In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, host Sam Saperstein sits down with Laura Modi, CEO and co-founder of the organic infant formula brand, Bobbie. From her early days as a first-time mom navigating formula options in a drugstore to founding Bobbie, Laura's journey reflects her commitment to revolutionizing the infant formula industry.

Born from motherhood

Laura says her journey to founding Bobbie began in trauma: as a new mother excited to do everything possible for her baby, she suffered from mastitis and found herself unable to breastfeed. “Here I am doing something I wished and I hoped and I wanted to do so badly and I wasn't anatomically able to feed my child,” she tells Sam.

When she went to shop for formula, things got worse: “I'm in the middle aisle of a pharmacy, a place that you go for a medical solution, not food,” she says. “It didn't feel natural. Even worse, I had to ring a button to get someone to open up. So now you almost feel like you're asking for permission in a way that you felt shamed.“

She also remembers seeing ingredients she wouldn’t feed herself: corn syrup, palm oil, and “ingredients or words that I'd never even heard of.” She felt shame and guilt, but also she knew there should be a better option. She and her husband were astounded that the baby formula industry seemed to be stuck at least 40 years in the past. That’s when she started dreaming of disrupting the industry, and creating the formula she wanted.

An ounce of naivety

Before founding Bobbie, Laura was the director of host operations at Airbnb, and she drew on her experiences there when she created her own business. And when it came time to select a partner and co-founder, Laura turned not to a food scientist or a technologist, but someone who she had worked with at Airbnb, someone who she knew she wanted as her “work wife.”

As for actually formulating the baby formula they wanted to make, Laura says that she was nearly clueless. “An ounce of naivety is probably the secret sauce to succeeding,” she tells Sam. “You learn on the go and then you go, ‘Oh God, if I knew that I probably wouldn't have gotten this far.’"

With her partner Sarah, Laura started with a global standard review, looking for the best infant formulas in the world and researching breast milk and how they could get as close as possible to breast milk in the most natural way possible. “And by no means was I trying to find a world where I was replacing breast milk or creating something ‘better’ than breast milk,” she says. “I wanted to create something that I felt could get as close as possible in the most natural way, so that in absence of not being able to breastfeed, you don't feel guilty.”

Managing growth

In 2020, just as the pandemic unfolded, Bobbie got FDA approval, the green light to launch. At the time, two baby formula companies were producing 80 percent of the nation’s formula—and not long into the pandemic, there was a nationwide shortage of available formula. Bobbie’s customer count doubled overnight. As a start-up founder, Laura had to make the difficult decision to uphold their commitment to their existing subscribers and not take new orders. The company took some flak for the decision, but as a result, Laura says, Bobbie was the only baby formula company at the end of the shortage that was able to continue to feed its customers.

For the next two years, Bobbie had to manage a growing waitlist, balancing what they knew they could deliver with the fast-growing demand from new parents. Today, the formula is available in major retailers but still focuses on its subscription service. Laura says it’s a model that makes sense, since formula is an ongoing, measurable need. And it’s important to her that customers have an option to avoid the drug-store trips. She wants people to be “able to wear Bobbie loud and proud on a sweater, even if they've never been a parent, they've never used the product, but they are so connected to our mission and what we stand for that they're willing to wear it on their chest.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of October 22nd, 2024 and they may not materialize.

In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, Dr. Topeka K. Sam sits down with host Sam Saperstein to discuss her journey from incarceration to nonprofit founder. Topeka is the founder and executive director for The Ladies of Hope Ministries and the co-founder of Hope House NYC, a safe housing space for women and girls. She's a pioneer in the fight for the decriminalization and decarceration of women and girls and works relentlessly to provide resources and support for those transitioning back to society.

A new start

After spending three and a half years in federal prison and seeing all of the disparities and harms that women and girls had faced, Topeka came home determined to be a voice for those still incarcerated. “I knew when I came home because of the support services, the family, community that I had, that I could do anything, but the sisters that I left behind would not,” she tells Sam. “And so as God would have it, I was really just moved to start my organization, The Ladies of Hope Ministries, while I was incarcerated. And when I was released in 2015, I hit the ground running.”

Topeka says two things drove her mission: to provide safe housing for women after incarcerations, and to create platforms for women to be able to use their voices. “I felt that if we saw the faces of women who were incarcerated and heard their voices, that there would be no woman or girl in prison or jail,” she says. “I'm a firm believer that you can hold people accountable by healing them, and prisons and jails don't do that.”

Expanding and looking to the future

85 percent of incarcerated women are mothers of dependent children and heads of households, and 95 percent have experienced some type of sexual trauma or violence. In addition, 90 percent have mental health challenges. “There are drivers that lead to incarceration,” she explains, citing some alarming statistics for incarcerated women who have experienced some form of abuse, violence, trauma or mental health challenges. “As we know, women often are the most marginalized, the most vulnerable population and have the least support and services, no matter what industry you're in. And so going into prison, it's the same harms and the same drivers, but yet we come home and there's not enough organizations [to support] or opportunities when we come home.”

Since starting her nonprofit in New York, Topeka has expanded to several additional states. Together with United States Department of Housing and Urban Development Rapid Re-housing program, they are now helping families get their own apartments in New York, in Prince George's County, Maryland, and in New Orleans, and helping them pay rent for a year. They also have a workforce development initiative, which includes certification programs in digital marketing, project management, IT, and AI.

Topeka is also a co-founder of a FinTech company, EPIC Financial  that focuses on making sure that justice-impacted people have financial education on savings and banking. “It’s about building the community,” she stresses. “Because if our families are strong, then it also helps that person who is reentering to become strong.”

Being a role model in the community, and in particular demonstrating that a criminal record doesn’t have to define you, is extremely important to Topeka.  “When you come from a limited resource community, you can't see that you can have more unless you see someone who's lived that experience,” she says. “So that for me is the greatest gift, to be able to show women that it doesn't matter where we come from or what we've experienced that we can be and do it whatever it is that we want.”

As far as inspiring other women, Topeka offers some simple advice. You have to believe in yourself and give yourself permission to follow your dreams and your ambition. “Know that many of us are incarcerated before we even go to a prison,” she says. “You can be living in a prison in your mind, in your community, before you've even gotten through what I've been through. You can change that today. Each day, God gives us grace. We can get up every morning and we can decide.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of October 15th, 2024 and they may not materialize.

In this Founder’s Feature of the Women on the Move podcast, host Sam Saperstein introduces Paula Ilonze, the founder of Chilon Industries

Paula discusses her journey with her own textured hair to founding Chilon Industries and her plans for 2024, which include launching new products like their Curl-eeze brush, a revolutionary hairbrush that dispenses products such as gels, creams, and conditioners while brushing. Learn more about Paula and Chilon Industries by following them on Instagram and visiting their website chilonindustries.com

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of October 26th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Transcript here

In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, host Sam Saperstein talks with Debbie Isaacs, founder and president of Unshakeable, a nonprofit that serves women offenders by addressing their trauma and needs. Unshakeable’s mission is to guide women survivors in recovery from traumas that include domestic and sexual violence, trafficking, homelessness, and addiction. “Our goal is to set them on a career path to achieve financial independence and stability,” Debbie says. Originally motivated to help just one woman achieve financial stability, Unshakeable has since changed hundreds of lives.

Making change

Debbie shares that she was already over 50 when she was inspired to launch Unshakeable. Living in Las Vegas, she had been a video producer with a successful business making “sizzle reels” for people pitching reality TV shows. She heard about a municipal court program that was helping women in recovery change their lives—and it ended up changing her life. “I sat in the courtroom and listened to the women share their stories and it was one of those moments where I just felt, I'm not here to tell their story, I need to change it,” she recalls. “One of the women shared that she had gotten dressed for herself that day, meaning that for the first time in months, her pimp wasn't telling her what to wear.”

Listening to more women share their stories that day, Debbie was drawn in not only by their heartbreaking experiences but also by the realization that she could relate to many of their feelings. “My physical circumstances didn't match, but how they felt matched,” she tells Sam. “And it didn't match only me, it matched friends of mine.”

And so Unshakeable was born, and soon incorporated into 501(c)3 that partners with other nonprofit organizations that provide housing and therapy. Unshakeable brings their Empower to Employ program, at no charge, to clients of those organizations in order to support their return to the workforce and into a sustainable career. Unshakeable programming includes three phases. Phase 1 is the “I AM” series, which includes a two-day conference where clients hear from community leaders, c-suite executives, and other professionals, who teach them business acculturation and other skills to build self-esteem. Phase 2 is career coaching, which is at least a two-year commitment to all clients, starting with an individualized case assessment and then moving into Phase 3, the bigger picture where case workers evaluate needs and bring clients from immediate employment to a longer-term career plan.

Today, Debbie says, Unshakeable partners with about 20 nonprofits in Las Vegas. Her focus is what she calls the “Four Rs.” That includes Rescue, where the goal is to find shelter for clients and possibly treatment or court. Next is Residency, where they find stabilized, temporary housing. Then comes Recovery, which is the therapy component. Finally, there’s Ready: “I tell people we’re the Get Ready part or the Rest of It, which means we partner with organizations here like Safeness, Shade Tree, and WestCare. We become their workforce development and allow their case managers to help the clients get the therapy they need, or then we work together."

Eye to the future

This summer, Debbie says she’s been traveling and connecting with other nonprofits, learning more about the needs that exist. “Housing is the number one factor that people are ending up on the street or in a situation of staying with somebody that is abusing them,” she tells Sam. “I think the other thing that works [is] the specialty court approach where we're not jailing people for misdemeanors and we're looking at that system as, can we create reform as opposed to just putting somebody into jail.”

As for the future, the vision is to grow Unshakeable in Nevada with a dream of expanding to another state and cities. “And one of the biggest things on our heart is to launch a social enterprise by the end of second quarter next year,” she says. “So that is an ambitious undertaking, but that's really the heart of Unshakeable. We have enough history here that we know our impact matters and it works and it's sustainable and there's thousands of other cities that we think that we could grow into. So that's an undertaking of ours, and the social enterprise, that will be our big focus.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of October 19th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

During a special event for JPMorgan Chase managing directors in honor of Women's History Month, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein talks with Randi Braun, author of Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work, and the CEO and founder of the women's leadership firm Something Major. Randi discusses her mission to empower women at work to chart their own course, and touches on longevity, loss aversion, and why she hates the term “Imposter Syndrome.”

Longevity and loss aversion

Randi, a certified executive coach and sought-after speaker, has worked with a variety of large organizations and coached dozens of senior women in high-powered, “male-driven” industries.

“I think that in the conversation that we have around burnout and around thriving, we're seeing women in senior levels of leadership face this low work libido situation,” she shares. “So that, for me, was the light bulb, where I was like, okay, we need to start talking to women about how they can play the game on their own rules and win, because there's just no little blue pill for that. So instead, I hope that we have a new playbook.”

Women’s longevity in senior positions is one of Randi’s top concerns. She tells Sam that she frequently hears of women who are leaving the workforce at senior levels of leadership because of burnout. “So if you want to leave because it's your goal to retire early, I celebrate you,” she says. “But if you feel like you need to leave because you can't sustain, then something is wrong. And we need to create a space where women cannot just lead and thrive, but have that longevity for years to come.”

The idea of “loss aversion” is another top concern of Randi’s. She describes this as a trend where successful women, as their careers advance, begin to focus on minimizing their failures instead of maximizing their successes. “And that's when self-doubt moves from being something that is a healthy catalyst for evaluating a situation and making smart choices, to being something that really hampers our ability to be creative, share an innovative idea, or just not feel so burnt out,” she explains.

The case against “Imposter Syndrome”

Randi says that she wants to help women know that it's okay to be both successful and stressed out. “I want to normalize that it's okay to feel overwhelmed and grateful for the career that you've built, and I think we need to have a more nuanced, open conversation where those things have permission to coexist,” she says.

One thing that can help that acceptance is to move past the idea of “Imposter Syndrome.” It’s a term, she says, that can imply that women are somehow at fault for not feeling up to the task of being successful. “There is nothing wrong with any of us,” she reminds the audience. “We all go to work in a world that was not designed for our success. And I want us to understand that it is normal to have self-doubt. Every single one of us has an inner critic, it's that voice of self-doubt or self-judgment. It doesn't make you deficient, it makes you human.”

That’s where women run into trouble, she says: “Our inner critic can be an incredibly helpful problem identifier, because all our inner critic cares about is keeping us safe from a few key things . . . failure, risk, humiliation, vulnerability. What I want us to understand is that the inner critic is healthy in evaluating that there might be some risk or some exposure, and it's also really important to not let that voice of self-doubt start to dictate all of your decisions.”

Stream the rest of this episode to hear Randi talk about how to rethink the way you process feedback, and how the change you're looking for within yourself can be a spark to others as well. Following her discussion with Sam, Randi takes questions from the JPMorgan Chase managing directors in attendance.

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of October 12th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

In this Women on the Move Podcast episode, host Sam Saperstein sits down with Melissa Jun Rowley, founder and CEO of Warrior Love Productions. Melissa shares her journey as a storyteller and how she came to realize her power and start her company. Along the way, she’s had a big impact on the Web3 space and has helped drive change at the intersection of social impact and technology.

Telling the story for impact

Melissa started Warrior Love Productions, a social impact strategy studio and marketing consultancy, nearly three years ago after her career in journalism—including stints with CNN and the Associated Press—led her to recognize a business need for internal corporate storytelling. She describes herself as a kind of internal editorial director, weaving storytelling into content strategy, marketing, thought leadership and other areas. “Our sweet spot is the intersection of technology and social impact,” she tells Sam. “So either companies working at that convergence or companies specializing in tech or company culture [who] really want to bring more social impact or climate positivity into what they're doing.”

Melissa says Warrior Love Productions works with many start-ups, perhaps because they’re a start-up themselves. “My journey into social innovation started when I began meeting entrepreneurs and founders who were harnessing technology for social good,” she says. “I was a tech journalist for a number of years, but didn't really feel passionate about it until I started meeting those people [who are] harnessing or creating technology for social impact, a lot of them creating incredible products and services.”

To those companies, Warrior Love Productions offers support in both telling stories with clarity and confidence, as well as helping them learn to drive deeper impact. She notes that while many founders have compelling stories and focused purpose, they don’t always see the value of those in their branding. “They just don't necessarily have the capacity to put their storytelling at the forefront of what they're doing,” Melissa says. “They're busy having an impact, they're busy getting customers, they're busy making deals.”

