Unlocking What 40 Years In Silicon Valley Taught Her About Real Success With Kamini Ramani

* Website
* Book: Lotus Leadership: A Modern Playbook of Ancient Wisdom
* LinkedIn

Chapters
00:00:01 – Cold Start & Intro
00:06:19 – The Thing Great Leaders Stopped Caring About
00:09:45 – The Five Traits Behind Lotus Leadership
00:14:26 – Ambition Without the Burnout
00:18:32 – The Hidden Cost of Visible Work
00:21:26 – Mentor, Sponsor, or Champion?
00:28:07 – No Mud, No Lotus
00:30:49 – The Doubt These Leaders Didn’t Have
00:35:33 – What Silicon Valley Gets Right (and Wrong)
00:39:47 – What’s Your Metric of Abundance?

Kamini Ramani (00:03)
I was really surprised how they cared less and less about being likable.

They tapped into the inheritance that they had, either their cultural heritage or their family heritage or the wisdom of their ancestors, to channel a feeling that I’ve been put on this world for a larger purpose.

There’s a saying that there’s no mud, no lotus. The lotus blossoms from the mud. So, I knew there would have been challenges along the way as they got to the top. But Skot, I was blown away by the searing experiences they had gone through.

Skot Waldron (00:45)
When I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the world. I’m helping leaders and I’m helping teams communicate better. I’m helping them build trust faster and actually enjoy working together. I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot. I’ve spoken at national architectural firms. I’ve spoken for pharmaceutical company offsites. I’ve spoken at associations, you name it.

With 99% of attendees of all those events, over 1800 people have reviewed me at this point. 99% of them saying they got some value. That’s pretty awesome. Even the caterers have thanked me. And if they are thanking me and they’ve heard a lot of talks and they’re busy doing their jobs, that’s saying something. If you’re an event planner looking for a speaker who’s really easy to work with, trust me, I want to be the last thing you’re worried about on event day. I’m going to take care of you. And who actually delivers value for your audience that they are going to use on Monday morning when they return to the office, then let’s talk.

My next guest has spent a long time interviewing and getting really deep with some of the, I guess, most profound women in leadership in Silicon Valley, interviewing these women, gathering insights and gold from them, and trying to understand what it is that has gotten them to where they are and what are the things they’ve had to endure? What are the things that they believe about leadership and culture and what it takes to get to a place and build a meaningful life.

And Silicon Valley, as you know, as you’ve heard, I’m sure, is full of ambition and full of drive and full of big ideas and how do we make sure that we reel those things in? Learn the good things from Silicon Valley but also learn about the bad things from Silicon Valley and how we can make sure that we are taking the good and amplifying that within our own organizations. These women that she has interviewed have a lot to share and a lot to give to all of us.

Kamini Ramani built a 40-year career in Silicon Valley advising Steve Jobs and serving as Chief Marketing Officer of Mayfield Fund. And she’s worked and advised many, many other companies that you have heard of. She grew up in Mumbai and holds a Masters in Communication from Stanford University and a Masters in English Literature from Yale University.

And we’re going to get talk to her a little bit. She’s very excited. Her book just hit USA Today bestseller. So, she’s super excited about that. I’m excited for her. And she’s got a lot of gold to give us on the show. So here we go.

Well, hello, come on Kamini it’s good to see you.

Kamini Ramani (03:34)
Good to see you, Skot.

Skot Waldron (03:36)
You have a new book out, and we’ll promote that a little bit at the end here, but I think the gold of your experience in the place where you’ve lived in Silicon Valley for you know 40-ish years now, there is a wealth of information there that I think we all need to benefit from. And I’m so grateful you’re on the show to share that with us.

Kamini Ramani (04:04)
I love that you’re having me and happy to share, you know, the Silicon Valley state of mind, as they like to say.

Skot Waldron (04:12)
I’m intrigued. I’ve had a client in Santa Clara Valley there, and visiting the Silicon Valley area was so like eye-opening to me. I’d never been there in, you know, 40 years of my life. And then visiting there and seeing all the things that are going on, it’s intriguing. There’s a lot. I mean, there’s technology billboards everywhere. Here, the billboards are just law firms and, you know, accident attorneys. Over there it’s all technology stuff.

