As a 38-year-old single mom with a successful career in neuroscience, Frida Polli recalls the surprise when she took a detour to launch a startup. Kathryn Minshew was told “no” 148 times when she began pitching investors to finance her website idea. “Am I crazy?” she thought.
Today, both women are leading successful New York City career tech startups. How did they do it? By defying conventional thinking and pushing boundaries.
Women hold influential positions in technology companies, but there's clearly room for more women in startups and the C-suites of the world's most innovative companies. Silicon Valley Bank’s Innovation Economy Outlook 2016 survey of 900 executives worldwide found that 63 percent of companies have no women on their boards and 44 percent have no women in executive positions.
In their startup journeys, Minshew, founder and CEO of The Muse, and Polli, co-founder and CEO of Pymetrics, have navigated through the ups and downs by keeping focused on making a difference; in their cases that means finding technology solutions to improve the job search experience and enhance career planning.
When investors initially questioned Minshew’s online job-search business model, she didn’t pack up and go home. “A lot of people are going to tell you that you're wrong, that you're crazy, that your idea doesn't work. How do you know if they’re right?” she asks. She proved those skeptics wrong by focusing on her idea and, as she put it, managing her own psychology.
Polli agrees that you have to believe in yourself, or no one else will: “Any founder has to have the belief of how the world should be.” But in those early days of handwringing, with no office and not much money, she admits she had thoughts of giving up. Only then did she recognize that her startup’s biggest asset was staring her right in the face: “We had one of our engineers once say to me, ‘Frida, the power of the team is stronger than the individual’.”
Today, as they each lead growing companies, Polli and Minshew have made a point of helping open doors for other women entrepreneurs. Despite growing discussions about bringing more diversity to the tech workplace, the SVB survey found just one of four tech companies surveyed have plans in place to help women attain leadership roles.
Polli does in fact use her neuroscience background to design better algorithms to help people pursue career paths based on skills not stereotypes. Her algorithm-based analyses show that men and women have equal potential for many careers, including tech.
Polli uses these findings to help jumpstart discussions and begin to change attitudes about who will succeed in the workforce of the future. “I tell companies, ‘Look at the inputs. They are not known to have gender or ethnic bias; they are as objective as possible.’ That is very compelling,” she says.
For Minshew, when coping with something new or unexpected, she makes a practice of reaching out to a trusted network of advisors. That network includes men, but she advises female entrepreneurs who may have faced additional obstacles getting started to get a female perspective.
“Sometimes you have to push through barriers to get to the other side,” Minshew says. “There’s nothing more powerful than talking to someone (who can say) ‘I’ve been there, here’s how I handled it’.”
