Moment 152: The Top 4 Most Successful Stories From Women in Business!

0:00You know when you're in a meeting, taking notes, trying to focus, but your devices keep pinging notifications. For me, that's really annoying. And usually it makes your brain start to wander away and fall into distraction. This was happening to my producer, Jack. And we were chatting about it when I realized that I knew the exact product that would fix this problem for him. It's from our sponsor, Remarkable. Essentially, it's a paper tablet with no notifications. So it's far less distracting than most tablets. It's called the Remarkable Paper Pro Move. And it really does look, feel, and sound the same as writing on paper, which is really nice if you spend a lot of time taking notes.

0:36But because it's digital, your handwritten notes can be converted into typed text and then you can send it over email or Slack or just keep editing it within the app. All of their products have no blue light, which for someone who looks at screens as much as I do is something I really appreciate. Remarkable is offering a 50-day trial on their products for free. And at the end of that time, if it's not what you're looking for, you simply get all of your money back by sending it back. Give the present of being present. Find the perfect distraction-free paper tablet at remarkable.com.

1:10But that kind of brings me onto a wider point about, and as you say, the reason why you're in Saudi is this battle that I know you've had through your career with men kind of underestimating your sexism, which I guess started when you first got the job at Birmingham. Yeah, I mean, I remember my first away game, I think it was Watford. and I turned up and I said, oh, hi, could you tell me where the boardroom is? And this little old boy, little steward on the desk, he went, oh, director's wives over there. And I said, it's interesting, but where is the boardroom? And he said, dear, you don't understand.

1:42The director's wives go in the ladies room. And I said, no, I don't think it's you who understands. I am the managing director, so I want to know where the boardroom is. And this little boy put his little glasses on. He went, oh, yes. He said, yes, you're that woman. Stay here and I'll find out what to do with you. because there were no other women in football. So there was never a woman in the boardroom and women weren't, you know, weren't welcoming in boardrooms because it was meant to be the place where the directors all met. And of course they were all men. And I remember thinking that it was the very first door I'd kicked down and I was determined that I would keep that door open as wide and as long as possible to get as many other women through as possible.

2:23And that is something I've spent my last 30 years doing. it's really important to me. It's really important that there is a sense of equality and equal pay and equal respect for everything that you do, regardless of where you're from, what sex you are, what your beliefs are, how you look, where you're educated. Equality is very important to me. Why do you think it's so important to you in particular? I think because, look, at 23, I was given the challenge and chance of a lifetime, and I took that and I knew that that started with someone having trust in me and I knew that there were so many talented people out there that didn't have someone that had that trust in them and I wanted to be that person.

3:11Going back to the question which I kind of took us off on a tangent away from about why you think Bumble won or was successful, was able to break through into that very small category of dating apps or dating sites where there's really only like a handful of real players why why because i know you know i have to say something i know that the other dating apps because i was sometimes in the room tried to launch dating apps of themselves so they took their existing network they tried to launch a new dating app into it and it didn't work yeah i've seen it happen over and over again i know michelle yeah from peanuts she's one of the people i used to work with when we were doing the marketing at Purdue.

3:52Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. She's, I think what she's done is awesome. Yeah. I love peanut. It's, it's great, but, but I, but I know it's not easy and I know it's not chance. I know it's not luck because I've seen, I can't tell you at social chain, how many times we had dates, dating apps come to us and say, can you do our marketing? Maybe 200 times. There's 5 ,000 dating apps in the app store. It's impossible. It's impossible. It's impossible to start a new one because of the network effects and all of those things. It's impossible. Impossible. So why you? How you? How?

4:29Every other dating product until Bumble had been solving for the wrong side of the coin. They've been thinking about men. That's all. They woke up in the morning and thought about how to make a dating app good for guys. And they had it backwards. Why are you solving for men when this is all about what women need? and what women want. No one was asking women. You think women want to get abused on the internet? Think again. Like find me a woman that enjoys being harassed on a dating app, not one. But for some reason, that problem didn't strike anyone as a problem. So it's not that hard to say, wait a second, this is a double-sided marketplace.

