carolina, on into Alabama, and in that direction. Lee: That's my line. Lloyd: That's his line. Our line of Pughs landed at, uh, Richmond County, which is the upper neck over on the, uh, near the, on the east, west side of the Chesapeake Bay, and they migrated on down through, uh, came this way, Chesterfield, on to Amelia County, and eventually they end up on the, uh, east side of the Appalachian Mountains.And the third group came in, in New York, and they migrated down the west side of the Appalachian Mountains into Tennessee and Kentucky on down in that direction. So there are three distinct lines of Pughs, and I was happened to be the one that migrated down through the Chesapeake Bay into Richmond County.Lee: What did the Pughs do here initially? Lloyd: Farmers. Tobacco was king in Virginia. They raised other crops. They had to raise, uh, food crops, but the money crop was tobacco. Tobacco was critical to the expansion of the slavery economy in America, so it doesn't surprise me that the White Pughs were involved in the tobacco trade. But through talking to Lloyd, I learned more about their interactions with Black people, specifically through a man named John Boyd Pugh. He's Lloyd's great-grandfather, and he fought on the Confederate side of the war. In fact, he was so committed to the Confederacy and the slavery it represented, he refused for months – after being captured and imprisoned near the end of the war – to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. It blew me away to learn how deeply committed people I share heritage with were to white supremacy – John Boyd Pugh and others believed devoutly in it. They practiced it, and were willing to die for it. And after the war, he became an overseer for a prominent family named the Baylors.Lloyd: And the Baylor family, signers of the Declaration of Independence, founders of Baylor University, some kind of way found out about my grandfather, John Boyd Pugh, and they offered him the oversee of New Market Plantation, which is in Milford, Virginia.His salary was one fourth of all the crops, plus $50 a month salary. And so he took the job, and he moved from Albemarle County with his family up to Milford to New Market Plantation. And he was the overseer of that plantation, right there at Bowling Green, Virginia. When I heard that, my mind went back to all the books I've read in my research, including The Half Has Never Been Told, by Edward Baptist, which clearly outlined the role of overseers as the drivers of productivity on plantations, many using whipping and other torture techniques to get the most out of enslaved Black people. Baptist explained that on many plantations, overseers held the enslaved to strict quotas. They'd weigh the crops and assess the work at the end of the day, and if the quota wasn't met, the person would be whipped in front of all the other enslaved people, to make an example out of them.Hearing that I not only share heritage with enslavers, but also overseers, I was absolutely stunned. I began to see how far back the whip could be traced in my family.Lloyd stipulated that because John Boyd Pugh did his overseer work after Emancipation, he believes he probably wasn't involved in whipping. Lloyd: When John Boyd went to Newmarket, this was after the Civil War. So they had to have hired labor. And I think, I doubt that there were the whippings and the lashing and so forth when you have hired workers because they could say, “I'm leaving,” and just walk off the farm, so, yeah. To be fair, it's possible that Lloyd is right – maybe John Boyd Pugh was one of the few exceptions; an overseer who never resorted to violence. But I doubt it, and here's why: in my research, I found the archive to be packed with proof that whipping continued to be a foundational aspect of overseer duties for decades after Emancipation into Jim Crow.Lee: This is the hard part, you know, for me, because, you know, I think when I first talked with you, Jim, you were telling me that your great – great-great- grandfather was an overseer. And I didn't know – or you didn't know – what an overseer was, and when I looked at, you know, a lot of these movies that you see, the overseers are the guys that drove the production of the, of the plantation. Um, and that, for me, is just, that's inextricably tied with the capitalistic, sort of, reality of building America and how so much of the productivity was driven at the plantation level. How did you feel when I explained, especially the part that whipping was a big part of overseer work? How did you feel about that?Jim: Well, you know, you don't really know what you don't know until you find out. And that's when you learn about it, you know, 'cause you don't, you think of, um, overseeing, uh, like a agricultural operation today, you wouldn't have that 'cause you have machines, you know? So, um, but yeah, that was pretty, pretty shocking to find out about that, but it's also the reality of what, the way the world was at that time, you know. [music starts]My mind went back to that interview with my Uncle Ike in 1991, when he told us about Grandma Charity. He told us that when he was a kid working on his father, Isaac Pugh Senior's farm, she would beat the kids if she felt they weren't being productive enough. This, from a woman who was enslaved by Jesse Pugh, a cousin of John Boyd Pugh. It's almost as if, once she became emancipated and the family got its own farm, she became the overseer, and her grandchildren, the free labor. Lee: I've been always fascinated by the way, when we built our country, just how deeply rooted it was, not just in slavery, but also in the establishment of the land, how people got their land, you know, um, particularly from, from the Indigenous people.And I think that the problem, just in my opinion, is that everything is so controversial that people have decided they don't even want to even begin to study this work. And there, of course, are many, many academics who write powerfully beautiful detailed accounts of all of this history. Um, Doug Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, um, Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told.And in a lot of this stuff, they give really detailed accounts of the economy of slavery and also the Civil War, and the way all of the different range of realities that were at stake as our country was starting to form itself into what we now know today. Um, when you study the Civil War and the Confederate side of it, what, how do you relate to that history in terms of your un– do you know anything about John Boyd Pugh or was the, the oral history lost?Lloyd: I knew absolutely nothing. No one in the family shared anything, ever shared anything with me. And what was learned, learned through my research. Clearly, family secrets are preserved on the white sides of the family, too. Dark secrets like the violent role of overseers, the fact that land was stolen, and the identity of white men who fathered Black children, were not often openly discussed. And those lies of omission make it harder for future generations of whites to acknowledge the causes of generational disparities and trauma – through ignorance or cognitive dissonance. But this work – especially the DNA testing – exposes the lies, and people doing it have to prepare themselves for unsettling discoveries. This work isn't about agreeing on everything. It's about opening up the family bibles and records to access information that neither side would have without the other. So it requires a rare form of tolerance, and a spirit of unity as opposed to division on the issue of genealogy. The truth is that I feel like I was blessed. I was fortunate to stumble on a white guy who I'd known for 30 years, and we discovered we were cousins. We already had trust between us, and he opened up the door for me to meet Lloyd. And the timing was perfect. Lee: I think for me, and especially the fact that, that you're basically a Republican dude [laughs] who, uh, you know, really like, and deeply rooted in the Republican party, um, and, and that you're a Republican dude who took me through to make this introduction so I could meet Lloyd so that we could study this together, to me, defies all of the conventional wisdom, which is that we're all divided and we're all, um, to be, you know, enemies on the other side of the issue.Jim: Well, Lee messaged me. I had posted about the, the trip where we did, we followed Lee's retreat back to Battle of White Oak Road. I think that was our last stop, and then we came home. And Lee, he said, ‘I, I see your, I think we're related.' And I said, I messaged him back and, and I'm thinking, ‘I don't want to put a bunch of this stuff in writing,' right? 'Cause I'm being like, it's not, this is sensitive stuff. I mean, we're dealing with race, and this is a war –Lee: You knew the political, the political – Jim: Yeah, I'm working in operatives, and he was working for the Wall Street Journal! And I'm thinking, ‘This is gonna be, this is not, this is gonna end bad,' right? So I, I said, “Lee…” He's like, “I think we're related.” He goes, ‘I've been doing family research. There's Willoughby and Spotsworth –.' And I said, ‘Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That sounds about right.' He said, ‘Can we do a call?' 'Cause I'm thinking, I want to, I want to turn off the typewriter. There's nothing good that's gonna come [Lee laughs] from this if it's typed forever and ever.And we did a call, and he's like, ‘Yeah.' And I said, ‘Well, how do you know?' He said, ‘I did 23andMe. And my DNA goes back to Wales,' and I said, ‘Well, you know, welcome to the family.' [laughter]Lee: And then I said, ‘I want my reparation.' Jim: Yeah.[laughter]And as the conversation continued, we drilled down deeper into the undeniable proof of our ancestors being enslavers, and Lloyd plainly stated the facts: Lloyd: Okay, let me, let me confirm that. I'm looking at the will of John Pugh in December 1827. His will, one negro hired by the name of Harry, worth $300. One woman, Judy, worth $200. One young man named Abram, $400. This is actually in the will, so that goes directly in our line, so there's, I mean, that's the proof of our line owning slaves.Lee: Do you feel guilty about it? Lloyd: No. Lee: Tell me what you think about it.Lloyd: It was a, it was a time. It's just like the Confederate statues in Richmond. It was history in a time, and you can't destroy it. Even though they've taken them down, they're still there in the minds of people, and they are people who are gonna keep them alive.Jim: But we're not white supremacists. Lloyd: No. Jim: We're not white supremacists, and that's the thing people need to understand. It's so easy to just shortcut from, ‘You're a conservative Republican or you're a libertarian or whatever' to, ‘You're a white supremacist,' and that's just not the case. I don't hold white people of today responsible for slavery and the actions of their ancestors. We're not responsible for the sins of our forefathers. But we should take responsibility for the present and the future by being transparent and honest about history. I know I joked with Jim about reparations, but that discussion isn't just between the white and Black families tied to slavery; it's between Black American descendants of slavery and the U.S. government, which includes states that enforced racist laws. Contrary to what many assume or imply, reparations wouldn't be about individual white citizens personally compensating Black people; it would be government obligation, funded by taxpayers like any other public expense – infrastructure, education, or foreign aid. Taxpayers don't get to opt out of funding highways they don't use, just as those from families who didn't own slaves can't opt out either. Slavery fueled America's economic rise – on the backs of Black people, largely on stolen land – a legacy from which today's Americans still benefit, no matter when they came here. [music starts]All in all, I spent two days with Lloyd, his daughters, and Jim. We had dinner and we talked a lot. He told me more about his life, like how he spent most of his career as an educator and superintendent, even helping oversee the desegregation of schools. I realized our families share many common values despite all our differences.Lee: When you hold all these documents and all the binders you've made, thinking of all the Pugh history, what do you feel?Lloyd: First of all, I feel thankful that I'm the result of all of that, that I'm able to carry on the family line. I just look at the Pugh family across the years as just good, sound, solid business people who did what they were supposed to do, and stayed out of jail, and paid their taxes, and didn't beat their families, and just good old southern Christian families is the way I look at it. The information I received from Lloyd deepened my understanding of why so many slavery-era customs appeared in my childhood. It helped me with my quest to begin to trace the whip back to the very plantation where it started. For me, that's part of where the healing comes from – not from any kind of validation I'd seek from Lloyd and Jim, but from the information that's allowed me to draw my own conclusions and undertake my own healing work. The Pugh family history is intertwined with America's story, from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War and into the Jim Crow era. Lloyd and I come from the same family, but our experiences reflect opposite sides of the American history it's rooted in. Meeting Lloyd helped me piece together our family history. It also triggered a need in me to uncover the story of how the white Pughs in America treated the most disenfranchised and exploited person in this saga, my great-great-grandmother, Charity, the matriarch of my family.That's on the next What Happened In Alabama.[outro music]CREDITSWhat Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It's written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.Our executive producer is Erica Kraus. Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa. This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando. Our fact checker is Erika Janik.And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.Thank you for listening.

ASCO: You're listening to a podcast from Cancer.Net. This cancer information website is produced by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, known as ASCO, the voice of the world's oncology professionals. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guests' statements on this podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Cancer research discussed in this podcast is ongoing, so data described here may change as research progresses. In this Meaningful Conversations podcast, Dr. Richard Lee talks to Dr. Tara Sanft and Dr. Biren Saraiya about what people with advanced cancer should know, including the value of palliative and supportive care and ways to talk with their families and healthcare teams about their health care wishes. Meaningful Conversations is a Cancer.Net blog and podcast series that describes the important discussions people may need to have with their providers, caregivers, and loved ones during cancer and offers ways to help navigate these conversations. Dr. Lee is a Clinical Professor in the Departments of Supportive Care Medicine and Medical Oncology at City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center and serves as the Medical Director of the Integrative Medicine Program. He is also the 2023 Cancer.Net Associate Editor for Palliative Care. Dr. Sanft is a medical oncologist and Chief Patient Experience Officer at Smilow Cancer Hospital, the Medical Director of the Yale Survivorship Clinic, and Associate Professor of Medicine in Medical Oncology at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Saraiya is a medical oncologist at Rutgers Cancer Institute and Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Medical Oncology, Solid Tumor Section at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Both Dr. Sanft and Dr. Biren are members of the 2023 Cancer.Net Advisory Panel for Palliative and Supportive Care. View disclosures for Dr. Lee, Dr. Sanft, and Dr. Saraiya at Cancer.Net. Dr. Lee: Hi, my name is Richard Lee. I'm a clinical professor here at City of Hope and also the Cherng Family Director's Chair for the Center for Integrative Oncology. I'm really happy to be here today and talking about the topic of advanced care planning. And I'll have Dr. Tara Sanft and also Dr. Biren Saraiya introduce themselves as well. Dr. Sanft: Thanks, Dr. Lee. I'm Tara Sanft. I'm a breast medical oncologist at Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. I am board certified in medical oncology and hospice and palliative medicine. I do direct the survivorship clinic, which is an appropriate place for advanced care planning that we can touch on today. I'm really happy to be here. Dr. Saraiya: Hi, my name is Biren Saraiya. I'm a medical oncologist focused on GU medical oncology and also a board-certified palliative care physician. I'm at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. My focus is on decision-making. My research interest in decision-making and end-of-life planning for patients with serious medical illnesses. And I do a lot of teaching on this topic at our medical school. And I'm also glad to be here, and I do not have any relevant financial disclosures. Dr. Lee: Thank you so much for both of you for being here. I should also add, I don't have any relevant financial or disclosures, conflicts of interest. Dr. Sanft: Thank you. I'd like to add that I do not either. Thanks for the reminder. Dr. Lee: Yes. Thank you both. And so this is a really important topic that we deal with when we see patients, especially those with more advanced cancer. Could you talk about when we say advanced cancer, what does that really mean? Dr. Saraiya: When I think of advanced cancer, it is either cancer that has come back, recurred, or that is no longer curable, no longer something that we can't completely get rid of. So many times, it is what we call stage four cancer. Each cancer is a bit different. So it's a general rule of thumb, but not necessarily intelligible for every single cancer. But that's what I mean when I say advanced cancers to my patients. Dr. Lee: How about yourself, Dr. Sanft? Do you use a similar concept, or is it a little bit different? Dr. Sanft: I agree with all that's been said. Advanced cancer typically involves the spread of the cancer to other sites outside of the primary site. And the strategy tends to be a chronic long-term management strategy rather than curative treatment, although not always. And as our science becomes more advanced and sophisticated, these terms can apply to people with all different tumor types and locations of involvement, and that's really exciting. But in general, advanced cancer is very serious and can often be life-threatening and needs to be dealt with always. Dr. Lee: And that leads into the next question, which is, if it's not possible to completely cure the cancer, does that mean there's no treatment available for these patients? Dr. Sanft: Absolutely not. Does it mean that there is no treatment? Even when anti-cancer treatment may not help the situation, there is treatment. And I think as palliative care professionals, in addition to being medical oncologists, treating symptoms and treating suffering that comes with symptoms from cancer is always on the table from the time of diagnosis through the balance of life. And when a diagnosis comes through that is life-threatening or advanced or stage four, it is very common to pursue anti-cancer treatment, sometimes many different types of treatment. And it's very rare that someone with a new diagnosis of advanced cancer would not qualify for any anti-cancer treatment. Dr. Lee: Thank you. And moving along with that same concept, Dr. Saraiya, could you talk about what are the kinds of treatment options available to patients with advanced cancer? And then could you comment a little bit what Dr. Sanft was talking about, which is also there's anti-cancer treatments, but then there's also these treatments that help with quality of life and symptoms. And can they be coordinated together? Are we choosing one or the other? Dr. Saraiya: That's a great question. The way I think about this is I always want to focus on what's important for the person in front of me, what's important for the patient. And so even when there is no cure for the cancer, it is certainly treatable. And as Dr. Sanft pointed out, we have many treatments, many types of treatments. So they are delivered by someone like me or Dr. Sanft who are medical oncologists, but also by our colleagues in radiation and surgery and our colleagues in palliative medicine. So it depends on what the symptoms are; we can discuss how to best address it. And sometimes it requires radiation, short course of radiation. Sometimes that's the most effective thing. Sometimes it requires medicines that are by mouth or chemotherapy that are intravenous or by mouth or immunotherapy or different kinds of newer agents that we are using these days. So they can be delivered under the care of a medical oncologist. We can also have sometimes something that's very painful, and the surgeon can remove it. And that is also just as good of an option. So what we choose to do depends on what the objective is, what we are trying to accomplish. And to me, at any point in time I see a patient, every single person I meet with, my goal is how do I help them live better? What's important for the quality of life? And many times is what I do as a medical oncologist, many times it's just listening to them and talking to them and providing support, either myself or my staff or social work. And many times, it's my colleagues in palliative medicine who are helping me care for their symptoms such as pain, other symptoms that I may have a hard time addressing by myself. And so we call on their help when we can't address it. Dr. Lee: We've touched upon the topic of palliative care and supportive care, that terminology. And I'm wondering if you could expand on that so we have a common understanding. And how is that different than hospice care? Dr. Saraiya: This is how I explain to my patients and my students, which is to say, when I went to medicine and I asked my students this question, how many times do we actually cure cancer or cure anything, forget cancer, just anything? And the fact is that most times we don't cure many diseases. So things like high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, heart disease, liver disease. We don't cure things outside cancer as well. But what we do is we help patients live long and well for long periods of time. We focus on quality of life. And in essence, we are providing palliative care. So I define palliative care anything that helps patients live better or live well. Sometimes we can cure things as well. So many cancers are curable. But let's say you have extensive surgery for a cure of the cancer, but you have pain from the surgery. We certainly help give you pain medicines. That's palliative care. And so for me, palliative care is anything that we do to help alleviate patient's symptoms. It can be delivered by the surgeon who prescribes pain medicine postop, by radiation doctor, who helps with palliative radiation, by medical oncologists like myself and Dr. Sanft, who give medicines for nausea, vomiting, or other symptoms that either the treatments or the cancer itself is causing. When we need help of our colleagues who specialize in this is specialized palliative care. And some just call it supportive care. It's just a naming terminology. As long as we are helping patients live better, any intervention we make to me is palliative and supportive care. At a time when we agree, both patients and we agree that look, our focus is just on comfort. We are not going to focus on cancer anymore. And we're going to focus on just quality of life. That can be dealt with palliative care and hospice care. Hospice care is a very specific defined insurance benefit that requires certain certification. And that's the difference. So palliative is something required from day one, I meet a patient. It doesn't matter what they have until the end of their life. And sometimes even after that, caring for their loved ones after the patient has died is also palliation. Hospice care is a very small piece of that when we are just focused on end-of-life care. Dr. Lee: I appreciate that understanding. And I think it's a great point that you make that anyone can be providing palliative and supportive care. It doesn't take necessarily specialists, but different types of oncologists and other clinicians can be providing in addition to specialists. And Dr. Sanft, could you talk a little bit about this concept about after kind of after a patient may pass through hospice? Dr. Saraiya was mentioning about emotional and spiritual support. How can we help patients find that kind of support from diagnosis through the whole journey? Dr. Sanft: Yeah. I really think of palliative care as taking care of the whole patient. So not just treating the disease, but really addressing the emotional, spiritual, and other physical aspects that cancer and its treatment can impact on a human being that's undergoing this. And then, of course, the entire family unit. So the importance of addressing all of these aspects has been shown in so many different ways. And getting palliative care involved early can really impact how that individual does with their disease course. But it can also provide the structures around that spiritual and emotional health for the patient and their family from diagnosis throughout. And as Dr. Saraiya mentioned, when the time gets short and the end-of-life time is near, palliative care and hospice care in particular can really provide a lot of that bereavement support or that anticipation of loss. And then, of course, all the grief that comes after the loss. Dr. Lee: And could you expand a little bit in terms of if patients are starting to feel some emotional spiritual needs, how do they find help? Or what should they be doing in terms of connecting with their clinical team to get that type of support? Dr. Sanft: I would like to say first that I think part of it is on the medical team ourselves to ask patients. Our culture in general is not one that often openly discusses emotions. So what I teach the medical students is, for every visit, how are you doing with all of this emotionally? And that is a very open-ended question that patients can reflect on and share what they're comfortable sharing with their providers. Now, not all of us who are practicing learned these techniques when we were going through medical school. So your doctor and medical team might not automatically ask about your emotional health. So it is within a patient's right to say, "I would like to discuss with you how this is impacting me emotionally. Could I share that with you?" And really, I think most healthcare professionals come into this profession to help. And this is a very rewarding conversation to understand how this is impacting you and your family emotionally and then trying to get the support that is needed. Most cancer teams have social workers that are highly trained in assessing and counseling and helping patients get triaged into the help that they need, whether it be a support group or a psychologist or a psychiatrist or all of the above. Usually, social workers are embedded in many cancer teams. And if it's not a social worker, it may be another trained professional who can deal with this. But certainly, the medical team is the place to start and to really raise emotional health and spiritual health issues, even though we might not routinely be asking at every visit. Dr. Lee: Great points. And as we think about the journey and we talked a little bit about hospice care and kind of the end phases, sometimes patients fear losing their capacity or ability to really think clearly and maybe even make their own decisions. How can patients in these situations who are concerned about making their wishes known, how can they make sure that's communicated if there is a situation, maybe temporary, maybe longer lasting, which they have trouble with making medical decisions on their own? Dr. Saraiya? Dr. Saraiya: So I think, hopefully, all adults, all of us, have sort of thought about what-if scenarios in our lives, right? I think the thing I tell my patients that maybe there are three or four people in the room, and it's entirely possible, I'm not the one here tomorrow morning because accidents happen. And we certainly have seen that in our daily lives that suddenly things happen. So hopefully, every adult has thought about it. I always prompt my patients to tell me what they have thoughts about, what thoughts they have had. And I ensure that they have some sort of documentation. This is what we call advanced care planning documentation. Sometimes it's a living will, healthcare proxy. Different states might have different documentation. And many of them may have had it as part of their normal will or their sort of lawyers have drawn it up. I always ask them to sort of just tell me or discuss with me what they have written down. If they have not, I encourage them to have that conversation with their loved one. And there are two points. One, at least have had that thought, and the second, have the conversation. At no point in time do I want my patients' family, their loved ones, whether it's a spouse, whether it's a child, to have to answer the question, "What do you want for your loved one?" It's always about, "What will your loved one want for themselves?" And so that is my responsibility to facilitate the conversation to make sure that the patient and the family has had that discussion. Once they've had it, document it, whether it's an advanced care planning or many states like my state of New Jersey have specific forms for-- it's called Physician Orders For Life-Sustaining Therapies [POLST]. So especially in a setting with advanced care and we know we had the conversation. We can't cure this. It's about their quality of life, how they want to live. And patients have the absolute right to tell us and guide our decisions in what kind of treatments are acceptable and not acceptable. And that can only happen if you had the conversation. We have discussed things that are important for them. Are they okay being in a situation where they are not able to communicate? And whatever the what-if scenarios are for themselves, let's help figure those things out and make sure that we value their opinion, their autonomy at every single point by completing this advanced care planning documentation, and more importantly, having the conversation with loved ones so they can ask the question, what would your loved one want in the situation? Dr. Lee: Those are really good points. And I imagine a lot of individuals, a lot of patients, may not have had that conversation. And so what suggestions do you have for patients who are maybe newly diagnosed? They're just totally surprised by the diagnosis. Unfortunately, it may be, in some cases, it's advanced. Dr. Sanft, how would you suggest patients discuss this topic with their family and friends? Are there certain types of questions to be thinking about or certain topics? Dr. Sanft: Oftentimes, in the midst of a new diagnosis, the whirlwind of having that upside-down feeling is so strong that it's very difficult to then think out into the future. However, once the treatment plan is in place, that tends to be a time where things could sort of be evaluated and the horizon might seem a little bit more stable. And I think most patients are willing to admit that the gravity and the seriousness of the situation that's facing them, yet it's very difficult to really reflect on what might happen in the future or what you might want. I think it's really important from a patient perspective to think, "What are your most important priorities?" And that could be a good framework to start to think about if you aren't able to do these priorities, then what else would you want? So if being able to walk around your yard and enjoy the garden is a very high priority, even identifying that and understanding that can give you some framework, or talking about that with your loved one can give you some framework down the line if that becomes an impossibility. If interacting and talking with your children or your grandchildren is one of the highest priorities, if that ever became impaired, then how would that influence what you would want? So again, it doesn't have to be yes/no questions that you're answering, but it can really be an understanding of what brings you joy, what are the most important parts of your life, and if those were threatened, then how would you reevaluate the quality of your life? Dr. Lee: I think that's a good way of framing the priorities and thinking through that with your loved ones. And for Dr. Saraiya, next after they've had some of these discussions, what should they be asking you and Dr. Sanft as the healthcare providers and helping to guide along these important conversations around advanced care planning? Dr. Saraiya: I will answer that question, but I just want to sort of highlight what Dr. Sanft said is so important, which is really prioritizing and framing. And I think framing is so important. And to sort of put some of the other things Dr. Sanft talked about, the emotional and spiritual support, when someone walks into our office, many times they're really scared. And I take this opportunity to really sort of ask them important questions like, "What are your worries?" Which allows for them to emote a bit about what their worries are. And sometimes it's uncomfortable, right, because they're crying. They're worried about death and dying and what it means for the family. It's hard for the family. It makes a lot of us uncomfortable. But I think it's also very important. So I do take the opportunity early in my interaction with patients just to allow them to emote and just to process their worries. And sometimes I'm acknowledging their worries. Sometimes I'm telling them that those worries are maybe not reasonable, right? Sometimes people say, "Well, I'm going to die next month." And they know that's not the expectation. So they have worries that may be unreasonable. So I can help talk and address specific worries at that point in time. So we do have to-- and again, this is why we have a team. Many times, patients are not comfortable talking to me about some of their worries, but they are much more apt to talk to my social worker or my nurse or my infusion nurse where they spend hours at times. And they will tell them things that they may not tell me. They will talk about some of the side effects that they have that they won't tell me because they worry. This is my hypothesis and what the research shows. They worry that because I hold that key to that chemotherapy or that key to that treatment, that if this is something that I may not like, I might hold it. And so patients have this natural tendency to not tell me absolutely everything. That's why we have a team. We gather all the information to make sure that we sort of make the right decisions. Sometimes we do have to help patients and families facilitate their conversations to make sure that we address their worries, their fears, their emotions. And it can be done, as I said before, just by us as the primary oncology team or our palliative care team or our social workers or nurses. All of us provide a different role for each patient. And in some patient cases, it is me, and some patients sometimes it's my nurse or sometimes it's my infusion nurse, or sometimes my social worker. And sometimes I do need the help of my palliative care and hospice colleagues. Dr. Lee: And, Dr. Saraiya, coming back in terms of just guiding patients, are there certain questions you wish your patients might ask you in terms of helping to kind of navigate these difficult conversations? Dr. Saraiya: I think many patients have this one question, that they have a hard time asking, which is, what's the treatment goal? And many times, we talk about is this something that's treatable. And the answer is yes. That was one of the first questions we're asked. Is it treatable? But many times patients have a question is it curable? And if the answer is no, then what does that mean? Or even if the answer is yes. What does that mean? I think most of us in our lives think about what-if scenarios, but it's really hard to ask those questions. So what I advise and sometimes I facilitate this, but I encourage if you're listening to this, you're a patient, ask your oncologist, "Well, what does this actually mean for me?" And if you have those questions, ask them, "What if this happens? This is my worry. Can I just tell you what my worries are and address them?" And with the worries, also come my hopes. Here's what I'm hoping for. How can I get there? How can you help me get there? And as Dr. Sanft sort of talked about before, if I have a situation where someone tells me, "This is my hope”, but I can't do it, it's not likely, I will tell them. But I will also tell them what we can accomplish, what we can do. And so I think having that honest conversation and patients and families can talk amongst themselves, but also with us as clinical teams to just make sure that we, at all points in time, address and put them and their needs in the center of focus. Dr. Lee: Great questions. And Dr. Sanft, do you have any other questions you wish your patients would ask you in terms of helping to guide these challenging conversations? Dr. Sanft: It's helpful for patients to come at questions about what to expect directly with us. I think it's most helpful when patients say, "Here's the deal. I'm feeling fine right now, and I want to keep going as long as I feel fine. And I want you to offer me every line of treatment until I don't feel like it's going to be worth it anymore. And we can continue to talk about that. And we'll do this together. I will let you know when I'm ready." And that allows me to say, "Okay. I appreciate what you're saying, and I agree with this plan, and we're on the same page. And when I see signs that things aren't going well, I will tell you." And it sort of sets these expectations upfront that we are all on the same page. We all want the same things. And we commit to each other, "You're going to tell me when this gets too hard, and I'm going to tell you when I think that this isn't helping anymore." And so it allows for this open dialogue to continue throughout. Dr. Lee: Well, this has been a great conversation, and learned a lot and think about priorities. And I think you make a very good point. This is an ongoing discussion. It's not a single discussion you have, and then it's done. It's really an ongoing process through the whole journey. Do either of you have anything else to add in terms of helping patients who are addressing advanced care planning? Dr. Saraiya: My biggest ask or sort of consideration is all of us, as Dr. Sanft said in the beginning, all of us came into this to really sort of help. And that is still our primary goal. And good communication really facilitates that. And we have, as a medical team, have to sort of do, as Dr. Sanft pointed out, sort of explore a bit more and really address the concerns. At the same time, you also have to develop a language that we can all understand, both understand, patients and doctors. And I think that's the key work. And I think it's so important to have that partnership with our patients and our families to make sure that we are doing the attentive care that they deserve and they need. So I think having an honest conversation. One thing I always reflect on is for my patients, they may start in the beginning saying what's most important for me is-- and we are in Jersey so going to the casino on the weekends in Atlantic City. And that's the most important thing for me. But there comes a time when they say, "No, I've changed my mind. Most important thing is having the Friday night dinner with my family." And a few months later, maybe, “I've changed my mind. You know what's really important? If I can just sit in the patio on my rocking chair and enjoy that. Can you help me make those things happen?” I think having those conversations, being aware that we can change our minds, I think is absolutely fine. It's encouraged. And I think that's what we expect. Dr. Lee: Dr. Sanft? Dr. Sanft: Oh, I love that. I think I love that. I'm so glad that you brought that up. And the only thing I would add to that is if there are things that you know in your heart you absolutely would not want, telling it to someone, your partner, your family, your decision-makers, and your medical team will really help make sure that that does not come to fruition. So it can be scary to voice those things, but most of us have an idea of what we would never want to have happen. And saying that out loud and making sure that someone close to you, ideally, also your medical team, but certainly someone who's close to you understands what that line is. That can help decisions that need to be made in difficult times make sure that they honor, that they know that that was not what you ever wanted to have, and we can help make sure that that doesn't happen. Dr. Lee: Well, I want to thank both Dr. Saraiya and Dr. Sanft. This has been fantastic. I learned a lot myself in terms of communication and addressing advanced care planning. And I hope all of you listening also were able to learn some pearls of wisdom from both of them. I think your patients are very lucky to have both of you. Feel free to look at Cancer.Net if there's more questions and a lot of information around advanced cancer and treatments and advanced care planning and having these discussions. So thank you both again. And stay tuned for more podcasts on these important topics. ASCO: Thank you, Dr. Lee, Dr. Sanft, and Dr. Saraiya. Find more podcasts and blog posts in the Meaningful Conversations series at www.cancer.net/meaningfulconversations. Cancer.Net Podcasts feature trusted, timely, and compassionate information for people with cancer, survivors, and their families and loved ones. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts for expert information and tips on coping with cancer, recaps of the latest research advances, and thoughtful discussions on cancer care. And check out other ASCO Podcasts to hear the latest interviews and insights from thought leaders, innovators, experts, and pioneers in oncology. Cancer.Net is supported by Conquer Cancer, the ASCO Foundation, which funds lifesaving research for every type of cancer, helping people with cancer everywhere. To help fund Cancer.Net and programs like it, donate at CONQUER.ORG/Donate.

Angi: St. Paul's PACE Roving Clinic is finally here and ready to hit the streets to serve our seniors in San Diego. We're so excited to show you around. Dr. Lee, tell us about our clinic on wheels. Dr. Lee: Well, if you all remember about a year and a half ago, when pandemic hits San Diego, we were not able to bring in our frail seniors to the clinic. Because of that, we have to develop new and innovative ways to serve them. At that time, we did not have any actual clinic on wheels. What we did was we converted one of our transport vans so we can serve our seniors there. Now we have a customized van to serve our seniors. This is specially built so we can serve our seniors. Now we can take this van and take the clinic without doctors or providers or nurses to go to our patient's home so we can serve them better. Vena: Hi, my name is Vena, and as you can see, we have everything we need here to safely and securely treat our patients.We have computer systems in the front and the back. Plenty of storage for whatever we need. We have sinks, a nice, comfortable blood draw station with more storage underneath. An exam chair that fully extends. So it can be used for multiple types of visits. We also have a wheelchair ramp for patients that aren't able to walk up into the van. Angi: Eric, aren't you so excited about our new Roving Clinic? Eric: Heck. Yes I am. Did you know where the only PACE program doing this?Angi: Wow, that's amazing. Eric: We'll bring the care directly to our patients. Everything from provider visits, health fairs, lab draws, seasonal vaccinations, physical exam, infusion, wound care, and so much more.Dr. Lee: As you can see, this is a game changer for us, how we care for our participants. In fact, we think this is a future for our care and we can take the clinic or the home and provide senior care at home.Angi: And there you have it everyone. A game changer. Words from our medical director, Dr. Lee, we're super excited. And we can't wait to get this show on the road.