Moving into Web3

Melissa says that while she wasn’t initially drawn to Web3 and the idea of blockchain transactions, she quickly changed her mind when she realized how essential the idea of community was to the Web3 space. She says she was writing about blockchain as a journalist as early as 2014 without fully understanding its impact, but then she started to see it from a social impact perspective. “That’s really what attracted me to Web3,” she explains. “Web3 is going to not only survive, but potentially be successful and thrive, if there is a very strong community that vouches for one another, that values one another's opinions, and moves together collectively and consciously in that way.”

When she first started reporting on Web3 and blockchain investment, Melissa says her sources were mainly white papers for investors. But she knew that in order to tell the story in a way that the general public could understand and resonate with, she needed to see firsthand a “real-life tangible blockchain-based solution.” She found one in 2018 at a refugee camp on the border of Jordan and Syria, which had a grocery store that ran on blockchain. She contacted the World Food Program, who ran the project, and arranged a visit. “Basically, the refugees go to their grocery store to shop for themselves or their families,” she explains. “They walk into the store and rather than having to show a card that does a cash transfer, the biometric system comes up, scans their digital identity, and then the money's transferred immediately. And the reason the World Food Program wanted to do that was because so much money was going to banks as the third party to facilitate this. But because this is done on blockchain, there's no third party involved.”

Flash forward a few years, and many of Warrior Love Production’s clients are heavily Web3 focused. And while she says she fully enjoys the work, she’s experienced her share of start-up challenges, including the Web3 market running hot and cold—and the ensuing stress that’s put on her business. But after several up and down years, Melissa says she learned to take a step back from the stress and prioritize. “I'm just being much more mindful and selective about the kinds of projects we're taking on,” she says. “Every year that I am in business, I feel like I'm very privileged because we do get approached by companies that are mission-aligned and values-aligned, but we can be even more aligned. You might be focused on social impacts or climate action, but if your company values seem like they're not really going to integrate with ours, I can't do business with you. The stress of it is not worth it.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of Sept 28th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

Women on the Move Podcast host Sam Saperstein talks with two leaders who support Latinos in building strong futures: Rocky Egusquiza, executive director of the Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation, and Silvana Montenegro, global head of Advancing Hispanics and Latinos at JPMorgan Chase. Silvana and Rocky talk about the partnership they’ve created, which is focused on providing financial health education to students and their parents.

Career with a purpose

Rocky says her experience as the daughter of immigrants has inspired her career. She says she comes from a “typical immigrant family” with hard-working parents who sacrificed for their kids, saw education as an economic equalizer, and valued giving back. “So whether it was opening our home to other immigrant families or friends, lending a helping hand, my mom used to always say, just add more water to the soup and more people can join the meal,” she says. “They really led by example and showed us the value of paying it forward and helping others.”

She says that emphasis on giving back and mentoring has been the common denominator and purpose in her career, which has spanned government, corporate, nonprofits, media, sports, and the music industry. “It's been about paying it forward, working with purpose, giving back,” she says.

Rocky took on the executive director role at the GRAMMY Culture Foundation—the philanthropic arm of the Latin Recording Academy—in October 2022. The foundation’s mission is twofold: One part is focused on the next generation of Latin music creators, supporting them through education, scholarships, and mentoring. The second priority is on Latin music preservation. “We work globally to look at, how do we preserve Latin music and how do we tell those stories?” she explains.

Educación Financiera

From her role at JPMorgan Chase, Silvana says she was inspired by the work that Rocky does with the GRAMMY Foundation to not only help students with their music but also to help them thrive. It’s work that aligns well with her team’s mission to advance Hispanics and Latinos, partly by creating opportunities for students and individuals overall. In early 2023, JPMorgan Chase and the Latin GRAMMY Cultural Foundation partnered to launch Educación Financiera – financial health education workshops as part of the Latin GRAMMY® Master Series. The workshops provide high school seniors and college students with access to money and credit management information and resources, as well as expert advice from financial leaders, music executives, and creators.

Silvana describes Latin music as a great connector for everyone. “One of the ways that we can really help the community is by making sure that Latin music is even more accessible and that we can support artists regardless where they come from,” she says. “The basis of continuing to grow as individuals is obviously through financial health because we want to make sure that these artists have the tools and resources they need, not only to have a thriving career in music, but also to build their families, build their journeys and so forth.”

The value of expert advice

Rocky talks about the importance of mentorship. It’s something she prioritizes in her career, in part due to her own experiences. “I remember my first job that offered me the opportunity to contribute to a 401k,” she says. “My parents didn't have 401k’s, so I didn't have anyone to talk to and to help me understand the importance of that and how important it was to contribute early so that I could really help build that long-term wealth. So find those allies, find those mentors, find those sponsors that'll help you and ask the questions.”

She says that kind of expert advice is one of the biggest benefits of the partnership with JPMorgan Chase. She shares a story of an event where a music industry executive took out his Chase credit that he first got in college and talked about the importance of that moment. “And I thought that was very interesting and kind of shows the impact that finances and this financial education and our financial journeys have on us,” Rocky explains. “And even later in life, regardless of the level of our success, we don't forget when we were given credit, when we were given those initial opportunities and learned how to navigate that ourselves.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of Sept 22nd, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

In this Founder’s Feature of the Women on the Move podcast, host Sam Saperstein introduces April Holmes, co-founder and CEO of Hero Hangout, and a Paralympic gold medalist. April shares her inspiring journey of developing Hero Hangout, which was born out of her experiences as a professional track and field athlete.

During her athletic career, April noticed that parents often wished their kids could interact with athletes like her, seeking guidance on various topics. This sparked the idea of creating a platform where kids could connect with their favorite athletes, entertainers, musicians, and more to ask questions and gain valuable insights.

While April's entrepreneurial journey comes with its challenges, particularly navigating the tech space and creating a roadmap for the app's growth, her mental toughness, resilience, and experience as an athlete have equipped her to overcome obstacles.

Listeners are encouraged to support Hero Hangout in any way they can, as April believes that community support and help from others will be critical to achieving the platform's mission of making the world a better place for kids. To learn more, visit hero hangout.io

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of September 14th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, host Sam Saperstein is joined by Jamie Kramer, head of the Alternative Solutions Group for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, and Ali Rosenthal, founder and managing partner of Leadout Capital. Jamie and Ali connected after Jamie's team invested in Ali's Venture Capital fund. Here they discuss their career journeys and why they both believe asset management is a great career for women.

The story behind Project Spark

In more than 30 years at J.P. Morgan, Jamie’s career has spanned both Asset and Wealth Management, with roles across public and private investments. Five years ago, she was named head of Alternative Solutions at the firm, where she’s responsible for insights, analytics, and cross alternatives investment solutions. She’s also the CEO of Global Hedge Fund and Alternative Credit Solutions business.

Jamie recalls when she met a woman who was struggling to raise funds for her own venture fund in 2020. “I couldn't really understand why she wasn't as successful raising these assets,” she says. “And so I approached our CEO and asked on behalf of Asset Management if we could give her some capital.”

That initial investment led to the creation of Project Spark, an effort aimed at providing capital to funds managed by diverse, emerging alternative managers, including minority-led and women-led venture capital funds and other private funds. “I'm really excited that the 33 managers that we've invested in and the $140 million has helped accelerate well over a billion in fundraising,” Jamie says. “And Ali is one of those managers.”

Leadout Capital

After a stint as a professional women’s cyclist, Ali began her career in operating roles at consumer technology businesses (she was an early employee at Facebook) and in investment banking as both an angel investor and an institutional investor. “I got Leadout going because I saw a gap in the market with respect to who got access to capital,” she tells Sam and Jamie. “I believe today the numbers are still that fewer than 3 percent of companies are invested in by the venture capital community. And I thought that was really compelling.”

Leadout’s focus has been on women, underrepresented minorities, and people who according to data are less likely to receive venture capital funding. As Ali says, these are founders who “had great ideas, great momentum, but oftentimes were overlooked because they didn't fit pattern recognition. And so I wanted to use my platform, my network, my experience to back them and to connect them via bridge for them to other sources of capital, not only monetary capital but network capital and social capital and people and experts who could really help them go from zero to one.”

“We really pursue what we call a founder market fit–driven thesis,” Ali says. “So we look for founders who themselves are customer segment experts, people who have lived a problem in a market that they know well either because they care enough about that market to embed with the customer, become a customer themselves, really understand the pain point that a customer is having and solve it with software.”

“A great career for women”

Ali and Jamie agree that asset management can be a great career fit for women. Jamie notes that the field is both relationship-driven and problem-solving oriented, two skills that women tend to excel at. It affords good life balance, she says, with relatively predictable hours. And she cites research that shows that although there aren't enough women in asset management, they tend to be successful in the field. In addition, it offers an opportunity for women to do well financially which in turn allows them to give back, which research shows women gravitate toward.

“And something that Ali said, which is that asset management is not transactional,” she adds. “It's extremely relationship driven. No matter what aspect you're in, you are managing money as a fiduciary on behalf of someone helping corporations meet their goals. You're helping individuals retire.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of September 7th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

In this Founder’s Feature, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein interviews Jennie Nwokoye, founder of Clafiya, a company with a mission to increase access to primary healthcare for communities in Nigeria and beyond. Jenny shares her journey as an entrepreneur and how her personal experiences motivated her to create a community-based approach to healthcare in Africa.

Jenny reflects on her own upbringing, moving from the United States to Nigeria and experiencing the challenges of accessing healthcare firsthand. She explains how her father's entrepreneurial spirit inspired her to become an entrepreneur, emphasizing the resilience and persistence required to succeed in this field.

She also shares how through the Techstars Founder Catalyst program, she learned to refine her storytelling skills, leading to success in raising funds for Clafiya. She shares valuable tips for other entrepreneurs, focusing on maintaining good health and well-being, leveraging storytelling to connect with investors, and not hesitating to seek help and support from their network.

Her passion for her mission shines through, and our listeners are encouraged to visit clafiya.com to learn more about the company's impactful work.

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of August 24th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein got the chance to sit down with Diana Marrero, Vice President of Strategic Development for Foreign Policy Magazine. Diana talked about her Cuban-American background and how that influenced her career journey, and she discussed her work at the magazine around educating readers on the geopolitical landscape and expanding the offerings across channels.

From Miami to Davos (via Capitol Hill)

Born in Cuba but raised in Hialeah—a Miami suburb with the highest Cuban-American population of any U.S. city—Diana says it was hard to not to be interested in geopolitics and politics. Her father had been a political prisoner in Cuba before she was born. “There's a very personal relationship with Cuba and politics and really understanding what the breakdown of democracy can do to communities and to populations,” she tells Sam.

She gravitated to journalism early, serving as editor-in-chief of her college newspaper as well as working for the Miami Herald before graduating. She headed to Washington, D.C., as a congressional reporter in the mid-2000s, just as newspapers were experiencing a sharp decline in revenue. “I was starting to feel those declines as a daily news reporter and looking around and thinking, This is the industry that I love. What can I do and how do I make an impact?" she recalls. She ended up getting an MBA at Georgetown with a goal of “saving journalism” by finding new revenue models. 

Spotlight on the Hispanic community

Diana says she’s always taken pride in her Hispanic background and heritage, and while in D.C. she launched and directed The Hill Latino with the aim of covering the issues that are important to the Hispanic community. 

“One in five Americans right now are Hispanic,” she notes. “It’s important to really understand the issues that they're grappling with, to cover these trends and shifts in the population and what it means for politics, what it means for the economy, for businesses. It was so gratifying and validating to the U.S. Hispanic community to have a publication that covered Congress and that covered the highest forms of leadership and political debate in the country, and to have that publication say Hispanics matter so much that we are going to devote resources specifically to covering them.”

Today, she says, The Hill Latino lead reporter Rafael Bernal is “doing incredible work.” She’s proud of how the outlet originally put a spotlight on the Hispanic community for politicians who weren't Hispanic and weren't necessarily thinking about the Hispanic community in such a nuanced way, and she’s thrilled that the work continues today. “You might see a lot of members of Congress who equate being Hispanic and thinking about Hispanic issues with immigration and that's it. And so thinking about what the community is interested in, how to serve the community better, I'm really proud of the impact that we've had,” she tells Sam.

Foreign Policy Magazine

Diana made the move to Foreign Policy Magazine in 2018. Today, she serves as Senior Vice President for Strategic Partnerships, and leads a team working with partners from both the private and public sector on a range of projects. “We work with a huge variety of partners on topics from healthcare to technology to gender equality, so it's a really varied group of topics and partners,” she says. “From events at Davos and other major global convenings to really very cool podcasts, but also research and analytics.”

Foreign Policy Magazine has been in circulation for 50 years. “So it's a very well-established, reputable magazine that covers global affairs and geopolitics,” Diana notes. “Our mission really is to explain the world to our readers, to bring the world to them, to really go a lot deeper than the typical headlines that you'll see in most major news organizations.”

Today, she says, the magazine is much more than a news outlet. “We've really diversified our offerings to be a multi-component multimedia publication, really leaning into digital media, but also convenings, bringing people together, bringing the world's foremost experts and leaders together to have really important conversations about what's happening in the world and bringing all of those assets that we have at our disposal together, so leveraging our analytics department and our podcast studios and the journalists that do incredible reporting day in and day out.”

You can check out the magazine’s podcast, HERO: The Hidden Economics of Remarkable Women, here: https://foreignpolicy.com/podcasts/hidden-economics-of-remarkable-women-hero/

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of August 17th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Transcript here 

In this exciting new episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, hosted by Sam Saperstein, listeners are introduced to the new "Founder’s Feature" segment. This biweekly addition showcases founders who participated in the Techstars Founder Catalyst program. These inspiring short episodes shed light on entrepreneurs refining their business models, perfecting their pitches, and building networks to take their ventures to the next level.

The spotlight of this episode falls on Marnee Goodroad, the founder of ReBLDing, a company dedicated to supporting homeowners, contractors, and insurance companies working to rebuild homes after catastrophic events. Marnee aims to streamline the process of restoration and repairs, benefiting all parties involved and addressing the challenges faced by the industry. She describes her ambitions to help as many people as possible, making the rebuilding process easier and more transparent for homeowners and contractors alike.

Throughout the conversation, Marnee discusses the challenges she has encountered as a small business owner and the importance of perseverance. She also expresses gratitude for the Techstars Founder Catalyst program, which empowered her and provided invaluable mentorship, helping her secure a place in the Global Insurance Accelerator.

