Empowering Others: A Conversation with LeBaron Meyers

LeBaron is a connector, an innovative business development executive and a proponent of raising our collective emotional intelligence to best solve today’s greatest challenges. As President and Chief Business Officer of #NotMe, she’s passionate about creating and sharing practical, scalable solutions that protect and empower employees and employers to safely and justly do their best work. 

LeBaron’s diverse background includes seven years in the corporate world of investment management, a year on the radio in San Francisco as a morning show host, a nine-month sabbatical studying yoga and meditation in Southeast Asia, and eight years in the startup landscape of digital media and tech. 

"When your inner dialogue doesn't align with your external environment, things won't turn out right," explains Mayah Curtis. Join Pratima and Mayah as they discuss how through leadership, you can create an environment of empowerment and elevation. 
____________________________________________________________

Mayah Curtis is a Senior Principal in Commercial Services at IQVIA. With over fifteen years of experience in healthcare analytics and technology consulting services in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, she is widely recognized for her visionary executive leadership, highlighted by a passion for entrepreneurship and organizational growth. Mayah built and led the rapid growth of commercial analytics and outsourcing practices spanning sales, marketing, client services and corporate development.

At IQVIA, Mayah is leading the innovation and commercialization of new artificial intelligence machine learning offerings across U.S.businesses and in global partnerships. She also established the U.S. commercial outsourcing practice nationwide and led significant revenue and operational expansion; founded the IQVIA Academy, a high-potential leadership development program with a healthcare industry footprint of alums; drove acquisitions and integrations, achieving new market entries; and, led critical consulting engagements.  Mayah’s achievements have been recognized multiple times by IQVIA with her nominations for the CEO Leadership Award. 

Prior to IQVIA, Mayah held consulting roles at IBM Watson and OptumHealth.  She completed clinical research at Harvard Medical School, University of California San Francisco, and UMASS Memorial Medical Center.

Mayah leads a life coaching and consulting practice, New Beginnings.  Her focus is on ‘coming alive inside to begin living one’s legacy’.  She is a “Designing Your Life” certified coach, one of a few hundred in the world.    

Mayah holds a Master of Business Administration from Georgetown University, and a Bachelors from College of the Holy Cross.  She serves as VP on the San Francisco City College Board Foundation and a Director on the CMR Institute Board.  She’s a mentor with Girls, Inc. Women of Impact and SHE-CAN (advising young women from post-conflict countries to become leaders who change their nation). In the Healthcare Businesswomen's Association, she is a Rising Star Award recipient and annually in the professional mentorship program.  She is engaged in several Silicon Valley professional leadership organizations.  She is a guest lecturer and regularly publishes on leadership and management.  With Habitat for Humanity Global Village, she led and volunteered throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America. 

"Do you want to be safe or do you want to be free?" 
As a child, Swati learned from her parents about resilience. With a father who lived through refugee camps to a mother who taught her about pushing through regardless of experiences, Swati learned early to fight for what she wanted. 
After taking time off to care for her children, she put her foot down and followed her principals. Unwilling to take a step back after a break, Swati stuck to her values and would not compromise. 
Join in on the conversation with Pratima Gluckman and Swati Bhatia as they discuss how to use your support systems and apply resilience and find the purpose to keep moving on. 
____________________________________________________________
Swati Bhatia is Chief Payments Risk Officer at Stripe Inc., where her team’s responsibility is to ensure that financial losses are minimized across Stripe’s platform, financial crimes are mitigated, and to ensure Compliance.

Prior to Stripe, Swati held various Vice President positions at PayPal. In her last role, she headed a global team of 700+ associates comprising Business Analysts, Data Scientists, Product Managers, Program Managers and Back-end Fraud / Credit Operations Associates. Her team was responsible for managing losses and risk experience for PayPal’s Payments business globally.

She has built her career as someone who solves business problems and creates impact at scale and who knows that impact created through an inspired and aligned team is far scalable and enjoyable than attempting to create impact through individual brilliance. She strives to inspire the people around her to be their best. She is adept at building and leading cross-functional teams and driving cultural change.

Swati holds an M.S. (Finance) from Birla Institute of Technology & Sciences, Pilani (1993-97).  She is married with two sons aged 14 & 11, and lives in Palo Alto CA.