How do companies like Dell, SAP and LinkedIn build successful B2B influencer marketing campaigns that translate into real business ROI? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, TopRank Marketing CEO and Co-Founder Lee Odden talks about B2B influencer marketing and what it takes to build influencer campaigns that deliver measurable marketing results.  Lee uses his own agency, TopRank Marketing, as a laboratory where he tests new influencer marketing strategies that he then rolls out to clients like SAP and Cherwell Software. In this episode, he shares advice on how businesses can partner with influencers, and what kinds of results to expect. Highlights from my conversation with Lee include: TopRank Marketing is a B2B digital marketing agency focused on content, search and influence. Lee sees B2B influencer marketing as an opportunity to give subject matter experts a platform to talk about things they're really passionate about, and do it in a way that is a win for both the influencer and the business with which they're partnering. The best influencer campaigns bring together and curate credible voices in a way that gives them value from an exposure standpoint and at the same time are very "infotaining" to experience on the consumer side. With B2C influencer marketing, very often brands are simply feeding the message to the influencer. By contrast, with B2B influencer marketing, brands are giving the influencers - who are experts on a topic - a platform to create and share a message of their own. For companies interested in using influencer marketing, Lee says it is important to begin by identifying the business or marketing problem they are trying to solve. The next step is then to identify the topic about which the business wants to be influential. This is often in the form of a topic cluster, much like you might see in SEO. Once that topic has been identified, Lee and his team use three criteria to identify the right influencers: 1) Topical relevance (the degree to which that individual's own content that they're publishing is a match at a relevance level to the topic of influence that they're targeting); 2) Resonance (the degree to which that topic of influence actually resonates with the influencer's first and second level network); and 3) Reach (network size). Lee says that the process of identifying influencers is similar in many ways to the process of search engine optimization because influencer marketing is optimizing for both findability and credibility. Unlike B2C influencer marketing, B2B influencers do not always expect payment. It really depends upon the type of influencer you are working with and the level of commitment you are looking for. Lee suggests starting small and working with unpaid influencers before committing to larger paid partnerships. Lee has built strong relationships with a variety of B2B influencers and credits his success to something he calls "influencer experience management," which is essentially the process of ensuring the influencer has a positive experience working with the brand while also obtaining a high return on their contribution. One way he does this is by shortening the time horizon between the influencer's investment and effort and the return that they see, as well as by delivering longer term value. When it comes time to promote influencer content, Lee says it is important to be emphathetic to the influencer in developing a mix of media and messaging that you can supply to them and which they will want to promote. Timing is also important and it is critical to have sufficient volume of promotion right at the launch of a campaign in order to trigger social algorithms to show the content at the top of the feed. In terms of results, Lee says that if you are new to influencer marketing, you shouldn't expect that your first campaign will deliver a large number of leads, BUT you should plan to use the assets you develop in your lead gen campaigns and over time, you will see results. He suggests thinking of your first campaign as a pilot, and then building from there. Resources from this episode: Visit the TopRank Marketing website Check out the TopRank Marketing blog Follow Lee on Twitter Connect with Lee on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to learn how to build a successful B2B influencer marketing strategy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm Kathleen Booth and I'm your host. And today, my guest is Lee Odden who is the CEO of TopRank Marketing. Welcome Lee. Lee Odden (Guest): Hey, it's great to be here, Kathleen. Lee and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am so excited to have you here. I've been following you online for a very, very long time. And this is one of my favorite things about hosting a podcast, is it gives me an excuse to meet and talk to people who I would otherwise never have a reason to get to know and pick their brains on really interesting marketing subjects. So, looking forward to doing that with you today. Lee: Well, I'm going to have to reciprocate. I'm going to have to reciprocate because I'm really... I'm interested in picking your brain too, so. Kathleen: Well, let's do it. Let's get to the picking. Lee: All right. About Lee Odden and TopRank Marketing Kathleen: So, for my listeners who may not be familiar with you, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and who you are, what you do, what TopRank does and really how did you wind up where you are today? Lee: Well, that's quite a story and I'll make it short. So, I'm the CEO of TopRank Marketing. We're a B2B digital marketing agency focused on content, search and influence. We create experiences that inspire people basically. And we started as a PR firm in 2001. I joined as an SEO guy at the time and started to really explore the confluence of content and PR/earned media and earned media and owned media and how we can surface a relevant audience, not only buyers but also journalists, through optimization. And I remember that kind of combined into this sort of hybrid mix of services that we have today where we are serving clients like Dell, LinkedIn, SAP. We've done work for Oracle and Adobe and lots of other really cool B2B technology brands. We're based in Minneapolis where it is wonderfully cold and snowy. We are in the heart of winter a little bit earlier than normal, but that's okay. That makes for some a very fun running in the morning. And that's one thing about me, I've become a runner in the last 12 months or so. Kathleen: Do you have some of those tracks things for your running shoes that they have the little springs on the bottom? Lee: I didn't. So, I opted to get some... oh God, what are they called now? Something One One, Kona One One, anyway. So, these are some special shoes that are made - they're actually a trail running shoes made for the winter. Kathleen: Oh, wow. Lee: So, it's a hybrid between a trail running shoe and a hiking boot basically. So, it's got a huge foam foot bed but with super grippy Vibram soles. And I ran in the ice this morning and it worked great. So yeah, I'm an all-weather runner. Kathleen: Oh, that's great. I used to be a runner. But things have caught up with me and my knees decided that I would no longer be a runner. So, now, I am an avid spinner Lee: There you go. Kathleen: But I miss running and I missed it. I used to love running in the snow. It's so pretty and it's such a great way to experience, snowy world. Lee: Absolutely. I spent many years not doing very much at all being very much a computer geek type person sitting behind a desk. And so, while a lot of other people my age are in your seat... in the situation you described where their hips or their knees or their ankles or various tendons have gone caput, I don't have that. So, hopefully, I have another 20 years or so of the joy and the euphoria that comes right from the... all those endorphins firing after a great run. And what's really interesting about what I found about running and really a big fitness focus for me over the last year and a half or so is the parallels to marketing. You know what I mean? Because it's just kind of interesting and very curious. I think the people expect to lose weight overnight because they tried a new exercise program or meal or diet plan. And people sometimes look at marketing tactics and feel the same way. A lot of inbound marketing tactics actually like SEO and content. It just doesn't work that way. You've got to invest, you've got to commit and all those other things. So, there's a lot of interesting parallels I think between fitness and marketing performance. Kathleen: So true. And you just gave me the perfect segue into my next question, which is that you and I really first connected around this because you reached out and asked me to participate in your B2B marketing fitness guide, which was related to MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum. I was speaking there and you were putting together a guide that essentially did tie marketing and fitness together and were asking for almost sort of submissions around that. And it's funny because when I got that email from you, I was like, "Yes, I have always thought this too" that with fitness, we all know what we're supposed to do, right? We know that we're supposed to regularly exercise and this and that. It's just that so few people actually do it. And it's the same thing with marketing. We pretty much all know what we're supposed to do. But so, few companies and marketers actually managed to do it consistently on a regular basis over time. So, I thought that was genius. But the other thing that really what's interesting to me as I interfaced with you and your team around that project was just the whole process that you put together and how incredibly thorough it was, how thoughtful and detail oriented it was. Watching you execute that and the way that you worked with the different contributors and influencers on the project to me was fascinating. And so, that's what I was excited to dig into today since then I've learned that you do this kind of influence our work not just with your own company but with all kinds of clients. And so, I would love to talk about that with you. B2B influencer marketing Lee: Sure, sure. It's one of the joys of what I get to do and that is to shine a light on people with great talent. And it's in the context of Influencer Marketing. But really, it's interesting to me to have an opportunity, create conversations to create opportunities or architect opportunities where people can talk about things that they're really passionate about, situations where they can add value. And then, as puzzle pieces, pull them together into an experience that really showcases them in a really positive, optimistic light. And ultimately, I'm after a 360 win situation. This brings me great personal and professional joy to get to do that. So, there are opportunities for marketing obviously when trying to create thought leadership or customer acquisition or we have other obviously traditional marketing objectives. But how can we create value for people first? How can we bring together and curate super credible voices, experienced voices together in a way that gives them value from an exposure standpoint? But at the same time, because of the story behind it all, it's very infotaining to experience on the consumer side, right? And so, people enjoy consuming the information, they are inspired to share it, people that contribute enjoy consuming the information and they too are inspired to share it. And ultimately, becomes more successful as a result. Kathleen: So, this is really interesting to me because you think about this term "Influencer Marketing" and it's a very broad catchall for a lot of different things. And I think most people think of influencer marketing and they're probably thinking of things like somebody pays a Kardashian to plug a product on their Instagram feed or the Fyre festival. There is certainly that kind of influencer marketing where you're just really paying to put your product or service in front of that person's audience. But then, there's this whole other world that I think you've tapped into which I think is the more interesting one. And I love that you refer to it as an experience. But what I noticed about the way that you managed this particular project that, that got this going was that it wasn't the typical, "Hey, you have an audience. I want to get in front of it." What will it cost? It was, "We're creating something and we want you to be a part of it." And the big takeaway I had was that every... I kept speaking only for myself as somebody who participated. I felt like I had a sense of ownership in it, right? Because I played a part in creating it. And I think that's a very different angle to Influencer Marketing when your influencer has a feeling of ownership actually co-create the content with you seems to lead to a very different outcome. So, maybe you could just talk about that a little bit. Because I just feel the spectrum of Influencer Marketing. Lee: Absolutely. One of the big challenges of our time in the marketing world is the growing distrust consumers have of brands. And so, our opportunity as marketers is to bring forward as much authentic information and create as many authentic experiences as possible. So, rather than treating people who are credible experts -- and in the case of B2B influencers, we are really talking about credible experts as opposed to people who self-anoint them, an influencer who are really good at taking selfies and all that other silly stuff -- so, what we're looking at is inviting them to contribute to a thing that's bigger than ourselves, right? Where in some cases, it really is changing the world, it's a movement. Others' work, we've done with SAP and the United Nations around some initiatives around the United Nations around purpose. And it's like pretty remarkable. Where I mean, these influencers are just CEOs of major corporations and celebrities sometimes and then... and other folks. But on the other hand, it's other folks who are working in their industry and they've really established the respect. And they also have that domain expertise too. So, rather than feeding them a message, rather than treating them like an ad by which is where the B2C world tends to focus, we're rather trying to help them. First, we identify them as the credible person around the topic and that that topic resonates with their audience. That's our data informed homework we do beforehand. And then, once we invite that person because they are credible and there's evidence that they are credible, we do invite them to contribute and we want to hear their authentic, authentic voice. We want to hear what their opinion is in the context of an overall story. And then, whatever they say is perfect because it's real. And that's what people are looking for. And that's why I think it turns into that experience that is not only good for the contributors, but it's obviously a good experience for the audience that we're out there to attract and engage. Getting started with B2B influencer marketing Kathleen: I love that. And trust really is at the heart of business. When people are buying from you, they're buying because they trust you. And that authenticity is the biggest thing that fuels that... You named a lot of the different companies that you work with. It's an incredibly impressive list. I imagine there are many clients and prospective clients who come to TopRank and they talk about wanting to do some form of influencer marketing. Can you talk a little bit about what those first conversations look like -- when you engage with someone or consider engaging with someone? I imagine that influencer marketing is not necessarily right for everyone and, or you have to have the right set of expectations. So, how do you suss that out? Lee: Yeah, that's a great question because people come in from a variety of perspectives. So, a lot of the time people come in from a marketing or demand gen perspective. And in that case, they may say influencer marketing outright because they've pulled themselves through education, around industry information or conferences or whatever and have come to the conclusion that this is something that will help them get solve a marketing problem. And so, really, what we're after first is defining what that marketing problem is because it's not always an exact match. You know what I mean? Also, we have people who have interpreted what the expression influencer marketing means and then, for example, if they see it only as an ad. We had a company recently that said, "We have 30 days." There's been some positive news in our industry that would be good and a good reflection on our brand and the problem that we solve as a company. And so, we have 30 days to quickly... I want you to find some influencers, run a campaign and take advantage and sort of ride the wave of this positive news in the industry. It's like, "no." But we're very focused on organic and authentic advocacy and engagement, not on just paying people who are willing to say something nice and it's not legitimate or genuine, you know what I mean? And also, the timeframe makes no sense. 30 days is crazy, especially in a B2B context. So, the first thing we're looking for is to really understand what it is that business is... what's the business problem or the marketing problem they're trying to solve? And the degree to which partnering with credible experts can help solve that problem. And the interesting thing is, from a demand gen lead gen standpoint, that is totally reasonable. And it is possible within a short period of time to find people who the right kind of people who can contribute to that outcome. It's not always possible. You do have to look for data, you have to look for evidence of people who are already actively advocating for the brand and that actively publish, that are respected in the industry. And when you have the good fortune of finding those combination of traits, then, you can reach out to them, invite them to contribute to something and have a reasonable expectation that one of the outcomes from that content you collaborate on is going to result in some sort of MQL. And usually, in a B2B case, it's a download or a trial or demo or something like that. On the other hand, there are people from PR who come in. And it's influencer relations to them, not influencer marketing. So, they think of it from an analyst relations standpoint. They're thinking more thought leadership. They're not looking at conversions. They're not looking at lead gen per se. They're looking at building the influence of the brand, building the reputation of the company and even ways in which they can elevate the influence of their key opinion leaders and senior executives. Well, that's a very different approach and is also appropriate as a collaboration with industry influencers. It's just executed in a very different way. So, we find out what it is that it needs to be solved and then we apply the expertise and knowledge and the networks that we've already built with all these different influencers in the different industries, especially in B2B industries and then architect a plan on how to do that. Identifying the right influencers with whom to partner Kathleen Booth: So, if you get someone in who has the right expectations and it's a good fit and you think influencer marketing makes sense, one of the things I'm curious about is, how do you identify the right influencers? I assume there's obviously a component of, they need to have something of a following. But I imagine there's probably more to it than just that. Can you talk about that a little bit? Lee: Absolutely. In fact, one of the biggest failures that people make is, when they do focus only on popularity. It's easy to do that, but everyone's doing it. And of course, it can be faked. It doesn't happen as often in B2B as in B2C. So, to identify the right influencers, starts with topic specificity. What is it that you want to be influential about? What topics are going to matter to your customers or to the audience that you're after? The association of that topic of influence amongst influencers is something that can then elevate the brand and can give the marketing message more credibility, more reach and more engagement. So, we have to understand what those topic or topics are. Usually, it's a topic cluster. There's a primary and derivative topics -- something similar to what you might do with SEO for example. And once we identify those topics, then we use a variety of approaches to brainstorm influencers -- everything from interviewing people at the brand to looking at CRM data to social data. But ultimately, we're going to use a platform that is crawling the social web platforms like Traackr, T-R-A-A-C-K-R. I spell it just because it's easy that... not spell that right. And so, what they're doing is they have a database of millions and millions of people on all the things that they're sharing and what their followers are interacting with. And so, the minimum criteria, the data points that we're looking at are topical relevance, the degree to which that individual's own content that they're publishing is a match at a relevance level to the topic of influence that we're after. Second, we're looking at resonance, the degree to which that topic of influence actually resonates with their first and second level network, right? Because we don't want it to be weird that they start talking about Apple mice or something like that and they never talk about that. And then, the third thing is reach, of course, which is network size. There are other elements like audience characteristics and what kind... do they publish their own blog? Do they publish to industry websites? Do they speak at conferences? Are they a book author? And there are other sorts of signals that are both online and offline that we may consider according to the situation. And increasingly, we're starting to bring in SEO metrics. So, we want to know sometimes where there's someone isn't a recognized entity by Google, right? And so, are they on Wikipedia? Are they showing up in... from an SEO perspective provided that the reason why we're doing the campaign has SEO expectations. We'll look for those criteria. That's not always the case, but increasingly it is because there's a lot of congruence between topic specificity as it relates to SEO and topic specificity as it relates to influence. You want to help someone be the best answer. And what we like to say is we're optimizing for findability. But we're also optimizing for credibility. So, all those factors come into play and identifying well, who's the right match, right? And obviously, there are other things, and I know that I could probably write a book all just about this but we want to make sure that the type of content we have planned is a match for obviously what they publish. So, YouTubers -- video, right? Bloggers -- text. Podcasters -- audio, and so forth. And making sure that we're really aligning from a value standpoint what that influencer has demonstrated through their interactions with their community and the values that brand stands for. All those things factor in to picking the right person. And still, after a campaign or two, it may turn out to be that that person is not a fit because influence is temporal. It is not permanent. It goes up and down and it is very important to revisit these... some of these criteria on an ongoing basis and that's something most brands are not doing. Working with influencers Kathleen: I hear a lot of marketers talk about influencer marketing and they're intrigued by it. They love the idea of it. They see the potential. But I think sometimes what stumbles them or causes them to stumble is the actual, like, execution. How is this going to work? And for somebody who's listening and they're thinking, "This sounds great, I love this idea, I'm willing to go out and find these influencers that combine the credibility with the popularity and all of the other things you just mentioned", this is a two-part question. First of all, what kind of expectations should they have around, should I be paying these people? And if so, how much? And the second part is, if they're not getting paid, what are the odds they're going to actually say yes to participate? Lee: Sure. So, getting paid or not paid especially, now, we happen to focus on B2B, so that's where my most of my experience lies. In B2C, if someone has a significant level of popularity and experience being an influencer for brands, almost all the time they're going to want to be paid. In a B2C scenario, where people don't get paid, maybe you have a cause-oriented marketing initiative. So, the influencer is part of the same cause or initiative that your brand is interested in and you come together to make a big difference and that's something where they may just volunteer their time because you believe in the same thing. In B2B, it's less common for influencers to be paid. There's a lot more content and when you look at the full customer life cycle at a B2B scenario, there's just so much more content involved as increasingly buyers are pulling themselves through that sales cycle or through that process before they ever contact sales. So, what you would pay an influencer for is what you would pay a consultant for in a lot of cases. So, for example, well, let's look at this. When I reached out to you and some of the others, you know I mean, they were super credible, it was a really a great group of people that shared a quote, a 50 to a hundred words, that's not normally a paid thing. Plus, we have a great reputation in our industry for making people look really good. We put them in these interactive experiences and it really does showcase and everyone gets... it's really valuable for them and they can monetize that exposure in other ways by being more credible at their job. It could contribute to book deals, it could contribute to paid speaking gigs or consulting gigs and so on and so forth. So, on the other hand, if I asked someone to... well, for example, I'm working with Brian Solis on an industry report as an analyst. I'm paying him. I mean, he's an influencer but he's also an analyst. Kathleen: But that's what he does for a living, right? Lee: So, he's doing work. Yeah, exactly. And that's a good distinction too. So, there are different types of influencers. There are "brandividuals" and I would say Brian is one of them. These are professional influencers. They are making it their business to continually collect intelligence to do analysis, to be a thought leader in their industry. So, they also publish and they actively engage in the network. And they're able to do this in a way that creates much value that it just makes sense to engage them on a paid basis. So, I mean, sometimes this manifests as a keynote presentation or they may emcee a whole track at your user conference. They may do a webinar for you that is hyper focused on something that you can monetize through lead gen. Or they could create a whole eBook or they could do a video series. We engage influencers like Tamara McCleary for example, who is the host for a season of podcasts for SAP called Tech Unknown. And you've got to listen, if you get a chance to listen to season two, just the first episode just dropped. It is so cool. We're talking about supply chain management and it's actually interesting. It's actually, it's amazing. You go from a farm in Thailand somewhere to a coffee shop and it's all audio. It's like you're listening to an NPR well-produced show but it's a podcast. And influencers are involved both as a host and as guests. So, the host is probably a paid situation whereas the guests are not because they're only on for one show, for one interview or whatever. So, hopefully, that makes sense. So, I think a lot of people just starting out feeling optimistic. They can start off by identifying people who are already advocates for their brand that are also influential and simply invite them to do something simple, share a quote, share commentary about a report, share some insights. Or at this time of year, some trends. And start things that way and see how that goes. And you can build from there. Building win-win influencer partnerships Kathleen: Yeah. And if I hear you correctly, part of it is also making it a great experience for that person who contributes. It's not just asking and getting the information, it's the follow-up that you do, the way that you help that person leverage their involvement in order to achieve their own goals. Whether that's building their personal brand or as you... I think you mentioned publishing a book or getting a speaking gig. I feel like there's that whole, you called it earlier a 360 win. How do you make it a win for them as well? Lee: I think that absolutely. And we call that "influencer experience management." So, customer experience is so much of a, a term, or it's in the vernacular of marketers these days of selling platforms and marketing services or whatever. And we apply those same ideas to the influencers that we work with because so many of them are organic sorts of collaborations and value exchanges that we have to. It's very important that we make it easy for them to do their best for them to enjoy it and to get a disproportionately high return on their effort. And that spells a win for everyone. It really, really, really does. Examples of TopRank influencer campaigns Kathleen: So, assuming that I wanted to do an influencer campaign. I'd love to just talk through what... how this work, what are some of the better frameworks for them and what kinds of results I could expect. And I guess the best way to tackle this might be to do it through some examples because I know that you've used your own company as a bit of a laboratory to try out new strategies and figure out what is going to work well and what isn't. And then, you tend to roll that out to some of your clients. Maybe you could share some of those examples and talk through the kinds of results you've gotten? Lee: Sure. So, excuse me, one of the earlier examples, I think it was 2012 or so, we approached, or Joe Pulizzi and I were talking. So, he's the founder of Content Marketing Institute, Content Marketing World conference. We were talking about how we might collaborate together. Because previously, our blog is fairly popular and we had been a media sponsor for quite a few conferences as a blog which at the time was very... you had to be actual magazine or have a massive email list or something like that. So, I had great success with that kind of collaboration with events and publications. And we were talking about what we could do together. And I thought, well, how about if I do this? Now, today, this is going to sound so unique. But at the time it was fairly unique. So, I thought, well the conference has, I think it was a secret agent was a theme somehow. I don't know if that was a theme of the conference. But oh, know what it was. So, I suggested, how about if I reach out to somebody of the other speakers and invite them to share their expertise as a preview to the conference. We'll publish this before the event and it'll attract attention to the conference. At one level, that was like, "Yeah, duh, that makes sense. Okay, great." But what I knew as a speaker is that this is a multi-track conference. And nothing is more disappointing to showing up at a multi-track conference and finding out that three or four other super popular people are speaking at the same time as you and there's only 25 people in your seats. So, I empathized with the speakers in this way. And so that is part of the context of my invitation to some of the really popular speakers that I didn't have a relationship with as an invitation to give them exposure, immediate return on their effort, opportunity is really what that was. And I learned a lesson in this. So, I started out thinking, I would just do 10 question interviews and publish the interviews on our blog. That was the format of the content I had in mind. I sent out these 10 questions to quite a few of the speakers and only one responded. And that was a big failure. So, one of the questions was, can you share one secret about content marketing? And I thought, I'm going to try this again. And so, I repositioned a question. I said, I asked it as if I was a character, I said, "You're a secret agent and you've just returned from a meeting with your handler and now you have a secret that will save the content marketing world. What's that one secret?" And these people who had no time for the 10 questions rapidly responded, many in character, "This is agent 35. Here's my secret from technology company X, Y, Z." And we got, I don't know, 30s or 25 responses. And so, we use the vintage James Bond sort of theme where you have an aged folder with coffee stains on it. And the red-letter stamps secrets as an eBook aesthetic that Joe Kalinowski at Content Marketing World created the cover. And then, we took that cover's inspiration and created all the interior aesthetics and everyone loved it. They had all these graphics and we positioned them as the little Polaroid photos and all this stuff. So, it was, what is it, 40,000, 50,000 views over the weekend on SlideShare alone. It was the featured content on SlideShare and other speakers at the conference were talking about it because it dropped right before the conference. So, that really set the stage for events and content, the people speaking at events and content, as something where we could create immediate value for people, right? Because, the hypothesis was not what can we get from people, it was what value can we create for people. But we've got to shorten the time horizon between their investments and effort and the return that they see. And we also want there -- because it would be digital content -- we want there to be an ongoing or long-term return as well, hopefully. So, that was the framework for what we still do today. And actually, that was the framework for the project that you contributed to as well. Kathleen: Yeah, it sounded- Lee: And so, there's lots of other examples like that. Yeah. Kathleen: Yeah. And kudos to you for recognizing a huge pain point because yes, I have spoken at many a multi-track event and there's nothing worse than there being three tracks and the other two guys have packed rooms and you're like, "Okay, you five people, we're going to have a really interactive session because there are so few of us." Lee: Yeah, exactly. Promoting influencer marketing content Kathleen: So, that's great. What I thought was really interesting is, a lot of what you talked about is, it really is leveraging the classic principles of marketing. Because when you talked about reducing the number of questions that you asked, it's the same principle behind how many forms do you put in a... or fields you put in a form. If you asked for 15 things, not a lot of people are going to respond. You asked for two things, you're going to get a lot more. So that makes a lot of sense. But I think one of the most interesting aspects of this to me is, how you enabled the share-ability. Because I know you did this with the one I participated in as well. And you talked about the graphics and making it really cool kind of Polaroid picture like things. Can you maybe talk through how you... what happens once the piece is done? In other words, what assets do you deliver to the contributors and how do you follow up with them to encourage sharing? Lee: So, the, the magic of promotion starts in the planning. So, I talked about topic specificity as it relates to search and influence. So, we use search data as a reflection of demand and we use other data sources to kind of get an idea of what questions are people actually asking around the topic, the brand wants to be known for. And that actually informs the influencers we pick but also the questions we asked them to give insights about. So, there's information architecture if you will, to the way the content is curated and then structured that follows through then to the promotional assets that are delivered, right? So, for example, if I worked with you on a future project, I'm like, "Kathleen in inbound marketing, inbound marketing." So, I'm going to ask you about inbound marketing. And then, in a promotion asset it may be an infographic, it maybe an interactive infographic. We often repurpose content into promotional videos. Actually, I've got a great example for you to just... we did a conference, had a game theme. All right. So, we decided to use 8-bit video game as an aesthetic. And then, we did these promo videos where we literally turn the influencers who contributed into these 8-bit characters and you could... and then, it had the music like the Mario Brothers music... and the left to right and the scene moving behind them and whatever. And so, we use those as a promotional videos and we gave static images, we gave the video content to the influencers to share. And of course, we shared that on our own network as well. And obviously, we pre-write social messages. And that is an art all by itself because the social message you would give to the industry is a completely different social message you would give to someone that works at that brand or to the influencers themselves, right? People often mistake that influencers only want to self-promote and they'll give them a graphic with their own photo in it and it's like, no, in certain cases that is... the last thing in the world they want. But if you give them a graphic with a photo of all the influencers that they are participating with, now, that is motivating because by association, that'll lift their credibility. Otherwise, it just looks like gratuitous chest beating. Kathleen: It's so awkward when you're like, "Look at me. I'm doing this thing." Lee: Yeah. And so, it's being empathetic. That empathy is instrumental obviously in marketing but especially with promotion. And so, there are promotional assets that are a mix of media and messaging. There's also a timing that comes into play. As we all know, social algorithms will emphasize engagement within a very focused period of time. So, when there's a launch, we want to architect as much organic sharing as possible around that very specific launch time so that algorithms will respond and then feature that content higher in the feeds and that sort of thing. What kinds of results can you expect from B2B influencer marketing campaigns? Kathleen: So, at the end of the day, you run a campaign like this. What kind of results does it deliver? Lee: So, again, results and metrics and all that obviously are tied to the goals of the program. While some people will start with a campaign sort of idea, really what it is, it's a pilot. And what you should expect from a pilot where you don't have an influencer program in place already is simply to create great relationships with the influencers to have created content that you can repurpose for demand gen efforts, which could lead to the lead gen that you're after. But as far as the actual influencer content on that pilot, that is a top of funnel thought leadership type of expectation, that's the reasonable expectation. And again, like I say, you can repurpose that content for demand gen efforts. You can deconstruct that influencer content and use its ingredients to put in other demand gen and lead gen types of efforts long-term. But I wouldn't expect leads off of a pilot. I really wouldn't. That said, we have had pilots do really well. There's a company, it is an IT service management industry called Cherwell software. The very first pilot we did for them, or the pilot we did for them, I don't know, they're 15 influencers talking about... is reacting to a report, an industry trends report that they had produced. And so, the influencers are reacting to that data and the content of that report, we put it together as an eBook. We gave them compelling content to share that one campaign because obviously, you were encoding all those URLs that they're sharing. That one campaign was responsible for 22% of their pipeline for the entire year. Kathleen: Wow. Lee: It's an award-winning campaign. Demand Gen Report gave it the Killer Content Award offer that year. In fact, well anyway, I'll stop there. But we're continuing to work with them- Kathleen: I want a link to this campaign so I can check it out and put it in the show notes by the way. Lee: Absolutely. Yeah. And so, that can happen. But that's not typical. And the thing is, when you do a pilot like this and you don't have influence or relationships already, I mean, it only makes sense that you're just opening the door to this as a tactic. It's kind of like, if you know about SEO. Obviously, if we optimize something and we get a couple of links, we're not expecting a flood of leads after a month, that's crazy. Or even a quarter, it takes time to earn it. Now, if your starting point is one where you have a super mature website and you've got hundreds of thousands of links in all kinds of content and you're just making some technical mistakes, you can fix those things and have great expectations. Same sort of thing in influencer marketing. If you already have really great relationships and credibility with industry influencers, but you're just not activating them in an effective way, we can see that. And then, we can architect an experience for them that will result in the thing that you're actually after. So, it really depends on the goal. It depends on the starting point. But ultimately, no matter where you start, we can get there, right? There's a phased approach that you can take, a maturity escalation that you can follow or a path of escalation and maturity that you can follow that can take you from experimenting to being processed and transactional to be more relationship focused, ultimately, being... having momentum and being fully integrated. Companies that are nailing B2B influencer marketing Kathleen: Now, you mentioned Cherwell as an example of a really successful campaign. Are there other companies or specific campaigns that spring to mind if somebody is listening to this and they want to go out and see a living breathing example of how this was done in the wild? What should they look at? Lee: Absolutely. So, another great example is a SAP has as a Tech Unknown podcast. I mentioned that before. So, just if you Google "TechUnknown" as one word or "SAP Tech Unknown," you'll see season one has been out there and we just crushed it with the downloads or they crushed it with the downloads. And so, Tamara McCleary was the host inviting industry experts from within and with outside the organization and just really talking about topics of interest to their buying audience. Same thing with Dell technologies where Mark Shaffer and Douglas Carr, are the influencer hosts and they're interviewing people within Dell technologies, group of companies as well as outside experts about things that their audience will care about. Also, another podcast example I'd love to share is 3M. 3M publishes the largest study of science on the planet, right? It's the study, State of Science Index study. And as a complement to that, we started a podcast where their chief science evangelist, Jayshree Seth, I'm hoping I'm saying your name right, is the host. And then, she interviews people from astronauts to educators other intellectuals or practitioners in business that work in the field of science to help people understand how science impacts our lives. And again, I think we're on season two of that. So, audio wise it's a great opportunity. Episodic content bodes really well I think for influencer engagement because it creates a platform you to have guests. And it's a very natural metaphor for what people already know to be exposed to different ideas and for you to invite people who can add to your sort of portfolio of influencers. Because when you create that interview experience, the experience can inspire advocacy long after that episode has dropped for that person as they go about talking about things of interest in the industry. We also create a lot of interactive assets. So, the marketing, fitness, the B2B marketing fitness thing that you were part of was a slightly interactive. There was a conference where I... the topic, what was the topic? Break Free of Boring B2B. So, in fact if you search "Break Free Boring B2B," you'll find this. And so, I gave a challenge to my team and our designers came up with a couple of designs and one of them was basically, it would be 150-foot-tall grizzly bear with lasers coming out of his eyes lighting up the city. I was like, "Okay, that sounds great." And so, we used that as the aesthetic for this interactive infographic that featured experts in B2B talking about how to not be boring, how to break free of boring B2B marketing. And we also created a promotional video, which was as or more popular than the actual inner infographic. So, that went over. Well, people talked about it and I could show it on my mobile phone and people are like, "Oh, that's amazing. Can I take a picture of you holding that infographic on your phone." Which turned into new business for us. But that also instigated a series of interviews, which we are publishing twice a week now through January where we interviewed people about the series is called Break Free B2B or Break Free B2B Marketing. So, I mean, what a topic, right? It's universally interesting. How can we break free of status quo? How can we break free of legacy mindsets? How can we break free to greater results? So, there's so many things that we can talk about. So, that one influencer generated infographic initiated an ongoing series of episodic content. And it's really that episodic content that's creating all the momentum. So, I know that's a whole bunch of ideas there. But I think what's common amongst all of them is, one, topic specificity, meaning that we know the brand wants to... they stand for something that the customers care about and we find people who are influential around those ideas that have something of value to contribute. But first, we're creating value for them as a reason to contribute. And all of them are experiential, right? They're experiential at their audio capture, they're interactive if it's static capture or heck, we've even done virtual reality experiences that feature influencers. So, it's something that is experiential for the influencer and it's experiential for the consumer, the audience that you're after. And then, ultimately, because of those meaningful, relevant experiential characteristics, they are productive. They have impact and they deliver on a return on the investment. Kathleen: Those are all great examples. And I'm really actually looking forward to checking them out because I think there are lots of brands that kind of check the box and have a podcast for example. But as a podcaster myself, I've really come to appreciate how much strategy there needs to be behind what you're podcasting about and how that fits in with your broader goals and then how that informs who you have on. Like, there's a lot of work that needs to be done before you sit down in front of the microphone and start talking. And so, can't wait to check a couple of those out and see what they're all about. Repurposing influencer content Lee: Absolutely. And one of the great things about all of this is of course the re-purposing opportunities, because when you are planning to repurpose as part of the content planning itself, atomizing or deconstructing the influencer content into ingredient content is easier. And it gives you a library of a resource to draw from to add to your sort of recipes, if you will, to follow the metaphor of other content types that you're creating. So, if you're contributing an article to an industry publication, you go, "Oh yeah, I talked to Kathleen and she said that really smart thing and I've already got that saved. I'll pop that into that article and contributing to Forbes." And are you going to be disappointed that you show up in Forbes? Probably not. Six months after you actually gave the quote in the first place. So, it's something that is the repurposing opportunity is great because it creates more value from a marketing standpoint. But also, it's a way of showing love to your influencers long after their original contribution and it keeps that love alive, which is super, super important in an organic relationship. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Absolutely. Well, I feel like I could talk about this forever with you because there are so many good nuggets here. But we do not have forever. And so, before we wrap up, there are two questions that I always ask all of my guests. We'd love to hear your answers on these. The first is that on this podcast we do talk a lot about inbound marketing. And I'm curious, having worked with so many different companies, is there one particular company or individual that really stands out who's just killing it with inbound marketing right now? Lee: I think I racked my brain around this a lot. And one company that I think that has had a long view of this and is doing really, really well that we work with is LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. So, about five years ago, Jason Miller, who was at LinkedIn at the time -- now he's at Microsoft, had tasked us with finding and interviewing influencers for a new guide he was putting together called The Sophisticated Marketer's Guide to LinkedIn. That one guide, five years ago, which had a 21,000% ROI, had become a sub-brand for LinkedIn. So, if you Google the expression Sophisticated Marketer's Hub, you will find an index of what that one guide has turned into. eBooks, podcasts, a video show, a print magazine, blog posts, obviously social -- they even repurposed the podcast into an actual book. They have learning courses. They verticalized a lot of this content for other specific industries and they're just... I think they're just doing an amazing job at creating a micro brand around this idea of the Sophisticated Marketer's Guide to fill in the blanks as it relates to LinkedIn as an inbound marketing exercise. Kathleen: It's fascinating how it has blossomed and sort of mushroomed into this other thing entirely over the years. Marketing is changing so quickly. That's the biggest complaint I hear from marketers is they can't keep up with it all. How do you personally stay educated and keep up with the changing landscape? Lee: Oh, that's a secret, Kathleen. I can't really... I'm just kidding. My network is the number one source for sure. Also, my team. One of my great joys in life is getting to meet with my team and talk about challenges and successes that they're having. And I learn an awful lot about that. I'm also afforded the opportunity to experiment with our agency. I'm still very much a marketing practitioner. So, whatever time I can carve out for experimentation is a great learning experience. I also subscribe to different topics, not so much websites but to topics so through social channels, there is content around marketing that surfaces to me. There are some individuals that I'll follow. Obviously, people like Ann Handley as an example. Certainly, I speak at a lot of events and rather than just... dine and dash as it were, I like to come in and I stay and I sit in on sessions. And also, competitive intelligence. I'm a big fan of understanding what the market is doing, not just direct... they're not just other marketing agencies, but also other businesses and really doing a lot of reflection and analysis on what seems to be working for other companies in the industry and creating some lessons at our company. We do quite a bit of knowledge transfer, lunch and learns and other structured learning opportunities. And so, all these sorts of things keep me accountable to sharing knowledge with my team and they are sharing knowledge with me as well, right? So, it's very dynamic situation, very symbiotic in that way. And yet, I still feel like I only know 10% of what I need to know. Kathleen: Oh amen. I have the same problem. There's never enough time. But, yes, it does definitely. I mean, you have an amazing network. And certainly, people like Ann Handley, et cetera, these are people that you can learn so much from. So, I love that idea. But I think for somebody who doesn't have a network, they could probably even approximate what you're doing by putting together a really curated Twitter feed or set of blogs they follow of people that clearly know a lot and absorb it that way as well. So, that's a great strategy. Lee: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I can't underestimate the value of experimentation. And whether you're able to do the experimentation yourself or if you happen to be working with an agency and you can carve out a little budget for experimentation, I highly recommend it. How to connect with Lee Kathleen: Yeah. Now, if someone's listening and they want to learn more about Influencer Marketing or they want to reach out and ask a question or somehow get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to connect with you online? Lee: Well, people can certainly come visit us at toprankmarketing.com. And there, they can find our blog, which has many, many articles over the last five or six, seven years around Influencer Marketing, especially B2B Influencer Marketing. And you can certainly connect with me on the Twitter, L-E-E-O-D-D-E-N on LinkedIn or lee@lee.to. You know what to do next... Kathleen: All right. Great. I will put all those links in the show notes. So, if you would like to learn more or connect with Lee, head over there and you'll find all of those contacts. And if you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learn something new, we always appreciate a five-star review on Apple podcasts so that other people can find the podcast as well. Kathleen: And if you know someone else doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next interview. Thank you so much, Lee. This was a lot of fun and very informative. Lee: Thanks Kathleen.

It's the final week of Pride Month 2019. The guys wish everyone celebrating World Pride in NYC a wonderful time. Jeff talks about being homesick for New York and missing playing hockey. Pose's early season 3 renewal is praised. Will talks about the special Masterwork Experiment happening on The Story Grid Podcast where they are breaking down and analyzing the story structure of Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain. Jeff and author/blogger Lee Wind have an extended interview in which Lee discusses his debut YA novel, Queer as a Five Dollar Bill and how he's become engaged in discovering queer history. They also talk about the YA book blog I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell Do I Read? that Lee began over a decade ago. Lee also recommends a couple of his favorite YA books and the queer history project he's trying to jump start on Instagram. Complete shownotes for episode 194 along with a transcript of the interview are at BigGayFictionPodcast.com. Interview Transcript - Lee Wind This transcript was made possible by our community on Patreon. You can get information on how to join them at patreon.com/biggayfictionpodcast. Jeff: Lee, welcome to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. Lee: Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here, Jeff. Jeff: Now, I recently read your debut novel, "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill". In fact, I reviewed it back in Episode 189. And absolutely love it. Now, tell people in your own words what this YA novel is about. Lee: So it's all about the fact that I don't have a time machine. When I went...in 2011, I went to a game in summer camp kind of weekend. And there was a guy talking about the letters that Abraham Lincoln wrote Joshua Fry Speed that convinced him that Abraham was in love with Joshua. And I just thought he was full of it. Like how could that have been possibly been true? It's the first time I heard about it. And I went to the library, and I got the letters and I read them and because the emotions Lincoln speaks about are the same emotions I experienced when I was closeted in dating girls and sort of judging it the right thing to do, but not feeling it, I had this moment of sort of goosebumps, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, I think maybe Lincoln was in love with speed." And I thought, "Oh, if I had a time machine and go back and tell my 15-year-old self that the guy on Mount Rushmore, the guy on the $5 bill, the guy on the penny, was maybe in love with another guy, I think it would have changed my whole life. I don't think it would have taken me until I was 25 years old to fully come out. I think it would have been a game changer. But I don't have a time machine. So "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill" is my paying it forward. I'm a writer, I wanted to write the story about a 15-year-old who's closeted and bullied and dating a girl because he kind of judges it's the right thing to do, but he doesn't feel it. And then he's assigned a book report on Lincoln and he gets the same book that I got from the library, he reads the actual letter, where Lincoln is asking his best friend, after the best friend has gotten married to a woman, "Are you now, in feeling as well as judgment, glad you're married as you are? From anybody but me, this would be an impudent question not to be tolerated, but I know you'll tolerate it for me." And he ends the letter saying, "Please tell me quickly, I feel very impatient to know." And we don't have Joshua's answer, because Mary Todd burned all the letters on that side of the correspondence. But we do know it was only four weeks later that Abraham had married Mary. So to me, it felt like wow, that, like what would happen if a kid today found that out and decided that he wants the world to know? Because everyone loves Abraham Lincoln in our country. And he thought, "Well, okay, so if he tells - the main character, Wyatt - if he tells the whole world that Abraham Lincoln was in love with another guy, he thinks it's going to change how everyone feels about gay people, cue the songbirds and the rainbow and happy ending." I do think if in our culture today if someone was to go really viral with the information that Abraham Lincoln was, wrote these letters and was in love with Joshua Fry Speed, I think there would be a huge conservative backlash and media firestorm. And that's really that what I wanted to show in the novel, how this Wyatt, how Wyatt, this main character makes his way through this incredible maelstrom of fury that he's ignited by just sharing what actually is part of American history. And then to kind of ratchet the stakes up even further, I wanted to make it, like, how was it important for a teenager today? Why is Abraham Lincoln important? So I kind of situated him in Lincolnville, Oregon, a town I kind of made up. His parents own the Lincoln Slept Here Bed & Breakfast. And when the economy of the town kind of starts to tank and they're threatened with losing their business, they bring in a civil rights attorney to help and she has an openly gay son and sparks fly between the two teens. But the main character Wyatt can't do anything about it. Because gay kids saying Lincoln is gay is really different than a straight kid saying Lincoln is gay. And he's faced with his choice, does he follow his heart and see if something might be happening with this guy, Martin? But the cost of that is letting this secret fade back into history, and nothing will ever change in our world. Or does he sort of sacrifice himself and his own happiness, and persist with the story that Lincoln was indeed in love with another guy and see if he can change the world a little bit, even though it won't change for him? So that's the story of "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill". Jeff: And I feel like even before I read this book that I had heard, you know, some of the rumblings that Lincoln may have had a relationship, may have been gay. So I think it kind of dances around the edge of what some people know, because I can't even begin to tell you where I heard it or anything else, just that it had been kind of back there somewhere in the memory of I don't know, something. Does that even make sense? Lee: Well, it's been a big thing on "Will & Grace", the revived series. They've been doing a whole run on jokes about Jack doing a one-man play called Gaybraham Lincoln, which is sort of all about Lincoln being gay, which I think has been good on the one hand, because it's letting more people know that this is something that people are talking about, but it's also doing so as if it's a farce, as if it's not true at all, and completely made up in a complete flight of fancy on the part of this bigger than life character. When in fact, if you read the letters, it is remarkable how to me it feels so clear that Lincoln was in love with Joshua. Jeff: What was your process for researching the history? Because there's more in here than just the letters themselves. There's a lot of Lincoln history, there's comparisons drawn between Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. In my review, you know, I kind of likened it a little bit, you know, you go see "Hamilton" and you get this big infusion of history, while you're wildly entertained. What was kind of your process around gathering all the pieces you needed? Lee: Well, first of all, thank you for comparing it to "Hamilton." That is like the best compliment ever. I need to embroider that on a pillow or something. I did a lot of research. I started out with the letters and then I realized that I just didn't know enough. I looked around and I live in Southern California. And it turns out in Redlands, California, there is an Abraham Lincoln Memorial shrine and museum. And it's like a three-room edifice that has display cases and a gift shop. And so many of the things that ended up being part of the bed and breakfast that Wyatt's parents own were kind of taken from that real-world experience of going to this place and seeing that they actually had, you know, civil war chess sets. And they had, you know, little teddy bears that were gray or blue. And they had, you know, Confederate Flag and a Union Flag. And that was hugely helpful. And then just starting to dig in deeper to some of the things I discovered there, there's a whole sort of subplot about how Wyatt feels that there's no one he can actually talk to. And so he's developed this strange internal dialogue with this image of a soldier in the background of one of their display cases. And I actually have a photo of it from when I went to this Lincoln shrine. And it was there, it was behind all these ammunitions. And I don't know that my gaydar works 150 some years later, but definitely, there's somebody in that, they're one of the soldiers in that photo does look like he could be gay. And I thought, "Wow, what if this was the only way that Wyatt felt that he could have somebody that recognized who he was, and how sad that was that he didn't really have a friend?" And that was why I was excited to create the character of Martin so he had somebody. Jeff: Were you a history buff all along? Lee: No, I hated history. And I'm sure that they're all these teachers that are like hitting their foreheads in shame right now. But like, honestly, I never had a history teacher that kind of got me excited about the stories of history, because I really feel like the way we teach history today, and my daughter's in 10th grade right now and her history textbook could have been my history textbook from the 1980s, where basically, it's the stories of rich, white, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied men from Europe. And, you know, history is more than that. There are the stories of disabled people and people of color and women and men who loved men and women who loved women and people who looked outside gender boundaries in history. And I kind of feel like, we have to crack that facade of that false facade of history and let people know that that there's all this amazing light and you can see yourself in history. And, you know, Lincoln and Joshua are just sort of like the tip of the iceberg. There's, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, there's Mahatma Gandhi and his love for this German Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach. There's the pharaoh Hatshepsut in Egypt, there is Safa, there's so many stories that impact us today. But we don't really know them because they don't get taught, or when they are taught, they're not taught in a sort of, queer inclusive or respectful manner. So I kind of feel like now I love history. And in fact, I wrote this novel, but as I was writing the novel, there was so much history, there was so many things that came up, so many more pieces of evidence, so many more pieces of the pie, things that made me surprised, like, I didn't really know that Lincoln was sort of a racist, even though he's credited with freeing all the slaves, he had this whole plan that he signed off on with Congress at that time to sort of, you know, explore shipping all black people back to Africa. And I didn't know that. And the deeper I dug, when I found a piece of information that kind of contradicted what I knew, I really wanted to find a way to include it in the story. Because I feel like that's what we should be doing when we find things that show that history is complex, and that people are not black and white, that it just makes it all so much more real and so much more relatable. And if we can see reflections of ourselves in the past, like if we know that there were men who love men in the past, then we can believe that we have a place at the table today. And if we know that we have a place at the table today, we can envision a future that is sort of limitless. And I want that for everyone that doesn't feel like their history is included. I want it for all the women and all the people of color and the disabled people and the women who love women and the people who lived outside gender boundaries, too. Because that's, you know, we call it LGBTQAI+ or QUILTBAG or whatever. But really, the job is about being an ally to other people. And me as a gay man, I have to think, "Well, how can I be an ally to everybody else?" And hopefully, they're thinking the same thing. And that's how we start to create societal change. Jeff:: That is wildly profound. And especially, given that this episode of the podcast is dropping in the last week of June, as you know, the queer community celebrates Stonewall 50. Lee: Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I love that we're celebrating Stonewall, I love that the gender non-conforming people that were there, the transgender people, the drag queens are getting some respect now that they were part of that and they were in fact, the leaders of standing up to the police finally. But for many, many years, Stonewall had a banner, the Stonewall Inn had a banner outside that read "Where Pride Began". And I think that's really misleading. And we talk in the queer community in America as if that's where pride began, right. Like, pride, "Hey, we're celebrating 50 years of Stonewall, Hooray." But wait a minute, Karl-Maria Kertbeny came up with the word homosexual 100 years before Stonewall. Right? Like Lincoln and Speed were writing these letters to each other 20 years before that. You know, you can go back thousands and thousands of years and there's this beautiful story from China before China was unified, where the State of Wey that the guy that ruled it, his name was Duke Ling and he had a guy he loved his name is Mizi Xia. And they were walking through the orchard one day and Mizi Xia picks a peach off a tree and starts to eat it. And halfway through, he stops because it's so delicious. He wants to share it and he gives the half eaten peach to the Duke and the Duke makes a really big deal out of it. Like, "I can't believe your love for me is so profound that you would sacrifice your own happiness to give me the peach." And something about that moment captured the imagination of people in that pre-unified China. And for over 1,000 years, the way in Chinese that they said gay love was love of the half-eaten peach. Like we have this amazing, amazing history. And we just need to kind of breakthrough that facade and let all this amazing rainbow light shine through. So that's kind of what I feel my mission is to kind of let people know that we have all this amazing history, and we can start to dive into it. Jeff: Is this all history? Because you mentioned earlier that you're not, you weren't a history buff and you hated history. Have you gathered up all of this new knowledge since you were researching to write "Queer as Five-Dollar Bill"? Lee: Yeah. So while I was writing "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill," like I mentioned, there was just so much stuff that came up, so much evidence that I was like, "I can't really cram all this into a novel, because at the end of the day, the novel is really about a kid today." And I didn't want it to feel like a historical novel. I wanted it to be this page-turner. So I realized that maybe it was two books, maybe there was the novel. But what if there's a nonfiction book as well that presents the primary source materials, like a popup video thing on MTV or VH1, whatever it was, helps interpret, or at least how I interpret the thing? So like, there's all this talk about Shakespeare's Sonnets, and how, while they're very rarely taught, over 100 of the sonnets, Shakespeare wrote to another guy. And these are love sonnets that include really, really famous lines that we all recognize, like, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day. Thou art more worthy, yet more temperate." That's a line that Shakespeare wrote to another guy. For hundreds of years, they had changed the pronouns of that in one of the folios. So it ended up being that for hundreds of years, people thought that Shakespeare wrote all those poems to a woman, to the Dark Lady. But when "The Riverside Shakespeare" came out, the editor of that section, he talked about how, "Well, we've restored the sonnets to their original, you know, pronouns, but you shouldn't mistake that, you know, the affection men felt for each other in the 1500s was nothing like the homosexual attraction today." He wrote this in 1970s. And I'm like, "Really? Really?" Because, you know, "A man in hue all hues in his controlling, Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth," it sounds pretty romantic to me. So what I realized what I wanted to do is to create a book that wouldn't be just a book about Lincoln and Speed, but it would be a book about the broader thing, about men who love men and women who love women and people who lived outside gender boundaries. So there's 15 chapters. One is about Lincoln and Speed, one is about Shakespeare. And then there's, like, you know, a bunch of other amazing people in history, and it really presents the primary source material. And I'm really excited because today - that we're recording this - is the day that I'm signing the contract for that book with a publisher. Jeff: Oh, that is exciting. Congratulations. Lee: Thank you. It's been a long journey, long and crazy journey. Because the book originally was set up at one of the big five publishers, and I worked on it for a year and a half with them. It was approved, we were talking cover design. And then two weeks after our current president was elected, they canceled the book. I think they were concerned that it was going to be too controversial. They just didn't have the courage to proceed. And that was really devastating. And it took a long time to find a new home for it. There were a lot of shenanigans, a lot of plot twists. The agent I had had at the time turned out to be a criminal who, well, she was telling all her clients she was submitting things and that they were having all these pending book deals. She was lying. And the book was never submitted anywhere. Even after it was returned, the rights were returned to me. And the novel, "Queer as a Five-Dollar Bill" ended up getting crowdfunded because I thought that I was being, well, stonewalled by the children's book industry and they didn't want word to get out about Lincoln and Speed so much so that no one would even respond to the submissions. So I crowdfunded it. I have a blog, I think we're talking about that a little bit later. But I have a bunch of people that know who I am and what I was trying to do, and they all supported me to not just publish the book professionally, but also, what I wanted to do is raise enough money to donate at least 400 copies of the novel to LGBTQ and allied teens, and the Kickstarter funded in six days, it was amazing. And then it went on for another 24 days. So we ultimately raised enough money to give away 910 copies. So that's been really, really gratifying. Jeff: That's incredible. I mean, it's really one of the great things about publishing today is that there's really no more gatekeepers out there. Anybody can publish, get it on Amazon, get an audiobook done, etc, and get their messages out there. Lee: There still is the thing, though, that being with a traditional publisher, you generally can reach more, especially when we're talking about like middle grade, you know, or books, where you go into libraries, which I think that this nonfiction book really is a, you know, hopefully, it'll sell like hotcakes. But also, I do think that to get it adopted more broadly into schools and into libraries, I think that coming from an established publisher is really useful and really helpful. So I'm excited about that. I do think that yeah, that there are many, many fewer boundaries than there used to be - or barriers than there used to be. But at the same time, we have the additional challenge that while access to the marketplace has never been easier, the marketplace has never been bigger. So getting noticed in a marketplace, where there's over a million books that are published every year now in the U.S., is a challenge. And that's why it's so important to have safe places to find out about these things, like your podcast, and my blog. Jeff: Yes, absolutely. To spin back on "Five-Dollar Bill" a little bit and talk a little bit more about it. What were your inspirations for both Wyatt and Martin and the type of teenagers they would be? Lee: When I was growing up, or when I was coming out, I think it felt like you couldn't be gay if you lived anywhere except for one of the big cities like San Francisco or New York. And I really wanted to have a character that felt connected to nature. And that one of the thematic subplots would be, 'Could he be himself where he was? Could he be himself in small town America, in a rural community, was there a way through for him to be successfully himself and authentic?' I feel like I spent so much of my life being inauthentic, that I want to do everything I can to help teens be authentic now. So on the one hand, Wyatt was the study of a kid that was on a journey to be authentic and Martin was the flip side of that. Martin was the character that already was authentic, and was already reaping the benefits of that level of confidence. And you know, as soon as you, for me, when I came out, it was like this huge burden off of me. And suddenly, I realized the weight of it was on everyone else, right? Like, if they had a problem with it, that was their problem. But it wasn't me hiding or holding back, or pretending or acting, which I did for so long. My husband and I have a joke, where when you go to a Starbucks or something, they're always like, "What's your name?" And every time my husband changes his name. Like he just makes up different names every single time. And they ask me and I'm always Lee because it took me 25 years to even start to like myself and to accept myself. And I finally got here. And I'm like, "Yeah, I'm not anybody else. I am me. I am Lee." It's funny. I take a spin class and as a motivational thing the spin instructor does, "Who do you want to be today?" I'm always like, "Me, I want to be me." I spent so long being other people. And then also, it was really cool when I was creating Martin's character, to think about him being African American. And that being an opportunity for me to talk about the complexity of Abraham Lincoln and him not being so perfect and explore those themes a little more. And it's funny because I hear from a lot of people how much they love Martin. And yeah, he's pretty lovable. Jeff: Yeah, I really liked them both in their individual ways. For sure Wyatt...I grew up, I spent like middle school, high school, college in Alabama. So I could totally relate to where Wyatt was in his journey like he knows, but there's no way he's telling anybody. And I didn't have a Martin for a best friend. So I also loved Martin, because he was the ideal friend to have for Wyatt in the moment to show him what could be. Lee: Yeah, exactly. Jeff: What do you hope the audience takes away from this kind of history/fiction mashup? Lee: So I think a lot about words, you know, being a writer, and I think that the word homosexual isn't helping us. I think that if we, because we're so reactive and weird in our culture, in America about sex, and we are obsessed with it, and we don't want to acknowledge it. And especially we don't want to talk about it to teens. So when we talk about homosexual rights and homosexual history, all straight people are hearing, you know, to paint with a broad brush, is they're thinking about sex and that we have sex differently than they do and how do we have sex. And I just don't think that's particularly helpful. And I think that if we talked about love as sort of the binding element that makes me and my husband and our teenage daughter a family, or the love between you and your husband, if we talked about HomoLOVEual rights and HomoLOVEual history, I think we'd have a very different cultural conversation. So what the tagline of my book is, "What if you knew a secret from history that could change the world?" And I love this because it gets a little meta. But it's the challenge that Wyatt faces, right? He finds out the secret about Abraham Lincoln writing these letters and maybe being in love with Joshua Fry Speed. And he decides that he's going to tell the world because it could change the world. And then it's the same challenge that I faced because I knew the secret from history and I thought this drumming sense of responsibility, like I had to share it, I had to get it out in the world. And because I wasn't getting anywhere with traditional publishing, I thought, "Okay, well, I'm going to crowdfund it, I'm going to get it out in the world, myself." And then what I am really excited about is that it's also the challenge that the reader faces. Because when you've read the book, or you even heard me talk about the book, you know that there is something more to the story of Abraham Lincoln that has been taught to you. And it's that first crack in that facade of history. And it makes you think, "Well, wait a minute, when you see the picture of Mount Rushmore, or when you pick your kid up at the Lincoln middle school, or you're driving on Lincoln Boulevard, you know, does it occur to you that, you know, our culture has not shared that part of who Lincoln is? And does it make you feel a little more pride about the fact that you know what, we do have history, queer people, and we need to lean into it? And we have the opportunity to because there are hundreds of years of historians that are going to argue with us and that are going to say, "Yeah, yeah, it's not true. It was very typical for men to share beds on the frontier." Not that Springfield, Illinois was the frontier. But for four years, you know, Abraham and Joshua shared a bed long after Abraham could afford his own bed. "Well, it was cold." Okay, yeah. But they shared a bed for four years. It's not proof. But it's interesting. And I think that as all those things add up, we can all make our own determination of what we think, you know. Is it important for me that I convince the world that Abraham Lincoln was in love with Joshua Fry Speed? No. I think a lot about Anne Lamott, she's a writer, and she writes about writing. She has a beautiful book called "Bird by Bird". And in that book, she talks about lighthouses, and how they don't run all over an island looking for boats to save, they just sort of stand there and they shine. And I think a lot about that. Like, I need to be a lighthouse. Like I found out this amazing, cool stuff about history, and how it relates to today, and how empowering it is. And I just want to shine. And if people are interested, they can come closer to the light. And if they're not interested, no worries, you know, watch out, there's some rocks over there. Jeff: Any chance of a sequel? Because I know I would love to see more of Wyatt and Martin at some point Lee: I haven't really come up with a good angle on a sequel, I had this funny idea for...one of the other pieces of history that really struck me was Mahatma Gandhi and the story of his love for Hermann Kallenbach. And we talk a lot about Gandhi having this sort of breakthrough where he talked about it doesn't matter whether you pray facing left and I pray facing right - I may have that reversed. We're all praying to the same God. Like he had this huge breakthrough, not just in terms of, you know, a peaceful protest, Satyagraha. He changed our world in such profound ways. And at the same time, he was in love with this German Jewish architect named Hermann Kallenbach. And if he was in love with a Jewish guy, like that's actually really interesting and really germane. Like maybe that's why he had that inspiration, that insight about it doesn't matter who you're praying to, because it's, we're all sort of bonded by this sense of spiritual connection. Like, that's really exciting. And I feel like there's so many stories like that, like Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. Eleanor Roosevelt was the woman that after, you know, her husband died, she went to the UN and became this advocate for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And would she had done that if she didn't have this experience of being in love with another woman, and feeling that sort of outsider status, while at the same time being this empowered woman in our world? History starts to open up like a flower. So I don't have an exact idea for a sequel for Wyatt and Martin, but I will put it in the hopper as ideas. Reason I brought up Hermann Kallenbach and Mahatma Gandhi was that I thought, that would be an interesting thing to talk about a kid finding out about that, and how that would have changed their life. And then about, "Wait, that's the exact same story over again, I don't need to do that. I already wrote that." So for now, I'm going to focus on the nonfiction piece and some other fiction writing that I want to get to that, actually, I'm very inspired by your book too, by the "Codename: Winger" series, because I love the idea of mashing up a gay teen with a sort of spy thriller. Jeff: And I can't wait to read what you might do with that. So please, bring that to the marketplace. Lee: Thank you. I keep thinking, "Is there a way I can get gay history in here somehow?" I haven't figured that either yet. But, you know, I'll work on it. Jeff: You'd mentioned earlier that you've got your blog, which I was so excited to find right around the same time as finding the book. You've been a YA blogger for more than a decade now. I believe you said it'll be 12 years in September. And the blog is called "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I Read?" What led you to starting that? Lee: Thanks. Yeah, there was no safe space to find out what were the books with queer characters for kids and teens. And I remember, there was a review on Amazon for a really sweet picture book called "The Family Book" by Todd Parr. And it's sort of a cartoon-y book. And there's like one page, it says, "Some families look alike." And it's a bunch of dogs that they all have similar features. "Some families look different." And it's a tree with all these different kind of animals in it. "Some families adopt children." And it's a bunch of ducks. And on the back of one duck is a penguin. And then you turn the page and it's, "Some families have two moms or two dads." And it's a picture of two women and two men. And then it continues, and there was a review, pretty high up that said, "If you tear out the page with the two moms and dads, then this is a lovely book on diversity." And I thought, "Wow, way to miss the entire point of what diversity is." And I got so upset and so hurt, you know, because I'm a gay dad. And I thought this was an amazing book for my daughter, but also for all of my daughter's classmates to see and recognize, "Yeah, yeah, you know, some families do have two moms and two dads." And to Amazon, that wasn't hate speech, it didn't violate their terms of service, it was just somebody's opinion. Albeit kind of, you know, nasty, or at least I interpreted as nasty. And it got me thinking about how there really needed to be a safe place online, where a kid could go and find out what are the books that were out there. And when I started, there were maybe 30 books total that were inclusive of LGBTQ characters and themes for kids and teens. And what's happened over the years is that by keeping this curated safe space, where I'm not vetting all the books, but I'm making sure that no nastiness is happening on the site. We have over 500 books now in many, many categories. And it's been really exciting to see that sort of explosion of content. And yet, it's that sort of similar problem again. Like now, suddenly, there's so much content, how do you make your way through it? How do you find the things that you want? So the idea behind it was to post about the books, what's queer about the books, and then let readers add their own reviews. There hasn't been a lot of review, there's just too many places for people to leave reviews these days. So I don't see a lot of that. But I also didn't want to make it, you know, "Lee's favorite book site" because I think that that has a limited value, I thought that there was more value in it being a site that felt really comprehensive. And that's what I aim for. And then it just became a place where I could talk about the stuff that I really care about, that I want queer and allied teens to know about. And over the years, what I've discovered is that the readership is split into thirds. There's about a third, queer teens and queer and allied teens on it. There about a third of librarians and teachers and people that work with LGBTQ teens. And then there's a whole bunch of adults that are sort of reading the books for themselves and sort of healing their inner teen. And I think that there is a healing that happens. Every time I read a queer book that has a happy or even a hopeful ending, there's a healing that happens. And I think maybe that's part of why romance as a genre is so popular. I know Will was saying in a previous episode that people get on his case for like ruining the ending, but it's all romance, you know it's going to be a good ending. And I think maybe that's why people turn to it. So I know how empowering it is for me when I read something where I see a reflection of myself, and it's a positive thing. Because when I was growing up, there was nothing to read, nothing positive. The only queer characters were like evil pedophile villains, it wasn't particularly helpful. Jeff: Yeah, that's, unfortunately, the case in the history that you and I have from that era when we were growing up. In the decade-plus that you've been running the site, other than just more YA, how have you seen it all evolve? Lee: There's more, and there's better and there's deeper, and there's less preachy and there's room for it all. It's funny, there was a kind of push a few years back for...well, maybe we're beyond the coming out story. And I kind of got my dander up a little bit on that. And I felt like, "Well, we're never going to be beyond the first love story when it's, you know, a straight romance. So, Andrew Solomon has this great book that he wrote called "Far From the Tree" and it's a nonfiction piece. And he talks about how, you know, when your identity is...where you're the apple that does fall far from the tree, or falls from the tree and rolls across the, you know, down the hill and across the orchard, when you're queer, most likely your parents were not. And so you have this moment where you have to find your sense of community outside of the family that you grew up in. A lot of other identities, you share that. Like, usually, like me, I was raised Jewish and so I would, you know, my parents were Jewish. So I sort of shared that identity. For all of our identities, we sort of are either sort of close to the tree or far from the tree. And when you're far from the tree, there's more work involved. So coming out, I think is going to continue to be this universal thing. Because just like, you know, my daughter has two dads, but she's straight. So in a funny way, she's going to have to, you know, she had a bit of a coming out where she had to tell us, sort of, you know, abashed, hoping that we'd be okay with it, that she was straight. And we had a good laugh about it. Because it's not that big a deal for us. We just want her to be her authentic self and to be happy. So we do want to have coming out books, and we also want to have books where being gay, like your character Winger, Theo, where it's the least interesting thing about him. I loved when you said that in your interview. Because yeah, we want those stories, too. It's like in acting, right? In improv, the rule is yes/and. So we want these books, and we want those books. We want the fantasy, we want the romance, we want the science fiction, we want all of it because truly, if you look at the numbers of books that are published - traditionally there about 5,000 books published a year for kids and teens. And then, if you look at the world of self-publishing, let's say that 5,000 are doing it really beautifully. And the books are indistinguishable with the quality of that from traditional publishing. That's 10,000 books a year, a year. And you have all those years going back too. So what we want is the opportunity to sort of have all of those books and right now we still only have like 500. So we have a long way to go. We need lots more books, we need lots more voices, we need people writing their own voices, stories, we need more diversity included in everybody's stories because truly, you're not going to have a classroom today that doesn't include someone that's LGBTQ, we need it all. Jeff: That's very true. Given that you had the blog, did you always see yourself eventually writing the YA novel that you did? Or did that just kind of manifest itself because you have the story to tell? Lee: I've always been a writer. I've written...I remember one summer when I was like between 9th and 10th Grade in high school, I was like, "I'm going to write a novel." I sometimes think of those poor characters still trapped in the broken space station that was orbiting the Earth. And I'm like, "Oh man, I have to do something with that someday." I don't think I will. I've always written. I think that for the last 14 years, I've really focused on writing for kids and teens. I also write picture books and middle grade. And when I found out this thing about Lincoln and Speed, it really inspired me to focus on writing that as a novel. I think that the blog has been a way to have my voice heard in a more direct way, and not wait for somebody to tap me on the shoulder and say, "Okay Lee, we're ready for what you have to share." So that's been really empowering. I remember, when I started the blog, there were very few people reading it, and I would get all excited, I'd be like, and I'd tell my husband, "Hey, 15, people went to my blog today." And I was so, so excited. And now, all these years later, we passed 2.6 million page loads. I get between, you know, 15,000 to 25,000 page views a month. It's remarkable, and humbling, and also a really cool responsibility to continue to maintain this safe place. And at the same time, I'm trying to keep writing and work on the new stuff, which has been really a good thing, because balancing the day job and the blogging, there's a lot but I have stories I want to tell. And I'm going to keep trying to tell them. Jeff: Good. Yeah, keep putting it out there. Because we always need more, to be sure. For people who haven't seen the site yet, and we're certainly going to link to it in the show notes. It has an amazing hero image across the top of the superhero. Where did that come from? And where did the name come from? For folks who might question the name too, because I have a pretty good idea where the name came from. But let's hear it from you. Lee: Sure. So "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I read?" is a play on words of something we chanted in Act Up in the '80s and '90s. The chant was "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it." And I thought, well, my issue is a little more "What the hell do I read?" Because I felt so starved for any books that included somebody like me. I mean, you know, I grew up and I really and truly thought I was the only person in the world that felt the way I felt about other guys. And which was super ironic, because I have an older brother, who's five and a half years older, and he's gay too, but we never spoke about it. We are the children of immigrants and when my parents came from Israel, they sort of brought all their homophobia with them. And the American culture at the time was super homophobic, especially where we lived outside Philadelphia. It was not a safe place. And it's so amazing to think that you can grow up and feel like you're the only person and everything I read, I was obsessed with the series by Anne McCaffrey called the Dragonrider series. And there was this super between the lines, sort of thematic thing that you could maybe interpret that there was gay stuff happening in that world, but you had to really stretch for it. And looking back, I think, well, maybe that's why I was so obsessed with that book, with that series, because there was some faint, not even mirror reflection, but like the gleam of a tarnished piece of silverware. I was like, "Wait, wait, maybe that's me." So that's where "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I read?" came from. The image happened a few years later. I had been running the site for about two years, it had been doing really well. And I realized I wanted to have a customized image. And yet, it's a pretty wordy title. So I realized I needed an image that didn't have any additional words to it. So I contacted someone I knew, an artist I knew, Jim DeBartolo. And, I said, "Look, I need an image that says empowerment." And he came up with this sort of superhero moment of like ripping the denim shirt off. And there's this sort of T-shirt underneath with the sort of superhero logo, which is the website, which is leewind.org. And it was funny. We tried to play with the sort of partial face that you see, we tried to, you know, could we make it a person of color? Could we do some things with you, know, the physique? But ultimately, it was sort of an avatar of me, and it took me years to admit it that's sort of what of course it is, it's an avatar of me, but I don't have that good a jawline. But at least in my mind, I think that it's been this sort of symbol of empowerment. And that's really what I hope that people get from visiting the site, from reading anything I write. I want them to feel empowered. Jeff: I like that. That's a great story behind that. Lee: Thanks. Jeff: So relying on your...I'm going to call it a YA expertise because of the site that you run. What are three or four titles of current YA that you would recommend our audience to take a stab at? Lee: Sure. So I have to start with "Carry On" by Rainbow Rowell. I know it's not super recent. But this is the gay Harry Potter book that I wanted so badly. And I was so frustrated that JK Rowling didn't include Dumbledore as being gay in the canon. It sort of was outside the books that that revelation happened and you can go back and sort of, you know, read subtexts and stuff. But I really was hoping that there would be some sort of, you know, on the page, queer love or something, and it didn't happen, there was really nothing. And, you know, Rainbow Rowell, she wrote two books, one about the girl that writes the fan fiction, which is called "Fangirl", which is really good. And then there was this book, which was the fan fiction, that ended up being a huge success on its own, called "Carry On". And I don't want to say too much, but it is absolutely brilliant. And if you are queer, or love queer stories, and you had any connection to Harry Potter, and that sort of world of magic, you've got to go read this. It's just wonderful. Jeff: Excellent. Her books have been on my TBR forever. And I actually need to take the leap and read them. Lee: Read this one first. It's just you will be so happy you did. Jeff: So you mentioned the nonfiction that you've just signed the contract on and other stuff noodling around in your head... anything else you want to shout out that's coming up soon for you? Lee: So there are a bunch of things percolating. But nothing has come to full boil yet. So I will let you all know when it does. Jeff: That is fair. I can't wait to hear what they are. Because I think that, yeah, having read the one book from you, I'm looking forward to reading so much more. So where can people keep up with you? There's leewind.org as we talked about, which is the "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I read?" site. Anyplace else people should be looking for updates? Lee: Yeah. I mean, I'm playing around with Instagram. I'm trying to do this thing. I had the idea that we could do a #queerhistoryiseverywhere. And I wanted people to upload photos of Abraham Lincoln or the word Lincoln wherever they saw it and just start posting it on Instagram. It hasn't exactly caught on yet. But I still like that idea. Jeff: Maybe our podcast listeners will play along with that. Lee: Oh, yeah, that would be really fun. And also, I mean, as, you know, more queer history happens. I was speaking at the Bay Area Book Festival recently and someone came up after my panel and they said, "Did you know that Bābur from the Bāburnāma when he was a teen he was in love with another boy?" I was like, "Really?" Totally, I have sitting on my desk right next to me right now the "Bāburnāma" and indeed, when he was 18, he was in love with this other boy. And it's so exciting to find out this stuff. So I feel like because it's been hidden, the more we can crowdsource this information and share it and then all amplify each other. I think it's very, very exciting. Jeff: Very cool. So we will link to all that stuff, the books we talked about - everything else - in our show notes. And Lee, I'm so glad we got the opportunity to talk, spread the word a little bit more about this book and the website and thank you for all you're doing to get more out there about YA literature too. Lee: Thank you, Jeff. I really want to say thank you to you and to Will. I'm really a fan of the podcast and getting to be on it as a real thrill. So thanks.