To learn more about ReBLDing and its innovative approach to rebuilding communities after disasters, visit reblding.com.

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of August 10th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

Nicole Emanuel says it isn’t fear of failure that drives her—it’s fear of not doing what you're passionate about. Here the co-founder of 21 Seeds Tequila talks about her journey with her co-founders—her sister Kat and their friend Sarika—to create a liquor brand that embodies empowerment, innovation, and inclusivity. Through their brand, they've crafted more than just a spirit. They've created a movement that celebrates friendship, authenticity, and the bold pursuit of dreams.

It's the inaugural episode of the Women on the Move podcast in its new format, featuring video as well as audio recordings of women leaders discussing their careers and personal journeys. They’ll dive into topics such as ambition, leadership, driving change, and building networks. In this episode, host Sam Saperstein sits down with Nicole to discuss the inspiring story behind 21 Seeds Tequila.

Starting with a dream team

Nicole tells Sam that it was her sister Kat who first came up with the idea of making infused tequila. As wine lover who didn’t tolerate wine well, Kat set out to create a relaxing spritz-like drink. “Her new goal in life was to figure out how to make this tequila as easy to drink as a glass of wine,” Nicole says. “She's an amazing cook, and she started infusing her own tequila in a filter.”

Kat’s first homemade infused tequila was cucumber jalapeno. “She did that happily, just to drink it for herself, for her friends, for about eight years, and everybody was asking her, Can I have more of your tequila?” Nicole remembers. “At some point, I couldn't even get to parties without bringing my sister's tequila.”

Soon Kat asked Nicole and their friend Sarika about starting a tequila company together. The three each brought unique skills and experience: Nicole had been a CFO and COO, Kat was a film producer, and Sarika had worked in organic foods. Together in 2019, they launched 21 Seeds with three infusions—grapefruit hibiscus, Valencia orange, and cucumber jalapeno—all at a lower alcohol content (35%) than most spirits.

“We all really had our lanes, and I think that's what allowed us to run faster,” Nicole says. “Because, we really stayed in our lanes in order to run, and we trusted each other, because it does go back to trust, of knowing that you trust their judgment, you trust how they're going to do it.”

A different approach

As women launching a product in an industry dominated by men, Nicole and her partners were bound to forge their own path. One early difference was their market strategy: Rather than focusing on getting into bars to begin with, they were focused on becoming the beverage of choice of women drinking at home or at friends’ homes.

“We were set up pretty nicely, because our go-to-market strategy was completely different than the spirits industry,” she tells Sam. “In the spirits industry, you went to on-premise, which are bars, restaurants, had the consumer taste it, and then moved to off-premise. That's typically the go-to-market strategy for spirits. That was not our strategy. We knew who our consumer was.”

An early break came when some of the early adapters “happened to be celebrities.” Katie Couric featured 21 Seeds in her Holiday Gift Guide, and through that, they landed on the Today Show. Soon they also made Oprah's Favorites, and Jessica Alba and Naomi Watts were fans. With help like that, they kept their first year’s marketing budget to just $4,000.

Looking ahead

By 2022, the three founders sold 21 Seeds to Diageo. Nicole says that once they started looking around for the right owner, it was an easy decision. “They have a lot of women leadership,” she says of Diageo. “They understood our position in the market. We felt like we had great representation because of that women leadership.”

As for the future, Nicole says she’s excited to continue mentoring talented and passionate women. “I've been lucky enough to be able to do that throughout my career,” she says. “I put my money where my mouth is. I invest in women, and I invest in their products.”

Most of all, she wants other women to feel empowered to achieve their dreams. “If you want to build a company, you can,” she says. “You have to not be so risk-adverse that you can't jump and chase your dreams. That's the kind of environment I want to create for my family, for my friends, for my children. Anything is possible, and I really believe that.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of Oct 8th, 2024 and they may not materialize.

Transcript here 

Ceci Kurzman, board director, investor, and entrepreneur is on a mission to change the haircare industry to better meet the needs of multicultural consumers. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein and shares insights on her life as a senior executive in the music industry, her extensive corporate board experience, and the launch of her businesses, Nexus Management Group and OurX.

From executive to founder

After years of experience as a music industry executive, Ceci founded Nexus Management Group in 2004, initially as a talent management company. “My first client was Shakira,” she tells Sam. “I had just left Sony Music where I'd been an executive for many years. I really felt like it was time to do something sort of entrepreneurial in the business. There were no women managing artists and no female-led management companies at the time that I could identify.”

Ceci says she originally formed Nexus to handle talent, but what she identified as her point of differentiation was to ensure that artists had second acts. “Most artists like athletes and other cultural icons, they have these very, very bright careers that reach a peak and then eventually have the slide in their career due to natural organic relevance erosion,” she explains. “There are very few artists in that career class who are at their apex throughout their entire lives. The idea was how do you maintain the earning potential for that artist once they're no longer at their peak in terms of cultural relevance?”

Over time, Ceci navigated Nexus to become more of an investment firm. She says it was a combination of changes in her personal life—having children and wanting be at home more and working less around-the-clock as talent management requires—along with an increasing interest in the investments side of her business. “It felt like a very natural thing,” she says. “And it was very stimulating intellectually and in terms of building a network of people beyond the entertainment industry.”

A natural shift to board directorships

Beginning to serve on boards was a natural next step for Ceci. “Having worked with a lot of these management teams and investors over time, the natural evolution was being asked to serve on various boards, and it was a continuation of the learning and career and professional evolution to be honored to be asked to serve on some of these boards,” she tells Sam.

For several years, when she started serving boards, she says she stayed away from entertainment companies because it felt important to step away from that industry in order to gain perspective in the long run. “I only came back into Warner Music and UTA [United Talent Agency] relatively recently in the past few years because I did want to specifically explore industries that might have been tangential to but not squarely aligned with the entertainment and media business,” she says.

Meanwhile, she served on boards of beauty-related companies including Revlon and Johnson Publishing. She says it was there that she started looking at the unique needs of multicultural beauty. She soon found herself intent on identifying who exactly the multicultural consumer is, and where they've been underserved. She says the last bastion of segregation she identified in the beauty business was haircare: “While all these business model innovations had [thrived], none of that had reached the multicultural haircare world.”

Haircare entrepreneur

Based on her experience on boards like Revlon, when Ceci decided to enter the haircare business as an entrepreneur, she started by diving into market research of the multicultural consumer. She founded OurX with the mission of merging technology with the needs of the textured hair community. She says it was the research-driven approach that helped her stand out. She describes OurX as less of a product company and more of a Noom for textured hair. “It's a personalized system that takes an individual's data and creates a customized plan for them and shapes it through product and one-to-one coaching and a personalized content feed that stays sort of with you day in, day out,” she says.

Ceci’s long-term goal is to be able to open more access to investment for entrepreneurs who want to serve multicultural consumers. “I would actually love to challenge the beauty industry to fold those categories and move everybody into what is universally a general market so that there is this value exchange,” she explains. “And I think it's happened in all the other categories—this is sort of the last one, and I think [the industry] needs to see this category and this consumer differently.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of August 3rd, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

In this episode, Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein sits down with Dr. Wendy Borlabi, Director of Mental Performance and Health for the Chicago Bulls. Wendy discusses the personal philosophy and authenticity she draws on to support athletes, young women, and even herself to help optimize performance and become mentally tough. The pair also discuss Wendy’s commitment to bringing other women along in the sports psychology field, and how she strives to be a role model in success and failure for both her own kids.

Commitment to authenticity

Wendy followed her own authenticity to her current role with the Bulls. After earning her undergrad degree in psychology, she worked as a psychologist for several years in Oklahoma, helping support adults with depression and schizophrenia. Being an athlete herself (she had once aspired to play in the WNBA) and remembering a conference on sports psychology that she had attended earlier with a friend, she started thinking about moving into that area.

She soon started the master’s program in sports psychology at Georgia Southern, and describes a pivotal moment in her life: her advisor warned her that the sports psychology field was full of men who may not be welcoming to a woman of color. “He wanted to prepare me that this was not gonna be an easy thing,” she tells Sam. At first, she says, she was upset by his message, but she soon had a realization: “I needed to be me authentically. I couldn't change who I was in order to get a position.”

Since then, she says, being true to herself has served her well. “I just remember my first year so much,” she recalls to Sam. “I just got to see when I was myself, my goofy regular self, they gravitated to me. And when I tried to be somebody else, it didn't work again. I don’t know if I would've thought of that if he wouldn't have said that to me.”

Commitment to other women

In her role with the Bulls, Wendy works with players, coaches, trainers, and “anybody in basketball operations” to help them perform better mentally. “If you think about a strength and conditioning coach or a nutritionist or a physical therapist, they get you back in different pieces of your body to help you perform,” she describes. “And what I do is on the brain, to help you be able to tackle some of those things that can possibly prevent you from performing your best at your job.”

But, she says, there aren’t a lot of women in the sports psychology field and it can be a difficult space for women to maneuver in. She hopes to see a big increase in the number of women across the entire male-dominated sports industry: bringing other women along, who in turn inspire more women is a personal goal.

To that end, Wendy founded a nonprofit called Wisdom Knot, which is dedicated to educating disadvantaged youth about careers in sports other than being an athlete. The more women that girls see doing these jobs, the more girls will be inspired, she says. But she also notes it’s just as important that men in the field are welcoming to women and make active statements like “A woman could do this job.”

In addition to the nonprofit, Wendy also founded Borlabi Consulting, focused specifically on women in sports psychology. Recognizing that there aren’t a lot of avenues into the field of sports psychology, she wanted to spread the word and provide more opportunities for women.  She hires interns who get experience working with an NBA team or another institution, but also learn directly from Wendy about being a sports psychologist. The foundation also provides a platform for Wendy to do podcasts, presentations, and other outreach.

Wendy has a message for listeners working toward their own goals, which comes from a John Gordon Book called How to Be a Coffee Bean. “It talks about the fact that if you take hot water and you put an egg in it, that the egg becomes hard and you don't want to be a hard person to work with or deal with. If you put a carrot in the hot water, it becomes mushy and you don't want to be that person either. However, if you put a coffee bean in the hot water, what happens? They come together, they work together, they develop something magical: coffee. So I want you to be a coffee bean. I want you to come together with the things in your life and develop something magical. And that can be anything in your corner of the world.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July 28th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

As Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer at The Atlantic, Alice McKown is always on the lookout for new ways to work with clients and deliver the magazine’s brand. “What's unique about The Atlantic is that we are known for our influence on the cutting edge of conversation,” she says.

In this episode of Women on the Move, Alice sits down with host Sam Saperstein while at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The two discuss Alice’s two-plus decades in the magazine business, and how having a solid support system has helped her navigate change.

From coast to coast in the magazine world

At The Atlantic, Alice oversees all commercial revenue and partnerships related to the magazine, events, website, social media, mobile channels, and the branded content agency, as well as the brand’s new film and TV business. She tells Sam that it was her 20 years of magazine experience under the Conde Nast umbrella that prepared her for her current role.

“I got incredibly lucky,” she recalls. “I moved to San Francisco after college. It was the internet heyday. I had some friends who worked at Wired magazine, who had just gotten bought by Conde Nast, and I jumped into the magazine business. I jumped into a marketing role and really grew at Wired. It was at a time when there was tremendous growth with the internet exploding, and we were just an ideas machine and we launched some amazing things.”

She eventually made the move to New York, where she worked on other Conde Nast products such Vogue, GQ, and Vanity Fair. “And what was incredible is I was there for 20 years, but I had so many unique different opportunities and different bosses,” she tells Sam. “I jumped from marketing into digital operations into sales. And I think that was a big moment for me, was sort of moving from marketing into sales.”

She says she’d always thought of herself as a marketer, as someone creative, until a friend suggested she think about sales. “And I was like, I don't know clients, I don't know how to sell,” she recalls. “And they're like, you're creative, you've got big ideas, don't worry. That's what the clients want to hear. So I jumped into being an associate publisher and managed a very senior sales team and I was terrified. But then I realized as you started having these conversations around partnerships, it really was about solving people's problems, big ideas, what could you do together creatively?”

Leveraging teamwork and a support network

Alice says she realized early in her career that people work best when they work together and allow their skills to complement each other. Another key lesson? Letting her team members shine. The best salespeople, she says, are like “heat-seeking missiles.” When something works for them, they keep coming back to it. “And so that's how I found both my relationships with them, and [with] their clients,” she tells Sam. “It's like, Working with Alice is really working for me and my business. And so I didn't come at it as, I'm your boss. I came at it as, Let's figure out how you do you and I do me and one plus one is three.”

Coming to The Atlantic to head up a new team—many of whom had been working together for a long time—was a challenge that Alice says she was prepared for. “It's tricky and I think you want to kind of listen and hear, but you also want to remember what you know and what you know that works, right?” she says. “And so I think some of it is thinking about who are the people within the organization that I know will get on board with how I'm thinking, right? And really lean into those folks, have them help you kind of spread that change too.”

During her earlier career moves, Alice says she learned to make sure she had one or two people with her who knew her well. “Whether that was a boss or a colleague, but knowing that I could show up in a new place [and] I knew I had a person or two that knew me, knew what I was capable of,” she says.

As far as the future, Allice says she continues to be inspired by the work she does and is excited about managing and motivating a great team: “I am so excited about the year ahead and how we can work with our partners, how we can make The Atlantic brand stand out even more in new and surprising ways.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July 20th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

Sabrina Horn believes that we’re all the director and lead actor in our own movie—and therefore we control our destiny. “You have one life to live and it's yours,” she says. “You have to push every day. You have to fight, and when you get shot down, you have to get up the next day and try it again.”

In this episode, the longtime CEO, C-suite advisor, professor and bestselling author sits down with Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein to discuss this philosophy and her own career journey. Sabrina founded a PR company in the tech industry in 1991 when she was just 29—and she ran it for 24 years before selling it. At that point, she made a decision: “I decided that rather than doing public relations for companies and putting companies on the map, I wanted to switch to really helping individuals like CEOs and founders, entrepreneurs, students as well, people who run teams in corporations, individuals who want to become leaders and help give them the tools to get over certain challenges that they have,” she tells Sam.

