Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on Markets, leadership, and vision and global business; the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
A few weeks ago, CNBC hosted a dinner here at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the 10th Annual Disruptor 50 list, the 50 private companies recognized each year for growing and innovating through a challenging and changing world, while, at the same time, inspiring change among their larger incumbent competitors. It's become an annual tradition and one of the marquee events for us to talk to the innovators who will be shaping events at the markets for years to come. And I don't mind saying that it also serves as a reminder to this Disruptor 50 of the opportunities to scale and capitalize their companies here at 11 Wall Street. It's no mystery that several of the formerly private Disruptor 50 companies are now publicly traded here on the exchange, companies you might recognize such as BOX, NYSE ticker symbol BOX, and Square, NYSE ticker symbol SQ among others.
And we've also seen other ways the D50 intersects with our listed companies. One of them recently featured on our podcast, User Testing, announced in June that more than 20% of firms on this year's Disruptor 50 list names like Canva, Chime, Discord, Maven Clinic, and Next Insurance, use its human insight platform to maximize customer experiences. Now, User Testing's CMO, Michelle Huff, had this to say about the DISRUPTOR 50 list. "It's part of the DNA of leading-edge companies, like those listed on the 2022 Disruptor 50 list, to ensure that great customer experience is at the heart of their business."
Now, the creator of CNBC's Disruptor 50 list, Julia Boorstin, who happens to be today's guest on Inside the ICE House, isn't just shining a light on upstart private companies. She's also helping to launch CNBC's Closing the Gap initiative to highlight the people and businesses that are helping to close gender gaps. And that's just the tip of the iceberg as it were. Julia's passions for storytelling and advocacy have combined in the publication of her new book out now from Avid Reader Press, When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn From Them. Julia's book recounts the triumphs and setbacks of a cohort of female entrepreneurs telling the story of the obstacles they've overcome on their journey to success. Our conversation today with CNBC's Julia Boorstin and her accomplished career as a writer and on-air reporter and the takeaways and inspiration in her new book, When Women Lead, it's all coming up right after this.
Speaker 3:
Connecting the opportunity is just part of the hustle.
Speaker 8:
Opportunity is using data to create a competitive advantage.
Speaker 17:
It's raising capital to help companies change the world.
Speaker 16:
It's making complicated financial concepts seem simple.
Speaker 17:
Opportunity is making the dream of home ownership a reality.
Speaker 16:
Writing new rules and redefining the game.
Speaker 17:
And driving the world forward to a greener energy future.
Speaker 16:
Opportunity is setting a goal.
Speaker 17:
And charting a course to get there.
Speaker 16:
Sometimes, the only thing standing between you and opportunity is someone who can make the connection.
Speaker 17:
At ICE, we connect people to opportunity.
Josh King:
Our guest today, Julia Boorstin, is Senior Media and Tech Reporter at CNBC. She's now the author of When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn From them, at bookstores now or wherever you buy your printed matter from Simon and Schuster's Avid Reader Press. Welcome, Julia, inside the ICE House.
Julia Boorstin:
It is an honor to be here. I always love being in the New York Stock Exchange Building. It's just fabulous.
Josh King:
It's great to have you at the NYC today. You just wrapped up a celebration of your book and a Q&A session in our historic boardroom at the New York Stock Exchange hosted by our president Lynn Martin. How'd the event go?
Julia Boorstin:
It was fantastic. There were so many amazing women in the room, and it's so important and powerful to see how women, like Lynn Martin, are changing the game and changing the patterns of what we understand great leadership to look and sound like.
Josh King:
You were also here in September, as I noted in the intro, I was here as well, for that Disruptor 50 reception. Let's go back in time. How did you first get the idea to start the D50, and how does it feel to be celebrating now the 10th annual list?
Julia Boorstin:
Well, it's very interesting because the Disruptor 50 has not only been one of my favorite projects at CNBC but also was really the inspiration for me to write this book, When Women Lead. So about 11 years ago, more than 11 years ago now, I was reporting on Facebook and the lead-up to Facebook's IPO, which as you remember, was a very big deal.
Josh King:
Up the street, as I recall.
Julia Boorstin:
Yes. I was always interested in private companies, in startups, in entrepreneurs, but CNBC, as you know, is very much focused on public companies and investing. But what I was seeing in covering the private companies, either the likes of YouTube, which was at the time very disruptive within Google, or looking at startups like Facebook. I realized in covering Facebook's IPO, which did not go so smoothly if you'll recall-
Josh King:
As I mentioned, it happened up the street.
Julia Boorstin:
... that I thought it was really important to figure out how to shed a light on these companies and their disruptive technologies years before they went public. And I know that CNBC has always been focused on these public markets, but there was this wave of innovation happening, technology disrupting all sorts of different industries, every type of company becoming a tech company. So what I wanted to do was to create a structure to talk about the startups within this broader focus on public companies at CNBC.
So that's why we talk about as being Disruptors. These are companies that are either going to be the public giants of tomorrow, or they're already challenging, forcing change, within today's behemoths. So this is a very seriously put together list. We use a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics. We have an advisory board. Many of the members of the advisory board were here at our Disruptor 50 dinner, and we gather over 1,000 nominations every year for this list of 50 companies. And the idea is to find the companies that should be on the radar of tomorrow as public investors. And it's been such a thrill to get to work on this list, and it's been fascinating to get to meet so many successful and innovative entrepreneurs.
Josh King:
To go from 1,000 companies to 50 names that you actually make public and put on your list, it has huge implications for those 50, and you've got to take that responsibility pretty seriously. We actually wait with bated breath to see what those 50 names are because those are names that we're going to want to be talking to pretty soon about what their next plans will be. So how do you manage the secrecy, confidentiality, impartiality of that process?