This week in the Spookeasy Leland, Shane and Matt talk about the their favorite king if the vampires: Dracula. Sticking to the film versions only they fall down the rabbit hole of which actors played the the character best. Is it Bela? Oldman? or Lee? Well, come on in the Spookeasy and find out!Read OnThe [...]

This week in the Spookeasy Leland, Shane and Matt talk about the their favorite king if the vampires: Dracula. Sticking to the film versions only they fall down the rabbit hole of which actors played the the character best. Is it Bela? Oldman? or Lee? Well, come on in the Spookeasy and find out! Play... The post The Spookeasy: Episode 2: Dracula first appeared on Pixelated Geek.

Ps Ken Lee - Well Well Well by Nations Church

When Lee Ritchey “got through launching things to the moon” his career took off (in Silicon Valley...before it was Silicon Valley!) and he is now widely regarded as one of the premier authorities on high speed PCB and system design. He is the founder of Leading Edge and author of Right the First Time. Show Highlights: Lee started as a microwave engineer who designed chips that went up on the Apollo ICs and “faking” logic High Speed design courses first offered at Berkeley. He wrote the books to make the students happy and provide the coursework that didn’t exist. High speed signal path losses - how do we control skew? Where does it come from? And what’s the answer? Spread glass. Links and Resources: Lee Ritchey on Linkedin Right the First Time Lee’s Digital Library Lee Ritchey’s Presentation at AltiumLive 2017 in Munich   SI forum - an email forum that is a very good resource for SI questions. All one needs to do is send an email to: si-list-freelists.org Type subscribe in the subject line to become a member. Disclaimer: We respect the unique perspectives of all of our OnTrack podcasts guests. Therefore, we choose to offer their uncensored opinions in favor of full transparency. However, all opinions expressed are exclusively those of our guests and do not reflect the views of Altium or our employees.   Hi everyone, this is Judy Warner. Welcome back to the OnTrack Podcast. If you would please subscribe, and let us know what you'd like to hear more about here on OnTrack. Today, another amazing guest Lee Ritchey, who truly needs no introduction. But if you haven't met Lee before - Lee is considered to be one of the industry's premier authorities on high-speed PCB and system design. He's the founder and president of Speeding Edge - an engineering consulting and training company, some of you have read his book. He's author of 'Right the First Time' and he has a very illustrious, amazing background, and we also had the privilege of having Lee speak last year at AltiumLive in Munich, so I'm delighted to have this conversation with Lee. Not too long after Design Con, so I know he'll have some great wisdom to share. So, before Lee and I get started, also please connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter @AltiumJudy and Altium is also on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Lee I'm going to start with a very high-level question. First of all, welcome. It's good to see you again. Thanks for the invite. Always my pleasure. So, you're known as the high speed authority in our industry, but how did you get there? How did you, out of all the paths you could have taken sort of in your technology field, how did you end up kind of going down this rabbit hole? I started out as a microwave engineer on the Apollo program, which as you probably know, was a long, long time ago. And the company I went to work for was in Silicon Valley, when it was not yet Silicon Valley. Well, after we got through launching things to the moon, NASA decided, well we're done with that, and lots of us - like sixty thousand of us - had to go find something else to do. Wow. Well I was in Silicon Valley and integrated circuits were starting to be a big play and the big jobs were designing things with integrated circuits digitally. And so I interviewed for a job designing equipment for testing digital integrated circuits, and got the job. And said, oh now I’ve got to go learn something about logic. So I went to bookstores and got books and I faked it, and that's how I got got my start. And of course, since I was already in the microwave end of things, transmission lines were already part of that, and that was what you had to be good at if you wanted to use ECL, and the high speed computers back then were ECL. That's how I switched from microwave to what everybody called digital, and for a long time digital was slow enough so you could pretend it was digital, but I never did and always designed on transmission lines and so, as the speed went up all around the industry, everybody needed to learn how to do something with this high speed stuff. And I had a design company from '82 to '92 where we designed pretty much all the early work for Sun, Silicon Graphics, Cray - people like that, and invariably I would get a new client and the engineers knew nothing about high-speed design. So I'd spend two days teaching them the basics so that we could design their board. Out of which grew the courses that I do now. Which I first began to offer at UC Berkeley, and the complaint after every course was: there's no book, there's no textbook, and that's where the books that you mentioned, came from as I  had to write those to make the students happy at UC Berkeley. And in 1999, we decided that we didn't like working for companies so we started Speeding Edge. Okay. That's it, that's how I got here by - almost by accident. Well I always say, most of us got here by accident. I mean some EEs take a nice, clean, straight path, but even they don't take that straight path., I know I didn't end up here on purpose either. But that's interesting, I didn't know that's how your book came to be. So the last time I saw you, you were actually speaking at DesignCon. And how often are you teaching these days actually ? Most of my classes are private and I would guess about every two months or so. Okay. There are two-day, three, and day classes so, that's about as often as I want to do that. I don't know if you've lectured for 14 hours in a row, but it kind of wears out. I don't think I know anything about anything enough to talk for 14 hours, maybe raising kids I don't know - like I don't think I know about anything to talk that long so now we - now we know for sure, you're way smarter than me. Oh no, I just came from a different path that's all. Well you and I were talking recently, preparing for this call and we sort of went down this path talking about PCI Express. So can you kind of talk a little bit about the evolution of speed and the extremely acute curve that we've taken in the last couple of years? All right, well maybe let's start with PCI itself, which is the Bus architecture that is in - has been - in all the personal computers that you can buy, that's what PCI stands for: Personal Computer Interface, and it was a parallel Bus that you might have seven or eight plug-in cards, all on this Bus. That CPU could talk to any of those, any time, and then originally there was - it clocked at 33 megahertz, and it wasn't too long before the CPUs got faster than the Bus, and all of a sudden we were - what we call - IO-bound. We couldn't get any more performance out of a PC, because the Bus was too slow. So we upped the speed to 66 megahertz, and then a hundred, and for a lot of reasons they're too complicated for today, we couldn't go past 100 and that block limited how fast you could make a personal computer. And so we realized the architecture had to change. And the reason is that if the CPU can talk to any spot in the backplane at any time - to do that really fast, you have to have really, really short connections and that was not realistic. So we turned to an architecture that actually is old. The difference was signaling protocol, that is in PCI Express, has its origins way back with IBM. I was using it in '74, where we would connect two boxes to each other, where we couldn't do that with a parallel Bus, because the the noise in the background was too high. And so that's not a new technique adjust that early on, as you know, the guts of a computer is a parallel architecture meaning lots of bits switching in parallel, and the differential links that we're talking about here are serial. So at each end, you had to go from a parallel Bus to a serial stream on the line, the other end - go back. And at that time, the serializers and deserializers were extremely complex and expensive. So the only reason you'd ever do that, is there were - if you were stuck, you couldn't do it any other way. Well as we'd gotten to where we have a billion transistors in an IC, these serializers and deserializers are what we call basically free. So all of a sudden it doesn't cost much to go from parallel to serial and back. And the advantage of that is, you can - you can drive... Well let me start from - in a parallel Bus were either series or parallel terminated - if you're lucky, you can drive that at 2 gigabits per second, that's very hard to do. With a serial Bus - we can drive them and we are right now driving them at 32 gigabits per second, which you could never do any other way, and this is how we're getting all the performance we need in the internet. Everyplace else is with these serial lengths and that's what PCI Express is. We switch from a parallel Bus to a serial Bus, to allow us to go faster. Well, when you have serial links there, you can only have a driver and a CI receiver on the same net. So how is it the CPU's going to talk to six or seven devices like it was doing with the old parallel Bus? And the answer is, we have to have a switch chip somewhere so that we can switch between the CPU of whatever we want to talk to. Well early on, those were expensive chips, so we only use PCI Express in real high-end PCs like a gamer would buy. But we've now integrated those switch circuits right in the CPU so it's not an extra part to buy. Oh okay. So it's everywhere. So pretty much everywhere we've got PCI Express, well in itself it's not really all that big a deal because the early PCI Express was - well depends on your point of view - as fast as 500 megabits per second on the line and that's not special, to these terms. The rub is, we have started to go up the performance curve where we've got Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3, and so on. And Gen 3, which is it just about around the corner for everybody - it's 8 gigabit per second. That's not slow, and we start to see things that we could ignore at lower rates. The one we're going to talk about today is not lost - it's the thing we called skew. Skew is the fact that the two sides of a differential pair don't arrive at the receiver at the same time - and some numbers on this, the most common until recently - most common data rate in switches and routers for the internet, was 10 gigabits per second. Where one bit is 100 picoseconds. And I did a test board in 2013 at DesignCon where we discovered 62 picoseconds of error in a path which is almost an entire data bit at 10 gigabits per second - which destroys the work. The link does not work and of course, we've got Gen 4 coming in at 16 gigabits and Gen 5 at 32 - where 32 of the bit period is only 30 picoseconds. So that error I just talked about, is two whole bits which means, nothing's gonna work right? So the question is, where does this skew come from? So is that, Lee let me interrupt you for just a moment. Is that what you - the course a you taught this year at DesignCon, was that your focus? Yes well the bootcamp, I call it 'Getting to 32 gigabits per second' which covers a number of things, skew being one of them. Okay. Of course the first worry almost everybody had, is loss. So we had this flurry of activity to make low loss materials and smooth Cochrane on and on like that. At the same time we were doing that, I see manufacturers figured out a way to improve their circuits so that loss is not a player anymore - not a big deal anymore. For example, the latest Vertex I guess their Vertex 8 or 9 from Xanax, at 28 gigabits per second, the Lincoln tolerates 38 GB of loss. Meaning that we start out with say a thousand millivolts and we wind up with four at the receiver, and it still works, so all the drive to have the world's best, lowest loss laminate is not a player anymore. Skew is, skew's killing everybody. All these laminates from people like Rogers and - you mentioned one earlier - I can't remember. Taconic. Taconic are simply not necessary - not necessary. At any rate, skew is just - and that was the theme of DesignCon this year. It is how do we control this bloody thing? So my impression - I guess that comes up next - is where's it come from? Yeah, where does it come from Lee? Well if the two sides were different to pair with different links, that would be, I think obviously, one way that can happen. Right. But pretty much everybody else had to design physical links to a few mills, so that tends not to be what the problem is. The problem is - and these are what we call micro defects or micro effects - the glass cloth in laminates you know, on average has a pitch between threads of about 16 mils - between 16 to 20 mils - Traces are 4 or 5 mils wide, so there's a huge difference between the width of a trace and the spacing of those glass fibers. Well, laminate is a mixture of glass and resin, and the dielectric constant of glass is on around 6 and the dielectric constant of resins is less than 3. That means that the lower the dielectric constant, the faster the signal is going to go. That's right. So if I had one side of a differential pair on the glass, and on the other one in between, there are two different speeds. That's where the problem comes from. Now along those lines, I was just talking to Chris Hunrath from Insulectro, and he was talking about spread glass. What do you think? That's what the answer is. It is? Okay cuz you know I've been here at Altium a little over a year and I guess I missed the spread glass thing, but I'm like, that actually sounds like it makes sense. Well I and my colleagues have been the drivers of spread glass. Really? Tell us about that. Well so we found - I've got to confess - we found out by accident, That's how all good inventions are found right? Yes, and it had to do with - let me think about when that was - about 2005, we were trying to improve the uniform distribution of glass by using two plies of thin glass, hoping that they would sort of average out. And I had a fabricator in Oregon who says: you know, if you use a single ply of 33:13, you could save some money. So we built the test board and by chance that was really spread very nicely and so we had no skew problems. So all of a sudden, we thought we've solved all the world's problems by just using this glass. And then we built our test board from a different weaver. So and this weaver spread the glass in one direction but not the other? Yeah. So, if you were to get that DesignCon paper you'd discover that we had really good skew one way. One direction - - [laughter]. And so back to square one. Why aren't people spreading glass? So we got to digging around - and it was for laser drilling of blind vias. Because, if you think about it, if you have like the classic 4 mil core was called 1080 glass. If you look at that, the glass bundles are round or not spread out, there are big voids between. Well so, if the guy drilling a laser drilled blind via wanted to get rid of the glass, he'd set the intensity to burn the glass and then go tear right through the backstop directly right, and so the laser drilling industry is the one responsible for spreading glass. Like you said, complete accident. It is, and they don't care about signal integrity, they care about laser drilling - so I and a guy named Scott 'Hindiga' of Cisco, started going to IPC's sessions on 'Standards for the Last Week' with the intention of getting some standards for how you spread the glass. Well it was got a whole lot like herding cats. [laughter] What an IPC committee being like herding cats? I don't know what you're talking about Lee [laughter] Yeah, so around the table we had five or six weavers and they would not tell us how they wove their glass. Because it was proprietary? Yes, so he couldn't come up with the standard, and the only standard that the laser drilling people had was, you take the section of this cloth and they put it in the chamber and see how - put compressed air on one side and see how leaky it was. That's it - that's all there is today. If it was leaky, let's make it an X, and it was good. That would not be good enough for what we're doing here. So we are not done solving this problem, and there's about seven or eight different ways that people approach it. Now if you were at DesignCon this year, you'd discover two papers were presented by Cisco where, when they built the boards at five degrees to the weave, they got the best skew results. So that's how they're... - Wow, yeah. Can you imagine what that happens to you in a fab shop if you say pop this artwork on their at 5 degrees? [Laughter] -well I remember hearing about - from a colleague, he was an EE - they were actually at some point, because of the glass crossing and there being those bundles, they were actually starting to do it at - basically laying the prepreg at a diagonal. Do you follow what I'm saying? Oh yes. -do you remember that? That was kind of going on for a while to see if that would help, and I think it did help a little bit but again, the expense. There's so much loss of materials doing that, that it didn't make sense, or there was the trend of making that weave super, super tight so at least it was consistent, even if it was lossy. So, I feel like we've been going at this from a lot of angles - but hearing from Chris Hunrath, at Insulectro, it sounds like some people are really moving towards that spread glass and getting some good results. Oh, that's my choice, but if you were to get the PCI Express Design Guide from Intel, they would tell you one of two things: you route all the signals at fifteen degrees through the X and Y-axis, or route them X and Y, and then you have the fabricator rotate the artwork 15 degrees on the panel. Yeah. That's in the standard for PCI Express. I had no idea that was in the standard. I've heard about it, but that being - kind of anecdotally, but I didn't know it was actually written in the standard. Yup it's in the standard from Intel, and you can - if you imagine a backplane where you have a regular array of pins for connectors and so forth - there is no way to route it at a 15 degree angle, because it's constrained by the pin array that's X and Y - so that's not a choice. So that leaves you with only the choice of popping the thing at an angle on the panel and then - you've been around enough to know the fab shop's gonna look at you like you have lost your mind. Yeah. Well we're not doing that, we're not doing that. We found some weaves that we know are well enough controlled that we're succeeding without that. Okay good, that's good news. So this spread glass - so that's helping with the skew, you're saying, among other things? It solves the problem. It does? Yeah. That's amazing. The rub is, you've got to be very careful who the weaver is. Well can't you spec in a certain - - What if I tell you that I had two weavers with the same stuff? That's the problem. When you say 33:13; there's no standard, that just means there's X in this direction Y in that direction, that's all that means. Are there are prepreg providers that are - it sounds like there's prepreg providers that are doing it the way that you prefer. Or maybe other high speed... There are, there are. So do tell or can you tell? Well the Doosan material I mentioned to you before we started this, is one of them. Okay. And a couple of Isola materials are okay but nothing else is. That's a good hint, it's a good hint, look I mean I'm doing this podcast hoping to have a takeaway - so I don't just bring up all the problems and then say have a nice day thank you for sharing that. Right that's the goal like: yeah I found out what works, good luck! No. So I have been seeing this word and this thing skews, so thanks for sharing that. One thing I could see as a potential problem - and tell me if I'm right or not - since that speed curve has risen so acutely, it seems like, the people who weren't previously doing high-speed design must be getting pulled into that space whether they want to go there or not right ? That - would that be a correct statement? That's true yes. When you and I were talking before this call about - let's talk about resources. About where these designers that are coming into this space I mean - speak just a moment about DesignCon, cuz I know you're pretty passionate about that show, and particularly giving out really good information? DesignCon is the only conference I know where the level of information you need in this area exists. It's where everyone who has done research, or has studies and that sort of thing that are advancing the state of the art, that's where the papers get presented. It used to be - that was it. There were no tutorials, no education, that sort of thing. But over the last four or five years, we've added several things. This year we had three all-day boot camps on topics that matter to people who are trying to get on top of things. I did one title ‘Getting to 32 gigabits per second’ which dealt with all these topics. Intel did a three-hour on 'what is this PCI Express and what do you have to worry about' for people who have not seen it before and if it was five years ago, you might see there was nothing there for a board designer. Now you would say it's the place you go for a board designer. There was a time when the PCB West was, but that has - I've been keeping track of that for a while - not offering the kinds of things you need for the these topics and I'm not sure why. I certainly have been talking to people who run it saying that you've got to offer tutorials, you used to do that. We used to offer stuff for engineers and they quit doing that because well, the guy who was running it was a board designer and he considered design an art, and their art dropped the stuff that appealed to engineering. Now, that stuff has to be learned by the designers. It does, and as an old board designer person, I had to learn it from the board manufacturing side because I didn't realize - because I had left the industry for a while and come back, that things had sped up so much, that board designers all of a sudden weren't just dealing with: oh here's the specs, just adhere to the tolerances, do what the documentation says and have a nice day. There wasn't like now, high-speed board designers have to think about performance and all this wacky stuff. I mean the way we clean the board, the way we etch the board, the way we drill the board, everything can in a positive or negative way, affect the performance and it mortified me to think we got to a space where we could be completely IPC compliant and the board wouldn't perform as expected. Yeah that's a good thing to observe and that is standards. By definition standards document the past by definition, and there are no standards group I can think of right now that has more behind the curve than IPC is, because they... Why do you think that is? I have my suspicions, you're probably right actually, and you're more of an authority than me. But I'm just wondering why? What's caused that to happen? Well who's driving it? Well, volunteers are driving it. Where do they come from? Well when IPC was at its prime, the standards committees were all staffed by engineers from aerospace companies. Yeah true. And the quality of the work was superb. It's very true. That's not true anymore - not true anymore, who goes to the IPC now? I don't, nothing there for me... Why do you think the committee's aren't run by aerospace engineers anymore, or the Intels of the world, or Ciscos? Why why do you think it's not? I wish I knew. Yeah I really don't know either, I thought maybe you'd have some... In the aerospace, that part of it, the aerospace contractors got out of the standards business and remember Jimmy Carter had a thing, The Commercial off-the-shelf Masters what... at any rate we're going. Yeah - faster, cheaper... Yes and the standards bodies that aerospace had, lost their money for example. So they lost their funding to focus on that kind of thing. I can see you probably heard of that. You know the last time it was updated? 1998. [Laughter] How outdated do you think that is? And the update was to correct some spelling. [laughter] Oh my gosh, that's just plain sad, but they've come out with AS9100 and other things to replace it. I don't know the quality of those specs. Well aerospace is on average about 15 years behind the industry now, it used to be the other way around. Yeah, it's just really sad but I think that speaks to a lot of the way that politics have been run unfortunately, and the way things are getting funded. Yes aerospace doesn't drive technology anymore. Yeah, that's a crazy thing to think - to say out loud - I don't know, for you and I who have been around a little while. So, before we get too far off track, so DesignCon is definitely one place. Now because Design Con, if you pay to go to DesignCon, you can get all the proceedings. What can you do if you didn't go to DesignCon? Well you can, for a hundred bucks, buy all the proceedings for a given year. So someone could go on their website right now and for a hundred bucks buy... All the papers that were presented this year correct. That's amazing. Okay well that's a really good resource. Obviously your book which - because we were gonna talk - I went on your website and I noticed you're having some kind of fire sale on - I don't know if it's part one or something - but 'Right the First Time' - it looked like you were selling it and then it sounds like you now have a digital library of things you've published over the years? That's true, and back on the topic of the books. We have two volumes and there was really gonna be one but - I don't know if you've written books or not - but you start out with great enthusiasm and this long list of topics. Then I had a deadline which was a Berkeley class, and I was only halfway through my list. And so I said: okay, this is volume one, next year we'll do volume two and what you probably don't know is, our books are printed in color. You have to have that in order to illustrate a lot of the things that matter. No technical publisher will publish in color, none of them. Really, I didn't know about that I know it's expensive, but I didn't know that they wouldn't do it in color. Yeah, so we were so focused, we formed our own publishing company and we went to a printer and said: we want to print this book. You see, there's a little secret about publishing. Bonus material! You have to give them a check for all the books before they turn the press on. Oh boy that's expensive. So for each of these two lines I wrote a check for $50,000. Wow! Crossed my fingers that someone would buy them, otherwise my garage would be full of books. Well, we sold out of volume 1 and volume 2 came along it sold faster than volume 1 did because it was a pull from volume 1. I am just debating, do I want to write another check for like $50,000 to get to print more volume one's, and the answer is no. So it became an eBook . Oh ok. So if you go on the website, when you buy you get them both, one's an e-book and the other is a hard copy. Ok smart. Then 200 books from now they'll both be eBook. [laughter] You got smarter. My garage will be empty [laughter]. I thought it essential that the books be in color. That makes sense because some of those diagrams you can't distinguish between certain things without color being present. No the color's for this industry. And so we are publishers and we sell our own books and people pay. I may be where I need to write volume through 3 and there needs to be a volume 3, to cover the things you and I just talked about. But I have told my friends - if I start talking about writing another book - their job is to slap me around until I get rid of the idea. [laughter] Well I'm not gonna slap you because this speed curve's going ahead now, we need to learn about skew and stuff. So - and who else Lee Ritchey, is gonna write that book? I have actually written another book, working newsletters and articles that are on that - and someone should put them together but it's not me. You know, we should get our friend Barry Matties to do that for you. Maybe he will. You saw my distraction behind me which is the model railroad and that's more important. Okay well I'm going to ask you about that, so I'm putting a hold on that subject, but let's cover a couple more quick things. One: you and I had an interesting conversation about circuit board manufacturers that are capable of doing good high-speed work and I made a comment and you corrected me right away because I said: well you know, board manufacturing hasn't changed that much in North America over ... blah, blah, blah. And you said, no that's not true. And I said except for places like TTM and you said which TTM? Yes. So tell me what you meant by that and fill our listeners in you know, of that conversation you and I had, cuz I thought it was very valuable actually. Well when you say TTM, you're really talking about a dozen or so fab shops, which were acquired one by one. All have different capabilities for different markets, and if you're not careful and you get a bid from some - say TTM - they'll choose the fab shop that has the most capacity at the moment, which may not have the skills you need. And so I learned the hard way, you have to know what their capabilities are and when you give them the order, you say what plant is allowed to build the board. And they'll accept that request and send it to the best location? They won't get my business if they don't. I am writing the check you will send it here. Yes, yes and if you don't do that you won't get paid. Yeah that totally makes sense. Well you and I talked about Stafford Springs which is a board shop, one of TTM's facilities I've always wanted to go through and it sounds like you've been through and that sounds like at least one of the locations that is capable of doing those high-speed designs? That's right, and another one is in Hillsboro Oregon. It was originally called Merricks. Oh yeah I remember Merricks. Yeah and of course if I'm building small volumes it's my - my choice is a little place down in Orange called MEI. It's not MEI anymore. No it's got another name. It's Summit Technologies which I agree they - I know Jerry Partita there - I hope to have him on this podcast actually because I think they've done a real good job there. Yeah so you're sort of testing out something that we all say explicitly. If you're designing for this kind of space you need to be in direct conversation with the engineer at the fab shop, so that you don't make decisions that are not realistic. So I always have got that guy at the other end when I'm designing a new board. I think that comes up again and again on this podcast by the way, people saying you have to talk to the key people at the board house which I totally agree with. So let's talk about - I used to blog on Microwave Journal about what shops I thought - because I was working for Transline Technology, which is a really small board house in Orange County but they're quite good at RF and microwave. But I used to try, because I would see board houses say, sure yeah we do high-speed or the microwave because they've been built on say Rogers 4350 which processes much like FR4 - - not really   - well not exactly but close. It's pretty stable but then they would take an order for something that was PTFE because they built some 4350, and then they'd fail and say, sorry we tried to build three times and we failed. And I kept seeing this happen over and over again. So I started writing about what I thought people should know, what they should look for in a good board manufacturer, i.e. what percentage of their work is high speed. So let's stop for just a second and clarify what high speed means. Okay. Because RF & microwave is not high speed with respect to the digital world. Yes that's true. Actually RF and microwave were simple compared to digital boards. I consider them to be trivial. Yeah but some of the stuff you do on those for microwave boards are funky and weird. That's not because they need to be like that. That's because RF engineers say things that are goofy [laughter] It is true because again why I started blogging is because RF engineers were starting to lay out their own boards which was not a good model. Yeah, remember I'm an RF Engineer, and so most of the stuff you see people asking for on those RF and microwave boards is goofy; it's not good engineering, pure and simple. At any rate, so when we're talking about high-speed I'm talking about, cuz this is far away the majority, of things that must be digital. Yes high speed digital, yeah. Yeah and the people who can do that are good at laminating high layer type boards, and very rare in our microwave or high layer board count - almost never. - Yeah this is true. It is two different animals. So if a guy says I'm a high speed fabricator and I make RF microwave boards, that's a different capability than what I need. Yes it's true. So let's just talk about high-speed digital so you're right, somebody who can do high layer counts what would you look for laundry-list wise? Well at the top of the list, is boards like mine. If you're not making boards like mine, you're gonna lean on me, and I'm not ready for that. Yeah good point. Yeah it really is, that's my first thing, you're making boards with the same class that I want you to builm, if the answer is no I'm gonna go someplace else. And I would say, and how much of their work is like your work because if it's a really small percentage that would make me nervous too. Yeah but it's my experience that if somebody's making high count boards, that's about all they're making. Yeah it's true, they kind of - they kind of aim at that. And they're good at it, they're busy. Yeah and they're busy and that's what makes them profitable actually. So and that also you will see in the equipment set. There you go, exactly - exactly. You won't see archaic… you'll see the most modern tools that gives them the precision and... Yeah exactly, a really good vacuum lamination guy can supply and will build a twenty four layer board with ten mill vias and 12:1 aspect ratios. Yeah. And so you've gotta go find fabricators who are in your sweet spot. Yeah I agree with that. And so - and of course - if you're in it for a little while you figure out there's about six choices in the US. Yeah there's - it's true - there's not a lot and as you're speaking those are coming to mind I won't sell for anybody today but they are relatively easy to find. Now - and now just before we finish that - six years ago, there were none in Asia because they were busy making consumer electronics. Yeah I'm interested in your perspective on that, because I don't really know what that is - if it wasn't kind of cookie cutter consumer. So what's the state of the ability in China these days? We've got as good a capability in Korea and China as there is in the US. I guess that's good news from a price point standpoint? Yeah and it's bad news for the American laminators though. I know I'm an American and I feel whatever but we gotta - - it is what it is. Don't forget not so long ago we made TVs. I know we made a lot of stuff. It's the nature of the business that we go where the low-cost labor is. Yes that's true. Okay, now back to your trains. So always at the end of the podcast here, which we are beginning to wrap up here, and thank you so much for your time. I always learn a lot from you Lee. You are working on - this part of the podcast I call 'designers after hours' because my observation has been, a lot of people that I know that are pretty smart engineers and designers, have neat hobbies after hours. So tell us about your after-hours fun? Well the one that you can see in the background - there's a lot of railroad. Let's see it, can you flip your screen that way without disrupting us? Oh there it is. Can you see it? Yip I sure can. And the one you can't see is I repair vacuum tube radios. You do what? Old, radios vacuum tube radios. No way. Yeah. Just for fun - who still uses vacuum tube radios? Well we're starting to get Wi-Fi guys who think that vacuum tubes are the way to go. But I started out making my spending money as a kid, fixing the radios. I've always been in there you just may know... I know. -so I'm just back to fixing old radios. That's kind of a fun hobby, but vacuum tubes - like that cracks me up. Yeah you probably didn't know you can buy new vacuum tubes? I didn't - I didn't but I was talking to someone recently and I - it cracked me up because I remember doing this as a kid so, is - remember going to like the drugstore - the hardware store and you could test the vacuum tubes? Yeah, come on over I've got a tester. No way - somebody mentioned that - I was like whoa! Like my childhood came flooding back going with my dad to the store and sticking in the vacuum tube testers that's funny. [laughter] Yeah, good times - good times. Well we're about out of time Lee, so thank you again for your time. And I know we could go further and further but I will share the link to your information about your books, and I will also share the link you shared with me for the design concept people that download white papers, and if you think of anything else just let me know and we'll put it on the show notes here. So we don't leave people feeling hopeless. We get them registered for DesignCon and get some papers in their hand, and get some books in their hands so they could do their job better. One last thing we talked about I oughta mention, if you can - if you do those - what do you call the thing we did in Munich? Oh AltiumLIve. Oh yeah if you keep doing those I would argue you should start offering these training courses. Okay, all right you heard it here from the mouth of Lee Ritchey. I have to go show this to the CEO later - proof! It's been my pleasure. Thanks so much Lee. And we will talk to you soon again. This has been Judy Warner with the OnTrack podcast. Thank you for joining us and thank you Lee Ritchey, have a good day. Have a good day. Bye.  

Dr. Martin Lee. Photo courtesy of Prolacta Bioscience. Episode 4 features Dr. Martin Lee, Vice President of Clinical Research and Development at Prolacta Bioscience. During this episode, Dr. Lee provides a comprehensive overview of a 100% or exclusive human milk diet in the prevention of NEC in extremely premature babies, those weighing less than 1250 grams (2 pounds 12 ounces) and who have the greatest risk for developing the disease. He discusses: * His transition from the blood industry to Prolacta, which developed of the world’s first human milk-based human milk fortifier * What constitutes a 100% or exclusive human milk diet * The clinical evidence showing a 70% reduction in NEC, an 8-fold reduction in surgical NEC, and a 4-fold reduction in mortality through the use of exclusive human milk diet * The importance of safety in the breast milk industry, including Prolacta’s rigorous product testing and donor safety profiles which parallel blood industry standards. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. This episode was produced in part by the TeacherCast Educational Broadcasting Network. [powerpress] STEPHANIE VAUGHAN, HOST: Welcome to Episode 4 of Speaking of NEC—a free, audio podcast series about Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Produced by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, and funded by The Petit Family Foundation, Speaking of NEC is a series of one-on-one conversations with relevant NEC experts—neonatologists, clinicians and researchers—that highlights current prevention, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for NEC, and the search for a cure. For more information about this podcast series or The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, visit our website at morgansfund.org. Hello, my name is Stephanie Vaughan. Welcome to the show. I’m the Co-founder and President of The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund. Today, my guest will be Dr. Martin Lee, Vice President of Clinical Research and Development at Prolacta Bioscience, which “creates specialty formulations made from human milk for the nutritional needs of premature infants in neonatal intensive care units.” Last October (2014), while attending the annual Preemie Parent Summit in Phoenix, Arizona, I had the pleasure of meeting Prolacta’s Chief Executive Officer Scott Elster. During our conversation, I was invited on a tour of the company. A few weeks later, along with a group of representatives from various preemie organizations throughout the country, I flew out California to tour Prolacta’s human milk processing facility, and to learn more about the people and research behind the company. I was highly impressed by all aspects of Prolacta from the manufacturing plant itself to the rigorous testing their products undergo throughout their processing. Even more impressive to me is the fact that everyone that we met at Prolacta has a personal connection to prematurity. The CEO himself is the parent of twins born prematurely. And, I was shocked to learn that one of the key reasons the company was formed, and their products developed, was to reduce the incidence Necrotizing Enterocolitis. The company’s reason for existing is the prevention of NEC. And the research presented to us by Dr. Lee was stunning. So when we began producing this series, it was only fitting to invite Dr. Lee to share the benefits of an exclusive human milk diet to premature infants and the clinical research supporting its use. With that in mind, let me introduce my guest today. This is Dr. Martin Lee from Prolacta Bioscience. And I’m so glad you could be with me here today. How are you? MARTIN LEE, GUEST: Good. How are you doing Stephanie? STEPHANIE: Good, good. So in previous podcasts, we’ve talked to doctors that are attending neonatologists and researchers. So I would like to give you the opportunity to give a little bit of your background and how you got involved with research in NEC. DR. LEE: OK. Absolutely. Well, I spent probably most of my career doing clinical research with various types of pharmaceutical and biotech products. I started with a company you’ve probably heard of called Baxter approximately 35 years ago, and I spent a good number of years working with them. And how that’s relevant to our discussion today is I was working with their group that manufactures blood products, and obviously blood is a significant human fluid, has many of the same issues with regards to safety that we have with breast milk. And so I learned a lot about some of the testing that needs to be done, some of the safety factors that we need to consider. And then I would say about 15 years ago, I met someone who was talking about forming a company who basically wanted to bring breast milk and breast milk products to premature infants so that they would have the benefit of receiving 100% human milk diet, particularly the smallest of the small premature infants. So together we started the company Prolacta. And the whole idea of course in starting the company was to put it‚…I think the most important thing was to put it on a firm clinical scientific basis. And that meant doing really important well-designed clinical trials to evaluate the most important morbidities like NEC, in particular, and even mortality in premature infants, infants certainly that had a high risk of both of those consequences of prematurity. STEPHANIE: OK. Maybe not all of the people that will be listening fully understand…what is an exclusively human milk-based diet? Can you get into that a little bit? DR. LEE: Absolutely. So obviously we know‚…we meaning pretty much the world understands that the best thing a newborn baby can be fed is mother’s milk. And for term babies, that is obviously going to be sufficient. They’re born at the right time and usually at a sufficient weight and mother’s milk has all the good things in it that help the baby to grow, help their immune system to develop, help their organs to develop, importantly it helps their brain to grow at the right rate. But a premature baby by definition is born too soon. And we specialize‚…the work that we’ve done at Prolacta,…specializes in the infants that are born as much as 27 weeks or 12 weeks premature so 27 weeks since the time of gestation. When those babies are born, they have a lot of problems obviously because they’ve come out of the womb way too early. And one of the things that of course they are is way too small. The average baby that we’ve studied in our research trials is less than a thousand grams. That’s around two pounds. Now most people know that the average baby is 6-7-8 pounds. And so they’re born so small that what happens is that mother’s milk which of course comes in when the baby’s born‚…nature didn’t intend mother’s milk to be able to feed these type of babies. This is an unfortunate consequence of something that happened with the mother, something that‚…injury, genetics, whatever it is that would cause a baby to be born premature, the milk comes in, but it cannot feed that baby well enough. And what I mean by that is the baby needs to grow. He needs to grow a lot. The baby needs to have their immune system protected by the mom’s milk, and so on and so forth. So obviously we always talk about mother’s milk being the thing for a newborn baby. It’s not enough for these premature infants. So what they need is what we call a fortifier, something with a little extra kick to the baby. And there are fortifiers that have been on the market for a long time. They’re made by the formula companies. And naturally these fortifiers are made from cow’s milk. And cow’s milk is not the best thing for a premature infant. It may not be the best thing for babies in general, but besides the point, it’s certainly not the best thing for a premature infant. So when we’re talking about 100% or exclusive human milk diet, we’re talking about mom’s milk; we’re talking about a fortifier which is necessary for the baby to grow and to be protected from infection and so on and so forth. That comes from human milk. And what Prolacta did was develop the world’s first human-milk human milk fortifier. And in fact, it sounds like a mouthful because when we talk about human milk fortifier, general people realize or may not realize that that’s a cow’s milk-based fortifier. We make the one from human milk. So that’s what we mean by 100% diet. And then one other thing just to add to that, Stephanie, is sometimes mom’s milk doesn’t come in enough or the baby wants it or needs to eat more, get more milk, so then there’s donor milk involved too. And that’s another aspect of the 100% diet. And of course donor milk is coming from other moms, which again provides the additional nutrition that the baby needs. And there you have the entire spectrum of what we mean by 100% human milk diet. STEPHANIE: OK. Thank you. Yeah, I know that there’s probably a bit of confusion amongst parents new to the NICU that human milk fortifier is a fortifier put into human milk, and not necessarily made with human milk. So I know that that does tend to cause a little confusion. DR. LEE: Right. STEPHANIE: So thank you for clarifying that. DR. LEE: Sure. STEPHANIE: So I guess I’ll ask you to go into a little bit of the research because I find it fascinating. As you know, we were out to your facility in November and I thought that this is a fabulous company. I was not aware of it when our babies were in the NICU and I will just make a tiny note that I know you’ve got significant statistics showing the benefit of human milk and exclusive human milk. Unfortunately for Morgan, he fell in to that other small percentage that I did pump. But he developed NEC so rapidly at four days old being born at 28 weeks. At four days old he developed NEC and I don’t think he had two feedings. So there are babies that get it even when all attempts are made to have an exclusive human milk diet. DR. LEE: Sure. STEPHANIE: And I also know that my other son, Shaymus, his milk was fortified, and to be honest, I’m sure it probably wasn’t with an exclusive human milk fortifier. So just some things to sort of give everyone background. And again, that was, you know, four years ago, 2010-2011. DR. LEE: Sure. I hope…I assume they’re doing OK today, right? STEPHANIE: Yes, yes. Everybody’s doing very well today… DR. LEE: Excellent. Excellent. STEPHANIE: which I think is why I’m so personally‚…my personal opinion is that your products are wonderful and, you know, things being what they were then versus now, I would definitely advocate for 100% human milk diet and advocate for this if I was a parent in the NICU now. So I think it’s great to get this information out to people. DR. LEE: Sure. Absolutely. So your question concerned the type of studies we did. Well, as I said to begin our conversation, we recognized that the only way that people‚…the medical community, both neonatologists, nurses, lactation people‚…would appreciate and realize the importance of what 100% human milk diet does and helps as far as the baby is concerned is to do proper research. As I said earlier, my experience is in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries where doing formal randomized controlled all the kinds of bells and whistles that need to be done when you need to license a drug or a biologic for marketing in this country and other places in the world as well. That’s standard stuff. So when we set out to do these studies, we said what we’re doing here is just as important, just as the need for rigor has to be here as it would be in any other kind of situation where you’re testing a new medical intervention. And that’s what this is. So we decided right off the bat we would get together the best of the best as far as the neonatologists in this country are concerned, and we brought them together and we set up a protocol. And basically the protocol was based on a very simple premise. It is 100% human milk diet better than feeding a baby mom’s milk fortifying then with standard human milk fortifier and then if all else fails or at least maybe not be sufficient than using formula. That’s standard practice for premature infants in this country. It was in 2007 when we started this trial and to a large extent it still is today. So it’s 100% human milk diet standard of care which includes cow’s milk based fortifier and formula. Babies in this study were randomized which is‚…you know, it’s a fairly simple term, but just to make sure everybody understands what I mean by that, the decision when a parent agreed to have their baby be participating in the study which group they get into, the Prolacta or the 100% diet versus standard of care was essentially a coin flip, not literally of course, but that’s the basis. Now why do you do that? Because that’s the best way to design studies. It provides an unbiased approach to making the decision of treatment of nutritional treatment, taking it out of the hands of anybody and putting it in the hands of strictly chance. So you randomize babies. There was a sufficient number of babies in the first study we did. There was over 200 babies that were randomized and I think it was 12 centers around the country. And what we were looking for in this study was whether or not they develop NEC and that was the most significant endpoint of the study. There were other things that we looked at. We looked at how much parenteral nutrition they received. We looked at other things. We looked at sepsis. We looked at‚…which is essentially bacterial infection that circulates in the bloodstream. We looked at hospital days. We looked at days on a respirator/ventilator and so on and so forth. But the main endpoint in this study was Necrotizing Enterocolitis. Now, the babies, by the way, that we used in this study or the babies that constituted the population of the study were babies under 1250 grams (2 pounds 12 ounces) down to 500 grams (1 pound 1 ounce). Very simple reason for that. I think many of the people listening will know that there’s a classification of premature infancy called very low birth weight. And that’s babies under 1500 grams (3 pounds 4.91 ounces). But we said, you know, we want to get the babies that have the highest risk of NEC. So we didn’t use, if you will, the heaviest babies in that weight category because they have, it turns out, the lowest risk of NEC out of all very low birth weight babies. So we took away that 1250-gram group. We also didn’t go below 500 grams because unfortunately, babies born less than 500 grams which is really about a pound or less have unfortunately not a high chance of either succeeding in life really and survival or they have a lot of other problems that make it very difficult to evaluate then. So it was 500 to 1250. That’s basically, I think, the most important aspect. And like I said, they were randomized. We followed them for a period of 90 days, maximum 90 days. Babies could have gotten off the study earlier if they got on to mostly oral nutrition which of course hopefully babies all do because they start off with what’s called parenteral nutrition which means they get their feed essentially through intravenous feeding. They then transition off of that onto enteral feeding which is typically a tube that goes either through their nose or directly through their mouth into their stomach. And that’s called enteral feeding. And then they go to oral feeding. So babies who are on for 90 days or if they got to oral feeding sooner, then they were off the study. Very simply, just to summarize what constitutes a fairly complex study to manage, we found a magnificent reduction in Necrotizing Enterocolitis. The babies in the standard of care group had a NEC rate of about 16%. Or put simply, that one in every six babies develop NEC that got some sort of cow’s milk protein or cow’s milk diet. The babies who got 100% diet was less than 6%. That 16 to 6 is about 70% reduction, and that is phenomenal. We’ve had some of the really very famous neonatologists told us that they don’t see‚…you don’t see that kind of reduction with really any intervention that they’re used to seeing. You just don’t see that. You see incremental things. But now all of a sudden we cut NEC by 70% by doing this. And it even gets more impressive when you consider that the majority of babies or at least half the babies who develop NEC have to go on to have surgery. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. LEE: And that is a really serious consequence not only just from the fact that a premature infant has to go on to major surgery and they take out part of their digestive tract. But even worse, they have a reasonably high mortality rate. So in this study, the rate of NEC surgery of all those babies that were in the two groups, it was at 11% in the standard of care arm and only just over 1% in the Prolacta arm. We reduced the rate of NEC surgery by eight fold, I mean just an incredible difference. Virtually wiped out NEC surgery in this study. STEPHANIE: That’s amazing. DR. LEE: Yeah. I mean, we expected to see something really good. We didn’t expect‚…I guess you could say well we should have expected‚…but it was beyond our expectations, wildest dreams to show this kind of effect. Now a lot of people have looked at this data and said well that’s interesting, and maybe that’s real. But can you‚…you know, can you do it again? And the answer is yeah. We did it again because that first study that I just described, these were only babies who were getting‚… which are most babies‚… who were getting some breast milk from their mom. But there are a small cohort of‚… I don’t know quite what the percentage is in this country, but there’s a percentage of babies who don’t get any breast milk. There’s various reasons. Mom is sick. Mom’s not available. So on and so forth. So we also did a second study in which we only treated babies or fed babies who had to get their nutrition either one of two ways. Since breast milk wasn’t available, they got formula. Soon as they were able to get enteral feeding, in other words the tube feeding, they got formula. That’s one group. The 100% arm, same thing, except here, instead of getting mom’s milk, they got donor milk, and then they got the fortified. So it was a real stark comparison. Only human milk, only formula. And it was a very small study. It was only‚…that first study, I don’t know if I mentioned or made clear, that was a 200-baby study. Pretty big study. STEPHANIE: Yes. Um-hmm. DR LEE: This study was only 53 babies partly because it was very, very hard to find these babies. I mean, we would sign up a mom, they would agree to put their baby on, and then they realized gee, I really want to feed my baby. I really want to give them breast milk. And of course, that’s fine. That’s great. STEPHANIE: Right, right. DR LEE: But they can’t participate in the study. STEPHANIE: Right. DR LEE: So we had a hard time finding. But we eventually did it. Took us three years to find 53 babies, but we did, and you know what? We found the same significant difference, particularly in the surgical NEC. There were‚…in the control arm, there were 24 babies, and four of them had to go on to surgery for NEC. That’s one in six. So about 16%. In the Prolacta arm, in the 100% milk arm, nothing, no surgeries, nothing. One case in NEC overall, but no surgery. So that turned out to be wow. That’s the kicker. Two separate studies, two different classes of babies, breast milk, no breast milk, doesn’t matter. When you give a baby that’s born premature like this, this weight category, less than 1250 grams, and you feed them with only human milk, they’re going to do better. And it even turns out when you start putting all the data together an extra‚…I hate to call it a bonus‚…but an extra important key outcome was that mortality was reduced. Mortality fortunately in this baby population is pretty low. It’s about 8% overall because of the prematurity, of course. We reduced that to 2%. So a four-fold reduction in mortality. So now when you put it all together, what do you have? You have prevention of the major morbidity‚…that is NEC‚…of prematurity, and you prevent mortality. And how can you really ask for anything more from a nutritional approach to these really fragile infants. STEPHANIE: Right. Right. No, I totally agree. And as I said before, my personal opinion, you know, as the mother of a surgical NEC survivor, I would advocate for this if we had to do it again. It’s definitely phenomenal. DR. LEE: Yeah, it’s almost this kind of effect you would expect to see if this was a pharmaceutical breakthrough or some new wonder drug or some sort of biotechnologically-produced intervention. But all it is is feeding the babies properly. I mean it’s such a fundamentally sound, logical‚…this is what nature wanted these babies to get. STEPHANIE: Right, right. DR. LEE: Babies should get human milk, nothing else. STEPHANIE: Now you had mentioned previously the difference between donor milk and then your human milk nutritional products. Can you‚…when I hear conversations, I sort of always think it’s like comparing apples and oranges. You know, it’s almost two different things. So can you clarify what the difference is with donor milk and your products? DR. LEE: Well, again, I’m sorry to be maybe not entirely clear. We make a donor milk product. Essentially, all our products are made from donor milk, both the fortifier, of course, and we make a simple donor milk product that is formulated to have 20 calories per ounce which is what doctors and nurses and dieticians believe they’re giving the baby when they feed the baby either mom’s milk or milk from another person. So donor milk is essentially the equivalent of mom’s milk other than the fact, of course, it comes from another mom. But however‚…and in fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics has said the best thing for a baby is mom’s milk. But if mom’s milk is not available, then donor milk is good. STEPHANIE: Right. DR. LEE: But the problem, of course, and one of the I guess you could say‚…I’m trying to think of the right word. Bad things that people associate with donor milk is well it comes from somebody else, and how do I know that person is the right person to provide milk for my baby? And that’s one of the key things that we had at the center of what we did at Prolacta from the beginning, which was to have a safety profile that was beyond reproach. I mean, we do things as far as testing the moms, testing the milk, that nobody else who ever handles breast milk does pure and simple. I’ll give you some examples. One of the things that I thought of very early on is because, again, remember I told you I came from the blood industry and they test blood and they test donors obviously every which way you can think of. But there’s one additional problem that donors who provide milk have in a sense that blood donors don’t. When you take blood from a donor, you’re seeing the person and it’s blood coming out of their vein and it’s coming right into a bag and you know whose it is. But a milk donor, she donates at home, pumps at home, puts it into containers, and then sends it wherever the donor, the milk bank, might be. In our case, it’s here at Prolacta. They’ll send it to us, and here’s the problem. How do we know it’s that person’s milk? STEPHANIE: Right. DR. LEE: How do we know it’s the person who we screened and did all the blood testing on to start with, that it’s her milk. So we do something very, very unique. We actually have the mom provide a DNA sample, they do a little cheek swab, they put a little stick essentially in there, and scrape off a little tissue from inside their cheek, send it to us so we have a profile. Now she sends us her milk, and when she sends us her milk, we can actually match it up. And now we know it’s that safe mom’s milk, all right? Now you might ask what’s the point? I mean what self-respecting individual is going to send somebody else’s milk to you? And the answer is nobody, for the most part I can say almost universally, will do that intentionally. But there are mistakes. I mean one of the things we’ve seen is moms that are lactating, sometimes there’s a couple of women in a neighborhood, and they’re all doing the same thing. And somebody’s freezer will become full with milk, and they’ll say to their neighbor, “Can I put my milk in your freezer?” And they said, “Sure, no problem.” And she’s got her own milk in there. And then they go to ship milk and lo and behold, there’s somebody else’s in there. We love that‚…we love the moms, but we have to be sure that every mom that donates is a mom that’s free of all of the nasty things that could be in blood because those things could be in milk as well like AIDS and hepatitis and syphilis and all those kinds of things that we should be concerned about. Even as an adult you certainly want to get blood from someone like that. You certainly don’t want to give that to this fragile premature infant. STEPHANIE: Right, right. DR. LEE: So going back to your original question about what we do versus donor milk, that’s all one in the same, I think you could safely say. Everything is based on the concept of donors and the milk that they provide and the safety of that milk supply being tested from any way you can think of so that every product that’s made from human milk is as safe as possible based on all of the different protocols that are used. And that includes other things besides DNA testing. It includes drug testing; it includes testing for whether the mom smokes because they may tell you they don’t smoke, but we’ve seen that instance where there’s byproducts of nicotine in the milk, and that’s not good for a baby. So we do that kind of testing. It’s just a laundry list of things to make that as safe as possible. STEPHANIE: Right. And I guess‚…I’m sorry‚…I guess to clarify my original question, I was speaking specifically about your fortifiers versus human milk. If you could explain a little bit the difference of that‚…I mean this was a very good‚…I can’t think of the word‚…a very good deviation, but yeah. When I was saying apples and oranges, I meant donor milk versus fortifier. DR. LEE: OK. I’m sorry. STEPHANIE: No, that’s OK. DR. LEE: The fortifier essentially‚…if you want to keep it very simple, the fortifier is just very concentrated milk. STEPHANIE: OK. DR. LEE: So essentially, what you do to make the fortifier is you take milk, you filter it to get rid of a lot of the fluid so that you concentrate the protein, you concentrate some of the other important nutrients in there. And that way the baby can get extra, like we say, protein, extra other nutrients in a very, very small volume. So for example, in our typical fortifier which we call Prolact +4, if you add that to mother’s milk in a ratio 80% mother’s milk to 20% fortifier, assuming mother’s milk is about 20 calories per ounce, you’re going to add 4 additional calories for that baby in that small volume which is a lot. So then we can actually do even more than that. We can do a +6, six calories, we can do +8 and even +10. That kind of product is for the babies that are the most fluid restricted. They can get 30 calories per ounce in the same volume that milk that originally was 20 calories per ounce was. So that’s really important for those babies, for example, that have heart defects who can’t take in a lot of fluid or babies for whatever reason are fluid restricted. STEPHANIE: OK. Thank you. DR. LEE: Sure. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that was‚… I think it’s important for parents and family members that might be in the NICU to be able to have a conversation with their doctor and fully understand what’s being given to their baby and be able to ask the right questions. So would there be anything else that you would want to add if you were talking to a parent who’s got a baby in the NICU right now for them to be able to advocate best practices for their baby? DR. LEE: I think that the simple issue for a parent under these circumstances is to ask the doctor based on all of the evidence that’s out there, clinical evidence,…and that’s how doctors make decisions. We talk about evidence-based medicine. This is based on the best evidence that the doctor is aware of, what’s the best way to feed my baby? And having said that, you know, the evidence that we’ve discussed here today is for those smallest of the small. For a larger baby, this is not necessarily‚…it’s not that it’s wrong. It may not be necessary, but when you’re dealing with the smallest babies and the ones that are struggling to survive and grow and thrive and get to where you want all babies to get to, to childhood and so on, then you have to ask the doctor the question what is the best way that our baby can get out of that NICU, that Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and get home and be with his or her parents. That’s really, I think, the fundamental question. And the doctors should be able to answer that question based on the evidence that exists for the diet that the baby should be fed. STEPHANIE: Right. Thank you. Yeah, I think this is a really great conversation for any parent in the NICU, especially those, like you said, the smallest that are at the highest risk for developing NEC and as you said, other issues as well. And it’s‚…it can only be a benefit in my opinion. DR. LEE: Absolutely. And just to add to that, they should also ask the question‚…because there are other sources of nutrition, and there are other places from which milk can be attained we know about, for instance, women sharing milk on the Internet, milk sharing sites. You’ve got to be extremely careful. You’ve got to ask the question not only what’s best for my baby from the point of view of effectiveness, but also what’s the safest for my baby. And you want to be sure that the source, where that milk is coming from, where those products are coming from, comes from a place where you can say everything possible based on modern technology has been done to protect that milk, protect the safety of that milk. And I think that’s really critical. I think there was a story the other day‚…I forget which show, where it came up in one newspaper or another‚…about‚…oh, I know what it was. It was an article that was published that basically looked at milk samples. They actually collected milk on one of these sharing sites, and they found a large percentage of them had nicotine in the milk, had other things, other bad things that you don’t want a baby to have in that milk. So you’ve really got to ask that question what’s the best? What’s the safest for my baby as well? STEPHANIE: Right. Right. And Prolacta has provided us some material, some reference materials for sharing. So I will say that we’re going to be posting those on our website and will have them in the show notes as well. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. If there’s anything else at all that you would like to add, please feel free. DR. LEE: Well, I just want to thank you for the opportunity to let obviously the parents out there know that we’re here for one very, very simple reason. I mean I know it may sound kind of corny, but we said from the day we opened the doors at Prolacta that we’re here to save babies, and I think we’ve done our job in that regard. And we’ve proven that that’s the case. So I’m really‚…I’ve worked, as you heard me say, for 35 years doing clinical and medical research, and I’m very, very proud to say that this is, I think, my best story to tell out of all that long career. STEPHANIE: Right. And as I said, I was out in the facility, took the tour in November, and we were very impressed with your company. And like I said, if I had to do it all over again, I would certainly be asking these questions and in my opinion, I think this is a phenomenal company. And your rigor in testing and your facility are top notch. So thank you. LEE: Well, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that, and it means an awful lot to me and to obviously everybody that works at Prolacta. STEPHANIE: Right. So thank you for joining us. And hopefully we’ll talk again soon. LEE: Alright. Thanks so much, Steph. STEPHANIE: In closing, I’d like to share a few thoughts about today’s conversation with Dr. Lee. Recently, I’ve seen a lot written about the use of donor milk, human milk products, and the emerging breast milk industry. Often times, the opinions expressed about Prolacta are solely related to cost: the expensive of Prolacta’s products versus those coming from nonprofit donor milk banks. In my opinion, the cost of using Prolacta’s human milk-based human milk fortifier far outweighs the potential risks of not using it, and any discussion about cost needs to be framed within the context of total cost of care. As Dr. Lee mentioned, Prolacta’s human milk-based nutritional products are intended for extremely premature infants who weigh less than 1250 grams (2 pounds 12 ounces) at birth. My son Morgan weighed 2 pounds 5.5 ounces at birth; my son Shaymus weighed 2 pounds 7 ounces. Prolacta openly shares that the typical cost of using their human milk-based human milk fortifier for these babies is $10,000. That, however, is only a fraction of Morgan’s and Shaymus’ total cost of care. Each of whose exceeded $1 million. In actual numbers, the cost of an exclusive human milk diet using Prolacta’s human milk-based human milk fortifier would have been less than one percent of Morgan’s total cost of care, and less than one percent of Shaymus’ total cost of care. And while Morgan’s case shows that no current preventative strategy for NEC is 100% effective, research shows that access to, and the use of, an exclusive human milk diet significantly reduces the risk of NEC in the majority of extremely premature infants. Show your support for our smallest and most fragile babies, those who have the greatest risk for developing NEC. Show your support for continued research in NEC. And join our effort to raise awareness about, and funds for research in NEC by making a donation to Morgan’s Fund at morgansfund.org. If you’ve had a personal experience with NEC and would like to share your story, or have a question or topic that you’d like to hear addressed on our show, e-mail us at feedback@morgansfund.org. We’d love to hear from you! Additional resources: Prolacta Bioscience, Inc. What Is Necrotizing Enterocolitis? N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2015. Print. Prolacta Bioscience, Inc. 100% Human Milk: The Best Nutrition. N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2014. Print. Prolacta Bioscience, Inc. Nutrition for Premature Babies. N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2014. Print. Prolacta Bioscience. Premature Babies: What to Expect. N.p.: Prolacta Bioscience, 2014. Print. Copyright © 2015 The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund, Inc. The opinions expressed in Speaking of NEC: Necrotizing Enterocolitis (the Podcast series) and by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund are published for educational and informational purposes only, and are not intended as a diagnosis, treatment or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis and treatment. Please consult a local physician or other health care professional for your specific health care and/or medical needs or concerns. The Podcast series does not endorse or recommend any commercial products, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals, brand names, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm, or corporation name is for the information and education of the viewing public, and the mention of any of the above on the Site does not constitute an endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by The Morgan Leary Vaughan Fund.