Starting out as a 29-year-old female CEO in 1991 was a bold move, and Sabrina says one of the reasons for her success was the fearlessness that people have in their 20s. “I would say 98 percent of the executives I worked with were almost twice my age, and they were all male,” she recalls. “I felt like as long as I've done my homework and I'm really intelligent about the advice I'm giving them, there's no reason to be worried about my gender, and if they don't want to work with me because I'm a woman, then there's plenty of other fish in the sea to work with.”

PR as strategy

Sabrina says a common misperception about public relations work is that it’s all about the message and the hype. “It was never just about putting out press releases,” she clarifies. “It was about helping them think through what those strategies might be, what move are you making today in anticipation of this move you're going to make tomorrow and the day after tomorrow so that it's strategic, it's a plan. It can't just be tactical.”

In terms of helping companies grow strategically, Sabrina says being authentic and not being intimidated or backing down is important for leadership: “This is where standing true to what you believe, if you really have done your homework and you really have done your research and you know in your heart that the direction that they're going in is not going to help them, I would always say, Look, you can do that. You can do whatever you want. But I'm here. You ask me to come here to give you my advice. So if you go down this path, here's what can happen and if you go down this other path, here's what can happen here.”

Why “Fake it ‘til you make it” is the worst business advice

On the surface, she says, there’s nothing wrong with this common adage. “If you are doing cognitive behavioral therapy to practice certain behaviors that you wish you could exude, like more confidence, and you practice that and you visualize what that might look like or you wear a certain color to a meeting because it makes you feel more confident or as Amy Cuddy did over a decade now ago in a TED talk about power posing where you stretch your arms out, that was how fake it till you make it got started and it's okay because you're just helping yourself,” she says. “It’s self-help.”

The problem with the phrase, she says, is that it’s mutated over the years to become an excuse to lie and exaggerate the truth at the expense of others for personal good. “It was like an excuse for bad leadership,” she tells Sam. “But the problem is that the truth always comes out. The investor will do her due diligence, the customer will use the product and it won't work as prescribed. Then you expose yourself, you set yourself back, you embarrass yourself and your team. You ruin your credibility.”

Rather than go down that dangerous route, Sabrina encourages people to be authentic at every turn. “It’s about looking at yourself in the mirror every day and saying, this is what I stand for,” she says. “These are my values. This is what my company stands for. This is what we don't stand for, and committing every day to that. And surrounding yourself with people who will call you on that when you don't stay true to that.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July13th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

Diana Markaki spent 22 years in a successful corporate career before founding the Boardroom, an organization dedicated to preparing women who aspire to be board members. Here she sits down with Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she built a rigorous approach for helping executive women get on boards.

Diana grew up with what she calls a strong sense of justice and a desire to address the big problems of the world. She left her native Greece for New York as a 21-year-old and began a career as an international lawyer. It was when she received her first public board appointment, at 36, that the idea for the Boardroom started simmering. “I was the only woman on the board, by far the youngest,” she tells Sam. “And obviously the last thing I wanted was for my older male peers to challenge my credentials. I wanted to be the best board member anyone had ever met. So immediately, I started looking at the different things that I had to do in order to be a successful board member, then I built a solution for myself.”

As an MBA student at Harvard Business School at the time, she got the opportunity to put that solution into an actual business case, and she quickly realized that many women had the same problem she had. She decided to share the solution with the world, and the Boardroom was born.

Four pillars

Diana formally founded the Boardroom in Switzerland in 2021, as the world’s first private club for women executives who aspire to be board members. It’s an in-person focused organization, with a villa in the center of Zurich which members go to daily. “We developed what we call the holistic approach to board readiness, in the sense that we identified everything that an executive needs for the next step in our career, then we brought everything together in a one-stop shop approach,” she tells Sam.

The Boardroom has four organizing pillars. The first pillar is executive education for aspiring board members, for which they developed a proprietary five-module curriculum based on extensive market research. The second pillar is called the inner circle program, which is a combination of leadership development and peer learning. The third pillar is strategic networking, and the fourth is what Diana calls “the inspiration, the role models, and the representation in the sense that you cannot be what you cannot see.”

Disrupting the “boys’ club” culture in the workplace

Although the Boardroom is for women, Diana stresses that she was very intentional about including men, since they dominate the corporate board space and lead many board appointments. “You go through these informal networks that are dominated by men. Someone is a guy that knows a guy that played golf together, were in the Army together, and that's how it goes. That's why we bring the male supporters.”

The men recruited by the Boardroom are senior level executives who support senior female talent retention and board diversity. Diana notes that they don’t do coaching or mentoring “because we believe that our women are just as good and qualified as the men.”

Instead, the men who are supporters commit to bringing more women on their executive committees and boards. “When they have an opening and they want to affiliate with an amazing executive, then immediately they tap into the community of the boardroom and then we make nominations and referrals to make sure that we place the right people in the right positions,” she explains.

Future growth

Since its birth in Zurich at the beginning of the pandemic, the Boardroom has expanded to Athens, London, Paris, and Brussels, with plans for six more European sites next year. And while for now, the organization is focused on enrolling women who are already senior level executives, in the future Diana says they plan to expand their membership. “Once we create the critical mass that's needed at the board level, these women together with the support of the boardroom structure are going to build the pipeline and then we go to the next generation of leaders that will be able to join boards,” she tells Sam. “But it is time critical to create that critical mass, and that's why we focus only to very senior women executives that are determined to put in the time and effort to become a successful board member.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of July 6th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

Continuing her conversations with global leaders at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein sits down with Sara Kehaulani Goo, Editor in Chief of Axios. They discuss the organization’s newsletter approach to expand into more local markets—and how Sarah is committed to Axios reporters understanding their community and building trust with readers across the political spectrum.

With a background in reporting, Sara says she  moved her way across the country working at local newspapers, eventually landing at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post before moving to Axios a few years ago. “I loved being a reporter,” she tells Sam. “I loved breaking news, and over time I realized that there was an opportunity for me to shape the news in a bigger way at a time when our digital forces were changing how people consume news.”

News that is trusted, and locally responsive

Sara says that the premise at Axios is that while people increasingly don’t have time to read the news, they still want to be informed about the news. “So we came up with something called Smart Brevity,” she says. “It really distills the news to the most important essential elements of what you need to know, why it matters.” Axios uses a newsletter format to deliver brief summaries—written by experienced journalists—on major news topics. Readers can get what they need to know from the newsletter, and they can visit the website for deeper dives.

Earning readers’ trust is a key goal at Axios. “We know that people really need information, but we're operating at a time when people don't have a lot of trust,” Sara says. “They don't have trust in a lot of institutions, but in news it's become very polarized. So what we've tried to do is really be transparent with our audience and say [that] we are going to be clinical in our reporting and facts and delivery, and be not right or left. We don't have an opinion page. We want to attract an audience of all political stripes, of all backgrounds and interests, and give you the news that's essential for you to feel like you've got what you need.”

In addition to the trust gap, Sara says there is a growing gap in local news coverage—and filling that void is one of her top goals for the year. “There is an opportunity to rebuild trust,” she tells Sam. “So it's not just politics, but what's going on in my community, how do I understand the issues that I'm going to be voting on?”

To that end, Sara says Axios has expanded the newsletter approach and hired local journalists in 26 different cities to do targeted newsletters. “The goal there is to figure out both the business model and the journalism model to make sure that we become an essential trusted source of news,” she adds.

Representation matters

One key to earning readers’ trust is making sure that Axios staff are reflective of those readers. Sara says she’s committed to ensuring that women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and other historically underrepresented people have a spot at the table. “When I was first entering the news business, there weren't very many women at the top of the newspaper,” she recalls. “And why that matters is because that's who makes decision on what you cover.”

“I think it is making sure that we have journalists and editors who can cover the story with real authenticity and experience in relatability,” she says. “And the topics that they're covering matters. So immigration for example, or wage gap issues. And if they don't know, they have to be comfortable asking and getting out of their comfort zone. I mean, that's the essence of every reporter. So to me, I think about: it’s issues around race, it's issues around gender, LGBTQ, when you have issues come up around anti-trans hate or harassment going on, we have to have people on staff who can speak to that.”

Keeping with this year’s focus on the theme of ambition, Sara tells Sam that she feels like she’s always been ambitious, and for her, that’s gone hand-in-hand with a natural curiosity. “What's great about that is that it's really an unending curiosity,” she explains. “So how do you get the story? What's happening next? How do I get the interview? How can I tell the world first about what's happening, how I help them understand the story to then how do we run this newsroom in a different way? To me, those are all fun versions of the same curiosity. So I think I just love the challenge of it. It's not just a job. Journalism is essential to this country, to how we live to our lives, and I feel very responsible for that.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of June 29th , 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

Ash Beckham wants us all to have the hard conversations. The speaker, advocate, and author of Step Up: How to Live with Courage and Become an Everyday Leader sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss how she found her own voice as a speaker and a leader, and the qualities she believes everyone can tap into to grow their own leadership style.

Ash’s journey to advocacy started when her sister and friends began having children and Ash was thinking about how her LGBTQ identity might present challenges for them. “I knew I wanted to give those kids the tools and not bear the responsibility of having to advocate on my behalf,” she recalls. “So I did an Ignite talk which led to a TED talk and then all of a sudden the ball was rolling.” Her TED Talk, Coming out of the Closet, went viral. Her message was more than advice about coming out. She emphasized a universal truth that resonated with many: growth is possible when we commit to having those hard conversations.

She tells Sam that going on that journey of opening up via the TED Talk allowed her to have an understanding of finding the commonalities among people. “Empathy is so key in that our ability to connect is based on our ability to relate,” she says. “And I think we can get into the nitty gritty of the more difficult parts of the conversation if we start from a place of trust and really establish that from the beginning.”

Growing into the expert role

Once her talk went viral, Ash says her world started changing quickly. She experienced some imposter syndrome as media outlets started asking for her take on various issues. Coming to terms with the fact that she really could be an “expert” was a growth step. “Of course we are the expert in our own lives and I think a lot of us, especially when we step into leadership, we really downplay the impact of that,” she says.

“So I went through a phase where it was kind of like an aw shucks, who me?” she recalls. “And then all of a sudden there was this expectation of, okay, Where are you in the DEI space? What are your positions on intersectionality?” She soon learned to claim her expertise, and in doing that she says she made herself vulnerable, and, by extension, authentic—something she encourages everyone, and especially leaders, to do.

Continuing the conversation

In change-making, Ash emphasizes that winning someone over to your side is not the goal—the goal is to keep the conversation open so that people have room to grow and evolve. She uses a story to illustrate. A 15-year-old transgender teen was meeting with a state senator to talk about trans rights. The teen was nervous until a fellow advocate gave this advice: “You don't have to get him to change his mind, you just have to get him to question the certainty of his position slightly. That's all you have to do, and then all of a sudden you’re relationship building.”

As long as we’re continuing the conversation, she tells Sam, we’re making progress. And by being authentic and speaking our truth from a place of compassion or empathy, we’re leaving the door ajar for understanding and change. “Some things that people say, you can treat like they have broccoli in their teeth after a meeting,” she says. “You [can say], ‘I know what you really meant but this is kind of how it sounded. I thought you'd want to know. And if you want to talk about it, let me know.’” When you can broach difficult topics in a respectful way, you’re on the path to impacting real change.

Impacting leaders

In Ash’s book Step Up, she applies this concept to leadership: effective leaders, she says, need to have qualities such as empathy, courage, and grace. And they need to be flexible enough to be able to know when it’s time to employ which trait. “So to me it's kind of like a recipe or a tool belt,” she tells Sam. A good leader, she notes, needs to be able to quickly calculate when it’s time to lead with courage, or when it’s time to step back and lead with empathy.

“When we're stepping into that leadership role [we’re] creating a space where there is no fear of repercussion or judgment,” she says. “A place where people are not afraid. . . . You’re creating a space by being authentic and being vulnerable so that other people can do the same. And to me, that's the first step to leadership.”

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Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of June 15th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

From the World Economic Forum in Davos, this episode of Women on the Move Podcast features Anita Bhatia, Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Executive Director of UN Women. She shares the mission of UN Women with host Sam Saperstein, and they discuss the importance of public-private partnerships in the journey to gender equity. Anita also describes her personal commitment to educating women and how education influenced her own trajectory in life.

Small agency with a big mission

Founded just 11 years ago by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, UN Women is the newest agency in the UN system. Anita recalls sitting next to the Secretary-General at dinner one evening as he shared his first perception upon getting to the UN and realizing there were agencies dealing with children, hunger, trade - but nothing that was focused on solving one of the greatest problems in the world: gender inequality. “So he set up UN Women,” Anita tells Sam.

“We're a small agency, but I like to think that we punch above our weight, and my role is really a partnerships role,” Anita says. “It's a resource mobilization role, but it's also partnering both within the UN system and outside the UN system.” Anita says her focus is on making sure her team is growing UN Women's impact on solving for gender inequality by partnering with others “because we're too small and this problem is too big for us to do it alone.”

Anita says the goals of UN Women include women's economic empowerment, ending violence toward women, and increasing leadership representation. One critical factor is driving more finance toward the mission. “Public finance and private finance because without proper resourcing, we're never going to be able to change the state of the world,” she notes.

Anita says she learned about the importance of the public-private partnership approach during her time with the International Finance Corporation, the private sector branch of the World Bank Group. “Working in IFC, you understand something very fundamentally, which is that it's possible to do financially well while doing social good,” she says. “The other thing you understand when you work at the World Bank Group is the important role of the private sector in business in solving for development problems because governments just don't have enough money or bandwidth to do this.”

Personal commitment to educating women

But Anita says she brings more than her professional background to her role at UN Women. “I think the thing that gets me going is the idea of a girl getting educated,” she says. “It's because education has been so fundamental in my own life. I really do believe the research that education is the single biggest lever for development. When I think about a girl going to school, that inspires me, and I also do think about women who are victims of violence and about the need for the world to just do a hell of a lot more on that issue.”

Anita grew up in Kolkata, India, with a mother who she describes as a very progressive teacher who believed firmly in education. Anita was just 18 when her mother died, but before that, her mother had asked Anita’s father to make sure their daughters were educated and not married early as many young women in India were. “So my dad was a very strong feminist actually,” she tells Sam. “He kept his promise. He made sure the girls were educated.” After college, Anita told her father she wanted to go to the United States for graduate school. And while many Indian fathers kept their daughters near to help take care of them, he urged Anita to accept her scholarship to Yale.

