Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio. Well, I've been
Speaker 1: looking forward to our next guest and entrepreneur has founded
Speaker 1: and let three tech startups, let a high growth business
Speaker 1: at IBM, where she ran the high growth information life
Speaker 1: Cycle Governance business, one of her company's PSS systems that
Speaker 1: was acquired by IBM just about a decade ago. Let's
Speaker 1: get to dadre pack No. She is CEO and co
Speaker 1: founder of the Enterprise sas Company Workboard. They work with Comcast, Cisco, Microsoft, GE,
Speaker 1: so many well known companies. She joins us on the
Speaker 1: phone in Silicon Valley. Dadre, nice to have you here
Speaker 1: with us. I'm going to jump right in because Bloomberg
Speaker 1: has done a lot of reporting on women and the
Speaker 1: VC world, and I just kind of want to start
Speaker 1: there that just two and a half percent of all
Speaker 1: venture capital back startups have an all female founding team.
Speaker 1: Why is it so difficult still in the startup world
Speaker 1: for women to find funding? What was your experience? This
Speaker 1: is my third company where I thought funding and got
Speaker 1: funding in CC world, And I'll say, you know, with
Speaker 1: some embarrassment, that it hasn't improved much in a few
Speaker 1: decades that I've been working on it. I think part
Speaker 1: of it is, Um, we don't look like what the
Speaker 1: prototypical founder should look like, right, the archetect that people
Speaker 1: have in their heads. Now, that's changing, I think now
Speaker 1: in very meaningful ways. And there's a lot of organizations
Speaker 1: driving change, including for example, all rays And what you
Speaker 1: see today which you just wouldn't have seen five years
Speaker 1: ago as much less ten years ago, is women partners
Speaker 1: at really every quality firm has real women partners making
Speaker 1: real investment decisions, uh and driving those investment decisions in
Speaker 1: in the VC firm. So I think we well it
Speaker 1: takes a bit of time. I think we actually finally
Speaker 1: turned a corner on getting women partners in the venture
Speaker 1: firms that actually fuel those startups. Well that that gives
Speaker 1: me hope. Um. What about corporate boards though, and I
Speaker 1: know this is something that you've certainly been keeping an
Speaker 1: eye on. Corporate boards still mostly white? Uh white? Are
Speaker 1: eight in ten directors at spmpanies at least in are
Speaker 1: still male. What's going on with corporate boards? Why is
Speaker 1: it so slow? Especially when we you know, we know
Speaker 1: the research when it comes to diversity. Mackenzie's done it,
Speaker 1: so many others have done it that when you've got
Speaker 1: a diverse board, when you've got a diverse senior leadership,
Speaker 1: you do better financially. Yea. I think there's a couple
Speaker 1: of things that are shifting there and that will accelerate
Speaker 1: some sense of sort of accelerate post. But a couple
Speaker 1: of those. One is, you know, I just added to
Speaker 1: women independent directors to my board, Margot gr Judds who
Speaker 1: was a former CEO of Ancestor and Kathy Bengo, who
Speaker 1: is a former vice chair of Deloitte, both really senior
Speaker 1: talented women, And as I was doing the search to
Speaker 1: add them to the board, I used a search firm
Speaker 1: that was focused on women executives. And so what they've done,
Speaker 1: which is something I think hadn't been done in the past,
Speaker 1: is actually build the database of candidates, build the pool
Speaker 1: so that when you want to find talent, you're looking
Speaker 1: at a pool that is enriched by women leaders and
Speaker 1: women executives, versus the same old database of the same
Speaker 1: old pool that looks the same old way it's always looked.
