I Want Her Job

In a world where technology helps us be anywhere and do (almost) anything, Katie Linendoll is leading the way. A true multi-hyphenate in trade, Katie is an Emmy-winner, journalist, TV personality and tech insider. You can see her regularly on the TODAY Show, where she’s served as a tech contributor, wow-ing everyone from Matt Lauer to Willie Geist to, of course, the viewers, for the past six years. She’s also a regular on The Weather Channel, Fox News, HLN, CNN and CBS Sports Radio. Katie also creates and hosts her own podcast Katie Show where she uncovers and breaks down the latest in technology trends in plain, “Oh, now I get this” speak for us non-techies. In her podcast – which BTW, has climbed to No. 4 on the iTunes tech charts – she’s covered virtual reality, the Hyperloop, gadgets known to boost your mood and much more. Katie’s also a “friend with connections” for her listeners. On her show she’s interviewed GM’s CEO and Chair Mary Barra, Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto (who happens to be the cre

Jean-Marie Shields is a brand builder and a brand lover. She’s led a powerhouse career taking her from Nike to Starbucks and then Lululemon, but most importantly, she’s also a mom. And, as a single mom, she believes kids are smart and they want to be a part of their parent’s job, too. “When I helped reposition the Starbucks brand and we updated the identity and we enrolled 5,000-6,000 people across the company into the new brand and experience as it had evolved, I actually had a conversation with my son. I said, “Hey, during the next 7 weeks Mom is going to be really busy. That means we’re not going to see each other as much as we were before, but right around the corner is going to be really different. Here’s what Mom is working on.” But, before she was a mom, Jean-Marie was born and raised in Sweden. She came to the United States as an exchange student, and then she married and had a family. Early on in her career she worked mostly in creative roles -- starting her path at Nike in a creative position. After

Rachael Norman is the founder of a Better, a technology company that helps people get their out of network medical bills paid. If you send Better your claim, they will do the work that can require hours of back and forth phone calls, codes, procedure conversations and requests for documentation. if your bill is paid, Better takes a 10% fee, and you get your money back. For those of you have tried the process of getting a claim paid, this business model is likely to make you smile. Rachael and her team have structured their business to be centered and financially aligned around the needs of the patient. In this show, Rachael shares her thoughts on problems in our healthcare industry, and her hopes for how to build businesses and healthcare systems that put patients first. getbetter.co

Sabrina Mutukisna, is co-founder of Town Kitchen,  an Oakland based, chef-crafted subscription food delivery service that employs low income youth between 15-25. Sabrina shares her story of growing up in her parents drycleaners in California and then working to support herself through UC Berkeley.  Along the way, Sabrina became very motivated by what she saw and experienced, and spent 13 years doing jobs in workforce development. Sabrina worked to help foster children, formerly incarcerated youth and other young people figure out how to start a career, complete  degrees and certificates, often helping with basic needs such as housing or childcare. While working for California Teacher Pathway, a program that helped lower income young adults complete a program of community college and then a 4 year degree, Sabrina learned the difficulty of using grant funding to employ youth for more than a year. Sabrina came up with a solution that would offer training and jobs that lasted several years. At Town Kitchen, most

Happy 4th of July! In honor of the holiday, we are speaking with Erin Loos Cutraro, the founder of She Should Run. Erin founded She Should in 2008, a bi-partisan organization dedicated to increasing the number of women running for political office. if you just decided to run or are just exploring, through an incubator, research, events and campaigns, She Should Run offers community support and many other resources.  We learned so much from this show, and hope you will enjoy it and be inspired to run for an office or encourage someone you know to run for one of the 500,000 elected offices across the US.  As you ll hear on this show, when women run for office, they actually win at the same rate as men!  

Lucienne Ide started her career as a physicist working for a mobile company and then for a venture capital firm. When Lucienne kept receiving requests to help large corporations manage the cost of diabetes, she came up with the idea for Rimidi, a digital health start up focused on diabetes management. We discuss the alarming diabetes epidemic in America (research indicates half of Americans have diabetes or prediabetes!) We talk about the the need for more women to pursue career paths in digital health: although 80% of healthcare dollars are controlled by women, women are not represented in health IT as much as other healthcare fields within nursing and medicine. There is a tremendous opportunity to be a part of the growth in the digital health field in areas such as design, user experience, marketing, research, technology and more.