Today, Anita calls on men to follow in the footsteps of her own feminist father. That’s because another key part of UN Women’s mission is male allyship. “We work with women and girls, but what's becoming even more important in our work is working with men and boys because this is a problem that is not a woman's problem, it's a whole of society, whole of government problem,” she says.

“I don't want men to be bystanders,” she adds. “Men need to call out bad male behaviors and toxic masculinity when they see it. And so in Davos, I've made a call to action to men and said, ‘You need to acknowledge that you guys actually still hold the power. You need to challenge negative masculinities and you need to share space. When you are on an all-male panel, it shouldn't be the women who are saying, Hey, we're not there. It should be the men saying, Where are the women?’”

Full transcript here .

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of June 15th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Elizabeth Lieba is on a mission to help Black women feel supported and heard. Here, the writer, college professor, and advocate for Black businesswomen joins Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to discuss her journey to understand the important historical context of race in America.

“Why are black women feeling this way?”

Elizabeth believes that the most important job for leaders is to develop their people, and she says really listening to Black women's needs is a critical part of that. She’s had a career as an educator and an advocate, and has recently released a book called I'm Not Yelling: A Black Woman's Guide to Navigating the Workplace, which provides strategies for savvy Black businesswomen navigating a predominantly white corporate America. She says one of her goals in writing the book was to empower Black women and to give them a sense of context about why they were feeling what they were feeling, and to validate those feelings.

“We've seen lately in the news that Black women are exiting corporate spaces in record numbers,” she tells Sam. “Black women are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, tired. There's a sense of a mental health crisis that has been happening. And I think it wasn't really brought to the surface until Covid 19, and a lot of Black women were obviously in the workplace and then working from home and having to juggle and balance all of those responsibilities. And I think there was a collective sense of What is happening? Why do I feel this way?”

Elizabeth says she’d already been vocal on LinkedIn about social justice and racial inequity, thinking and speaking about police brutality and racial profiling, so she felt it was the time to pivot into her identity as a Black woman and focus on issues like why all the Black women she knew had such a visceral reaction to seeing George Floyd murdered. Additionally, she said she heard over and over from Black women in every space that they did not feel like they belonged in the spaces that they were in.

“And that's literally why I started to write the book,” she says. “I wanted to advocate for Black women, and I knew that social justice and racial equity was important, but I felt like as a Black woman, I also had a responsibility to find out why I was feeling this way.”

Challenging the constructs

Another goal Elizabeth shares about writing her book was to emphasize to Black women that their authentic selves are already enough. “Because obviously if there's a problem, and Black women are exiting the workplace in record numbers, Black women are not waiting for these places to become more equitable,” she notes. “They're saying, you know what, I don't have time or space to wait for you to figure this out.”

She shares that across demographics, Black women have seen the biggest increase in leaving traditional employment and starting their own businesses—only to run into the challenge that very little venture capital funding is going to women or Black people. “They didn't really have the resources to start businesses, and they were even more stressed out because they're exiting these [traditional employment] spaces,” she says. “But then finding the same struggles with just trying to create a living outside of those spaces.”

In her book she provides the historical context for why Black women often feel like imposters in the workplace—or, even more commonly, feel that they are constantly code switching between their work and personal lives. “When you're going into a space and now you're second guessing yourself because somebody said you don't belong there, of course you're gonna have lack of confidence,” she says. “But you didn’t just hop off the bus and walk in. Someone had to invite you there. We have education, we have experience, someone has hired us, why are we being pathologized and why is someone saying, oh you have imposter syndrome.”

In the end, Elizabeth says, she won’t be happy until representation is equal for everyone. “When I fight for women's rights, when I fight for my rights as a Black woman, because we have intersectionality, everybody wins. We need to empower everyone. When Black women are empowered, everyone is empowered because our empathetic nature really creates that. And I want people to understand if you're sitting there, standing there, or in a space and you're not advocating for others, then that's a lack of empathy. That's apathy.”

Full transcript here 

The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of June 8, 2023  and they may not materialize.

In today’s special feature, Women on The Move is highlighting J.P. Morgan’s newest podcast ZoneIn featuring special guest Michelle Meyer, founder of the NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) Network. She shares about her experience as one of the first, full-time NIL administrators in the country, how she stayed true to her purpose, and how athlete's build relationships with brands.

Full transcript here 

At JPMorgan Chase’s eighth annual Women's Leadership Day, Byna Elliott,  the firm’s Global Head of Advancing Black Pathways, sits down with Alicia Boler Davis, CEO of Alto Pharmacy and JPMorgan Chase Board Director. They discuss Alicia's extraordinary career, from her engineering roots at GM to her pivotal decision to join Amazon, and eventually, lead Alto Pharmacy.

It's all about people

That’s a lesson that Alicia learned early in her career: “No matter what you're doing, no matter what you're leading, it's all about people.” She tells Byna the story of how she started as an engineer at GM, but after just a few years, she asked to work in an actual plant to learn more about “what it really means” to build cars. She says most of the leadership discouraged her from making that move, but in the end, she ended up in a plant where she led a team of 60. She recalls feeling both nervous and excited, and a bit overwhelmed at first—before she realized she had made exactly the right decision. “And so I think it started for me being curious and not being afraid to go into areas and do things that people may not think are easy.”

After nearly two decades and a number of promotions, Alicia’s next big move was to Amazon—a whole new industry, in a different part of the country. She says it was one of the hardest decisions she ever made. She says she loved her time at GM, had great mentors and colleagues, and advanced in her career—but she was ready for a new challenge. “I felt like even though I had an opportunity and there were more opportunities to come, there was a level of comfort being there that actually made me uncomfortable being that comfortable,” she tells Byna.

She made the move to Amazon just a year before the pandemic shut down businesses worldwide—and changed Amazon’s trajectory immeasurably. She says it was one of the best decisions she ever made. “Joining Amazon was really about joining a company that I thought was very innovative,” she says. “A very customer-obsessed company, a technology-based company. I thought I could have an impact.”

She did have an impact, taking on more and more responsibilities until by 2021 she was Senior Vice President for Global Customer Fulfillment. She recalls that she started getting recruiting calls for CEO positions but she barely had time to breathe. One of the calls was about a startup pharmaceutical company called Alto. At first Alicia wasn’t even intrigued, but, she says: “The more time I spent with the founders at Alto, the more I felt like this was the right thing for me to do. And it was a leap of faith, but I finally told myself: Alto is about challenging the status quo. That's who you've been. That's what you've always done. It's about fixing something that's broken, and it can have an impact on so many people's lives, and if it doesn't work out, you can always go run something big.”

On women and mentoring

Alicia tells Byna that she’s always had great mentors—and nearly 80 percent of them have been men. She says she’s very grateful for those invaluable relationships, but she now focuses on mentoring women—75 percent of the people she mentors are female. “And so I like to give examples and I like to be very vulnerable around, This is what happened to me, this is how I felt. I'm not saying this is what happened to you, but I'm saying that it's okay. Let me tell you how I work through it."

In the end, Alicia says, she likes to listen and learn. “I have a responsibility to help create opportunities for other people and also to encourage people to see beyond what they think is possible. For me, I think that's important, because sometimes, we think about what we can see, but there's so much opportunity if you can see beyond that. What's your wildest dream? What's the thing that you can just say this will never happen? Then that's the thing that you should be going for. And for me, that's how I think about it, and not to run away from those things, but to run towards them.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of December 21st, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

In this episode of Women on the Move, host Sam Saperstein sits down with Jill Koziol, co-founder of Motherly, a well-being destination. Jill co-founded Motherly in 2015 with the goal of empowering mothers to thrive.

“We felt like there were so many misconceptions about what it meant to be a modern mother back in 2015, and we knew that there was this tsunami of parents that were millennials that were about to become parents that were digitally native, super educated and very diverse, and we wanted to truly redefine what it meant to be motherly,” she tells Sam. “The definition is to be nurturing and caring and it really connoted this like martyrism approach to motherhood, and our lived experience was that motherhood gave us new superpowers and that we could be caring and ambitious, we could be strong and nurturing, and we wanted to really give a much more holistic approach to that.”

Drivers of change

As a co-founder, Jill’s approach was to look not at trends but at what she calls drivers of change, and to leverage a design thinking approach that got her out from behind her own identity as a mom. She says she and her co-founder identified three such drivers. The first is that the millennial generation that were having children in 2015 were the first generation in history to be digital natives when they become parents—and legacy brands were not speaking to them in a way that resonated with them. The second driver was that this generation is also the first one in which women are more educated than men. And third was the knowledge, based on demographic trends, that this was going to be the generation that shifted demographics in the United States: this generation was giving birth to the most diverse generation in history.

Jill says this approach was informed by her background as a strategy consultant, as well as her lived experiences as a mother, military spouse, and a daughter of an entrepreneur. She had young children when her husband was stationed abroad in the military, and soon after he left the military and started business school, she started her first company where she and a partner invented, patented, and brought to market a baby goods product called the Swingy.

By the time she started Motherly in 2015, Jill had a clear idea of the company culture she wanted: a workplace where women could thrive without having to make a choice between family and work. From the beginning, Motherly’s offices were 100 percent remote, cutting out lengthy commutes, and she encouraged her staff to have difficult conversations with their partners about sharing childcare and other duties.

Expanding to empower

Jill also discusses the results from Motherly’s latest Motherhood survey. The annual survey, now in its sixth year, is the largest statistically significant study of its kind of U.S. mothers. “The number one kind of key finding from this year’s 2023 state of motherhood survey was that the lack of and costs of childcare are continuing to create financial stress and are holding moms back from the workforce,” she tells Sam. “We saw that was the top reason cited why mothers are choosing to stay home with their children. We saw that 18 percent of mothers in our sample size this year chose to either leave the workforce or change jobs. And the number one reason that they did that was to stay home with their children, about 28 percent.” She says that bringing these women back into the workforce is an “economic imperative because, as we've discussed, today's mothers are the most educated cohort in the peer group.”

Looking forward, Jill says Motherly will be offering additional free resources. “This is something I'm really passionate and excited about,” she tells Sam. “I always knew that education was a really important social determinant of health, and when we launched Motherly, we knew that we were targeting this super educated demographic and that that was how we were going to grow with this new brand and this new perspective and voice. But 50 percent of today's children are born on WIC and Medicaid, and we are not going to achieve our mission of empowering mothers to thrive if we are only offering resources like our classes to the mothers that can afford that have disposable income to do it.”

Full transcript here 

As Global Head of Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs for JPMorgan Chase, Vivian Young says her mission is to drive opportunity and progress for Asian and Pacific Islander communities globally through advancement and economic inclusion. In this episode, she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about that mission and to describe her own immigration story and how the immigrant experience has changed since then.

Seeking fuller representation

Vivian’s team is one of the most recently established of the seven Centers of Excellence in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at JPMorgan Chase. Her priority, she says, is to bring a cultural lens to the broad API community. “Here in the United States, the Asian and Pacific Islander community is almost 24 million people that comprise over 30 different ethnicities and speak over a hundred different languages,” she tells Sam. “So I think it's really important for us to bring in that cultural dimension because we are not a monolith and honestly the term Asian American as a roll-up brings us together as a group. But what that does is it makes us invisible in that there's no representation for each of us.”

As a leader in a global organization, Vivian notes, making sure to attract and address the needs of employees, clients, and communities globally is a business imperative. She adds that a critically important step is addressing the model minority myth that all Asian Americans are doing well. “Because we are not as an aggregate,” she emphasizes, “When we roll up all of the information, our numbers look fantastic. We have the highest household income of any racial group. But when you take apart the numbers, what you see is that Asian households are larger than normal. So if you have a household of four with a hundred thousand dollars, you'll look at the Asian community and sometimes it's eight people or 10 people in a household. So when you start peeling those layers of the onions, they're not doing as well as we think on the surface. Part of it is really illuminating that not everybody is doing well. In fact, the Asian-American community has the largest income inequality of any racial group where the top 10% earns almost 11 times more than the bottom 10.”

A full 360 immigrant experience

Vivian believes that it’s critically important to understand immigrants’ origin stories of how and why they came to the United States—because coming as refugees, through chain migrations, or through education or employment sponsorships are all vastly different experiences. Her own story was one of chain migration: “My uncle came here first. He joined the Navy and was an engineer and worked on a nuclear submarine. And then he sponsored my father who was an accountant and he came over and got a job and then a year or two later, he was able to sponsor my mother and myself to come to the country.”

Growing up, she said her parents wanted her to assimilate—and she wanted to also. She shares a memory of asking her mom not to make egg rolls when guests came over. Of her parents’ generation of Asian immigrants, she says that many had opened service businesses to be able to support their children, and then invested their entire life savings into educating their children so that they could enter a profession such as lawyer, doctor, or engineer.

But she says she’s seen a complete turn-around with her own children’s generation. For one thing, they are embracing their cultural heritage and food. “What we are seeing now with this generation is that they're embracing entrepreneurship and they're rejecting the corporate structure and saying, I want to go in and take a risk and create my own table and have my own business,” she says. “So you're seeing this 360 of immigrants coming here, building a business, having their children not pursue the business, but then their children are now going into an entrepreneurial role.”

Diamond in the room

Today, Vivian advises others in the API community to embrace their differences. “Because if you are the only [Asian-American] in the room, it means that you are rare and you should embrace that difference,” she tells Sam. “Diamonds are rare. Think of yourself as the diamond in the room and own that. People don't invite you into spaces where you don't belong. So I think that is so critically important that when you are the only one in the room, that you represent yourself and your culture and have that pride because you are a diamond.”

Full transcript here 

When Victoria Garrick Browne began experiencing anxiety and depression as a Division 1 college volleyball player, she recorded a TED talk about her experiences. The recording instantly went viral, leading her to become a social media influencer, mental health advocate and podcast host. Here she sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about her journey.

The decision to speak up

It was during her sophomore year at USC that Victoria began struggling with the demands of being a high-level competitive athlete. “I was really struggling with my own mental health and just the intensity of the stressful environment that I was in competing at that level,” she tells Sam. “In going through that performance anxiety and a depressive episode, I kind of realized that if I'm feeling so alone, there's probably other athletes who are feeling alone.”

She also realized that she wasn’t hearing anyone else talk about the issue. Her solution was to talk honestly about it in a TED talk. “I just did not want someone else to kind of suffer in silence the way that I did,” she recalls. “So I gave that TED talk purely to come up on Google search and comfort someone else. It spiraled and it went viral in the athletic community.”