5:15This product can't survive without women, Yet we're exploiting and degrading women on a lot of these products, not naming any names. What? And so for me, it was all about taking that original concept of mercy, a kind space for women, a safe space for women. And to Andre's push, got to give him some credit for being so interested in dating, right? I was so turned off of dating. I wanted nothing to do with dating. When Andre was like, oh, let's do a dating, you know, come be my CMO. So first of all, I'm not for hire. I'm starting my own company. I must be founder and CEO of whatever I do next. I cannot work for someone.

5:55I just, I have to be my own boss. And, you know, I got to give him a lot of credit because he trusted that. And he said, okay, do whatever you want to do. But it just, my one stipulation is it has to be in dating because I know dating. And I want to get behind a dating product. so when I was sitting there you know we were we had kind of agreed to okay we're going to do this dating app what's it going to be what about mercy I want it to be mercy I want it to be about women and I want to be women only I want safety and kindness and accountability there's no internet spaces for women nothing's been built for women we have to do this for women and then it kind of just all clicked.

6:34And I sat there and within literally minutes, it all just wrote itself. I said, wait a second. I know the problem. Women don't go first. Men do. Men message as many women as they can. Women are getting inundated. They never respond. The lack of response is causing a rejection and the rejection is triggering an aggression. And that aggression is now translating into harassment. And this is why women are being abused on the dating apps, because if only they would go first, the man wouldn't feel rejected. They'd feel empowered. It would totally calibrate this whole experience. And I said, okay, great.

7:17I know what we're going to do. Women have to talk first on this product and they only have 24 hours to do it. I knew nobody else could conceptualize the way I would explain it. So I was like, thanks Cinderella. the pumpkin and the carriage and men can send one extend on time a day to capture their attention if they want to now we have to also call out something this was back in 2014 in a very heterosexual oriented dating app experience the landscape has evolved we have to be inclusive to all and so of course we are and of course we are currently as we speak spending countless time and putting all of our heart and soul into how to make the experience better for non-binary, for the trans community, for anybody that identifies as a woman as well, right?

8:05And so that's a big portion of the future, but that was really how I would say we became successful because of two things. Women, making sure that we were solving for women's real problems on the internet marketing to women. So when I went back to those sororities and fraternities, instead of going in with, you know, whatever we had gone in at Tinder, I went in with things for women. I went in with items women wanted, cute yellow cookies. Like I understood that we are going to build a cute brand, not a sexy brand. And that's what set us apart. I wanted it to feel warm and cozy and inviting and soft and feminine and safe and that's the beginning and still the current through line of bumble you know starting a business like that at 53 a lot of people have a like a stigma or a stereotype that you can't start a business in midlife you know you shouldn't be doing that at that point or that you know you won't be able to raise you know all of those kind of stigmas around starting a business in midlife crap crap yeah total crap i started a business at 16 called what's my first business bows unlimited when i was at school i sold hair bows i know um and then i started business at 53 so it's like there's no other way to put it that that age is is a number it is just a fucking number and you can either mention that number endlessly or you can look at what energy do you have at that moment in time to execute on your dream that's all it's that's all you need energy all you need well you need a lot but you know you need to feel that you need energy passion drive relentlessness perseverance resilience pick yourself up and just get fucking on with it you need all of those things but you need the energy so that you jump out of bed in the morning and you are on it did it take time for you to cultivate that in the passing after after johnny had passed was there like a do you know what i mean because i did i did already too before and for that i was you know i did 18 hour days for two and a half years it's like it you know it's it's in me that i've i've been a grafter for quite a long time so you'd been mulling this idea for many many many years yeah and um and then you finally put it into action i heard you say i started pitching in 2014 and it took me three years to launch yeah i started pitching in 2013 i think and what were you pitching i was pitching what was the elevator pitch the elevator pitch was um to create portable cream-based personalized makeup for women 35 plus and how was that pitch received i did 48 pitches before one person bit i must have sent 300 emails what kind of uh negative feedback did you get oh i had lots i had um i had you don't have enough followers fine i had like i think 50 000 followers then um i had your two old start a business i had who's going to really run the business classic oh that's a nice little backhanded love that one you live in this neverland it's not like it's never going to happen but it's never going to happen but you don't put words to either you sit like this place and i had that feeling i thought are people ever going to get it but i thought i'm never going to give up so they both sat side by side really strongly.