Kamini Ramani (04:43)
And especially now in the age of AI, it’s all about you don’t need humans, hire this AI agent. I mean, it’s just become so sort of all AI all the time. But I moved here in 1984, which is over 40 years ago. I grew up in India and then I came first to Yale University to do a master’s in English literature. That was a year-long master’s, but I decided very quickly, I couldn’t hack another New Haven winter, especially with an $80 coat from Salvation Army, because I was a graduate student on a scholarship. I couldn’t get the fancy Canada Goose or whatever jacket. So, I came out to California, and I did a second master’s at Stanford. And I started working in Silicon Valley in 1986. So, it’s a 40-year, you know, 40 years ago is when I started working in technology, both for small companies as well as for a venture capital firm for the last 20 years of my career. So, I saw the valley from many different angles over a you know 40-year cycle.

Skot Waldron (05:52)
And you have all that in your book, which is so cool. I mean, I want to start with this question though. And I hope this is a little bit different than some of the other things that you’re getting. But after talking to, you know, 30 plus accomplished leaders in this book, what did they care about less than what you expected them to care about?

Kamini Ramani (06:19)
Very good question. And nobody’s asked me that before. You know, first of all, they’re all 33 women leaders who care a lot about the world. Okay, so that’s what they care about. They care about the impact of their actions. They care about their teams. They care about their families. They care about their communities. So, you know, they are naturally sort of they have these broad circles of caring. That’s just who they are. They’re not sort of inward looking, they’re much more outward looking.

So, as a result of that abundant mindset that they have, I was really surprised how they cared less and less about being likable. Likeable. That’s one of the traps women leaders fall into. You’re trying to be likable. You know, you’re always sort of being judged anyway, it feels like. So sometimes you shrink into smaller places, so that you can be seen as likable and not that difficult person in the room and you know, not the buzzkill or whatever the derogatory term of the day is.

But I found that these are women who’ve achieved their potential. They were CEOs, they are CEOs, you know, founder CEOs, they’re movement creators, they’re top-ranking academics, investors, and so on. So, they had one of those I’m going to do what I have to do, and I really don’t care what the room thinks about it, because I know my path and I’m following it.

Skot Waldron (07:53.)
That is so fascinating. And I have seen that too with some of the women leaders that I’ve worked with and I’m wondering where do you feel that comes from?

Kamini Ramani (08:05)
You know, it comes from confidence and conviction as you grow. Maybe in your 20s, like you know, all of us in our teens, we’re so defined by how our friends look at us. We have no self-identity. It’s all defined by who’s the popular crowd, am I in the right group, etc.? Then, you know, in your 20s, in your college days, you finally find your small group of friends. And, you know, they kind of support you through everything. And then as you grow older, you get the kind of friends around you that, you know, really value you for what you are. So just how you grow socially in confidence, I think professionally also you grow in confidence.

I spoke to a group of young women earlier this week at Uber because I’m giving corporate talks on the framework, and I could see that they’re still a little bit tentative. They’re early in their careers; they’re trying to figure out how do I speak up in a meeting without offending someone and so on. But I think these women have, you know, come into their own over decades. Now, don’t get me wrong, they’re not brutal, unlikable women. Actually, they have teams who are crazy loyal to them, who follow them from job to job, you know, who just adore them. But they’ve figured out a way to be comfortable in the duality of being aggressive and compassionate, assertive and empathetic. So, I think it comes from as you build conviction in your own powers that you care less about what the world is telling you.

Skot Waldron (09:34)
Was there a common theme throughout these leaders you were speaking to that surprised you, maybe from what you thought versus what you ended up with?

Kamini Ramani (09:45)
Yeah, I organized the traits of the five traits of the framework from deep conversations with 33 leaders and actually conversations with a broader group of over 100 women. And so, they fell into these buckets really based on the recurring feats. Because I wanted to make sure that the framework was broad enough to, you know, include everybody. And one of the ones was that I just alluded to this thing about combining so-called feminine and so-called masculine ways of leading. I mean, not very many men stay up at night thinking about am I likable? Okay. They just go, they get the job done, and yes, if you have to break some glass along the way, you do it.