Hurdles and the strategies that helped

That TED talk catapulted Victoria to popularity, especially among athletes and coaches who started following her online and reaching out. In those early days, she says, her goal was for people to genuinely be able to validate themselves and know that it's okay to not be perfect or to experience failure or struggle. “I've literally never met a student athlete who said they got through four years of college athletics, no matter the division, no matter the sport, and said it was a breeze,” she says. “Everyone can relate to the struggle.”

Victoria discusses the challenges that she typically sees people face when confronting mental health issues. One of the biggest ones, she says, is not understanding the change in mental health as it happens. “These things happen gradually,” she says. “You don't wake up one day in the midst of your depression, you slowly drop down to that place.” A second hurdle, she says, is the stigma around being worthy of getting help.

As far as strategies and approaches that worked for her, Victoria says one of the main ones is therapy. “It's powerful to have an expert hear what you are going through and then kind of offer their advice and guidance.” If connecting with a therapist isn’t an option, she says talking to a trusted friend or journaling can also help people handle their complicated emotions.

Meditation is another strategy that Victoria says she finds helpful—and this doesn’t have to be as scary as it might sound, she adds. “It can be as simple as 10 minutes without your phone in the morning sitting with yourself, maybe you're thinking a lot, listen to your thoughts and then you'll recognize, oh my gosh, my thoughts always take me to work,” she explains. “My thoughts always take me to the situation. I'm gonna try to bring 'em back here. That 10 minutes to slow down your entire day and just be with yourself. I think that that's powerful and I do that in the mornings.”

The Hidden Opponent

Soon after her TED talk went viral, Victoria created the Hidden Opponent, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on creating a platform and a community for athletes to discuss topics like mental health. “We highlight student athletes and their stories,” she tells Sam. “We give them a voice. We're always publishing and posting articles that the athletes have written about what they've been through. I remember feeling like, Where do you talk about this? Where do you say it? How's it gonna be received? And so we've created that safe space where athletes who do want to be vocal can be, [and] we educate the members of our community.”

As far as ambition in her own life, Victoria says she’s trying to manage it in a good way—in a relentless pursuit of helping herself rather than being perfect. “I definitely consider myself ambitious, consider myself a go-getter,” she says. “However, I do think that that ambition has become a default state of who I am and the default state being constantly better, constantly improved, constantly do more. And of course it serves you well when you can become successful and you can build something, and that's great. However, it doesn't allow you to ever turn off, reap the benefits or take a break or pause. And it's funny because my whole message started as it's okay not to be okay, take a break.”

Full transcript here 

Are you seeing a difference in the types of benefits that companies are providing since the pandemic? And if so, what are employees taking advantage of these days?

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, is joined by Lilly Wyttenbach, the Head of Global Wellness at JPMorgan Chase, to discuss workplace wellness and how companies recognize a greater need to support their employees.

Full transcript here 

Denielle Finkelstein and Thyme Sullivan are on a mission to make high quality period products available in restroom stalls across America. In this episode, they sit down with host Sam Saperstein to talk about the company they co-founded, Unicorn.

The Triple Co

Denielle and Thyme call themselves the Triple Co to reflect their stats as cousins, co-founders, and co-CEOs. They both had successful careers in corporate America—Denielle spent 20-plus years in fashion with Ann Taylor, Coach, and Kate Spade, and Thyme worked with beverage and food giants Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Nestle for 27 years. But as Denielle explains, “I'd gotten to that amazing C-suite job, that job I'd always dreamed of—and I was completely unfulfilled. I was working in a toxic environment. I had sort of lost that love of learning and the passion and really where that purpose was.”

She made the decision to walk away from her corporate career, and before long she reached out to her cousin Thyme who was similarly feeling unsatisfied and ready for a transition. Thyme says her background as a “grocery geek” provided inspiration for the idea of producing high-quality, organic tampons and other period products. “Going up and down the aisles for years on end, I just saw as everything was changing to organic and to sustainable and non-GMO and gluten-free and transparency became so important,” she tells Sam. “Yet when you got to what is called the feminine care aisle, and saw the period products, it looked like you were shopping back in the seventies. There'd been little innovation, and nobody was talking about it.”

Once they started researching and learning facts—such as the stat that in the U.S., one in four girls has missed school or work because she didn't have access to period products—they were even more motivated to start a business in the category that “nobody else wanted to talk about.” It didn’t hurt, Denielle says, that they’re perfect complements for each other: “Thyme came with an amazing, amazing pedigree with sales and operations and supply chain, and that complemented mine and where I came from as this brand-building and this marketing background.”

The challengers become disruptors

While providing quality, organic period products was the motivator, it wasn’t long before Thyme and Denielle zeroed in on a mission to address period poverty. Thyme says that their mission was always to advance women in society, and they didn’t initially see themselves as disruptors. “A disruptor by definition is more like an Uber, your Netflix, your Airbnb, it's something that's never been done before,” she says. “When we started this company, we were much more of a challenger brand. We were challenging the category, challenging the transparency and the efficacy and better getting access to better products for women. But we've actually evolved into a disruptor and we're incredibly proud of that.”

Specifically, they wanted to disrupt the outdated period product machines in public restrooms. “A lot of places don't [offer period products] because the big metal machines are very expensive, they're difficult to install, they're difficult to service from the staff, they don't hold very much product,” she explains. “They certainly don't hold quality products. Nobody has coins, and often they're broken and empty. And we were thinking long and hard about that's a real problem, and the solution goes even deeper.”

They spent a year and a half developing a low-cost, low profile dispenser that goes in the stalls, right next to the toilet paper. Then came the fun of fundraising—or as Denielle says, the non-fun. (“We have a phrase that there's no fun in fundraising, and it is real.”) The two had what they call a summer of un-love during which they spoke to about a hundred VCs without success. Then they found Barbara Clark, who they say changed their trajectory overnight. She not only believed in their mission and offered funding, she provided expert advice in terms of how they should shift their pitches to other VCs.

Another huge break came last summer when JPMorgan Chase became [one] the first big organization to adopt their dispensers. It started when they found CEO Jamie Dimon’s ear during his annual summer bus tour. “So everybody's asking about Bitcoin and world economics, and we're like, we know you got daughters, we want to talk about period products,” Thyme says. “And he listened. We had a good enough elevator pitch and he understood as a father of daughters and granddaughters.”

Full transcript here 

Investing feels complicated and there's a lot of uncertainty around how to start and what to do. How do you know when it's the right time and the right amount to start investing?

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, is joined by the head of Women and Investing at JPMorgan Wealth Management, Iliana Taormina. During the episode, Iliana gives tips on how to get into investing and how in 30 years, the average woman could end up with a portfolio worth 25% more than the average man.

During the chat, Iliana also mused on how she wished she understood the benefits of investing earlier and consistently. “ A 25-year-old college graduate invests a hundred dollars a month in a tax-deferred account and earns 12% annual return when that person retires at age 65, their investment can be worth just over a million dollars. If that same person were to start investing a hundred dollars per month at age 35, instead, they could only have around 300,000 by the time they reach 65, those 10 years could cost them $700,000.

Full transcript here 

From the World Economic Forum in Davos, Francine Katsoudas, Executive Vice President and Chief People, Policy & Purpose Officer at Cisco, joins Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about her journey at Cisco, the idea of empowering managers in a hybrid workplace, and why Cisco includes mental health professionals in company meetings to support a culture of wellness.

Francine started working in Cisco’s contact center more than 25 years ago. Her first job was providing first-level technical support, despite not having much of a technical background. Francine credits the leader who hired her for believing in her potential to learn the skills needed for the role. Since then, she’s sought a variety of positions within the company, telling Sam that she believes there’s power in collecting experiences. “And so I would have one role and I would [ask myself] okay, what have I learned on this role and what do I still need to learn?” she says. “And I think that focus on learning really helped to navigate me through the company.”

She says she moved into HR about 15 years ago, which led to her current role of Chief People Officer. “I focus on people, policy, and purpose,” she tells Sam. “And what that means is that together with our team, we focus on how our people organization, how government affairs, how real estate, how building a digital agenda all come together in service of our company and our purpose, which is the power and inclusive future for all.”

Empowering managers

One focus of her job in the last few years has been hybrid work and work-life balance. At Cisco, she says, technology had enabled virtual work even before the pandemic—and so when the pandemic forced people out of offices, Cisco already had historical data showing that employees’ “promotion velocity” was the same whether they worked remotely or onsite.

“The approach that we have within the company is to really focus on the work and what is best as it relates to the team,” she says. “And so we've basically decentralized that decision. We ask leaders to make the best decision for their team. We also ask them to experiment.”

She notes that over time, the role of leaders has evolved. “I think it will continue to evolve, meaning that our leaders now I think have to be a bit more customized as it relates to how they approach every individual” she explains. “As we went through the pandemic, we asked our leaders to understand, how are your people doing? What do they have going on? Check in on them, right? I think we got rid of this belief that there's a one-size-fits-all approach to leadership.”

A culture of wellness

When it comes to helping women in particular navigate and succeed in their careers, Francine notes that Cisco relies on what they call their conscious culture. “Our conscious culture is this belief that every single employee owns the culture,” she notes. “We as a company have to focus on the environment, we have to focus on the experience and our principles. Part of how we do that is we have to be really overt in talking about what's not working. And I think when you do that, you build trust with your teams and they know that if there's something that you can do better, that you're willing to work it because you were willing to say it in front of the entire company.”

Once specific strategy that’s worked at Cisco is having a mental health practitioner attend every monthly meeting. “What will end up happening is we'll take questions about, hey, what's our strategy for security? Where are we going? Hey, there's this new program. Oh wait, we have a question for Dr. Zane. Dr. Zane, there's a question here about how do you handle anxiety?" Francine says. And when employees have actively received that message that it’s okay to ask about mental health issues, they feel empowered to embrace their mental health as a critical component of their work life.

Looking forward, Francine has three main goals on her 2023 agenda. The first priority is around hybrid work and ensuring that leaders are making the best decisions about how their teams can be at their best. Next is something the company calls resilient communities: the idea of how they show up in the communities in a way that builds lasting success. And her third item is focusing on people and taking the conversation around wellbeing and career growth to the next level.

Full transcript here 

It's important to me that I hire the best people and create a diverse and inclusive team. What are the most critical points in the recruitment and hiring process to consider?

Live from the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, Women on The Move Podcast host, Sam Saperstein, welcomes Daniel Chait, CEO of Greenhouse to discuss how the hiring process at an organization can drive positive change and big impact.

Full transcript here 

The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of April 6, 2023 and they may not materialize.

In this episode, host Sam Saperstein kicks off Women’s History Month by sitting down with Julia Boorstin, CNBC's senior media and technology reporter, and the author of When Women Lead, a book focused on leadership for which she interviewed 120 women from various sectors and backgrounds. Sam and Julia talk about the lessons she learned and the key commonalities her research uncovered in terms of the skills and strategies of successful leaders.

Digging into women’s leadership styles

Julia tells Sam that she was inspired to write her book after her 20-plus years as a business journalist. Her career spanned six years as a writer at Fortune Magazine and then 16 years as a business reporter with CNBC. Along the way she created and launched the CNBC Disruptor 50, an annual list that highlights private companies that are transforming the economy. “And in that time I've been really grateful to get to interview thousands and thousands of leaders, CEOs, founders, [and] executives,” she says. “And the vast majority of those people have been men. The vast majority of them have been white men.”

In the past five or 10 years, she says, she’s noticed more and more women entering the conversation, and more female founders in particular. “And it was interesting for me through my work doing the Disruptor 50 list to see women founders create companies that were tackling different types of problems than the male founders were,” she says. “And also to approach that problem solving and approach their businesses, managing their businesses, leading their businesses differently.”

What she learned once she dug in, she says, is that women's leadership styles are incredibly effective. And she found a wealth of research indicating that if men were to adopt their styles, they would be more effective too. “It started as a storytelling exercise, and it turned into a research project, and I really wanted to combine the stories with the research to illustrate a new vision for what success looks like, a new vision of what leadership looks like, and a new type of path that people should be thinking about to pursue their own leadership strengths,” she says.

What makes women leaders shine?

Julia notes that while each of the 120 individuals she interviewed for her book are unique, she did find common threads in the attributes of successful business people. One of the those is having a growth mindset, which she defines as having a combination of the humility to understand you don't know everything and the confidence to believe that you could grow and push yourself to do the things that you aren't currently capable of. A second commonality, she says, is having authenticity. “The women who had succeeded did so by not trying to fit into any sort of stereotype or archetype of what leaders are supposed to look or sound like, but by leading in ways that were really honest and true to themselves,” she says.

Julia also discusses a list of more specific skills and strategies that she says research has shown to be effective. And she notes that an important footnote to these findings is that they are not anything that are biological differences between men and women. “Almost everything I write about are things that are socialized, and therefore they are things that if men want to get better at, they can learn as well,” she notes.

Her list starts with empathy. “Empathy is really about the ability to see things from someone else's perspective, which can be incredibly strategic if you're negotiating a deal or if you're trying to motivate your employees or to figure out what's gonna be more successful working with a team,” she says.

Other items on her list include vulnerability, a “communal leadership style,” and a divergent approach to problem solving rather than a convergent approach. Men, she says, are more likely to have a convergent approach where they focus in on solving the problem as quickly and efficiently as possible, whereas women are more likely to have divergent approach, where they're more likely to ask about things that may appear to be tangential but really are about taking the time to understand the broader landscape.

Julia also responds to audience questions that dig deeper into her findings on the nuanced differences between men’s and women’s leadership styles, on ideas such as intersectionality, and on traits including extroversion and introversion. Overall, she says, what she learned in the course of writing the book made her optimistic. “I'm very optimistic about the power that women have to drive change not just in the industry but to help each other succeed,” she says.

Full transcript here 

I'm looking for my next opportunity and not sure how to get myself noticed in the application process. How do I give myself the best shot at my next job?

Live from the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, Women on The Move Podcast host, Sam Saperstein, welcomes Daniel Chait, CEO of Greenhouse to discuss how the application process has changed over time and how staying focused on jobs that excite you can give you a better chance at success.

Full transcript here 

As head of community and business development at Chase, Diedra Porché has a deep passion for understanding the needs of the people the bank is seeking to serve. In this week’s episode of Women on the Move, she joins host Sam Saperstein to discuss her role and how she empowers local communities and helps individuals build financial security and wealth.

