Good morning, Broadsheet readers. Today we hear from longtime media executive Susan Lyne on a strategy for finding your next big career move. Read on to see Apple’s HR chief discuss employee perks, and for some new findings on female entrepreneurs. Happy Friday!
EVERYONE'S TALKING
•Powerful women take on Turkey. A group of female Fortune 500 CEOs and U.S. government officials such as Penny Pritzker were in Turkey this week to promote trade and investment. “We forget -- we’re an oddity,” Xerox CEO Ursula Burns told Fortune's Nina Easton in a phone interview. “It’s a man’s world here. You may see one woman [in official meetings], or none at all.” Fortune
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
• Marissa Mayer courts advertisers. During an Advertising Week interview on Thursday, the Yahoo CEO urged the crowd to view her company as a premiere publisher worthy of investment. "One of the things we've had through our history is a personality and a point of view," she said. "Yahoo has a brand, a value, a perspective." Mayer has met with about 500 advertising and agency executives during the second quarter. AdAge
•The anti-Hillary? "I don’t know how you’ll see me, but I would like to be in a situation where I can offer an opposing viewpoint to Hillary Clinton,” Michele Bachmann told Politico. The Republican Congresswoman has gone on an aggressive media spree recently with one goal in mind: "Emerge as... a female conservative foil to [the] likely Democratic presidential contender," writes Lauren French and John Bresnahan. Politico
•Nancy Snyderman talks Ebola. NBC News's Dr. Nancy Snyderman told Rachel Maddow on Thursday night that her cameraman who contracted Ebola in Liberia is in "good spirits." Snyderman and her team have been quarantined since he began to show symptoms. The crew is now back in the United States where they will stay in isolation for 21 days. HuffPost
•Apple's HR chief on people over products. “We’ve led with products for a long time and we always will,” says Denise Young Smith. "But we’re at a point where people are really important and experience is really important and how people experience our products is really important.” She is reworking Apple's employee perks program to ensure that the tech giant continues to recruit top talent. Fortune
•The first woman to take a tech company public is building something new. Sandy Kurtzig, a software industry pioneer who founded ASK Computer Systems in 1972, is now busy at work building Kenandy, a cloud-based management platform for professionals. "This isn't my first rodeo," she told Fortune. Fortune
•MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Alison Rosenthal, former chief operating officer of MessageMe and ex-director of business development at Facebook, is now VP of strategic partnerships for automated investment service Wealthfront.
BROADVIEW
How Susan Lyne found the next big thing
The motto for Susan Lyne's multi-dimensional career is a simple one: Go toward the heat.
Before becoming CEO of AOL's brand group in early 2013, Lyne ran the Village Voice, created Premiere magazine, co-headed ABC Entertainment, led Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and built Gilt Groupe into a digital retail heavyweight. What drove Lyne through all those high-powered jobs was a drive to be where the action was happening.
"I got into the magazine business because that was where the conversation was at the time back in 1975," Lyne said Thursday at Fortune's Most Powerful Women event during Advertising Week in New York. "If you wanted to participate and shape the conversations that were going on, magazines were the place to do that... That has been a driver of every decision I have made. Where is the conversation moving? Where are consumers right now? What is getting them excited? I want to be a part of that."
Now the heat, for Lyne, is at women-led companies. Lyne relinquished her role as AOL brand CEO last month to start a venture fund that will invest in digital startups headed by women. Seeded by $10 million from AOL, the BBG Fund -- which stands for Built By Girls -- will make seed and Series A investments in the range of $100,000 to $200,000. Just 7% of venture capital funding goes to women-led companies, says Lyne, yet research shows that investors get, on average, a 34% higher ROI when they put their money behind women.
What triggered Lyne's new calling? Five enterprising 17-year-old women. AOL invited the teenagers, all graduates of a program called Girls Who Code, into its offices to redesign Cambio, its millennial news site. The five young techies did an extraordinary job on Cambio, Lyne says, plus they built an online contributor platform for young girls to write their own stories.
Spending time with these ambitious teens made Lyne--who has grown daughters--rethink her own career. "A generation ago, most smart young women thought 'I'll go work for a major company and work my way up, or I'll go to law school or I'll become a professional some way," she says "There is a whole new wave of young women coming through school right now who think, 'I can do what I want to do. I can build what I want to build. I can create something.'"
Lyne is 64--but she's thinking more like a 32-year-old than a retiree. Now doing due diligence on two startups that will be the BBG Fund's first bets, she's excited by the prospect of riding the next big thing, whatever that may turn out to be.
"In 2006, Facebook opened up to non-students… and the iPhone was released in June 2007 and the App Store in 2008," Lyne says. "Mobile and social are the two biggest transforming event that have taken place in my lifetime. Maybe those two forces are going to be the drivers for a decade, but we don't know that."
Her advice: "Something can come onto the market that changes the marketplace for everybody—so keep your eyes open."
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
•Female entrepreneurs have more purpose. Entrepreneurs are more likely to find purpose and well being through their work than are other workers, a Gallup poll finds. This is especially true for female entrepreneurs. Why? "The same characteristics that help entrepreneurs start their own businesses -- such as determination, drive, and creative thinking -- may also increase their chances of having high well-being in those three elements." Gallup
•Women’s talk show on sports deserves to succeed. On Tuesday, CBS debuted the first episode of We Need to Talk, a weekly sports show with all-female hosts and commentators. In wake of the NFL's Ray Rice scandal, the network should do its best to "make the show a fixture on a sports cable network" and ensure women are becoming apart of the discussion in sports, writes Richard Sandomir. NYTimes
•MeetDisney's Star Wars maestro. Screenwriter Kiri Hart oversees virtually every piece of content that Disney puts out through its Star Wars collection. As vice president of development, Hart says she's "crazily passionate about this idea of narratives travelling across different platforms." WSJ
ON MY RADAR
At Ad Week, a push to make diversity a reality beyond conference discussions NYTimes
Brit + Co is changing the way we look at marketing Biz Women
Why wearables could be a breakthrough for women in tech Fast Company
When women manage men who don't support women NYTimes
The woman changing the way you spend your free time Forbes
QUOTE
A lot of these issues of structural unfairness, we need men advocating for them too. Many men would love the flexibility of having paid leave when their mother is dying or when their child is hit by a car and in a wheelchair or when they have a baby or adopt a child. Everyone needs that kind of flexibility. If men will advocate alongside women and take that leave, it will become the norm, not just something that women need and women want.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand talks with Fast Company.