Speaker 1: And that's what people and that's what's going on to
Speaker 1: a lot of companies. Right, everybody's going back to the
Speaker 1: existing pools, the old ones exactly. But I do think
Speaker 1: that executive search firms are now quite mindful of opening
Speaker 1: the aperture. The other thing, and probably more interesting, is
Speaker 1: in my work with senior leaders. Most of them are
Speaker 1: looking beyond their own sector for expertise, for insights for
Speaker 1: how other people are changing the game. And most of
Speaker 1: them are acutely aware of the extreme disruptive opportunities and
Speaker 1: for the risks and face their business. And I think
Speaker 1: that what we'll see is this enormous generation of direct
Speaker 1: to consumer leaders, many of whom are women who created
Speaker 1: fantastic companies grown them, have real go to market leadership
Speaker 1: skills and are very disruptive thinkers. If I were the
Speaker 1: CEO of a mainstream company looking for diversity of thought,
Speaker 1: provocative ideas in a way to enrich the conversations I
Speaker 1: was having at the board, I would look to those
Speaker 1: disruptive leaders coming out of d C, DTC. What is
Speaker 1: for what forgive me? And what is it about d
Speaker 1: to see that you think really puts them out there
Speaker 1: ahead of ahead of others. Their business models, the way
Speaker 1: they think about reaching their customers, the way they think
Speaker 1: about serving those customers. It's a a lot of it
Speaker 1: is just blank slate, right, not bogged down by the
Speaker 1: way we've always done it, and started instead with what
Speaker 1: would be awesome? Like what would what could we imagine?
Speaker 1: And then that's a pool of many many women in
Speaker 1: those organizations as co founders, as CEOs and clos and
Speaker 1: CFOs right, women in different roles there. So I think
Speaker 1: it creates a pipeline of diverse talent that has the
Speaker 1: kind of disruptive thinking and phenomenal success that you'd want
Speaker 1: around you in the boardroom. Because I do wonder too,
Speaker 1: and you probably have a lot of experiences this are
Speaker 1: are a great person to talk to about this is
Speaker 1: that you know, money always talks, and I do wonder
Speaker 1: if there's at some point somebody's going to be like, wow,
Speaker 1: look at this company, uh, the diversity that they've got,
Speaker 1: and look at how well they're doing, and so what's
Speaker 1: the common denominator? What is it that's getting them to
Speaker 1: that point? And I know there's a lot of factors
Speaker 1: that play that make a successful venture or institution or company,
Speaker 1: but we but we know the research and I do
Speaker 1: wonder at some point is it just people are like,
Speaker 1: this is the smart thing to do financially if you're
Speaker 1: publicly held or anything. Yeah, I think until its leaders
Speaker 1: perceive CEO is perceive it as the smart thing to
Speaker 1: do financially. Until they perceive it as when I bring
Speaker 1: those different voices on that different experience to my table,
Speaker 1: I'm a smarter leader. When they think that, then they'll
Speaker 1: make different choices, which I think that's actually more than money,
Speaker 1: which is which makes me feel better, Like I hope
Speaker 1: that that's what they were doing, to be quite honest
Speaker 1: with you, right, because it's it's the right thing to
Speaker 1: do to represent more voices. What do you do specifically
Speaker 1: at work board when it comes to your own leadership,
Speaker 1: like how are you getting them your you know, your
Speaker 1: management to think about diversity and make sure that it's
Speaker 1: not just checking the boxes but it's really a productive
Speaker 1: form of leadership. You know. We our first four people
Speaker 1: in the company were incredibly diverse. So three women, one man,
Speaker 1: and of the three women, one was from Central America,
Speaker 1: one's a native Hawaiian, I under I'm the other. Uh.
Speaker 1: We started really as a diverse group of people and
Speaker 1: what is you know fabulous about that? Is you never
Speaker 1: have to go backwards and fix it. You never have
Speaker 1: to go backwards and clean it up or make it
Speaker 1: an overt effort. It sort of spawns from there. And
Speaker 1: so I think we enjoy an incredibly diverse team in
Speaker 1: the level of experience in the age, which is another
Speaker 1: enormous one, in ethnic backgrounds, in educational backgrounds, and gender diversity,
Speaker 1: really broad spectrum, and I think that is something that
Speaker 1: we think of as to be celebrated, and we're try
Speaker 1: and put a fair bit of ritual around celebrating and
Speaker 1: valuing it. And of course when you celebrate it and
Speaker 1: value it, you get to build on it. Right, it
Speaker 1: shifts forward Women in every layer and every level the
Speaker 1: organ and people with diverse experiences and perspectives likewise, in
Speaker 1: every layer and every aspect of the ward. Well what's
Speaker 1: interesting too, is um I mean California, right, I mean
Speaker 1: it was because of a lot of pressure among the
Speaker 1: California public that really pushed them to pass a law
Speaker 1: requiring diversity and public boards. But do we is that
Speaker 1: what we need? Because I feel like things are moving
Speaker 1: so slowly. I talked about this, uh, just in the
Speaker 1: last hour or so with the CFO of s. D.