So, I think that the fact that the women were also demonstrating that they could achieve the ambition and not get trapped in this likability bubble is a trait that I call, you know, fusing so-called feminine and masculine styles of bleeding. For instance, one of the women said, you know, I’ve been told I have a dazzling smile, but I’m also a ruthless negotiator. And those two can go hand in hand. So that was one theme that came through really clearly.

The second theme that came through really clearly is around curiosity. You know, they were not climbing the rungs of a ladder, which is so great because in the age of AI, the ladder’s been kicked out from under us anyway. And so, they zigzagged across a rock wall to get to the corner office or whatever the equivalent of the corner office is in their field. And by doing that, it was very freeing because they didn’t feel if I don’t get the next promotion or if I don’t make partner by year seven at the firm, I’ve fallen off the track.

A third one, and this was the most surprising one, Skot, of the women who are in long-term life partnerships, and I would say 90% of them were, there was a real harmonious relationship they’d managed to develop. So that the success was considered a family project. There wasn’t this contention about is it your career or mine, keeping 50-50 score in the moment. You did the laundry yesterday; I take out the garbage today. It was seen as a partnership over time where it evens out in the end. Maybe I take some time off a caregiving of my aging parent because I have to right now. And you know, you keep the, you know, you take the front line on the career but then my turn will come.

And so that was the most interesting discovery because Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In from 2013, gave women the permission to pursue the ambition. But it had a sub–unintended consequence effect of if you lean out, you’re irrelevant. And so, there was an anxiety around it. And women felt they had to stay on the path at all times. These women have taken huge career breaks for many different reasons and still come back to rise to the top. So that was the third and most surprising discovery, which is the third trait of the framework.

The fourth one is abundance. They define abundance as more than material wealth. Here in Silicon Valley, where I’ve lived for the last 40 years, you’re never rich enough or thin enough or beautiful enough, right? So, if, you know, you’re looking who has the next monster compound, who has the next cool yacht? Who’s getting the private flight to space? You know, you’re always pursuing things. Versus the women, yes, of course they enjoy their things. They’re unapologetic about the success they’ve created for their families. But they define abundance as uplifting their teams, as giving back to their community, as family harmony, as a metric of net worth. So those were the four traits that emerged in themes.

And the fifth one is once you can do all four, you own your power and you live your life in 3D.

Skot Waldron (13:44)
You said when you were talking about, you know, the luxuries of Silicon Valley and who’s going to get that private flight to, and I thought you were going to say Asia or Spain, but you said space and I had to remember, oh my gosh, we have private flights in space now. So that was funny.

Kamini Ramani (14:04)
Yeah, no, it was a thing. It is a thing. You know, because you can sign up, right? Blue Origin or whoever. So, people are signing up.

Skot Waldron (14:13)
That cracked me up. It was just something but like check my brain. You’ve spent 40-ish years around some really incredibly ambitious people in Silicon Valley. I mean, things move fast. If you don’t move fast enough, you’re either outdated or you’re irrelevant or you get run over or you’re just out. I want to know because I really want to understand the idea of, like, ambition and what it means to have ambition. Does it mean that I have to work all night and then I have to, you know, forget seeing my kids’ baseball games? And like what does it require to be, “whatever your definition of successful” is, to be successful and to have a meaningful career?

Kamini Ramani (15:14)
So that was one of the reasons I wrote the book. I wanted to give young rising stars a playbook where you can build a meaningful career, but also a meaningful life. You know, you don’t have to rise and burn out at the same time. I think of my framework as yoga for business, where it’s something that it’s a practice for life and it teaches you endurance, but also flexibility. You need strength and you also need stillness, and it’s something that’s very calming and resilient. And what I mean by that is ambition is this drive that fuels you to achieve your career goals. But it can also be something around the ambition to be an amazing mother and wife and daughter and friend and neighbor. That’s also ambition.

