Latest / South Asian Trailblazers / Intel's CLO Aparna Bawa & Author Kamini Ramani: A New Playbook for Powerful Women

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Intel's CLO Aparna Bawa & Author Kamini Ramani: A New Playbook for Powerful Women · South Asian Trailblazers

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Lotus Leadership.
0:02
SPEAKER_01: What inspired you to write this book?
0:04
SPEAKER_01: Every time we talk about Indian American success, we talk about the men.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: It's Satiana Della and Sunday Pichai.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: And I was outraged.
0:11
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, how come they don't have the stories of the women?
0:14
SPEAKER_01: And so that's what set me down this path.
0:17
SPEAKER_03: A lot of what I hear from women in our community is they often feel like their peer South Asian women are trying to push them down.
0:23
SPEAKER_03: Look at all the VC firms out there.
0:25
SPEAKER_02: Now they are being led by people of color, mostly men.
0:29
SPEAKER_02: The woman in that role is not mainstream.
0:32
SPEAKER_02: It is an innovation.
0:33
SPEAKER_02: And I think there is a bit of element of like, is there space for all of us?
0:38
SPEAKER_03: What surprised you in writing these chapters about your friends seeing things like Chiva Chakti come out and mapping it to also their professional experiences?
0:45
SPEAKER_01: They have spine.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: These women have style and spine, and there's a duality right there.
0:50
SPEAKER_01: I felt proud to bring these women and their stories to the world.
0:55
SPEAKER_03: There are inheritances from your culture that uplift you, and there are inheritances from our culture that hold you back.
1:01
SPEAKER_02: My father just passed away, and my sister and I did a pooja for him first in the priestess.
1:05
SPEAKER_02: Do you have a brother?
1:06
SPEAKER_02: No brother here, so it's gonna have to be us.
1:08
SPEAKER_02: This is the duality of our inheritance.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: How do you define success for yourselves today?
1:14
SPEAKER_01: Success is a family project.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: Both of us achieving an ambition, both of us fulfilling an outsider obligation, actually means both of us have meaningful lives and meaningful careers.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: That's the place you have to start.
1:28
SPEAKER_02: There's a saying that people say when you're in the workplace, does another senior person do they leave the ladder down for other people to climb up or do they pull the ladder up?
1:36
SPEAKER_02: I want to be remembered as a I leave the ladder down.
1:39
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
1:40
SPEAKER_03: As a founder, I need to move particularly fast.
1:43
SPEAKER_03: And I tend to talk a lot faster than I type.
1:46
SPEAKER_03: Whisperflow takes those ideas and long streams of verbal consciousness and turns them into exactly what I said in text.
1:52
SPEAKER_03: It makes it so that I can work smarter and faster.
1:55
SPEAKER_03: And the best part is there's a South Asian Trailblazer story behind it.
1:58
SPEAKER_03: Whisperflow was founded by Thane Kothari, who grew up in New Delhi and met his co-founder his freshman year at Stanford.
2:05
SPEAKER_03: Today it's used by millions of people around the world and hundreds of thousands of businesses.
2:10
SPEAKER_03: And India just happens to be its second largest market.
2:13
SPEAKER_03: I only champion products I love and actually use, which is why I'm so excited to say Trailblazers come whisper with me.
2:21
SPEAKER_03: You get three months free on us at whisperflow.ai slash partner slash trailblazer.
2:27
SPEAKER_03: Now let's head into today's conversation.
2:29
SPEAKER_03: Welcome back to South Asian Trailblazers.
2:31
SPEAKER_03: I'm Simi Shaw, and today I'm about to share a conversation that is very near and dear to my heart.
2:37
SPEAKER_03: If you've been following our platform, you've probably seen me sharing a little bit about this new book called Lotus Leadership, a modern playbook of ancient wisdom.
2:45
SPEAKER_03: It's written by my friend, Trailblazer and client, Kamini Romani.
2:50
SPEAKER_03: Kamine Romani spent three decades in Silicon Valley as a CML at Mayfield, a top-tier venture firm.
2:56
SPEAKER_03: She has helped narrate the stories of iconic companies like Poshmark and Genentech and Lyft.
3:02
SPEAKER_03: What drew me to this book immediately is that Kamini realized that while the story of Indian success has become super prevalent in America, women have largely been left out of that story.
3:13
SPEAKER_03: And so she set out to interview 30 of the most powerful women in the world, from Indra Nui to Raish Matsaujani to Ravid the Advipey to Jenny Ming, many women who we've had on this podcast, and share how they rose to the heights of success.
3:27
SPEAKER_03: Today I'm sitting down with her and a prominent lotus leader featured in the book named Aparna Baba.
3:32
SPEAKER_03: Aparna is the chief legal and people officer at Intel, and during the writing of this book, she was actually the COO of Zoom.
3:39
SPEAKER_03: She initially grew up in India, lost her mother at a very young age in a harrowing story that's shared in this book, went on to study at Harvard Law, spent her early career in investment banking at places like Lehman and Deutsche Bank before pivoting to the tech sector and rising to the C-suite.
