Thanks everybody for being here. Uh It's been a long day uh with some amazing sessions. So thank you for choosing to spend some time with me this evening. If you're here, you're likely at a juncture in your career wherein you're wondering why you should continue.Um I've been there, done that uh Today. I hope to share with you my journey and why after almost 30 years in tech, I continue to be here. Uh Before I get started, let me introduce myself. My name is Neri Gupta. I'm currently the CEO and founder of uh diversity.com. Uh Diversity is a private community of women and non-binary engineering leaders. Currently, only 9% of engineering executive roles are held by women. Diversity is on a mission to change that by accelerating uh careers of our members and building their high powered network for them. We are a not for profit company solely driven by our mission to help more women get into the CTO office. Prior to founding Diversity, I've been a product and engineering executive in tech for over 20 years at various companies such as N A or hired. Most recently, I was the chief product officer at hire. Um So on to our topic today. Uh As the song goes, I love Tracy Chapman, Chapman. Uh Give me one reason to stay here. So you worked hard. You finally made it into the C suite. You continue to have to stay intact. You now have a few leadership roles under your belt.

You pretty much nailed it. You've mastered this art of executive leadership and then you feel like you are at the pinnacle of your career. There's no other glass ceiling for you to break. There is no other mountain to climb every other leadership role. Feels like the same, same movie, just different actors, cha even the challenges that you encounter in every rule are pretty much the same team is not producing fast enough, you're not hiding fast enough. Company is not growing as aggressively as they should, et cetera, et cetera.

Feels like deja vu, especially given the challenges of the last two years with the pandemic. Many of us are questioning our life choices and when you have, you have this uh repetition that presents itself at work, you wonder why should I continue to stay? I was at this exact juncture when I was a CPO at higher. And in this talk today, I'll share with you my journey how I kept myself motivated to first stay in tech. And then after I had that epiphany, why I continue to still be in tech. Uh So I became a V Pe uh Vice President of engineering in 2005. At that point, I was still learning so much of it was new. I was working at a company called Mobi TV. It's a mobile streaming. It used to be a mobile streaming company. And uh a few years later, when the time came for me to look for a change, I got paid by many other companies in the, in the mobile space. I could have stayed in that vertical would have been easy. But at that time, I decided to get out of my comfort zone and go to another vertical. Don't get me wrong. There were, these were early days of my leadership career, I was still learning a ton. But by making a conscious move into another vertical, I learned a ton more than I otherwise would have. I learned so much more about this new business and this new space. This is how I got to name a social media platform company.

While I was at N I continued to learn about uh executive leadership and hone my skills. But I also learned very quickly how to scale platforms. At hyperscale, I learned about social media and consumer products. And so over the course of my career after name, I continued this pattern of switching verticals, verticals as I as I went through most of my career, all set and done. Uh At the end of the day, I got to learn about mobile streaming mobile app development, e-commerce, various talent marketplaces and now community building. Uh As my career progressed, I started to formally grow my role beyond just engineering and operations. Soon, product design and data started to fall under my purview and then it uh came under my purview as well. This offered a whole host of new challenges and new learning opportunities. Expanding my scope offered me the opportunity to not just in uh challenge me in different ways but also to increase my impact and influence at my companies. Fast forward, a few years I had mastered, I think being an executive, mastered running all of R and D. So what was the next hill to climb again? All the jobs started to look the same.

The only newness came from meeting new people learning about that particular space or, you know, that particular company that's when I started to focus on company and team size because the way you operate as an executive in a really tiny 15 start up is very different uh in terms of how you operate and, and multinational.

So that's sort of the next hill that I chose to climb. And I ended up working at a range of companies going as, you know, as small as a 12 person start up to all the way to um to a large global multinational. So 20 years went by 20 years of executive leadership, feels like a very long time. Looking back. Um One of the things that kept me going. So the themes, the two themes uh that I've covered uh thus far are first and foremost, it was my growth, my career growth. At the very beginning of my career, it was climbing the ladder to get into C Suite. Once I got to C Suite, it was becoming an established VP, followed by tidal growth. VPs, VPC XO, what have you from there? It was moving, it was expanding my scope, moving beyond engineering. Uh uh And from here, it was running teams operating sizes. So at each step of this journey, I felt like I was still climbing up one rung at a time of my ladder. As you see, uh I and so as you progress in your leadership career, know that there are very many ways you can continuously grow and challenge yourself, right? Title growth, role, expansion, and expanding or contracting your team size.