How do you define success? It’s a question Courtney Martin asked herself and others while writing her book, The New Better Off: Reinventing the American Dream, which attempts to help all of us think about redefining our measures of success. She encourages us to “reject the tired narratives about success” because our motives and lives will change when we shift our focus, instead, to community. “The New Better Off most succinctly is realizing that our quality of life is more determined by the quality of our relationships than by our own individual achievements as we’ve historically thought about it,” Courtney says. “It’s more about meaning, relationships, community and fulfillment – as opposed to status and stuff.” The book asks questions many of us have asked ourselves, and it challenges what many of us have come to accept as the status quo. One of our favorite lines in Courtney’s book is: “I don’t want to get a good job, a house with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids and then just go to sleep.” Host Polina Sely

It’s often said there are two roads – a well-beaten path and one less traveled that provides obstacles that teach you as you go. While many get to choose which path they take, Hope Alcocer’s was decided for her. A rocky path, her life has thrown her many curveballs to endure – from a terrifying head injury, struggle with PTSD and two heart-shattering breakups – to highs including a self-started and internationally lauded magazine, KHLOE, and now a new book based on her life, Where Hope Lies. In episode 45 of I Want Her Job: The Podcast, Host Polina Selyutin talks with Hope about dealing, ironically, with hopelessness, to founding a women’s magazine, creating her own boutique marketing agency and turning her painful life experiences into a just-released novel. We also discuss her Armenian culture and how her family has remained her source of strength and wisdom. And if you like what you hear, be sure to check out our online interview with Hope here. We’re excited for you to see (and hear!) that Hope is a woman

Deb Nelson has a job at RSF Social Finance that is all about helping people align their values with their money, all while helping fund entrepreneurs for social impact businesses. As vice president of client and company engagement, Deb also works on strategic partnerships and client engagement. On top of that, she’s also the lead on a new initiative for the company – the Women’s Capital Collaborative. Pioneered with an impact investor who wanted to do more to support women entrepreneurs, the Collaborative aims to do more to support women entrepreneurs – a group routinely overlooked and underfunded. In fact, Deb points out, women entrepreneurs received only 3% of venture capital funding from 2011 to 2013. Why is this? Unconscious bias, says the Harvard Business Review. Even when a presentation is given identical word-for-word by men and women, males are 60% more likely to get funded. This Collaborative is in place to do something about that. “Our goal is to create an economy of generosity and connectedness,”

As a book lover since childhood, Cherilyn Parsons longed to be a part of the literary community. So, she risked her security, job stability and comfort for her dream of starting a world-class book festival in Berkeley, California. Although there had been a book festival in her home region, the San Francisco Bay Area, more than a decade prior, there wasn’t one when Cherilyn decided to take a chance and begin her efforts. And even though she had no prior experience in event planning or the literary world, she did have one very important skill on her resume – fundraising. “I had no experience in event planning,” she says. “I did not know the literary world. I had no money to start with. But I thought, hey, let’s do the book festival.” And so, with a background in nonprofit fundraising, most recently at the Center for Investigative Reporting – Cherilyn thought she could apply her experience to help launch a large-scale book fest. And although it wasn’t easy, she made it happen. Now in its third year, the 2-day Ba

Eugenia Cheng has built a “portfolio career” combining her passions for math, piano and education. Eugenia has a PHD in Pure Mathematics and is a Scientist in Residence at School of the Art Institute in Chicago. As part of her portfolio career, Eugenia also performs as a concert pianist and is a published author of two books about math. Eugenia also works to develop math training materials and curriculum, she does research in math within higher dimensional category theory, and she writes about math for media publications. Eugenia has built her career by finding ways to use her talents and work to help others. Eugenia suggests we build our careers by finding what we are really good at and then finding how to use our talents in the best possible way to contribute to society. Eugenia has a talent for showing how math relates to our world, and in describing the beautiful and mysterious intersections of math, science and art. We talk with Eugenia on how she got on her path and how playing the piano was her refuge

Marta Bralic is VP of Business Development at Flatiron, a digital health company selected by the The World Economic Forum as one of the 30 most promising Technology Pioneers of 2016.  At I Want Her Job, we get excited by technology for social impact and flatiron’s technology is fighting cancer in such an exciting and transformative way. Flatiron’s cloud based software is bringing together cancer centers and hospitals to allow more sharing of cancer data with a goal of accelerating the ability to identify opportunities for cancer treatment and research. “The magic happens at Flatiron when you have an oncologist or nurse sitting side by side with an engineer and they are looking at a screen or at a whiteboard and they are trying to figure out how to solve a clinical problem or a data problem actually using some of the modern software applications that are used in other industries but haven’t so far been applied in a place like oncology” says Marta. For those of you motivated by working on health related problem

Times are a-changing, and with it, comes new efforts to keep our planet healthy, which we are major supporters of at I Want Her Job. Today’s interview is with someone hustling to change the future of clean energy, Dawn Lippert. As the co-founder of Elemental Excelerator (formerly Energy Excelerator), a startup accelerator program based in Hawaii, Dawn and her team helps budding businesses change the world, one community at a time. As co-founder of the organization, Dawn talks to I Want Her Job: The Podcast Host Polina Selyutin about the iteration she went through to refine and design the model Elemental Excelerator uses to fund and support startups. With many startups having different needs and time frames to scale, Dawn says, the nonprofit helped develop a model that works by partnering with corporations to test products and services, as well as non-competing companies that can support and complement one another. Dawn also discusses her initial inspiration for the nonprofit, largely driven by the realization

