Celebrating Women Leaders in Santa Cruz
In honor of National Women’s History Month, we would like to highlight several females throughout Santa Cruz County’s tech ecosystem. Like many women throughout history and present day, these females have stayed motivated to thrive and accomplish great milestones. We had the opportunity to speak with these amazing ladies to learn more about their challenges, how they have overcome these obstacles, and their advice to you!
Anna Lee-Poli, Kerri Johnson
Owl Eye Media
Anna Lee-Poli & Kerri Johnson - Owl Media
Challenges: What’s not a challenge when you start your own business? The thing we have found most challenging was how to network and connect with potential clients without feeling too sales-y. We have backgrounds in documLearn about entary filmmaking, and it was our jobs to mine and distill the truth. To some extent, I think we mistakenly approached sales with preconceived notions, of it being unsavory or not always truthful, but we’ve learned that’s not usually the case.
Overcoming obstacles: We were lucky enough to have found a mentor whom we trust - a woman who is a veteran of the tech industry. Even though our business isn’t strictly tech, it’s still a business. She taught us everything we know about sales & marketing, and how it fits into the overall machine that is our business. She also helped us figure out our identity as a company. We learned how to speak authentically about what makes us unique, which was the main thing that helped us overcome the challenge we faced on the sales front. When you believe in what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, it becomes a lot easier to convince others of the same thing.
Advice: Don’t be afraid to reach out for help. Does anyone ever do it alone? We certainly didn’t.
Chrissy Meyer
Root Ventures
Challenges: I’m a venture capitalist, working at a seed-stage VC firm called Root Ventures. Prior to joining Root, I spent over a decade working as an engineer and program manager for hardware products of all shapes and sizes. After spending over a decade in engineering organizations, it’s a pretty major career shift to pursue investing. Now that I’m on the VC side, one of my biggest challenges has been repeatedly pushing myself outside of my comfort zone, and maintaining the same level of confidence that I had as an engineer. These days, I’m spending a lot less time in factories and labs. I’m spending a lot more time thinking about strategy related to sales, fundraising, recruiting, etc. I’m no longer building products; now I’m building companies. It’s pushing the bounds of my “comfort zone” every single day, but that’s why I find it so thrilling!
Overcoming obstacles: Over time, I’ve learned to treat my prior experience and background as my superpower. At Root Ventures, we invest in deeply technical founders building deeply technical products. I’ve spent so much time in the trenches myself, that I can offer a level of support and understanding that technical founders can’t get from other investors. Along with that, I can assess early-stage technical risk very quickly. I’ve figured out how to leverage my inner engineer to become a better investor and in the process, I’ve become a lot less apologetic about not having a decades-long career in finance.
Advice: Build up a tight-knit group of other entrepreneurs you can lean on for advice and support is critical to surviving the journey. Leverage high-quality resources (for free)! AllRaise is an amazing organization that I’m involved with. They create content to help female entrepreneurs - and in COVID times, all of the events and workshops have gone virtual, which makes them even more accessible. I strongly recommend checking out their events page. They also sponsor “female founder office hours” for pairing founders with mentors.
Cindi Busenheart
Merge 4
Challenges: I found that I have to work incredibly hard to get funding. So, I built a super detailed business plan and presented it to CEOs, businesspeople, and mentors I admire. I wanted to get their input and see where all the holes were in my business plan. By the time I was ready to present to potential MERGE4 investors, I had already filled in all the gaps. I showed my plan to people who have been influential in my career and have dealt with high level businesses in the past to see if they were interested in being shareholders. Thankfully, that’s worked. Still, earning respect in traditional bank settings has been really challenging. I can feel everything I do being put under a microscope - past and present.
Overcoming obstacles: Overcoming obstacles is a daily practice. I’ve built a great group of mentors, ambassadors, and team members. Guy Kawasaki (of Apple fame and Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People Podcast) and businessmen, such as Jason Acuna (WeeMan of Jackass fame), Rob Roskopp (Founder of Santa Cruz Bicycles), and Nico Perruzi (of Elucidate and analytics expert), have been huge assets to my success. By surrounding myself with the right people I’ve been able to overcome a lot. I’ve had challenges with past businesses and, somehow, for women those can be perceived as failures (which, for the record, might not be necessarily true). Despite having pitfalls, I’m still surrounded by people who believe in me, support MERGE4’s vision, and encourage me to keep going.
Advice: Be yourself. Walk in with confidence. Come in with a strong work ethic, surround yourself with great people, and keep reaching for what you want and execute. Bring on an amazing team that will work with you in reaching your goals and objectives. Keep investing in your company and your team to bring them up to their full potential. Ensure that you build a diverse and hardworking team that brings in different perspectives. I can’t tell you how many times you’ll hear no. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep going. Perseverance is often more valuable than brilliance in business. Always take the time to find out why someone turned you down, adjust, and go try again. Don’t give up even if you feel like you’re fighting the current. Swim upstream because eventually there will be moments of calmer water for you to enjoy.
Krista Snelling
Santa Cruz County Bank
Krista Snelling - Santa Cruz County Bank
Challenges: The primary challenge I’ve faced during my career has been accessing and navigating new opportunities. Making a career change and/or accepting promotions can be intimidating and involves risks that can affect all aspects of your life, not just your career path. I’ve always been very open minded to opportunities, which has led me from academia to public accounting, to banking, to real estate, and back to banking. I’ve made some choices that I may not have made if I had them to do over again. Ultimately, I consider those learning experiences as key to getting me to where I am today - a new Santa Cruz resident, leading a terrific, top-rated, community-minded financial institution.