3:57
SPEAKER_03: My conversation with Kamini Romani and Aparnababa is up next.
4:05
SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Kamini Ramani and I'm the author of this book, Lotus Leadership, which by the way was just named to the USA Today bestseller list, so I hope you'll go out and read it.
4:18
SPEAKER_01: Yes, this book is for you.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: For the next 250 pages, you can think of me as your hip, wise, but brutal brutally honest Indian auntie, who will tell you about these stories over some chai and show you how to live a better life.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: She's called Papa, Boa, Chachi, Chitthi, Mommy, Mousi, Periyama, Thai, and more, depending on which part of India you came from.
4:47
SPEAKER_01: But she's simply auntie to all.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: In our culture, your grandmothers indulge you, your mother pleads with you, but your aunties are direct.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: They tell you what you need to hear, but are also there for you when you stumble and can't tell anyone else.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: They are both parachutes and safety nets, sharing expertise on what to wear, whom to date, when to cut date, and how to thrive.
5:16
SPEAKER_01: You can complain to them, you confide in them, and collaborate with them.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: What you cannot do is push them out of your life, as they are only there to help you sore.
5:29
SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Avrina.
5:31
SPEAKER_02: Um I'm one of the Lotus Leaders in Comedy's Lotus Leadership book, and I'm gonna read you a couple paragraphs from her book about myself.
5:40
SPEAKER_02: So I had a whole design of an entire garden, which my dad said required$200,000 to implement.
5:53
SPEAKER_02: You know, in Michigan, you have bigger sized lots.
5:56
SPEAKER_02: It's a lot of grass.
5:57
SPEAKER_02: And I was in charge of the entire outside, and I would do it all so prolifically.
6:04
SPEAKER_02: Back then, her dad balked at the price, but according to SEC documents, Upperna's pro promotion to Zoom COO came with a multimillion dollar pay package.
6:13
SPEAKER_02: She can certainly buy her own flowers now.
6:16
SPEAKER_02: That was her Shiva Shakti bubbling up in its rawest, earliest form.
6:21
SPEAKER_02: She couldn't just bake cookies, she had to master the recipe and become renowned for them in the Michigan Indian diaspora.
6:29
SPEAKER_02: Pick up a magazine on gardening at the library, and she'd wind up sketching out a$200,000 redesign of the entire property.
6:36
SPEAKER_02: This tendency would hit a boil by the time she was in her twenties, building her career investment banking.
6:42
SPEAKER_02: But her Shiva Shekhi duality was unsettling to men in the environment.
6:47
SPEAKER_02: It's particularly jarring in a male-dominated environment because I look a certain way.
6:53
SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm five foot two.
6:55
SPEAKER_02: Nah, I'm really five foot one and three-quarters, let's be honest.
6:58
SPEAKER_02: Indian, kind of young looking, a cutesy girl, if you will.
7:03
SPEAKER_02: And then I open my mouth and it's like stainless steel, and concrete comes out.
7:09
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to South Asian Trailblazers, ladies.
7:12
SPEAKER_03: It's such an honor to have you here and to discuss a book that has become very close to my heart, Lotus Leadership.
7:19
SPEAKER_03: Where I really want to start this conversation is at the beginning of your journey as friends.
7:24
SPEAKER_03: Tell us how you met and actually came to be friends with one another.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: So I first met Aparna, I think it was about four years ago, as part of Nateri, the South Asian Women's Network that I'm part of.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: That's a wonderful network that I hope your listeners will tune into.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: We've had the founders on the podcast.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: Oh, great.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: And Aparna, I was interviewing her for a fireside chat, and they said there's this really cool woman who's the CEO of Zoom, and you know, you get the honor of interviewing her.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's how we met.
7:53
SPEAKER_01: Yes, it was wonderful.
7:55
SPEAKER_02: Any any POV from your end?
7:57
SPEAKER_02: That one event where she interviewed me and she was spicy right out of the gate.
8:02
SPEAKER_02: Like she did not hold back.
8:03
SPEAKER_02: Her questions were spicy.
8:04
SPEAKER_02: And I remember thinking to myself, my goodness, I like this woman.
8:08
SPEAKER_02: And this was an interview for the book.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: No, this was an interview for Nate 3.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: Okay, why was it?
8:12
SPEAKER_02: It was a fireside chat on leadership for Nate 3.
8:15
SPEAKER_02: But I feel like the themes kind of resonate with the book.
8:18
SPEAKER_02: I I feel like Comedy's been brewing with this topic for so long that she doesn't even realize it.
8:24
SPEAKER_02: But her the themes were very similar because I remember she she brought out my my childhood, my past, and you know what it takes to lead today.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
8:33
SPEAKER_01: Inheritance, I think, has been something that's been swirling around my mind.
8:37
SPEAKER_01: And it was logical for Natri because it's a South Asian women's network.
8:41
SPEAKER_01: So we have shared heritage with all the members there.
8:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
8:44
SPEAKER_03: I want to double-click on obviously the themes in the book, but I want to go back to the origin story of you being on a vacation with your sister and what inspired you to write this book.
8:54
SPEAKER_01: Actually, what outraged me.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
8:56
SPEAKER_01: I was lying by the pool in San Miguel de Allende on my 60th birthday trip with my sister, and I said, every time we talk about Indian American success, we talk about the men.
9:07
SPEAKER_01: It's Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai and some others we named in the pre-show.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: And I was outraged because I had met Aparna by then.
9:16
SPEAKER_01: This was after we'd met, and I'd met a few other women through, you know, my sort of Silicon Valley career through Nate 3 and so on.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, how come we don't have the stories of the women?
9:26
SPEAKER_01: And so that's what set me down this path of elevating the narrative to reflect the contribution of these amazing women.
9:35
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
9:36
SPEAKER_03: And you set out to interview over 100 women, settled on ultimately profiling 30, including a parna.
9:43
SPEAKER_03: How did you distill from that group of 100 the 30 you wanted to specifically feature in the book?
9:48
SPEAKER_01: Well, I was lucky enough to get a uh really nice offer from Hopper Collins to publish the book.
9:54
SPEAKER_01: But along with that came some conditions, including you can't have too many, you cannot have a hundred voices in the book.
10:00
SPEAKER_01: Because I have read those books and you just get a little paragraph from each person or one insight or one quote.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: But I wanted to go deep into these women's journeys.
10:09
SPEAKER_01: And to their credit, they were willing to be vulnerable and trust me, because I said I'm writing the book for the next generation.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: So that's how we winnowed it down to 30.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: And then after that, it was different personae, you know, founders, investors, leaders, movement creators.
10:26
SPEAKER_01: And then it was to have some diversity across the kind of Indian, first generation, second generation, not all Hindu, so on and so forth.
10:37
SPEAKER_02: Two things.
10:38
SPEAKER_02: I would say first and foremost, um, I agree with her.
10:42
SPEAKER_02: We don't hear about South Asian women.
10:45
SPEAKER_02: And there are so many of us, you know, really hustling, uh, doing great things.
10:52
SPEAKER_02: And it it it's a gr it was a great opportunity to support that.
10:56
SPEAKER_02: You know, it's not my book, but I don't really need to write a book to participate in the uplifting of all South Asian women.
11:03
SPEAKER_02: And the second thing is, you know, when I look back on my own career, I made mistakes, I struggled, I cried.
11:11
SPEAKER_02: My husband reminds me all the time, like, remember when you were really upset about this and now you don't even remember it?
11:16
SPEAKER_02: Um, I want to short circuit that for other people.
11:20
SPEAKER_02: If there's a way to eliminate some of the struggle, struggle is good, don't get me wrong.
11:25
SPEAKER_02: But if you can eliminate some of the unnecessary struggle, the struggle that doesn't result in metamorphosis but is more negative or draining, I would love to participate in helping another person, another human bringing it up.
11:39
SPEAKER_02: You know, it's there's a saying that people say does she leave when you're in the workplace, does she, meaning another senior person, do they leave the ladder down for other people to climb up or do they pull the ladder up?
11:52
SPEAKER_02: I'm I want to be remembered as a I leave the ladder down for people.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: And this is a part of doing that.
11:58
SPEAKER_02: Did you have any hesitations about sharing such a vulnerable story in the book?
12:03
SPEAKER_02: I did.
12:04
SPEAKER_02: Um, part of the reason my hesitation is anytime that you talk about yourself, it involves other humans that and your opinion on or your characterization of events as they um relate to other people.
12:17
SPEAKER_02: And you just don't want to mischaracterize a lot of the experiences I talk I talk about, you know, the people on the other side are still today in the same companies today.
12:27
SPEAKER_02: Um you don't want to mischaracterize them.
12:30
SPEAKER_02: I think mentally I've been very fair in my own perception.
12:34
SPEAKER_02: I've really sort of analyzed is my perception something that someone can say is accurate given what I went through.
12:40
SPEAKER_02: And yeah, I I can say that.
12:42
SPEAKER_02: So that was probably my challenge.
12:44
SPEAKER_03: What was it like to profile some of your closest friends for this book like a partner?
12:49
SPEAKER_01: You know, you can't take friendship for granted.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: I was an author.
12:54
SPEAKER_01: She's a leader, she's a very, very well known and respected leader.
12:59
SPEAKER_01: So it, you know, she took it seriously.
13:02
SPEAKER_01: And so I think that we sat down and had fun.
13:06
SPEAKER_01: We laughed, and you know, we had fun in the process of the discovery, but I respected the decision every one of these leaders made to lend their voice.
13:17
SPEAKER_03: Something that you couch at the top of the book, which I really loved, is that these are all highly educated women that come with a certain amount of privilege.
13:27
SPEAKER_03: How do you hold that alongside their stories of grit and making this accessible to any young leader reading this book?