Hayley is General Manager for Media and Product Development at NewCo, a VC-backed startup that highlights innovative business practices around the globe through media and events. NewCo is an online publisher launched entirely on Medium. NewCo shares stories from companies who are trying to change the world and have missions beyond the bottom line. Hayley has worked in media for over 20 years, including roles for Wired.com and the New York Times. Topics Discussed: How NewCo started a their platform on Medium and the benefits of having a a plug and play platform agnostic publishing strategy. Working as Director of Product for Wired: Hayley’s role being one of the first Product Managers for Wired.com.  Hayley led two years of site improvements that translated to a record high number of pageviews in 2015 (breaking 1 Billion pageviews) for the 20 year old Wired.com. Hayley’s favorite resources for staying in the know for her career. Up and coming interesting career paths: Hayley's thought on interesting new roles

Diana Klochkova is VP of Digital Strategy for Rebel Ventures, a leading sports digital strategy and tech venture firm, with a client list including Real Madrid, Golden State Warriors, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Bulls and San Francisco 49ers. We discuss Diana’s path to digital marketing strategy, her previous role as Global Social Marketing Lead for Levi Strauss, projects in Shanghai, Panama and what it is like to work in Sports digital strategy. In her free time, Diana also created a product called the The Bang Wrangler, a sport accessory line for women who love water sports.

Kimberly Cassady is VP of Talent for Cornerstone OnDemand, a company that provides businesses with software to recruit, train and manage their employees. Cortnerstone has made it on to many best places to work lists including Forbes and Glassdoor. If you only remember one thing from this show,  Kimberly suggests all of us just make the ask. If you hear about upcoming projects at your company, just ask for the opportunity.  Kimberly’s role leading a manufacturing floor scared her and forced her to adopt a fake it till you make it approach. Today, Kimberly’s operations experience has given her the confidence she uses every day in her role as VP of Talent.  Looking back on her career, Kimberly says “If you were to look at the aggregate of my career I probably have more failures than I do successes, but I am willing to take the chance and I am ok with the failure. I am ok if it's a learning experience as a result of it.”  Kimberly attributes some of her success in her willingness to test ideas and take action, "

If you love writing, blogging, photography, creating content — and having control of your future while developing your own business — we think you will enjoy hearing how Lauryn Evarts created her blog and brand, The Skinny Confidential. When Lauryn started blogging 6 years ago, she was broke and miserable working in a bartending job. Today, With six employees, Lauryn is running her own business.  In today's episode of I Want Her Job: the Podcast, we talk to Lauryn about how she engages with her audience, her mindset for setting goals and dealing with criticism. She also shares how she chipped away every day at the goals she made for her blog. "Every day when I laid my head on the pillow I had built The Skinny Confidential in some small way,” she says.  Now as a professional blogger, Lauryn shares some practical advice for what it takes. “If you can’t deal with criticism probably being an influencer is not the way to go,” she says. But if you can? Well, we think the upside could be that it's your dream job.  

Ida Tin is founder of Clue, the world’s fastest growing period tracking and fertility app. Ida shares why she is so committed to using technology to empower women with more knowledge and control of their bodies and for family planning. Ida is on a mission to help women become more aware and “friendlier with their bodies”. Hear how Ida founded Clue and and about Femtech, an emerging area of technology addressing women’s health. As Ida says “Within Femtech alone there is so much unmet potential. Everywhere we look we see needs that women have that are not being addressed where technology can play a role.” Prior to founding Clue, Ida had a business leading motorcycle tours around the world. Listen to hear how Ida’s background and early interests in women’s health evolved into her role as founder of Clue.

We strive to inspire women leading the future of business here at I Want Her Job. This is why we were so excited to speak with Cecilia Foxworthy, co-founder of Torus Teens, an online tool for connecting teens with afterschool and summer programs with the leaders of our future – teens – in mind. The idea for Torus Teens came about after Cecilia had the realization that the majority of the free afterschool programs for teenagers were available, and sometimes just around the block, but many of the teens she knew were not even aware of them. So, she made a move to fill the need. Now the idea has blossomed into an organization that is supported by Inc., ImpactLab, Urban Assembly, and A Better Chance, among other organizations. And it’s this drive to help others that we admire so much. “I just don’t accept that all teenagers don’t get the chance to make themselves who they want to be … and explore those interests,” she says. We already have the resources today to change lives and open the doors for teenagers, but w

At I Want Her Job we love a good startup story, and we like one that involves two friends destined to meet and create a business even more. One day in early 2016, Annie Dean called her friends – asking them to direct her to the smartest women they knew. As fate would have it, a few friends directed Annie to Anna Auerbach, a woman described by mutual friends as a “force of intelligence” and full of energy. Over a phone conversation, Anna shared her thoughts on a business that would help create a marketplace for women seeking flexible job opportunities. Annie was instantly hooked on the idea, and this first phone call ignited a passion and partnership between the two dynamic women. The idea became Werk, a business dedicated to helping women thrive in the workforce and find flexible job opportunities. Since launching earlier this year, Werk has received funding, created a marketplace for flexible jobs with over 60 companies – including Facebook, Uber and Samsung – and has hired a staff of four and developed a ne