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Bettina Hein Founder and CEO, Pixability Date: March 7, 2011 NCWIT Entrepreneurial Heroes: Interview with Bettina Hein [music] Kennedy: Hi, this is Lee Kennedy, board member for the National Center for Women in Information Technology, or NCWIT. I am also CEO of Bolder Search. This is part of a series of interviews that we are having with fabulous entrepreneurs, women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors, all of whom just have terrific stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs. With me is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson: Oh, hi. I am really excited to be here. Once again, this is going to be a fantastic interview with a number of high powered women who have really been examples of super entrepreneurship. Lee: Wonderful. You want to tell us just a little bit about w3w3. Larry: Well, we have been doing it for 12 years. We are an Internet‑based business radio show. We host everything and archive everything. We have over 17,000 pages on our website and they are all business interviews. We are excited about that. Lee: Wonderful. Well, today we are interviewing Bettina Hein who is the founder and CEO of Pixability. Pixability helps small and medium sized businesses increase sales by using video. Bettina is a repeat entrepreneur based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prior to Pixability, Bettina cofounded Swiss based SVOX AG in 2001 and led the venture‑backed speech software company to profitability. Then in 1996, Patina was the initiator of START, an organization that advances entrepreneurship among college students. She is also the founder of SheEOs, and that's a network for female CEOs and founders of growth companies. So Bettina, welcome. Bettina Hein: Thank you very much for having me. Lee: Well, we'd love to hear a little bit about Pixability before we jump into some questions we have for you. Bettina: Well, you said it correctly. We help companies and non‑profits create and promote themselves via online video. We help you create a great video by for example sending you a flip camera and you shoot the video. We spruce it up and then we have software that publishes that video all over the Internet and search engine optimizes. We are really the experts for video marketing. Lee: Wonderful. Larry: Oh I love it. Lee: We are just going to jump into things here. We'd love to hear how you first got into technology. Bettina: I've been in tech all of my career. I guess it started a little bit earlier than that. I started with computers and programming in Logo when I was in fourth grade on an Apple IIe way back when I went to college for business administration and did finance. But I was always in love with technology and would spend lots of time with all the guys in the windowless rooms with the computers. When I got out of grad school, I had offers from investment banks and consultancies and all of that. But I really wanted to be in tech. I took my fourth grade book where I had written down these Logo programs, written them out, so I took them to talk with the founders of tech companies. I became involved in SVOX my first company which is a speech technology software company based in Zurich, Switzerland and became a cofounder there. I've been in tech and an entrepreneur all of my career, basically straight out of grad school. Lee: Well, and the other question I had is what today you think is really cool, what technologies do you just love to play with? Bettina: Well, you should really play with Google Translate because that has my SVOX [indecipherable 00:03:56] and the company SVOX's technology. There is a speech technology that is pretty cool. But apart from that, the obvious thing video. There is a lot of things happening around video and into active video and video on mobile phones. That ties in with all the things that are happening in the mobile space. I really think that there are lots of things happening that are relevant for businesses in mobile and that again ties in to the social web, social media. As a geek on the side I am also really interested in things like Amazon's Mechanical Turk, because that sort of shows the human computing interface. Probably you saw what was on Jeopardy last week was IBM's Watson. I am really fascinated on how humans and AI that interface there. But that's something that's a little bit further out for commercialization, actually. Larry: With your experiences now, what is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick, and why did you become an entrepreneur. Bettina: I didn't know any better. All of my four grandparents are actually entrepreneurs. My grandmothers as well as my grandfathers were entrepreneurs in their own right, and my parents as well. They are professionals and nobody in my family ever had a nine‑to‑five job. I didn't really know what that meant. I heard that you have this career thing and you go to an office and you come back at night. But I never experienced that from home. I didn't really know what that meant. For me it didn't seem like a far reach to become an entrepreneur. Also, I love creating something from nothing. It's really so wonderful if you do it with an organization or if you do it with a company, that you have this idea in your head that you want to create something that helps fosters entrepreneurship in college students. What I did was START. Or you want to make speech technology an everyday then people use, and you have this idea and you work really, really hard. It's extremely hard, but it comes alive when you create all these jobs. My last company has over 120 people. My husband is also an entrepreneur. Together we have created over 500 jobs. I am really, really proud that I figured out by hard work how to take something and turn it into an entity that provides a livelihood for so many people. Lee: Boy, that's so cool. This question is a lead on to that. Who influenced you or supported you to take the career path you have? Do you have any role models or mentors? Bettina: Well, my family, definitely. My grandfather grew a company. He was a coal miner and when he was 15 he went into the coal mine and was under the earth. It was a really back breaking hard job. Over the years, he found ways to make money in other ways. He ended up having a wholesale Coop providing hundreds of millions of tons coal to the big energy producers, electricity producers. He was retired by then, but he would always tell me how he did that. How he used his knowledge, when he was 15, to do all of that. He would do math problems with me on this and tell me about how he negotiated across the table and that he always was really faster in his head. They couldn't pull out a calculator as fast as he could do the math, so we would work on that. Up to about five years ago, I had mostly male mentors because I haven't seen any women doing what I was doing. As a female entrepreneur in technology, in Europe there were hardly anybody to look up to. But then I moved from Zurich, Switzerland to here to Cambridge Massachusetts. I found that well there are these people I can look up to that can be a mentor. You interviewed Gail Goodman the founder of Constant Contact, or the founder of the Zipcar, Robin Chase. People like Beth Marcus who sold her fifth company. People have done this here before. I now feel like I am living in Disneyland in a way because I have so many people that support me. I am trying to give it back with SheEOs group that I created to foster more female entrepreneurship. Larry: That's terrific. By the way Lucy Sanders always likes us to ask this tough question. What is the toughest thing that you had to do in your career? Bettina: So I started my first company when I was 27. This was in 2001. So it was post dotcom boom. But there was still money around and a little bit of hype around. But that very quickly evaporated. But, we were able to raise money and we hired people and that was going pretty well. Then we just did not make any of our goals. It was terrible because I, the young person, had promised the world to all these people. We hired over 20 people. I had to fire half of them at a certain point, together with my co‑founders. That was really, really, really hard to do that. In Europe, it's also harder to fire people. You don't fire them and they leave that day. You have to keep them on for three months. You have to continue to paying their salaries so, that was really, really hard. It made me very prudent about over hiring and making sure I meet my goals before I promise people too much. Lee: Yeah, I think we've heard from a good majority of the people we have interviewed that having to lay off people or fire people is not easy. Larry: Yeah, Bettina, you're absolutely right about in Europe. My wife and I have owned a number of companies in Europe. We had some of those similar experiences. Bettina: Yeah, you have to look people in the eye for three months and say, "I failed you." Every single day they look at you while they're searching for new jobs, but they still work for you. I didn't feel so hot. Lee: If you were to think back of all the things you learned through growing businesses and having the networking, the CEO, what would you advise a young person about entrepreneurship if they were sitting with you there today? Bettina: That's one of the things I really love doing. I really love helping other people make their dreams come true. I typically tell them anybody can be an entrepreneur. I tell them that "You can do it." There are three things I tell them that they need. The first one is naivete. If you knew what was going to hit you during the course of building your company, you would not start. [laughter] Larry: You're right. Bettina: You should really, really start young and go at it. That doesn't mean to be unprepared, right? That means, you have to do your research. You have to look for a good market. But, if you knew too much, you would not be able to be an innovator. Naivete is the first thing. The second thing I tell them they need to have is chutzpah. Do you guys know what that means? Lee: Yes. Larry: Yeah, we do, but why don't you explain it to our listeners. [laughter] Bettina: Yeah. I always usually ask them. It means being audacious, putting yourself out there. You really have to own it and say, "Yes, I am convinced I can do this and I can solve your problem." Let me give you an example. When we started SVOX, we were a small company, but we had the chutzpah to go to Mercedes Benz and say, "We have the solution for your flagship product, the S Class and we want it." We didn't know at the time how we'd be able to deliver. I mean, we had a plan, but we couldn't the next day have delivered. But, they gave us an order for this, and that made the company. Chutzpah means putting yourself out there. It doesn't mean winging it. You have to do your homework and be prepared to deliver. But, you have to also say, "I know I can do this for you. Trust me on this." Then the third thing is perseverance. You have to have the willpower to see it through. Because It's hard. It's very hard and you're going to want to quit. Often. You have to see it through. But, that doesn't mean being stubborn. You do have to take cues from your environment and pivot and change your business model and evolve it. Just as I said my toughest experience was firing all those people. Well we didn't give up. We laid off all those people because we said, "OK, with the cash that we have and where we need to go, this is how we can get to growing the company." Since then, the company has grown more than 10X. But, we knew we had to see this through. If you have those three things, I think any young person can make it in an entrepreneurship. Larry: Wow. You have hit on a number of different things that you've done, and so on, but let me just see if we can narrow this down. What are personal characteristics that have given you the advantage of being an entrepreneur? Bettina: Well, first of all as I said before that not know any better, the family background, definitely. Also, if you statically look at it, what makes people more inclined to be entrepreneurs, is if they have role models in their family to do that. But, just personally, I have a dogged determination to succeed, to make things happen. I think that's really the most important thing that people say to me. I feel that motivates the people that I find to work for me most is that people can serve me all kinds of punches and I will get back up, get back on the horse and just continue on. Obviously, that's my strategy and learning from those punches, but I will do that. I think my team also [indecipherable 00:14:46] the energy through hard times to keep going. Lee: With all the startups and things that you've done, how do you bring balance into your life, between personal and professional? Bettina: It all melds into one, in a way. I just don't believe in this myth that you can completely separate your personal and your professional life. I think that's just not true. I do think that you have to have some little bit of distance. I try not to work on Saturdays. That's what I try not to do. I also advocate that people take time off and I do that myself. It's very hard to do that, but being from Europe, a lot of vacation there is mandated by law. What I always try to train everybody in the company to tag team it. We're experimenting this year with a vacation policy that says you get two weeks off a year, or you get four weeks off a year, if you take two weeks at a time. You have your pick. You can either get four weeks, or two weeks. But, of you want to take off time, don't piecemeal it a day here or a day here. You have to take two weeks off. The reason for that is, that I want people to do their jobs and document them so well that other people can take over their jobs for two weeks while they're gone and they don't have to worry. I try to do that with myself. I really try not to be a bottleneck for decisions or for things that are happening in the company. For me, I think, it's very hard to do. But, I am really working hard on it. Right now, I am getting ready to have my first baby so I am really working very hard in order to be able to take four weeks off of maternity leave and trying to get everybody transferring enough responsibility so I can go do that. It's a big challenge, but I absolutely believe if you fail at that, then your company will collapse like a house of cards if you leave. That means you didn't build a good organization. Larry: Bettina, you're right on. My wife and I, who are in business together, we have five kids, so we have some empathy for what you're talking about. Bettina: I'm glad, yes. It's going to be a challenge. I know that. Larry: Besides your new baby, you've already achieved a great deal. What's next for you? Bettina: Well, I think there's lots more out there. I think I am 10 years into my apprenticeship of being an entrepreneur. I think I'm constantly learning. I do have a dream of taking a company public one of these days, like Gail did with Constant Contact. Pixability we often sell ourselves to investors as, "What Constant Contact did for email marketing we're going do for video marketing." But, maybe being public these days isn't the most attractive thing anymore, but I do want to grow a company in a substantial way and into the thousands of employees. That's my dream that's still out there. Larry: I have a feeling you're going to do it too. Lee: That is a wonderful dream. Bettina: Thank you for that confidence. Lee: We thank you for interviewing with us today. For everybody out there listening, you can find these podcasts on W3W3.com and as well at ncwit.org. Please pass it along to a friend. Thank you Bettina. We've enjoyed having you today. Bettina: Thank you very much for inviting me. Larry: Thank you. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Bettina HeinInterview Summary: Bettina Hein believes there's a recipe for successful entrepreneurship, and in this interview she shares it. Ingredients include chutzpah and persverance. Release Date: March 7, 2011Interview Subject: Bettina HeinInterviewer(s): Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 18:34

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: NCWIT Entrepreneurial Heroes Lee Kennedy: Hi, this is Lee Kennedy. I'm the CEO of Bolder Search and a board member for the National Center for Women & Information Technology or NCWIT. This is part of a series of interviews that we are having with fabulous entrepreneurs. They're women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors, all of whom have just fabulous stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs. With me today is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hey, Larry. Larry Nelson: Hey, I'm excited about this interview, certainly a person with a tremendous amount of experience. Wow, I can't wait to get into this and we know we have lot of firm executives and young people that are looking into becoming an entrepreneur and getting into the high tech arena who are listeners. So, I'm really looking forward to this interview. Lee: Super. So, today we are interviewing Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. She is a leading Internet and media executive with a touch over 18 years of leadership in working with early stage companies including Google, Amazon, Yodlee and Polyvore, which is a leading global fashion community site. So, why don't I go ahead and interview Sukhinder. We are so happy to have you today. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy: Thank you. Lee: Larry, I think we'll just jump into things. Larry: All right. I'm going to ask you a question that Lucy Sanders always likes us to ask and that is how did you first get involved in the technology business and what technologies do you think are cool today? Sukhinder: I actually first got involved in the technology business probably 13 or 14 years ago in 1997, actually, late '96, early '97. Prior to that, I had been working in New York, in London in media and that investment banking. I stayed in Merrill Lynch for several years and then I went on to market BSkyB, which is the leading satellite broadcast at that time. So, actually, kind of a technology company but more of a media company. I moved to the Bay area on fundamentally I guess on thesis that I wanted to be close to entrepreneurs and one day be an entrepreneur myself. I did not know what I wanted to do but I did know there were smart motivated people in the Bay area. I had traveled out to San Francisco to visit friends and fell in love with the Bay area. So, I took a leap of faith. I moved from London, sold everything I had in London. Bought a car for $10, 000 in LA and drove up the Coast to San Francisco and found my first job. Larry: Wow. Lee: I have to say it is not too dissimilar to my background. I moved out to the Bay area and it's kind of hard not to get into technology. Sukhinder: Absolutely. So, I did not want to be an entrepreneur. But it was that classic, I didn't have an idea. So I thought the next best thing was to put myself close to smart people, working on interesting problems and being entrepreneurs themselves, somehow that path would be a positive one. Larry: Of all the different things that you've been involved with the technology, which ones do you think are cool today? Sukhinder: There are some I had been lucky enough to be involved with and some less so that I just admire from afar a bit. Probably, two of my favorites I'll say as consumer there's something you got to see these businesses built at Google. One, I mean the technology I just to love today, are anything that you would of think as geo or location based. So, my first job at Google was helping to launch Google maps and Google logo and the idea that your location is a pretty important indicator. Where you are relative to your friends in the case of Foursquare or where you are on a map and where you are trying to get to go and having driving directions on your iPhone, forgoing the traditional, heavy-duty MAPS systems that are sitting in cars or something; lightweight but just as revolutionary. So, I love anything geo where as a user my location has something to do and some relevance to play in what I want to do next. And I think we see geo now as a layer on top of many technologies. The second thing I love is of course cloud-based applications. For me, it is actually very simple. As a consumer, the idea that I no longer have to be stuck to one PC to access my contact list, to access my emails, to access documents. I mean today we have apps of every kind based on the cloud; business apps, enterprise apps, consumer apps. But I think of Google really as introducing that concept in a pretty revolutionary way with Gmail and now of course its very standard. I just love cloud based apps because they truly make me mobile. And the last thing, it's hard not to love the iPhone, now the iPad but if you think about the iPhone as just an incredible tool but more importantly an incredible statement instead of just ability to use that hardware and software. To have a pretty revolutionary consumer design and that the integration of hardware and software still matters. And owning both, which was Apple's proprietary focus and goal. And long after people forgot about hardware, Apple believed that innovation was still possible in hardware, right? And the group did this to all by fundamentally changing the way we communicate with the iPhone. Lee: I'll have to have an offline discussion about the iPhone versus Android GP and you being a former Google employee. Sukhinder: Yes and it means like I said like the Android OS and then the non proprietary system and that is amazing being able to boot application development to many different phone and the fundamental thesis for Google creating an OS and then integrating with third party hardware and redesigning hardware. Instead of working a new age phone that showcase the power software. So, I guess my point is that long after people have forgotten about hard ware and all the software, lo and behold Apple app and hardware. Lee: I know that's the jobs. Sukhinder: Application development layer and in Droid continues on that screen stream.  Larry: Well, I just want to let you know that I have something in common with you. We moved from Copenhagen to the Bay area a number of years ago. Lee: Are you trying to warn me up Larry? OK. All that said about your background and the technologies you think are cool. Tell us why entrepreneurship turns you on? What are you an entrepreneur? Sukhinder: I think there are probably three things I just love about it. Number one is obviously the building that create an author and that is every level. Yes, you are creating a business model on a product but also to go and author your team. Who you get to work with, how you want to work, the culture you want to create. I think that there are people who love to build stuff. I happen to love to build stuff. I think authorship and creation except for some people is a drag and I think I really enjoy the process. I think the second think is I'm sort of a gratification junkie. I like to put in work and get back feedback quickly and then iterate like progress to me is best measure in those increments and that is also how I motivate myself and I think entrepreneurship is really suited to this iteration cycles, right? You get to put out something out there, see the results, see what works, see what doesn't, try it, try something else. And I think that fast cycle times really feels and considers me and probably my own kind of cycle which I work and I think that is fundamentally one of the reasons that it gives me so much excitement. So, I think authorship and the ability to create the kind of quick iteration and feedback loop in entrepreneurship those are things that resonates really, really highly with me. Larry: Sukhinder, with all the things that you done in the different organizations, it's really phenomenal. But let me ask you this, along the way, who supported you in your career path or your role model or your mentor? Sukhinder: Well, first of all, it is interesting. I don't believe in a single role model. I feel like for different parts of my career, depending on the things I have to learn, there were different mentors to me and role models along the way. First and foremost, my father. He was a doctor and loves to be a doctor. He loves running the practice like the business of running the practice. My first job was doing tax returns when I was 15 years old. My father taught me balance sheets and income statements because he was fascinated and he was thinking of different ways to optimize his business and he share the same with me. My second job was in his office as secretary but he was clearly passionate about the job he was doing. The content of his job which was medicine and also entrepreneurship and running the business. He was from very young age clears want to work for yourself. I would say more recently, I think my role models and mentors have really been at some point of time very relevant to what I have to learn to ramp sure ramp, Google and obviously very notable angel come valley. Before that was the CEO of Jungly, my first copy in the Valley that was acquired by Amazon and I had a pleasure to work with the man. And he was an investor in Yodeli, the company that I joined as a co-founder and then ultimately was also involved with Google where I joined next. From Rome, I learned great skills and I also just learned how important it is to match a great business team with a great product team and Rome as an angel has been very successful in helping to find and integrate entrepreneurs. Rome was certainly one. I think Henry Ryan, one of the founders of Jungali, first company that I joined in the Valley. He is a serial entrepreneur. He is in a company five and he has calm, stability, successful exit, diversity and experience and it turned operating CEO so when I have current issues, I call him and I think about my route in Google. Certainly my boss Kurt Estani who was the chief revenue officer at Google and he was probably employed 13 or something like that build Google's revenue from zero to 23 billion. For me, certainly, I just add what I learn, the skill associated with being a great relationship daughter and a great manager not to say I was but I think I learned from him the important of their skills and he is just the ultimate consistent builder and relationship manager. And also, someday he was able to hire greatly skilled people and let them run. Stan Standberg is now running Facebook, Armstrong is running AOL. These people are on the team and I give credit for figuring out how to hire us, mentor us, harness us and still let us run and build. So, I think the different people are the different points of my career to some of them. Lee: Sukhinder, you have been super fortunate at least from my viewpoint to have such phenomenal mentors. That is really exciting. Sukhinder: Yeah, I certainly felt privilege to get to work with these people. So, I guess my point is it is not just one mentor but there are people you learn different skills and I think at different point of my career, I feel like I had the opportunity to work with these people and certainly some of them go and instilled to them. I go for different type of advice when I think there is something they have to offer me. Lee: So, on to something a little more tough, what is the toughest thing you've had to do in your career? Sukhinder: I think of very tough business challenges, but then I think of the challenges that take their toll on you emotionally. This is often a question I ask others when I'm interviewing them, when I'm interviewing executives to join my team. I often just say, "What's the biggest career mistake you've made?" Which is another way of asking the same question. But I think the things that take the hardest emotional toll on you are not the decision or strategy vantage point perspective you called wrong, because you can two or three or four different paths in a different strategy, and maybe you chose the wrong path, but smart people can have different answers. But the ones that're really tough, honestly, are the ones that surround people, right? Awful, making a decision that someone's not a fit. I think those are the most personally taxing and tough things to do in my career. You know, at Yodelly, certainly, we went through to Boston , we had to lay off people, and it was my first time laying off people. You dissolve a relationship with people, you feel a huge amount of responsibility for people's career and career choices when you bring them into a company, I do. Lee: Yeah. Larry: Oh, sure. Sukhinder: Some of that was recession-driven, but there're other times where it's actually not a function of the recession. Often in cases outside of those extraordinary circumstances, like the Boston 2002, the Internet dark days. It's really actually just about culture set, because the people you hire are, by and large, exceptionally competent. It's whether or not they're a fit with the organization, and it's a place that allows them to thrive. When you see that for whatever reason it's not working, learning to make that decision or call quickly or expediently, expeditiously, is important. Because the cost of not doing it well or quickly is high for everyone. It's high for the organization, it's hard for the person who feels like they're, for whatever reason, not able to get it done. They're feeling frustrated. But it's very hard to bring that conversation to a head, and I've been on both sides of it, right? I've certainly had to make the call when someone wasn't a fit, so I just think that whenever you have people decisions, your own decision to move on from something, or managing someone for whom you need to negotiate whether or not they're going to move on. Those are always the most difficult decisions, because they involve people's lives and careers and you want to do them with the right amount of diligence and care and conscientiousness, but also in a way that is expeditious for everyone. So everybody can move on. Larry: All right, well let's move on, and we're going to lighten this one up a little bit. Let's pretend, right now, you are sitting at your desk or around a table. You had a young person who thinking about becoming an entrepreneur. What advice would you give them? Sukhinder: Well let's see, I think there're tons of bits of advice you can give to young entrepreneurs, and I'm sure you have, in all of these interviews you've done, many greater nuggets than what I have to offer, but...I think if there were two things, and one may be obvious but I don't know if people truly accept it. So clearly one of the key things is to iterate in very quick cycles. I think a lot of times I spent, like, perfecting the business idea in PowerPoint. But the reality is, it's not substitute for customer feedback. As quickly as possible, and as cheaply as possible. So I think before you go out and raise money or create too many PowerPoints, you want to find a quick way to test and iterate on your idea at low cost. And keep trying until you find the nugget that seems to resonate with the consumer. Particularly true in Internet business, right? We're consumer Internet businesses. We can't quite predict how the online consumer is going to react, and what they're going to love, and what they're not going to love. It's not always just rational, right? Some of the web stuff companies weren't built of rational need. They just were launched and tested and iterated on, and they found some resonance with the consumer. So that's one, and it's probably fairly obvious. I think the second one, I think a lot of people say they're self-aware. But honestly, I think as an entrepreneur, you have to become incredible self-aware, and I think that's for a couple reasons. First of all, I think self-awareness revolves around understanding what's your own trademark strength, and what do you excel at, right? And part of building a great company, obviously, is figuring out how you fit and how to do what you're great at. If you can build an entire company around it, around your trademark strength, that's amazing. But quite often, building a great company is bringing into the building and, bringing in a diverse set of experiences. Often that means self-awareness about what you're also not great at, right? Where can you attract and surround yourself with people who have other strong skills that are complementary to your own. If you really want to win, and you really want to grow a company of some scale, I think it starts with self-awareness. Playing to your own trademark strength, and then being very quick. I would say in some ways open to building a company of great, strong, diverse talent that helps complement the skills you have. But it takes both parts, right? Playing to your own strengths, but also being, being pretty clear on your weaknesses, and certainly if you want to scale a company beyond a certain size. It is about recruiting incredible talent to your vision, but with complementary skills. Lee: I have to totally agree with you on that. Larry: Mm-hmm. Lee: I'm going to follow along and ask you, what do you excel at that's made you a fabulous entrepreneur? Sukhinder: Well I think first of all, I think most people who know me would consider me high energy and intensity. I think an entrepreneur for many years, it's about being your own best evangelist, right? Not for you, but for your company's vision. I think that requires a lot of energy. Then you have to be able to do that, and have a surplus of energy, if possible, to give to your team, right? To motivate and bolster them, and let them know it's possible. Again, most entrepreneurs, there's not always a rational need for what they're doing. They're often thinking to where the market is going, right. That requires evangelism. It requires a certain energy and intensity to come to work every day, and when the market's not yet there, or investors don't believe, that you believe, and you're able to convey that belief and conviction to others, with energy. So I think that's one piece. You know, I know how to sell. I spent most of my early career in sales. My college jobs, were summer jobs, were in sales. Then when I arrived in the valley, my functional specialty, if you could call it that, was business development. Business development in every company I've ever worked at correlated with sales. It was revenue-producing. As an entrepreneur, you kind of have to sell. And so I think having core skills that are functional set in sales and being very comfortable with that, has been helpful. And then roughly, I mean, I would circle back to the self-awareness piece. I'm certainly very, very flawed. But I think over the years, being in a variety of leadership situations and having to scale through both successful and failed experiences, I have the benefit of a lot of feedback. And I know what I'm good at and I know what I'm not good at. While I work at what I'm not good at, I try to play to my strengths and find a place where they can be accelerants, to a business or a team, and where they're not, I don't, I guess, pretend to believe that I'm going to become perfect. But I think I'm pretty clear on the areas I need to surround myself with to actually have a fully embodied and diverse team that's capable of getting it done. And so I think years and years, instead of repeated feedback on the same issues has yielded a lot of self-awareness. I think at this stage that what am I good at, and where is it that I need to bring in a strong and talented team to really create, and as I said, some things a team together can win. Larry: Well I like that. Let me throw a little curve ball at you. Now, with all that stuff that you're doing, you've mentioned everything from high-energy and intensity, how to sell, being self-aware, and everything else, how do you bring balance into your personal and professional lives? Sukhinder: Well, first of all, I guess let me start by saying I'm not a believer in balance in the typical way that people talk about it, which is just this ... I have this thesis that people imagine this perfect day, right, where you wake up at six, and you work out for an hour, and then you play with your kids. And then you have a great breakfast filled with protein and carbs, and you work perfectly from nine to six, and you come home and you feed your children and you have wonderful family time, and then you do two hours of email, and you get ... early, this is thesis of what balance looks like and I just don't believe it. I don't believe it, at least for me. I think balance has to be measured in cycles that are far longer than a day, often months and years. Because I think that to do anything well requires a certain amount of energy and focus. To be a great parent requires energy and focus and intensity. To be a great manager requires it, to be great manager requires it. To be a great entrepreneur. To be great at sports. And so, when you think about trying to do things well simultaneously, I'm a believer that kind of the best it gets is that there are going to be periods of your life which are all about work. There are going to be periods which may be all about family. And I measure balance in my life by cycles, there are cycles of time, often measured in months or years, where I know I'm going to have to give a lot of focus or priority to something. And then the best you can do in that situation, is really trying to manage very clearly expectations, which I think of as the multiple shareholders in your life, right. Your husband expects something from you. Your children expect something from you. Your team expects something from you. Inside constituencies. Boards you serve on expect something from you. And the most you can do is actually manage expectations very clearly, like hey, I'm going into a period that's going to require a lot of travel. What are we going to do about it. In the case of managing expectations, what I would say instead of negotiating with your family. There would be other times that you negotiate with work. And you say I'm about to have my third child. I'm going out on maternity leave, but I know we're trying to close a big deal. How are we going to get it done. And so, I guess I don't believe in balance, as by the standard definition. I believe instead, of cycles in your life. And managing expectations with an increasing number of constituencies as your life goes on. And hoping that when you look back on your life, as measured in months or years, maybe it was equally divided between all the things that are important to you, or at least divided between the one or two things that are important to you, in a way that you feel good about. But it's measured in a much longer cycle. And in between, you manage expectations, and you learn to live with a lot of guilt. Lee: Well, thank you for that honest answer. Suhkinder, it's clear you've achieved a lot. And we have thoroughly enjoyed hearing your answers to our questions, and last but not least, we're curious what's next for you. Sukhinder: It's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I think in the spirit of what we chatted about, which is, you want to play to your trademark strengths. For me, it's about working with great teams at high intensity and high RPMs, and feeling honestly that I could move to a place where I could make my maximum impact, and that's about finding a place where my skills are a great fit. And I think it could be pure entrepreneurship, and founding something, or it could be operating at significant scale and complexity. But where the trajectory for a company is high, and navigating it with a smart group of people is important. Both to them and to me. Lee: Well, we wish you great success in your next. Larry: Yes, and we're going to follow up on you too. Lee: So thank you so much for spending this time with us. Larry: You listeners out there, pass this interview along to others that you know would be interested, you can listen to it at w3.w3.com and ncwit.org 24/7, look at our blog, it will be in our podcast directory too. Lee: Thank you so much. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Sukhinder Singh CassidyInterview Summary: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy has worked at companies large and small in their early stages, including Google, News Corp., Amazon, Polyvore, and Yodlee. But before she got into the tech industry, she did the taxes for her father, a doctor. In this interview she gives some great advice about the energy and intensity she thinks are vital to being a successful entrepreneur, as well as the importance of knowing how to sell, and how to be self-aware. Release Date: January 30, 2011Interview Subject: Sukhinder Singh CassidyInterviewer(s): Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 22:10

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Leila Boujnane CEO, Idee, Inc. Date: January 4, 2011 Interview with Leila Boujnane Lee Kennedy: Hi, this is Lee Kennedy. I'm the CEO of Boulder Search, and a board member for NCWIT, the National Center for Women & Information Technology. This is part of a series of interviews that we're having with just fabulous entrepreneurs. These are women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors, and all who have just fabulous stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs. With me today is Larry Nelson, from W3W3.com. Hey Larry. How are you? Larry Nelson: Oh, I'm magnificent. I'm excited about this interview. This whole series has been just terrific. We get all kinds of people from the entrepreneurs to the executives, and many young people who are looking into getting into this kind of business. Lee: Great. Today we're interviewing Leila Boujnane, the CEO of Idee. That's French for "idea." Hi Leila. Welcome. Leila Boujnane: Hello. Hello. Lee: Now did I get your last name right? Leila: That is correct. Leila Boujnane. It's too many Ns, but yes, that is correct. Lee: Great. Idee's goal is to make images searchable. Idee develops advanced image identification and visual search software. The technology looks at patterns and pixels of images and videos to make each image or frame searchable by color, similarity, or exact duplicates. Did I get that pretty close? Leila: That is very close. That's pretty much exactly what we do. Everything that we do is based on actually looking at what we call an asset. That could be an image or a video. But we'll look at it differently. Instead of looking at a text file or looking at a keyword, or looking at what describes that image, we actually look at what makes that image, so all the pixels that are actually making that image or the frame in a video that you're looking at. Lee: That is so interesting. Larry: That really is. Lee: Tell us a little bit about what happening at Idee lately. Leila: Well, we launched, I would say, the world's most awesome reverse image search engine. I think it is still the largest reverse image search engine out there. It's called Pineye. So basically what you do is you give it an image and it indexes that image on the fly. By indexing, we mean it actually creates a unique fingerprint for that image based on what it sees in the image. Then it compares it to our image index, and it tells you in real time where that image is actually appearing on the web. Lee: Wow. Leila: It does that very seamlessly. If you've played with it, it's as simple as, drop your file here and get results there. It's doing that using image recognition, with a pretty, pretty large index. Our current image index, and these are the images that we've crawled from the web and indexed, is actually close to two billion. We haven't gotten to two billion, but it's very, very close. Lee: Wow. Larry: That's with a B? Leila: Yes... Larry: Wow. Leila: ...With a B, with a big B. Upper-case B. It's been a really, really exciting undertaking for us, because it really brought what we call image recognition-based search to everyone. Anyone that is used to actually going online and searching for an image has been doing that using keywords. When you have this in your head and you say, "Where did this appear?" or, "Who created this?" or, "Where can I get more of this image than I already have?" There wasn't really a mechanism to do that. This was a very good way to actually put image recognition out there and have it solve problems daily for people. Larry: Wow, that's fantastic. One of the questions, of course, that Lucy Sanders likes us to always ask is, how did you first get into technology? If I could couple that with another question, is, what technologies, in addition to the wonderful things you're doing, that you think are real cool? Leila: Well, how I got into technology was completely by accident. I tell people all the time, you can't underestimate the power of luck or accidents, or just what makes you do something when it's not really what you planned. If you had told me more than a decade ago that I would be in technology, I would have just looked at you and laughed and said you didn't know what you were talking about. Lee: Wow. Leila: Because I actually was in med school studying medicine, in Bordeaux, in France, to become a doctor. Lee: Oh my gosh. Leila: I was curious about technology and computers and so on, but I was more of a science-mathematics mind rather than an actual engineering or software type of person. Much to the dismay of my family and parents, I decided that medicine was not for me. I just completely out of the blue stopped my studies and decided to take a year off to figure out what was it that I was really going to be doing, after having grown up... I thought my entire life that when I grew up, I want to be a doctor. I actually never questioned that. Nothing besides medicine ever entered my mind. But when I was studying it, I just realized that it just was not for me. When I took a year off, I actually moved from France to Canada, and completely by accident, met a group of individuals who were starting a software company here in Toronto. They were looking at an addition to their team. I turned out to be a good fit. I just decided to try it and see what happens. If I like it, then that's great. I just needed a bit of a change. After that, I've actually never looked back. I'm amazed that I didn't do that early on in my life. But it was really, really completely accidental. Lee: That's a very cool story. Larry: Yeah. Leila: And scary at the same time, because if you think about how one decides what to do and what career to enter, like this was a fluke. If I hadn't met the individuals that started Algorithmics in Toronto, and if I wasn't talking about being interested in exploring other things, this really would not have happened. Perhaps it would have happened later, but it wouldn't have happened the way most people enter technology or move into working in software. Larry: Yes. What technologies outside of what you're doing do you think are cool today? Leila: You know, it's a bit funny to be asked that question, because in the field that I'm in, I'm in search. I always think all technologies are awesome. Everything that I see out there, you look at it and you think, "Oh my God, this is exciting, it's going to change A, B, or C." But I'm very focused on search. When I look at what I find really, really exciting that's outside of search, I have a tendency to look at any type of technology that allows us humans to analyze really, really, really large sets of information. Like, anything that allows us to visualize that. If you were able to get access to, I don't know, all the war, conflicts in the entire world for the past hundred years. If you had that kind of information, what tool could you use to visualize it? Tools for visualizing information, and also any type of tool that actually allows us to stay in touch and communicate better. When I think about that, and I think, tools like Twitter. But it's not the only thing. But I just think that communications and tools that facilitate communications are really, really transformational tools, for all kinds of purposes, whether it's a mobile device that allows you to sell goods or to stay in touch with family or to book an appointment or confirm something, those are pretty transformational technologies. At least, when I look outside of search, that's what I see. Lee: I totally agree. It seems like with the ubiquitous use of cell phones that all have cameras, it's amazing what's going to images. People are taking pictures of coupons and the little scan codes... Leila: Of everything. Lee: Yeah. Leila: Absolutely everything. Lee: It's really exciting. Leila: Yeah, we find that exciting and strange at the same time. But the reality is that our brains are actually wired to work with images. An image has far more impact on us than a word. If you look at an image and you see something in that, the impact of it is far greater than a word that's displayed to you. If I put a word in front of you and it says "famine" and I show you a photograph, they have very, very distinct and separate impacts. Larry: It is worth a thousand words. Lee: Yeah. Leila: Just about, I think, yes. I think there is some truth to that, that's true. Lee: Leila, I'm curious. You went from your plan to be a doctor, scientist mode, to a technologist. But why are you an entrepreneur? What is it about entrepreneurship that really excites you, makes you tick? Leila: Well, that's something that I've always had. Like from the day I was born, I think, much to the dismay of my mom, I had this thing where I really wanted to do things on my own. I wanted to set my pace. I wanted to do things in particular ways. I didn't want to have anyone else dictate how this should be done, even if the way they are asking for something to be done is actually the correct way to do it. But I have this thing about wanting to figure things out on my own and then set a pace and then run to that pace. That was always there. Even when I was in med school, it was there, which was also a bit of a challenge in that kind of environment. For me, that was very, very critical. So when I started working in a software company and I realized that that's a fantastic environment, or technology is actually a fantastic industry for that, it just confirmed exactly what I always had, which was the desire to do something by myself and build the road and travel on that road. That's always been there. I didn't find it surprising when it materialized into building a firm, but it just took longer to get there. Larry: After you get into the technology part, Leila, who are some of the people that maybe influenced you, supported you in your career path? Sometimes the word "mentors" is used. Leila: Well, for me, it's a bit different, because as I said, I accidentally fell into technology. But once I was there, I figured that this is really something that I'm very, very interested in, so I wasn't really looking so much for encouragement or someone to facilitate that entry. It was pretty much like, roll up your sleeves and figure out what you need to get done, and figure out how to do it. Learn and learn as much as possible. Stay curious about what's happening around you and ask questions. But I couldn't really have done anything that I'm doing today if it wasn't for one single thing, and that to me has been very critical my entire life. That was really, really my mom's desire to make sure, and I'm not sure it's a desire, but the way she brought us up. It was this philosophy of, it didn't matter what you wanted to do. You just go ahead and do it. You might succeed, you might fail. But you shouldn't be questioning, "Can I do this? Will I be good at doing it?" It was like, today I call it overconfidence-building, because it went beyond just making sure that your children have the confidence to undertake or try anything. It was more about, don't let anything stop you from doing something. Actually, don't even ask what that could be. Just go and do it. And that was critical. That was very important. If I were to say, what can be encouraged or what people should have more of in their lives, it would be that. It would be really someone who completely encourages them to try pretty much anything that they want to try, and figure out the other pieces afterwards. There are, of course, a lot of people that you look at and then you think, "My goodness, these people are incredible." You really admire them. Like for me for example, Cheryl Sandburg, the CEO of Facebook. She would be a hero. She would be in my book somebody that I really admire. I'm sure everyone is familiar with, Takushi, who started as a biomedical engineer, but became, at least for me, because I was in the medical field, somebody who actually transformed the batteries used in defibrillators. In the time, and even today, to me, that was just fantastic. That was just incredible. Not necessarily individuals that I related to my field, but just people whose work I admire and who have accomplished so much. Lee Kennedy: Wow. The takeaways I get is your mother basically gave you the confidence and courage that you could do anything. Then you're inspired by some of these other women that have just done really, really exciting things with their career. That's great. Leila: My goodness, yes. You look at what they have accomplished and you just think, "wow. How can they have done all of that in such a limited time? That's so brilliant!" Lee: Every time I do one of these interviews with Larry and Lucy, I get so excited and motivated. I leave that day just feeling like I could conquer the world. Thank you. Well, speaking of all that exciting stuff, I guess on the flip side of the coin, what's been the toughest thing you've had to do in your career so far? Leila: Well, that would have been early in my career. When I started Idee, we actually didn't start as a pure software company. We did a lot of consulting work. We took on a lot of clients that had nothing to do, necessarily, with the world of image search and search technologies overall. That's simply because the company was not VC- backed. It was completely organic. Profits and revenues actually built the company, not outside financing. But at the time, we were taking on a tremendous number of consulting projects, and a tremendous number of new outside clients, a little bit away from our field. There were, generally, I think, great revenues, but it was going to, how do you say that, just keep us from releasing search products because we would be busy solving problems for customers, which was great at generating revenues, but not really working on search problems. I have to say that one of the toughest decisions was to sit down and simply say that we can no longer do that. We are not going to do that. We are going to bite the bullet and restructure the firm to move from a service company to an actual product company. When we did that, it was my decision as well to lay off a number of people that just didn't fit the vision of where the company needed to go. I have to say, reflecting back, that was one of the hardest decisions I had to make. Larry: I'll say. Now if you were sitting down right now, across the table, across the desk, with a young person who is thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, what advice would you give them? Leila: Well, I would say, don't do what I have done, which is sometimes, try to figure things as you are trying to solve a problem. Like, something I have lacked in the beginning of my career was looking at how other people have done things and learning from that. That's something that I've become much better at doing with our board, so figuring out, what is it that I'm good at, and what is it that I'm lacking? Is what I'm lacking something that I can learn, or is it something that I can get by talking to a number of people that have done that, and have done it very, very, very well. It's doing a little bit of an assessment early on, as you decide to become an entrepreneur and to build the company, just figure out what are the few things that you need to do better or learn, and figure out where to get that, and not wait until you are actually battling something to know or to figure out and reach out and try to get that expertise. That would be one thing. The second thing I would say, and I see that happening a lot, don't wait until tomorrow to start something. Lee: That's great advice. It's always easy to think, "Oh, I'll get to that." Leila: Yeah, exactly. Or you know what, this is a really great idea. Let me think about it a little bit longer. Then before you know it, a whole year has gone. Just do it. Lee: Well, along that same vein, you had spoken earlier about how you've always felt this entrepreneurial spirit. What would you say are the personal characteristics you have that have given you an advantage as an entrepreneur? Leila: I think about it as a great characteristic to have. Other people might think about it as something that's pretty awful. It's just one of these things. It's just like, giving up, to be honest, is just absolutely not part of my DNA. It's not part of my vocabulary. It's just like, it's not there. Lee: That's probably the most important thing, because being an entrepreneur, you face so many roadblocks. Yeah, that's awesome. Leila: But sometimes you have to, and I still haven't learned that. I'm sure I need another 10 years. Sometimes you have to stand down and then just give up because something is not going to work. But I have to say, the one saving grace is just exactly that, like, no desire to give up. It's not part of my makeup or who I am. It doesn't even exist. Larry: Yeah, I'm going to have to look up the word "give up" in the dictionary. I don't know what it means either. Leila: There you go, exactly. That's what I should be saying. Exactly. Larry: All right, Leila, I have to ask this. With all the things that you're doing and working on and starting up, how do you do bring balance in your personal and professional lives? Leila: Oh my goodness, Larry. You guys had to ask that question. I don't. I have to be honest. I don't. I don't even try. I know things will fall apart when they do. Then I'll deal with that then. I don't even try. Lee: Well, good for you. You sound like you know yourself. Leila: Exactly. I just like my life, and I know this. I'm a workaholic. My life is very chaotic. It's very fast. It's at times a bit disorganized. At times it's difficult for other people to deal, because I have a lot of balls in the air, and that doesn't change. But I would be lying if I actually said that I look at trying to introduce balance in my life or figure out how to lead a balanced life, because it's just not my personality. I look at things that I'm interested in, and I'm interested in doing them, and I just do them. If it ends up being too much, then I adjust as I'm doing things. But yeah, it's probably something I will have to learn. Lee: Well, good for you. So far it sounds like it's worked. Larry: You bet. If we have a class on that, we'll let you know. Leila: Awesome, yes. I'll attend. Lee: Well, last question we have for you. You've achieved so much in your career. What do you see as next? What's down the road for you? Leila: Well, I'm not very good at looking at the future and predicting, thank God, actually, what may or may not happen. But I know one thing. I will speak again from a business point of view and from what I'm doing currently that is work-related, because that's a very, very big focus. We're just in the very, very early days of search. Everyone has spent the last decade typing keywords into a field to basically get search results. That is actually being enhanced by image searching, by mobile searching, by augmented reality. We are just getting better and better tools to find the needle in the haystack. For me, at least when I think about it, from a research perspective and a software development perspective, these are incredibly early days. My work's not done. I could be working on this for the next couple of decades. This is not really something that I would consider as, "Hey, achieved check mark, and let's move on to something else." It is really the early days of that. Short answer, I'm looking forward to more of the same. Larry: We're going to follow you, too. Leila: That would be great. Lee: That's great. Larry: You betcha. Leila, I want to thank you for joining us today. You listeners out there, pass this interview along to others that you know would be interested. They can listen to it at w3w3.com, and ncwit.org 24-7. Download it as a podcast and we'll have it on the blog also. Leila: I will, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Larry: Thank you. Lee: Thank you, Leila. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Leila BoujnaneInterview Summary: A decade ago Leila Boujnane was in medical school in France, studying to become a doctor. If you'd told her then that she would be involved with technology, she would have laughed and would have said you didn't know what you were talking about. Release Date: January 4, 2011Interview Subject: Leila BoujnaneInterviewer(s): Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 21:50

