Name: This Is What It’s Like to Be a First-Time Female CEO
Uploaded: 2016-03-11
Duration: 4 min 11 s
Description: In a male-dominated field

[ SOUND ] [ MUSIC ] You founded the first girls' soccer team at your high school. Tell me about that. I always loved playing soccer, and In middle school, there was no girls soccer team. And so, naturally, I tried out for the boys team. I was a pretty good soccer player when I made the team. But it was so rough, I ended up breaking my arm two years in a row [ LAUGH ] To the point where I'm like okay, I think maybe it's time that we have a girls team. So, we banded together, got the whole community involved, Raised money, started a first girls team, I ended up becoming captain of the team. I just think about that, playing sports and overcoming those obstacles totally translates now into what I do. Are you a good CEO? My gosh that's such a hard question I try to be. I aspire to be a great CEO. This is the first time I ever started a company, and I've never been a CEO before, and there's really no such thing as CEO school or training, and There are, so few women CEOs even, it's hard to find those role models, or even those playbooks of what to do. And it's hard to know, how am I tracking? One of the things that I, I did actually, a couple years ago, is I've been getting executive coaching, every month, for the last two years now. And I can definitively say, I've dramatically improved. Since the beginning. We still see so few women founders in tech, even women founders who don't have a male co- founder. Why is that? And when is that going to change? I think it's finally changing, and I think something that inhibits women a little bit, and I see it from a young age cuz I see it in little girls, is a fear of failure. How exactly know where it coming from, but there's something in our culture, we're boys grow up learning that it's okay to fail and get messy, and get dirty, and a boy thing to do. And girls becomes obsess with this being perfect. Getting everything right. And that needs to change. Because in order to be successful as an entrepreneur, you are going to fail again and again and again. And the only way you're going to succeed is to brush it off, learn from it and move on. Some people say [ UNKNOWN ] is all about disrupting the pink aisle, but there's still a lot of pink in the product. So how do you respond to that? Girls are inundated with Products that promote beauty and fashion, being a princess, being saved by the prince. We want to offer something different. But at the same time, we want to appeal to those girls who like those things. Because it's not that that's bad and evil. It's just that they need to be exposed to more things that might spark new interests Especially in science and math which is so important. How is you parents or friends react when you told them that you are becoming an engineer? My mom was so funny like her reaction literally she said, eww. [ LAUGH ] [ INAUDIBLE ] why. Why did she say that? Her dream for me always pushes to become an actress. She, like a lot of moms out there, don't really understand, or know what engineering is. They just think of it as very intimidating. The images that come to mind are the, the car mechanic. Or, the Albert Einstein genius doing these long equations on the chalkboard. and that's kind of how I thought of it at first too, so I can see why, She had that reaction at first, like why you're so creative why would you like that. I don't think people realize that actually creative people are desperately needed in the field of engineering, social people are needed in the field of engineering. Is there any other job that you would like to have? [ LAUGH ] I feel like this is my life calling. Before this I was searching for What I could contribute to the world is trying everything. I was doing volunteer work in India. I was working for a jewelry company. I tried branding. I mean I think if it weren't for this I would still be searching. I feel so lucky that I found this because empowering and inspiring girls and getting them into STEM is It's just my thing. You know what I feel like I can contribute to the world. [ MUSIC ]