S6 EP 10 | The Lessons Nobody Teaches You About Leadership Ft Vanessa Kingori (Ex-Google)

0:04Hi everyone, I'm Mara Genovese. I'm the CEO and founder of MG Empower, a global integrated marketing agency. Today, we are joined by a woman who has redefined what leadership looks like across media, culture, and now technology. Someone who has broken barriers, shaped iconic brands, and it's now helping steer the future of business and creativity in the AI era. From transforming British Vogue to leading Google's technology, media, and telecoms division, Vanessa Kingery's journey is a masterclass in vision, resilience, and bold reinvention. Vanessa, what a pleasure to have you here. It's so good to be here.

0:48we've been trying for a few months it's like the definition of busy women but i feel like so honored it's gonna be worth waiting for just you and i sharing i'm really looking forward to it yeah and so grateful to our friend michelle that has introduced us because we're here because of her we're so lucky to have intentional friends who really care about our networks and actually it's not luck I think it's the universe it's like when God wants to put people together he finds a way yeah but tell me I I'm just like I'm a big admiration of your work how you know position yourself everything that you have done and changing so many you know aspects of your career but also your personal life but let's start off like who is Vanessa Oh, wow.

1:42I'm a human being. I know it's a really strange thing to say right now, but I feel that it's worth saying out loud in the tech era where so much of what we are talking about is about productivity, is about efficiency, is about increased output, particularly at work. and I love my career but I also love life and living and so I think it's important to say that if I even look at the wellness industry I'm a wellness girly all of it is about maximizing your sleep so you can work harder and these supplements you can work harder let's live and I think particularly in the careers that we have where you're leading people or you're communicating with people through marketing and PR and so on.

2:39My career is one facet of the whole self. I never knew, actually, I wanted to have the career I have. I didn't know growing up what I wanted to do. I always knew I wanted to be a mother. And pretty early on, I knew that I would be a citizen of the world through virtue of my parents and my parentage. And so I am an explorer, a dreamer, an organizer, and someone who likes to fix things that may not be working in the best possible way. But I'm full of all of the human frailty and human desires as everybody else, you know. So I think it's important to say that. No, 100%. I love that. and then like because you talk about like i'm a human and then we're human being which we we i love that you said that the era that we're living today now yeah so it's ai and technology and even the robots now when you go to conference and you go see people like no guys bringing back the human yeah but do you think that your childhood had a lot of impact on the the way you're just describing being yourself yeah yeah yeah in a big way because um i had a very unusual i guess childhood i don't know that it isn't but for for the circle i'm in now i was born in kenya amazing to um a kenyan father who met my mother here in london my mother is from the caribbean so they moved to back to Kenya, pushing for Kenyan independence.

4:25So my mother was the only non-Kenyan in the area where I was born and so on, apart from some expats. And then I moved from Kenya very young to the Caribbean for a time. And I spent really my formative years there with my grandmother, who is a very very very wise woman worldly in her mind and who really set my work ethic and my vision for how to interact with people with strength and kindness and giving everyone a fair chance and then I moved to London at seven and this was you know I was moving from like Kenya Caribbean to like London. It was crazy in so many ways because I had never experienced so many things you know there were I remember moving and was like what do all these trees do what what do they what fruit do they bear and people like it's just a tree you know and I never experienced drizzle you know it was either sunny or raining or raining right so true um I'd never worn a coat before there's no so even before you get into like the culture it was in a sensory way so different but it was very very good for me because culturally the exposure that you get in London I think is unmatched around the world without even trying too hard you know you don't have to go looking for but I think having the three cultures was very defining for me because when you have experienced in your formative years, three very different cultures, you start to learn what are the common threads, I think, across culture, across humanity.