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Katie Hall Chief Technology Officer, WiTricity Date: July 16, 2010 NCWIT Entrepreneurial Heroes [intro music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology or NCWIT, and this is the next in a series of interviews with women who have started IT companies, just wonderful entrepreneurs who have a lot to tell us about their success in entrepreneurship, a lot of great advice. With me is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson: Hello. I'm so happy to be here. This is a great organization, NCWIT, and the interviews that you've been doing with all these wonderful women, sharp women, it's fantastic. Lucy: Well we're getting a lot of uptick on these interviews, a lot of good remarks from people, so thanks for that, and thanks for w3w3's partnership with us. Larry: Yeah. Lucy: Awesome. Also, Lee Kennedy is here, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Boulder Search who's also on the NCWIT Board of Directors. Hi Lee. Lee Kennedy: Hi, it's great to be here, I'm looking forward to this interview. Larry: Yeah. Lucy: I'm very excited about this interview. First of all, the person we're interviewing worked at Bell Labs. Yay! Lee: Yay! Larry: Yay! Lucy: We always like those Bell Labs people. She's a very impressive technologist. She's an expert in photonics, and she holds 11 patents, so I think easily one of the top technical talents that we've interviewed. She's a serial entrepreneur and her latest company is especially exciting, called WiTricity. They transfer, get this, electrical energy or power over distance without wires. Larry: Wow! Lucy: So imagine all the cables in a room-size space, all the cables disappearing. I personally think that would be just fabulous, considering all the cables I have right here in my office. I'm sure that we'll hear more about the technology, but I watched a YouTube video on WiTricity which I thought was hilarious, and people who are listening to this interview should go and pull it up and look at it, because the tag line that I wrote down was, "Being stuck in with a bad power cable is like being stuck in a bad relationship." [laughter] Lucy: That really describes their mission, and I'm very eager to get on with this interview with Katie Hall. Hi Katie, how are you? Katie Hall: I'm fine, thanks. Thanks very much for having me. Lucy: We really are looking forward to interviewing you. Why don't you tell me a bit about WiTricity? I should tell listeners that Katy is the CTO of the company, and we're very eager to hear... First of all, the name is interesting, so you might want to say why you chose it, but also what the latest happenings at the company are. Katie: OK great, thanks. WiTricity actually is a small start-up company that was founded at the end of 2007. It's a spin-out, really, from MIT and some technology that was developed there by a professor Marin Soljacic, who has a great story of how this technology came to be. Which is that he was woken up in the middle of the night a couple of times because he had a cell phone that, when it started to run out of charge, would beep. The only way he could get it to stop beeping was either to plug it in, or to actually take the battery out. You couldn't just turn the phone off. It was really annoying. You'd have to not only get up to have to deal with the phone, you'd have to find the cord, and maybe it was the fifth or sixth time in a row he'd been woken up and he finds himself standing in the kitchen holding the phone in his hand and looking at the outlet on the wall and saying, "Why can't this thing take care of its own charging? How come I can't just get the power from the outlet to the phone?" It really motivated him to start thinking about how could he get that power wirelessly to his cell phone. So, he did some looking around, being an MIT professor, you go off and you try to see what's already out there, is there a solution to the problem. But he couldn't find anything that could be used in a house that would be very efficient. There are things like radio waves that are used to transmit information from cell phone towers and for TV broadcasts and things like that. There are inductive systems where, if you have an electric toothbrush in your bathroom you might know that if you put it in the cradle it'll recharge itself. Those kinds of systems only work over very short distances. He wanted to be able to go actually a couple of feet. So he came up with this idea that he should be able to use resonance as a way to transfer the power, and the nice thing about resonance is that power is transferred between two resonant objects very efficiently, but it doesn't transfer power to anything else that is off-resonance. For something like a home application, you can transfer power from the outlet to the phone, but you're not going to put that power anywhere else, it's not going to be going into people or plants or any of the objects around it. So it's this great technology. He came up with it, demonstrated it, and the amount of interest from people when they saw the first demonstration, which was lighting a light bulb over about six or seven feet... Actually, the team was sitting in between the source coil and the receiver coil and then they were lighting a light bulb, and it just captured people's imaginations in a way that was amazing. Marin started to receive all kinds of calls and emails from people saying, "This is fantastic. Could I use it for this application, or that application?" We realized that this is the kind of thing that you start a company around. I'd known Marin for many years and had worked with him on other projects to do with photonics and, like you mentioned at the beginning, some of the stuff I had done originally at Bell Labs. He said, "We're going to start this company and we're looking for people who know how to do start-ups, would you be interested?" I absolutely jumped at the chance, because both the technology and the people involved in it were, to my mind, top-notch. The company has been around now for two years and we've been really doing the engineering that it takes to start to put this kind of technology into real-world products. We're looking at ways to recharge consumer electronics like cell phones and cameras and iPods and things like that, which are relatively low-power applications. We're also looking at things as different as charging electric vehicles. So, imagine you have an electric car and you can drive it into your driveway and then get out and go in the house and the car just takes care of its own charging. You don't actually have to plug it in. So, this is wide range of applications that the technology can address and we are developing all kinds of systems now to prove it out. Larry: Wow, that's fantastic. Lee: Can I be one of your pilot users? Lucy: Yeah. Larry: There you go. Wow. Lee: Awesome. Larry: Katie, we know prior to WiTricity, you were the founder of Wide Net Technologies but how did you exactly get into technology period? And then the other part of it is what technology do you find today that's very cool? Katie: Well, I was trying to think about how did I first get started, and I think for me really when I got the most interested in it, at least in science was in college. And oddly enough, I had no thought of being, spending my life or my career in science. When I entered college, I was really thinking more about being a politician because I really just... There were lots of things I felt there like the way they work and I thought just... You can make the world better and I can do that by being politician. That was really what my goal was when I first started. But I wanted to get my science requirement out of the way. So, I signed up for physics course when I was a freshman and it was a web course. Those introductory physics classes that you take where you roll a card stone and incline and you shoot balls out of pens and some things like that. And I just love it. It was so much fun. It was fun to actually do the work. It was fun to see there were equations that people understood the laws of motion and you could write down equations and predict how things are going to happen. And I just got absolutely hooked by the technology and especially by having my hands on something, working in the lab. And so then really, it only took me one semester before I switch my major with physics from there and on out that was really how I got interested in it. In terms of technology that I think is cool is I like the simplest things. I want to find something in the store that is a solution to some problem you have around the house. For example, one of the things I like to collect are these bicycle cups. I don't know if you have really seen those but they are sort of concentric rings and you can extend them and it forms a cup and then you can push them back down, pack it up and use it to carry in your back pocket. So, lot of the technologies that I like are very simple design that solve some kind of a fundamental problem. I really just like that something you look at it, you get it right away. And you do just think it's cool. I mean anybody who loves technology loves to see something well done like that well designed. Lucy: So, Katie, it's clear that you've been a serial entrepreneur and it sounds like from what you are just saying that it started off in college wanting to change the world. Tell us about what it is about entrepreneurship that really excite you and why you continue to work with new start-ups. Katie: Oh, it's funny. I think it is actually the same motivation which is that you want to make the world better. We can have an idea. You think you can see the way things are being done and you think they are not being done the best way they can be done and that you have a better solution and you want to go out and you want to prove it to people and you want to make it available to people. I think it's just so exciting to do a start up. You find a team of people. I love team work. I've always played sports all of my life. So, I really do enjoy being part of the team. It's kind of alarming when you work on your own and I think this is... When you get the right group of people together, what's the expression about the whole is more than the full its parts. When you can find something that comes together like that and all of a sudden your efforts are being amplified by the people around you and you are making real progress and you are able to change things. WiTricity is a great example. When we saw the excitement to everybody had for us to be able to eliminate wires and all kinds of applications. Some of them are medical for example. If you want to recharge and imprint device. Some of them are industrial. You can just really hopefully make the way people live, make their lives better with the technology and being able to be part of the team that developed that is really exciting. Lee: I say it's exciting. I'm sitting here and thinking can I come and help? It's very exciting. Lucy: I mean this is like a breakthrough technology. Katie: We love all the help we can get. Lee: Well, and so, it is a case I think that in your technologies, you are improving the world. I mean that's one of the goals that drive great technologists. Along the entrepreneurial past, who influenced you? Your mentors or who encourage you? We are always eager to hear that because it is very insightful. Katie: Yeah. It's interesting and I think it's important to recognize the people that helped you along the way because I certainly know I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for people that really helped me out every step of the way. And I think for me it started even when I was just a little kid. My grandfather was a bit of a tinker-er and an inventor. He was always coming up with things around the house. He made special kinds of carts that we could drive around in the driveway and built an automatic rebound machine. And he was only doing a little workshop down in the basement and he always includes us on that. Come on down and let's take this thing apart and figure out how it works. So, he was definitely a guy who was always curious and interested and because being around that note kind of sunk in. And of course, I also have to credit my mom as well who just was really... She just believed in all of us. All of her children so strongly that she would say, you've got to find what it is that you are good at and you have to do it well because the world needs people like that. And about that specifically saying go into science or that sort of thing but just find out what it is that you can do and try to make the world a better place. When I got to college, I had a great professor who actually taught that first class that I talked about. And really encourage me to stay in science. Especially when you're a freshman, if someone takes the time to find out who you are and what you're thinking, what you're interested in... In the case of Liz, she watched out for me all through college and told me, "These are the classes you should be taking." Before I finished up I actually worked in her lab on campus, just sitting around and talking, and finding out what her life had been like. You know, people who will stand by you. You have good weeks and bad weeks, you have good tests and bad test. Having somebody encourage you all along, so you keep that chin up and keep moving. Those kinds of people in your life are absolutely essential. When I went to Bell Labs I worked with a guy, his name is Bob Jopson, and he also gave me a lot of responsibility, but also a lot of help, in a really nice way. He'd give you really fun things to work on, but made sure that you had the resources that you needed to be successful. I actually went to Bell Labs before I went to graduate school. When I went to graduate school, I was lucky in the sense that I had spent a lot of time already working in the lab, and I was quite familiar with it and was able to fit right in. I had a professor at MIT, his name is Eric. He's very famous in the field of optics that he's working in, but he's a very down to earth guy. He was always there for his students, and taught us a lot about how to be professionals, how to review papers, how to participate in societies. I think I've also been especially lucky in that the people I've worked for have always been really upstanding people. They really care about doing things the right way and being ethical, and all of those things that are so important to science, and that get taught not in a class, but by working with people. I've really been blessed to have people that taught me those important lessons all the way along. Larry: That's great. With all the support that you've had over the years, and the successes that you've had over the years, what is the toughest thing that you ever had to do professionally? Katie: One of the things I love about what I do... I always think one of the most important things you can do when you're choosing a job is to consider the people that you're going to be working with. This is actually advise that Liz gave me when I was in college. She said, "Care a lot more about who you work with than what you work on." There are so many interesting problems in the world that you know you're going to be able to find good ones, but there's nothing that's really worth working on if you don't really like or trust the people that you're working with. The hardest times, when I look back on them, are times of change where maybe somebody was leaving some place to go take another position. And even though you might have been wishing them well, it's always hard when you lose a teammate, or if you had to cut down the size of a team because of the various things that were going on with the business or the economy. I think at work those are some of the hardest situations that you face. Lucy: Yeah, I think we've heard that consistently in the interviews we've done. Katie, you've had a lot of great advice, it sounds like, in your career, and we have a lot of young people that listen to our podcast. If you were sitting here today with a group of young people, what advice would you give them about entrepreneurship? Katie: That's a good question. I guess I think about the things that I've learned, and I think sometimes it's really important to try to take a risk and not be afraid to fail, because chances are you are going to fail at something along the way. You're going to certainly make mistakes, everybody does. Sometimes people can very clearly think about all the things that could go wrong down a path, but they forget to remember all the things that could go right, or how great it would be if it went right. Just because you don't know how to get to the end point, it doesn't mean you should not step off and start. Most people, if they tell you the truth about how their careers have gone or how their companies have gone, they tell you things in retrospect, "Here I am now, let me tell you how I got here, " and it can sound like such a straight path. It maybe even sounds like they knew from the very beginning how they were going to get here, when in reality, if you look back, it probably was very zig-zaggy. They might have had some completely different idea in mind, and something, in the process of solving one problem, came up that took you in a totally different direction and turned out to be your life's work. So, I'd say to take a risk and to be brave, and don't be afraid to fail, and don't take yourself out of the game. I think a lot of people are very hard on themselves, and they say, "Oh, I'm not good enough to do this, " or, "I'm not smart enough." Whatever thing they can think about themselves where they think it's a reason not to take a chance. But being an entrepreneur is very much about being part of a team, and you never know which pieces are going to come together to make that great puzzle. Not everybody is going to score a basket, and not everybody's going to be the best re-bounder. You need all different kinds of skill sets and personalities and passions, to come together in a mix that's going to make the whole enterprise work. I would just really encourage people. If you think you're interested, and you're enthusiastic and you're passionate, and you want to work hard, you should definitely take the leap, because it's just so much fun to be an entrepreneur and to be working in a start-up. Lee: That's really great advice, it's not a straight line. Sometimes you have to take the first step to see what the second step's even going to be. Katie: Oh, absolutely. Lee: I think once you understand that, you kind of go, "Yeah!" But it does take... it's a little scary sometimes. Katie: Sometimes you figure it out as you go, right? Lee: Yeah, exactly. We're really interested in understanding personal characteristics of entrepreneurs as well, Katie. We're curious about personal characteristics that you have that you think make you a successful entrepreneur. Katie: Well, one thing is I don't like to be told no. Lee: God, OK. [laughs] Katie: And in fact, when somebody tells me no, it makes me mad and I just think, "Oh, yeah? Well, let's see." Maybe that is not actually very flattering. [laughs] Larry: We want the truth. Lee: We want the truth. I mean I had an employee one time lean over to another new employee and say, "Don't say no." Whatever you do, she is not good with that word. Katie: I mean whenever you see something or somebody will say, "Oh, you can't do that. That can't be done." Well, come on. I mean there are some things fundamentally that cannot be done, but there are actually very few things that are like that. Most things are just really hard and I just love that some are very stubborn about that. If some... If I decide I think something can be done, boy, I just hard headed about it and I'll try and try and try very persistent manner. I think that is actually can be a very good quality when you have to be knocking down barriers. Most are pretty competitive like I said before, I like teamwork and I always played on teams. But I like to... You work hard to try to be the best and being part of a company is really no different. You work as a team and you want to make the best product that is out there. You want to find the best solution to a problem and you really won't take no for an answer, right? You are going to run into all kinds of problems that you can't predict. You have to be optimistic because you have to be able to sort of keep at it and keep at it and maybe it is the second time you try something you saw that maybe is the hundred time. But if you really believe that the solution is there somewhere then you find it. Lee: I changed my phraseology when I worked at Bell Labs. I never said no again when somebody asked me something. I hated it so much so I changed it to I don't know how to do that. Katie: Yet. Lee: Yet. Larry: All right, now, Katie with everything that you do and you're involved with everything else. How do you bring a balance into your personal and professional life? Katie: Oh, boy, I hope I bring a balance. [laughs] That's one of the hardest things that you have to do. I think because I have a family. I have kids and they are absolutely the most important thing in the world to me. But being a working mom or being a working parent means that you are spending a lot of time away from your kids and so finding that balance is hard. And especially I think in a start-up company, the hours are long and sometimes it's very unpredictable. As hard as you try to say, "Oh, I'm going to always make sure to map out X amount of time for home and X amount for work." It never really holds that way. I think thing about balancing is you are always tipping one way or another, right? There's always a correction that's in process. I think I try to be sensitive to that so that you make sure that you're keeping your priorities straight because sometimes, suck has the young people especially when they get started. It's like you are a lot more likely to get complaints at work if you don't show up, then you are going to get them at home if you don't show up. But that doesn't mean that you should always be giving into those. You really do have to work hard to keep that balance. I wish there was an easy answer and I wish I knew it but I seem to just sort of constantly befalling one way or the other and then trying to correct that and get it right. Larry: Just keep it up. Lee: Yeah. Yeah, we want that wireless stuff. Lucy: Yeah and speaking of that wireless stuff, you have achieved so much and your company has been going at this for a few years now. What's next for you? Where do you see Katie going? Katie: Oh, boy. Since I've already admitted that I didn't know, that I can only work back and tell you what my past is, I don't know. Right now, we are right in the middle of getting more WiTricity going. And so, my thoughts about the future for my career are... I mean I'm just all consumed right now with what I'm working on and part of the reason that is so exciting is because the technology can be applied so many places. I mean one of the things we say to people is think about it as replacing disposable batteries or extension cords. And if you think of all the places where those things are used, you can see that the applications are limitless and so we are just having so much fun learning about all the different areas where the technology could apply and building commercial systems. Even though, we've been at it for a couple of years now. The company, it's still really young in its life cycle and there are just so many exciting things happening. Right now, as far as I can see into the future, I will be working on this but we have to check in on a couple of years I guess and see. Lee: Well, so, I have a career path for you. Katie: OK. Lee: I do because I think we should have more computer sciences on Capitol Hill. So, just check back in a few years and we'll manage your campaign for when you run for Congress. Katie: I have to say I still get the urge every now and then when I see something going on. And I'd say, oh, I really wish I could do that but you only have so many hours in the day. There are only so many things you can tackle at once. Lee: Well, you will be really wealthy after this exit and then you can run for office. So, see? Larry: I love the idea. Lucy: So, Katie before we finish, I'm sure our listeners are dying to know when is the projected date for the first commercial application? Katie: Oh, yes. So, we are actually expecting that people will start to see this technology in commercial products by the end of this year beginning in next. Lee: Oh, my gosh. Wow. Lucy: Awesome. Lee: Shock beam. Awesome. Lucy: Well, Katie, thank you so much for talking with us. We really enjoyed this interview. I want to remind the listeners that they can find this at w3w3.com and NCWIT.org. Thanks so much. Please pass this on to other listeners who might be interested. Lee: Thanks Katie. Larry: Bye. Katie: Thank you very much guys. This has been really fun. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Katie HallInterview Summary: WiTricity is working on transferring electric power over distance, without wires. This groundbreaking technology, first invented at MIT, could soon power cell phones, game controllers, laptop computers, mobile robots, even electric vehicles, without ever plugging in a cord. Release Date: July 16, 2010Interview Subject: Katie HallInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 23:50

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Julia Hartz Co-Founder & President, Eventbrite Date: July 12, 2010 NCWIT Entrepreneurial Heroes [music] Lee Kennedy: Hi this is Lee Kennedy, board member for the National Center for Women and Information Technology or NCWIT. And we're here today as a part of a series of interviews that we're doing with extremely interesting entrepreneurs. These are women who have started IT companies in just a complete variety of sectors, and they all have just very cool stories to tell us. Today with me is Larry Nelson. And Larry is from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Hi, I really am happy to be on this show. And by the way there are so many parents and so many managers and leaders that listen to this show. So that's why we're tapping into all these great entrepreneurs and leaders. Lee: Great. And we also have Lucy Sanders who is the CEO for NCWIT. Thanks for joining us Lucy. Lucy Sanders: Hi Lee. Very happy to be here. And I wanted to mention that very often our entrepreneurs that we interview for this series are showing up more and more on the top 10. To watch the top 10 there, the most in this region, so the women we're interviewing are just top five entrepreneurs. Larry: You bet. Lee: Cool. Just to get right to it today we're interviewing Julia Hartz. And Julia is the co-founder and President of EventBrite. And EventBrite is the leading provider of online event management and ticketing services. Is just a really cool company, and Julia has brought the creative and energy of the entertainment business. She was at MTV formerly. Lucy: Oh wow.  Lee: Welcome Julia. Thanks for coming here today. We're looking forward to talking with you about entrepreneurship. Julia Hartz: Thank you. I'm really honored to be here. Lee: Wonderful. So can you tell us a little bit about what's going on at EventBrite lately? Julia: Oh goodness, a whole lot. Well, we were originally founded in 2006 by my husband and I and our third co-founder Renaud Visage, our CTO. And since that we bootstrapped the company. We were just three people for two years, very product focused. But I'm happy to report that we are now nearing 60 employees. So it's quite a different company today than it was even back in 2008. On the topic side we're just really focused on making life simpler for the organizers, and delighting our customers through innovations of simple tools they can use to publish event pages, promote their events to a wider audience, and sell out their events. So sell more tickets to their events. And we're also now looking at our relationship with ticket buyers. Now that we've helped event holders host over 200, 000 events, obviously that there is a larger accumulation of attendees that are now coming back to EventBrite to find out about more events that they want to attend. So that's a current feature trend that we're seeing. Lee: Well you know NCWIT runs events, so we could well be one of your future customers. Julia: [laughs] I'll give you the sales pitch. Lee: All right. [laughs] Julia: On a different time maybe. [laughs] Lee: Yeah. I would love to hear more. We find that running events can be very time consuming. So it sounds like EventBrite is on to something. So Julia, the first question is about technology. And first of all, how you became interested in technology? And also really interesting technologies that might you see on the horizon that would interest our listeners. Julia: All right. So my career as you said it before began in television. I was a development executive at MTV, and I worked the first season and the first movie of a little project called Jackass. Sorry, I'm not sure if I can say that on radio. And then I went on to FX Networks, and I worked on shows like Nip/Tuck, The Shield, and Rescue Me. So my career there was really high in creativity, and it was definitely pushing me up a little as they were in cable television, and the projects they worked on. But it was very well in technological innovation. So we found it very hard to break the traditional distribution mold as well as the traditional advertising mold for that matter. So my last year at FX I spent a lot of time on product placement, which was sort of a thankless job, trying to make sure that the label of the beer can was pointed in the right direction at all times in a scene. I started to get the inkling that there was something out there that would make me feel fulfilled, and I was lucky enough to meet Kevin about two years before I left television. I was able to see him start a company from inception. I was sold. Two years later I was ready to leave my traditional career and take the leap. So that's how I first got into technology. I felt like it would be something I would feel, I wanted to be ahead of the curve instead of trying to chasing trends, which I felt like we were doing in television at the time that I was working at MTV and FX. Technologies that I think are cool? Kevin is an avid angel investor and adviser. By virtue of that we were really lucky to be involved in a lot of different companies and see a lot of great trends come out of those companies, and very bright people. I always say that what I feel like is cool right now for me personally is not exactly original. But it is in the way of communication and information dissemination and I'll give you an example of how that applies to me and why I think it's cool. We were recently on a trip and our trip itinerary was shared with our family and anybody else who needed no know where we were through TripIt. We were not in touch with our family during the trip so I posted mobile photos of our two-year-old on Facebook so that my mom would know how she was doing at all times. In our company we share information through Yammer and we also share expenses through Blippy. Then, on the social side oftentimes, I'm checking in through Yelp to let people know where I am in case they're in the same area. We live in the city so it's not so large. So that idea that I can instantly broadcast and disseminate information easily and with no friction is really huge for me today being an entrepreneur and a mom. Larry: Well, entrepreneur and a mom, and you got this "techie" background, why are you an entrepreneur? Also tying in with that, what is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick? Julia: I'm an entrepreneur because I believe that I can change an industry. I also love helping to build something that people want and that's extremely valuable. I feel day-to-day glee in making a difference, in working on projects that are both very large scale and very small scale. I also feel like being an entrepreneur, for me, I feel like I'm part owner in a movement. So I think if I were to sum it up, being an entrepreneur and being a parent, I feel equally about both. [laughs] So EventBrite is very much our baby and there is just something inherently satisfying about working on something that you feel such ownership and passion about. That's what entrepreneurship means to me. That's what excites me about it. Lucy: That's great. So Julia, who would you say influenced you or was a role model or mentor along the way to get into being an entrepreneur? Julia: The reason why I took the leap and didn't hesitate was because of Kevin. Entrepreneurship comes like second nature to Kevin, and he had founded two companies before that. So I really believed that everything would be OK [laughs] and that somehow, someway we would succeed. So for him there was just no question that he wanted to always be an entrepreneur and it was almost like, "Why not? Why not come work for free with me and see what we can do and how we can change the world?" So really he's the one that influenced me first and foremost. Our families really support us along the way. They're very unconditional about everything we do. As far as role models go, we have mentors in Michael and Xochi Birch who are a married couple who founded a few companies. But most notably and recently Bebo, they founded together. They gave us some great advice in the beginning, which was divide and conquer. As a married couple if you're working together never work on the same thing at the same time. Not only is that sort of a recipe for disaster if you're behind the same spreadsheet in trying to share them out, but also you get from point A to point B two times as faster, even maybe faster, because you have complementary skills. And that very much applies to Kevin and I. We divide and conquer in everything we do. At this point in the game we work on very different aspects of the business, and actually get to catch up at the end of the day. And ask each other how each others day went. And my parents are role models because just everything that they've done they've done with a lot of grace. And finally, two-year-old daughter Emma is a huge role model to both of us. Because I think, for me it's because she never backs down from wanting to know why. She doesn't settle for an answer that she can't completely believe. She can definitely be a role model for us in many different aspects. Lucy: Well, I certainly think parenting has taught me up. That's for sure. She probably got a double dose of entrepreneurship. We'll have to see what she ends up starting. Lee: Or determination. Lucy: Or determination for sure. So Julia along the way you've been encouraged, you started a company, you've worked in entertainment, you've had a great career so far. What's the toughest thing in your professional career you've ever had to do? Julia: The only thing that I dread and the toughest part of this gig is coming to the realization that a team member is not a right fit, and having to let them go. And for us it's been, we haven't had to let go many people, and that's great. But it's really hard when you're building a team, because you feel like this is your family. And for me, I feel like each person on our team is like an athlete. I have to keep them like well-feed and you know hydrated, and well, and out of the tabloids. [laughs] I want to take care of everyone who works at EventBrite. And to have to part ways with somebody is by far the toughest part of this gig. Secondly, I think making decisions that I feel like are going to maybe not sit well with our customers. And our interests have been extremely aligned with our customers since the inception of EventBrite. And we really built EventBrite through having a dialogue with our customers and understanding event organizers' pain-points, and how can we alleviate them through technology. But making decisions like pricing changes it's totally agonizing. And we have a story where we went from a freemium service to offering a free service and paid service, to just a completely paid service. And we fretted over it for months. And when we finally reached the decision and pulled that cord, not only did we not see the turn that we had expected, but we saw our conversion go up. Because people who were coming to the site going to have to make that decision over or whether not to sign for the free or paid service. So these kinds of decisions are really tough for us. And I feel like one thing we could have done better is not fret so much over it, and believe in our product, and our ability to delight our customers. Larry: That's great advice. So one of the things we wonder about and always ask and that is if you were sitting down right now with a person who's considering becoming an entrepreneur or just starting to be an entrepreneur what advice would you give them? Julia: I think that if you're going to do it you have to jump in. I mean I feel like when I visualized the leap that I took from a corporate secure job to running EventBrite and working on this project, I envisioned myself jumping in with my eyes closed, head first and all hands and feet in. I mean I don't think that it's possible to have success without completely committing yourself. So whether that is committing yourself completely mentally, or if it's mentally, logistically and financially you really have to put all your skin in the game to actually have a chance. Most start-ups don't' succeed and I think that it's for obviously a variety of reasons. But first and foremost, if you're going to choose entrepreneurship, you have to commit in every fiber of your body. Lee: The word devotion comes to mind. Lucy: Yeah. Julia: It takes a lot of devotion. You can't have one put in and one put out. It doesn't work very well. Lee: So, on the same note what it takes to be an entrepreneur, there's certain personal characteristic that everyone thinks of that makes us entrepreneur successful. What would you say are your personal characteristics that have given you the advantage as an entrepreneur? Julia: So, me personally, I feel like I have a very strong willingness to pitch in. Now, that we are 60 people and our roles as founder, I feel like at this point I do not get in the way of greatness. We hire very, very smart, capable, talented people and we need to let them have their freedom to really change this industry. But on the flip side, I am always willing to pitch in and help so whether that be any sort of mundane task. It is not mundane to me because it contributes towards the success of the EventBrite, of my baby. So, that willingness to pitch in is key. I also have an ability to be objective. So, because of my first start up, I'm not very dated and everything is very new. I try to just come about it and to have a fresh perspective and being very objective about everything that is happening and not ever feeling like we have to be status quo. We are actually trying to disrupt an industry, the ticketing industry, and so to look at it from a fresh perspective is an advantage in many different aspects of running a start up. And, finally I feel like I'm a 110 percent committed. I mean I feel extreme honors over EventBrite in a way of like I really care about it and I care about everybody who works on changing the world with us. And so, commitment and then accountability really being accountable for the bad things and the good things. I think that makes a big difference. Lucy: Julia, you've mentioned that you travel and you mentioned your family and you mentioned your devotion to EventBrite. So, we're curious. We always ask this question. How do successful entrepreneurs bring balance into both their personal and their professional lives? Julia: Right. So, first of all you have to prioritize and you have to perhaps write it down on a white board. What is most important to you and then write everything up. I mean we talk a lot about [inaudible 15:15] optimization here and I kind of feel the same way about balancing your life. For us, it is an interesting talent because EventBrite is very much our first baby and we have and I who is a part of this process. So, instead of dividing them into two things, we feel like we are in it together. Sort of cliché to say but it is very true. It takes a village and for me personally, I have to find my vortex of happiness so that for me is being a great mom and being a great entrepreneur. I have to be confident enough to ask for and receive help from our village of family and friends. And I have to prioritize. And so, I have to note that if push come to shove, what would I do in each scenario and how do that emergency sort of exit plan. That is also very applicable to working with your spouse. And so, I feel like for us, our family and our friends and our daughter, they are in it with us and so they feel invested and understand what's going on as well. Larry: Well, you have already achieved a great deal. You are doing a lot. You are young. You are building a family. What's next for you? Julia: My goal for EventBrite is to grow the service and to the only place you would ever go to buy a ticket for any event you would ever attend. And then secondly, I want to have more kids. Lucy: There you go. Julia: It gets a little bit harder to scale for some reason I don't know. I look at it and I'm like, I am pretty sure one plus one doesn't equal to so we'll see. [laughs] Larry: Well, I've got five kids and my wife and I are in business together so it works. Lucy: I have three. Julia: I need to sit down and pick your brain. Lee: Well, thank you so much Julia for talking to us. We really appreciate it. I want to remind our listeners where they can find this interview. w3w3.com and NCWIT.org and please do pass this along to other people who would be interested in listening to it. Thanks very much Julia. Julia: Thanks so much for having me.  Larry: Thanks, Julia. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Julia HartzInterview Summary: Julia is a reformed Television Network Executive and comes to Eventbrite by way of FX Networks and MTV. "I'm an entrepreneur because I think I can change an industry. I also love helping to build something that people want. Being an entrepreneur, for me, I feel like I'm part owner in a movement and there is just something inherently satisfying about working on something you feel such ownership and passion about." Release Date: July 12, 2010Interview Subject: Julia HartzInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 17:20

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Candace Fleming CEO and Co-founder, Crimson Hexagon Date: April 19, 2010 Entrepreneurial Heroes Interview with Candace Fleming [music] Lee: Hi, this is Lee Kennedy. I am a board member for the National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT, and I'm also the CEO of Boulder Search. This is part of a series of interviews that we are having with fabulous entrepreneurs, they are women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors, all of whom have just fabulous stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs, and with me today is Larry Nelson from W3W3. Hey Larry. Larry Nelson: I'm very happy to be here, and this is a wonderful so reason and you make sure you pass these interviews along to others that you know would be interested and they can give it here at NCWIT.org or W3W3.com. Lee: Great, and I also have Lucy Sanders, who is the CEO of NCWIT. Hi Lucy. Lucy Sanders: Hello. Lee: Great to have you. Well, and just to get right to it, we are interviewing Candace Fleming. Candace is the CEO and co-founder of Crimson Hexagon. Crimson Hexagon's technology analyzes the vast social Internet, so blog posts, forum messages, tweets et cetera, and it's done by identifying statistical patterns in the words used to express opinions on different topics. And the product is called Foxtrot, and it helps you to develop your listening approach to many different Internet channels. So without further ado, I would love to introduce Candace, and have her tell us a little bit about her background and experience. Candace, welcome. Candace Fleming: Thank you, it is great to be here, I am excited about this opportunity to share. Lee: Well, if you could tell us just little bit about Crimson Hexagon, that would be great. Candace: At a very high level, what Crimson Hexagon does is, we have technology that goes out and find millions and millions of blogs and forums and tweets, product reviews and things that are probably available on Facebook, and reads them all everyday and can summarize opinions that are being expressed. So in some ways it's a little bit like an automatic opinion poll, but you are not actually asking a poll question because you are really just harvesting values from conversations that are already happening. Lee: Wow. Candace: And we are a 15% company based here in Boston. Lee: So basically, you have got bots or robots that go out and hit all of these different social sites and pull back the data and then analyze it, is that kind of a nutshell for our novice technology listeners? [laughter] Candace: It is that idea where we get data from lot of different sources, we license some data streams, we also do our own call link, but it is not so much the data collection that is special about what we do, it is really in the content analysis of what we do. So if you imagine, I think a lot of your listeners are familiar with Google Alert, were you can very efficiently and very quickly use keywords, and every day multiple times a day, you will get an email in your in-box with the links to mention of those words. But the problem is, when you start to build a large brand or you have a large company, there are so many mentions that it is nearly impossible to stay on top of them. We end up speaking with marketers and brand managers or PR agencies who sit down with a list of 30,000 links and they say, "How do I make meaning out of all this?" So our technology really allows you... It quantifies for you in that list of 30,000 links, what percentage of people are saying they like a specific feature of your product or what percent of people are saying they actually like your competitor's product better or really getting down to the opinions of what's being said. Lee: So we could use it to figure out what people are saying about Larry. Larry: Uh oh. Candace: Exactly. That's right. Larry: That's a different dinner gig. Lee: I'm liking this more and more. Candace: The only limitation is that people have to actually be talking about the topic. Lee: Oh don't worry, we've got plenty of info, don't worry. Lucy: So Candace, back to you. We'd love to hear about how you first got into technology. Candace: Ever since I was little, I have been noticing how technology improves our lives every day. My dad was an electrical engineering professor, and so we were always talking about science and technology and new innovations and seeing how the world progressed. And so, I've been thinking about it from a very early age, and went on to get an engineering degree in college and have always done work in my professional career around technology and algorithms and the application of technology. Larry: Oh. Lucy: So as a little add on, what technologies do you think are cool today? Candace: Well, of course our technology. Lee: Of course, you want a list. Candace: I could be honest, that I'm very biased about that. Actually I think there are a couple of things, I think there are some really neat consumer electronics coming out like they talk about 3-D TV or the Nexus One phone. But even maybe a little bit less mainstream, I heard about a technology that a Harvard biologist named Pete Gergen developed in microbial fuel cells, and it sounds like a lot of big words, but essentially what he's developed is a way to harness energy as microbes that decompose organic matter. And what that means is you can basically take a bucket of trash, stick one of his apparati into it and have light, or have enough to charge a cell phone. Stuff like that, if you think about the implications of that for third world countries or differences parts of our lives, I think it's incredible. So there's a lot of good stuff laying around. Larry: Yeah. Wow. I'm ordering one of each. Candace, let me ask this. What is it about being an entrepreneur that turns you on? Talk about that. Candace: I think for me it was all about this particular opportunity. I didn't set out to one day start a company of my own necessarily, and so in this instance I saw a huge opportunity that was so exciting that I wanted to literally drop everything and get this off the ground. I think in general, nothing is more exciting for me than pulling together a team and seeing what we can collectively accomplish. And I think in small companies, you really can see the impact of that. Where I walk into our conference room for a team meeting, and a year and a half ago these people didn't even know each other, and now they're doing things for big brands and big name companies, and really doing things that even the people on their team never knew they could accomplish. Lee: Well and forming those teams and forming something from nothing is really an exciting part of entrepreneurship. Now Candace, you mentioned that your father from a very early age was talking about technology, talking about engineering, and we find that that's very typical, especially for women. That their father or mother played a role in their early sort of sense of technology. Can you tell us a bit more about who else influenced or supported you in your career paths, or role models or mentors? Candace: So I would have to say that number one on that list is actually my husband. Lee: Yay husbands! Lucy: Yay! Candace: His name is Lee Fleming. And you know I was at a breakfast on Friday and there was a female entrepreneur who said, "Well you know, everyone knows the saying 'Behind every good man is a good woman,'" and I say the exact opposite is true as well, especially as it applies to start-ups. Behind every entrepreneur, especially if it's one who is a family, there's got to be a supportive spouse there." And so I think my husband wanted me to do this even more than I did. And so even before day one, when I heard about this opportunity, he's been helping me every step of the way. Quite literally, because he happens to be a professor at Harvard Business School, and he teaches a class on commercializing technologies and innovations, so I get some good coaching over the dinner table. Lucy: That's pretty handy! Candace: Very handy! Other than my parents, of course, who have been so supportive along the way, my co-founder, actually, who is also a professor at Harvard, his name is Gary King. He's the one who invented the algorithms that we've commercialized. So, from day one, he has said, "I think you're the one who should grow this company, I think you can make this happen and I want to work with you to do this." So having someone who believes in you so completely, and stands by you every step of the way, and is so fantastic to work with is a great gift. Lucy: That is really exciting. Lee: I downloaded his paper to read. Candace: Did you read it? Lee: Not yet, it was a little long for me, but I downloaded it for plane reading. Lucy: We just had interviewed somebody about advisory boards, and I'm thinking you've got these great built-in advisory boards. So to switch topics just a smidge from all these wonderful things, what's the toughest thing you've had to do in your career? Candace: It's actually what I'm doing now, but more specifically, starting and growing a successful company. Basically, in 2008 which is when we had the worst economic meltdown since the Depression, is by far the hardest thing that I've ever had to do. Or, at least chosen to do. But, as I'm sitting here, we just finished putting together our financial plan for the year, and I think it's going to be a great year. I feel like we've made it through and we have a lot of momentum. But, the economy has not been necessarily the friend of any entrepreneur, I think, in the last 18 to 24 months. Lee: You're right. Lucy: That's the truth. Lee: It hasn't been good to anyone. Larry: Yeah, well, boy, that's an interesting lead-in to the question I'm going to ask, and that is: If you were sitting down right now with an entrepreneur and you were going to give them some advice, what advice would you give them today? Candace: That's a great question. I would say maybe three things. First, and I mean this both perhaps literally and figuratively, eat your broccoli. Eat your broccoli because it's good for you, and it will make you healthy. But, figuratively, I mean being an entrepreneur, there are a lot of things that you need to do that are good for you even though you may not want to do them. They're good for the company, they're good for your own personal growth, and so I would say don't shy away from those things. The second thing, also I mean both literally and figuratively is to play team sports. I think, literally, go out there and play volleyball and basketball, soccer, because I think playing in a team is actually very much like working in a small company. You have the same small team environment, you need to give and take and you have rules in a company just like you do on a sports team. Learning about leadership and teamwork, I think sports is an incredible way to learn that. And then the last thing is again, both figuratively and literally, put things to bed earlier than you want to. [laughter] By that, I mean definitely get more sleep than you want to get, but metaphorically, don't set perfection as the bar for everything. I think that in many, many cases good is enough. And if I had learned earlier, I think I would have saved myself a lot of time and stress. Lucy: Well, so, my next question is about the characteristics that make you a great entrepreneur. What we just saw in that last answer was one of them is wisdom. [laughter] Lucy: So, perhaps you can, other things that come to your mind when you think about yourself and entrepreneurship. Those characteristics that you think give you an edge. Candace: I think that I'm an optimist. I think entrepreneurs have to be willing to look reality in the face and convince themselves to see the rosy side of it, perhaps. [laughs] You need to say you can be so focused and drive for something even though there are going to be a lot of obstacles in your way. The second thing is I'm not scared of hard work. That's something that I think is crucial to being able to get a company off the ground. I think the last thing is I'm fairly direct and honest. I think when you're working in a small company environment, there's - somewhat thankfully from my perspective - there's not as much politics. You sit in a room with people, you decide things and you get things done. There's not ten layers of approvals. So, I think being straightforward with people and being honest with people really carries you a long way in being successful, particularly in a small group. Lucy: I have to agree with all of the above. When you have that small group, you just have to be really direct and honest. Candace: Limit to cycles. Lucy: Yeah. Candace: That's it. Lucy: It really does. So, Candace, one of our favorite questions is with building start-ups and being an entrepreneur, as you'd mentioned earlier, it's a ton of work. So, how do you bring balance into your personal and professional life? Candace: Yeah, I think this is a great question. As I thought about this, I have, perhaps, an ironic take on this. And, that is I view my family as an enabler of my professional success. I think that I have a fantastic husband, I mentioned earlier. I have two little kids. I have a two-year-old and a six-year-old. I actually started Crimson Hexagon when my two-year-old was two weeks. Lucy: Oh, my goodness! Lee: Oh, my God! Candace: There is no better way to give you perspective back in life than when you come home from a hard day of work and you get tackle-hugged by these two little people before you can even put your briefcase down. [laughs] So, I actually think that, by having a family, it allows me to be successful at work. Because I work just as hard as the next person and just as many hours. But, I think the trick is, even if it's 15 minutes that you sit down and talk with them in a day, you make that time. And, that time gets paid back to you in a thousand different ways that help you in the rest of your life. So, I just think you have to make sure that you spend time on each, even if the time is very little. But, mentally, it's what keeps me balanced. Lucy: Absolutely the case. Those are great ages for kids, just great, full of energy. So, Candace, you've already achieved a lot. What's next for you? Candace: I have achieved some good things, but I don't view myself as being done here. [laughs] I plan to continue running and growing small companies. I think that what we're doing here at Crimson Hexagon is so exciting. This type of activity is something I want to do for a long, long time. Lucy: Crimson Hexagon is exciting. That is just a cool company. And, I feel like I want to make a plug for a Boulder-based company that's one of your partners. Because we have a lot of Boulder listeners here. Room 214 is a partner of Crimson Hexagon. So, we're just excited about that. If you come out here to Boulder, you need to stop by. It would be great to have you. Thank you so much, Candace. We all appreciate your time. I want to remind listeners where they can find this interview. Larry: At W3W3.com as well as NCWIT.org. Lucy: All right. Thank you very much, Candace. We appreciate it. Lee: Yes. Candace: Thank you. Larry: Bye-bye. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Candace FlemingInterview Summary: Data is abundant on the web, and information is free. But meaning is what matters, and uncovering it requires a good deal more than counting keyword mentions across the social web. Crimson Hexagon's technology – based on groundbreaking work conducted at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science – distills meaning about brands, products, services, markets and competitors from the online conversation. Release Date: April 19, 2010Interview Subject: Candace FlemingInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 16:28

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Gail Goodman President, Chair, and CEO, Constant Contact Date: March 16, 2010 Entrepreneurial Heroes Interview with Gail Goodman [intro music] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders and I'm the CEO of National Center for Women and Information Technology or NCWIT. This is our next podcast interview in a series of interviews with women who have started IT companies and/or who are CEOs of start-up companies and the technology spaces. And today, we have Lee Kennedy with us, who is a serial entrepreneur and right now with Bolder Search and also with NCWIT Board of Directors. And Larry Nelson from W3W3 who has just informed us that tomorrow is his eleventh year of his Internet... Larry Nelson: ... Talk radio show. Lucy: Yeah, absolutely. Lee Kennedy: Congratulations, Larry. Larry: Thanks. Lucy: Well, in this interview is very exciting for all of us who send mail out and who know about Constant Contact. We are interviewing Gail Goodman, who is the President, Chairman, and CEO of Constant Contact. And she has done so much, both personally and through her company to really revolutionize the way that businesses reach out and send mail to their stake holders. And really since she's doing Constant Contact, the number of customers has just skyrocketing. NCWIT is a customer. We use it for our newsletters and our campaigns and everything else. So, welcome, Gail, it's good to have you with us. Gail Goodman: Great to be here and thank you for your business. Lucy: Well, you're welcome. Well, we are really eager to hear first, before we start into our entrepreneurial questions a little bit about what's going on with Constant Contact lately? Catch our listeners up a little bit. Gail: Right, for those of you who don't know Constant Contact: Constant Contact is 100 percent focused on helping small businesses, non-profits associations who look great. That's staying connected to customers, clients, members. So, we started with email marketing and that's absolutely our kind of flagship product. But, over the last couple of years, in addition to growing how many customers use Constant Contact, we also added two new products. Event marketing, so to help people run complete closed moved event registration, take money for the event and that whole community advice for business. Lucy: Of course. Gail: And an online survey tool to help people hear back from their customers or members with feedback and learn more about who those folks are, true demographic questions. Today, we have over 325,000 customers around the world who count on our service to stay connected to their most important audiences. And we are just immensely grateful to that group for their business. Lucy: Well, I didn't really know you had an event marketing tool. So, we have events. Gail: That's fabulous. Lucy: I'm going to have to go take a look at it. Gail, you're the CEO of a Tech company, an obviously you're immersed in Tech every day as you think about what Constant Contact is going to be doing in the future. What is it about technology that really interests you and how did you get into a technology company? Gail: Well, I have to say that I had the technology bug pretty darned early. I started using a computer when I was in high school, which to many of the listeners may seem obvious, but when I was in high school, they didn't have personal computers. You had to actually go find a big computer and something that looked like a refrigerator box and actually program on paper tapes and now I'm starting to sound like a dinosaur. Lucy: No, Gail, you're sounding just like Lucy and Larry. [laughter] Gail: But, I just love technology pretty early on and what excited me as I went through my career was not the technology itself, but the problems that it could solve for real people and real businesses. And so, as my career matured, it was all about solving customer problems and that really is what still excites me and makes me get all into the new and emerging technologies. How can this solve a problem that couldn't be solved with a mainframe, with a laptop and now that we have the Internet and mobile devices and it all creates new opportunities to solve problems. Lucy: Well, as you look at technology today, do you have specific technologies that you think are really leading the charge in terms of being innovative. What technologies interest you the most? Gail: As a business person thinking about what we do for our customers. The technology that interests me the most are the social networks and mobile. As a consumer, I'm really interested in the convergence of the smart phone with identity geo targeting and all that that brings together. I think it's consumers, we're just getting so empowered with the iPhone in our hands to do things so dramatically differently. It's like trying to go back and forth with trying to be a consumer and then thinking about what does that means for our business customers, how can they take advantage of that. Lucy: That's definitely the way that you have to think even in your business because your business is all about how consumers use your product. So, if we switch back to you, you started off as a techie and you loved solving problems. What moved you into being an entrepreneur and what is it about entrepreneurship that you love? Gail: The thing that moved me into entrepreneurship was really this combination of wanting to solve customer problems and really feeling like I was ready to earn my own destiny. I had spent a career working for others, sort of frustrated at the pace of what I could do with a pace of change, with the pace of innovation and it just got to the point where it was time to put my money where my mouth was and see if I could do it better than all the people I was thinking I could do it better than. Lucy: Obviously being in a start up that pace is fast enough for you right? Gail: Yeah, and the very interesting challenge for me now is, I joined Constant Contact in '99, there were six people. But, the place was definitely fast enough. Today, we are 625. Lucy: Wow. Gail: And I could hardly call us a start up anymore and how do we just keep that pace of innovation going? How do we keep internal entrepreneurship going? How do we make it easy for people to get things done and make decisions? And I am increasingly challenged to keep solving the same problems I came here to solve. Lucy: That's in interesting topic. You know, we have another interview series called "The Toolbox Series" where I think this idea of, how do you take a startup that has grown to some significant size and keep that innovation, start moving? That would be a very interesting topic. Larry: Yeah, it certainly would. Lee: And that's amazing that you've been there. It'll be 11 years, this year? Gail: Eleven years in April. Lee: Wow. Gail: Me and Larry, we're both doing our 11 year anniversary. [laughter] Larry: Yeah, I'll tell you. I was thinking that, wow. Lucy: Wow. Larry: You know, along the way I'm sure that you had either mentors or role models, or people who helped you out along the way. Well, who would that be that you would pick out that has influenced and supported you in your career path? Gail: I'm going to go with two answers here. Larry: OK. Gail: And one seems just a tiny bit trite. But, my parents really were huge influences here and I think the thing they did for me that is pretty unique, for their generation for women, is they really gave me a huge belief in myself and the confidence that I could do or try anything. And that was really a huge piece of what gave me the confidence to step out from under, you know, the corporate safety net and go alone. Lee: That's wonderful. Larry: Yeah, great. Gail: And then, along the way, you know, my best role models have been my CEO peer mentoring group. So, when I was about two years into this adventure, I joined a group of other venture-backed tech CEOs, who sat down together for a day-and-a-half a quarter and really talked about what we were doing to grow our businesses. You know, the role of the CEO, how to manage the board, how to raise more money. And we helped each other grow into our CEO roles. And so, I would say all of them were role models and I learned something from each and every one of them, because we each brought unique backgrounds and experience sets to the table and created an environment where we could be completely open about the issues and challenges we were facing in our business. Lee: And you sat down each quarter for a day-and-a-half solid? Gail: -huh. Lee: Wow. Lucy: Wow, well, that's pretty intense networking. Lee: Yeah. Lucy: That's awesome. Well, you know, and your statement about your parents, we see that time and time again at NCWIT, that, in fact, encouragement of parents, especially to women, young women, who are interested in technology. As you said, you were interested in computing in high school, at a time when there really wasn't... It was hard to be interested in computing in high school. And that encouragement from your parents, I think, is quite a factor. So, switching gears just a bit, from the encouragement of parents, to something maybe not quite so pleasant. We always like to ask the people we interview the hardest thing they've ever had to do in their career. So, why don't you tell us the most difficult thing? You mentioned working for others and then you started Constant Contact as an entrepreneur; what's the toughest thing you've had to do? Gail: Well, I think the toughest thing I had to do was, you know, really face the fact that Constant Contact might not make it. So, we were venture-backed, the good news is we got some money before the Internet bubble burst. But then, we needed some money after the bubble burst, and money was pretty darn hard to come by. And so, as the cash balance was dwindling and I was counting down how many payrolls I could make, while I was frantically running around the world hat in hand, I needed to write a shutdown plan. And we got within 10 days of pulling the trigger on that. Lucy: Oh! Lee: Wow! And you got funding? Gail: You know, get the executive team in a room, tell them the plan. Tell them we're... You know, at that point, it looked more likely than not, that we were going to shut this thing down. And I think it was... You know, the full employee base never knew how close we got. But, looking around the table at the team who had been working hard every day and saying, "Guys, I think it's over," was the hardest thing I had to do. Larry: How many employees did you have at that time? Gail: More than we should have. [laughter] Lee: Oh, no! Lucy: Wow. Lee: Well, that's a great story. Right? And that it turned out happily ever after this. Larry: Yeah. Lee: So, Gail, we have a lot of young people listening to our podcasts and we would love for you to... If you were sitting here with them, what advice would you give them about entrepreneurship? Gail: Well, the thing I would say, is get a good solid foundation before you strike out on your own. So, get some experience first working for a company, and be very observant about what works and what doesn't work. Leadership style, management style. You know, it is very difficult to be figuring these things out for the first time in an environment where you are, you know, absolutely supposed to be running the place. And as you think about those first sets of jobs, be very thoughtful about the set of experiences you want to get. And I would say, get as close to the customer and the value delivery point as you can. So, if you're in a professional services company, you know, get into the client engagements. If you're in a software product company, get into product management. So, you see how the sausage factory produces a product. And not everything you're going to learn there, you're going to want to take with you, but get some stripes somewhere else. Not only will it give you an experience and guide to your own leadership and management style, I think it'll make you much more fundable, if you're going into a business where you're going to need some other people to vote for you and give you their money. Larry: You listeners out there pay attention to that reply, because I wish I had heard that, before I started my first company. But... Lee: That is. That's sage advice. Larry: So, Gale, you talked about your parents, the CEO mentoring group, and so on. Getting right into you, what are some personal characteristics of yours that have made you a successful entrepreneur? Gail: So, I'll highlight four that I think are pretty important. And I'll start with tenacity. I just refuse to fail. [laughter] Gail: Every obstacle was a challenge to be taken on. The second kind of directly relates to that which is I am an analytic animal. So, when I see challenges I don't react to them emotionally, I react to them analytically. Let's diagnose it. Let's do the root cause analysis. And let's fix it. The third thing is that I am a continuous learner. I understand that I don't know what I don't know, and I'm not afraid to get help from others. Talk, you know, peers... One of my first reactions to a problem we would have in the business is who might have solved this problem already? And how do I get access to them to figure out how they solved it? So, I'm always reading books. I am always talking to others. I am always trying to pick people's brains. And the final piece and probably the hardest piece, for me, because it wasn't natural, is I think it's important as an entrepreneur that you be immensely open to the feedback of others and recognize the weaknesses in yourself so you can complement them with the team. And so I ask for, and on a good day listen to a lot of feedback. Lucy: Well, and I think that, I'd add a fifth characteristic that you didn't mention. You have a great sense of humor. A great laugh, I have to think that that helps get through the day as well. Gail: If you start taking yourself too seriously you're in deep trouble. Larry: Yep. Lucy: Yeah. We think so too. We don't take Larry seriously. [laughter] Larry: We'll talk offline, Gail. Lucy: So speaking of your day. You have a lot of work in your day obviously running a successful company like Constant Contact. And yet you have a personal life too. We like to ask how people bring balance into their life knowing full well that perhaps most people are totally unbalanced when they're in the situation that you're in. But, we find that they amazingly have coping strategies so they do have a personal life as well. So, why don't you tell us about how you bring balance there? Gail: Yeah. Just a couple of things. I have so many interests outside of work that I have been unwilling to give up because of that tenacity. So, that's really helped. So, I happen to be a tennis addict as a player and watcher. The good thing about tennis is you've got to schedule it. So, you've got a bunch of other people waiting for you on a court, you don't blow it off. So, it happened to be a very good hobby because other people were waiting for me. To all the tennis players out, all I need to say is doubles with three people is really not as much fun. And I never said, wow, I'm not going to have that much time for that this quarter. I'm not going to sign up for the contract with the ladies. I just did it. And so that formed some anchors of things that got me out of the office and got me moving and fun. The second thing is I have always prioritized the people who mean the most to me. My family, my friends, you cannot let those relationships go. They are the most valuable thing in your life. Someone once told me that story, just think about the world from, sitting on your porch in your 80s, looking back on your life. Very few people are going to say I wish I had spent more time working. The number one thing you hear is that I wish I had spent more time with my family. And you never get a chance to go back and do that. So, I've always been very clear that while on a given day a work priority might overwhelm a family thing. As I look at weeks and months, I can't let that happen more than occasionally. Lucy: So, it's an integration process as opposed to this perfect idea of balance. Larry: Yes. Lucy: Yes. Gail: Yeah. You never get the perfect idea of balance. But you've got to keep the priorities in place. Lucy: Absolutely. Well, Gail, we have loved talking to you, and it's been so interesting. We have one last question. You've achieved so much. Give us a little insight into what's next? What's next with you? What's next with Constant Contact? Gail: So, we at Constant Contact feel like we are just getting started. We are thrilled to serve 325,000 customers. There are 27 million small businesses in the US. And when you add non profits and trade associations, the number gets up to 40 million. And we think those small organizations succeed based on customer intimacy and relationships. And our vision is nothing less than to help them revolutionize that success formula. And so we are on the march to a million, and just unbelievably excited about it because small business is the backbone of the American economy. It employs half of the private workforce and has typically been the very first to hire coming out of recession. So, literally our mission for this year is to re-energize America's small business and pull the United States out of the recession. Lucy: We're behind you. Lee: Hallelujah. Lucy: We're behind you. Larry: Wow. Gail, I just wanted to thank you for joining us today. Gail Goodman of Constant Contact. And this is Lucy, Lee, and Larry. You know the three Ls. It's really our pleasure. Your interview will be up on ncwit.org. It will also be on w3w3.com. And we'll have it on a podcast, a blog, and that social networking stuff you were talking about. So, thanks for joining us today. Gail: That's great. See you all on Twitter. Lucy: All right. Thank you Gail. Gail: Bye-bye. Lucy: Bye. Lee: Bye Gail. [exit music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Gail GoodmanInterview Summary: Gail Goodman joined Constant Contact in 1999, when the company had six employees. Today it has 625 employees, with more than 300,000 customers worldwide. Release Date: April 16, 2010Interview Subject: Gail GoodmanInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 20:02