Growing along with JPMorgan Chase

Diedra began her career with JPMorgan Chase nearly 30 years ago. She likes to tell people that she’s had about 10 jobs and worked in three different business lines. She started her career in an officer development program in Texas, moved on to Commercial Banking, worked with the Government Banking team, and then physically moved across the country to California and helped build out the bank in Los Angeles.

“It’s been a wonderful journey,” she says. “I’ve always enjoyed staying close to customers, and working with our field teams, and representing the bank in our communities. I had no idea how much the work would evolve into an opportunity that allows us to work hand with community stakeholders to effect impact for people beyond banking. At the time when I started in banking . . . things were pretty straightforward. You went to your local branch, you worked with your local team. Fast-forward to today, and there’s just a myriad of complexities that customers are dealing with.”

She says that one of the most important things she learned along the way is how to work together with all stakeholders. “That means each of us has a role to play in serving communities in the best way,” she tells Sam. “And it takes private sector, it takes our public sector, and it takes our not-for-profits and our local stakeholders to really be that three-legged stool to make communities really thrive.”

“We do this work together”

In her current role as head of community and business development in Consumer Banking, Diedra says she’s “delighted and privileged” to serve her team. “We are a collective team of leaders that have the opportunity to go into communities, build trust, to work to boost financial health so that we can put people on a path to building legacy wealth for their families,” she explains. Her team accomplishes that by providing information in the form of free financial health workshops and programming, as well as building hyper-local relationships with stakeholders.

For context: Chase opened its first Community Center branch in Harlem in 2019 as part of its $30 billion racial equity commitment to build stronger ties to the community and provide banking services and financial education in underserved areas. Since then, Chase has opened 15 additional Community Centers across the country, primarily in low-to-moderate income communities.. Each Community Center features  a team of local financial health experts focused on community engagement, mentorship and advice. Each Center also features a large multipurpose room which can be used to host free financial health workshops, community gathering or pop-up shops for small business customers.

When asked what she’s most proud of about the work her team does, Diedra has an easy answer: “First, let me just say I am delighted that in two and a half years, we really have become a part of the framework of the  franchise. I tell my team all the time, we’re knitted and weaved into a full tapestry of who we are as a firm.”

In terms of metrics, Diedra has plenty to be proud of too. One of the most important metrics she looks at is trust metrics—how communities and consumers feel about the bank’s brand. And while noting that JPMorgan Chase  already enjoys a very strong brand, she says that seeing those trust metrics in the communities where her team has invested in represents a meaningful shift – it’s the kind of change the bank is committed to building upon.

One of the keys to success, she says, has been welcoming non-customers into community center branches to get access to education and financial health workshops at no cost to them, and not requiring them to be a customer. “Additionally, we collaborate with local nonprofits that are already working with residents and [Chase] customers in these neighborhoods,” she notes. “So in partnership with them, we're able to create programming that our communities can access either at their nonprofit location or inside our branches.”

It's never too late to start…on your financial health journey

Diedra offers a simple idea for anyone wanting to improve their financial health. “The one tip that I would give is to create a plan. It's never too late to start and ensure that you have a plan. Start small. Any amount that you're putting away will make a difference, and to just stay focused on those habits and stay disciplined.”

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of December 14th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Full transcript here 

In this special feature from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein sits down with JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon and his Chief of Staff Judy Miller. They discuss the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion at JPMorgan Chase and the equal importance of all stakeholders to the firm, and Jamie shares tips on being more efficient every day.

Jamie talks about what he sees as the biggest global issues facing the world today. “There's only one thing taking place in 2023 that matters for the future of the world, and that's what's going on in Russia, Ukraine, related trade, China, security, the trade issues around national security, what it's going to do to energy prices, oil prices, poor nations,” he says.

Being together with the world’s economic leaders at Davos is critical, Jamie says, because the issue today is about how the Western world can stay united—in terms of security and energy in particular. And although many of the solutions will come from government policy, global corporate leaders like J.P. Morgan have an important role to play as well. “We have a really complex problem here, which is we all want to get CO2 down, but we also need reliable, secure energy and cheap,” he notes. People yelling at banks and corporations isn’t going to solve the problem, he adds. But people coming together for R&D and solution seeking can impact change.

DE&I at JPMorgan Chase

Diversity, Sam notes, is one area where JPMorgan Chase has been a change leader. Judy says that for Women on the Move, it’s both internal—helping women thrive and take on leadership roles within the firm—as well as external—helping women entrepreneurs with training and resources. Women on the Move, she points out, started internally as a group of senior women who really wanted to help support women throughout the firm.

“I think that the roles that women are in at the company is really outstanding,” Judy tells Sam. “When you look at Jamie's direct reports, about half of them are women and they are leading some of our biggest businesses. It wasn't that way when I first started. And I think the women in these positions, they both can act as role models and the younger women can look at them as role models and see there is a path for themselves.”

Jamie adds that all areas of diversity are equally important to the company, and he notes that the challenges faced by people of color can be more substantial than those faced by women. “We want [everybody] to feel treated with respect and decency where they can contribute to the company to the best of their ability.”

Finding efficiency amidst the bureaucracy

Another core value for the firm, Jamie says, is efficiency. In such an immense global firm, bureaucracy is inevitable. The challenge, he says, is to not let it stifle growth. People are going to get bogged down in the details—sometimes to an unhealthy degree. But the way to fix that, he says, is not to resent it. “It's to understand that it's like weeds in the garden,” he tells Sam. “It's always growing. Meetings are getting bigger. Meetings taking longer. People want to collaborate. I want you all to come here to collaborate, but I don't want you to over collaborate.”

One of Jamie’s strategies for ensuring momentum rather than getting bogged down by bureaucracy is his to-do lists. He says he consistently maintains both short-term and long-term lists. “People throughout the company know about Jamie's list,” Judy vouches. “So I can just send an email and say, ‘Okay, you're on the list, let's work to get off it.’ Jamie rewrites this follow-up list every Sunday and there's nothing worse than being transferred from one week's follow-up list to the next week..” Judy describes Jamie’s list as something that keeps the company moving: “It keeps that constant forward progress.”

Jamie describes himself as relentless. “Nothing gets by me [where] I don't say, ‘Cut that out. We don't need that. That's too long.’ Every meeting starts on time. It ends on time.” Jamie says he’s relentless about it is because bureaucracy leads to politics. And that leads to stasis. “That's why you can't take it lightly and why I don't.”

Full transcript here 

How do you shift your mindset from being a manager to being a leader?

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares how to take it to the next level and start thinking and acting as a true leader.

Full transcript here 

Kayla Castañeda turned a favorite childhood treat into a successful and fast-growing good-for-you beverage company. In this episode of Women on the Move, the CEO and co-founder of Agua Bonita sits down with host Sam Saperstein to talk about her family, company, thoughts on ambition, and advice for other founders.

Journey from California’s Central Valley

Kayla tells Sam that she grew up in a family of migrant farm workers in California’s Central Valley. Her grandfather would bring home fruit from the fields and make aguas frescas for the family. She also grew up with a dream of owning her own business—and although she didn’t realize it then, producing good-for-you versions of those refreshing fruit-based beverages would become her business plan.

First she cut her teeth in the food and beverage industry from the inside. Growing up in a small town made her crave something entirely different, so after high school she moved to New York City and started working in food and beverage, eventually moving into a sales and marketing position with Major League Baseball. She then took a role with Coca-Cola that bought her back to her roots in California.

It was during the pandemic, while working as a consultant for food and beverage companies, that she had the inspiration for Agua Bonita. “Oh, this is something that has been around in my family and in our culture forever,” she recalls thinking. “So why am I not doing something like this and why is this not commercially available?” Within a week she had fleshed out a business plan and embarked on a learning curve with venture capitalism. Agua Bonita’s product of a “modern” agua fresca—they use 80 percent less sugar than traditional recipes—was a hit. They first found a place on shelves in small California retailers and recently landed their first national retailer with Whole Foods Market.

Kayla attributes their success to their healthy approach as well as their commitment to corporate responsibility. Their sustainability efforts include a reliance on using imperfect fruit and recyclable aluminum containers, and they work with nonprofit partners like Justice for Migrant Women to help current migrant farm workers. But she says she believes their defining characteristic is their flavor profiles. “Right now our current offerings range from some more traditional ones like hibiscus and pineapple and sweet melon to some more fun and modern takes on these drinks like mango habanero and watermelon chili and some really cool new innovations coming soon. And then our packaging, we use a lot of fun packaging that's inspired by our culture and put it on shelf as a work of art. It's the Bonita part of Agua Bonita.”

Ambition and helping others

In keeping with this season’s theme of ambition, Kayla also talks with Sam about her perceptions of her own ambition. “I do consider myself ambitious,” she says. “I asked my mom, have I always been this ambitious? And her answer was yes. And there's been teachers along the way that have helped you with that. So I think I've just always been ambitious and that ambition really stems from my family. No one has ever capped my dreams or told me that I could not do something internally. . . . It gave me the mindset of if not me, it's gonna be someone else, so why not me?”

In terms of advice, what Kayla most wants to convey to others is that everything is going to be okay. “I think sometimes we can get really tunnel vision, and there's a lot of things that you're juggling when you're trying to get a company off the ground, and the wins are really high, but sometimes the losses can be really low,” she says. “And I think just having people around me to remind me that it's all gonna be okay, whether it works out or whether it doesn't, it's all gonna be okay, is sometimes just like that humbling thing that I need to hear to just be able to get on with my day.”

She adds that she tries to encourage others by making sure that they're feeling fulfilled in other areas of their life. “Because I don't think that you can pour from an empty cup,” she says. “And so that is how I encourage people to keep going with things is that there are other things that you find joy in than just this one thing. So don't let this one thing eclipse everything else.”

Ful transcript here 

As a manager, I want to make sure I'm creating an environment of belonging with a strong culture. What are the best ways you've seen this done?

Live from the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, Women on The Move Podcast host, Sam Saperstein, welcomes Daniel Chait, CEO of Greenhouse to discuss building workplace culture with intention.

Full transcript here 

In this episode, Women on the Move Host Sam Saperstein sits down with two leaders in the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) space. They discuss the experience women of color have at work and how, through storytelling, they illustrate this experience for others who don’t look like them. Deepa Purushothaman is the author of The First, the Few, the Only: How Women of Color Can Redefine Power in Corporate America, and the co-founder of nFormation, an exclusive community for high achieving women of color. Ryland McClendon is the Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion for Corporate & Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan. Both women had early career success and followed slightly circuitous paths toward their current roles where they focus on driving the conversation on DEI and optimizing the work experience for everyone.

Find a home in the DE&I space

Deepa attended Harvard University’s Kennedy School and the London School of Economics while planning for a career in policy and politics. She landed as a consultant at Deloitte, where she stayed for 21 years, leaving during the early stages of the pandemic to focus on women of color research and topics. She tells Sam that “not quite fitting in” has been a part of her experiences her whole life. Growing up as one of only a few families of color in her hometown, she later found herself the only woman of color in many professional spaces throughout her career, especially her decades of consulting in the tech and telecom sector.

Ryland, meanwhile, wanted to be a singer when she was young. She also wanted to move away from her hometown of Atlanta, so she went to Duke University where she majored in economics and public policy. Ryland started her career in corporate banking at a regional bank and, frustrated by a lack of opportunity, moved to J.P. Morgan about 12 years ago. She had an opportunity to explore the human resources space a few years into her career and then knew that supporting the firms talent was the right place for her. That ultimately led to her current role as head of diversity and inclusion.

Stories and storytelling

Both women agree that listening to stories and encouraging others in their own storytelling is critical to growth in the equity and diversity realm. “Unless you tell stories to really impress upon people what different experiences you can have—depending on your dimension of diversity, whether that's race, whether that's gender, whether that's having a disability—the storytelling is the most powerful tool we can use,” Ryland says.

In the process of founding and running nFormation, and writing The First, The Few, the Only, Deepa listened to the stories of hundreds of women of color. She said she often hears women say that they hadn’t realized how much they would be representing their race at work. They describe the pressure of feeling that everything they do—what they eat, how they speak, even what objects they keep in the workspace—is under a microscope because sometimes they are the only people of color their colleagues know.

“You take on a lot outside of the job you were hired to,” she says. “I think that's kind of the dialogue that we need to get to, and those are the stories we need to tell, and that's how I have the conversation.”

The role of ambition

The conversation also veers into the territory of ambition, a top theme for the Women on the Move podcast in 2023.

Deepa describes how her own definition of ambition changed over the course of her career. “I think it started probably when I was a teenager. I was highly ambitious. I would say more competitive. I think I'm more comfortable with that word than ambitious, because I think ambitious is a little bit more vaguely defined, but I was always competitive, and always really good at everything I did.” Then, after leaving her career in consulting, her perspective shifted. “It's less about ambition. That word doesn't even mean anything to me anymore. It's success. I have really stepped back and defined success really differently.”

Ryland also describes herself as ambitious and says she wants to change the negative perception that’s often attached to the idea of an ambitious woman. “Last year a senior person used that word to describe me in the minute as a compliment and I was taken aback by it, but I'm gonna say yes, I am ambitious,” she says. “I want to reclaim that word. I want to make it a positive word.”

Full transcript here

For entrepreneurs who are building a business to drive impact, what advice would you give them?

Live from Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, Women on the Move Podcast Host, Sam Saperstein, talks to Dr. Anino Emuwa about finding your tribe and building a business with impact.

Full transcript here 

Leyonna Barba and Monica Wheat are committed to advocating for diverse founders. Leyonna, managing director of Technology and Disruptive Commerce at JPMorgan Chase, and Monica Wheat, managing director of Techstars Detroit, have embraced diversity in funding throughout their careers. In this episode of the Women on the Move Podcast, they sit down with Host Sam Saperstein to talk about their passion for that cause, and how they encourage investors to get more proximate to a diverse group of founders.

Ecosystems and networks

Monica discusses how, after spending time working with start-ups and investing on her own internationally and in San Francisco, she ended up in Detroit and being drawn to Techstars’ mission. She initially tried to “copy and paste everything that was in San Francisco and bring it back to Detroit.” But she soon realized that didn’t work—there simply wasn’t the ecosystem in Detroit to replicate the Silicon Valley/San Francisco model. Founders didn’t have a network of other founders to rely on for encouragement or resources. “And that's where Techstars came in,” she recalls. “They not only came in and said, ‘here's a check and here's some support and some resources,’ but they kept coming back and they kept asking the questions like, ‘what do you need?’ And it gave us the courage to really think about Detroit and some of these other emerging markets shaping themselves versus trying to copy and paste what was in Silicon Valley.”