6:14And what are the stories we tell ourselves that are made up, you know, their structures within a culture. And so there are certain things that I was like, wow, okay, that's the same everywhere, you know. And there are other things that I learned were cultural constructs. I didn't have the language for that. But certainly the idea that, for example, people are organized and different based on, let's say, race, for me, was learned very early because I saw in Kenya, in St. Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, and then in London, that most people who were doing the things that they loved were either based on hard work, dedication or maybe connections right and nothing to do with these other attributes and so I think that was very um I think it was very grounding for me because what it taught me is that I can really achieve anything that I put my mind to as long as I surrounded myself with the right circle if I could and worked really hard and with intention and so I do think a lot of the myths that some people are held back by that I see I was fortunately dissolved of very early I also think I learned to adapt very quickly which in this stage of my career as I pivot a lot and I change from thing to thing like when you have to young assimilate and connect with people who are not the same as you very young it becomes less scary when you're older so your exposure is like a young age you're seven years old and going to school probably there was just like a big huge like shock in terms of a new world yeah different accents different faces the schooling system completely different yes um different practices so once you learn to adapt you know I think one of the things that's really important for people to know is if you have done a big adaption in any part of your life once you can do it again right and so I often think about women um and how much women question themselves and wait to be like 110 % ready to go into a career change but women are intrinsically adapting all of the time because of frankly their cycle um you know frankly um moving through different stages with their bodies with their lives we are always constantly evolving ourselves and adapting so actually you can extrapolate that out if you've been a mother you have gone through the biggest adaption life can never throw at you and then these women are saying oh I don't know if I can I'm like do you know what you just did like this is crazy of course you can do that thing it's really about the mindset yeah and then like we're like okay moving to London and then adaptability which I think is this like is such an important thing for us to talk about it because you know to adapt it to change is what is gonna make you successful in anything you wanted to achieve but if you don't have that mindset of adaptability they can get stuck with your mind 100 and then growing up in london career-wise because you have as you said has been very adapting on moving careers on you know changing your path how fashion came into your life because you have now someone that's very well known in the fashion industry but not just well known for the things like you're a fashionist well known because everything that you have done within the industry how fashion came to your life it's funny you know when I really think about it fashion was knocking at my door in a lot of different ways so um I was scouted as a model when I was um 14 or 15 and my parents were really not interested they were scared it was in the era where the models were always in the news misbeings, misbehaving.

10:36And they are very educationally focused. What's really interesting is that Kenya ranks very highly in the world and certainly in Africa in terms of educational standards. It's taken very, very seriously. And in St. Kitts, where my mother's from, it's also ranked one of the highest in the Caribbean. So I have two parents who are like, education get it yeah we work super hard to get you in this position where you can have this amazing education do that and then have your base and then you can do whatever yeah but in the end I managed to kind of convince them I could do both and I started modeling a little bit albeit I wasn't fully in and it is something you probably need to be fully in yeah but I it was really really fascinating for me because I fell in love with fashion, but not with modeling.

11:33And it was very, very useful for me as someone coming from so outside of the industry where I don't have those family connections or, you know, my family were very working class at this point. We were not shopping in these brands and so on. Modeling was very useful for me to understand what I loved and what I didn't like. So one of the reasons that I was not a great model in terms of, like I booked jobs, I worked with Vivian Westwood, who was so, she was so defining for me actually, because she was so radical and her fashion was not just about beautiful pieces, but always political. And coming from the Caribbean, fashion has always been a little bit political as well.

12:20it was a statement of who you are and who you're going to be of pride and so I really resonated with her and she booked me and so on but and although I booked lots of jobs I had too much to say in that time the model was really a blank canvas it was a blank canvas it wasn't the days now where everybody has a social platform everybody has another come to the studio do the feet walk and I was asking questions and why wouldn't we and what if we and they're looking at me like oh my gosh this precarious little teenager and so it was very good for me because I got exposed to some of the people actually I know now and I didn't know who they were but I was having really incredible conversations and I was witnessing this entire machine that you see a beautiful image at the end where you see a garment and you have no idea the sort of hundreds of people that go into making that moment with the garment and it opened up my eyes to the number of career paths that could be possible and so it was great my parents were complaining all along the way I think they triggered a little bit of defiance in me that I was like I'm gonna stick with it even though it's not for me but I met some incredible people and it got my mind turning and so that was the first one at a certain point I had to prioritize university was too much what did you do for university I did marketing and sociology which was super interesting because I didn't do it because of a career plan I did it because of my interest which I would advise communication marketing is the way exactly so I did that and um sociology was also super interesting to me, I guess, because of this cultural experience I had moving around and this macro experience of these different cultures and then how it boiled down.