Julia Boorstin:
It's a very complex process, and we have all sorts of algorithms that I work on with my colleague David Spiegel, who helps run the process of creating the list with me. And we really rope in a lot of people from CNBC to work on this process together. And it's a months-long process. We start the nominations in January, the list comes out in May. But what's so interesting to me as a veteran journalist, veteran business journalist, is this idea that technology is disrupting every industry. So it's very important that this list not just include enterprise software startups, but really include a wide diversity of types of companies that are being disruptive because of their use of technology.
Josh King:
Julia sometimes when a great athlete gets in the cover of Sports Illustrated and their career doesn't quite deliver on the promise that people talk about, we invoke this idea of the SI curse. I look at the D50 class of 219 for example, and it includes The We Company, Peloton, Impossible Foods, Robinhood, all of which have encountered various degrees of challenge since those heady days back in 2019. Is there possibly a D50 curse or is creating a company just a long tough slog?
Julia Boorstin:
There's definitely not a D50 curse, and I stand by the decision to put all of those companies on the list, and in fact, Robinhood was number one. And I wrote a very long and thoughtful essay about why we decided to put Robinhood on the list, despite all the hoopla and questions about its impact on the markets. There have been companies that were on the list and then failed spectacularly. I think about a company years ago called Aereo. And this is a company that used antenna technology to effectively livestream content, perhaps going around some of the copyright issues when it comes to streaming and content. This company, Aereo, was put out of business by a lawsuit. I think it was very disruptive. If it had legally been able to keep on continue operating, it would've been a serious contender as a longtime Disruptor, but it was put out of business. Another really interesting example is 23andMe, a hugely disruptive company when it comes to giving consumers access to data about their genetics and their health.
Josh King:
Yeah, same 2019 class.
Julia Boorstin:
Yeah, but you know what? It was briefly off of the list. It was named to the Disruptor 50, but there was a moment when the FDA was really challenging its existence. And there was this question of whether or not it was going to be able to keep operating. And so it got kicked off the list when it looked like its future was not so bright. And then when they said figured out a solution to navigate those FDA limitations, then we thought, "This is a company that deserves to be back on the list."
I mean, it's so interesting as you look back at 2019 and how much the world has changed since then. Peloton, if it had continued along, its more slower growth path than it was on in 2019. It might still be on the list, but if you look at its massive growth and pull forward in those early years of the pandemic, the pandemic has changed so much and the world looks so different than it was in 2019. You have to wonder how much that has an impact on which companies remain Disruptors.
Josh King:
CNBC has been part of the fabric of the New York Stock Exchange for a long time. What are your first memories of getting assigned here?
Julia Boorstin:
It was so exciting to get to come and do hits, do segments from the New York Stock Exchange. I always love coming and fill in anchor from the New York Stock Exchange. I'm based in Los Angeles, but before the pandemic I used to come about a week, a quarter, and come fill an anchor and fill in on shows such as Tech Check, and before that, it was called Squawk Alley. And it's so exciting to be here on the floor. And even though so much is digitized now, and the floor isn't as crowded as it used to be, you feel the energy, and it's amazing to be here the day of an IPO to watch who's ringing the bell, opening bell, closing bell. So I always love an opportunity to be here on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and I miss it. I'm glad that the pandemic is over so I'm not just broadcasting from home anymore. I can have more frequent trips here to New York.
Josh King:
Well, you mentioned your home base in Los Angeles and a lot of people are going to recognize you as CNBC's Media and tech reporter. But before we get more into your work at CNBC, let's start with where it all began. What was it like growing up in LA, the epicenter of media and entertainment innovation where you're currently based?
Julia Boorstin:
Yeah, it's so funny because the entertainment industry has transformed so dramatically since I was growing up in Los Angeles. Back then, it was about movies, theatrical movies, maybe documentaries, old-fashioned television. That was about it. When I moved to the East coast and went to college at Princeton and then moved to New York to work at Fortune Magazine, I never imagined that I would go back to Los Angeles to live, let alone to report on an industry that would be undergoing so much transformation.
So I joined CNBC in 2006 first as a general assignment reporter. And then they asked me, "Would you rather cover media in Los Angeles or retail in New York?" And I wasn't dying to move back to Los Angeles, but I saw that the retail industry was relatively stayed. Yes, there was e-commerce, but the media industry was in this moment of total transformation and there was the rise of YouTube and Netflix. There was the rise of social media and all of these new platforms that were merging and succeeding because of these ad-based models. And I thought it would be so much more exciting to move back home to an industry that looked almost nothing like it did when I was growing up in Los Angeles and to cover this moment of transition.
And covering the media industry led me to digital media. Companies like YouTube led me to social media. I mentioned the nascent years for the likes of Facebook and Twitter. And then from there, that led me to the Disruptor 50 and covering more technology. So it's been an amazing journey. And even though I've been at CNBC for over 16 years, I feel like every year the job, the beat, the companies are so different. And I really love the Disruptor 50 because it enables me to have that lens of the tech trends to better understand what's going on.
Josh King:
Drilling into that media story a little bit as it's unfolding as we speak, you look at those in the middle of it right now, Bob Iger, Reed Hastings, David Zaslav, Bob Bakish, and to a lesser extent Apple led by Tim Cook, Amazon led by Andy Jassy.
Now, Julia, Sherry Lansing, and Amy Pascal had their big moments but entertainment, to think about how things really haven't changed that much, they were dominated by men then, and they're dominated by men now. If they were somewhat more led by women, would the entertainment industry be different?