Leyonna agrees that an established ecosystem is critical for start-up success. “To be successful in venture and within the tech ecosystem, you have to have a strong network, which is why for many founders, diverse founders, female founders, they've traditionally been locked out of those markets, locked out of those rooms,” she says. She’s proud of the work her team does at JPMorgan Chase in terms of being intentional around ensuring that diverse and female founders and veteran-owned business founders all have a voice at the table.

“We have a lot of emerging diverse managers,” Leyonna says. “We've seen an increase in the number of those diverse focused funds over the last couple of years, making sure that they're in a room with potential opportunities for investment, bringing those networks together. I know that I sit in a very special place in intersection at JPMorgan Chase where the power of our network can be amplified if we use it to bring those parties together. And it's part of the reason that I love the work that we're doing with Techstars.”  

Making change

Leyonna and Monica agree that increasing the very small percentage of VC money that goes to diverse women—Sam currently notes that it stands at about 3 percent of all funding—will require funders to be deliberate in their attempts at inclusion. Monica says she doubts that any current funders are trying to purposefully divert money away from women- or black-owned businesses. “But you also have to be very intentional about the fact that you are including them. You have to be very intentional about the fact that you're making an environment that's not just for gamers and 18 to 22-year-olds, that it is for folks who are different ages and coming from different backgrounds,” she says. “The space of investing in women and investing in underrepresented founders is the biggest opportunity in investment to date because these are untapped markets that folks just really haven't had access to and the folks that are building in these spaces haven't had access to these markets.”

Leyonna agrees and emphasizes that it can’t just be diverse fund managers who fund diverse owners—it needs to be all investors. “Not all investments and all the people you're investing in should look exactly like you or only solve problems for certain types of people,” she says. That’s one reason, she notes, that it’s critical to have women and other diverse people on boards and investment committees. She describes it as following the money trail. “And I think the beauty of what Techstars is doing with this $80 million that is powered by JPMorgan Chase is they are using the fund structure to show and to amplify that investing in diversity is not charity,” she says. “It is real dollars, it is good returns. And hopefully by continuing to see that performance, it will create a fear of missing out from others.”

Full transcript here

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JPMorgan Chase and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of February 2, 2023 and they may not materialize.

What is the relationship between confidence and ambition? And if so, how does it contribute to success?"

Women on the Move Podcast Host, Sam Saperstein, welcomes Kat Zacharia, Head of Organizational Effectiveness at JPMorgan Chase & Co., to share her thoughts on what confidence means and how when coupled with ambition it can lead to success.

Full transcript here 

Jordann Windschauer believes everybody deserves to have quality food made from pure, nutrient-dense ingredients. Here, the CEO and Founder of Base Culture sits down with Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein to talk about her journey from making paleo-friendly baked goods in her apartment to running a 44,000 square foot facility producing items for national distribution.

Beginning with a gym challenge

Jordann was just out of college when she joined a CrossFit gym that was running a paleo challenge. Looking for ways to clean up her young adult lifestyle a bit, she signed up for the challenge. She recalls that she didn’t know one thing about paleo eating at the time, but she soon found that she was attracted to the simplicity of the ingredients—and she was a huge fan of the way it made her feel.

Soon she was experimenting in her kitchen, trying to bake the perfect paleo banana bread and brownie. Her motivation was that she wanted to treat herself to something that was good for her and not just okay-tasting, but delicious. “It took me six months, because it's extremely different baking with seeds and nuts as opposed to flour and yeast and sugar and all of these traditional baking elements,” she recalls. “I was just doing it for my selfish wants and desires. I never really had a business in mind at this stage.”

After those six months of experimenting and perfecting, her gym began its next biennial paleo challenge, and Jordann started bringing in her baked goods to share with friends. She still wasn’t thinking of a business, but the reaction from her gym friends helped her along that journey. They loved the baked goods and they really loved the idea that they didn’t have to bake them themselves—they could pay Jordann to bake extra for them. "I started a business on Facebook and would post online when I was going to make something and the people would place their orders and I would make everything at night and deliver it on the weekend,” she tells Sam.

After her small business took off, scaling up seemed only natural. She began by naming her brand Paleo Box but after less than a year she landed on Base Culture. “We are trying to lead this global revolution around nutrition culture, to honor that and do it so that we're creating the best for you baked goods, that are held to our mammoth standards,” she says. “And how we describe our mammoth standards are essentially a bar that you cannot rise above. It's the highest bar possible. And we did that by creating our own manufacturing plant. We built a 44,000-square-foot plant to bring these products to life. We weren't just adding a product to a category that already existed, but doing it a little bit differently.”

Ambition and embracing challenges

While Sam notes that ambition is not always perceived as an admirable quality in women, Jordann embraces the label. “I would say that sometimes I'm blissfully ambitious and keep away those dark voices that come up,” she says. “We are in a stage of the business where those scary voices come in saying, ‘What if this isn't going to work?’ Or, ‘What if I let everyone down and what if I lose everyone's money who's invested in this? And what if I fail?’”

Her advice for staying on track while also heeding your ambition is to stay true to your purpose. She notes that there is an “insane” amount of pressure on entrepreneurs to build an empire and do the impossible. Recognizing that so many decisions involve uncertainties and unknowns, Jordann says that knowing that you won’t always have the answers is critical. When you do need to make a decision, she says you should be able to say a full-bodied, unqualified yes.

“When I look back at some of the things where we took a misstep here or there, I really know in my gut that there was something telling me at that point that something's not right and I ignored it for one reason or another,” she says. “So when you're making a decision, have the full body yes. And if you have any inkling of doubt, lean into that and explore it and either that doubt will subside or it will get bigger, and then listen to it even if it's not the easy choice.”

Full transcript here 

How has the discussion on ambition and the perception of ambitious women evolved over time? Why is it important that Women on the Move at JPMorgan Chase’s mission is to fuel female ambition?

Women on the Move Podcast Host Sam Saperstein breaks down why it’s important for women to be ambitious and why JPMorgan Chase has made it their mission to fuel female ambition.

Full transcript here 

In Today’s Founder’s Feature of the Women on the Move podcast, we’re speaking with Erin Croom, co-founder of Small Bites Adventure Club. Sam and Erin talk about Erin's mission to revolutionize food education for children and instill a love for fruits and vegetables.

Erin shares her vision for the Small Bites Adventure Club, aiming to empower teachers across America to lead engaging food education programs. The goal is ambitious yet crucial: she envisions every child naming five vegetables and confidently making their own snacks before reaching first grade.

As Erin unfolds the story behind Small Bites Adventure Club, listeners gain insights into the program's hands-on approach. Teachers receive monthly kits containing everything needed to lead food education, from Super Power Kale Pesto to Summer Salsa. Erin also emphasizes the importance of partnerships and scaling nationally, highlighting recent expansions to California and North Carolina.

The conversation delves into the challenges of picky eaters, and Erin shares a transformative moment when a child, initially hesitant about trying zucchini, ended up describing it with enthusiasm—a testament to the power of curiosity and exposure.

Tune in to this episode for an insightful and uplifting conversation that explores how Small Bites Adventure Club is sowing the seeds for a healthier, more food-literate generation.

Disclaimer: The speakers’ opinions belong to them and may differ from opinions of JP Morgan Chase & Co and its affiliates. Views presented on this podcast are those of the speakers; they are as of December 7th, 2023 and they may not materialize.

Transcript here

Women on the Move host Sam Saperstein kicks off the podcast’s fourth year with a focus on the nuanced role that ambition plays in women’s lives. Here she sits down with Jamie Vinick, founder and president of the Women's Network, the largest collegiate women's networking organization in North America. With a mission to connect women to each other, to industry leaders, to resources and to mentorship, the Women’s Network grew from a pandemic-era launch at Syracuse University to a network including chapters on more than 120 college campuses in the United States and Canada with 45,000 members.

Filling a need on college campus

Jamie tells Sam that her inspiration for starting the Women’s Network actually grew from an uninspiring event. After arriving at Syracuse University for her freshman year, feeling like she was “behind” her peers in terms of career focus, Jamie threw herself into attending campus speaker events, looking for inspiration. “There was one event in particular that really changed my college experience and has impacted my life,” she says. “I left that event feeling very uninspired and I took that lack of inspiration to heart and thought a lot about it and launched the Women's Network as a club on campus eight months later.”

Jamie was dissatisfied with this particular event because of what she thought was a missed opportunity. “Here was this incredibly powerful accomplished woman who came in to speak about her career, and there really were no topics or conversations that centered around gender or in particular gender in the workplace,” she recalls. “And I felt like it was this tremendous missed opportunity to have nuanced, real, raw conversation on the challenges, the biases, the barriers that disproportionately often affect women more so than perhaps our male counterparts.”

She also says she recognized a lack of community around women’s ambition and being able to celebrate having career interests and meeting people in a non-competitive environment. “And it was a culmination of the lack of conversation, the lack of community, the lack of true mentorship regardless of what industry you were interested in pursuing a career in that culminated into this idea.” By her sophomore year, Jamie was going dorm to dorm, knocking on more than a thousand freshman dorms to hand out flyers about the brand-new Women’s Network. 

Expanding and building confidence

Throughout her time at Syracuse, Jamie remained committed to building the Women’s Network. In the fall of her senior year, she turned down a full-time job opportunity, realizing that she wanted to focus on growing the network. In February, she chose five “random” college locations to launch proof of concepts. “We launched, and hundreds of people were coming out to these meetings, and then the next month Covid hits and everything was moved online,” she says. “No one knew what Zoom was. My professors didn't quite know how to lead a virtual classroom, and so I just put my head down, decided I wanted to see where this could go, and I doubled down on the work and we just kept launching. So we went from one school to about five additional universities to 16 to 22 to almost a hundred, in a little under two and a half years.”

Celebratory of ambition

Jamie explains how the Women’s Network functions: “The chapters operate in the sense of hosting their own events,” she says. “And then we also have national events open to members in the entire network. We host experiences such as speaker events, alumni receptions, networking trips, financial literacy workshops. Then we also host more social events as well.” She says the goal is to ensure members have access to the right networks, the right resources, and the right community.

Today, Jamie says, she’s looking ahead to moving the Women’s Network beyond college campuses to reach women as they’re entering and advancing in the workplace. She notes that the mission really speaks to a broad range of women. “The concept of being very celebratory of ambition, which we talk all the time about in the Women's Network, has struck a deep nerve with a lot of people,” she says. “A lot of people initially join to either meet ambitious individuals or to explore their own career interests, and then they often stay because they want to develop leadership skills, build more confidence, access better mentorship or resources specific to their career or industry, and to have vulnerable conversation.”

Full transcript here 

As I continue to grow in my career, I've become more and more interested in joining a board of directors. Do you have advice on joining a non-profit board to build your skillset and round out your portfolio? If I'm thinking of being on a corporate board one day is being on a non-profit board a step stone to that?"

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, welcomes her colleague, Rebecca Thorton of the Director Advisory Services to give advice on how to join a board of directors

Full transcript here 

In this special episode from JPMorgan Chase's seventh Annual Leadership Day, Anu Aiyengar, JPMorgan Chase's global co-head of mergers and acquisitions, sits down with the highest-ranking female CEO ever in the Fortune 500, CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch. Karen discusses how her commitment to mental and physical health in her own life has carried over to the work she's doing at CVS Health.

Personal commitment to mental and physical health

Karen tells Anu that she had an early traumatic experience with healthcare when, at age 12, she lost her mother to suicide. She and her siblings were then raised by an aunt, who also died early—when Karen was still in her 20s. She says that her mother didn’t know how or where to get the mental health she needed, and years later, sitting in her aunt’s hospital room, Karen realized she didn’t know the questions to ask or how to get the help she needed either.

“And both of those experiences sort of have fueled my passion around healthcare and really being able to make a difference so that people are educated about healthcare, that people have access to healthcare, that people understand their options that are available to them in healthcare,” she says. “So that's really the passion I get up with every single day, from a very young age.”

Karen notes that it wasn’t just her passion that got her to where she is today: she’s had help from many, including relatives, a high-school teacher, and mentors and sponsors throughout her career. From her aunt she learned the importance of being decisive and making decisions based on whatever information was available. “That was an important lesson because as leaders, as people kind of managing people, people are always, always looking at you and watching whether or not you're making those decisions,” she says.

Another key lesson Karen learned early was about the importance of taking care of your own mental and physical health. Today, she says, she does that through early morning workouts as well as end-of-the-day Duolingo lessons. “I think it's important for all of us to make sure we're taking care of our own selves because if you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of others,” she notes.

Keeping the customer as the north star

Leading CVS Health through the unprecedented challenge of the pandemic allowed Karen to put her leadership and priorities to the test. The last several years have seen huge changes in both mental and physical healthcare. “Before the pandemic we had 10,000 virtual visits for Telepsychiatry,” she says. “Last year we had 10 million. And so that just gives you a sense for the change and the ease that people have had with using virtual care.”

To thrive in the midst of all that change, Karen says she had to lean into focusing on her employees first, and then, most significantly, the customers and their evolving healthcare needs. “And we set sort of guideposts that we were focused on health and safety. We were focusing on our colleagues’ safety, focusing on the importance of getting Americans vaccinated and then looking around the corner,” she recalls. “So we had to tactically make sure that operationally we could do all the things that we had to do, but at the same time, we had to set a sort of a north star because everything in the world was changing around us and consumers expectations in healthcare were changing dramatically.”

In the end, Karen oversaw the shift in CVS Health “from kind of a corner drug store to this broad national healthcare company.” Today the company is focused on being in the community—meeting people’s growing interest in accessing care online. How does she do it all? “I think it's all about setting your own goal, setting your expectations, defining who you are and what you want to be and getting comfortable in your own skin,” she tells Anu. “And for women, sometimes that's hard. We just have to keep working at it. And I always say, there's always going to be those little voices in your head saying, You can't do this or questioning it. And you've just got to push beyond those voices and say, Yes, I can.”

Full transcript here 

I'm a new people manager and want to ensure I'm building a strong culture and highly effective team. What advice do you have for managing and growing a team?

Women on The Move host, Sam Saperstein, shares how to take a step back and think differently about managing your expanding team.

Full Transcript here