Discover the keys to negotiating your pay while avoiding conversations that could deter you from earning a higher potential salary. Join me, Pratima Gluckman, in this conversation with Nadia De Ala, Leadership & Negotiation Coaching for Women of Color in Tech, on this episode of Getting to 50/50: Conversations to Bridge the Gender Gap.
____________________________________________________________
Leadership and negotiation coach who specializes in helping women of color in technology thrive and elevate pay, positions, and purpose. Her mission is to close the leadership and wage gap for women of color, one bad-ass leader at a time. Nadia earned a Co-Active Coach Certification from the Coaches Training Institute through one-on-one, group coaching and workshops. She empowers her clients to activate their voices, fully negotiate their value, and get excited about their careers again. Previously, she was an audio engineer and in senior tech sales for thriving enterprise corporations and rapid growth startups like Booking.com and HelloSign which were acquired by Dropbox. Through her practice today, she has helped women of color leaders navigate, grow, and thrive at companies like Expedia, Google, and Lift. 

Make way for change: the change that you are creating within your sphere of influence and the change we would all like to see when it comes to women in tech.

_____________________________________________________
Olga V. Mack is a blockchain and distributed ledger technology strategist, security professional, experienced board director, nationally-recognized author, public speaker, and impactful women’s advocate. She is the CEO of Parley Pro, a collaborative & intuitive contract platform. Olga was instrumental in passing AB 2658 and SB 838, which define blockchain and form a working blockchain group in California. She co-authored Fundamentals of Smart Contracts Security (Momentum Press, March 2019) and she is writing a book about blockchain and distributed ledger technology business models. Olga leads the Smart Contracts Security Alliance to help enterprises innovate in blockchain securely. She spoke at TEDxSanFrancisco about the impact potential of blockchain and smart contracts and at SXSW about blockchain business models. Olga was previously General Counsel at ClearSlide. She also worked at Zoosk, Visa, Yahoo, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. She serves on the California Law Revision Commission (appointed by Governor Jerry Brown).

At what point does someone become an advocate for others? for yourself? 
Could it be as simple as taking the thing that makes you uncomfortable or the thing that inspires you to awaken yourself to the reality that surrounds you?

Pierre offers his unique viewpoint for how sees the men and women in his life, in the workplace, and in the world.  Join Pierre and Pratima in this raw, thought-inspiring conversation about bias, advocacy, and developing yourself.
_________________________________________________________________________

Pierre Vannier is an ex software engineer and serial entrepreneur. He pledges for a more diverse Tech and more women in Tech and created Flint and Flint Academy, respectively a Tech consulting Firm and a Remote Tech bootcamp dedicated to ramp up software engineers to new technologies after they lost their jobs because of COVID19 crisis. 

Both Flint and Flint Academy are animated with humanist values at heart.

Pierre has also a podcast called Refactor where he interviews developers (women and men) to talk about their experiences and how they became developers. This helps evangelize and maybe could create vocation.

Pierre's vision is to create companies which make sense for Society and acting also in mecenat and solidarity, giving both time and money to a children's hospital in France.

A seasoned, successful women of color who has navigated the world of leadership in Fortune 100 companies, Janet Miller Evans has a plethora of knowledge to share. In our conversation, Janet and I speak about the difficulty for leaders to speak up, and how to bring your authentic self. How do women teach our girls to form successes early? What does it take to be seen and heard in meetings? Listen to this week's Getting to 50-50 Podcast with Pratima Gluckman.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Janet Miller Evans, MPA, PCC, EQCC, is President of Entevos, an international coaching and consulting professional services company.  Recognized as a business and community leader, Janet is known for achieving results through effective strategic planning, hiring and coaching winning teams, building excellent client relationships, and practical negotiation skills.  She shares the knowledge gained from extensive and diverse business, professional, and personal experiences, to guide others to reach their goals.  Following her passion for coaching and motivating executives, teams, and individuals to unleash untapped areas of their potential, Janet founded Entevos, In her role as International Coach, Janet guides clients to re-engineer their current thinking and act on self-identified possibilities enabling a complete transformation. Through administration and debriefs of neuroscience research and artificial intelligence assessment tools, along with the use of mindfulness practices, Janet assists clients in creating solutions to reach their goals.  Using knowledge gained and lessons learned through 30 years of sales, operations,  P&L, and entrepreneurial experience as the foundation, Janet founded Entevos. The principal tenet of Entevos is to foster a culture of trust that inspires motivation, innovation, and optimum levels of engagement.   She guides clients to co-create environments for success that unleash empowerment for "being you."  Janet specializes in coaching business executives, organizational team development, and individuals in transition. Her certifications include the International Coach Federation Professional Certified Coach (PCC), Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Coach (EQCC), and Envisia Learning NeuroView Assessor.  Janet is a Network Leader for Six Seconds and an Alliance Associate with Envisia Learning, Inc.   Partial client list includes Mills College, AT&T, San Jose Evergreen Community College, Merritt College, National Black MBA Association, Inc., San Francisco Chapter, employees of UN/UNICEF, PG&E, Fire Fighter’s First Credit Union, California State Bar Association, IT, financial services, lobbying, legal, real estate, telecommunications, and internet industries, and in the countries of Africa, Sudan, Canada, and France.  Janet began her career in the government utility industry and progressed thru Fortune 100 companies in the healthcare, logistics, IT, internet, and telecommunications industries. She held various roles in TVA, FedEx, IBM, UPS, and Comcast, including leading sales and delivery project teams. Janet received excellent reviews for fostering successful client experiences, as well as many honors and recognition.  She has led teams of over 150 employees. Janet attained target revenue goals of 450 million dollars, managed P&Ls up to two million dollars, and consistently delivered on key performance indices. Janet was the first African American female field sales manager at Federal Express. She was named National Account Manager of the year and achieved five President’s Club awards. While at IBM, she participated in the Executive Leadership Council. Clients included companies in the commercial real estate, health care, financial services, pharmaceutical industries, small and medium businesses (SMB), and non-profit organizations.  Janet’s community leadership experience has includ