Julia Boorstin:
It's interesting because we're seeing women run certain divisions of companies or leave their mark. So for instance, in my book, I write about Sarah Harden, who's the CEO of Hello Sunshine and Reese Witherspoon who co-founded it with her, and the impact they're having on really creating authentically-authored series and movies that are for women by women. And they sold their company in $1 billion deal to Candle Media, which is backed by Blackstone. Or Lena Waithe, who has directed and created a number of series and films. And then you look at women like Donna Langley who runs Universal Pictures. So that's CNBC's sister company under the parent company of NBC Universal, and she's had massive success. So there are women who are succeeding and running their businesses. We are not seeing women run these big publicly-traded media companies just yet.
Josh King:
You mentioned your move from LA to Princeton. You studied history. You were also the editor of the Daily Princetonian. At about the time you headed there, I was working for another Princetonian, Mike McCurry, then the White House Press Secretary. How did you decide that journalism was going to be your path?
Julia Boorstin:
I didn't. It happened to me. I always did journalism. I was an editor on the newspaper. I did the newspaper in high school. It was always something that I did, and I always loved the community of a bunch of kids sitting around writing op-eds or editing articles, figuring out what to put on the front page. And that was really fun for me, but I didn't think I was going to do journalism professionally. I did take an amazing writing class from the author, John McPhee, who I love.
Josh King:
Great New Yorker writer.
Julia Boorstin:
Amazing New Yorker writer. It was one of the most amazing classes I ever took. And so I definitely cared about writing, but I didn't think that journalism was necessarily going to be my livelihood. I actually got into a graduate school program in international relations at London School of Economics, and I was going to go, but I decided to defer for one year to go work in New York with a bunch of my friends who were moving to New York City after college. And I thought it was going to be a year. The best job offer I got of the 20 publications I applied to happened to be Fortune Magazine. And I fell in love with it. I was not looking for a career in business journalism, and I just got really lucky. I had an amazing mentor and so many older editors and journalists who really took me under their wing and taught me how to read SEC documents, what to look for in analyst notes, and how to create stories out of numbers and businesses.
Josh King:
So let's talk about Fortune for a second; founded by Henry R Luce in 1929, now edited by Alyson Shontell, its first female editor-in-chief. I remember growing up reading Fortune in its inch-thick days and admiring the words, art, and ads that lived on its pages. What was it like working as a writer at Fortune in your first gig out of college?
Julia Boorstin:
Well, I was definitely the youngest person there. I was 21 years old, fresh out of Princeton, the youngest reporter. And I definitely noticed that the halls of power were dominated by men. There were some very influential senior women like Carol Lummus, who is famous for writing the Berkshire Hathaway annual reports. And she was a legend. And I remember she taught me how to read SEC documents. I was totally intimidated by her and will never forget standing with her in this desk outside of our offices. And she had a highlighter and she showed me what to look for.
So I was very lucky to have amazing mentorship, but it was also a rude awakening to see how all the most powerful businesses were run by men. Yes, there were a couple of female CEOs here and there, but the senior editors of the magazine were all men, while the people at my age were very gender balanced. The young reporters and writers were very gender balanced. The older you got, the more it was male-dominated. And then if you just looked at the people on the covers of our magazine, and the CEOs who would come in for big interviews, they were almost all men, almost all white men. So it was really interesting to see that world of business and power very much up close and to try to figure out how to be taken seriously as a young reporter asking some tough questions to companies who in 2001 say, were not doing very well.
Josh King:
Carol Lummus really was one of the first journalists to see what was going on in Intercontinental Exchange ICE, founded by Jeff Sprecher. She wrote that big profile of him called the Iceman Cometh that really put Jeff on the map. You talk about John McPhee; you can put Carol Lummus in a pantheon that springs from John. Why haven't there been more Carol Lummuses?
Julia Boorstin:
Well, it is very exciting to see that Fortune magazine now has a female editor-in-chief, Alyson Shontell, and is just great to see this next generation of younger journalists. And I think we are seeing more of them. So I think that there is this new generation. And whether it is running startups or running magazines, I think the fact that Alyson Shontell was put into this position is a testament to the potential to have those younger voices at the helm.
Josh King:
Now, I sat in on part of your fireside chat with Lynn Martin just now you referenced the story that's in the book about the tennis experiment that you did while a staffer at Fortune Magazine. And I'll be honest with you, a good friend of mine is Sean Tulley, another Princetonian who plays very avid tennis, and he must be your example of how the guys get the big stories because they're playing tennis.
Julia Boorstin:
Well, should tell the story. So the story was that I was a young reporter at Fortune Magazine. I was always told to keep my head down. Do the stories that no one else wants. Do the boring investing stories, and don't be too ambitious; just make sure to get the work done. And one of my male colleagues, one of my dearest friends who had an office right next door to me, he would go play tennis with our bosses. And I do not play tennis. I'm terrible at tennis. But he was great at tennis, and they would play tennis and then have drinks.
And he told me one morning, the next morning he said, "I got this assignment to go to Mongolia, and they're going to send me to Mongolia to cover the Mongolian gold rush." He knew I was going to be so frustrated that I never would've been given such an opportunity. I was writing the boring stories that no one else wanted, and he was going to be jetting off to Mongolia. But he had that access because I never would've felt comfortable having bourbon at 9:45 at night with our bosses. So it was just a different time, I hope. And yes, I don't think he was playing tennis with Sean Tulley, but he was another amazing Fortune writer and tennis player.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about another time a year into your reporting, you're asked to appear live on CNN to discuss a news story. How did that opportunity come about, and how did your career at CNBC evolved from that?