And I think one of the things that I saw as a threat among these 33 women. 30 are of Indian origin like me, and 3 are women of color from other communities, is they tapped into the inheritance that they had, either their cultural heritage or their family heritage or the wisdom of their ancestors, to channel a feeling that I’ve been put on this world for a larger purpose, and I’ll do the actions it takes to achieve it, but I’m not going to get obsessed about the outcome. You know, do your best and the rest will follow is a shorthand way of saying it. And that was very freeing to them because they said they didn’t feel they had to compete with the Joneses. They didn’t feel there was a ticking clock by which they had to achieve a certain rung on the ladder, otherwise they become irrelevant.

So, I think you can be extremely ambitious and do great things without feeling depleted and you know, right now, unfortunately, in this AI age, you know, there’s all this thing about 996, which is the schedule that companies are working on 9 hours a day for what is it, 9 hours a day, for 6 days a week. It’s from 9 to 9, 6 days a week. Sorry, that’s what it is. It was a Chinese way of working. And that’s really unhealthy, especially for these young kids who are here in San Francisco, because that’s where we live. I mean, they don’t have a life. Because Sunday you’re just recovering from that 9 to 9, 6 day a week thing you’ve just put in. And they don’t have relationships, they don’t have time to follow their hobbies, you know, they’re just running on empty.

So, I think putting out a framework where these are women who are looked up to, because you know, one is the CEO of Waymo, the self-driving car, another one is on the board of Levi Strauss, another one is on the board of Uber, another one is the former CEO of PepsiCo. I mean, these are well known companies that these companies– that these women are leading or have led. Zoom, you know. I think readers can get inspiration that you can reach the top without, you know, following this kind of burnout recipe.

Skot Waldron (18:32)
What’s it going to take to get people to believe that? So, part of the reason I’m asking this is I’m doing a lot of research on my own book right now. And one of my arguments in here is, we reward visible work in our culture. And it’s just been something from the industrial age that we picked with from Frederick Winslow Taylor and a lot of his methodologies of coming up with timing, manufacturing work and visible work and seeing that. And I look at some of the things we talk about here and this idea of where we go with our thinking culture and the people that produce work that way versus produce work by the clock. And by the clock mentality has created this I have to grind. I have to make sure that everything I do is visible. I have to make sure that people know I’m working at 3 a.m. to see how “dedicated” I am, or how much of a get or done type person I am. Right.

And we have this because when people, I will say this: when we see people like that in our meetings, maybe as a leader, I’m looking at somebody, I’m like, wow, Janice got on that immediately. She’s a real go-getter. Like she is on it. But then, is there an invisible pressure, an invisible weight that Janice is also carrying that I’m rewarding because I’m saying, good job, Janice. I love how hard you’re working on this thing, you know, because I see her emails at 4 a.m.

Kamini Ramani (20:13.)
Yeah, you know, you’re onto something and I’m glad you’re writing deeper about it. I think it’s important and you know, I hadn’t thought of the visible work as a trend and a phrase and you’re going deep into it. I’m looking forward to reading your book.

You know, I would say there’s a saying, I don’t know if it’s Silicon Valley saying, but there’s a saying that says culture eats strategy for breakfast, and culture is set from the top. So, if you’re the leader of a company, you should reject an email that comes in at 4 a.m. Far from rewarding it and saying, yay, you, you know, you call that out and say, hey, I don’t need you emailing at 4 a.m. Like, you know, set that culture. And now, you know, some clever employees scheduled the email to go out at 4 a.m. And then, you know, they’re out partying at 9 p.m. But that aside, you know, so that’s one thing you can do as a leader is sort of set the culture of, you know, hey, we do want to have balance, and it’s I from the top kind of sanction that.

The second one is, you know, as you’re growing through the ranks, I think it’s really important for you to find a champion. And I use the word champion deliberately. So, I have a whole section in the book about the difference between mentors, sponsors, and champions. Mentors are someone who guide you. I bet you guide a lot of people. Sponsors are someone who speak for you when you’re not in the room. And champions, that’s someone who goes the extra mile to help you achieve your ambition.