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Lena West CEO, xynoMedia Technology Date: November 17, 2008 Lena West: xynoMedia Lee Kennedy: Hi, this is Lee Kennedy, board member for National Center for Women and Information Technology or NCWIT and co-founder of Tricalyx. And this is part of a series of interviews that we are having with fabulous entrepreneurs, women who have started IT companies and a variety of sectors. All of whom have great stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs. And with me is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi Larry. Larry Nelson: Hi, I'm glad here to be today because the topic that we are discussing is something of high interest for us. w3w3.com, we are an Internet based radio show. We started in 1998 and we really like to look into all of the new areas. And I have a feeling that Lena will really take us into that direction. Lee: We'll great and just to get right to it, we are interviewing Lena West. Lena is the CEO and chief strategist of xynoMedia technology. It is a New York based firm that helps high growth company leverage the power of social media, blogs, podcasts and online communities. She is a real expert in social networking, very active blogger and she is involved in NCWIT entrepreneurial lines and regularly gives back to society. So welcome Lena. Lena West: Thank you so much. Good to be here. Lee: Great. Well, Lena, why don't you take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about xynoMedia. Lena: As you mentioned, we are a social media strategy and development company. And I will favor that fancy terminology for. We hoped companies to just try to make sense of everything that they are hearing about social media and really take it down or not and relate it to the brand and to their company and figure out what is the best way to actually use the tool to meet our business and marketing objective and we take it a step further, we don't just provide the strategy. Once the client determines that "Hey, that's brought them on to podcasts" or "it is better to launch an online community and start a vicinity network." We actually build those plans and tools, so we build online community, so we build blinded blogs. That in essence is what we do. Larry: Well, I tell you what, I'm really curious. I know there are all kinds of cool things out there, soft ware wise, and technology wise. How did you first and when did you first get into technology? Lena: [laughs] Oh boy, this is... Look, it's a cool story that almost involved me getting tossed out of my parents' house, actually [laughs]. You wouldn't know to look at that lovely head shot of me that I was in college when I decided that college just wasn't going to work for me; this is after my parents paid the tuition for the year [laughs]. And I left college and I went to work. I was in a pre law program in school and I actually left college and my parents just part of it, and I went to work at a law firm and that just added insult to the wound. But while I was at the law firm, this was pre Windows days and I know that all the paralegals and secretaries would come to me and they would always ask me to help them find their lost file, because I was the only one who could ever remember the dot.form in the dot command. And I said to myself at that time that this is really a good skill and I was too young to really know what to do with it. But I knew that this technology thing, I am good at it. And to make it shorter, I ended up working as secretary at IBM because I figured I'd rather be a secretary in IBM rather than working in law. Because being in IBM will get me closer to technology and one day something went wrong with my computer and they sent out a technician and it was a woman and I asked her "Hey, how did you get this job?" and she told me "Well, you got to know this, and you got to know that." So I went to this company and I registered to be a consultant and, you know, made a couple of... I was very generous with my experience and took some creative license with experience on my application. One thing led to another, and I started doing technical support. And then I realized there was more money to be made being a consultant. And once I became a consultant, I realized there was more money to be made in the long term being a business owner. And here we have it. Lee: Well, that is a great story. Lena: Yeah, but when I left college, my parents were really not happy. [laughs] Lee: Yeah, I can imagine. Well, you know, you are not the only successful entrepreneur though that's left college. You have got Bill Gates and Michael Dell, that, you are following in their footsteps. Lena: Hey! Lee: So Lena, tell us, it was clear that you liked technology, but why are you an entrepreneur, and what is it about being an entrepreneur that makes you tick? Lena: The reason that I am an entrepreneur, I would say, is bit of a sad story. My grandmother, when I was in that first year of college... my grandmother, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she ultimately ended up losing her battle to that that same year that she was diagnosed. My mother is a retired medical professional. And I saw, even how working in the medical field, she couldn't get the time off that she needed to go and visit my grandmother. My grandparents lived in another state. I mean, it was just hard for her to go visit. My mother really struggled with that and, I think, till this day, she had some bad feelings about that. And, she just couldn't spend as much time as she liked because she had a full time job. And even at the age of 18, first year in college, I said to myself... I said, you know, "I am going to build the kind of life and the kind of business where I don't have to worry about whether I am going to work or whether I am going to tend to my family's needs. I am never going to ever have to make that choice. The choice is always going to be up to me, not up to some someone else." And that's really why I became an entrepreneur. Because, I figured, if my family ever needed me, I wanted to be able to pack up my business and go. And that's what I did. Larry: Fantastic. Well, now, here we have almost a lawyer to a techie, and I would guess along the way there has been many people who have a big influence on you, and maybe, even mentored you. Who would be somebody that really was the turning point in your career path? Lena: You know, I would have to say that it was before my career even got started. Although, you know, don't get me wrong, there have been many, many, many women that have just really taken me under their wing and have given me advice - Adrian Lopez, Karen Wilson; I mean you name it. But I would have to say it was... I think it was maybe my ninth grade teacher, social studies teacher, a woman named Barbra Deller. I will never forget. I was always very smart, very intelligent; always did well. I noticed that when I went to my first year in high school, which where I come from it was ninth grade, I noticed that I had really started to take my intelligence for granted, and I started to act out in order to be cool. As a result my grades started to suffer. And I remember Miss Deller pulling me aside one day after class, and she said, "You know, Lena..." She says, "Its OK for you to be smart. Being smart is cool too." And I really thought about that. That impacted me. And so I said, "Yeah, being smart is cool." And I think that was the turning point. I think had she not said that to me...maybe someone would have taken the time to rein me in and say, "Hey, you are too smart to be acting a little nutty like this." But it was then that I thought about, "Wow, you know, I am going to blow up my whole high school deal here because I want to be cool with my friends." Lee: Boy, it's so great to hear stories like that, that teachers have made such an impact on your life. Lena: Oh, yeah. I mean, every time I look back on my life, I think... it was Dr. Phil that says: "You have seven critical decisions in your life." And I think that was one of them, to listen to her and recognize that, "Hey, I am smart. I aced all these tests. I am really good at school, and I don't want to mess that up for myself." Lee: So when we take a look at all the things you have done in your career, what would you look back and say was probably the toughest thing you had to do? Lena: Wow, that's a good question - the toughest thing that I had to do? Probably, I would have to say was take my company and really go full time with it. I ran this company part time for many number of years before I went full time with the company. And it was really hard to take that leap of faith and get out there and say to the world, "I am going to probably eat a lot of Ramen noodles. I am probably not going to be able afford to do a lot of things. But this is my vision and this is what I want." And those were tough times and those were lean times. I mean, I remember them well. Not fondly, but well. Lee: And that's good for people, for our listeners, to hear that because so many people that are just starting their careers or just starting to open up a new business... you know, you hear so many success stories, but a lot of people that have made it had to put in a lot of hard hours and, it didn't come quickly or easily. Lena: It's not easy, because ultimately everything rides on you. And if you are not... I have always had the spirit where I am just like, "Whatever it takes, let's make it happen". And if that's not who you are, then being an entrepreneur may not be for you. There are tough times. I mean there are choices between: Do I pay the electric pay or do I pay my car insurance, so that I can go meet clients. It's really tough. But those tough times, they build character. I know that's cheesy and cliche, but they do. And they make you grateful for the good times that come. If you are doing the work that you love and you are following your heart, and you are passionate about what you do... I mean I would get up every single day and talk to people about social media in the streets for free. Lee: Wow! Larry: Wow. Boy, that's a great segue into our next question here. Right now, if you are sitting face-to-face with someone who said, "I want to be an entrepreneur" what advise would you give them? Lena: Understand that it's not just about the service that you are providing. There is a distinct and huge chasm between understanding the service that you provide and being able to do that task really, really well, or understanding your product and understanding your product really, really well and running a business. Two totally different things. You have to be able to run a business. Lee: That is great advice. Because in the end, if you don't run the business well, it doesn't matter how good your product is. Lena: Well, the business runs... you get behind on your paperwork. Set up your systems, you know, find a good bookkeeper; find a good accountant; find a good lawyer, and really understand the business side of business. Lee: So Lena, probably the toughest question we have, because just being an entrepreneur is all encompassing, it's a 7x24x365 job. How do you bring balance in your personal life and professional life? Lena: You know it's so funny; it's really hard to do that, especially because I work in social media. And I am very, very clear. There is a very clear line for me between my home life and my professional life. And I was just telling someone, I was on a conference call earlier, and I said there are probably eight people in the world who know where I live. And that's on purpose. Because I do want to have a line. And it's difficult when your business is to be social. But, it's a matter of setting priorities. It's a matter of understanding that if you are not well, nothing happens. If you are not happy, the business doesn't move. It's a matter of understanding your own personal energy. I mean, I will give a quick forward example: I am really an introvert. And if you were to meet me, you would say "Wow, she's friendly, she's personable," people seem to like her and people tell me I'm friendly. Lee: Oh get out of here! Lena: But I am really an introvert. I don't' get my energy from spending time with other people. I get my energy from being at home. And when I first learned that, I realized, oh OK, being in groups I like it. But it's a source of stress for who I really am. So I make sure I build in alone time. And I take four vacations a year. Larry: that's fantastic. Lee: I like your schedule. And Larry and I were just saying we are both introverts. So we get it. We both can be outgoing and sociable, but I get drained with too many social activities. Lena: And I take a silent retreat once a year. Every year for my birthday. Lee: Wow. Larry: A Silent retreat. Lena: I am working up my way to two weeks. Wish me luck. Larry: Fantastic. Now I have to say Lena, I know you are heavy in a social media, or should I have said xynoMedia. But nonetheless, let me ask this question, what's next? What are you going to go after in this next round? Lee: What's next for me personally is that I am writing a book. And I would say what's next for the company is we are at the tail end of probably a two and a half year process of rebranding the company. So we are going to be launching a new brand soon. It's going to be very, very exciting. It's something that we've waited a long time for. My team has been absolutely very patient. And we are looking forward to taking the next decade with a new outlook and a fresh perspective. Larry: That's fantastic. And I'm just finished a book also. We are in the final editing stage, hopefully. And it's called "Mastering Change." And that has taken me more than two years, so you mentioned the time frame for your rebranding. Lena: Yeah, I think one of the things that you have to understand as an entrepreneur is that things are going to take the time that they take. Aside from you being complacent, it does you no good to try to rush the schedule. I mean I wanted to rush this rebrand. I really wanted to get it done. And I kept talking about and talking about it. And eventually I got tired hearing myself talk about it so I didn't even mention it anymore it. It was just; it became just a source of stress. And things just take their time. And as long as - my friend said this to me, this is so fabulous and I live by this-as long as you make a measurable amount of progress in a reasonable amount of time, that's it. Larry: Very good. Lee: Thank you Lena. Lena: Get off the treadmill of trying to push and get things done and beat the competition. Things take as long as they are supposed to take. Lee: They do. Larry: That's right. Lee: Well Lena thank you so much for interviewing with us today. We've enjoyed it. Larry: I think this is fantastic. And by the way, this interview will be available not only in the form of a podcast but also go to ncwitt.org or w3w3.com. Listen 24/7 and please pass this interview along to others that you think would be interested. Lena: Great, thanks I appreciate the interview. [music] Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Lena WestInterview Summary: From blogging to Facebook, Lena West, CEO of xynoMedia, helps hi-growth companies make sense of everything they're hearing about social media and the best ways to use these online outlets to their advantage. Release Date: November 17, 2008Interview Subject: Lena WestInterviewer(s): Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 17:11

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Jessica Jackley Co-Founder, kiva.org Date: September 29, 2008 Jessica Jackley: Kiva Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO for the National Center for Women and Information Technology or NCWIT. This is one in a continuing series of interviews that we are doing with women who have started either IT companies or organizations that are based on information technology. We are very excited that we have Jessica Flannery here today from Kiva to talk to us. Also with me is Larry Nelson, from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: It's really a pleasure to be here and I must say we are getting tremendous feedback from not only adults who are having their children listen to some of these interviews, but some of the employers that are looking for more women and more technical people to get into the business which is sometimes a very good step to becoming an entrepreneur. Lucy: Also with me today is Lee Kennedy who is a Director of NCWIT and a serial entrepreneur herself. Right now, her current company is called Tricalix. Hi Lee. How are you? Lee Kennedy: Hi Lucy. Hi Larry. It is so good to be here. Larry: It is. We are the three L's, right? Lucy, Lee and Larry or something. Lucy: Or something. Welcome Jessica. We are very happy to have you with us today and the topic that we are going to talk about, I mean, you're fabulous social entrepreneur, and I think that this whole area of micro-finance and what Kiva is doing is just fascinating. And as part of this interview, we all went and spent time on the Kiva site and just really got lost in all the wonderful stories that are our there. So welcome. Jessica Flannery: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Lucy: Well, for our listeners, I'm sure everybody knows but it bears repeating that Kiva is the first peer to peer micro loan website. It really demonstrates how the Internet can be used to facilitate these meaningful types of connections between people who want to lend money and entrepreneurs all over the world especially in developing countries, how we can all help each other really move the economies ahead. It's a really fascinating website. So Jessica, why don't you just spend a minute and tell us a bit about Kiva. Jessica: Sure. You said it very, very well and very concisely. We are the world's first person to person micro lending website so anybody in the world can go onto the site, browse business profiles and entrepreneur profiles really I should say. Whether that person is a farmer or selling small goods in their village or a seamstress or a restaurant owner, there are all different kinds of small business. And you can lend as little as $25 to that entrepreneur and over time you get updates on that business and then you get paid back. Larry: Wow! Lucy: Well, and Kiva is a fairly young organization. I read someplace that you started a bit of a hobby website and it just exploded. Jessica: Yeah. It's been a very, very busy last four years. Four years ago, I learned about micro-finance and decided that's what I want to do. I quit another job and I went to East Africa for a few months to see it up close and personal. While I was there it was impossible not to be deeply moved by the stories of success of people that I was meeting. People who had used often just a $100 to change their lives and lifted their families out of poverty. So, I became really excited about these stories and wanted to share them with my own friends and family. And as I did that, my husband Matt and I kept asking not just "Oh, this is great. Micro-finance works, but wow, how do we, and our friends and family, how do we enable people to lend money directly to these individuals we're meeting?" So, it started out with a very specific way, very specific context with individuals who we had met face to face in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda who we wanted to help. We wanted to participate in their amazing stories, and we wanted to see them get to the next level. So what we did was basically Matt came to visit me during his time in East Africa, and then he went back home, built our website. We emailed our friends and family and said "Hey, we have seven businesses in Uganda that we'd like to lend a total of $3,000 to. Do you want to pitch in?" Then overnight that money came in and we sent that along to Uganda. We had a six month kind of beta round with these seven entrepreneurs in Uganda. After the six months they had repaid, we took the word beta off of our website and that launched us. And that was just in October of '05, so not even quite three years ago. Our first year was $500,000 a month, the second year was $13.5 million more, and today we're just around $45 million, and we haven't even finished our third year. So it's grown very rapidly. Lucy: And you have an incredible payback on the loans, incredible payback percent. Jessica: Yeah, it's in a high 90 percentage. That's representative of a micro finance alone, not just our site. Lucy: But wow, that's just and incredible history and such a good cause as well. One of the things that I noticed there was a Soft-tech video on YouTube that I watched that I thought was very interesting. Where you mentioned that you all created the tool that Kiva uses really to match lenders and entrepreneurs without really knowing how the world would use it to your previous story. This gets us to our first question which is around technology, and I thought you would have a really interesting spin on this. You know, how in general do you see technology helping missions like those of Kiva? Slightly different than potentially a four-profit business but you have incredibly interesting uses of technology. So what do you see in the future? Jessica: Kiva does a lot of different things, but our mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. The real key there is to connect people. The money transfer is very interesting, and technology obviously helps that happened, but what really we care about is this connectivity. Loans happen to be a great tool for poverty alleviation as well as connectivity. I mean, if you lend me something and I have it and I'm fully giving it back to you, you're going to pay a little bit more attention usually, than if you just donate something and I tell you how that's going forever and ever. That back and forth communication is obviously free or a lot less expensive. It's quick. It's real time. You can see on the other side of the planet how this person is waiting right now today for that $200 that's going to allow them to start their business. So there are all these elements, but then technology makes it faster, more efficient, less expensive and just overall easier to have that human connection happen. Very specifically while I said the money is not the point, it's a great tool for a lot of things. For example, we've had a lot of help from great technology leaders out there that we've been able to leverage. So PayPal, we're the first non-profit to have PayPal generously agree to provide free payment transactions. So we have literally zero variable costs for sending these little bits of money back and forth all around the planet every day. Lucy: Well, one thing too, I'm a technologist so I'll get off this question in just a minute. I know Larry and Lee are looking at me like "Let's move off the technology." But I do have one more thing to observe here, because this is a different kind of interview than we've done. There is a whole growing area called ICT for D which is Information and Communication Technology for Developing World and one of the things that I have read that you either have done or will do is you make an offline browser so that people can conserve power on their computer, sort of a low energy kind of browser so they don't have to be always plugged in. That's an example of the type of technology around ICT for D that you have to start thinking about the climates and the situation and the resources that people have all around the world. Jessica: It's been very, very interesting for us to see, even how sometimes we'll have really wonderful generous lenders say, "Hey, I also want to donate financially or otherwise." And let's say they send a great batch of brand new video cameras for us to send out to the field. Well, sometimes actually a lower tech solution is better, because of the technology that's available in the field. So maybe we don't need the highest quality photos, the highest res photos, maybe a lower tech solution is better. That's been interesting to watch, just figuring out really what's the best and what's the most appropriate tools to get the job done. Lee: That's exactly right. Lucy: So, we normally ask what it is that you love about being an entrepreneur, but since you're working with entrepreneurs it would be great to hear about the stories from the entrepreneurs out of Kiva, as well as what it is that love about this whole environment and the entrepreneurship. Jessica: OK. This is a really good question. What I found is the idea of being an entrepreneur, I think that's really attractive to a lot of people. I think there are some, I don't want to put value judgments on it, good or bad, better or worse, but I think sometimes it has to do with freedom or this idea of being your own boss, or something like that. For me, my introduction to business and my entrepreneurship at all was in Africa seeing people who were gold hunters, or subsistence farmers, or fishermen, or people who were basically entrepreneurship to them was doing what they needed to do every day to survive. It was definitely not an option. They had to do the next thing, figure out the next step to get closer and closer to their goal to find food, and they could survive that day. It was very hand-to-mouth sort of entrepreneurship. It wasn't what we usually think of in Silicon Valley as entrepreneurship being super innovated perhaps or anything like that, but in context it was as innovative as anything else in Silicon Valley would have been, and as much entrepreneurship as anything else that you would see in other places of the world. For me, it's funny. I guess yet that it's true, when you look back at what we've done in Kiva the last four years, great! We have been social entrepreneurs, but we didn't go out thinking, I definitely thought over the years, over the last few years, "Oh, social entrepreneurship. How great! I want to do something like that." Then what happened is you have to get specific. You have to start with something specific. So, we started to do Kiva, a very, very specific mission of Kiva, and then retroactively we're like, "Oh, yeah. I guess that's what we're doing. It's pretty entrepreneurial, isn't it?" It came down to, "We have this mission, and we're going to do whatever we need to do everyday to make it happen. We're going to be scrappy if we need to. We're going to iterate. We're going to put things out there that maybe aren't even perfect. We're going to keep moving, and everyday say, 'What can we do next to meet our goals?'" That's what it felt like to me to be entrepreneurial. I think it's really been informed by the people that originally inspired us in the first place, and these micro-entrepreneurs all over the world. Lucy: You know what? That's just what entrepreneurs do. Everyday they're looking around, trying to figure out what they can do better. Do you have a story or two that you can share with some of the entrepreneurs that have taken loans and been successful, and then paid the loans off? Jessica: Sure. I mean there are so, so many. It's actually one of the hardest questions I get, because really I mean every one of them is amazing. If you want an amazing success story, I can tell you for example there was a woman that really was one of the very first people I ever met in East Africa. She did such amazing stuff. She had started one business, like a charcoal selling business. She had gotten them $800. For that initial business, she did like the equivalent of what a multi-national corporation would do, like all the principals were there. She started the one business, and then she diversified. Then she expanded, not from her local market, she went to markets in other trading centers and other villages. She extended beyond her geographic region. She started five other small businesses of all different types. I mean really things that you really wouldn't think would be related. What she did was she got practice, and then she got very good at seeing market needs and seeing opportunities. So, she had the capitol after time, and she was able to say, "Huh." I think of a very small caring business that you could start with $200 or $300. I think that's what made it. So she did that, and she did the next thing, and the next thing. She just blew me away, because you knew that had she just been dealing in another environment with bigger numbers, she would be the head of a huge multi-national corporation that was doing all sorts of different things really well. So, people like that just always blow me away. I would say truly, it sounds like a bit of a cheesy answer, but the real truth is any story that you read on the Kiva site, there's something to learn, there's something to appreciate, and there's something good. I think say, "Hey! Good job there, " to the entrepreneurs for doing it, because each person is taking a risk even just in accepting a loan, and putting themselves out there and saying, "I'm going to try. I'm going to try to do things differently. I'm going to try and make my life better, and life for my family better." Just taking advantage of that opportunity is something I think should really be applauded, and in and of itself is really a triumph and a great thing, a great thing to see happen. So, that's the hardest question to answer, because all of the entrepreneurs that you can see, I truly find inspirational in something. Lucy: Well, thank you for sharing that. That really is inspirational. Lee: Well, the other thing, and I'm sure somebody has already tumbled to this, there's a business book in this. When you said that she was making all the right entrepreneurial business moves, there's got to be a lot of nuggets of wisdom in there. Larry: You had mentioned offline Jessica, that you are involved with Ashoka? Jessica: Well, yes. I mean, I have found a lot of inspiration in Ashoka over the years, and sort of been introducing the idea of social entrepreneurship through Ashoka. Additionally, he has been honored with the Ashoka Fellowship very recently. We're really excited to be part of that community. Larry: Congratulations! Let me get on with another question here. Who has been either a role model or a mentor in your career, in your life? Jessica: Oh, my goodness! Now, that's the hardest question. I feel like I have been so blessed and so surrounded by encouragers. I mean, can I say like my top five? Larry: OK. Jessica: My parents first and foremost have always given me... Actually, it was really funny. I watched the Emmys last night. I actually don't have a television, but I was with and brother and sister-in-law in L.A., and we were watching the Emmys a little bit. She was saying something funny. She was like, "Thanks to my mom and dad for giving me confidence, that was to the portion that was my looks and ability." It was like "that's what my parents said." My parents first and foremost made it without question an obvious thing, that I could do anything I wanted to in the world. So, that was kind of the foundational piece in a very supportive family. There's been a few others. When I heard Dr. Hamadias speak, his story spoke to me like no others had at that point. That's what propelled me to quit my job and go off and try to figure out micro-finance for myself, and try to do something like what he did, like walk around meet people, listen to their needs, and help. So, he gave me a huge inspiration. Then I guess, the other person I'll mention is Brian Reynolds actually gave me that opportunity to go. He is the Founder and Executive Director of a really great organization called "Village Enterprise Fund." They give $100 grants to entrepreneurs for business creation. They really start people on the very first string of the economic ladder. These are actually folks who are doing such risky things like their systems filing that "If it doesn't rain, everything is lost." Really, really small businesses, who their commissioners wouldn't take a loan probably because they would be not in the right position to do so. Their organization is amazing. I basically met with Brian right around the time I decided I was going to figure out a way to work in micro-finance. He really gave me that opportunity. He listened to me, kind of met me where I was and said, "Hey." Even though I had no skills that I could really name. I had studied philosophy and poetry undergrad. I had done event planning, and administrative things in my job. I really didn't have a lot to go on to say "look, this is why you should hire me, and let me go do micro-finance," but he gave me that chance. On that trip. out to East Africa with Village Enterprise Fund, that's what changed my life, and that's where we had the ideas for Kiva. So, I am absolutely grateful for him, among many, many other in my life over the last decade. There's a lot of people. Lee: Well, that's the good thing about entrepreneurship as well that there are lots of other good people around to encourage you, and to offer wisdom. One piece of wisdom that we've been getting lots of interesting answers too on this particular interview series is the toughest thing you've ever had to do. So, we're curious. What is the toughest thing so far, that you've had to do in your career? Jessica: That is a really good question. I would say without a doubt that it has been...really tough to... you know when you do something that you care about so much, and also something that is like with the social mission I think, it becomes your baby. It becomes like your...I don't know there all these analogies, your right arm, you just feel so attached. It has been a challenge I think to do the work life balance thing in any way because you just feel so driven, so consumed by it, and you want to spend all your waking hours on it, but that can be unhealthy and actually lead to burn out and that sort of thing. So finding the right balance has been probably the biggest challenge and also being removed enough to make objective decisions. You know, it's always a challenge when you are so in love with the work that you get to do. Lee: So speaking of personal and professional balance what do you do to bring balance with all the entrepreneurs you're trying to help, and the changes on the website, how do you manage that? Jessica: Well, I think it's just about kind of knowing what your priorities are and knowing what your boundaries are of what you can control and what you can't and then just working away. I think it is just a daily reminding and daily recalibration saying, "OK, here is what we are about. Here's what we can do. Here's what we can't do and let's just keep moving forward." I think another trick too is just checking yourself often to make sure you are not making decisions others fear or panic in any way. We haven't really... we're an interesting state where we haven't had a competitors per se really, and we don't even think that way. But if we were forced to look at other kind of collaborative organizations out there as competitors, even if we saw them as such, I think it would be the wrong move to be driven to make any sort of decisions, or move to out of the place of fear. Just like it is in life, just kind of knowing who you are, and what you're about, knowing who you're not and just doing that, like the trying to respond to what else is out there or what someone else is doing. I think staying true and pure to your own mission is what it is about. It will make you stay sane. Larry: You have actually kind of covered part of the question I was going to ask you and that is, you've done so many things Jessica and you work with all kinds of people around the world but if you were right now sitting down in front of a young potential entrepreneur, what advice would you give them? Jessica: OK, I have the privilege of getting to do this quite a bit. This is the number one thing I would say, two things. Follow whatever you are really passionate about. It can be something that doesn't make a lot of sense like what do you do when we were passionate about the stories, how do you follow that? We loved them, we celebrated them, we read them ourselves, we laughed, we cried, we just got into those stories and then by sharing those stories, the thing that we are passionate about with the people that we were passionate about, our friends and family, that led to some really great stuff. So just follow as best you can, the stuff that you are passionate about would be number one. Two, if you're going to do something and start something and you really believe that's kind of what you were meant to do next, I would say don't be afraid to start small. In fact, that is really the only way to begin. I just finished my MBA at Stanford. I can't say enough good things about that place and that community. It was amazing. Additionally, it's a place where it is easy to think big very quickly and say "let's go change the world in these huge huge ways and let's have..." you know you don't want to start something unless it's scalable and unless it is going to touch three million people in its first two years or whatever. Easy to say think big or go home and what's your plan for scalability? You need to know that right now. I would say to a budding entrepreneur, don't be afraid, to be very, very specific about what you want to do, and how you want to begin. You should definitely think long term, too. But goodness, it's not a bad thing to start small, and in fact I really really believe that is kind of the way you have to do it and just do a little plug. There's a wonderful man who I would consider a mentor and certainly someone I have looked up to and learned a lot from. His name is Paul Polak, and he wrote a book called "Out of Poverty." He really talks a lot about being in contact like designing whatever you are designing, particularly if it's a program, or a service, or a product to serve the poor, go be with the people that you want to serve. Go get to know them as individuals and design things for individuals not this group of statistic of statistics or the masses. Go meet real people, design for them, start with the, serve them, and then see how you can grow things. That would be my recommendation, don't be afraid to start small and be really passionate about what you are doing because that's the way good things happen. Lucy: Dare I say that that I am old and wizened woman but you know your advice about starting small and don't be afraid to do that, it feels a lot like something I've come to view as being true. You just often don't know what the next turn is going to be. You have to live it a while, and see how things change and mature, and then be opportunistic about which way things are going to go because you often don't see the end. Jessica: Oh, yes and you can't. Lucy: You can't. Jessica: You actually probably sometimes cannot see the next step. It is totally impossible until you make the first one. Lucy: That's fine and that's actually part of the fun, isn't it? Larry: It is part of the fun. It's also by the way a big part of the book that I'm just finishing. Lucy: Oh, you had to plug your book. Larry: "Master and change," yes. Lucy: You had to plug your book. Larry: Oh well. Lucy: Well so I think we have a book here. So I have to ask you though, is there such a big about entrepreneurism and Kiva about teaching the basic elements of entrepreneurship? Jessica: No, not yet, but I think there are about 20 books we can write with them, different angles, different experiences, Web 2.0, the power of connecting people, what have we learned about business from the entrepreneurs out there? There's a lot of potential. Lucy: Oh, absolutely. I look forward to it. Jessica: Yeah, me too. Lucy: You've already really achieved a lot. It's quite inspirational to talk to you and kiva is just such a great organization. What's next for you? We just talked about how sometimes you can't see around the corner, do you have any long term vision that you want to share with our listeners about what's next? Jessica: No, I don't, but I will say that something that's been crazy is just this feeling that... I mean this is like my life dream. You read my favorite business school. I would say it was from three years ago. I would say it was basically someday maybe maybe I will get to be a part of something like this. I feel like the luckiest person in the world and to think that there could be other things in the future just blows my mind. I feel overwhelmed even thinking about it but overall in the most positive way because I already feel like this is my life. If my life ended tomorrow, I would be very a really thankful, happy person because I feel like I've gotten to see my dream kind of come true. Everything else is icing on the cake. What I am trying to do is to stay open to possibility, and learn, and read, and talk to people, and stay open to observing what is going on out there. I am thankful for kiva, and I am thankful for whatever the future hold, but yeah I'll let you know when I know. Larry: All right. Lucy: That has to be the most inspirational thing I have ever heard. I mean just to hear the passion in your voice and the excitement, it gives me goose bumps. I'm happy for you. I hope other people benefit from all the work that you are doing. Jessica: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I just feel very very lucky. Larry: Wow, Jessica I want to thank you for joining us today. This was marvelous plus. Jessica: Thank you. Man 1: By the way you listeners out there, would you pass this interview along to others who you think would be interested. We will make sure that we have a website link to kiva. Say your website. Jessica: It's www.kiva.org. Larry: Sounds wonderful. This has just been great here we are with the National Center for Women and Information Technology. You are doing some great stuff by bringing these messages out for people who are doing wonderful things. Thanks. Lucy: Well thanks and listeners can find these interviews at www.ncwit.org and at w3w3.com. Larry: You bet. Lucy: So thank you very much. Larry: Thank you. Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Jessica JackleyInterview Summary: Jessica is a remarkable social entrepreneur who is Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of www.kiva.org -- the first peer-to-peer micro-lending website. Kiva connects lenders with entrepreneurs from the developing world, empowering them to rise out of poverty. Release Date: September 29, 2008Interview Subject: Jessica JackleyInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 25:02

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Lee Kennedy CEO and Co-Founder, Tricalyx, Inc. Date: September 17, 2008 Lee Kennedy: TriCalyx [music] Larry Nelson: This is Larry Nelson with w3w3.com, Colorado's voice of the technology community. We link people's organization to unique and valuable resources. And we are at a very valuable resource today. We're here at the National Center for Woman and Information Technology, NCWIT, and of course we've got the boss here, Lucy Sanders. Lucy Sanders: Hi, Larry. Welcome. Larry: And you've got a very special interesting guest. Lucy: That's right. Lee Kennedy, welcome. Lee Kennedy: Thank you. Lucy: CEO of TriCalyx and serial entrepreneur at that, but here's what we like also about Lee, she's also on the NCWIT Board of Directors and gives that a lot of her personal time and woman in IT entrepreneurship, so extremely excited to be interviewing you today. Larry: And I'm sure everybody knows, Lucy you are the CEO of NCWIT. Lucy: I guess that's right. On any given day. Larry: On any given day. Lucy: On any given day. Larry: You've got a great team here too. Wonderful board and the things that you do are just absolutely phenomenal. I'm just happy to be a tiny part of it. Lee: Me too. Lucy: Well, thank you. Larry: Lee, just give us a little overview about what your company does and what it is. Lee: TriCalyx is a company that helps people grow their business online on the web. So we do everything from software development, building people web applications, online marketing, search engine optimization, anything to help them grow their business. Larry: Search engine optimization is becoming more and more popular. Is that something you feel is just an extra add-on or is it pretty essential? Lee: I think it's part of your basic marketing. If your product and your company can't be found on the web, you're at a real disadvantage from your competition. Lucy: What do you think about some of the social networking software? How are you seeing that working into how people want to grow their business on the web? Lee: That's a great question, Lucy, because a lot of companies are trying to figure out how they can grow their business doing advertising or being present on social networks. And it's still in that early phase where there's not a clear path on how to do that. Lucy: Well, it's a popular topic for sure. Larry: That's for sure. Lee: It is popular because there's millions and millions of people that spend time on Facebook and all the other social networks, but for the most part, most of those people are there to talk to their friends, and not look at advertisements. Larry: Now, Lee, you've got a very interesting background. You've been CIO for WebRoot Software. I know you've done a bunch of work with Brad Feld and some of his troops. What made you then really want to become an entrepreneur? Lee: Yeah, it really starts back as early as being an early girl. My dad was an insurance agent and I remember going around the neighborhood selling these little first-aid kits that he had. [laughter] Lee: I can't even remember why I was doing it, but I just loved getting out and starting businesses. I would even go to the local Salvation Army and bargain with them with their prices for things. Lucy: Get out of here! [laughter] Lee: I'm not kidding you. Lucy: So, it sounds like the sales part of this was intriguing. The marketing piece? Lee: I've always loved the sales and marketing and then my background is technology, which I loved because I just found it where there was always so many puzzles to solve. Lucy: It sounds like your parents had something to do with indirectly with starting you on this entrepreneurial path. Who else has influenced you? Lee: Well, I don't know if it was -- who influenced me to be an entrepreneurial, but my sister was definitely a bit influence on my life. She's 12-and-a-half years older and has always been the most fabulous person I've ever known, just can do anything, is smart, never let's anything daunt her on her path. Larry: Now would you consider her a role model or a mentor? Lee: She was a role model because I always saw her go after whatever she wanted and achieve it. Lucy: You were at WebRoot in the early days. What did you learn there as an entrepreneurial? Because that's been a success story. Lee: Yeah, I've been at a number of other successful startups before WebRoot, so I felt like a learned a lot at those companies, but the thing that was probably the most interesting at WebRoot was, when I came into WebRoot we were a small 20-person company, just a few million in revenue. But the market of spyware and anti-spyware was just about to boom, and I think all the experience I had told me it was like, "This market was hot and we have to go for it." And so, once I was hired, they had me build an enterprise division, it was our number one goal to get that product out there, to get the reseller base, to get the customers as fast as possible, because we knew that first-to-market was going to be the winner and that's what we were. We were able to capture that market right when it exploded. Larry: With all those experiences, let me ask this: what's probably the toughest thing that you've had to do in your career? Lee: That question, as you know, I've been on the other side of these interviews. Lucy: Selling first aid kits? Lee: Yeah! [laughter] Lee: That was tough. I didn't like that. There's a lot of things that were tough. A lot of the people we've interviewed talked about having to let people go or fire them, and that's definitely a hard one. Nobody likes to be fired and it's a terrible thing to fire people, but there's been a few other things that we really, really hard. I think cold calling is the worst thing on earth to have to do. And I had to do that in some of my early sales job. The other thing that was really, really tough was leaving a phenomenal job that paid well and had a great reputation and going and being nothing and starting my own business. Because you're in a position of power and security and then to just start something from scratch takes a lot of courage, and that was a tough thing to do. Lucy: What about cold calling did you find hard? Lee: There's a lot of things: rejection, the hanging up of the phone on the other end. But I guess it was the monotony. For me, it was just over and over, picking up the phone and expecting something different to happen, when most of the 99% of people didn't want to hear from you. Lucy: It's a bit like nonprofit fund-raising. [laughter] Lee: There we go! You keep hoping the answer will change. Lucy: No, somebody told me once and I carried this in my heart that a "no" is a just a first step to "yes." Lee: Yeah! Lucy: And they don't really mean "no" until they've told you "no" three times. Lee: Yeah. Lucy: And so, that's one of the things I've really had to remember. So, Lee, after all these different experiences, and you're sitting here with somebody who's considering being and entrepreneur, what kind of advice would you give them? Lee: You know, throughout my career, some of the best experiences I've had were working -- one of the companies was called Net Dynamics, and we sold that company to Sun Micro, and I have to say some of my best experiences came from that company, and it was working with some of the most talented people I've ever worked with. They were all smart and energetic and aggressive. In one year, I probably learned more than 10 years than at some of the other companies, because we were just doing everything right and learning from each other and making changes. What I suggest is, if you can get out of college, try to work with the brightest company, the smartest people, and get great mentors because they can all help you learn a lot quicker. Lucy: Don't you find that you're in that kind of situation where you're working on a great team, that you often don't know at that moment that that is a fabulous team? Sometimes you have to stop and be grateful for that because you get 10 years, 20 years down the road and realize, "That was really -- we had it all together there." Lee: I knew. I knew they wore, because I had been at a number of companies. I was, oh gosh, in my early 30s then, and I knew. I have never worked with such a great team, whereas in some companies you'll have some bright people but you'll have some people who are really slow and it's hard to get things done. It was just a great learning experience. Larry: Brad Feld -- who's quite a supporter of NCWIT also -- I interviewed him a few weeks ago and he pointed out with his team, the team he has over there at the Foundry Group and these are people he wants to work with the rest of his life. And so I think that's quite an extraordinary thing. Lucy: That's high praise! Larry: Boy, I'll say. Lee: Yeah. Larry: Isn't that the truth. Lucy: Maybe he'll hire me! [laughter] Larry: Me too! Lee: Maybe for life! [laughter] Lucy: For life! Larry: You're going to make another switch? No. You mentioned earlier, that you are got this marketing piece and you're also a techie, it sounds like kind of an interesting balance. Are those the characteristics that make you a strong entrepreneur? Lee: I think it helps a lot being in the field I am because in starting TriCalyx, I was fortunate in that I helped start a lot of businesses and knew all the marketing and knew how to get out and do the sales. But also having the technical experience, it's great because you can really talk from a first person perspective. It gives you more credibility with the people you're meeting with. Lucy: I'll add in another one for you because you mentioned it earlier, but I thought it was important enough to perhaps return to it, and that's this notion of reinventing yourself. You said it was hard, but you've been quite successful in doing it over and over and over again, which leads me to think of two things. One is, just because it's hard it means you shouldn't and can't do it, and that the reinvention process is so necessary for learning. It's really important to start over and not always to be so entrenched. Lee: That is such a good point, Lucy, because out of all the experiences, I think I value the learning piece the most. And probably in the position I am in now, I am learning more than I've learned in years, and I love it. I get up every morning so excited and it can be something as silly as in an application I learned how to do something on the technical back end. With my partners, they're laughing because I'm excited about learning about HTML and learning a bit of PHP. And they're like, "Oh, you really are a nerd!" Larry: In the past interviews with L, L and L - that's Lucy, Lee and Larry - the subject came up about how do you bring balance to your personal and professional lives. And of course the three of us have heard a wide range of replies. What's yours? Lee: I'd have to say having an ex-husband that is phenomenal as a dad. He's really helped me to having a career, because having three kids, that would of been impossible if I had a traditional husband that worked lots of hours and expected the woman to pick up the slack. And it's been just the reverse. He's really been a fabulous dad and helped out when I was working long hours. Stressful... Larry: We haven't heard that one before. Lucy: No, but I would say that would make a big difference! Larry: Yes, exactly. Lucy: That's for sure. So, you've achieved a lot with lots of companies, lots of learning. What's next for you? Can you see past TriCalyx or are you still in there writing code and having fun? Lee: No, we already have a plan. We want to keep TriCalyx, the aspect of TriCalyx being a service business but we also want to have an off-shoot business that is a software company, that has a service on the web. So we've been writing some code and bouncing some different applications about and hopefully we'll launch that later this year. Larry: Wow, well, we'll have to interview her again. Lucy: Again. Well because you're Lee, I want to ask you one final question that we don't usually ask people. Lee: I feel special. Lucy: Yeah. You give back a lot of your time to worthwhile causes here in the state of Colorado, and perhaps you can just spend a minute and say why that's important. We have found that entrepreneurial community is quite generous, here locally with their time and in this space. Perhaps a word or two about giving back? Lee: Yeah, my career was mostly in Silicon Valley up until seven years ago. I moved here to Boulder and one of the things that was so, so refreshing about moving here is about the spirit of giving back. I was amazed at how many people introduced me to other people and would spend hours of their time in trying to get me networked into the area. It just made me feel like, "Gosh, what a wonderful environment to raise and live with my kids" So, I wanted to do more of the same. The other thing is, being a woman in technology, earlier in my career and through college, there weren't a lot of other women. I was in engineering and I've always felt like it would have been so nice to have women to talk to, to have as a mentor. So I've made it a real point ever since I got out of college to be a mentor and to help with other women who are coming up the technology route and hope I can help them make decisions or give them advice on the way. Larry: Great advice, wow. Spread the wealth. Lee: Yeah. Lucy: Well, thank you for that too. And thanks for spending your time with us. You know, it was past due that we interviewed you, so this was really fun. Larry: It was fun turning the table. I love that part. Lee: Yeah. Larry: Well, this is Larry Nelson with w3Ww3.com, here at NCWIT, that's the National Center for... Lucy: The National Center for Women and Information Technology. Larry: Exactly right. Lucy: You can just say NCWIT, and that's just fine. Larry: NCWIT.org. Lee: And you can find these podcasts at www.NCWIT.org and www.w3w3.com. Larry: That's right. And download it as a podcast and you can also post on the blog if you'd like. Lee: There you go! Larry: Thank you, guys. [music] Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Lee KennedyInterview Summary: Lee's got some great advice for getting kids interested in IT and entrepreneurship. In fact, you might want your kids to listen to this interview. Release Date: September 17, 2008Interview Subject: Lee KennedyInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 14:19