Julia Boorstin:
Well, so at the time Fortune Magazine and CNN were owned by the same parent company, which was Time Warner, a now-defunct media giant. So it was pretty common to have people go from the magazine and talk about their stories on television. So actually, one of my mentors, an amazing former editor-in-chief of Fortune and also of Yahoo Finance, Andy Serwer said, "Of course, you should go do this." And I said, "What do you mean? I'm 22 years old. I've never been on TV before. This is crazy. Why should I go on TV?" And he said, "No, just do it. Don't be afraid, and just do it." And that was great advice.
And so I went on CNN to talk about my story. And I thought it was so funny to be on live television being so young and inexperienced that I was relaxed and had a big goofy smile on my face. And so they kept on asking me back. So I became a contributor to CNN Headline News. So the last five of my six years at Fortune, I was appearing regularly on CNN Headline News. And from there, I was offered a full-time job at CNBC. Again, I didn't realize I was going to fall in love with it. I thought maybe I'd go do television full-time for a year. And I've been there for 16 and 1/2 years.
Josh King:
Another quick digression, we remember that moment in 2000 when AOL and Time Warner tried their merger, Jerry Levin, Nick Nicholas, and there's such great hope for what could be created with the synergies of all these great journals and brands. CNN and Fortune started doing a lot of work together. I remember there was the CNN Money, and there was so much more business news reporting on CNN. If you think back about the trajectory of where CNN is today, had they stayed the course and done more business news, do you think they'd be a different business today?
Julia Boorstin:
Oh, who knows? Well, that was multiple mergers ago for Warner Media. I mean, if you look at Warner Media now, that was in the AOL Time Warner days. Then there came the AT&T days. And now we're in the Discovery Warner Brothers Day. So it's been quite an evolution over the past 20 years. Who knows what would've happened?
Josh King:
So you're at CNBC now. You've helped to launch the Closing the Gap initiative. What was your role in launching it, and how has it informed your work since including the creation of When Women Lead?
Julia Boorstin:
What was so interesting is I cover media and tech, and in 2017 with the rise of the Me Too and Times Up movement, and I was reporting on the departure of many of the CEOs who I covered, whether it was Les Moonves or Travis Kalanick who I had interviewed before his departure, and CEOs who had done effectively, I'm going to summarize it, just say bad things and left their jobs as a result of it. But what I wanted to focus on, and the reason I created Closing the Gap with some of my colleagues, is on solutions. There were gender gaps, and gender gaps were both the result of and cause of some of that bad behavior that resulted in the departure of many male executives.
But what I wanted to do was not just talk about what men were doing wrong, but ways in which to make companies healthier. And so the idea of Closing the Gap was to tell the stories of people and companies that were working to close gender and diversity gaps, not just as an inspiration, but also to offer practical tools. So for instance, we did stories on how Salesforce and PayPal were investing to close their gender gaps, not because it was a nice thing to do to have pay equity, but because it was better for their business. So we did a deep dive into how PayPal was investing to close promotion gaps, realizing that promotion gaps are a bigger problem than pay gaps and the source of underlying pay gaps. And that was a great opportunity to really dig deep and lay out a framework that others could follow.
So interestingly, you mentioned my book. The book was really inspired both by Closing the Gap and also by Disruptor 50. And here's why: in doing the Disruptor 50, I've gotten to interview so many fascinating entrepreneurs, and notably, over the past five years, you've started to see more and more women in the mix. And those women are really not just exceptions to the rule in that the vast majority of these CEOs are men, but also seem to be doing things differently, solving different kinds of problems. Female founders are far more likely to be launching purpose-driven companies. But also, I found them much more likely to be creating companies out of necessity and also doing of this interesting balance of long-term and short-term decision-making and strategic planning. So I was really impressed by these women, and I would leave these interviews so inspired. And then on the other hand, because of all my work at Closing the Gap, I was seeing this data about how little access to capital female founders get.
So there all these statistics about leadership in the Fortune 500 and about 8.5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. That's an all-time high. But when it comes to venture capital, the numbers and the gender gap is much worse. So for instance, over the past decade, an average of about 3% of all venture capital dollars have gone to female founders. That number actually declined to 2% in 2021. A greater percentage goes to co-ed founding teams, but male-only founding teams drew 82% of all venture capital dollars in 2021. So on one hand, I was super inspired by these women I was meeting, and I wanted to tell their stories. And on the other hand, I saw how incredibly rare they are and how much courage and determination and ingenuity they'd had to have to get to where they were. So I wanted to tell their amazing stories. And the more I dug into the stories, the more I wanted to understand the data and the research about how they'd managed to defy the odds.
Josh King:
You've described your approach to your book as show don't tell. What would you say makes your book unique among other books about women leaders? There are a few of them on the shelves, as we know. For one thing, as I looked through it and read it, there are two indexes of concepts and skills to go along with the usual index of names, not the usual bifurcation I see as a reader.
Julia Boorstin:
I think there's a lot of amazing books out there that are incredibly inspiring and helpful for women to navigate the workplace. I mean, obviously, there's the iconic Lean In, which is drawn criticism, but it certainly has played a role. But there are other books like Confidence Code, which is an amazing book to help women have more confidence. But what I noticed is that there weren't a lot of books that were showing and not telling. There are a lot of books that tell women, help women, but there aren't as many stories of female success in the canon, if you will.