14:16So the two things to me felt very hand in hand. It was very unusual at the time. But so that that was the first instance. And then when I was studying, of course, I come from a working class family, when a lot of my friends were off you know doing their sports and having those other I had to work but I wanted to work in a way that filled who I was so I didn't take a job local to the university I was coming into London and working in stores in fashion and so I got a job with matches fashion which was amazing we mismatched every single day Matt's come back I know it was it was like such a dream for me because it was I had a few different retail jobs I loved all of them but matches was really where I fell in love with the whole idea of convening people and marketing through heart and Tom and Ruth, who were the owners of matches, were so kind to me, even though I was basically a Saturday girl, you know, they saw, I think saw something and I was included.

15:27Actually, a lot of their staff were included in the bigger conversation, the buying decisions, how do we market, how do we connect with consumers who are busy and don't really need anything else, you know. And so they taught me that you need to know your your your customer and your consumer so i knew every coffee order which drinks every customer liked and then their preferences their children their wife their partner we would then i ended up doing a little bit of personal shopping with them where we would have to preempt based on their shop this was back in the day there was one there which ear was that one because they were not e-com yet no this was the noughties early noughties there was no e-com there was no practice of like data capture crm and so on but they had a database of their customers and they would and each store it was the responsibility to know them well so a lot of our time was making the space so that customers would just pop in if they were in there not because they were buying anything just to have a coffee yeah to chat hey guys I was just passing okay let's have a coffee and they did not mind if you sat with someone for two hours you didn't sell anything because they saw it as part of the experience and all of that was data capture because that customer would say, oh my gosh, I have three trips coming up and it's my daughter's birthday and, you know, my wife, we have an anniversary.

17:03And all of these things, we would then say, okay, well, listen, if you don't have time because you're on trips, we can send everything to the house and you can choose from there or I can pull some pieces from you. So for me, that was the early stages of learning how to market on a personalization level, right? We're talking about like years ago. You were very pioneering off on this. Super pioneering. And the power of personal connection, the power of ease, creating ease in busy people's lives. And this really stayed with me for a really, really long time. And then my career went in a different way.

17:44Once I graduated, I took some time. I continued to work with matches. I learned from them. And then I went into events, which is really pivotal now, which in ways I'm going to explain, but I really think the power of convening people elegantly around a purpose, whether it be a celebration or talking point is more important than ever in the AI era. And so these are all kind of happy accidents. Like someone at matches who was a very good customer said, oh my gosh someone is recruiting for um a um events director and I was like I've never done a director yeah but they said you would be amazing because it's all about connecting why don't you just meet them and then I met that person and I thought I don't want to embarrass my customer so I'm gonna be the best I can be and then I got this job and then I thought I didn't know I wanted to do this but every single opportunity that came whether by luck or actually through nurturing relationships I just was like I'm gonna give it my all you were never afraid never afraid and I wanted to be excellent so that that would connect me to something else because I didn't know which path to choose because you're so young I didn't know which password even there yeah and then uh through a long then i entered media through that and then the day i started in national press this incredible man so i went to an intern and he said to me not the day in the first two weeks he said wow one day you are going to be the publisher of uh it was in the first two weeks i'm an intern now in media starting brand new and i didn't even know what the job was and I was like okay Vogue I had Vogue yeah thank you and um again I guess fashion kind of found me because I was working in the national press and then someone saw me led me into the fashion section of that and that led on to jobs in magazines and and so on and so forth so all of it was quite organic with um you know the hard work meets opportunity like yeah a hundred hundred percent you're probably not gonna remember we met when you were at squire a long time ago because i was working at dax yes at bonefreet with joe smith with joe yes and i remember i started with joe as a pr and marketing assistant early age and then joe said oh we're gonna go to squire and we and Soho, Broadway Street.