13:34
SPEAKER_01: I don't think their education defined them.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: If if anything, I think there's a section in the book where I take down the IITs because you know, all the men in Silicon Valley that I used, you know, was interacting with a lot would use that as shorthand for excellence.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: And out of the 12 engineering leaders in the book, 10 of them went to second and third tier regional engineering colleges, not because they were not good enough to get into the IIT, but other circumstances prevailed.
14:00
SPEAKER_01: Same thing when it came to the graduate programs or the other colleges and so on.
14:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Aparna happens to be a Harvard law grad, um, which I know is close to your heart.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: But there are many, many of the women who went to state universities.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, many came here on scholarship as immigrants and, you know, landed in Clemson and Shawnee and, you know, uh State Street, you know, small, small places.
14:24
SPEAKER_01: Flint.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: So I think that um I don't take that educational privilege as a as a necessary condition to succeed as a leader.
14:36
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
14:36
SPEAKER_03: From we've spoken a lot about this behind the scenes about how you view this as the version 2.0 of Lean In.
14:44
SPEAKER_03: What did you mean in setting about to write the version 2.0 of Lean-in?
14:48
SPEAKER_03: And I'm curious from your perspective, Aparna, what that means to you as someone that probably came up through the Lean-in era but is now embracing Lotus leadership.
14:55
SPEAKER_02: I'll answer that question by saying, you know, in order to understand the privilege of education, you have to understand where South Asians come from.
15:05
SPEAKER_02: I cannot imagine a time where my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, everybody in sort of my inheritance, if you will, has not has not emphasized education.
15:16
SPEAKER_02: Education is the gold standard, it is the currency, it is the is almost the achievement that we all go for, even without thinking of the outcome.
15:25
SPEAKER_02: Like, what does the education give you?
15:27
SPEAKER_02: It is just assumed that an an education is going to lift you up and take you places.
15:32
SPEAKER_02: And so from that perspective, when I go back to India, what amazes me is that people in all walks of life, whether it's the drivers, the people who work in your houses, they are like in tough, tough situations economically.
15:47
SPEAKER_02: But there's one thing that's very common is they all educate their kids.
15:51
SPEAKER_02: They take that money and they educate their kids.
15:53
SPEAKER_02: So for me, it's not a privilege, it's a way of life per se.
15:59
SPEAKER_02: Going back to your question though, lean-in and being lean and to, I almost think it's this is not a lean into book.
16:08
SPEAKER_02: This is a book that says, you may be in a particular perspective or a particular position.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: Let me show you how other people who may have some similarities and some differences have done this.
16:20
SPEAKER_02: And you can learn from it, you can glean from it, you can take what you want, leave the rest, and make it work for you.
16:26
SPEAKER_02: Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote the counter to LinkedIn and said, Look, I my kid was flunking out.
16:32
SPEAKER_02: I was taking the train from DC to New Jersey or New York all the time.
16:37
SPEAKER_02: Um, I wasn't at home and I decided to take a step back.
16:40
SPEAKER_02: Uh, because you know what?
16:42
SPEAKER_02: When, yes, we we we all love to work remote and do all these kinds of things, but when Senator Clinton was in the office, I had to be in the office.
16:50
SPEAKER_02: That was the counter to lean in to say it's okay to take a step back.
16:54
SPEAKER_02: I don't think there is a prescriptive formula.
16:57
SPEAKER_02: You, as a woman, have to make what you want of your career and your life using various anecdotes from people fit it to yourself.
17:08
SPEAKER_02: But if there is a struggle you're facing, there is someone in the book who has faced that struggle and describes it and shows you how they solve it.
17:16
SPEAKER_02: Take that snippet and use it for yourself.
17:19
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't mean you have to take the whole thing.
17:20
SPEAKER_01: You don't have to be me.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: And the other part I would say is there's a whole section that I honestly discovered, and it was a wonderful discovery, which was the lean out section.
17:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
17:31
SPEAKER_01: So one of the things about lean in is it gave you permission to fulfill your ambition, but there was an anxiety that if you leaned out, you'd become irrelevant.
17:40
SPEAKER_01: And so it was hard to rise without burning out.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: Versus, I had so many examples of women in the book who either nature forced them to lean out, one had a brain aneurysm.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: She obviously had to go get rehab.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: In another case, uh a couple made a decision to have a dynamic hierarchy when one person's career was, you know, in the front burner and the other's, but both of them achieved the ambition.
18:03
SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, there was a there's also a lovely example of a woman who took a year off to do a sabbatical to conserve wildlife because she wanted to nurture her passions.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: And all these women came back to not just achieve the ambition, but to almost leapfrog.
18:19
SPEAKER_01: And so that told me let's give women the permission that you can take time off of caregiving, aging parents, children, follow your hobbies, whatever you choose.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: And the bus will still be waiting for you to get back on it.
18:32
SPEAKER_03: For our listeners who haven't had the chance to read the book, can you quickly encapsulate the five petals that you lay out and map them to the Hindu deities?
18:40
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: So this was another discovery.