So I think about Jim Collins Good To Grade, which is an iconic business book. Those stories are mostly about male leaders and about male types of leadership. What I wanted to do was introduce a new variety of leadership stories and archetypes and to try to break free from that traditional male archetype of top-down leadership and show just how broad the ranges of what diversity and leadership can look like. So the idea was to do something not so different from what Jim Collins does, but to show a new type of leadership with women at the helm and to showcase these remarkable stories by focusing on the women who defied the highest odds. And in showing, not telling, I hope to help change the conversation.
Josh King:
So you're sitting behind that computer as you're banging through the book Julia. You organize it thematically three major sections; how and why women build strong companies, fixing problems, creating new patterns. Why did you organize it that way?
Julia Boorstin:
I did about 120 interviews, and I was trying to figure out how to organize all these people into powerful stories that would help illuminate ideas and inspire the reader. And I have to say, I didn't organize it this way originally, but I found these common themes in the female leaders. And some of them were shared traits around empathy or vulnerability or communal leadership style or inspiring teams. And to be honest, I organized all these themes from the different women into these giant poster boards.
And with the organization of these ideas, I start to see it fall into this pattern: why the companies are formed, how women solve problems, and why I'm optimistic that we'll see a new generation of change and a female leadership, and hopefully, having men feel like they can take a page from women leaders as well. Because that's what's so interesting to me is just as we need to break free from that traditional archetype of GE leadership that was so dominant when I entered the business world in 2000, I hope men can understand that they will be successful if they lead with some of the skills and strategies that women have always embraced.
Josh King:
And we're going to get into a lot more of that after the break. But before we head out for our midway stop, Julia, in a recent article you wrote for Closing the Gap, you discussed what it was like actually to write the book during COVID and to hear firsthand from the executives you interviewed and how they were keeping their businesses afloat during such a challenging moment. And to quote you, you said, "I felt like I was watching a masterclass in leadership across sectors." What did you learn from these leaders during the pandemic, and what lessons learned from navigating COVID-19 are important to carry into this post-pandemic world?
Julia Boorstin:
Well, I think there's no doubt that the pandemic posed the greatest challenge to our economy and to business leaders that we have seen since World War II. I mean, just phenomenal uncertainty, lack of clarity around anything, the ground literally moving underneath people's feet. Or I guess, not literally. The ground metaphorically moving underneath people's feet.
So I started this project before the pandemic and once the pandemic hit I remember thinking, "Wow, we'll see which of these companies survive. We'll see how people navigate this." Who knows what the next couple of months were going to hold? It was a masterclass, and it was really interesting to watch this adaptability quotient that women are more likely to have; how women responded in times of crisis, how women turned to data to try to use that data to see around corners. And I was relieved to see that none of the companies that I start off on my giant poster boards tracking and in my Excel spreadsheets, none of them went out of business because plenty of companies did go out of business during the pandemic. It was a fascinating journey to watch these women try to transform their businesses from things that relied on in-person interactions.
I think about companies like Clear, which was a biometrics company focused entirely on travel when the pandemic hit, and how the CEO, Caryn Seidman-Becker, had to adapt and figure out how to make her technology relevant for getting into office buildings or getting into arenas. So it was really amazing to watch these adaptability skills in motion, the need for empathy to relate to what consumers and employees were going through. And it was really just a fascinating and intense time. I also have to say from a very practical standpoint, I benefited from access to CEOs who had nowhere to be, no travel, nowhere else to go. So I could Zoom with executives at any time of day or night. And it really, I think, gave me far more access and access to executives and CEOs at a time when they were incredibly reflective because I think we were all reflective during the pandemic.
Josh King:
A fascinating and intense time. As Julia says, many women leaders have had to be far more scrappy, flexible, thick-skinned, and innovative. And the companies they've built have taken on the same characteristics. After the break. Julia Boorstin, author of When Women Lead, What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn From Them, and I are going to dive deeper into Julia's book and learn more from some of these stories. That's all coming up right after this.
Speaker 5:
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Josh King:
Back now with Julia Boorstin, author of When Women Lead, What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn From Them. Julia, before the break we were discussing your career arc along with a couple notable digressions, and now we're going to dive deep into your new book's pages. Why Women Lead has been described as a groundbreaking and deeply reported narrative work, interviewing thousands of female executives that reveals the counterintuitive, against-all-odds approaches of women running the world's most innovative and successful companies. As you were doing the interviews, what were some of the most surprising points that the book reveals about women leadership?
Julia Boorstin:
Having interviewed thousands of leaders before going down the rabbit hole of writing this book, I always thought there would be something specifically distinct about entrepreneurs, in particular, some natural instinct to innovation, natural a way of thinking about things differently, and natural leadership skills. And I was impressed, and surprised, and frankly, a little bit relieved to see that every leader I wrote about really pushed themselves. No one was born good at anything. Everyone had to really push themselves to understand their own path where they wanted to be and chart their own road to success. So this idea of self-improvement, a growth mindset was dominant throughout the women I interviewed.
Josh King:
We were talking about before the break how the pandemic actually helped in the writing of the book. And we certainly saw that as we were producing this podcast; more people at home, better technology, better sound through Zoom, just people actually being more reflective. But you must have had a list of some gets that you couldn't get. Were there people that you wanted to talk to who ultimately, did not want to appear or be part of your thesis?
Julia Boorstin:
There were some women who I talked to who said they were afraid that the heightened attention to them might put a target on their back. There's been plenty of attention to the fact that female leaders are often scrutinized. There's this whole idea of token theory that if you're in a minority, you're going to draw heightened attention and criticism. So there were some women who said, "I just don't know if this is for me right now where I am in my growth trajectory as a startup, as a company, as a CEO." And then there was also this other complicated question. I don't want to be known as a great female journalist, and women don't want to be known as great female CEOs. They just want to be known as CEOs. So I really wanted to figure out how to highlight these stories of remarkable success and elevate these traits of leadership without othering these women and making their femaleness their defining characteristic because it certainly isn't their success is the defining characteristic the femaleness isn't.