20:35Yeah, oh my gosh. And then I went there with Joanne and she said, oh, you're going to meet Vanessa. She's from Esquire and then she kind of breathed me about you. But I was just like, just like, I remember clearly coming in to Esquire, the headquarters. The building there. And the building there. I love that job so much. I was like, I'm in heaven. I was working on menswear. For some reason, menswear was always, my grandfather father was so incredibly well dressed he was like so so I just loved everything about it and interestingly a lot of the contacts were women and it was this perfect mix for me of working in fashion but on the business side working in menswear but with women I loved that job so much yes I have good memories too and then British Vogue yes do you think british vogue was your like turning point in the sense of i got it not saying i've got it to the top but like do you think that british vogue really shaped your next move no i think gq was i think british vogue helped everybody understand what i did within the industry but gq was by far the role that shaped me because it was the most difficult because it was men's right yeah yeah but it was leadership so Esquire was like I'm in the team I'm part of the team I'm everybody's best friend of course it's fashion so there's a little bit of friction here and there but we were like a gang the creative director of Esquire is still a dear dear friend the editors it was just open and it was amazing amazing team amazing amazing team incredible energy there was no I was no threat to anybody because I was just like this little girl who came from press eager everybody brought me into the world GQ I was headhunted and I won this huge award at Hearst it was then Nat Mags yes and Hearst made me um gave me this global award at that time Condé Nast and Hearst were fierce competitors and Condé Nast was very closed you could not ever see a job advertised there it was posh totty was all the girls who had you know double barreled names landed gentry it was not even on my realm that it was possible to get a job there I didn't even think about it and I won this award and I think like the next day you got I got a call and um the then president said we want to talk to you about a job can you meet with the publisher of GQ and I was like wow this is amazing and um I said what is the job if you don't mind me asking and he said we don't know yet and so I had this incredible scenario where they hired me very quickly I think I had one one interview which wasn't an interview with a coffee where it was so surreal this publisher was selling Condé Nast to me I'm like I know what Condé Nast is you know and then before I knew it I was working there and it was nuts because this place that I thought would be the hardest place to enter that it was not even on my radar I suddenly was there with two conversations and I had the time of my life within the team I went there leading fashion the fashion business working very closely with the fashion team who were like nothing I ever experienced grand dames and big names and these super famous in our industry and it was like awe-inspiring for me but I think for some people it was like you're so different you're like who do you know and everybody there was like the niece of so-and-so the daughter of so-and-so everybody was one degree of separation and I didn't know anybody I didn't go to the same schools I did not ski and go to on those trips I didn't holiday in the same place I didn't ride horses so I was really like this you know very different very very different and rather than it being intimidating at that stage, I thought this is amazing because everybody's going to know who I am and be intrigued and I am going to treat.

25:11And people were actually very, very nice to me. They were just curious. And so I just lent into that and I lent into my experience being very young, going to these schools where everybody had different experiences and just decided to assume best intent i think once the key tough learning began was when i went from being in the team to the leader and how long did it take for that to happen very fast very fast because my work ethic is like you have to remember like i'm standing on the shoulders of my grandmother my great grandfather was a slave picking cotton. Wow. My grandmother left school at 14 with the intention of my daughter and my grandchildren will be educated to the highest extent.

26:06She taught herself. She had to leave school to pick cotton on the same plantations that she was freed from. And she read and she read and she read and she set this intention that every generation would have the world at their feet and would have these so i am in this space and i'm working thinking like two generations ago my grandmother would die to be in london she was reading dickens and shakespeare and she never ever came to london but she knew everything about it and she wanted for us to have these broad cultural experience and here i am in the center of culture of culture and so So I'm like, I'm living her dream.