18:42
SPEAKER_01: I was interviewing contemporary Indian women who, you know, get inspired by Beyoncé as much as by, you know, someone else.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: But consistently I kept hearing that they grew up with these powerful goddess stories, and that was one of their inspirations.
18:59
SPEAKER_01: So that's why I framed the five traits with the five stories.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: I haven't written a goddess book, and I've definitely not written a Hindu book, but I think these are powerful myths.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: Like if you love the Odyssey, you know, you know Greek myth.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: Just like that in Indian mythology, we have these wonderful goddess stories.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: So, really quick: one is about Shivishakti, which is a fused uh male-female god, which is the first trait, which is about leading with authenticity, rejecting whether it's a so-called masculine or a so-called feminine style of leading.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: And Aparna is the epitome of that, and we'll come back to her philosophy there.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: The second one is around following curiosity, not the rungs of a ladder, zigzagging across a rock wall, and partly rejecting this pressure cooker attitude immigrant families have, removing the lid and you know, following your curiosity.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: The third one is what I alluded to: building this kind of harmonious, non-contentious relationships with your life partner, should you choose to be partnered and doing that over time.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, it doesn't matter if it's a heterosexual partner or a same-sex partner, because I have an example, a wonderful example of a same-sex couple.
20:07
SPEAKER_01: The fourth one is redefining abundance beyond material wealth.
20:11
SPEAKER_01: It's not about titles and status and money, although all these women have that in spades and they enjoy it unapologetically, but it's beyond that.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: What do you define as abundance?
20:23
SPEAKER_01: And then the fifth one is when you have all these traits, you can then own your power and live life in 3D.
20:31
SPEAKER_02: You just summed it up so well.
20:33
SPEAKER_02: It's very inspirational.
20:34
SPEAKER_03: She has the pitch nailed.
20:36
SPEAKER_03: You open the book with Aparna story, specifically around Shiva Shakti.
20:41
SPEAKER_03: Aparna, did that profile surprise you when you finally had a chance to read it?
20:45
SPEAKER_02: You know, the duality of life has something, is something that I've been, you know, grappling with ever since I was little.
20:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, I think I've always been this way and I haven't understood it.
20:55
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and I've, you know, scratch my head.
20:58
SPEAKER_02: Like, I okay, I'll have to tell you the story.
21:00
SPEAKER_02: When I was uh a kid in Nigeria, my parents lived in Nigeria.
21:04
SPEAKER_02: My mother had a, she started a preschool in the house, and she kicked me out of my own pre like her own preschool because she said she's too bussy because she's like she thinks she's the she's the proprietor's kid, so she's too bussy.
21:15
SPEAKER_02: She put me in another preschool.
21:17
SPEAKER_02: And in that preschool, I was getting bullied and I would come home crying because a a boy was pushing me around and I would come home crying day after day.
21:25
SPEAKER_02: And my dad at one point said, just push him back.
21:29
SPEAKER_02: And I said, Oh, okay.
21:31
SPEAKER_02: And then I remember going to school and he pushed me around and I just gave like a giant shove back.
21:35
SPEAKER_02: He fell backward, he hit his head on the floor.
21:37
SPEAKER_05: Oh my god.
21:38
SPEAKER_02: And I got expelled.
21:40
SPEAKER_02: So my So I come home and my mom's like, What happened?
21:44
SPEAKER_02: I said, Well, he pushed me, so I pushed him back.
21:46
SPEAKER_02: He's like, Who told you to do that, Dad?
21:48
SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Wait, what why is that wrong?
21:51
SPEAKER_02: And I remember thinking to myself, but he pushed me and that was okay.
21:55
SPEAKER_02: Just because I pushed a little harder, maybe I'm a little stronger, you underestimated my strength, and maybe he's A bit of a weakling.
22:01
SPEAKER_02: Why am I getting in trouble?
22:02
SPEAKER_02: And it was quite like I remember that story thinking to myself, there is nothing wrong with a powerful woman.
22:11
SPEAKER_02: There is nothing wrong.
22:13
SPEAKER_02: And yes, we can be powerful.
22:15
SPEAKER_02: We can be, I can be powerful, I can be sensitive, I can be loving.
22:20
SPEAKER_02: All of those things can be true at the same time.
22:22
SPEAKER_02: There is nothing wrong with it.
22:24
SPEAKER_02: It's wonderful.
22:25
SPEAKER_02: It exists in life today.
22:27
SPEAKER_02: It exists in the the gods that we know through Hindu mythology.
22:31
SPEAKER_02: So it's something that I think I've been grappling with since I was little.
22:36
SPEAKER_02: And comedy has put words to it in a way that, you know, make you feel satisfied or like, oh, I'm finally home, you know?
22:44
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
22:45
SPEAKER_03: And there's some deeper explanation for this.
22:48
SPEAKER_03: Do you feel like you obviously share a deeply poignant story for the book about losing your mother in a car crash at age 11, literally pulling her out of the Jeep?
22:58
SPEAKER_03: I'm first curious, that it doesn't seem like that's a story you've shared in other forums before.
