Session: Did I Say That Out Loud?: How My Foot in Mouth Stepped Into Common Ground
Any woman who has made it in tech has run the requisite gauntlet of male dominated boardrooms, striving to hide emotions in the face of underestimation, disregard, or intimidation. There are few female executives who have not wanted to shout out “I don't want to join this f*@king call" at one time or another. When a young female cutting her teeth at IBM inadvertently said exactly such a thing to a room of male executives, she had no idea that the faux-pas would teach her a lesson that would inform her fundamental leadership philosophy until this very day. How should young, capable women fight the urge to suppress one’s own instincts -- business and emotional -- when working with older, male colleagues? In this session, hear how a rising female in tech learned that honesty and emotion do have a place at work -- and can be valuable mechanisms to mold a shared objective out of competing agendas. The courage to change a detrimental conversation can be key to finding shared objectives that leads to greater alignment -- and easier solutions. CCO and co-founder of boostr Katie Schuele will share how she learned and applied these lessons as she made her way as a successful tech founder, and how she learned to approach a situation exactly as it is, whether it be complicated, tricky or even unprecedented, and be okay with feeling a certain way about it.
Bio
Katie Schuele is the Co-Founder and CCO of Boostr, the only Enterprise Ad Sales Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform built exclusively for Advertising & Media Sales Teams. A forward-thinking, determined and visionary entrepreneur, Katie Scheule stepped out in 2016, after a career at IBM, Yahoo and Time Inc., to launch her own business as co-founder of Boostr, a CRM platform that has since grown to comprise more than 50 employees and millions of dollars in revenue. Schuele has built Boostr around a model that intensely focuses on customer success and going the extra mile. She currently runs both Customer Success and Product and loves it. As a tech founder, her story is one of finding holes in the market and dreaming up and then creating a solution to the problem.