26:52My mother then worked incredibly hard, left her homeland at 17, came to London and was very intentional about my sister and I being educated to the highest level in London so we could be in these spaces. And so now I am in a space which is top of the tree where people are like quite relaxed because they're like, well, we're number one. There's nowhere else to go. there's no bigger men's magazine and magazines were really big but my mindset was like it is like a one in a million chance that you're here no one else like you is here no one in your lineage has ever been given this opportunity and you have come from the number two title where everybody had to fight you had to meet with everybody like you know every single client dax and everyone you had to meet with them regularly i arrived at gq and i was like when did you last see dax and like i'm not sure i'm like oh so i applied my grandmother's work ethic my mother's work ethic and also the work ethic i had experienced when you are not number one in the market and so what happened is my bosses were like wow wow who is that what is going on i didn't know it was unusual and so very quickly I think in like 18 months or something like that they made me publisher of GQ Style a role it didn't exist before and this had really became to define my career they had a magazine that was being ignored it was a bi-monthly fashion spin-off of GQ it didn't have an editorial team I don't know how it was came to be by obligation, but no one was giving it love.

28:44And I saw everyone wants to be the publisher of Vogue or the publisher of GQ and the publisher of Vanity Fair. I felt like I have no chance because there's this whole line of people waiting for it. But no one cares about this thing. and it is way easier to prove yourself on something that has no proof of case to build something from nothing than to take something that is already winning and so I um pitched to my bosses they said we want to yeah they said you're doing incredible we want to step you up but it's very competitive. And so, you know, we see you as going for this role, very linear, work really hard and you're going to, and I thought there's five people going for that role.

29:34And I said, what about if I took GQ style? I did something similar at the Evening Standard. I created a fashion man. The editor wanted this and I helped to create it. And I said, I would love to do that and they said okay we agree to create that title hasn't existed before but there is no budget you have to work within the GQ budget which means you need to convince the publisher of GQ to share your share that budget or you need to create it through revenue I said okay no problem oh we do it I started my first business when I was eight so I know how to make revenue and I thought what's the harm you know what I mean let's try let's try and so I managed to charm everybody to like I can see get involved be excited like this is revenue from nowhere this is a chance to be super creative because it's not a really commercial entity super something that we can have more freedom and I'm very good at understanding creatives and so to the editors I would say that you know like within these big magazines that are so scrutinized you have to work within a certain line here do what you want do what you want yeah there's a freedom yeah and they really bought into that and so I was able to build a very credible significant business that within a year and a half was making more money than some of the other monthly magazines and from that then the bosses were like okay but with that also came a lot of frustration because once you create something that is successful it's human nature for it to seem easy it's like okay you know it's not yeah but once it's done it's obvious yes and so people were a little bit frustrated that like well how come she's jumping the queue and so on But I just, I had a lot of amazing supporters.

31:38I used my convening power, everything I learned in events and my, what I learned in just connecting with people, connecting with people, learning that very young is that you have to make the effort when you're the outsider to connect. And you also have to silence the noise and not make that the main event. The main event in your head. And then very quickly from that, I became the publisher of GQ. And that was really hard because that was the one that there was a whole line of people waiting. And then you got it. Again, our bosses, rightly or wrongly, did not interview anyone else for the job because they said, look, it's a contest.

32:26It's yours meant for you. and that was hard because and this is why I say I learned so much because a lot of the people who were rooting for me before were suddenly like is this too big like is it too fast um is it fair which is a fair question you know they wanted me to prove myself and I was challenged with a big change and I'm very good at change and I had to convince people then I was the youngest publisher I believe ever certainly working in the business the first female publisher of course it's GQ and the first person of color and I think the youngest was the thing that was the biggest How old were you?