So, an example from my book, there was a woman who was the CTO, chief technology officer of a company called SurveyMonkey. We all use SurveyMonkey for surveys. And she really wanted to grow into a business role, didn’t want to stay in the you know, technical track, and went to the CEO who said, you need to understand finance if you’re going to be more than a technology person. And then he gave her exposure to the financials of the company. And she worked with the finance teams and learned all that. Then she gets promoted to president. And she said to the CEO, one day I’d like to be a CEO. And he says, well, one of the things people look for when they hire a CEO for a company is if you’ve had any board experience. So, you need to get on an independent board of a private company to learn how a company works and I’ll help you get on your first board.

Now that’s what I mean about a champion. It’s that extra step of saying; I know it’s hard for women to get on boards. I have people in my network who are looking for board members. I’ll recommend you and help you get on your first board. And it would have been a wonderful, happy ending to her story. But sadly, the CEO of that company, it’s a well-known story, was Sheryl Sandberg’s husband, Dave Goldberg, who died very suddenly when they were on holiday in Mexico, until she lost her champion. And when they decided who would be CEO of that company, she would have been the natural one. She was already president of the company, but they passed her over. But the fact is, all along her time there, Dave Goldberg was her champion.

Skot Waldron (23:22)
We need those people. And we need to be those people.

Kamini Ramani (23:27)
Yeah. And they’re all male allies because honestly, let’s face it, most of the leaders in power are men.

Skot Waldron (23:34)
They are. And I want to ask you about that. There’s some research from a colleague of mine, and I actually had him on this podcast. Don Barden was talking about the, he wrote a book called “Here Come the Girls,” where it talks about the tipping point of ratio of female executives versus male executives. And right now, it’s predominantly male, but the wave of women executives is growing and that it will become, they will become, they will outnumber the male executives, the ratio, right? Like it will become more female than it is male at higher levels of executive leadership. Are you seeing some of that wave happen? Do you support that or no?

Kamini Ramani (24:27)
I’m really sorry to say, Skot, that if you look at the stats of the number of Fortune 500 companies led by women CEOs, I don’t think the numbers have changed. They’re sub 5%, probably. If you look at the number of women founders who raise venture capital money, it dropped below 3%. It was already 3%. I think it’s like two some percent now. So even though there is a lot of talent and you know women rising in the ranks, there was a book that came out last year by some McKinsey partners called The Broken Rung, which sort of examined this thing of women coming into the workforce in droves, but then there’s this gap between them rising to the top.

And so, I think if I look at the tippy tippy top, I don’t think it’s changed that dramatically, unfortunately. But I’m hoping that, you know, with the kinds of work that this author seems to be doing and that with more male allies and champions and many more networks of support that you know that gap will get redressed. And also, you need more women leaders to hire and promote more women leaders, you know?

Skot Waldron (25:39)
There you go. And I believe one of his arguments in there is that the generations, the younger generations that are coming through are responding better to women leadership and the characteristics of women leadership as opposed to some of the male leadership that has been taught in our culture and through the ages, and through their mentors who probably came from a more industrial age type leadership model. And so that was, I think I believe that’s part of his argument is too. Do you support that idea?

Kamini Ramani (26:17)
Yeah, and you know, there are two– there’s a funny little distinction people here in Silicon Valley make between geek– geek culture and bro culture. Have you heard these terms?

Skot Waldron (26:27)
No. Please tell me.

Kamini Ramani (26:29)
Ok. So, geeks are, you know, it used to be derogatory, but it’s not anymore. It’s people who are super techie and super nerdy. You know, they get into code and they’re like, you know, writing all the stuff and they may not have great social skills or whatnot, but they’re very– they’re like focused and they’re genius of what they do. That’s being geeky.

Bro is the kind of backslapping, hey, let’s go get a drink, let’s go play golf, which can be very exclusive to people who don’t look like you, who are not willing to go do that. Hey, let’s go to the strip club. Well, you’re not going to invite your woman colleague to go to the strip club. So, when there’s even in you know, in Silicon Valley companies, there is geek culture. But women who are technically savvy say, I can deal with geek culture. I can be as geeky as the geeks. I know how to write code better than some of my male colleagues.

But that bro culture? That is insidious and it’s hard to navigate as a woman. So, I think part of it is, again, you know, cultural shifts have to happen. And I’m not saying that it’s all bleak. I know there are many great companies around here, and I know young, both men and women working in these companies doing great work. I just was answering to say, I don’t know at the high level if the numbers have moved and changed that much.