11:43Why didn't you give up? Because I knew it was a fucking good idea and I knew it would work. I just had to find the right people who would get it. But everyone's telling you no, everyone's telling you to. I don't care everyone's telling me no, I know. And I know enough and I believe in myself enough to know I know it's a good idea. I just know it. I just got to find somebody who has the vision to understand it. How do you know it though? Because I know women. As you look forward at your mission and your future, and what you hope to achieve in the next chapter of your life, what is that tangibly?

12:19If I had to measure success, if I was to say that all the things you write about, the change you write about in this book, if I was to measure it and say it was successful, what would the world look like? That we have true equality. You know, that little girls can be everything and anything, honestly. you know, that they can be president or prime minister, that they can launch a company, you know, and get seed funding, that they can be a scientist, that they can literally, or they can be a stay at home mom, that they can be whoever and whatever that they want. And I think my hope for mothers is that they too don't see their biggest dreams die on the vine, that they don't live a life of regret and envy and should have been, would have been, because they let things happen to them rather than change things.

13:10That we live in a world where we respect and we dignify women and girls. We're not there yet. You know, we're so far from being there in many ways. And I think part of it, again, is because of the things that we've sold women, that we've basically told women that the problem is you. Think about all the books that women read, Confidence Code, oh, I gotta learn how to do a power pose. I gotta lean in. All of it is about women thinking that you're wrong. The amount of times that women come to me and say, I have imposter syndrome. I'm like, no, no, no, no, they didn't let you in. You're in there because you are the best.

13:47But now you're made to feel like you snuck through the back door. And so what I am saying in many ways is really radical. And it's very deeply seeded in us. And it's not just, it's women, it's people of color, it's poor people. anybody who is not, you know, who, who has really, you know, had to, had to, through grit, perseverance, you know, found themselves in rooms that people don't look like them. We're still asking ourselves, do I belong here? Should I be here? And we're constantly being fed information, book, podcast, movies that tell ourselves that we just have to change one more thing about ourselves, that we have to fix one more thing.

14:30And, you know, it's just simply not true. I, I always say that I feel so lucky that, you know, through the work that I've done, I've been able to be in almost every single powerful room. I've probably met every single powerful person in the world. And, you know, I used to be that girl at Yale Law School in my constitutional law class going like this. And, you know, a few years ago, I got asked to give a speech at Bill Gates' summit. And the slot that they had given me was between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. And it was the only speech that anyone was giving. It was a summit of Fortune 100 CEOs.

15:10You can imagine who was in the room. And I remember them saying, you know, this is a really hard speaking slot, Rashma, because most people are really intimidated because Bill and Warren are sitting in the front row and it can be a little scary. And I remember as I was sitting there in the backstage, they had given me 10 minutes to speak. And I remember thinking, man, I wish they gave me 12 because I really had some more stuff to say. And then I remember thinking, how did I become, how did I become this woman when I used to be that girl? And I remember thinking, yeah, it's because I've been in every single powerful room.

15:49I've met every single CEO, every president, every prime minister. And when I meet them, I'm like, you? You're running what? Me and my girls, we can run circles around you. And I realized that it's never been about whether we're qualified, whether we're prepared, whether we're ready, that we've really never really dissected all of the undeserved, unearned privilege that so many people have. And that we have literally bought and been fed, you know, basically this propaganda that we're not good enough, that we're not smart enough, that we don't belong. And the real resistance in this moment is saying no more.

16:35I'm not reading those books. I'm not taking those courses. I'm not taking that class. I'm not buying into that bullshit. I'm here and I can lead too.

16:50You know when you're in a meeting, taking notes, trying to focus, but your devices keep pinging notifications? For me, that's really annoying. And usually, it makes your brain start to wander away and fall into distraction. This was happening to my producer, Jack. And we were chatting about it when I realized that I knew the exact product that would fix this problem for him. It's from our sponsor, Remarkable. Essentially, it's a paper tablet with no notifications, so it's far less distracting than most tablets. It's called the Remarkable Paper Pro Move. And it really does look, feel and sound the same as writing on paper, which is really nice if you spend a lot of time taking notes.

17:27But because it's digital, your handwritten notes can be converted into typed text and then you can send it over email or Slack or just keep editing it within the app. All of their products have no blue light, which for someone who looks at screens as much as I do is something I really appreciate. Remarkable is offering a 50-day trial on their products for free. and at the end of that time, if it's not what you're looking for, you simply get all of your money back by sending it back. Give the present of being present. Find the perfect distraction-free paper tablet at remarkable.com.