The other true constant for me uh was learning, I fundamentally believe that if your brain is not challenged and not fed, you will stay out. You will feel that you are just, you could just sleepwalk your job, which you absolutely do not wanna do. Uh So for me, while I was learning about new verticals or domains or businesses, my brain was constantly fed and felt challenged. At the end of the day, I ended up, as I mentioned, I've ended up running teams as small as a five person person organization, two teams as large as a 300 people organization. Uh I got exposed to multiple verti verticals like mobile social media marketplaces, talent markets, Mar talent marketplaces, e-commerce, et cetera. And I learned so much more about so many business models and monetization strategies. So don't get complacent challenge yourself.

Figure out what it is that you haven't learned yet and see if that is the next hill that you want to climb in order to keep learning, try different companies big or small. If you have experience with a large company, try and go to a small start up. Trust me, you will learn so much uh with every single move that you make. Uh So, yes, sorry. I, I just uh sort of lost my train of thought. So now, eventually I got to hire and I've experienced all the, I've gone through these different experiences and I still had my, now what moment things were going great. The company loved me. My team respected me, my team adored and loved me. I was having a massive impact on the entire company in terms of driving their strategy, company, strategy, product strategy, business strategy. Uh There was still something missing. What was missing was my next mountain to climb. I'd gotten to a point where I felt that it was the same movie, different actors. I literally felt like I could sleepwalk through my job. Um I was not learning anything new. I did a lot of introspection. And I felt that I didn't care about a larger team. I didn't care about making more money. I didn't care about a bigger title. I no longer cared about, you know, becoming a coo or a CEO. So what was my aspiration?

I needed to discover that and figure out if there was yet another mountain for me to climb in tech or should I just hang my hat and leave tech? This is when I embarked on a process of self discovery. And for me, if there is a third act, then I have to figure out what that third act would look like. I pretty much had to go back to the drawing board to figure out what I should do next. If all of this sounds familiar, let me share with you what came next, first identity crisis. Uh We grew up in the industry and people ask you uh you know, like you introduce yourself and you say hi, I'm nitty. I'm the CPO at higher or hi, I'm Nie. I'm the CEO at diversity. It becomes part of our identity. So if I'm not working and if I don't have that title, then who am I? What is my identity? And this is with what this is what took a ton of gut wrenching self discovery. But ah my identity is not my title and my identity is not what I do. So first things first, I had to decouple who I am from what I do for so many years. I had been one and the same and we are and I think there's a reason for it. We are so focused on our careers. We lose ourselves more often than not.

We let go of hobbies and things that we really love between life, between work and life is just so, so busy. Home and work is just so so busy. I can't tell you how many people I talked to who are miserable in their roles, who were in the same shoes that I was in. But they don't leave their jobs because they don't know what to do with their time. They don't know how to challenge their brains and, but that is not a good reason to be working rediscover who you are today. You may be a director. A VP or AC XO, but that's what you do. That is not who you are. So embark on this hard journey. It, for me, it was harder than anything that I've ever done. Uh This far, finally, I came to this realization uh that I, I grew up as an engineer. Uh you know, I'm an engineer by uh education and I've always thought of myself as an engineer, even though I have not been a functioning engineer for so many years. The same holds true for my title. I will always be a CTO or a CPO regardless of whether I'm a practicing CTO or CPO. Once I process that and internalize that I fundamentally was able to decouple my identity from my title. That was great. But then the next big question raised its ugly head.