23:02
SPEAKER_03: What are you starting to share here?
23:04
SPEAKER_02: I don't share.
23:05
SPEAKER_02: It's funny you say this because even my own kids, um, they don't sometimes know much about me because I'm not a I'm not a natural self-promoter.
23:15
SPEAKER_02: It's learned behavior over time, but I don't necessarily talk too much about myself.
23:22
SPEAKER_02: I don't expect people to like know me.
23:26
SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't expect people to sit there and listen to me talk about myself.
23:29
SPEAKER_02: There was something about comedy wanting to understand the motivations and how, you know, the your history and we're all sort of formed by how we grow up.
23:41
SPEAKER_02: And we were sitting there, it was in my backyard, and for some reason, I just decided to open the spigot.
23:47
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was just all coming out.
23:49
SPEAKER_02: And at that point, I'm like, okay, we're here, like, let's not stop.
23:52
SPEAKER_02: Um, but I'm glad I did because when I got the manuscript back and I read it, I looked at my husband and I'm like, she nailed me.
23:59
SPEAKER_02: Like she got me.
24:00
SPEAKER_02: Like within one, I mean, a lot of the words were mine, but the way she put it together and the juxtaposition, the weaving of other people into the chapter, other concepts into the chapter.
24:11
SPEAKER_02: She just nailed me.
24:12
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it was like, this is me, I'm reading me.
24:14
SPEAKER_02: I don't have to tell anybody anymore because now it's written.
24:17
SPEAKER_02: I can just say, you know, I can point to it.
24:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
24:19
SPEAKER_02: Um, it was pretty incredible.
24:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's almost like having that caricature explanation in a print form that you can point to.
24:27
SPEAKER_02: Sometimes it's hard, even to at this day.
24:29
SPEAKER_02: It's been so long, it was 1988.
24:32
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's hard to talk about, you know, it's hard to talk about, but she's written it, so I can just point to it.
24:38
SPEAKER_02: Um, there's something freeing about it.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: But it's also, I mean, I felt it was extremely important.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: You have this vulnerable story that the book opens with.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: But guess what?
24:50
SPEAKER_01: That is the same young girl who grew up to keep Zoom alive for all of us during COVID.
24:58
SPEAKER_01: So my feeling is, you know, power comes from unexpected places.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: And then my other thing is because you know I have the Indian auntie voice in the book, my Indian auntie voice says, if Aparna can go on to achieve her potential, who are you whining over there that, you know, whatever, you know, I don't have balance or whatever.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: So many, you know, life throws you these, you know, sends you these club balls.
25:20
SPEAKER_01: And a couple of the other women like Aparna shared some very vulnerable stories for the first time in the book because partly they hadn't, like Aparna says, they didn't feel necessary to overshare as they went along.
25:33
SPEAKER_01: And they certainly didn't want pity.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: But in the context of what I was saying, when I said, listen, you know, no mud, no lotus, was there any mud in your life?
25:42
SPEAKER_01: They're like, Yeah, I have a story.
25:45
SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, you fall off your chair because you're like, wow, and here you are in your full force.
25:51
SPEAKER_01: You are a goddess, even though I'm not writing about goddesses.
25:54
SPEAKER_02: Do you know what I mean?
25:55
SPEAKER_02: No.
25:56
SPEAKER_02: Well, let me just jump in here because one thing you said, it hit home for me in this book.
26:01
SPEAKER_02: You know, you cannot look at successful people.
26:03
SPEAKER_02: So much, so often we look at celebrities, we're like, oh, they have it good.
26:06
SPEAKER_02: We look at successful people, oh my gosh, they have it good.
26:10
SPEAKER_02: There is so much struggle that is probably behind that person.
26:14
SPEAKER_02: And it's a wake-up call that you don't get through life.
26:19
SPEAKER_02: Life gives you difficulties and lemons, and you've got to learn from them.
26:23
SPEAKER_02: You've got to, you gotta pick it up, move on.
26:25
SPEAKER_02: Like some of these people are my friends.
26:27
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
26:27
SPEAKER_02: And I didn't even know this about them.
26:29
SPEAKER_02: Do you know what I mean?
26:29
SPEAKER_02: About their families and their lives, their life history.
26:32
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's just a reminder that what you see at the end game requires a lot of work and a lot of metamorphosis.
26:42
SPEAKER_02: And learning about that metamorphosis almost changes the way you view that successful person after the fact.
26:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, it's incredible.
26:49
SPEAKER_02: It humanizes them for sure.
26:51
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that that that's what I felt.
26:52
SPEAKER_03: It's like, you know, on one page I'm I'm reading about this story at 11 years old, you moving from India to India, back to America, back to, you know, and next page we're talking about you being the COO of Zoom.
27:04
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I know.
27:05
SPEAKER_03: In peak COVID, when I think daily users went from what, 10 million to 300 million, which is nearly the size of the United States.
27:12
SPEAKER_03: No, no, it's insane.