So I really grappled with this and I talked about it with dozens and dozens of women I interviewed. How to tell these stories, how to try to change the narrative around leadership, what good leadership looks like, and how to diversify the examples that are so powerful in determining what patterns people are trying to match things into, without othering these female leaders. So that's something I grappled with and something I tried to address in writing the book. That's one reason some women decided the interviews weren't for them. And for others, they said, "Look, I want to write my autobiography someday. I'm going to tell my own stories; for me to tell and not for you." Having said that, I got great access, and I think the pandemic did play a big part in that.
Josh King:
Some of the things you talk about in the book Julia, vulnerability, it's one of the three main superpowers of female leaders that you identify. What can we learn about vulnerability and leadership from the stories of perhaps Katrina Lake, the founder and former CEO of Stitch Fix, and also Gwyneth Paltrow, the chief executive officer of Goop?
Julia Boorstin:
Vulnerability has often been associated with weakness, admitting weakness, admitting you don't know what you're doing, admitting fault, showing that you shouldn't be in a position of leadership. But what's been so interesting is that the research and also the stories that I write have illustrated how vulnerability can be a sign of strength. You're not going to admit that you have a failure in one part of your expertise unless you're confident about everything else you bring to the table. And vulnerability is essential to invite collaboration.
I tell the story of Katrina Lake because I was fascinated by her because so many different people described her to me as a talent magnet, her investors. I talked to other founders and people who had backed her company, and I said, "Well, what do you mean she's a talent magnet?" And they said, "She has this ability to hire people from other organizations who are so experienced." And I heard these stories about how she hired the head of algorithms from Netflix to come work for Stitch Fix when it was a relatively small company, or she hired the COO of Walmart.com, who had a massive job running this massive multi-billion dollar e-commerce organization, to come work for her little startup, Stitch Fix.
So I was trying to figure out what does it mean to be a talent magnet? I thought there might be some formula or some research I could identify because gee, who wouldn't want to be a talent magnet no matter what your industry or career is? So I dug, and I dug, and I asked a lot of people, and I kept on pressing Katrina to understand what made her a talent magnet. And at the end of the day, it really came down to her humility. She said, "Nobody wants to work for a know-it-all." She reached out to the head of algorithms for Netflix, she explained the opportunity, she explained her lack of expertise in this area and said, "Come build this with me. Come build this for me. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to trust your expertise."
And so she was able to lure over these people by promising them autonomy, which as you know, is incredibly important for people to feel self-actualized, to feel happy in the world. And so in promising that autonomy, she was showing that she wasn't going to be bossing people around. She wanted to give people the opportunity to thrive on their own. And I think that's why vulnerability is so central. She said, "I know nothing about algorithms. Please help me with this." Or Gwyneth Paltrow, who's so intimidating in so many ways, she made herself and her brand accessible to her fans by admitting that she had struggles also. She talked extensively about her struggles with postpartum depression, and that invited people to feel comfortable with her story as inaccessible as it might seem.
Josh King:
I mean, speaking of vulnerability, you honestly admitted in your book, and I'm going to quote you, "I thought I'd be taken more seriously if I never discussed my personal life." And it's been a common belief in professional life. Where do you stand on this now, and what advice would you give to young professionals entering the workforce?
Julia Boorstin:
It was really hard for me to get used to talking about my personal life. I mentioned I started at Fortune magazine when I was 21 years old. I used to wear glasses I didn't really need. I think my prescription was -0.5. I did not need glasses. I wore glasses and boxy suits. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to look older than I was. I wanted to be seen as someone who could hold their own with men 20 or 30 years their senior. And so I think things have changed. I think the pandemic actually really pushed things to change. I felt comfortable admitting that I had a family and kids I had to rush out to. Once I had kids or frankly, once I got pregnant, I couldn't hide the fact that I existed in a universe outside of work with my giant belly on live television.
So I think things have changed because it is much more normal now to talk about having to leave work to take your kid to the doctor to go to a soccer game. And I think having women in leadership positions, like Lynn Martin, really changes things because you're seeing that you're not the only one; you're not alone. Other people, whether male or female, have to leave to take kids to their soccer game or have something that... It's not just that they have to do, but that they don't want to miss. And I found that I was much more productive after I had children and much better at prioritizing things. And I did feel some discomfort in admitting when I needed to leave for something personal. But I think the fact that the pandemic laid bare everyone's home lives, and kids, and cats, in the Zoom shots, I'm proud to say that I never had a child or a cat jump into my home studio shot on CNBC, but I think there was a greater awareness that people just have multidimensional lives and work and succeed despite all of those distractions.
Josh King:
We're talking about other women in leadership positions. Let's pause for a moment and just hear a couple words from Bumble's founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd.
Whitney Wolfe Herd:
You feel the pain point of something, the chances are somebody else feels it as well. If you can genuinely say you are creating something that would help you, that would solve a personal problem, a personal struggle for you, you are going to find success.
Josh King:
Julia, I've heard a lot of Whitney's interviews and we certainly wanted Bumble to list here at the New York Stock Exchange, which I've made very clear to my friends at Blackstone. But you said in recent interviews that one of the most surprising stories you covered was Whitney's. What about her story surprised you?