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Jean Kovacs Senior former Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Strategic Alliances, Sterling Commerce. Currently, she serves as a Partner at Hillsven and Chair of the HBS Alumni Angels. Date: August 19, 2008 Jean Kovacs: Sterling Commerce [music] Lee Kennedy: Hi. This is Lee Kennedy and I'm on the board of NCWIT, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, and I'm also a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Tricalyx. I'm here today with NCWIT and we're doing a series of interviews that we're having with just fabulous women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors all who have wonderful stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs. Today with me I have Lucy Sanders and Lucy is the CEO of NCWIT, the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Hi, Lucy. Lucy Sanders: Hello. Lee: I also have Larry Nelson who's from w3w3.com. Hi Larry. How are you? Larry Nelson: Hello. I'm a serial entrepreneur, too. So, I love this series. Lee: Well, great. Larry, also tell us a little bit about W3W3. Larry: Well, we're an Internet based radio show, and we host and archive everything. We've been doing it actually since 1998, but we have hundreds of shows that we do a podcast with also. But, we love to focus in the high tech arena. Lee: Great. OK and just to get down to it, today we're interviewing Jean Kovacs. Hello, Jean. Jean Kovacs: Hello. How are you? Lee: Just great. We're happy to have you here today. Jean is the former CEO of Comergent Technologies and she also had a number of senior positions at Sterling and other companies along the way. And Jean has a wonderful background and we're excited to have her here today. Jean, before we start in, did you want to just tell us a bit about Comergent? Jean: Comergent was started in 1998. We focused on e-commerce for the enterprise. So, we sold software to enterprises who wanted to sell over the Internet. So, our customers were companies such as Cisco, Best Buy, JCPenney. We had a lot of bio medical companies selling devices over the Internet. So really, any large enterprise that wanted to sell their products or sell their services over the web. Lee: Great. So, why don't we go ahead and jump into some of the questions we had for you. Looking at your background, you've worked with a number of different technologies. What are you thinking are some of the really cool technologies today? Jean: I think the whole area of social networking is extremely exciting. I think the potential there is really untapped. I see more and more people using it, and I see more and more enterprises and people in business using it. So, I think that's an area that we should all be looking at. I also think anything around mobile devices. When you travel, especially outside the US and you just see how people, basically, live on their cellphones. I think there are going to be a lot of applications and ideas around that; how you make the cellphone be the center of the person's universe. Many of these people don't have PCs at home or people, you hear now, don't even have land lines. So, anything that runs on a mobile device, I think, is also a very interesting area. Lee: Well, and mobility is a topic that we've been hearing a lot about in this interview series. It really is quite a hot industry sector, for sure. So, tell me a bit more about the technologies and social networking that you're thinking about. What strikes you as being the most adventuresome there? Jean: I look at it and say there's a lot of adventuresome ideas out there. But, being someone who's built a couple of companies -- took one public and sold one -- I look at how do you take an adventuresome idea and monetize it. So, I think that's the big question mark. How do you run these as businesses and make money so you're impacting people's lives? I think a lot of the Web 2.0 technologies that are being used are very exciting and you see just last week or the week before, they announced that Facebook users exceeded MySpace and sites like Linked In and you're seeing these become now more and more used in people's daily lives. I used to get two or three Linked In requests a day. Suddenly, over the last week or two, I'm getting Facebook requests. And so, I think you'll see it's not just young people. It's people that are starting to use this in their daily lives. Lee: I think social networking is really an interesting area as well and we see young people using that quite a bit. You mentioned that you've built a couple companies, you've taken some public. So, you've seen a lot as an entrepreneur. What we'd like to ask you is why are you an entrepreneur? Jean: Wow. That's a great question. The first company that I started, which was back in 1990, in a way I almost fell into it. I was with a company. We were looking at selling through the channel. It was a Unix software company and there weren't any Unix channels. And I remember going to some venture capitalist friends of mine and saying, "Is anyone doing this?" And the VCs would say to me, "No. But, tell me more." So, I started thinking about it more and putting together a business plan. Literally, at one point, a very dear friend of mine said, "We are very interested in this. But, you're not going to fund it unless you have a male partner, preferably one with gray hair." Now, this is back in 1990. So, it was a long time ago. Things are very different now. And so, I went out and found someone who was interested in started a company, and we got excited together about it and we went out and raised money. But, it was - I never set out and said, "Ooo. I'm an entrepreneur. Let me go find an idea." I was in a company that needed something in the market that wasn't there. I think that's a really big difference. I think it's a good thing to think about. I've seen too many people think they're entrepreneurs and they go off trying to find something. And I think look for the idea first and then look into yourself and say, "Am I the person that can turn this idea into a reality? And can I deal with the good times and the bad?" It's not all about being the guy that's made $2 billion. There's a lot of ups and downs. So, you really need to have that tenaciousness to get it done. Larry: I like that. Find a need and fill it. Jean, let me ask this. You've been with huge companies. You've been part of buy outs and you've venture capitalists and everything. Along the way, who are some people or a person in particular maybe that has really had a major influence with you? Jean: Larry, that's a great question and I can't think of anyone. It's interesting. In many ways, I learned more from bad managers than I did from great managers. Lucy: That is so true. Jean: And don't worry, I'm not going to say any of those names on the air. When you have a bad manager, you drive home at night and you think about what happened, what you would do differently, how you would never do that to your team and you process it. I don't think when we have a great manager, you drive home thinking about, "Oh, wow." You probably intuit it, but you don't analyze it as much. And so, in many ways, I think it was the managers that weren't so great that I learned a lot more from and just made mental notes from. Lee: That is so important. We haven't had that observation made yet on this interview series and that is so important because it's important to almost take an anthropological mindset with some of these things and think about a bad manager maybe certainly is a bad manager and perhaps a thorn in your side. But also, somebody that can teach you what not to do. Jean: I know. It's a funny thing. But, it really does work. So, all you bad mangers out there, keep managing away. Lee: Yes and we're just going to be studying you. Jean: Well, and it's a little bit similar to learning from your failures and mistakes from somebody else's failures. Lee: That's right. Well, that's very sage advice. Lucy: Well, I guess, sort of along that line one of the questions for you is in your career you've done a lot of really interesting things. What would you say is the toughest thing you've had to do? Jean: Clearly, we started Comergent in 1998 and developed the product. Cisco was our first customer. We raised an amazing amount of money in 2000, more than we ever thought was possible and then, we hit the downturn. Now, the good news is that we never went crazy with the money, but we did come to a point in time where we needed to restructure the company. That was the hardest thing we ever had to do. We decided to do it differently. We met with the people that we were going to let go. We told them what was happening. We also met with the people who weren't going to be letting go and said, "Hey, the guys in the next room are your co-workers. They're your friends. We're not going to do this, march them to their desks and let them collect their things and sort of skulk on out. They're going to take whatever time they need, take them to lunch and do whatever you need to help them. Nothing has changed except we need to economize a bit, and we're going to try to hire them back as soon as we can. And, you know, we hired back probably 70 or 80 percent. We didn't let go that many, less than 20, but we hired back most of them over the next year. So, we all learned as a company, but it was a very tough thing because at any small company you develop relationships. Lee: In this series of interviews I think laying off people has been the number one challenge for everyone. It's nice how you did it in a real human way. Jean: Yeah, because you know it's no fault of anyone. The person that gets let go, it's not because they're the weakest or they did something wrong. Often, it's the dynamics of the business and where you decide to reduce head counts. And so, it just drives me crazy when I see companies go through that, and they march the people through the office and stand there while they clean out their desks. We really said, hey, these are our co-workers. We're going to treat them with respect, today, tomorrow and we're going to do our best to grow the business and bring them back in. And everyone that we could bring back in we did. Lucy: That is so important. I'm sure we all know of people who were let go in the way that you mentioned. That is very dehumanizing, and so not only is the person out looking for a new job but they often have a crisis of confidence. Jean: Right. Lee: And it can really be a horrible thing for the culture and the morale of the people that are left, and that's why some companies have such a hard time starting back up again because people are feeling like, oh when is it going to be me? Jean: Right. We were very open through everything, so it's not like it was a surprise and a big ax came down and we took probably 15 percent of the company out, and that was enough and like I said, I mean, it was a good lesson for all of us. Fortunately, a lot of people-where we know of one company in our space that did like seven or eight. Everyone was waiting for the next one, the next one, the next one. Lucy: And I think, one thing that I'm taking from this as well, in those hard times you do learn a lot, and you learn a lot about dealing with people. If you were sitting here with young people and giving them other advice about entrepreneurship, what advice would you give them. And Larry and Lee, I believe it's right. You're the chair of the board of Build. Is that correct? Jean: Yes, it's non-profit. Lucy: Non-profit that really focuses on underserved kids and getting them interested in entrepreneurship. We're especially eager to hear your answer about this. Jean: I think part of what makes a great entrepreneur is positive energy and tenaciousness. There's very few companies, you know, I'd say probably less than one percent, where you just hit the ground running and everything works and the market was ready and you never have an up or a down. You never had a day where you thought you were going to close a sale on and you didn't, or the product you thought would be ready to ship wasn't, or you were going to get X number of users and you didn't. So, part of it is just his tenaciousness and saying, "OK, what have we learned? How do we keep going?" It's the most important part. And how do you keep your team focused and feeling good about it? Lucy: That's really true. Those are definitely qualities that you have to have because I've never seen any startup that didn't go through times where you had to be tenacious. Jean: Right, and that makes you better. I mean in a weird way it polishes your ideas, and it hardens the team, and fine tunes thing. During the bubble, we did see quite a few companies that just had an idea and through something on the web, and went public. Very few of them had the type idea -- we used to say it's the three P's, the P2P -- pass way to profitability, as opposed to B2B and B2C. All of a sudden the market dropped out, and they didn't have the technology, or the customer base, or the market need really understood. So it was a lot tougher on the company in some ways I believe. Lucy: Definitely. One of the other things that we've seen and heard from many of the entrepreneurs we've talked to is that building a company can take your heart and soul, and lots of hours. How have you found you've been able to balance into your personal life as well as your professional life? Jean: I don't have. [laughter] Lucy: I love that honest answer! I've heard that from people. Jean: It's very tough. It is 7/24, and I think the only way to do is to have a spouse who is understanding, and who is as committed as you are, and to have some kind of a support infrastructure, whether it's relatives or nannies or neighbors, or something, because when you're doing the start up it's 7/24. Often the biggest breakthroughs you have are 11:00 at night or 8:00 at night, when you're still there and someone walks into your office. You start talking, and suddenly something pops or the weekend. So it really isn't for someone who goes, "Oh, yeah. I want to have this balance." I've never been able to find it myself. Lucy: We've often spoken about it as also being integration. A balance often indicates that things are done in equal proportions, but finding a way to integrate the various aspects of your life becomes important when you are in those 7/24 situations. Jean: I actually like the term 'integration' a lot more than balance, because you're right. Balance sort of suggests that you're going to be there for every kids birthday, and every school play, and every time you want to, and it's just not going to work out. Lucy: It's not. Yet I also think that kids also value seeing what you do at work, and learning from what you're dong. So, there are big lessons there as well. Jean: You know what? I think daughters especially. I want my girls to see that I go out and work. We talk about business things at home. I think it's healthy for them. Lucy: Yeah. So, see my sons when they were little would go in the lab with me. We'd be testing the multimedia communication exchange at Bell Labs. One of my sons designed a logo for it on the whiteboard, while he was bored. [laughs] But it was fun, and they still remember it. Jean: Yeah. Lucy: So, Jean, you've really achieved a lot. We're very curious to know what's next for you. Jean: I think you know that I left. I sold Comergent to Sterling Commerce, which is a division of AT&T. I stayed there a year-and-a-half to do the integration. I just recently left. Right now, I've been asked to be on a couple of boards and advisory boards, and I've been meeting with a couple. In fact, this afternoon I'm meeting with some entrepreneurs who have an idea. In the fall, I'll probably start talking to a few venture capitalists, and maybe work with companies in their portfolio. So, no startup again. I've done a couple, but I think I want to work with a bunch of different companies. Lucy: A diverse portfolio. Larry: Wow! Well, we're going to do a follow-up on this one, for sure. Jean: Well, it's fun because I'm seeing a lot of different ideas and learning a tremendous amount. It's really exciting to me to see what's happening out there, especially, as I said, in the mobile space and the special networking space. Lucy: Well, Jean, thank you for talking with us today. I'm sure our listeners are going to glean a lot of good advice and information. Larry: I'm going to vote for "learning from bad managers." Lucy: Me, too. Larry is writing a book. I think that this should be a chapter in your book, Larry. It's not too late, is it? Larry: It's called "Mastering Change" and I think that would really fit. Lucy: Learning from the black hat manager. Jean: Great! Lucy: So for listeners out there, you can find our other podcasts at W3W3.com, as well as NCWIT.org. Larry: Alright. Thank you much! Jean: Thank you so much. Lucy: Thank you, Jean. Thank you so much. [music] Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Jean KovacsInterview Summary: Jean Kovacs is the Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Strategic Alliances for Sterling Commerce, responsible for driving global strategic alliances, including the AT&T strategic relationship, and all corporate marketing and communications. Release Date: August 19, 2008Interview Subject: Jean KovacsInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 17:30

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Audrey MacLean Co-Founder & VP, Network Equipment Technologies; Co-founder & CEO, Adaptive Date: July 30, 2008 Audrey MacLean: Network Equipment Technologies Lucy Sanders: Hi. This is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, or NCWIT, and this is one of a series of interviews that we're doing with IT entrepreneurs, people who have fabulous advice about starting companies. With me, I have Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Hi. I'm happy to be here, of course. Lucy: Why don't you tell us a bit about w3w3. Larry: We're an Internet based all business radio show. Our focus is high tech, which is why we are here. Lucy: Well, wonderful. Also, Lee Kennedy, an NCWIT director and a serial entrepreneur and also co founder of Tricalyx. Hi, Lee. Lee Kennedy: Hi. Thanks for having me today. Lucy: Welcome. Today, we're really fortunate to have Audrey MacLean as our interviewee and I can't say enough about her by way of introduction. Audrey, you have such a reputation for helping entrepreneurs for mentoring them. I know you're going to have a lot of great advice for our listeners today. But, you have such a great track record. You're a founder of the Network Equipment Technologies and also Adaptive. And, you're an independent investor and also a consulting associate professor at Stanford University where you deal with ethic entrepreneurship. So, there's a lot to say and I think we just want to jump right into the interview. So, welcome. Audrey MacLean: Thank you. Happy to be here. Lucy: We like to start our interview series with a question about technology and really pick your brain about the up and coming technologies. And somebody, such as yourself, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs so you see a lot. I'm very curious to know what you think are the emerging technologies and how they're going to shape the landscape. Audrey: Well, as you mentioned, in terms of my own personal background, I cut my teeth in the industry in the networking field; in ET, Adaptive and a lot of other companies that I've participated in the growth of. So, as a network bigot, if you will, I continue to believe that some of the most exciting innovation we're going to see across, at least the next decade or two, has everything to do with the Internet and mobile technologies. Having said that, I think there's going to be a lot happening on the clean tech and the med tech front as well that is going to change lives. Lucy: Well, and I happen to be a network bigot myself. Lee: Yes, you are. Lucy: So, we really like that answer. Say a bit about clean tech if you will. What are you seeing there? Audrey: I see a broad spectrum of applications emerging, literally, every quarter over at Stanford. There's the obvious big things with the big entrenched utilities and the search for alternative sources of energy. But, there's all kinds of little opportunities as well that I think you would find just as amazing. We've had companies that are building LED lanterns for applications in India. I think that the clean tech front is one of the most exciting places that I'm seeing my students have interesting new innovations in. Lucy: Wow. Larry: That really is a hot topic here, excuse the expression. Lee: Oh, stop. Larry: OK. I'd better stop. Lee: Well, Colorado is really into some of these things as well. Lucy: So Audrey, it's clear from looking at your background that you've been an entrepreneur and worked with entrepreneurs for years. What is it about entrepreneurship that you love? Audrey: Everything. I assume you wanted a more complete response to that. First of all, I tell my students all the time, it is an extreme sport. I've been on the faculty of Stanford engineering school now since '94 and I've made sure that my students understand that it is not for everyone. It is one of the most demanding feats that anyone can undertake. So, it's to be - proceed with caution. Let's put it that way. But, in terms of what attracts me to entrepreneurship, and I have to say to begin with, that I'm sort of an accidental entrepreneur. I didn't set out thinking, "oh, I want to be an entrepreneur." In fact, people didn't talk about it much when I began. It's just that I had been working for 10 years at a company called Time Net in the packet switching field and came upon an opportunity that was so compelling that I had to quit my job and go do it. I think that's at the heart of what makes me tick as an entrepreneur. It's that you want to solve problems that need to be solved and when you do, you want to turn them into reality. It's that process that's exciting and it's that process that got me excited as an entrepreneur. And it's that same process that keeps me excited about working with a new generation of entrepreneurs to help them realize their dreams. The fact is that to be an entrepreneur, you have to be able to see things the way they could be versus the way they are and you have to believe that if you can see it, you can make it happen and then you have to inspire others to want to do it with you because it always takes a team. So for me, personally, I'm always in search of how things can be improved and I love the process of creating something out of nothing. And truthfully, I'm happiest when I'm collaborating with others to materialize real results and I never give up. So for me, entrepreneurship is a natural habitat. But, I'm not sure that that's true for everyone. Larry: You just mentioned the word "inspired." Along the way, who might be somebody that had a major impact in your direction, maybe had been a mentor to you, a special adviser? Audrey: Again, you have to consider the time frame in which my career began. I didn't really have a specific mentor. I was certainly influenced by lots of entrepreneurs early on in Silicon Valley particularly those that cared as passionately about the corporate culture they were creating as they did about the product innovations that they were bringing to market. There were - I don't know; Bob Noyce, Ken Oshman, Jimmy Treybig - people like that that were inspirations to me. But, my primary source of encouragement and support was my husband, Mike. Lucy: Well, and we know that spouses play a large role in the success of an entrepreneur for sure. Larry: That's a fact. Lucy: And that's a fact. And that's a fact. So, you mentioned building corporate culture which I found very interesting along with the products or the services and that being an important byproduct of entrepreneurship. Often, good corporate cultures will help you weather the bad times, weather the hard decisions. Maybe you could share with our listeners what the toughest thing you've ever had to do in your career was. Audrey: On an umbrella level, by far the toughest thing that I've had to do in my career is keep my family life and my role as an entrepreneurial CEO in balance. I obviously was totally committed and completely professionally driven. But, when I look back on my career and I look at N.E.T., and Adaptive, and Peace, and Pure, and all the companies we've built and all the jobs we've created and all the market value achieved, the truth for me is that when I look back at my life, those things are in the top ten. But, the top three are still my husband, our kids and our family. So, I think that the overall balance is the most important thing. In terms of specifics, career things, I think the merger of Adaptive into N.E.T. was a very challenging transition in that Adaptive had built a very exciting corporate culture where the entire team was very bonded and the extended families of the employees themselves were very connected to the company. We had done that consciously in many ways and it was to support employees in a start up who have to put forward such enormous efforts. We wanted their families to be participants. For example, we gave New Baby stock to anybody whose spouse or themselves gave birth to a child while we were growing the company. Things like that and obvious activities at the company brought families in and engaged them directly. So when we were ultimately merging Adaptive into N.E.T., there was going to be a huge cultural change as Adaptive that had 150 people and had won back to back product of the year awards and everybody was totally on the same page in terms of goals and directions and culture. Suddenly they had to merge into a much larger entity and make that transition. I think that was probably one of the more challenging points in my personal career. But again, I think that the way you get through those things is by being completely clear on the objectives and completely direct and open with your employees. And ultimately, I think that reality drives a situation like that and you simply help people navigate it. Interviewer: Well you mentioned corporate culture as a way to help employees bring balance to their lives. This is something we don't often hear from the people we interview. We hear, you know, many wonderful things around hobbies or personal things that they do. I'd like to just follow up about a few other things that Adaptive may have done in this area in addition to the New Baby stock because this is such an important issue and we just keep seeing the same corporate cultures over and over again. Audrey: You know, it's taken a lot of different forms in a lot of different companies. But, I think first off you have to celebrate successes. That could be bringing in a vat of ice cream on a software build or it could be a massive party to celebrate a first customer shift. But, you need to celebrate successes. But on a daily basis, you need to do things as well. So for example, one of the things we did at Adaptive was if you were there in the evening, you had two corporate accounts from local restaurants that you could call up and order dinner. In practice, what ended up happening was someone would start walking around and seeing who was still working and say, oh, you like the garlic eggplant, and you like this, and order up a pile of food. People would end up in conference rooms all over the company eating dinner together and talking about what they were working on. Not surprisingly, they would end up solving different problems. "Oh, I didn't realize you were doing that. We've already done this piece." So, this bonding and this nurturing where you're saying, hey, if you're still working and it's time to eat a meal, we're going to make sure you get it as opposed to having to leave and drive somewhere and spend your time and money doing it. So, those sorts of things if you look at companies like Google today, they've taken it to the next step where they've got a cafeteria where employees at any point can go down and get a nutritious meal at breakfast, or at lunch, or at dinner. The idea simply is that if your employees are working that hard, you want to make sure that they're being nourished, as well as nurtured. So, I jokingly say feed them. Literally, feed them. So, those sorts of things are important. But then, it's also the little practical ways in which it infiltrates the culture. I remember one time my C.F.O. at Adaptive came into my office with a look of worry on his face and said, "I've got a problem." And, I said, "what's that?" He said, "Well, you and I have that 3:00 meeting in 20 minutes and I just got a call from the nanny saying her car broke down and she can't go pick up Tyler, his son, at preschool." And I said, "who else is in the meeting?" And he said, "just you and me". I said, "OK, so it's not a problem. We'll get in the car. I'll drive. You go over the material with me. We'll pick up Tyler, bring him to the nanny, and we'll be back in time for our next meeting. And, he looked at me and said, "I never would have thought of that." It's that type of thing. It's giving people the permission to think about what needs to be done that will make their life support the incredible task you're trying to undertake with a startup company. Lucy: I love it. It's the practical advise. So many companies will feed their employees if they're working late, but it's those little things like picking up the kid from school because the nanny's car broke down. Larry: Yeah. Audrey: Exactly. Lucy: So, Audrey it's clear you've had all kinds of successes, and I'm sure there's some failures along the way, but everything from building companies, merging companies, culture. If you were sitting here with a young person, what tidbits would you pull from your background to just give them the pearls of wisdom? Audrey: Well, it's interesting that you refer to it as "pearls of wisdom," because I obviously have been on the teaching faculty now since 1994. So, I frequently get asked for advice, and I frequently respond by saying, "I don't necessarily want to dole out advice, but I'm happy to share some used wisdom." Lucy: That's great. Audrey: I think that one of the pieces of used wisdom, apart from what we talked about earlier which is, "This is an extreme sport, and it's not for everyone." But if it is for you, and you really are going to go for it, one of the important things to realize is you can't do it alone. You need to create a team. One of the most important decisions you'll make are who to trust. It's extremely important that you choose your partners and your advisors wisely. So, I think that that's probably one of the most valuable pieces of used wisdom or advice that I can leave people with, which is that you need to put the team together. You need to be sure that the label of integrity and commitment is there across the board, and then you need to strap on the ski boots and get your knees forward in these boots. Larry: You've already achieved a great deal. You have lots of interests from clean tech, to just a variety of different topics that you're involved with. What do you see on the horizon next for you? Audrey: As you know, I got off the court and onto the coaching bench over a decade ago now, but I can tell you there are more exciting things happening right now that I'm involved with then at any other point in my career. The number of young entrepreneurs that I'm working with right now, and the potential for innovation that will help change the way we will live on this planet is greater today, then it was certainly at the beginning of the last century. I have tremendous faith in the future that this new generation of entrepreneurs can create. I will do exactly what I have done, which is to continue to work in support of the realization of their dreams. I don't give up, so I expect to be doing this for a long time to come. Larry: Well, they say, "Persistence is omnipotent." Audrey: Well, certainly tenacity is a fundamental tenant of any entrepreneurial endeavor. Lucy: Well, it's very heartening to know that you're out there coaching these young entrepreneurs. I can't imagine a better coach, a better person to pass along their wisdom. It's really inspirational. I know that Kristin McDonald was just, "Oh! One of my advisors is Audrey." I'm sure that she's one of many, who really depend on your experiences. So, I know that they would all be sitting here saying, "Thank you, Audrey." Audrey: Well, like I said it takes a team, so I'm happy to be on their team. Lucy: Well, thanks so much for sitting down with us for a few minutes and talking about entrepreneurship. We really do appreciate it. We want to remind listeners where they can find these interviews. They can find them at w3w3.com, and also at NCWIT.org. So, thank you Audrey. We really appreciate it. Larry: Thank you very much. Lucy: I want to say that I have now learned a new phrase that "Entrepreneurism is an extreme sport." Woman 1: Don't you love it? It's so appropriate. Lucy: I love it. So, thank you for that too. Audrey: You're welcome, and thank you for keeping and spreading the word. Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Audrey MacLeanInterview Summary: Audrey MacLean has a unique track record for entrepreneurial success as a founder, CEO, seed investor, and board member. Release Date: July 30, 2008Interview Subject: Audrey MacLeanInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 18:35

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Kristin Asleson McDonnell CEO, LimeLife Date: July 15, 2008 Kristin McDonnell: LimeLife [music] Lucy Sanders: Hi. This is Lucy Sanders, the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, or NCWIT. Today we have another interview in our series of interviews with IT entrepreneurs, people who have started just fabulous companies, organizations that use computing information technology. With me is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Hello. I'm happy to be here. Lucy: W3W3 is an Internet radio station. Larry: That's right. Lucy: And these interviews can be found at the W3W3 site as well as at the NCWIT site. Also with me is Lee Kennedy a director of NCWIT, a serial entrepreneur herself and a co-founder of TriCalyx. So welcome, Lee. Lee Kennedy: Thanks. Thanks for having me today. Lucy: Well, and today we have Kristin McDonnell here, CEO of LimeLife, for our interview. In looking at your company, Kristin, it's just such a great company. I think one of the tag lines I saw , "It delivers fun right through your mobile device." Kristin McDonnell: Right. Lucy: And it's fabulous and I know our listeners are going to be very interested in it because it's one of the companies maybe, perhaps the only company, that is developing content exclusively focused on the women's market. So, starting with gaming - OK, Look, you guys. I have a favorite game. Games like "Girls Night Out Solitaire," "Girls Night Out Blackjack." However, my personal favorite is "Law and Order." Ding! Ding! So, Kristin, welcome. We're really happy to have you here. Why don't you tell us just a bit about LimeLife? Kristin: Sure. So, LimeLife is a digital media company focused on the female market. We're focused primarily on females between the ages of about 18 and 34. Although we do know that there are younger teens and women that are more my age group, in their 40s, that are also our customers. We create experiences. Right now what you see on our website is primarily for the mobile platform. So mobile games, lifestyle tools like "People Magazine" on the phone. They leave text messages like horoscope, love tips, beauty tips and also wallpapers working with fashion brands to bring their imagery to mobile wallpapers. What we're launching this summer of 2008 is a web and mobile community for women that is a lifestyle community around shopping, fashion, music, and our tag line for that community is: "Everything I like wherever I am." It allows women to discover, collect, share items of interest, items of inspiration with each other as well as giving them a mechanism to have everything they like wherever they are, whether they're on their mobile phone or on their web-connected PC. So we're very excited about that launch that is coming up very shortly. Lucy: Wow. It sounds really exciting. Kristin: Yeah. Lucy: The mobile market is such an emerging market, such an exciting space, and that gets us to our first question, which is a technology question. Obviously mobility is a cool technology for you, lots of potential there. Are there other things surrounding mobility that you think are the hot technologies of today? Kristin: Sure. The things that I'm very excited about in terms of mobile -- and I think that the iPhone has started to show some of this capability -- is that it really is a connected computer that is with you all day long that can really give you access to your favorite websites, your favorite content, as well as to other people. Also, with the camera phone capabilities improving with each iteration, the ability to really take high quality photos and video with your phone and then to share it with your network is something that we're very focused on. And then as you layer on location-based services as those evolve, where the phone can really understand where are you in relationship to the people who are important to you, or the places that are important to you, or to places or people that the knowledge of the community think might be important to you. And so it's really going to become an amazing device in terms of its capability -- in terms of how we think about it - to make women's lives much easier and much more fun and much more connected in a way that the PC simply cannot and in a way that today's more rudimentary phones simply cannot. Other web technologies that that we see that are very interesting as well, that we do believe are going to migrate to the phone as well, are around creativity and self expression and really giving people capabilities of doing things far more interesting than, let's say, just making lists of photos or lists of things that are of interest, but really to create collages or match ups of content so that you can really self-express why that content is important to you as opposed to just having it in more of a list format. So those are the things I'm very excited about. And then the advertising technologies and capabilities that come as part of that are very interesting as well. Such that, can we provide advertising messages at a point on women's phones where the women really want that ad message or they really want that coupon and it really becomes a very powerful and meaningful dialogue between the consumer and the advertiser, as opposed to the advertiser potentially coming into their lives when the consumer is not welcoming that kind of message. Lucy: Well, it really is interesting when I think about the younger generation. And then we dinosaurs here in the room I'm speaking of. Larry: She looked at me mostly. Lee: Speak for yourself. Lucy: But I look at my teenage daughters and how they use their phone. It's amazing. We were somewhere where we needed my 16-year-old's social security number and she didn't have it memorized. But, "Hold on, mom. I've got it right here in my phone." I'm thinking, "I don't put my social security number in my phone." But everything is in her phone and all of her interactions are with her phone. Lee: Well, and this notion of providing advertising when people want it, I think is spot on. Lucy: That's the key. Lee: Because I don't mind advertising, especially if it gives me something helpful for what I'm doing. Lucy: If it's relevant to what you're doing, it can be really helpful. So, Kristin, that segues us back to the beginning of your career and education. What was it about being an entrepreneur or why were you interested in becoming an entrepreneur? And then now, what is it that you love about it? Kristin: When I think back to what was I doing in junior high or high school that might have indicated that I had this entrepreneurial bent, because one of my first jobs out of college was to join two guys from Arthur Anderson to start a company. So that entrepreneurial bent started very early in my career. And I always gravitated towards organizations that combined creativity and business and I, typically, was the business part of that creative effort. So whether it was the school newspaper or the school yearbook or the plays at school, I just loved being around creative people where we were building something, creating something, and where I took a role, typically, is more of the financial business arm of it, or the ad sales person for the school newspaper or whatever it may be. I just loved being around those creative people. And then in high school, it wasn't until I took the SATs that I realized that I was pretty good in math. I don't know how that - somehow, my teachers didn't tell me that or I just didn't realize it and it was only when I realized, "Hey, I'm better than most people in math," after the SATs that I then went to college and enrolled in the school of engineering and took my first computer science class as a freshman. And that computer science class really introduced me to one of my core loves, which is computer programming. I don't do it anymore, but building models in Excel and things like that, that same logic and building something out of nothing just really excites me. So it was through that, those computer programming classes that I took throughout my college career -- actually, I was just two credits shy of having a computer science degree from Northwestern -- that I really wanted to do something around computer science. So that first entrepreneurial company that I started with the two other gentlemen was to do systems consulting to corporate America just as the PC was starting to enter into the IT environment. Most of the environment thus far has been mainframe-oriented and the PC was just starting to come in, and we'd bring in PCs to act as clients to those mainframes. So that was my first startup. I've been a part of six startups now and I just found that I love building something out of nothing, whether it's a team, or a financial model or a consumer software experience, that I just love that process of building. Larry: Well, along the way, I can't help but wonder with all the different people you've met, the companies you've been involved with, and your success track is really super, have there been any particular role models or mentors along the way? Kristin: Well, my parents have been huge role models and mentors to me from a very early age. Both of my parents have been presidents and CEOs of organizations, both business as well as nonprofits. So that was a very early role model for me going back to when I was three, four, or five years old. And so I was able to see what does it mean to be the CEO or a president of an organization? How do you act around your team? What types of challenges do you have? I remember my mom having to, unfortunately, let somebody go at one point and, as a 10-year-old, we were counseling her on what do you say and how do you make this happen. So they just gave us a lot of great first-hand experiences where we'd be there with them at work, or at the company party, or whatever it may be, where we understood what does it mean to be a leader of a team. And then the entrepreneurs that I've worked for, the CEOs of the companies that I've worked for, have been huge role models for me. Audrey MacLean, who introduced me to all of you guys, has been a successful CEO many times and has been a great adviser to me. And then just also looking at successful media companies in this instance and just understanding what were the various steps that they took at various points in time and how did they shape their strategy as new opportunities evolved. So I'm a sponge for advice and guidance and mentorship, and I just love to hear other people's experiences. There's really a wide variety of people that I draw upon. But it's really my parents that I owe the biggest debt of gratitude to instill in that at a very early age. Lucy: And you mentioned that your mom had faced something that you remember around letting people go as being something quite difficult, and we've heard that in this series of interviews from a number of people, that that is a hard thing to do. What's the toughest thing that you've ever faced in your career and how did you handle it? Kristin: I would say layoffs are probably the most difficult thing. I've had to downsize companies significantly. It's very difficult to have a team that you've had such great experiences with in building a company and then, unfortunately, you have to let them go. So that's definitely extremely difficult. I think that one of my metrics for my own experience and success and just performance is whether people leave feeling good about the experience that they have. And thankfully, I do feel like that is something that even as they're departing unfortunately as part of a layoff that they have said, "This was a great experience for me. Thank you so much." I've actually hired people back after layoffs. But we found,hey, the company's growing again. We need to hire somebody back. And it's just been a really satisfactory experience for me to be able to hire people back and to have them want to rejoin even though they've been through this experience of having been part of a downsizing. So I think that those are very difficult experiences. I think that early on, entrepreneurs face a lot of difficulty, sometimes convincing investors of your vision. That just takes a lot of work and you have to almost think of yourself as a salesperson, where you're anticipating that you're going to get nine "no's" for every one "yes, and that you just want to get through those no's as quickly as possible so you can get to that one yes. So those can be difficult times. I think, especially for people if they can't hear a "no" easily. And I think that, as an entrepreneur, you just need to let it wash off you and to almost make you feel more powerful and more committed to your goals when you do hear those no's and just saying I'm going to show that person someday that they should've invested in our company. So, that's just another difficult thing that entrepreneurs face, especially in the early days of just getting started. Lucy: That in itself is some really great advice for people that are new entrepreneurs and don't realize how many no's you do get along the way. I'd be really curious with all the experience you have over the years, if you were sitting here with some young people that were starting their business, what kind of advice would you give them? What are some pearls of wisdom? Kristin: Sure. I would tell them to focus on something that really excites them, and they should anticipate that they're going to be working at this company and on this idea for seven-plus years. That they should not think of this as something that is going to take 18 months and is suddenly going to be purchased by some huge company. That it really should be something that every day they'll feel excited about working on it. You know when I look back at the six startups that I have been with, four of them have had various liquidity events, either IPOs or being acquired. And when I trace like how long did it really take for those companies to really achieve the vision of what it ultimately could be become, it took between seven and 10 years for that ultimate outcome to actually occur. That's why I think you just have to be really excited about it because it is every day [laughs] for a long period of time. And once they kind of gravitate toward that idea, then to just realizes that it is just every day pushing the ball forward, and that the more that they can create a list every day of those things that only they can do that will create major value for the company and really focus on accomplishing those things and trying to delegate or delay those things that they feel like, "OK, well it would be nice if I could get this thing done but it not going to create a huge value for the company," or, "This is a fun little exercise for me but there are five other people in the company that could do it." Try to deligate those things and really just focus on like what are the major value builders that only I can do today and today, and to get those done as quickly as possible so that the company really catapults forward as opposed to inches forward. Larry: Kristin, you know with all the different things that you are involved with, I have to guess that you probably put in some pretty long hours or maybe some weekends or evenings. How do you bring balance to your personal and professional lives? Lucy: Considering you have three kids, right? Kristin: Yes, yes, I do. I think that what I start with is what really rejuvenates me? What are those things that really feed my soul, and eliminate all the other things that don't truly rejuvenate me. And what are those things that really are critical? Again, I do this in my personal life, what are those things that only I can do? And try to delicate as much of the other things like cleaning the house, to other people. [laughter] Lucy: [sarcastically] My personal favorite. Kristin: Yeah, it actually drains my soul, the cleaning part. The things that I feel like only I can do, only I can be a mom to my kids, only I can be a wife to be husband, only I can be a daughter to my parents. So really focusing in on those very few things, because you're not going to have much time to do something else, and trying to do those things as well as you can with the very limited time that you have. So the one thing that my husband and I try to do as much as possible is to have dinner as a family alone together at least a couple or a few times a week, where there aren't any other people or friends involved and that we're all there together. We just really talk about what happened in your day, what was fun, what was not so fun, so that we are really communicating as a family because we do have so few hours together every day. And just doing those things, trying to play with my kids, trying to interact with my husband. He and I are just kind of passing in the night because he is also very busy with his career. Again, I think just focusing on what's truly emotionally fulfilling. My one hobby is gardening so I try to get in like 10 minutes a day of planting something or pruning something, just so that I can feel like I am doing something other than just working. Lucy: You know, I'm a gardener. [laughs] Kristin: Oh, really? Lee: Me too. Lucy: So, you're talking to some gardeners here. Kristin: Excellent. Lucy: We're right on the same page. I have to say, it's quite heartening, your parents are such role models to you and you're carrying on that tradition. I know your children will look at you as a role model as well because of the values that you hold and the great advice that you have given us on this interview today, so we really appreciate that. You've told us a lot about working on things that excite you, combining creativity and business. You're in a very exciting area. Mobility has got to be one of the most exciting technical areas that there is. In fact, I watched a YouTube session with you talking about the mobility market at Stanford. Kristin: What do you know? Lucy: Yeah, I thought it was quite good and would recommend that to listeners who want to know more about mobility and LimeLife. I thought it was wonderful. Kristin: Great. Lucy: We have one final question. You've done a lot and you're doing a lot, what is next for you? What is next after LimeLife, do you have a vision of that or what? [laughter] Kristin: I don't. Just keep building LimeLife and build it into a really great digital media company and continue to build a great team that's running it day-to-day. Some day hopefully, I think I always would like to be involved with it, but if it does reach a point where I don't have to be as involved with it day-to-day, it would be either starting something new again or helping other entrepreneurs start their vision and get it going. I do feel like I've seen everything from the highest of highs, of taking a startup public, to the lowest of lows, shutting down companies. I feel like I've seen quite a range of things that can happen in an entrepreneur environment. I think that when I'm older and grayer that it would be very satisfying to help other entrepreneurs realize their visions and realize their dreams and impart some of what I have learned to them. Lucy: We have just one final request for you too. One of the things that NCWIT works on is the image of computing, and when you were talking about be a programmer and loving to do that, we may be back in touch for a few quotes from you. Larry: You betcha. Kristin: OK. [laughs] Lucy: So thank you very much. We really did enjoy talking to you. Lee: Thanks, Kristin. Kristin: Thank you. Larry: And one last thing, Kristin, I want you to know that you are already in the process of helping other entrepreneurs, because we spread this out and we have parents, we have also young girls who listen to these interviews. I think your story is very compelling. Kristin: Oh, that's terrific, thank you. Lucy: Yeah, thanks a lot and just to remind listeners they can find these interviews at w3w3.com and ncwit.org. Thanks, you guys. Lee: Thanks. Kristin: Thank you. Take care. Larry: Bye-bye. [music] Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Kristin Asleson McDonnellInterview Summary: When Kristin McDonnell and the LimeLife team thought about what they wanted our cell phones to be able to do for us, more fun and more help were at the top of the list: more games and downloadable content like recipes, horoscopes, and lifestyle tips; less blood, bullets, and galactic aliens. Release Date: July 15, 2008Interview Subject: Kristin Asleson McDonnellInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 20:45

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Bambi Francisco Co-founder and CEO, Vator.tv Date: October 26, 2007 NCWIT Interview with Bambi Francisco BIO: Bambi Francisco is a co-founder and CEO of Vator.tv, the professional network for launching ideas and innovation. Vator.tv is a web platform for anyone, across all industries, at any stage, to share ideas, products, services and businesses with the rest of the world, mainly through video. People use Vator.tv to get their ideas or needs discovered or to find, discover and connect with others in networks of interest. Bambi is a veteran editor, columnist, and correspondent, covering the technology and Internet industries for 15 years. Her newsletters reached 400,000 subscribers interested in her thoughts on Internet trends and investing across public and private companies. She's appeared on Fox News, CNBC, and CBS as a commentator on the Internet. She was also the morning business anchor for KPIX, the CBS San Francisco affiliate. She was a founding producer at CNNfn, where she created business programming including programs on new ideas and innovation. She was named to the "blue-chip" financial reporting all-star team in 2000 by The Journal of Financial Reporters, the business news industry's leading organization. She was also named the top 10 most influential journalists on the Web by Adweek. She blogs at http://www.bambi.blogs.com/. Larry Nelson: This is Larry Nelson for w3w3.com, the community source for unique and valuable resources. We're here today with NCWIT, the National Center for Women and Information Technology. And I must say this is one of the most exciting series that we've been involved with. We have with us Lee Kennedy. She's the co‑founder of Tricalyx. And she's also on the board of directors of NCWIT. This is really an exciting series, so pay attention. Lee Kennedy: Thanks Larry, it's good to be here. Larry: Lee has been doing a wonderful job connecting with a number of people. And, of course, we're also lucky enough to have with us Lucy Sanders, who is the Director and co‑founder of NCWIT. So, welcome. Lucy Sanders: Thank you. Larry: And our special guest today is Bambi Francisco. She is the CEO of Vator.TV. Bambi, welcome to the show. Bambi Francisco: Thanks for having me, Larry. Larry: We are very excited about this. We've all been around your website and seen some fascinating things, as well as some people that we know from earlier times. Bambi: Yes, and it's been really fun watching the site grow. We launched June 6th, and we have over 1,000 innovators and hundreds of new ideas popping up every month. So it's exciting to see that there's just a lot of innovation happening. Not just here in Silicon Valley, because of course there's always tons of innovation happening here, but around the world. So we're seeing a lot of new ideas. Lucy: I think that the genesis for Vator.TV is pretty interesting, and dates back to your days as a columnist and a correspondence for "MarketWatch". Why don't you give us an insight as to how you came up with the idea for Vator.TV? Bambi: At "MarketWatch", I was a columnist and correspondent for publicly traded companies, mostly publicly traded companies. And I had focused on Internet companies, mostly Google and Yahoo!, the big companies. And what I've always tried to bring to my audience of public investors was what was innovating, and who were the innovators. And those were the leading Internet companies. But I started looking at a lot of the emerging companies, because they seem to be really innovating around the fringes. And they were the ones who would come up with disruptive technologies, which would inevitably change the landscape for a lot of these public companies. So I started writing a lot about startups. And before I knew it, I had people pitching me, from the public company sector, to the private company sector. And I just really didn't have enough bandwidth to learn about all of them, and write about all them. And so I created a utility for me, which was basically a repository, a place where the companies pitching me could create their pitches and videos. And what I wanted to do was at least showcase them. If I didn't have enough time to learn about them, I wanted other people to at least learn about them, in the event that they found them to be interesting. And I used it to rediscover new ideas. And also to just give exposure to the other ideas that I would invariably overlook. And so I created this little tiny platform and showed it to a friend of mine, Peter Teals, who said, "Wow, I think I could use this for investing as well." Because, again, I was trying to find the top companies to write about and he thought maybe we could use this utility as a way to vet companies that he would invest in. And so that's sort of the early days of Vator.TV, which at that point was called MyElevatorPitch.TV for lack of a better name at the time. Lucy: Well, Vator, I read, is short for "innovator" and "elevator". Bambi: Exactly, it was for "Elevator Pitch" initially, and pretty soon we realized (my partner and I‑‑Roland Vogl also helped found the company) and the two of us brainstormed on this idea. And he said, "We also stand for innovator." And I said, "Yeah, well, we are looking for innovators to give their elevator pitch." And so "Vator" sort of was a shared, obviously, part of both those words. And so we thought, well, we couldn't really stay with MyElevatorPitch.TV. So we shortened it to Vator.TV. Lee: I think the names of companies are just so interesting. Remember Mebo? Where they came up with that name? In the California Pizza Kitchen? So we want to know where did you get the name Vator. Were you in the California Pizza Kitchen? Bambi: Yes, well, Vator came from MyElevatorPitch.TV. And again it was just too long, and we wanted to shorten it. So Vator, actually, was taken by another company, a Finnish speedboat company. And so we thought, well, you know it's in Finland and so there was really no copyright problems there. So we just took the name Vator. And we actually now are named as Vator, Inc. We have the name here in the US. Lee: Well, so from columnist and correspondent to CEO and co‑founder of a high tech company, how did you decide to get into technology? And what technologies do you see on the horizon as being particularly important? Bambi: Well, I got into technology as a producer as CNN FM. And I started following a lot of initial public offerings. I launched and created a show called capital ideas, which was to look at new emerging companies that were at least ready to go public. So they weren't conceptual ideas. These were companies that were already in the pipeline to go public. And in ‘96, there were a number of companies we know today, including Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite. They were going public. And in ‘97, Amazon went public. So I really started following Internet companies around that time. So that was more than a decade ago. As far as technologies I think that are cool, I do have an I‑Phone. I think that's kind of cool. And we use Skype at work. I think widgets, the new widgets that are proliferating on the web where you can have your own personal store wherever you are, or where you could just create your own marketing and research materials through a widget. I like those widgets, any type of services or products with a widget component. I love Artifice. I think that's been a great technology. I do like the new services that enable people to create and share their content. And especially in my area, the video uploading companies. And Vator, of course, allows you to do that. But, of course you know the YouTubes, and a number of others and two dozen others, that really let people kind of mash up whether it's their video or audio or websites, and really create something special, and just share it with the world. Those get me really excited. Lee: There is. There is such neat technology on the web. It seems like every day there's a new widget that comes out. Bambi: The other kind of new services out there that I think are really interesting that I have started seeing on the horizon are really the ones that try to aggravate the influencers. Lucy: Hmm. Bambi: You know we've seen it 10 years ago where you had all this information and you had the early pioneers organizing the information and directories, then Google coming on about seven years ago and really helping you to just search or whatever it is that you want. Now with billions and billions of pages I think there is all this crop ‑ and probably in the last two years ‑ of companies that are really trying to mine the data for or mine all the content or helping people make decisions about which movie they should watch or which products they should buy. For instance, Aggregate Knowledge is a great company that does that where it aggregates behavior and offers up a recommendation or recommended item. Wise is another company that goes out and aggregates all of these consumers' opinions and reviews and comes up with a rating system that shows you which item may be best for you. So there are a number of companies that are really just trying to help you make a better decision and aggregate all that information, which I think is fairly new. Lucy: Bambi, talking about all these startups and entrepreneurs and innovation and elevator pitches and IPOs, early in your career you were covering all this. What made you decide to make the leap to become an entrepreneur yourself? We would love to hear what it is about being an entrepreneur that makes you tick. Bambi: As I said earlier in the interview with regards to how this came to be, I really created a utility for myself. I realized that it was turning into something that was of value to others, namely my initial investors. So that's the reason why I decided to put all my eggs in one basket and leave journalism and start focusing on building a product. Now that I have left, in the last six months one of the things that really makes me happy with my site is really hearing anecdotes from the users ‑ I don't call them customers ‑ when they either make a connection, whether they found an investor, whether they have gotten some exposure through Vader. So I guess you could say it is happy customers that really make me excited that I'm creating a product that's useful. So for myself, I think it's the opportunity to be creative and also to build a better mousetrap or a nice alternative to the way we innovate today. That really is just bringing people together and having their ideas showcased and either inspiring or motivating others to innovate, or helping the innovators on the site really connect with other people who can either partner with them or be employed by them or help distribute their products, or even be a source of funding for them. Larry: Let me ask you a two‑part question here Bambi. Were there some people along the way that helped support career path? And as you got into things, did you acquire or have any mentors? Bambi: I guess when I think about mentors, I definitely think about the people who really helped in the formation of my career as a journalist. That's really what I have been for the greater part of my professional career. So I'll start with my former boss at CNN. That's Lou Dobbs, because I worked there for six years at CNN. He really inspired me to really look hard at news and really be somewhat critical and really how to spot news or even how to create news. At CNN I also learned how to write. So it was really through a lot of his guidance and just his news judgment and how he delivered the news. I worked really closely with him. So I think he is one. Then I worked at MarketWatch for eight years. So I would say Larry Kramer, who was the founder of MarketWatch ‑ he also hired me after a three hour dinner. Then him, as well as Tom Calandra and David Callaway, Tom Calandra and Dave being both executive editors at MarketWatch. They really supported me and they really encouraged me to go out there and be very innovative when it came to how you package news. At the time that I started at MarketWatch in 2000, a lot of this convergence of news, whether it is radio, television, print and online was all coming together. They really encouraged me to try to use all those mediums and package them in a way that somebody could read my story, watch me deliver the story, hear me on radio and see it in print. They gave me a lot of freedom to be creative. So they gave me guidance, but they also gave me a lot of freedom. So I would say those really are my bosses. Unfortunately there are no women as far as mentors, but they were just the ones who just kind of shaped me. I guess one last person as far as a mentor would be Peter [Teal]. He is my early investor and he is also a great friend. One of the reasons I like Peter is because I like his management style. He is really fair, really generous. As is, by the way my boss Larry Kramer. He allows people to do what they do best. Actually back to Peter ‑ Peter is also very generous with money. So in terms of the capital formation of the company, Peter definitely guided me in terms of what's best for all my employees and me and investors. He's just a good manager. So I look to him a lot. Lucy: Well, sometimes when people talk about mentors, the rule of thumb is they can't be your boss. But I totally disagree with that. I think that your story is another piece of evidence of that. I think bosses can be just great mentors. They are certainly in a position where they can help you in your career and tell you and encourage you around things you are doing well, but also help you through some of the challenges that you have. That gets us to our next question, the toughest thing that you have ever had to do in your career. Bambi: I think the toughest thing that I had to do in my career was back in April, when I had to break away from my roots as a journalist and leave a really comfortable and well established job and leave the people and my mentors, who were at the time David Callaway and focus on something that really was still a concept. So breaking away from a company that I had been with for eight years is tough. I think it's tough for many entrepreneurs with whom I have spoken when I have asked them. Oh, you know, they started it when they were working as an employee. I think that everybody finds it really, really tough to take the leap. So I would say that, at least at this point in my career, that was the biggest and toughest decision so far. Lucy: That's surely understandable. Lucy: Yes, it's definitely tough leaving something that you're really good at and comfortable. And doing something brand new with lots of risk. Bambi: You know, I do have some female role models who I feel have really shaped my character, my professional character. Maybe they've not formed my career, but they've shaped who I want to be. Lucy: And who would they be? Bambi: Well, as a writer, I've always looked up to Peggy Newman. She's this conservative columnist. She'd worked for the "Wall Street Journal". She was also a former Reagan speechwriter. I like her because she's very insightful and thoughtful. But she's not snarky. And she really just offers very constructive criticism. And she's a bit maternal in her writing. But I like her gentleness. And she's also a great writer. And a couple of other people who I think are great writers that are able to take very esoteric messages, distill them down, and really reach out, and have an influence on a lot of people ‑ and one would be C.S. Lewis. And he's an author and Oxford scholar. I've always loved his books. He writes children's books, and he writes other books as well. But he has a great way with words. And Milton Freedman who is an economist I've written about, saying that he's an economic entrepreneur, because I think he's really a very much independent thinker. But if you read his stuff, and if you've ever interviewed him, he can take esoteric topics and really help you understand them. And so I think that's a gift. And then one last person, and I'm sure a lot of people will actually mention her (or these two), Madonna and The Rolling Stones. And one of the reasons why I like them is because they really know how to reinvent themselves and make themselves relevant. Lee: That's a really good point. Larry: That's interesting. Lucy: Well, so if we switch gears, we've just been talking about people that have influenced you or have given you advice along the way. What advice would you give if you had some young people sitting here? What advice about entrepreneurship and what might help them along the way? Bambi: I'd say one: do something that you truly love and build a really useful product. And the rewards will follow. I'd also say to trust your instincts, or trust your gut. And typically you end up finding yourself in among advisors and just people along the way. And everyone has their opinion. And I think this is mostly like a Steve Jobs thing. He definitely trusts his instinct. And so sometimes you can get really lost, because you're trying to form a consensus. But at the end of the day, it also loses everybody else. And you really need to provide direction. So I think trusting your instinct is a good one. Think along the lines of Andy Grove's, "be paranoid". I would say, "Don't leave any stone unturned." And that means, if there is something out there, I would definitely try to uncover what it is. If you feel like that they might be competitor, try to get as much information as you can. And maybe try to work with them. Or, actually, really try to work with them. And then, finally, I would say that I've learned a lot as an entrepreneur, and I think this is what I've spotted in other entrepreneurs as well, who do a good job leading, is that in order to lead, you really have to serve. And so I like to be able to do everything that I ask all my team members to do. And at the very least, is to be able to show them how to do it. So, it's to delegate it. But I think it's also good to be able to do everything that you ask other people to do. Larry: Well, it's certainly sounds like you do a lot in your 36‑hour day. So I have to ask the question, how do you bring balance to your personal and your professional lives? Bambi: Can I get back to you on that? No. Lucy: Still working on that, huh? Larry: We've got a class on procrastination. Bambi: I've perfected bringing imbalance to my personal and professional lives. No. I am still working on that. This is all pretty new to me. But I say the one thing that I try to do is really stay healthy; because one thing that I've realized is that you need energy. You need energy to sit down with each one of your team members, and go out there and share your story, and do your work. So if I don't try to eat well, or try to get my run in, or bike ride in, or do some things that keeps me healthy then I'm not a service to anybody in my personal or my professional life. Lee: And that's really important that personal health and taking time to take care of yourself. That's a theme we've heard, I think, through a lot of these interviews as being something very important to people who are very busy and passionate about what they're doing. We always want to ask people what what's next for them in these interviews, and I think that we know in some ways what's next for you. You've got a brand new company. You're going to put a lot of love and time into making that company successful. But what is next for you? What are your hopes and dreams for Vator.TV? Where do you see it going? Bambi: Well, I want to make some entrepreneurs successful. So I'm going to see this through over the next several years to make sure that we create the tools to enable them to connect with one another. And hopefully make it easier for them to really build upon their ideas and collaborate around their ideas online. I would hope that we could make connections that I'm already seeing with people who are from around the world (about 40 percent of our pitches for our innovators are from outside the US). And many from the Midwest and all these places that just don't have the access to investors or financial advisors or anyone who really knows what the value of an idea is. And so I hope to make those connections, or help people make those connections. And I hope to get a lot of female entrepreneurs out there. Lee: Yea! Bambi: Yeah, and hopefully they'll make themselves known by going onto Vator, and putting their pitch up, and contacting me or other people at Vator, so that we can help them and work with them. The nice thing is that people do connect with me once they are on the site. And it's really fun learning some of the obstacles that they go through, and how to help them. For instance, I think naturally we attract a lot of new media companies. And so we're, in the next month or so, launching another contest. And this one is going to be highlighting new media companies. And so that's one way that I hope to help them get some exposure. Lee: I think that Vator.TV is a great concept. And it's going to give people a way to make their ideas visible who heretofore really haven't had a platform or known how to do it. I did want to tell you I spent some time in your FAQ section on the site. And maybe this is a great way to end the interview, because I thought that the FAQ section was some of the best advice for entrepreneurs that I had seen. So, for example, a question like this: "What makes a compelling idea, or business, or productive video pitch for Vator.TV?" That's a great FAQ, right, for Vator.TV, isn't it? No more than three minutes, be original, demonstrate your value proposition, make it fun and entertaining, explain the market size, tell us what keeps you up at night, and I guess some of the best advice I've heard yet for entrepreneurs. Larry: Excellent. I love it. Lee: So, Bambi thanks very much for spending time with us. We really appreciate it, and wish you the best of luck with your new endeavor. We'll be paying close attention to you, and wish very much for your success. Bambi: Thank you so much for having me. Lee: And I want to remind listeners where they can find these podcasts. They can find them at w3w3.com and also NCWIT.org. So thanks very much everybody! Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Bambi FranciscoInterview Summary: As a journalist, Bambi Francisco has always loved being at the intersection of innovation, information, technology, and media. Release Date: October 26, 2007Interview Subject: Bambi FranciscoInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 22:05