If that's not who I am, then who am I? How do you rediscover yourself? So you first you have to go on this conscious journey. You try and uncover what you're passionate about, right? And this doesn't have to be work related. In fact, my, my I would highly recommend that it should not be work related. Ask yourself if you were to retire today, if you didn't have to work, what would you rather do? I personally came up with a blank here because I think part of me just didn't want to retire as it was too early. Uh But after a lot of processing and thinking, uh I knew that I like the arts and I like to create things. So I joined a lot of after work classes, um art classes like pottery, ceramics, glass, fusing glass blowing, et cetera. No, this is not to say that I wanted to become a full time artist. Absolutely not. This was primarily self discovery to see what I, who I was or outside of work. And through this, I realized that there were certain art forms namely pottery. For me that I really loved. Why am I telling you this? Investing time in the arts? Got my creative juices flowing. This helped me figure out what it is that I was passionate about in relation to work.

Arts provided me with an avenue to stop thinking about work, to completely be focused on the present, to stop that constant, to do list that we always seem to have in our brains and just free my mind to think. And that free mind is when you are at your creative best. And that's when I discovered that in all these years of work, what I was most most passionate about was two things. The process of creation, whether it was creation of a company or a team or a product and the process of giving back. That's one of the reasons to give back is why I became an um an engineering leader and why I enjoyed being a leader, seeing the company grow, the product grow and get adop adopted and my own team members and mentees grow and flourish so great. So I've decoupled my identity. I found my passion. What's next? How do I put this into action? What do I do with this information giving back is great. But there are so many organizations to get back to. This is when I started to volunteer with a bunch of different organizations. Some were for me, others, not so much and don't get me wrong. They were all very, very, very worthy causes, but they just didn't excite me enough to be able to give it my all.

And of course, the backdrop of all of this is that, you know, I've, I've spent the 30 years of my life working in tech. So I still want to apply my skills going forward. I realized that this process could not be forced. It had to be organic. I gave permission to myself to take it as it comes. I volunteer when I did not know what my own personal mission was. I decided I could work at mission driven companies. And if it was a mission that I could get behind, then that would be great. That's actually how I became the CPO out here. So after a few years following a company mission isn't enough because it's just not your own mission. Uh And this is how it changed for me while I was at higher, I was invited to an intimate dinner with CTO si guess, subconsciously walking into the room, I expected it to be a room full of men, but to my utter disbelief and shock, I walked into a room full of 15 other female CTS.

I didn't even know that 15 other female CTO S existed on this planet. Leave alone existing in the bay area. Some of them living a stone's throw from my house. And I was like, what? Let me figure out what this data is because obviously, I am not very well networked. This must be an anomaly and that's when I discovered that less than 9% of engineering exact rules are held by women. That's when my mission hit me like a ton of bricks. This was going to be my mission going forward so fast forward to today. That's why I found a diversity. Going back to my self discovery process. What I found that I was passionate about was two things. Remember, creation and giving back in working on diversity. I get to do both the process of creating a mission driven company that's solely focused on giving back to the community that takes a lot of it takes a lot of pride and joy in lifting others. If you are a leader, you likely became a leader because you like to lift others around you. Once you're done focusing on your own career growth, you can do, still do a lot more in tech if you start to focus on lifting others around you and taking joy in that. So for me, after almost 30 years in tech, 20 of those in exact rules.

What's the one reason to stay here? I'll give you four. Keep growing, always be learning, find your passion and mission and lift others around you. And more often than not, we think that we don't have that much to give as it pertains to lifting others around you. But trust me, even if you are an IC, you can still inspire others at diversity. We run a mentorship program and which is free for anybody who joins uh for anybody who wants to participate. And there are so many amazing leaders who join because they want to give back to the community. There are so many I CS that join because they want to learn from other women and also give back to other women. So your secret to saying in tech is keep growing, always be learning, find your passion and vision and lift those around it. Thank you for your time today. If you have any questions, feel free to post them and chat. If you would like to check out diversity, we're on linkedin and Twitter at the same handle, you can also join our amazing Network by going to diversity, diversity with an H uh dot com slash join us. Um So I'll be around to take questions if you have any. Thank you so much. All right, I guess there are none. So uh thank you. Thank you, Patricia. Thank you, Natalie and Kimberly, feel free to connect.

And if you have any questions or thoughts after uh today, feel free to ping me on linkedin more than happy to, to chat with uh with any other fellow woman in tech. Thanks everybody.