33:14I must have been barely 30. And, you know, the person I was replacing was well into their 50s, but has an heir that was much older. You have to imagine this is back in the days where it was almost like Mad Men. Everybody was in gray suits. The person I was replacing went to Sandhurst. Very military. Wow. Very. Big change. Yeah. Hierarchical leader. In fact, one of the things I've realized is everyone I have replaced has been ex-military. It's interesting. Very interesting. Male, older, ex-military. At the point where there needs to be change, it is no longer, and also when you're young, hierarchy doesn't work.

33:59In this generation, even worse. Because I look super young, and I look younger than I was even. And even though I had a track record, it just was weird to go from this guy who was in cut suits and spoke with a booming voice and was like, had a plan to like, OK, let's figure it out. Let's all pitch to get people were like, what? You see your job to tell us, you know. And but equally, when I told them, they were like, oh, this feels weird. So at first I tried to replicate the way I'd seen it done. didn't work for me and then I said you know what if I'm gonna fail I'm gonna fail doing it my way I need to convene people I need to convince people not dictate to them and we were trying to go for a big digital conversion at that time GQ was and Condé and us were unique they were still making a lot of money in print selling print magazines publication was already going to digital.

35:01Everyone else was going to digital. And I'd come from national press where everything was going digital. I come from Esquire where these were things that were being considered. And because of the success, they were behind. So no one could feel the impetus to change. And I had to be it. And they were saying, we're winning awards all of the time. I just want a Mark Boxer Prize. Now you want me to do extra work writing long form editorial pieces and then writing snappy social media posts and digital. Why should I do this? I'm winning. And I realized that it's like you have to have people see what's in it for them.

35:44But it was hard. It was hard because for the first time I didn't have everyone cheering me on. I had people questioning, really doubting my friends going and it's sitting uncomfortably that suddenly I had been in the pub with them and then out of this and then suddenly I'm in the big office right and so I had to use a lot of what I learned in sociology actually about understanding how culture works yeah not just as a societal level each space you work in is a microculture and you have to identify the different tribes within it and work with them in a different way in order to bring them onto your way of thinking so gq is where i made so many mistakes i did so much learning but ultimately the fast success there is where i created templates for what to do and what not to do yeah i love that story and then like but how did you navigate that like when you say about like it was like a time that I was with the pub and then all of a sudden I was in the big office.

36:51It was abrupt. Because in a way it's like, I wouldn't say rejection, but it's in a rejection in a way, right? And then it's not everyone that is ready to feel rejected or to accept it of not being accepted. So how did you navigate in order to keep resilience, to keep going? because you have to have a lot of resilience of not letting that noise of what people think or not think about your position and create that mindset of like, I'm just going to focus, but it's tough. It is really tough. Leadership is very, very lonely. And it's something that people don't tell you before. I also had zero leadership training and it was like this, the boss that I was replacing I didn't know that they had been in long conversation for him to go and do another job so by the time I had finished negotiating he had been like two months late to start the job so on the day we announced it like I signed the contract the next day it was announced and he left that day no handover no handover at all he handed me a folder and that was it he said this is the office he made an announcement he said guys Vanessa is going to be great please trust her I'm going to my other role it was also in the company but international bye and it was like that I literally moved my things from one desk with the team to the big office in front of everyone and that was it you're on your own I love it and it was crazy because because there's a few things I learned.

38:44One is I think we are teaching people a lesson that is not valuable about fitting in and assimilating and the culture of that. I think it's very important to be comfortable being an outsider. I think there's nothing more valuable in an organization than having an outsider or a few within your teams. Totally. An outsider from all different perspectives. And you have to remember all of my life I've been an outsider, a very comfortable, happy outsider. When we moved from Kenya to St. Kitts, we were the African girls. We were not Caribbean. We had accents. We were very different. But I realized that it wasn't a problem.