Julia Boorstin:
Maybe not surprising but impressive, and impressive how she took her own struggles, her own legal battle with Tinder, which she was a co-founder of, and her own challenges to navigate a new path. And she created something entirely fresh. I always think it's fascinating when she talked about a pain point, creating something for people like you. But she also took this combination of her understanding and expertise in an area, which was the dating world, and her outsider perspective. And the combination of those two things enabled her to innovate and create something very different. So she flipped the business model of dating on her head and put women in control. And I think this idea of women sometimes are outsiders because they're not part of the dominant culture, but sometimes that can be used as an advantage. Take your understanding of the world, take the fact that you might have an outsider perspective, and the combination of those things can lead to something really meaningful.
Josh King:
You talked at some length earlier about what you discovered as you were researching the book in the area of venture capital funding. And on that, you tell the story of Insurify's founder, Snejina Zacharia who gives advice to women pursuing investments from VC firms, especially those male-dominated firms. She says, "They're really making a decision in the first 10 seconds, and it's all about how these men feel." So along with this theory, what would be your advice to women pitching these firms, and what can we learn from Snejina's story about pattern-matching behaviors?
Julia Boorstin:
Well, Snejina is so interesting because she was pitching to largely male investors. She's in the insurance space, she's not in what we think of as more traditionally female area of retail or fashion or anything like that. And she found that it was really important to not only be totally ready to go with your pitch, but to find investors who were more inclined to be interested in your arena. And so she really found more success with... At the beginning, she ended up going with a group of angel investors. But once she had a track record, she tried to put that track record front and center and said, "Hey, don't direct the questions to my husband who works for me. Direct the questions to me. I'm the one who founded this company. I'm the CEO, and here is my track record."
And I saw her recently in her office in Cambridge. And it's amazing how fast this company has grown and partnered with major companies like Toyota and other insurance providers. But for her, she really struggled to get investment right out the gate. She'd tells stories about how people would ask her how old her children were. And she's like, "I'm trying to tell you about my company. Why are you asking me about my children?" But she persevered and really worked to find the investors who had a track record of focusing on her type of business, which I think helped pull through the noise.
Josh King:
As we're seeing more and more companies today increase the representation of women, not only among their management teams but in their boards of directors, it's important to understand the reasons behind some of these patterns. And sometimes we easily throw around claims that diverse companies perform better but don't often add a lot of proof points to that. Can you speak to how you do think that diversity benefits businesses, not just on a social and cultural level, but also financial performance?
Julia Boorstin:
Oh, I don't think. I've seen the data. And by the way, there's so much different data in my 40 pages of end notes, that if you don't like one of the studies, there are other ones to fill in there. And I think it's really important to say, "I don't think." And I actually think that the value of diversity is not about being nice to your employees. It's about finding economic opportunity. And I hope that companies really look at this data and realize that investments in diversity are not about perks for employees. It's about of the financial imperative of finding the employees and the leaders who are going to be most beneficial to your company.
There's data showing that having female CEOs, that helps companies outperform. Companies with female CFOs tend to have better financial performance. Companies with more women on boards perform better. VCs with more female partners increasing the number of female partners, those companies perform better. Female founders, they tend to, on average, yield returns to their investors a year earlier, on average. They either sell or go public a year earlier on average. There are various studies showing that female-led startups perform better.
So for instance, first round capital, a male-led VC that's based out of Philadelphia. After its first 10 years of operation, they said, "Hey, we're an early stage company." At that early stage, you're making bets primarily on the founder and on the idea. These companies at seed or A stage don't tend to have a very significant track record. They backed companies such as Uber. They were very successful. But they said after the first 10 years, "Let's look back at the data and see what actually yielded success." So they looked back at all their companies and their portfolios, and they found that companies with a female founder or co-founder were 63% more profitable. And what I think is so powerful about that is they weren't looking for that data. They weren't trying to find something positive. This was just came out as they were looking at other factors, whether companies were based in Silicon Valley or had co-founders or single founders.
And similar data has been found. There was a study out of Boston, I think it was BU, that has 350 companies. And the female-led companies had about 50% higher profits on investments that were half the size. So there are numerous studies like this. Female founders tend to do more with less, and more often than not, they outperform. So there's so much interesting research here, and I look forward to seeing more data on this. But I think it's really important to shift the conversation away from diversity being philanthropic.
Josh King:
You mentioned some of this in your fireside chat that you just did with Lynn, and I want to talk about another study, this correlation between gratitude and leadership. What did the entrepreneurs that you talked to reveal about practicing gratitude in relation to starting their company?
Julia Boorstin:
I was so interested to discover this gratitude thing because in 20 years as a business journalist, I never really thought about gratitude as having anything to do with business. But after a series of interviews in which a number of these CEOs mentioned their gratitude, gratitude for the opportunity, gratitude for the experience, gratitude even for horrible experiences that they had to suffer through. Whitney Wolfe Herd talked about how grateful she was for the horrible experience of suffering through a lawsuit with Tinder. Why was she grateful for that? She was grateful for it because it gave her this insight and this opportunity to create something very different. But I was so interested by this gratitude, and then I found this research finding that gratitude inspires people to be patient because they're feeling good with where they are.
If you practice gratitude, remind yourself how grateful you are to be where you are in that moment, you're not going to be in a rush for the near-term win. You're going to be able to take a beat and think about more about the long-term opportunities. And this is so valuable for leadership. And it's so interesting because there are so many women I found who were trying to solve really big problems like climate change or serving the unbanked. These are massive problems that are going to take decades to fix. But it was interesting hearing them talk about why they were able to take such a long-term view. And a lot of that came down to the fact that they were grateful for their perspective and their opportunity. Some of these women, even like Julia Collins, who has as a agriculture platform to help drive a sustainable agriculture and help the environment, she said she has a 100-year plan. And it's because she's so grateful that all these experiences she's had have added up to this perspective that can help her really change the environment.