27:14
SPEAKER_03: Talk about, can you speak a little bit to that experience and also the Shiva Shaktu that came out in that moment of crisis?
27:21
SPEAKER_02: Oh, it was just incredible.
27:23
SPEAKER_02: I mean, there was one sort of motivating, unifying factor for all of us at the company.
27:30
SPEAKER_02: It was the fact that we were helping people connect at the time that they really needed it most.
27:37
SPEAKER_02: Um, there was a purpose.
27:39
SPEAKER_02: So if you were up at 7 a.m.
27:42
SPEAKER_02: till 3 a.m.
27:43
SPEAKER_02: rinse and repeat every day, didn't care if it was weekend, weekday.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: I gained 25 pounds in that time period.
27:48
SPEAKER_02: It was insane.
27:49
SPEAKER_02: Didn't we at all?
27:50
SPEAKER_02: Well, from just sitting and having, you know, in your pantry.
27:53
SPEAKER_02: In my pantry.
27:55
SPEAKER_02: Um, but you know, it's it was just an incredible experience, a motivating experience, a unifying experience.
28:03
SPEAKER_02: And at that point, you think, like, you have no choice.
28:06
SPEAKER_02: You need to just bring it.
28:07
SPEAKER_02: There is no, there's no opportunity to feel sorry for yourself, to complain, to wish you had, you know, something different or wish you had more support, or whether the case may be.
28:18
SPEAKER_02: You just need to go.
28:19
SPEAKER_02: And that's when you harness your power and you bring it.
28:22
SPEAKER_02: But you also have to have a ton of empathy for people going through the toughest times of their life, lacking connection.
28:31
SPEAKER_02: And having that duality in your life was so important.
28:35
SPEAKER_02: You need the power to get through the tough stuff to rally the troops and bring them along.
28:42
SPEAKER_02: You also need the empathy to take care of the broken bones from war and the injuries and heal them.
28:50
SPEAKER_02: So at the same time, you're like the general or the like the general in the army, and you're also Florence Nightingale.
28:56
SPEAKER_02: It's a combination that is so strange but so natural.
29:03
SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah.
29:04
SPEAKER_02: Especially for women, I would say.
29:05
SPEAKER_03: No, and I I felt this so acutely in the chapter where you lay out the stereotypically female versus male leadership traits.
29:14
SPEAKER_03: And I'm just sitting there reading it, I'm like, yeah.
29:17
SPEAKER_03: And it's the way that I think a lot of women today even are still made to feel like we have to code switch rather than just like embracing both and being both, and that's what can make us superstars in our own right.
29:30
SPEAKER_03: But I I found that to to be really salient in reading that chapter.
29:35
SPEAKER_03: What surprised you in writing these chapters about your friends seeing things like Shiva Shakti come out and mapping it to also their professional experiences so profoundly?
29:44
SPEAKER_01: You know, I just was blown away by I hate the word grit, I feel it's overused, but there's just something they have spine.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: These women have style and spine, and there's a duality right there, right?
29:59
SPEAKER_01: Look at Aparta glowing in pink.
30:02
SPEAKER_01: But she matches the book.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she matches the book.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: I planned that, but not actually.
30:06
SPEAKER_01: Talk about the spine.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: That's just what I got.
30:09
SPEAKER_01: I would spend time with these women and think, wow, these are really enduring leaders.
30:15
SPEAKER_01: But none of them, not a one of them, had imposter syndrome.
30:19
SPEAKER_01: I never saw that come up.
30:21
SPEAKER_01: Partly because the world is questioning you anyway.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: You're brown, you're immigrant, you're a woman.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: That's a trifecta of challenge.
30:27
SPEAKER_01: So you're like, I'm just gonna own it.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: And so I just thought, what lovely role models.
30:33
SPEAKER_01: I felt so proud to bring these women and their stories to the world because I thought, you know, young readers, maybe they'll be transformed by reading these stories and really feel they can, you know, own their power.
30:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
30:47
SPEAKER_03: I don't want to understate your career in all of this either, though.
30:50
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you're not sure.
30:50
SPEAKER_03: Oh, let's bring that up.
30:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
30:52
SPEAKER_03: You spent multiple decades in Silicon Valley as a CMO for a top-tier venture fund, Mayfield.
30:58
SPEAKER_03: You've you spent time advising Steve Jobs.
31:00
SPEAKER_03: I mean, what did those experiences teach you about telling a story that you brought to Lotus Leadership?
31:06
SPEAKER_01: You know, Jobs was the ultimate storyteller.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: And even though when I met him, he was in exile and he was trying to revive his, you know, reputation and everything, he never lost that magic.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: In fact, walking over here to the studio through Nomad, I was thinking we'd come to New York and this is the one city that he loved walking in because he could be anonymous.
31:25
SPEAKER_01: You know?
31:26
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
31:26
SPEAKER_01: And that was really a crazy thing to think.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: So yes, I learned, I learned about, you know, storytelling from the from the sort of the master of it.
31:35
SPEAKER_01: But I also then applied it to founders.