39:32People celebrated it. They were curious. So instead of taking it as an insult, it was like, this is how everybody knows us. We're famous, you know, tiny village and a tiny island. There's these two African girls with, you know, all of these stories. When we moved from St. Kitts to London, no one had ever heard of St. Kitts. They were like, that doesn't, are you Jamaican? But you don't sound Jamaican because we had this crazy accent that was a little bit Kenyan, a little bit kittish-ing. Some kids you can't even find on a globe. It's so small. So I would say I'm from there and people would be looking and like, it doesn't exist.

40:09Are you sure? And so I was a super outsider. Then I went to school and because of the education, they were saying, oh, your sister and yourself need to be moved a year up. Like in every way. Also, I'm so tall. I'm an outsider. I was the only black person in my class. I'm an outsider but for me it was never a problem in my mindset because you have a very good mindset that was not letting you to make I don't even know if it was good but I think the cultures that I come from and maybe this will resonate is where it's not the British culture where you fit in and you're one no everyone's a peacock in Africa and in the Caribbean your aim is not to fit in your aim is if you go to church in in the caribbean it's like a fashion show going back to nobody you paint your house not the same color what color is no one else painted it so for me standing out only became a problem when i started to adopt english ways and so i had to go back to you're a happy outsider you've always been this way lean into that into that and don't let this to change you and then talk about fitting in yeah you have to fit in in the industry of technology when you went to google yeah because then is another extreme so you went to a very male dominant yeah what yeah technology it's uh it's still when you look at the percentage of women women and men it's like i'm getting worse is getting worse especially with ai now but you had the courage to say i'm doing it and then it was i don't even first i think yeah women being hired yeah by google if i'm not wrong i replaced another military man you replaced another military male led team it was like back being in gq how was it like okay i'm gonna go to tech and i'm gonna and go to google which you're talking about the giant of technology.

42:18I mean, to be honest, by this stage, I'm so intentional about what I'm doing. And to let you into a secret, I founded a company in 2020, the year after my son was born with a five-year plan. Wow. And I'm like, okay, in five to six years, I want to be working for myself and this is going to take time and I need to have a strategy and I need to lean into all the things I'm good at but I also need to plug the gaps of the things that I don't know and tech was one of them and at that time now the media industry is in a little bit of a frenzy around tech initially it felt to me like the early days of social media we navigated it I was a big part of helping the media industry adapt, accept, include.

43:16I worked so closely with all the tech companies then and I was bringing in YouTube and Google to do talks. You had to have the transition, right? Yeah, no, but I was, I realized a big part of my job at Condé Nast when I became chief business officer of all the brands was to bring technology in to make it less scary. so I started to develop the relationships the business needed but also I needed tech platform so I was flying to New York and meeting with Instagram Ava Chen making these relationships that didn't exist at Meta and saying to her who can you send can you train my team to really understand how to but at the same time I was learning of course because it was a new thing for you and Ava Chen was saying where is your account but you're the star I'm like no no I'm I'm behind the scenes.

44:05I'm not that she said, yeah, people want to know. This is what people want to know. So she encouraged me to start an account and she encouraged me to build my own following, no matter what, just like she had done. She was very instrumental. And then I was like, we need YouTube. Vogue doesn't have video. And so I started to know Google and bringing them in to educate the team on how do we create the best video? How do our videos perform? I made it my personal KPI to get Vogue to 1 million followers on YouTube so that we could build a video platform. And in doing that, of course, I became friends.

44:39You became friends and learning. They were asking me to come and speak at their key moments. And I was like, wow, this is another space like Condé Nast that feels excluding and exclusive. And here I am. But here I am. And I have and they are interested in me, but I'm interested in them. So there's an exchange there. so I set this intention that I need to fill that gap before I can go and do my own thing and they were approaching me and I was like this is amazing but I'm going to do my due diligence and I'm going to try to understand all of the tech companies and I'm going to pick the one that's most values aligned even though I know it's going to be super challenging I'm going to fall on the fact that it's okay to be an outsider you can learn on the job have learned that before We can do hard things.