Josh King:
It wasn't lost on me as I watched your conversation with Lynn in the boardroom just now, that the room was 100 percent women, with the exception of me in the corner of the room. So besides me now as your interlocutor, what advice do you have for the men listening to our show, and what do you hope that they take away from our conversation in your book?
Julia Boorstin:
I really hope men read this book. I really wrote this book for men to read just as much as I wrote it for women to read. I think men don't understand the gravity and the seriousness of some of these gender gaps and also don't understand the financial opportunity for them if they do two things. Number one, the financial opportunity and investing in women and having more women in leadership roles, that's not a nice thing to do. That will, based on the data, help them make more money. And second, to understand the success that is tied to some of these more traditionally female leadership traits.
Men should be embracing empathy in their leadership, empathy as a strategic skill. Men should be deploying vulnerability as a way to invite collaboration. Men should be thinking about communal leadership styles. It's simply better ways to lead when you're navigating through a crisis rather than the more traditional, hierarchical, traditionally male, top-down leadership. So I think that this is a moment for men to learn from the women who've succeeded despite the odds. Take a page from them. If you could succeed despite having access to only 2% of venture capital dollars, there are leadership lessons there for everyone of every gender. And I would say this economic uncertainty that we're all facing right now, trying to figure out what this future holds, the skills and strategies women have always deployed, now, they're more valuable than ever.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about succeeding despite the odds, Julia, recently you spoke at Goldman Sachs's talks at GS, along with Sally Krawcheck, the CEO of Alvis, who you featured in your book. And I've followed Sally's career for a long time. She appeared on the cover of Fortune with the headline reading, the Last Honest Analyst. This is way back in 2002. And that conviction is what ultimately led to her resignation, which she had this to say about. "The price of my honesty, of my trying to do the right thing was a lot of money." What was the bridge she wouldn't cross, and what's your advice when weighing the risk-reward of a controversial decision that might come at a cost?
Julia Boorstin:
It's interesting because female leaders are more ethical than male leaders. They prioritize ethics more in their decision-making, but they're also expected to be more ethical than they actually are, which is interesting. So they're held to an even higher standard than men when it comes to ethics. The specific instance that Sally Krawcheck was talking about was about one of the assets that declined in value dramatically in the wake of the .com bubble bursting. And she thought that based on everything she had seen, that the firm had misrepresented the risk to its clients. And so people had invested in things thinking that it might decline a little bit but didn't realize that it would lose almost all of its value.
So she argued that they should refund their clients at least a portion of the losses. And the company said, "Well, we're not really legally obligated to do that. Why would we do that? We're not legally obligated to." And she said, "This is the right thing to do. This is ethically the right thing to do, but it also will be beneficial over time, will help us with our relationships and our retention with our clients over time." And the company made some sort of compromise and ended up paying back some of what she was advocating for, but she also lost her job over it because she went over her boss's head to really push for this. So she made an ethical choice, and she didn't get stuck in what they call this cultural numbness of becoming numb to the failures of a culture. But it was at a risk to her. She doesn't regret it, but it's interesting to see how these things play out.
Josh King:
As we begin to wrap up, Julia, we were talking about your conversation with Lynn Martin, the president of the New York Stock Exchange. She recently gave her advice to women entering male-dominated industries in a Forbes Women clip. Let's hear from Lynn.
Lynn Martin:
The advice that I give to other women who are looking to break into a male-dominated field is to be yourself, and don't be afraid to speak up and fight your corner, argue your position.
Josh King:
So after hearing Lynn's advice, Julia, I'd ask you the same. What would be your advice to women in male dominated companies or industries, in a nutshell?
Julia Boorstin:
I Totally agree with Lynn. I think it's very important to be yourself. Don't try to fit into someone else's box, someone else's definition of what a leader looks or sounds, or behaves like. Be your own type of leader. Understand your own strengths, and leverage those strengths. Leverage traits which people have not traditionally seen as strengths. Being an introvert, that could be leveraged as a strength IN leadership. Being vulnerable, being empathetic, these are skills that can be leveraged as strengths. And it was so interesting for me to see how many women took things about their personalities that have not traditionally been seen as strengths, or even things like being hyper-competitive, that at one point in one of the leaders' careers, one of the CEO's careers, was actually a drawback. And figuring out how to use your own personal distinguishing characteristics as superpowers, I think is really essential. And women should not have to be afraid of speaking up, but I think the more that we're true to ourselves, the easier it is to speak Up.
Josh King:
I want to leave off returning to what your mom told you when you were 13 years old, and that is, I'm going to quote her, "When you grow up Julia, everything will be different." So what's your hope for the next generation of working women Julia, and what do you think will be different?
Julia Boorstin:
Well, unfortunately, my mom was wrong. There are still massive gender gaps that she could not foresee that they would be persisting into 2022. But I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic because I've gone to interview so many phenomenal, inspiring leaders who are not only creating disruptive businesses but also are doing so in a way that's having a positive impact on the world with these purpose-driven companies. So my hope is that the world does continue to change and that investors, male and female, understand the value of unlocking and unleashing the power of female leadership.
Josh King:
Julia, thanks so much for joining us inside the ICE House.
Julia Boorstin:
Thank you so much for having me.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Julia Boorstin, author of When Women Lead, what They Achieve, why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn From Them, out now from Avid Reader Press an imprint of Simon and Schuster. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show or suggestions about other folks we should talk to, like Julia Boorstin, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Isabella Bizone. The Director of Programming and Production at the New York Stock Exchange and ICE is Marina Stanley. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the Library of the NYSE. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
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