Overcoming obstacles: I’ve relied upon an extensive network of trusted mentors, friends and colleagues who gave me advice and encouraged me to stretch outside my comfort zone. Developing this network over many years has been key to my success. I am so grateful to all the men and women who have advocated for me and provided me counsel when needed. Their confidence in me has, in turn, given me the confidence to take my seat at the leadership table and to trust my voice, speak up and set an example for others.
Advice: Develop an extensive and supportive network in all aspects of your life and pass on the privilege to others. I’ve never had a female mentor and I’m happy to say that women I know who are following in my footsteps will not have that same experience. I’d also say, have confidence in your abilities and don’t be afraid to speak up if something (or someone) doesn’t feel right.
LeBaron Meyers
NotMe Solutions
LeBaron Meyers - NotMe Solutions
Challenges: #NotMe provides the most powerful and practical way to prevent and address workplace misconduct of any kind. Our solution works for the Enterprise as well as SMB and across any industry— and we're usually pitching the head of legal/compliance, HR or D&I. By casting a net that large, one challenge I've faced is recognizing the gap that often exists between lofty titles and real leadership so I can more efficiently identify our target market. Many people have risen to the top of their profession in companies by staying in the box, doing exactly as they were taught and maintaining the status quo. I try not to judge that and in many ways can understand it, but it's not real leadership. Real leadership often requires stepping out of the box or expanding it - not for the sake of being unique - but rather to facilitate and drive progress. This requires a little courage. Years of experience, C-titles and decision making power is not always correlated with innovation, progress and courage. Getting to the right titles is not necessarily getting to the right people.
Overcoming obstacles: I don't know if I've overcome this obstacle so much as I've learned to better identify change agents, champions of progress, out-of-the-box thinkers and those willing to admit that what they're doing isn't solving the problem as well as it could. These are the right people for us.
Advice: Focus less on the labels you're giving yourself, and even less on the labels that others may give you— and more on the problem you're trying to solve and the mission you're determined to accomplish.
Peggy Dolgenos
Cruzio Internet
Peggy Dolgenos - Cruzio Internet
Challenges: Everyone who starts a business faces a lot of challenges. One thing to mention is that a lot of women don’t have the experience with tech that men do, starting from childhood as boys tend to play more video games than girls. As a result, boys are often used to handling gadgets and overcoming problems with equipment, with their internet connections, with programs. There’s a shared language that goes along with the gaming world so gamers can “speak geek." Boys also tend to take more tech-oriented courses in school - when I was a computer science student at UCSC in the 1990s, there were very few girls in my classes, and I understand that the situation has gotten even worse! It’s hard to participate in the tech world when the language is unfamiliar.
Overcoming obstacles: Sometimes a disadvantage can be turned to an advantage. When my husband and I started Cruzio Internet in 1989, I was fascinated by the prospect of the internet but tentative around computers (back then a decent desktop computer was way more expensive than it is now!) and always worrying that I’d break something. So I went back to school for a second degree - I’d been a liberal arts major the first time through - and learned how to take a computer apart and put it together, how to program from the very lowest, machine-language level. I wasn’t worried about “breaking’ computers any more. My initial inexperience gave me a lot of empathy with beginners, even after I became an expert. I remembered how scary technology had seemed and knew that people often didn’t understand the tremendous power and capabilities of cutting-edge technology. Cruzio specialized from the very first in making those capabilities accessible to everyone, not just geeks who already understood it all. In 1989, we were one of the first private internet companies in the country and we were able to bring email and the web to people who had never even dreamed of such things. We’ve continued to push the envelope forward for our company's 32 years since then. We are always looking for services that sophisticated professionals and corporations use so that everyone else can benefit from them as well — one example is gigabit internet, which we brought to local residents years ago because we knew that everyone would want it. Our services compete with some of the largest companies in the country technically, but our customer service is definitely superior.
Advice: Value what you bring to the picture!
Dr. Antonia Franco
Callisto
Challenges: The first challenge was that I didn't have the tech background coming into this role at a nonprofit tech start up. My strength is in non-profit and I have a strong belief in Callisto’s mission - to use technology to address our pervasive issues of sexual assault and detect serial perpetrators. Another challenge is that there’s an ongoing need for capital rate (and that’s not unique), but I wanted to share it because it's always an acknowledgement that specially for women in tech and needing to find support.
Overcoming Obstacles: To overcome the fact that I didn’t have the technology side, I connected with mentors that have a lead and started their own non profits, as well as the founder of the organization. I have checkpoints with her to make sure I understand the history of the organization because that helps me to determine how we're moving forward. It has been super helpful to have a system of support to address the areas that I need to grow in.
Advice: I encourage all women and especially women of color, who have a lot to contribute in the space and are not represented, to be courageous in taking the lead. Surround yourself with people that will support you in that process, so that you can do your best on behalf of the organization.
May Roen
Lookback
Challenges: We have been working on hiring the right person, so that we can have a very distributed and remote team. There are practical and cultural challenges in order to make sure team-members feel included.
Overcoming obstacles: Through diversity and inclusion, employees can work much more efficiently. To overcome this, we have built a lot of systems that incorporate async communication and regular transparent meeting culture, so people can enjoy their overall. work. We also invest a lot in our work culture, like having 2-3 worldwide retreats for all in our team.
Advice: Keep a positive mindset. It takes a decade to be really good at something and you have to put in a lot of hours, but that doesn't mean you can’t have success throughout. It will roughly take 10 years until you're in expert in the field. Also, work for something that you’re really passionate about. For me, it was about realizing good ideas and getting good projects out into the world that can really make an impact. Use all the resources available to you! You can listen to so many books and podcasts, as well as pick the brains of the best people in the industry.