45:29It's not forever. And also, it's risk. If it isn't for me... Yeah, and we cannot lose anything. I'm trying. My motto in life, I have a few mottos, is if you are going to fail, fail on your own terms. Exactly. And fail fast and fail, it's good for learning. It's okay. It's okay. So by this point, I had multiple revenue streams already. I had made sure that I had savings I was very very frugal in the Vogue era that's good to make sure that I had with this plan in mind because once you have a plan you can start to put the wheels in place so nothing everything seems like oh my god this crazy pivot but I was really building to it for a long time what if I fail okay you have other things I never have one revenue stream.

46:23I never look at my job as who I am. And I never look at my job as how I make money. My job for me is very important, but it is one revenue stream. I always make, and I learned that from my grandmother. My grandmother would never say you can't, I grew up on a farm and she would say, you can't rely on the crops to be successful. So what else do you have? So she would sew, she would make things. And this is ingrained with me. So I was doing speaker engagements. I had my consultancy and Condé Nast were kind of okay with that because everything I was learning on the boards in these gigs, I was bringing back, refreshing the company.

47:03So it was a calculated risk by the time I went to Google. They had been talking to me at this point for nearly three years. I knew they wanted me and I had this feeling of if it doesn't work, it's all data. No data. Yes. And then what an amazing experience. Yeah. It was hard. It was still hard. I would not tell anyone a lie in that that learning, especially with a little child at home and leading while learning, you have to be very vulnerable. And another advice I would give is that it is really, really important to lean into your vulnerability and not pretend. Everything is OK. So this is where being, I think, a woman and using some of my, what I would say more feminine leading traits of I don't mind being vulnerable.

47:57I don't need this to be a hierarchy. I know your previous boss was military. I've done this before. I've done it before. Wow. We're not going to work like that. That's very interesting. Now, you know things I don't know. I know things you don't know. Let's pull. I'm going to elevate you because I don't know that. So now you're going to become the expert at that. I'm going to be the expert of this. So I created a really collaborative team set where people felt valued because they, all of a sudden they were useful in a different way and I was platforming them. And that's really how I navigated that big pivot at Google, but also because I built myself a safety net.

48:37I was never born with a safety net. I was always around people who inherited a safety net through Condé Nast and I thought okay the thing that's allowing them to be audacious is a safety net I'm going to need to build one so that's what I did you talked once to me about personal IP and I think now talking about story what you have been doing is your because I never heard about personal IP until we had a phone call conversation and I love that if you can describe personal IP what do you say that's the definition of a personal IP I think that it is one of the most overlooked resources that we personally have in this digital age and it's transformative we always had it actually but now people are interested in who you are and what you're willing to share and in your journey and so if you look at my Instagram account it looks super fun Sometimes it looks glamorous.

49:36It looks like I'm always on holiday, but it's very intentional. I want for people to understand that I'm someone who works hard, works with empathy, and I work hard because I also have a life. And that's a key part of my personal IP. And it means that when people meet you, they're already brought in to a certain extent, not just on your CV, but in who you are. Who you are, yes. So you don't have to work as hard, educate it, but this is why I do this and I might need this. people already say well I know you have a kid so is that time going to work for you they're there already they care about your value system if they if they've engaged and also you can write your own narrative what I noticed in some of the roles that I was going for that were deeply competitive where women often opt out you know that this is um and not only women I think people who are not centered who maybe are like oh well English isn't my first language so oh, maybe I'm not going to be great at this level.

50:38Will I be good in the boardroom? Maybe people won't understand me. You make that part of your personal IP, right? And so for me, I realized when you are in these very competitive roles and when Edward and I were appointed to Vogue, there was initially a backlash because it was like, why these people there's been this whole line people don't know what we'd achieved they just wanted to judge without knowing the the why yeah and suddenly it was public because in GQ was industry and people like oh in the industry she's doing great oh my gosh you know and then suddenly it's like oh my gosh the Daily Mail is covering oh my god you know and I realized that um I'm six foot tall.