Skot Waldron (27:46)
That’s fair. Did any of the findings, I guess, did any of the women that you interviewed change your mind about something that you believed previously?

Kamini Ramani (28:02)
Yes. Again, a really good question that I haven’t given enough thought to, but I didn’t assume that their journeys to the top were smooth. Okay. I assumed that there would have been hurdles and challenges along the way. I mean, the reason I picked the lotus as the, you know, motif for the book partly is because there’s a saying that there’s no mud, no lotus. The lotus blossoms from the mud. So, I knew there would have been challenges along the way as they got to the top. But Skot, I was blown away by the searing experiences they had gone through, many of them, and how openly they shared it with me because I said I was writing the book for the next generation.

So, they trusted me with stories. I mean, three of the– I won’t go into the stories because people can read the book, but three examples were a woman who pulled her mother out of a car crash when she was 11 years old and her mother died in her arms. Another was a woman who had a brain aneurysm rupture while at work, went off for an 18-month rehab, you know, and came back. And when she came back, her boss said, “What would you like?” And she said, give me a showstopper project so I can show that I’m back. And the third was the example of a woman whose father died in a factory accident when she was in her teens, and her mother was left raising 5 girls in India, which is not easy. Being a widow too in India, there’s a lot of stigma around that. That wasn’t easy. She, you know, made it through, went to engineering school, came to the US, and is now CEO of a $40 billion company.

So, I thought, man, if these women had those kinds of searing experiences, and still if you look at them today, they’re all, you know, they’re on the covers of magazines. I was like, wow, if this book is going to show rising stars, that life will throw you curved balls and even some really tough ones, but you can still survive those and fulfill your ambition.

Skot Waldron (30:13)
You have these experiences. Some people have way bigger experiences than others. And I think sometimes we compare ourselves to those and we’re like; I don’t know if I can be as resilient as that person. I mean, when you see some of the things that they go through, like, I don’t know if I could do that, I don’t know if I’m equipped for this, I don’t know if I’ve lived those things yet. I guess you could call it imposter syndrome. Do you see a lot of that? Did you hear any of that through your interviews with these women?

Kamini Ramani (30:49)
You know that was a surprising finding. Not a single one talked about imposter syndrome. Partly because they’re brown, most cases immigrant women, they had to push through a trifecta of challenge to get to where– to the next step and the next step. They didn’t have time to self-first, you know, sort of all the self-doubt. Yes, every once in a while, they’d be like, am I really ready enough for this next thing I’m being offered? You know? Can I lean in? Because there’s this stat about women wait till they’re 100% qualified to apply for a job and you know, men apply when they’re 60% qualified. But there wasn’t that deep like, oh my God, am I good enough? Because listen, you have to have conviction. The world is telling you all kinds of other stuff anyway. So, I actually didn’t see very much of that.

Skot Waldron (31:35)
That’s fascinating. I hear about it a lot with I guess, you know, women coming up through the ranks, whether it’s vice presidents, directors, some executives, when they come into a new position, I will hear some of that imposter syndrome talk but that’s really, I think that’s an interesting thing to think about with these specific women and these specific roles at these specific companies, there’d be an interesting trend to analyze.

Kamini Ramani (32:09)
Yeah. You should look at it. I mean I spent hours and hours talking to them. So, I think I would have picked it up. It’s not that it was buried and, you know, they chose not to talk about it. Yeah, that was actually a surprising, surprising observation for me.

Skot Waldron (32:24)
Yeah. Do you believe you can have a meaningful career and still be relentlessly ambitious? Or do you think those things come into conflict at some point? Like at some point, there’s going to be some, you’re going to have to decide.

Kamini Ramani (32:43)
So, if I heard the question right, are you saying that you have to have a cap on your ambition in order to have a meaningful life? Can you repeat that?

Skot Waldron (32:54)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, if I want to have a meaningful career, but I still want to be really ambitious in that thing. I think that, you know, there’s some level where people would believe like that is what it takes to have a meaningful career and to create an impact. But do you think that catches up to you at some point? Do you think you’re going to be like at some point you have to just decide something at. Like is that going to last?