Sandra Shpilberg is a digital health entrepreneur and the author of New Startup Mindset, in which she shares her founder’s story of starting, building and exiting her digital health startup, all while not following the Silicon Valley formula, and not being the formula (woman, immigrant and non-programmer). She tackles the startup myths that constrain entrepreneurs and offers key lessons for current and aspiring founders to free them to create the companies that only they can create, and to do so on their own terms. 

What's it like to reenter the workforce in the tech industry after a nearly two decade gap on your resume? Elizabeth shares her story in this episode of Getting to 50/50 where she and Pratima discuss the challenges of agism and of being a female in the workforce. Find out how persistence impacted her, and take away a few key pieces of advice for any age woman in the workforce.
______________________________________

Elizabeth Andrew is a top-producing technology sales executive, startup advisor, and TEDx speaker, who has established herself as a leader, motivator, and role model with her inspiring story of career reentry by breaking barriers into the San Francisco technology space – at over 50 years old, after a 17-year career break. She had a great run as a top-producing sales leader and senior manager at HelloSign, where she broke sales records and was the lead contributor to the rapid revenue growth of the company which led to the $230M acquisition by Dropbox. Elizabeth is an Advisory Board Member for several startups, serves as an advisor to Women Serve On Boards, and was selected for The CLUB of Silicon Valley's 2016 Incubator leadership program. In her early career, Elizabeth was a VP and Director with Wells Fargo Asset Management, where she opened up the New England Region as a Mutual Fund Wholesaler and grew territory assets from $0 to $70 million.

Sajida shares her unique viewpoint in this intriguing conversation - What happens when we speak up rather than sit quietly regarding issues that affect women in the workplace. From attending one of the most sought after colleges, BITS Pilani on a partial scholarship to working with strong masculine Wall Street personalities. She used each of her experiences to prepare herself and gain the courage to lead and address social norms. Sajida discusses how she developed her leadership style to make it her own, rather than conforming herself. 

_____________________________________________________________________________

Bio: Sajida Kaliyadan lead a product team as the Head of Buyer Experience at Atlassian with an exciting charter in pioneering a unified buyer experience by taking world-class consumer capabilities and applying them to a B2B model.

She said she has had a zig zag career path that she sought out consciously now and unconsciously at first,  to further her growth and learning. She began as a developer and then engineering manager in banking technology for global banks such as Citibank and Deutsche Bank, working in India, Singapore and New York. Looking for a change from large organizations, she joined a privately held algorithmic trading systems provider in New York - where she was the first female employee wherer she worked in the demanding and challenging environs of Wall Street, a huge learning experience for her.

Keen on building more customer facing products, she invested in a part time MBA at NYU Stern. She later transitioned to a career in product management which she loves in Walmart Labs after a move to the West Coast. Sajida led a portfolio that drove over $800MM in annual revenue. She was responsible for the digital transformation of gift registry and digital pharmacy including a patent pending innovation (Techcrunch, Fortune) for digital pharmacy refills. Seeking to further challenge herself and to learn new domains, she joined Atlassian. I am super pumped about the company’s mission to unleash the potential of all teams - whether its a small non profit or NASA’s projects to drive Rovers on Mars, Atlassian’s products have a huge impact.