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Judy Estrin President and CEO, Packet Design, LLC Date: September 13, 2007 NCWIT Interview with Judy Estrin BIO: Judy Estrin, CEO, JLABS, LLC. and author, Closing the Innovation Gap is a networking technology pioneer and Silicon Valley leader. Since 1981, she has co-founded eight technology companies and served as CTO of Cisco Systems. As CEO of JLABS, LLC, she is an advisor and speaker in the areas of entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation. In May 2000 she co-founded Packet Design, LLC, a network technology company. Prior to co-founding Packet Design, LLC, Estrin was Chief Technology Officer for Cisco Systems. Beginning in 1981 Estrin co-founded three other successful technology companies with Bill Carrico. Bridge Communications, founded in 1981, was a vendor of internetwork routers and bridges that went public in 1985 and merged with 3Com Corp. in 1987; Estrin served as Engineering Vice President and Executive Vice President of Bridge, and later ran the Bridge Communications Division at 3Com. Network Computing Devices, a maker of X terminals and PC-UNIX integration software, was founded in 1988 and went public in 1992; Estrin started with NCD as Executive Vice President and became CEO in 1993. Estrin served as CEO of Precept Software from the company's 1995 founding as a maker of streaming video software until Cisco Systems acquired Precept in 1998, and she became Cisco's Chief Technology Officer until April 2000. Estrin has been named three times to Fortune Magazine's list of the 50 most powerful women in American business. She sits on the boards of directors of The Walt Disney Company and The Federal Express Corporation as well as two private company boards -- Packet Design, Inc. and Arch Rock. She also sits on the advisory councils of Stanford's School of Engineering and Stanford's Bio-X initiative. She holds a B.S. degree in math and computer science from UCLA, and an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders, the CEO of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT. Today we have another great interview with a fabulous woman entrepreneur. And with me is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. Larry Nelson: Hello, I'm so excited to be here. Lucy: Why don't you tell us a little bit about w3w3.com, since the podcast series will be also syndicated on your site? Larry: Yes, and we've started already, and it's really popular so far. At w3w3.com, have it all set it where they can download it as a podcast, they can listen to it on their computer, and it's having great reception. Lucy: That's great! Also here is Lee Kennedy who is an NCWIT director and also, in an exciting new twist of events, is starting yet another new company called Tricallex. Welcome, Lee. Lee Kennedy: Thanks, I'm so glad to be here. Lucy: Well, and today we're interviewing somebody who is just somebody I'm thrilled to talk to because she loves data networking. Now you guys don't get on my case about this. I'm sure that she loves lots of other things, but I know she gets network congestion, and TCIP, and all those great packet protocols. Judy Estrin, welcome. Judy Estrin: It's nice to be here. Lucy: Judy is the co‑founder and chairman of Packets Design. And she sits on the board of the Walt Disney Company and also Federal Express. So, Judy, you know you certainly have done a lot in the area of networking, and not just networking but route analytics and all the different algorithms. Why don't you tell us a little bit about Packet Design first, and then we'll get into the interview? Judy: OK, Packet Design has actually evolved over the last five years. It started out in 2000 as a company that we started to target what we called medium term innovation. So we didn't want to just focus on one product area. We started a number of projects, and the idea was to either license technology or spin out companies. Now, we all know what happened in 2001 and 2002 in the networking market; actually and in the technology market, in general. So it was an interesting time to start a company like that. But we did spinout three companies: Verneer Network, Packet Design, Inc., and Precision IO. A couple of years ago, we changed the business model and stopped doing new projects and just focused our time on the spinouts that existed. So Packet Design, itself, is really somewhat of a shell company at this point. Packet Design, Inc., which I'm chairman of the board of (but not CEO), is in the route analytics business. Verneer is in the network security business. And Precision IO, unfortunately, ended up getting shut down because of, I would say, running out of patience in the eccentric community. Lucy: When you mention route analytics, tell us a little bit about what that entails. Judy: The products that Packet Design, Inc., which is really the spin off that most of the people from Packet Design, LLC went to, the products they provide, probably the easiest way to describe it, is allow you to get more information about an IP network, so that you can manage, diagnose, and plan more effectively. And it gives you information about the routing itself, which is why it is called route analytics, as well as the products that give you information about the traffic that goes on the network and correlates that traffic with the routing. And previously there'd not been products that understood the routing the way this product did. Lucy: Well, and that maybe gets us to our first question around technology because, certainly, I know enough about networking protocols to know that route analytics is an extremely difficult technology. How did you first get into technology? And as you look out into the future, what technologies do you think are going to be especially important? Judy: So, this is kind of a funny answer to have to how did I first get into technology, I would say I was born into it. And today it's common to have second‑generation computer scientists. But when I was growing up, it was not so common. But my father worked with Flid Noiman at the Institute for Advanced Studies, and they started the Computer Science Department at UCLA. My mother is also a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, and was one of the very early biomedical engineers. So I grew up in an environment filled with science and technology. I had a very strong aptitude toward math. And I used to joke that if computers hadn't been invented, I might have ended up being a statistician. So I'm very lucky that computers were invented. When I think of myself and what I really like to do, it's solving problems. And if you think of about technology and computer science, specifically, it really is about solving problems. And I, very early in my career, moved from being a dedicated engineer into management. And I was, in essence, an individual contributor for probably a couple of years before I started managing. And what I found is the same problem solving techniques that I learned in computer science worked very well in the world of solving overall problems, whether it was organizational or people or technological. So I was exposed to technology very early, and I loved it. When you ask me what technologies I think are cool today, as I look forward, some of the most interesting technologies I think are the ones that are, what I would call, interdisciplinary, essentially applying information technology to different things. So whether it's to the consumer market, when you look at entertainment or social networking or any of the other problems that technology is solving in that arena. The increase of mobility, so looking at the problems of trying to take everything we've done that runs so well on personal computers and make that information available on mobile devices. One of the areas that I'm very interested in, my sister happens to run this center at UCLA in this area, and I'm on a board of a startup, is something called sensor‑nets, which is the area of bringing the physical world, or being able to monitor the physical world, and bring information about the physical world into your information systems. Because you now can combine processors, sensors, and wireless together in a very small device that can be sprinkled around, and allow you to get information about the physical world that might be used for environmental needs, or energy, in data centers, in monitoring the elderly at home. There's a whole range of applications. So I think that is another interesting application. I think the application of information technology to healthcare and education will be very important areas, because both of those are areas we have big problems in. And I believe technology can really help solve them. And then last, it's a broad area, but anything having to do with what people call clean techs. So the whole area of energy efficiency as well as new forms of energy I think are going to be very interesting. And technology, information technology will play a role in solving those problems. Lee: Well, the area of sensors is also particularly interesting to me and us at NCWIT. Just a plug for a future NCWIT summit we're going to have at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne will be exactly, Judy, what you were just talking about. And we're talking about the future of computing and how it's driven from multiple disciplines. Judy: Great. Lucy: And Judy you may have already answered our next question when you talked about your love to solve problems. But the question is: why are you an entrepreneur? And what is it about it that makes you tick? Judy: You know it's interesting, a lot of entrepreneurs will tell you stories about how when they were kids they had a lemonade stand or they started a business, and I don't have any stories like that. When I was growing up, I don't think I ever imagined that I would become an entrepreneur. But when I graduated with my master's from Stanford, I had offers from a number of different technology companies. I was interviewing at Intel, at HP, Xerox, the classic large companies. But I also interviewed at a very small company with 50 people called XLog, which was a spinout of Intel. And I decided to go there, because a friend of my parents told me that the smartest people that he knew worked at that company. So I started off my career at a small company. And just became very passionate about what you could do in small groups. And how quickly we were able to move. And how innovative the environment was. And I realized, also, how much I enjoyed building my own culture, developing groups, developing an organization. So out of that XLog experience, I think, was probably what made me start to think that, you know, maybe I'd like to start something on my own. And the other thing is, because I went to a small company, I was able to move into management much more quickly than I think if I'd gone to a larger, more hierarchical company. And I found I loved managing and so the non‑technical side. I always stayed deep in the technology. But the business side of entrepreneurship, I've found that I really enjoyed. One benefit of being an entrepreneur: when you're building a company, you get a choice to stay involved in the technology and do the higher level executive functions. And you have a very broad scope. And I found that that was something that interested me. When you end up at a large company, you end up having to make a decision of either being at the top, and being very far away from the technology, or staying technical, and not being able to necessarily exercise the management side as much. So I think what about entrepreneurship makes me tick. It's a passion for an idea. Every company we started was because we were passionate about an idea and about solving a problem in the marketplace. Most of the companies were pretty ahead of their time. So we tended to look forward a lot in what we were doing. And I keep saying we. The companies that I was involved in, I co‑founded with my ex‑husband Bill Carrico. So that's the "we" that I'm saying there. Larry: Judy, you know I thought it's interesting that it was obvious since the very beginning of time for you, IT was going to be part of your life. But it wasn't until after you got your master's degree that you really started thinking about the possibility of being an entrepreneur. And by the way, this is Lucy's favorite question, having to do with: Who were the people in your life that shepherded you through this career path? And who were your mentors? Judy: Early on, as I was growing up, my parents were really my role models. And that is what led me toward science and to become a computer scientist. But both of them are academics. And so I was not at all exposed early on to the business world. And it really was at XLog that I first became exposed to the business world. And I would say my first mentor was Bill, my ex‑husband, because he came to XLog and was the one who promoted me into a management position. So I would say, if I had to pick an early mentor, it was Bill. But the reason I don't like the question is: I think as I have gone through my career, there are so many people that have influenced me. I watched everybody, whether it's people who have worked for me who have taught me things. I have people I have worked for. I sit on the boards of directors of some incredible companies with just terrific leaders. And watching them and how they lead influenced me. Watching people who I don't like the way they lead at times influences me, saying I don't want to be like that. So I would say that I really can't identify a small set, or a set of role models. I think I've pretty much built my career and have always taken a strategy of just learning from everyone around me. Again, from those people who have worked for me and those people I have worked for. Larry: I think you answered that question quite well. Lucy: Right. Judy: You know, I'm asked these days... People often ask will I mentor, get together and ask for help. And one of the things I like to tell people is that when you're looking around, and when you're looking to someone who has experience, and hearing about hearing about their experiences, don't listen to what they say and just say, "OK, I have to do it that way." What you need to do is listen to other people's experiences and then filter. And decide which of those things feel right for you. Because in the end, and I think this is probably the most important thing about mentoring and role models, one is most successful when you're being yourself and developing your own capabilities. That doesn't mean you don't learn along the way. But when you try to act like somebody else, and if it's not natural to your own personality and skills, it always backfires. Lucy: Well, and I think that's really well said as well. We certainly do learn from everybody around us. And I think you had a brilliant answer for that. The next question we have for you is maybe on the other end of your experiences, in terms of the tough times in your career and the challenges you've had. What was the toughest thing that you've had to face in your career so far? Judy: I'm going to say two things. They were kind of tied together. The Packet Design Model involved spinning out these companies, and then hiring executives to run them and getting back your investment for them. And it involved then me learning how to let go. Because if you spinout a company, the company has to become independent. The CEO of that company has to run the company. You can't have two CEOs. So one of the very interesting things for me was one: I learned how hard it is to find good executives, to find good leadership and that process of learning how to let go, which I think I have developed as a board member and is one of the things that makes me more effective as a board member today, is that I have learned when to suggest, when it's my business to poke in, and when not. And how to question in a way that helps the CEO think, and helps hold them accountable without meddling in their business or trying to do their job. So that's number one. But I would say, by far, the hardest thing that I had to do was being involved in the shutting down of Precision IO. It was the first time that one of the companies that I helped start had to outright fail. And we couldn't navigate an exit strategy for it. Every other time when there was something that didn't go exactly the way we wanted, we were able to navigate an exit. And whether it is acquisition or partnership or changing strategy, here, because of the timing, because of execution, leadership, the venture dynamic, we ended up just shutting it down. And having to let people go that I've been involved in hiring was just very tough for me. Lucy: It really is tough, I think, for anybody. And it's tough for the people on the receiving end. It's interesting how a lot of times; those are the changes in people's lives where they go off to do wonderful, exciting things. Judy: Right. And I'm happy to say that the core team that got let go, those that I have continued to touch base with, are all in great places. They were all terrific people and very employable. But it doesn't make it any easier to make that decision. Lucy: So, Judy, one of the reasons we are doing these interviews with women like you is we're hoping that a number of young people will listen to these, and learn, and get inspired to go off and, potentially, be entrepreneurs in their career. So if you were sitting there, what would be some of the best advice you would give them? Judy: Well, I guess a couple of things. One is: do it for passion, not for money. So it's wonderful to make money if you're successful. But if you're doing it for the money, and the money is what you're doing it for first, I guarantee you won't come up with as good an idea or be as successful. So every entrepreneur I've seen that is doing whatever they're doing (a new product, a new service), because they are passionate about solving a problem with a new type of technology, those are the ones that are most successful. I'm not going to say that having a company go public, or get bought, and making money from it is not great. And that has to also be a motivator, because the venture guys want you to want to make money, because they want to make money. But the passion has to be there. And that should be the number one. So I guess that's one piece. The second is: you have to be ready to fail. You have to be ready to fail, pick yourself up, and try again. I think that sometimes we get confused because it was such a long time of growth and opportunity in the IT business, that so many companies were so successful, that people forget how hard it is to really build a successful company. And more companies fail than succeed. And so you really have to be ready to fail. And everybody says it, but you have to be ready to do it and pick yourself up and try again. The third thing is: that when I think about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, I already talked about the passion. It takes flexibility and persistence. You really have to be willing to keep going and plow through obstacles. But you also have to have a sense of judgment and flexibility to know when that obstacle... Sometimes you need to push through the obstacle. Sometimes that obstacle is telling you something. And what it's telling you is: you need to be flexible enough to change your strategy a little bit. And so this balance between persistence that just has you pushing forward, ignoring the naysayers and just knowing that your vision is right, but the flexibility and the open mindedness, to be able to say to yourself, "You know what? Maybe it's not 100 percent right. And maybe I just learned something new that I have to change slightly or change dramatically." So that balance between persistence and flexibility. And then last, there are lots of people out of school that want to go right from school to being the CEO of a company. My advice is get experience first because it will make you a better entrepreneur. Again, I think everybody thinks it's easier to build a company that it really is. Now that experience might be at another entrepreneurial company where you go work somewhere and watch someone else do it. It doesn't have to be 10 years of experience but getting some experience first I think will make you a much better entrepreneur. I think the trend of get your degree and start a company is actually not a good one. Some people can do it but I think it's better to be able to watch others a little bit first. Lucy: I can really echo this notion of passion. Last night I listened to the three‑minute pitches of 10 young entrepreneurial teams here in Boulder. I got to be the judge. The ones that really were in love with their idea and passionate about it ‑ and you could really see that there was a subset that was and then a subset if I would have said, "Why don't you make black white?" they would have said OK. [laughs] Larry: Hmm. Lucy: So it was just kind of an interesting experience. You have given us a lot of, I think, great characteristics of entrepreneurs. I know that they are your personal characteristics as well in terms of flexibility and persistence and having good judgment. Do you have any other personal characteristics that you haven't shared with us so far that you think have given you an advantage as an entrepreneur? Judy: I work very hard. [laughs] So that's part of that persistence. I'm really willing to roll up my sleeves and work very hard. We have talked about passion. Communication skills ‑ I think that one thing that I have always been able to do is communicate my passion and my vision to a broad range of people, so whether it is to the customer, to the marketplace, to employees. It's not enough just to have the passion and vision. You have to be able to communicate it and get other people excited about it also, for instance, raising money. So, I think my communication skills probably have helped me. The other is that I tend to be very forward‑looking. I am always willing to question. I'm very open‑minded. So in terms of when you try to think about, "Well, how did you decide to start a company in this area?" that whole notion of being able to look at what is available and what isn't and how can you take technologies that exist and maybe do something different with them. So the whole arena of being able to question what is out there, question myself, be honest, and do kind of a self‑assessment about where I or the company is at any certain time, I think has helped. There are some entrepreneurs that go in one direction until they hit a wall. The ability to self assess and question oneself and what you're doing without becoming wishy‑washy, but just a healthy amount of it, I think is important. Then last I would say leadership. I love building teams of people and leading teams of people. I think the teams of people that have worked for me appreciate the relationship and the environment or the culture that we created. So I would say leadership is probably the last. Lucy: That's great. I sense you have learned a ton through all the startups you have built. Judy: I have. I would say leadership style is really what I am talking about. Lucy: So, one of the things about which we are always curious is, being an entrepreneur, especially with the phenomenally successful companies you have built or as an executive at Cisco, how have you brought balance into your personal and professional life. Judy: I would say that until I had my son, which was in 1990, in our second company, I didn't. All I did was work. I had no balance in my personal/professional life. The only reason it worked is Bill and I cofounded the companies together. So our personal and professional lives just melded into one. We didn't do anything except work. Having a child forced me to have balance because my son became my number one priority. It doesn't mean the companies weren't important. But there was no question in my mind about what my number one priority was. Then I had to begin to juggle. I think that what I always tell people is that you can do it but the first thing you have to realize this is really hard to acknowledge to yourself because you can't do everything. So you have to prioritize and figure out what you are not going to do. You know, I couldn't be at every event at his school. I could pick the ones I wanted to be at. I had to make trade‑offs and establish routines where I would leave work at 5:30 in order to be able to spend time with my son. But then I, at 8:30 or 9:00 would go back to email and work some more. So an analogy I like to give people is when you're juggling, good jugglers know how many balls they can juggle. They don't ever pick up any more than that. I think the mistake people make is at each stage of your life, if you have children at each stage of their lives, the number of balls you can juggle changes because the balls change in size. The different phases of the company take different amounts of attention. So in six month increments in my life, I have always said, "OK. How many balls can I be juggling?" because if you pick up one more than you know how to juggle, they all fall down. So you're much better off putting one down so that you can continue to juggle than having the whole thing fall apart. The other thing is learning to ask for help. That was very hard for me to learn how to do. Whether it's getting help in your personal life or getting help at work and delegating and getting other people to do things that maybe inside you know or think you could do better, usually it's just that you think you could do better and other people can do them just as well and you need to learn how to do it. Now that I am older and I'm in a different phase of my life, I try to more consciously balance personal and professional. I think for 25 years when I was running companies it was coping. Now I'm spending more time consciously saying I need to make sure that I pay attention to myself as well as others. Lucy: So, I think juggling is a wonderful way to describe it. It's a wonderful analogy. We have talked with a number of people who have also talked about integration and we have had other words. I think juggling is terrific. So you have really achieved a lot. There is a lot about your career at that we haven't even touched on in this interview. But we always like to ask our interviewees what's next for them. What is next for Judy Estrin? Judy: It's been an interesting couple of years in terms of changes in my life. For the first time I'm not running a company. A couple of years ago, I picked up my head and said, "What's next?" and decided that I wanted what's next to be something very different, that I do not want to start another company at this point in time. I do have my Board seats, which I spend a lot of time on and love. But I decided to write a book. I started about a year and a half ago and hope to have it in bookstores in the August timeframe, August '08. That is a very, very different type of endeavor than running a company. But the reason I did it was the same reason. It was passion for a topic. The book has to do with innovation. But it has not specifically targeted it as 'here is how to make your business more innovative', which is what most of the innovation books are about. It more looks at how you create cultures of innovation for science and technology and where we are as a country and the fact that we have lost some of the elements that made us so successful have eroded. So it's really a little bit of a broader perspective on not just businesses but the country and what we need to do to cultivate sustainable innovation looking forward. Lucy: Well, I've had the pleasure of seeing some of your early remarks that you gave a group a couple of months ago. I'm very much looking forward to the book because you have had very thoughtful ideas. So hurry up and finish it. Judy: I'm working as fast as I can. Larry: All right. Lucy: Really, thanks a lot, Judy for your time. I know you're really busy and we really appreciate you taking time out to talk to us. Larry: I want to thank you so much. You echoed one of my feelings that over the years we have learned more from our mistakes and failings than we have from our successes. Judy: No question. One of the big things in my book is that you need to failure as a step to success and not an end in itself. So if you're not willing to fail then you never try anything. Larry: That's right. Judy, I want to thank you for joining us today. By the way, you listeners out there, would you please pass this interview along to people that you know, that would be interested and maybe even should be interested. It's an excellent story. Just go to www.ncwit.org and that's where you can see all of the different interviews along with w3w3.com. Thank you much. Lucy: Thanks Judy. Judy: Bye‑bye. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Judy EstrinInterview Summary: For Judy Estrin, an interest in science and technology is in the blood: her older sister is an MD; her younger sister is a professor of computer science; and her parents both have PhDs in electrical engineering. Release Date: September 13, 2007Interview Subject: Judy EstrinInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 27:36

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Heidi Roizen Managing Director, Mobius Venture Capital Date: August 15, 2007 NCWIT Interview with Heidi Roizen BIO: Heidi Roizen has spent her entire life in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Silicon Valley, first as an entrepreneur and ultimately as a venture capitalist helping other entrepreneurs build the great companies of tomorrow. She is currently a Managing Director of Mobius Venture Capital, a venture fund with over $2 billion under management. In that capacity, Heidi serves on the Boards of Directors of Reactrix, Ecast, Perpetual Entertainment and AuctionDrop. Heidi began her career in 1983 by co-founding T/Maker Company, a software publisher and developer for early personal computers including the IBM PC and the original Macintosh. As CEO, Heidi led the company for over a decade, raised two rounds of venture capital and ultimately consummated a successful acquisition of T/Maker by Deluxe Corporation. In 1996, she joined Apple Computer as VP of Worldwide Developer Relations. After one year at Apple, Heidi decided to return to her entrepreneurial roots, this time as a Mentor Capitalist and ultimately a Venture Capitalist. Heidi has also been actively involved in the trade associations critical to the Valley. She is a past president of the Software Publishers Association and served on its board from 1987 to 1994. She also represented the venture industry as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Venture Capital Association from 2003 to 2007. She also served on the board of Great Plains Software from 1997 until its acquisition by Microsoft in 2001, and is a past Public Governor of the Pacific Exchange. She is also a frequent guest lecturer at Stanford as well as a speaker at conferences for technologists, entrepreneurs, or women executives. Heidi holds a BA and an MBA from Stanford University. She is married to orthopedic surgeon David Mohler and has two daughters. Lee Kennedy: Hi. This is Lee Kennedy, board member of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT. And this is part of a series of interviews that we're having with fabulous entrepreneurs, women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors, all of whom had insightful stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs. With me, I have Larry Nelson, from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. How are you doing? Larry Nelson: Oh, great. It's wonderful to be here again. And one of the things that is so exciting for us at w3w3.com is that we are helping support, I think, the most fabulous program that we've experienced since we got in the radio business in '98, and the idea that we're helping inspire young women, girls, getting into IT, looking into that, as well as being an entrepreneur. But now, we're also getting phone calls from business leaders, people in schools, who say, "This is such a great program. We'd like to help promote it, too." Lee: Well, that's wonderful. Larry: One of the interesting things that we have here that's a little bit of a twist is that we're interviewing an entrepreneur who became a venture capitalist, and also, of course, then, therefore works and helps support entrepreneurs. And we're very pleased that we're interviewing Heidi Roizen, who is a managing director of Mobius Venture Capital. And we've got a little bit of a twist here. Lee and I are here in Colorado, and Lucy Sanders, the CEO and founder of NCWIT, is in California, at Heidi's home base. So, Lucy, let's get started. Lucy Sanders: All right. Hi, everyone. I'm sitting here with Heidi in her beautiful home in Atherton. I've been here a few times, and I just think it's so much fun to be here and interview you here in your office. Heidi Roizen: Well, thank you. I hope the dogs don't participate. Lucy: Or they might. They might have something profound to say. Heidi: They often do. Lucy: One of the things that makes it so exciting to interview you is that when I think, about Silicon Valley, I think, about you. And I think that you're synonymous with Silicon Valley. You've done a lot, as Larry mentioned. You've started companies. You're in venture capital. You were educated here at Stanford. You're a part of the community... Heidi: I was actually born at the Stanford Hospital, which I think, I'm probably the only one in Silicon Valley... Lucy: And why don't you spend a minute or two bringing us up to speed about what you've been doing lately? Heidi: Well, I am currently serving on four boards. They keep me very busy. They are all companies that are definitely not in their "two guys and a dog and a laptop" stage any longer, but they're all still companies that aren't through to the end of the road yet. So, lots of interesting challenges in terms of recruiting, customer acquisition, strategic business development, and all the normal things one goes through in startup land. So, I'm working on those companies, and then I'm working on a few entrepreneurial ventures on the side, helping out some friends. I always love having my fingers in the very, very early stages, and so I like having a few of those to work on as well. Lucy: Well, and I happen to know you're very generous with your time for nonprofits and for Stanford students. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: The last time I was here, we had a great dinner, where you brought them back to your home. And I think, you're going to have some great advice for us, so why don't we just get right to the interview? Heidi: OK. Lee: Well, Heidi, I'll jump in and ask our first question, and that's: how did you first get into technology? Was it when you were a child or in college? And then, what technologies do you think are really cool today? Heidi: OK. Well, the first question is one that I think, if you're born and raised in Silicon Valley, at this time ‑ born in 1958, graduated from Stanford, undergrad in 1980 ‑ you couldn't help but apply for a job and end up at a tech company. So, even though I was not a technologist ‑ in fact, my undergraduate degree is in creative writing ‑ I ended up as the editor of the company newsletter for a little startup called Tandem Computers. Lee: Wow. Heidi: And that's really where I got my first inkling that there was something really exciting about the computer industry. What I realized, at that time, was I kind of looked around, and everybody getting ahead either had an engineering degree or an MBA. And it was a little late for me to go get an engineering degree, I thought, but I figured the MBA thing looked like a pretty good idea. So, I went back to Stanford and got that, and really fell in love with personal computing at the time. It's hard for people... I mean, I sound like such an old geezer when I say this. But, I was the class of 1983, and there were only three people ‑ I was one of them ‑ who owned their own personal computer at school. And now, can you imagine being a graduate student and not having a personal computer? You'd be hopeless. So, started my company right out of school and just never looked back. I had the good fortune to have a brilliant programmer as a brother, who really didn't like the business side, and I loved the business side. And the thing I like to tell people, often, who are non‑technologists, who wonder about being in the technology field, I tell them, "You know, need a mix of people." I don't have to know how to build a car to drive one. And in fact, I'd say, particularly in my early times working with my brother, who was the genius programmer, sometimes he'd build features that were so genius that only he could use them, and they weren't very practical. So, I think, sometimes it's good to be the petunia in the onion patch, as I used to call it in the development hall. Lucy: Tell us a little bit about the technology that you're thinking about as being the next wave of technical, cool gadgets. Heidi: I think, gadgets is always a slippery slope, because there are gadgets that I just love. I mean, we're investors in Sidekick and Sling, so we definitely have some gadgets companies out there. If any of you have seen a Reatrix system in the malls and in the theaters, and the Reactive television systems, or an Ecast jukebox ‑ we've got tons of portfolio companies I can tell you about that all have exciting gadgets and technologies. To me, where I'm focused right now is I've been thinking a lot about the demographic that is me ‑ the woman who still wants to look good and feel good, who has more free time, who has more money, who, however, still has family obligations, has a career. We're hitting 50, and when our parents hit 50, we thought they were pretty much close to death... Heidi: Now, we are shocked to find that we are 50. And I think, what's interesting is that the Silicon Valley ‑ and it's a little bit like Hollywood ‑ get so focused on youth and the youth culture and the spending money that youths have and advertising to youths. And while I've got nothing against young people, I think that the people my age and women my age have been an underserved demographic, when it comes to utilizing the web as a medium for exchange, as a community, as an outlet for all sorts of things and a place to go learn about things. And I'm seeing more and more activities around that, and I can't tell you how many times... this is probably hitting all of my same‑age brethren entrepreneurs, but we're all sort of getting up and saying, "I don't really want to start the next teen cell phone. I really want to start something that my friends and I could use." And so I'm seeing a lot of really interesting companies come about, a lot that combine community with some of the really innovative things that can be done online. Lucy: Give it some time. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: Give it some time. Larry: Yeah, you bet. I'm not that old yet. But, anyhow... Lee: That's right, Larry. Larry: They're laughing... Heidi: Somebody once asked me to predict the future of venture investing, and I said, "Just about the time we finally invest in the ultimate weight‑loss pill and the instant‑tan pill, culture will change so that it's not cool to be thin and it's not cool to be tan, and we'll lose again." Larry: Oh, boy. My personal friend, Mark Twain, said, "Youth is wasted on the young." Heidi: That's right. Larry: Anyhow. I can't help but ask this, Heidi. Many people don't look at venture capitalists as entrepreneurs, but anybody who is a managing director, believe me, they are entrepreneur. But, of course, Heidi has the background and experience of being an entrepreneur. She's now continuing to support and work with entrepreneurs. What is it about you that makes this all happen? And what makes it tick, in terms of an entrepreneur? Heidi: Well, there are so many answers. And I've had the pleasure to listen to many of your wonderful speakers on this series before myself, and I think, a lot of things have been mentioned about tenacity and creativity and mission and a passion about what you're doing. There are so many things that I can think of. And of course, if you look me up on LinkedIn, I refer to myself as a "recovering entrepreneur," which is a little bit of an inside joke at Mobius. We're recovering entrepreneurs. Heidi: I think, what I had to learn, going from being an entrepreneur to being a venture capitalist, is it's like being the quarterback and then being the coach. When you're a venture capitalist, you do work behind the scene, you do help a lot. But, they're sort of not your losses, and they're not your victories. And if you're doing your job right, the entrepreneur is on the cover of "Time" magazine, not you. When you're an entrepreneur, the buck stops here. It's funny. I just went on a walk with a fellow entrepreneur of mine, and he was talking about a friend who used to be a vice president of a big company and is now the CEO of a small company, and one of the things he was saying to her is, "Now you understand how the buck really stops here." Heidi: And I think, for me, what really defines an entrepreneur is something that somebody said to me once. When I was running T/Maker, we had this product line called ClickArt, which is still around today, and it's basically electronic clip art. But, you have to remember, when we did that product in 1984, there were no scanners; there was no PostScript; there was no anything. We were literally sitting artists down, at 128K max. We didn't even have a stylus. They were drawing with the mouse in 72 DPI to create electronic clip art. I mean, that's as basic as it was. And when we shipped that product, I remember staying at a trade show, and I can't remember how many people came up to me and said, "Wow! You know, I thought of that, too." Right? And in the back of my mind, I thought, "Yeah, you thought of it. But, we did it." Heidi: And I think, for most of these things, it's that "one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration." There are so many ideas that just die on the vine because a person doesn't go out and try to actually do them. They think they're a cool idea, but other things get in the way and they don't really work hard at it. And not only do they not work hard at the creative process, but the process I'll loosely call is the destructive process. With entrepreneurs, one of the things I respect the most is, when you come up with an idea, that instead of working on it for the first five days about how you're going to accomplish it, you spend five days trying to prove that it's already been done or it's not doable ‑ not because you're being pessimistic, but before you engage in the creative process, sometimes you have to go and say, "What else is already out there?" And one of my pet peeves as a venture capitalist is when somebody comes and pitches me an idea, and I say, "Have you ever heard about blahblah.com?" And they go, "What's that?" And I get on and I show them, and it's the exact company they were talking about building, but it already exists. My feeling is, today, particularly with Google and other search engines and the Internet, you can find a lot of this stuff out there, and you need to go out and look. But, I do think, ultimately, a long and winding answer, but the short answer is it's like Nike, man. It's "just do it." If you just do it, that's the only way to be an entrepreneur. If you're not willing to just do it, you're never going to be an entrepreneur. Lee: That is such great advice, Heidi, because so many people, even when they just go out and do it, it's not that first idea that they even end up doing sometimes. It's just having the guts to get out there and start the business and get in that industry and figure out what it is. Heidi: That's right. And ask a lot of questions and meet a lot of people and kiss a lot of frogs. Larry: Yeah. Heidi: It's always easy, in retrospect, to say, "Why did I take that meeting with that person?" But you don't know because, just as likely, you could take a meeting with another person. And I just had something happen this weekend, where I was helping someone on a music project. And we were talking to someone who was totally unrelated, and they just said, "Oh, what are you up to?" Totally unrelated to the music industry. And we told him what we were doing, and he said, "Hey, I'm good friends with..." And I won't name the names because it's all proprietary, but let's just say one of the most Grammy‑winning artists in the world. And he said, "I'll give him a call tomorrow and see if he's interested in helping you with this." So, it's like one of those random, like that's not what we were even there to talk about. But, that's how the conversation ended up going, and it could take us in a really exciting direction. You just never know when that kind of serendipitous stuff is going to occur. Lucy: Your remark about 1984, when you were doing T/Maker and you had to have the ClickArt, I just have to go back to that for a moment and say, in 1984, we were trying to draw things in P‑Roth inside... Lucy: That's not revolutionary. Heidi: Yeah, yeah. I remember the first time I showed my husband QuickTime, whenever it came out ‑ 1989, whatever. And I'd bring home my file, because we were under nondisclosure with Apple. And I'd show him this postage‑sized, grainy thing, and he goes, "Wow. I am really underwhelmed." Heidi: For me, as a computer geek, it was so exciting to see television on a computer. And for him, he was like, "Uh, honey? Have you looked at our TV set? It's like a lot better than this." Lucy: Because I know you, I think that one of the things that makes you a great entrepreneur is, in fact, you see potential, and you're willing to take the risk to develop the potential. Heidi: Yeah. It does make one quite dangerous. It's that joke about the person who buys houses because they see the good in every house. And I tend to be a person who sees the upside in things. Which I think, again, in order to be an entrepreneur, you have to be an optimist. You have to believe things are going to work out your way. But, you have to be realistic. And that's where I, again, for lack of a better word, call it the destructive process ‑ testing your idea, going out and thinking about the boundary cases: "What's the worse that could happen here? What's the worse that could happen here? How am I going to prepare for it?" And also going out and really combing the markets to make sure that what you're doing is unique, or, if not unique, that you're going to be the best somehow. Lucy: Well, along the way ‑ you've been here in Silicon Valley. You were born here. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: And you've got a great network. And we are really curious to also understand who helped you the most. Who would you look to as being your mentor? Heidi: I was very fortunate to be born into a family where entrepreneurship was not a bad thing. I think, it's one of the things that makes California such a great place and will play a continuing role in the world economy is because we are just a culture, for 150‑plus years, of people striking out and doing something on their own, and failure not meaning social failure. You can be a business failure and still hold your head up and go to your kids' school and not be embarrassed about it. Lucy: "I failed today." Heidi: "I failed today." It's part of the process. I think that, for me, my father was a great role model for me because he was an entrepreneur. He was always thinking. He would say things to me like, "Today is the best day of my life because I have every day before today that I can draw on what I learned to apply to today." So, he was just that kind of person. And he wasn't like Mr. Rogers. I mean, he was just a great role model about how one could look for the opportunity in everything. And he was a very poor immigrant. I think, he graduated from high school. I'm not really sure. His dad died when he was 12, and he had to make money for the family to make ends meet. I mean, he had one of those really hard upbringings that made him very grateful and thankful, and very creative and resourceful. And he treated me like one of the boys. He never said to me, "Oh, you're a girl. You shouldn't do this," or "You can't go to graduate school," or "You can't do anything." In fact, if I said I couldn't do something because of being a woman, he would scoff at me. And my brothers joke that I'm the most like him... Heidi: So, he actually made me in his image, not my brothers. But, I was very lucky about that. I was very lucky, also, just to be in the computer industry in the late '70s and early '80s, because I really did get to grow up with the people who are the leaders in the industry. And so somebody said to me, "Wow! How did you get to be friends with Bill Gates?" And it's like, "Well, started 25 years ago." [laughs] Heidi: He was easier to get to then. But, it's things like that, that I think, I just had the great fortune to have a front‑row seat and be a participant in an industry that I really believe has changed the world. So, it gave me a lot of opportunities to learn from other people and have mentors and role models. Lee: So, Heidi, when you think about all you've done in your career ‑ building your own companies, being an investor ‑ what has been the toughest thing you've had to do in your career? Heidi: You know, you face so many tough challenges when you are the CEO and "the buck stops here." Someone once said to me, "Gosh, you're so lucky. You're the CEO. You have so much freedom." And I laughed, and I said, "You don't understand that when you're the CEO, you have the least freedom, because you can't just quit." I raised that money. I hired every one of these people. I gave those venture capitalists my commitment that I was going to bring it home for them. I'm not just going to walk out the door. I remember walking into my company every day. We had about 100 employees. And I would count the cars in the parking lot, and I would think about the car payments and the mortgage payments... Heidi: Everything that was dependent on this company. And so I would say, still, to this day, that the hardest thing you have to do is lay people off. I mean, the hardest thing you have to do is downsize your firm. It's not as hard to fire someone. This is an interesting thing. I would much rather terminate somebody for cause than lay people off because we can't afford it. When you terminate someone for cause ‑ and "for cause" is a real legal term. I don't want to use the legal definition of that. But, what I really mean is, when somebody's not a good fit for the job they're in, I find that it's really in their best interest to tell them and get them to move on to something else. And while that is sometimes hard, I think, it's the right thing to do, and I think, it's the right thing to do for the person. And I've often found that you check in with them a couple years later, they're better off where they are, even though this can be very difficult. I do think, going through the dot‑com bust and having to lay people off, knowing that there wasn't going to be another job they could just waltz into, was a really, really hard thing to do. To me, those were the hardest things I ever had to do. In fact, my T/Maker employees still joke about this time where we had our first loss ever and we had to lay off some people, and it was Christmas. I was about four‑months pregnant. I said to my husband, "I've got to do it myself. I hired all these people. I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to give each one of them the news." So I'm in my office, and they're coming in, or I'm going to their offices. And I'm pregnant, and so the hormones coursing through my veins. So, I am sobbing through these terminations, and they are comforting me. Heidi: They feel sorry for me. But, I have to lay them off. Sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. And I say to my husband, "This is the worst business day of my life, where I'm terminating some people who've been with me five, six years, and I just feel terrible. And it's Christmas, and I had to tell them, 'No bonuses for you guys, and you're getting laid off.'" I said, "Please go to Blockbuster and rent a funny movie so that when I get home, I can take my mind off of it." So, I come home, and what had he rented, but Chevy Chase's "Christmas Vacation." Heidi: And I don't know if you guys have seen this, but of course, the whole story is about a guy who believes he's getting a Christmas bonus and builds a swimming pool or something, and then he doesn't get the bonus, and he ends up kidnapping his boss. Heidi: It was just one of those moments: I just didn't know whether to laugh. I'll never forget that moment. I still cry when I see that show. It was on TV last Christmas, and I'm like crying through it. My kids are looking at me. They're like, "Mom, it's a comedy." Not for me. Lucy: Not for me. In fact, my answer to this question is the same. I think that laying people off is clearly one of the hardest things that I've ever had to do. Heidi: Absolutely. Lucy: We've heard a lot of great advice so far in this interview from you about entrepreneurship, and the Nike "just do it," and who cares if you've thought about it? Just get it done. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: And other types of advice around doing your homework and seeing the potential. If you were sitting right here with a young person and you were giving them advice about entrepreneurship, what else would you tell them? And one of the things that comes to mind is a conversation we had sometime about networking. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: And I thought you had some of the best advice about networking that I've ever heard. Heidi: Well, I have a ton of advice about networking. I'm a little typecast as a networking speaker because Harvard did a case on me a number of years ago that really is about my philosophy of networking. And when they approached me to do the case, I said, "Why would anyone want a case on this? It's all just common sense." It's kind of like that book: "Everything I needed to know about networking, I learned in the second grade." But, it's just commonsense and practical and courtesy. And so, they did do this case, and I do speak on the case a lot. And my fundamental belief is that it's very rare that anything happens as a singular effort. Yeah, you can go climb ‑ well, even climbing Mount Everest, it's a team, right? And entrepreneurship is a team sport with very many lonely moments. So, you have to be the one. I'm working on this project with someone. I got up at four o'clock in the morning a couple of days ago because I thought of something, and I knew if I waited till morning, it wasn't going to be the same. So, I had to get up and come down here and sit at the computer for an hour and write up my thoughts while they were fresh. I think, there are a lot of times when you're just singularly approaching something, but I think, you have to know how to ask for help, and how to give help. Students say this to me all the time, they say, "Well, I don't have anything to give." You always have something to give, everyone has something to give. Good lord, you can come and talk to me and baby‑sit my children while you're talking me. I had one guy who traded me, I would talk to him about his business and he was a personal trainer, so he would train me while I was talking to him about his business. Heidi: And I think that one of the errors that people make in networking is they try to hard to gather business cards, and they don't think about "What is my connection with this other person, and what do I have to give them? What in return am I going to ask them for?" Again, I will bring it back to this other comment, a lot of times you don't know how the other person is going to help you, and you're not quite sure always how you're going to help them. Sometimes, it's quite surprising, but if you put yourself open to that, and you use some of the modern tools ‑ like I've become a real LinkedIn convert, because I love being able to get on LinkedIn and see who my friends know that I might want to talk to about industries completely foreign to me and vice versa. If somebody has a good friend from college who now wants to do something in the out of home advertising market and sees I'm on the board of Aventure and would like to talk to me. I don't mind doing that stuff because I sort of feel like there's this great, you know, we all help each other in this community and I'm a little bit of a believer in that kind of pay it forward. It's interesting right now because in Aventure I'm working closely on, I have to reach out and ask for a lot of favors, and I've been very aware that for a lot of my current roles in life I'm the one that asks for the favors than asked. Now that I'm doing the asking it's interesting, I'm uncomfortable. I'd much rather do a favor for someone else than ask somebody for a favor. It's my nature, and it's the nature of many people. But, I think that you have to get good at understanding "What am I asking for? Is it appropriate for me to ask it? Is the person capable of delivering it? Is it an appropriate amount of time for them to send and do something for me? And what could I possibly do for them?" I always try to make sure that people know I'm quite open to doing something for you in exchange, and by the way, no is a perfectly good answer, too. If I ask you a favor and the answer is no, just tell me no. I'm very comfortable with that. Lucy: That's great advice because so many people they really are either afraid to network, or don't know how to network, and that just makes it really clear. Heidi: Networking is also very awkward; somebody from Stanford called me up once and said, "Can I network with you?" What is that is that like my pen pal or something? Lucy: Just network. Heidi: Let's say you want to meet someone, and I guess, with the powers of Google and the Internet and all that, you might want to meet some important person. If you have no context, it's going to be a very fruitless conversation. But, every one of them, their kids go to school, they are on a charitable board, they may enjoy a certain kind of athletic activity. I'm not saying become a stalker, but generally, for example, if you want to get to know a person and they happen to be on the board of a charitable organization go find out what the annual fundraiser is on that charitable organization and volunteer to work at it. Chances are you're going to be able to meet that person over time if you get involved in something like that. And, by the way, you're doing something good too. That's again, one of the powers of Silicon Valley ‑ both good and bad ‑ you've got to be careful, you've got to find out if other moms and dads on the soccer sidelines have MBAs because everybody's kind of in this business. Heidi: It is interesting that you have so many different places where you meet and run into people, and so many people I do business with are friends of mine in other context. Lucy: So Heidi, you had talked earlier in the interview about different characteristics that you thought were really important to help entrepreneurs grow and build companies, but when you think about yourself, what are some of your personal characteristics that you have that have helped you to be successful as an entrepreneur? Heidi: Certainly tenacity. I mean, I'm very tenacious about... you put me on something I'm on a mission and I'm not going to let it go. I like to learn new things, so I like to push myself and try to learn something new. I think, when you're constantly learning it helps you get a better job, [laughs] and in so many areas. I'm definitely a people person, I love talking with people, I love meeting people. I'm very comfortable asking people for their opinions and I think, I'm a pretty good listener. So, I think that that also helps me be an entrepreneur, because you learn from other people, you gather opinions, you mold what you're doing. Frankly, it helps you in terms of going back to asking for favors, giving favors, recruiting people. People generally want to work with people they like and people they respect, which is another thing. My belief is that I'm going to be in this world for, I hope, a pretty long time. One thing I've learned being almost 50 and being in the Valley all this time is that you run into the same people over and over and over again. So, don't burn a bridge unless you've decided that's the best course of action. I like to sleep at night. I don't like to do bad deals, and I don't like to squeeze the last nickel out of somebody just because I have the upper hand. I like to live that way. While there's always different opinions about anything you do, I try to test everything. Does this match my ethics? Can I sleep at night? If my husband or my kids knew I did this, would they think less of me as a person? I like to live that way. I think, an entrepreneurship is not a zero sum game. Your gain doesn't have to come out of somebody else's loss. Larry: Boy, I'll say. You know, Heidi, one thing I've learned to do is that I'm going to call you "Coach" from now on. I just want to clarify one little thing. You said something earlier about kissing the frogs, or was it kissing your dogs? Heidi: Yeah, kissing frogs. Although frogs wish it was kissing dogs. Larry: Yeah. And you also just mentioned that you should ask for help. Do you want to introduce me to Bill Gates? Heidi: No. Larry: No. OK. Heidi: That's a good one you bring up, because it is one of those, how do you manage a relationship towards a person who's very important or famous? One thing I had to decide early on is, I just set certain rules. And I've gotten very comfortable saying "No" to people. So, people will say to me, "Can you introduce me to Bill Gates?" And the answer is, "No, I can't," because if I did that for everybody, they would.... And the hardest part is people thinking, "I have the best charity in the world. I have something that would be so interesting to the Foundation. Please help me get to the right person. Can you please send this to Bill and Melinda?" And I say no. One of the things that gives me comfort in saying no is that I say, "Look my own husband runs a charitable organization called Refugee Relief that does medical assistance in countries under conflict. He'd be a perfect candidate, and he hasn't even asked Bill and Melinda for money." One of the things I try to do is live by my own rules. The other thing I try to do is, for example, when I sold a company from my portfolio to Microsoft I didn't even talk to Bill about it. I'm not going to mention, "Hey, I'm selling one of my portfolio companies" to him. It's not relevant. I really try to respect that, particularly people who are in positions like Bill where everyone's approaching you all of the time, you need to be respectful of the pressures on that person's time. I think, that's one of the reasons why Bill and Melinda and I have a good and long‑standing relationship. They know that I respect that there needs to be boundaries there, because they don't have the luxury of living normal lives. Larry: Yeah, that's fact. By the way, of course, you know I was just saying that to.... Heidi: Oh, I know. Larry: However, last week we interviewed Brad Feld and he did say, "Hi to Heidi." Heidi: Oh, that's so sweet. I adore Brad. Larry: All right. Let me ask you this question. In your approach to your professional life, you do so many things. How do you bring about balance? Heidi: That's an excellent question. If you'd like I can bring my 12 and 14 year olds in here right now to continue the counterpoint to that. Larry: oh. Heidi: I do try to set limits. In my house, although we have wireless access, I'm not the person who walks around with my laptop and uses it everywhere. We certainly have a "no laptop in the bedroom" rule. I don't tend to watch TV and do email at the same time. I have a home office that I come in to do my work and then I try to leave it. I also try to have a commitment with my kids. If I say, "I'm going to stop working at seven," then I'm going to stop working at seven. I mix business and pleasure a lot. I have a lot of social engagements with people. I have a lot of people over for dinner. I try to engage my kids in some of that, because luckily at their ages they find some of that very interesting. In one of the projects I'm working on right now, I ask them for advice a lot. I've been able to pick their brains a lot about it. And they've been really great. I tell them, you know, if I'm having a bad day, you know I had a bad day about a legal contract I was working on. And because it didn't get done I missed a window of production for something. And I said to them, they said you know, "Why are you in such a bad mood?" And instead of saying something like, "Well, I had a bad day at work." I said, "Well, let me explain to you. This company needs a piece of paperwork before we can contract this production facility. We didn't get the piece of paperwork. Now because this production facility can only do things in, you know, they have another client the next three weeks that pushed me out a month. So, here's a one day delay on a contract that's going to cost me a three week delay on the production. And that's why I'm so mad about this today." And so that what is the thing? A teachable moment right? You know, I try to bring them in to the things that I'm doing. But, it is important sometimes to just close the door and say, "I'm sorry I'm not going to do this." I try very hard not to schedule meetings on the weekends. I try very hard not to schedule meetings at night. I try to really limit my travel because it is very disruptive to my family when I travel. And so, I try to make accommodations. Lucy: Well, and your daughters are wonderful. And having seen them at a couple of dinners. I mean the integration works really well. Heidi: They're pretty cute. Yeah. Lucy: They're pretty cute. It works really well because they get to see a lot of different people over here. Heidi: Yes they do. Lucy: That they wouldn't ordinarily see. They lead unusual lives. Heidi: We had a nice conversation about Norwegian and other things this morning. So, it was very good. Lucy: They were very funny. Heidi: And they do provide very funny moments. One time actually, Bill and Melinda were coming over for dinner. And Nicky was playing on her Xbox. And she knew Bill was coming over and said like "Can I have him sign my Xbox?" "Oh, I guess, you can ask him to sign your Xbox." Which she didn't ultimately do when he came over because she was too embarrassed. But, she said to me, "Microsoft, yeah, they make the Xbox. Do they make any other products?" And I just had to laugh. Heidi: You know, the eyes of a thirteen year old is like all they make is the Xbox. Lucy: Well you really have achieved a lot. And you have front row seats to a lot. And I have no doubt, fifty or not, that you are going to be on the front row for many, many years. Heidi: Not done yet. Lucy: Not done yet. So, tell us what's next for you. Heidi: Oh, I'm so excited about what I'm doing. But, I can't tell you. Sorry. Lucy: I'm going to jump across the desk and strangle her. Heidi: I know. I know. I am. You know I'm continuing to do my work with Mobee and then a company that we work on. And Brad and Jake my partners there. I mean, you know, we have a great relationship and I'm enjoying that. But, I am definitely an entrepreneur at heart. In fact I've been thinking, at some point on my link and profile. Right now, it says venture capitalist and recovering entrepreneur. And someday soon it's going to say "Relapsed entrepreneur and venture capitalist" because I just can't help myself. Heidi: So, I just started a little company. I actually funded it yesterday. I'm fortunate enough to have provided my own seed capital. I joke to my husband. I said, "It's very important tonight because we're having cocktails with my lead investor," which of course was me. [laughter] So, we laughed about that. So, I have a little start up that I'm working on, which I will hope to tell you all about really soon. But, it's not quite baked enough yet. So, you'll just have to wait. Lucy: I just hope it's about fifty year old women. Heidi: You will, you will buy one of these products. Well, I'm going to give you one. And Lucy. Larry Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Heidi RoizenInterview Summary: Born and raised in Silicon Valley, Heidi spent the first part of her career founding and growing tech companies. Now she enjoys helping entrepreneurs build companies as a coach instead of a player. Release Date: August 15, 2007Interview Subject: Heidi RoizenInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 34:33