Speaker 1: Lawder and the executive VP of Finance at st. Lawder
Speaker 1: about how many conversations we've had about improving boards and
Speaker 1: so on, and yet here we are and people put
Speaker 1: out uh dates by when they're gonna have more parody,
Speaker 1: and it's again several years from now. You know, is it?
Speaker 1: Do we need to have states with laws saying Okay,
Speaker 1: it's time to do it, let's do it. Yeah, good question,
Speaker 1: and I don't I don't know the answer, to be honest,
Speaker 1: I'm not a fan of regulating it. And I actually
Speaker 1: find that that has the potential to hollow out the
Speaker 1: value of the purpose of boards, and so I don't
Speaker 1: love that. I would say, in um, if we we
Speaker 1: look at i'll call the leading indicators, kind of we
Speaker 1: measure the upstream progress rather than the downstream progress, and
Speaker 1: the downstream progresses. We've got diverse boards everywhere that that
Speaker 1: undoubtedly takes time. Like there's not that many board seats.
Speaker 1: They don't come up empty every year, right, Some people
Speaker 1: sit in the same board seat for quite a long time,
Speaker 1: and that there's goodness in that. So it's not that
Speaker 1: the number of chairs up at any one time is
Speaker 1: so huge that we should dis measure how full they are, Right,
Speaker 1: we might instead start to measure and focus on the
Speaker 1: indicators of change and diversity of further upstream. So, for example,
Speaker 1: in California in particular, how many venture company venture funds
Speaker 1: have diverse partnerships and who do they invest in? And
Speaker 1: are they investing in founders and co founders that are
Speaker 1: diverse themselves? Right? Because in California in particular, the number
Speaker 1: of companies created far exceeds the number of open board
Speaker 1: seats this year, right there. And so if we start
Speaker 1: lay upstream, what's that look like? We might look at
Speaker 1: how many co founders are women and how that's going.
Speaker 1: We might look at how many executive leaders, right are
Speaker 1: not just the co founders, but of the executive teams
Speaker 1: of those young companies, how diverse are those? And those
Speaker 1: of what I think give us better headlights on are
Speaker 1: we going to see meaningful difference in the few board
Speaker 1: seats available being allocated to the best candidate, including the
Speaker 1: candidates with diversity. Well, if there is one piece of
Speaker 1: advice you would give to leaders out there in terms
Speaker 1: of thinking about more women, more everything at your company,
Speaker 1: I mean, what is it? How do you start? What
Speaker 1: do you do. I think I would go back to
Speaker 1: the common I think about the drive real change, which
Speaker 1: is two CEOs. What is the breadth and depth and
Speaker 1: diversity and disruptivelopment of thinking that leads to a smarter
Speaker 1: conversation about how your company serves as customers well. And so,
Speaker 1: if you happen to be a company that only serves men,
Speaker 1: then by all means you just keep going with the
Speaker 1: boards you've got. If, on the other hand, you depend
Speaker 1: on women talent in your organization to drive value, to
Speaker 1: behalf of your customers as women, then you're probably not
Speaker 1: serving either your talented team members nor your customers well
Speaker 1: enough if you've got a board that doesn't reflect those
Speaker 1: buyers and that talent. If you really focus on how
Speaker 1: do I have the smartest conversations about building the best
Speaker 1: business I can? And then diversity pools a day right right,
Speaker 1: And increasingly we're seeing you know, customers, whether it's your
Speaker 1: business customers or you know customers like me buying merchandise
Speaker 1: that increasingly, you know, you want to see what the
Speaker 1: company stands for, what the diversity is, and that's you know,
Speaker 1: going to be an element that really matters certainly going forward.
Speaker 1: Um Ddri, thank you so much, really appreciate it, and
Speaker 1: hopefully we can check in with you again in the future.
Speaker 1: Dedri Pucknachiese, chief executive officer co founder of Workboard, on
Speaker 1: the phone from Silicon Fowl. As we mentioned, she has
Speaker 1: started up three tech companies, including one that she sold
Speaker 1: to IBM, so really great to get a gut check
Speaker 1: with her when it comes to VC and UH, the
Speaker 1: investment world and the tech world.