Kamini Ramani (33:25)
I don’t think so. I don’t think there’s any ceiling to what it means to build a meaningful career or to completely fulfill your ambition. I mean, a great example from my book is there’s a woman who worked in regular, you know, tech companies here, well-known ones, eBay, Oracle, and so on. And in her 40s, she was carpooling her kids to school and realizing that it wasn’t a good system to get her kids to school and back. So, she was thinking of taking a career break in order to partly to be the carpool driver. And then she said, wait a minute, I’m going to create a company that solves this problem. So, at the time it was called an Uber for kids, because you know, Ubers, you couldn’t put kids in Ubers. There were restrictions.

And she started out as that mom who figured out a carpool service. Today that company’s valued at a couple of billion dollars. It’s raised hundreds of millions in revenue. It’s called Zum, Z-U-M and she just did it to solve a problem that she was finding, and her ambition knew no bounds, but she’s doing meaningful work. That company has since pivoted where they’re not doing domestic service for families anymore, but she’s taken over school buses in, you know, 20 school districts across the country where they’re running these electrified school bus services because the school bus service was so antiquated, you couldn’t track where your kid was or what was going on. And she said, “Wait, I can track my pizza being delivered to me, but parents don’t know anything about their kids. Once they put them in the school bus, they’re out of the system.”

So, she’s building a huge company on that premise. And she’s a great example of someone who founded a company in her 40s. She was just named to the Forbes most powerful women list of 50 over 50. So, it just shows that you don’t have to put a lid on what you think of as impact or ambition or, you know, doing what you want you feel you know, want to do.

Skot Waldron (35:28)
Well said. Well said. Okay, couple questions here. What’s one thing Silicon Valley gets right about leadership?

Kamini Ramani (35:39)
Dream big. Every founder I’ve worked with, whether it was Steve Jobs back in the day or the founders of Lyft or Poshmark, I’ve worked with so many, so many different founders. They honestly say, you know, their common thing is, I want to change the world. I want to change the way people live and work and play. It depends on what they’re doing. The Lyft founders, 20 somethings, never run a company before. They wanted to disrupt transportation, and they said, oh, your friend has a car, maybe they can be your driver. So, there’s just this permission to be audacious, you know, audacity is so rewarded.

Another thing Silicon Valley gets right is failure is respected. You know, I was at a venture capital firm for 20 years when people would come looking for money. And one of the things we’d say, oh, this founder had a couple of startups that didn’t work out. Yeah, this is good. This person has grit. This person has experience.

Skot Waldron (36:44)
Interesting. I love those. I think those are great. And I think we get too afraid. Fear holds us back from a lot of that. But I think being in that culture of Silicon Valley, it’s bread. It is something that is just expected in that culture. And I think that’s fantastic. Now let’s go to the other side. What’s one thing, do you think, that it gets wrong about leadership?

Kamini Ramani (37:10)
That it’s the cult of the narcissist. It’s too it’s a me feeling. You know, sometimes you know, a founder will grow to build a big company and think it’s all about them, not about their teams, not about the people who helped you realize your vision. And I just think you know that is not healthy because it’s not true, first of all, a single person doesn’t build a company.

And the second thing that that leads to is if that person who’s leading the company, you know, loses their way, their moral way or their ethical way or whatever, then, you know, the whole company follows in that path. And that was one difference with the women. They don’t think about the cult of I, they’re the cult of we, the cult of we.

Skot Waldron (38:03)
Yeah, okay. And where do you think that comes from? Why is that do you think?

Kamini Ramani (38:08)
You know, I mean it’s hard. I’m not a sort of psychologist or whatever. I think some of it is maybe there is some, it’s both nurture and nature, right? I mean, most of the leaders of the big Silicon Valley company still continue to be men. And so maybe there’s a little bit of that as you’re growing up, you know, you’re sort of you’re the team captain. And sometimes you just think of, you know, yourself as the magician who’s getting stuff done. So, some of it– some of it could be just that society giving you that message that you’re so cool, you’re the bro, you the man, you know, that kind of thing.

And then some of it is, the echo chamber does reward that. All the, you know, the investors and the partners and all, you know, keep saying, hey, this is Mark’s company. Hey, Mark, you’re the greatest, you know. So, they’re playing that back to you sometimes, sadly. And you know, there are some governance things that, you know, Silicon Valley companies have done where these founders control the board. So even the board, which is seen as someone who can check a CEO, sometimes cannot check a CEO. They don’t have the voting rights to do that.

Skot Waldron (39:26)
Okay. That yeah, that’s interesting. And again, something I hope shifts. I hope that there is a shift and a change to some of this mentality. Last question here, but if somebody is listening right now, they’ve been really successful on paper, they’ve built some great stuff, they’ve made a lot of, they’ve jumped over a lot of hurdles in their life and climbed that wall to get to where they are. But they’re wondering, is this really what I want the next 10 years of my life to look like, or the next 20 years of my life to look like? What should be they be asking themselves?

Kamini Ramani (40:08)
A simple question. What is my metric of abundance? How do I measure my net worth? Not what my bank balance is, not how big is the team I’m managing, not hey, what can I brag about at the next cocktail party? Not what is my cool reel on Instagram I can now put. It’s just how do I measure abundance? And once you write down the answers of what those answers are and then you rank them, I think your answer will become pretty clear.

Skot Waldron (40:45)
Beautiful, beautiful advice. Your book, Lotus Leadership, is now a USA Today’s bestseller, which is amazing. That shows that’s a lot of work and a lot of credibility and a lot of people buying into this idea, and they want to know and learn from you, which is great. And we have learned from you. What else can people do? Where do they get a hold of? I’m assuming they get the book wherever you do book stuff, right?

Kamini Ramani (41:14)
I would love for them to visit my author website. It’s lotusleaders.org because I’m, you know, keeping on adding content about the women, like more details on the women who are profiled in the book and, you know, other articles and podcasts and so on that I’m appearing on. Yes, buy the book. If it resonates, you know, write me and write the all important Amazon review.

Skot Waldron (41:41)
Amazon loves those reviews. So yes, please do that. Buy the book first and then write the review, right? Because Amazon likes to be verified.

Thank you very much. I love that you are pulling the gold from these women that everybody else needs to hear. I think that this isn’t a book just for women. I think the men need to read this book as well to understand the characteristics of what makes these women successful so they can be that champion for other women that they believe in their organization to set them up to be the next leaders of these organizations that they’re part of. So, thank you for writing the book and thank you for focusing on that.

Kamini Ramani (42:26)
And thank you, Skot, not Scandinavian Scot, for having me on the show. And just from the short interaction, you sound like someone who’s a champion and a cheerleader. So, you know, here’s to more men like you.

Skot Waldron (42:44)
The different parts of her framework are interesting. I’m going to hit on those in just a second. But and the Silicon Valley idea that failure is respected. I’ve never really heard it put that way before. The failure is respected. Failure is, I mean, I hear people that are talking about failing forward and opportunities to fail, and those failing moments are things that we, you know, acknowledge here and we encourage, but respected. That’s a different take on the word failure. That’s interesting. So, I think you should think about that within your organization.

What’s my metric of abundance? That’s intriguing. What is my metric of abundance? And what does that mean for me personally? That’s very self-reflective. Something that I think all of you should be thinking about. Let’s go through a couple of the ideas she talked about.

Feminism. The feminist versus masculine type leadership. And I learned this from a coach that I had back in the past when we were talking about archetypes. And, you know, some of you can have a feminine archetype, and that doesn’t mean that you’re female. It just means that there’s characteristics that you bring out in your leadership or in your sales process or in your interactions that have the feminist or the feminism type idea to them. I don’t know if that’s the right word. Or the masculine idea to them. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or if you’re female. It kind of plays out in the way that your characteristics of how you communicate. Curiosity being another one, harmonious relationships being the third, abundance being the fourth, and then owning your power being the fifth.

Fantastic, so grateful, Kamini for being on the show. Thank you so much for spreading your wisdom and your gold for us and good luck with your book.

Skot Waldron (44:49)
If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay Unlocked.