31:38
SPEAKER_01: As you know, Silicon Valley startup founders, they wake up in the morning and they want to change the world.
31:44
SPEAKER_01: But not all of them know how to articulate how they want to change the world.
31:49
SPEAKER_01: So I had so much fun over 20 plus years working with all kinds of founders: Lyft, Poshmark, Hashikar.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: The list goes on and on.
31:58
SPEAKER_01: Just taking them already their magic, but helping them articulate it into something that all of us could relate to.
32:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, which is exactly what you do in this book.
32:08
SPEAKER_03: No, I and I think that's what's revolutionary about it, to your point of I think a reason this story hasn't been told before, to your point, is South Asian women in particular are the it's it's our culture to put your head down and work.
32:20
SPEAKER_03: We're doers.
32:21
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
32:21
SPEAKER_02: We get it done.
32:22
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and you don't you don't want the pity, you don't need the praise, but as a result, the story sometimes goes under narrated, um, which is which is what immediately resonated with me in this book.
32:33
SPEAKER_03: What do you think people need to take away from Lotus leadership in the AI era?
32:38
SPEAKER_01: Wisdom.
32:40
SPEAKER_01: The role of wisdom just got even more important in the age of AI.
32:45
SPEAKER_01: Because at best, if you're a good prompter, you'll get context from AI.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: You're not gonna get the wisdom, you're not gonna get the DNA of Aparnabhava, you know, sitting in her little Bharat Natyam outfit in India or growing those, you know, monster kind of patch, you know, garbage in slint and all the other experiences that made her who she is.
33:08
SPEAKER_01: And like she said, there was struggle.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: She learned from struggle.
33:12
SPEAKER_01: So all that is in our DNA.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: And how is a leader that's an AI leader, an avatar even, how are they going to be able to harness all that?
33:21
SPEAKER_01: So it's just become that much clearer to me that tapping into wisdom, alchemizing who you are into who you became is that much more important in this age.
33:33
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
33:33
SPEAKER_03: Apart, I'm curious here your perspective as well.
33:36
SPEAKER_03: Obviously, when you're profiled in the book, you were the COO of Zoom.
33:39
SPEAKER_03: Today you're the chief legal and people officer at Intel.
33:42
SPEAKER_03: What advice do you have for people who want to rise in the AI era?
33:46
SPEAKER_02: I think you have to really spend some time examining yourself.
33:50
SPEAKER_02: It starts there.
33:51
SPEAKER_02: Uh learn about yourself and be brutally honest with yourself.
33:57
SPEAKER_02: One of the things that I think limits everyone, not just women, is insecurity.
34:03
SPEAKER_02: And we do things in personal life, in in professional life.
34:08
SPEAKER_02: We do certain things out of insecurity that we're not even aware of.
34:13
SPEAKER_02: Spend some time figuring it out.
34:15
SPEAKER_02: You know, for example, um I learned kind of along the way that sometimes when I get really excited, especially in a social, like a social context, I monopolize the conversation.
34:28
SPEAKER_02: And it's because it's not because I want to hog all the limelight, it's because I'm super excited and I just want to continue that fun.
34:36
SPEAKER_02: And you bring the energy, and sometimes you can just suck up the I can suck up the oxygen in my in the room.
34:42
SPEAKER_02: And I remember when my husband told me that for one time early on in our relationship, I was almost taken aback.
34:49
SPEAKER_02: And I realized it's because I have, I'm so excited for this fun, vibrant atmosphere that when the when it lulls, I need to inject it back.
35:00
SPEAKER_02: I'm afraid of it stopping.
35:02
SPEAKER_02: And I when it takes a while to examine yourself in those situations and really think about your own motivations to realize maybe it's okay to have it stop and everything has to come to an end, and we have to go home and go to bed.
35:13
SPEAKER_02: So maybe it's okay, you know, it's something as small as that to, you know, do I not support another woman because I'm jealous?
35:24
SPEAKER_02: Is it something that, you know, I am envious about?
35:28
SPEAKER_02: Is that why I don't do that?
35:30
SPEAKER_02: And stopping examining, reflecting, and learning about yourself.
35:35
SPEAKER_02: I can't tell you how many times I've been in corporate America where I'm like, I do not like that person.
35:40
SPEAKER_02: But I'm gonna do my darndest to support them because it is the right thing to do.
35:46
SPEAKER_02: I don't like them, but I will help them because it is the correct thing to do.
35:51
SPEAKER_02: It is, it is your duty, it's your dharma, and it will create good karma for the company.
35:57
SPEAKER_02: And the company needs it.
35:58
SPEAKER_02: And the company needs it.
36:00
SPEAKER_02: That has happened so many times in my career.
36:02
SPEAKER_02: Um, and it has been the right outcome.
36:04
SPEAKER_02: And it has actually helped me propel my own career because you can get along with a whole different bunch of different people.
36:09
SPEAKER_02: But that all that stuff starts with knowing yourself, really spending time with yourself, being brutally honest with yourself.
36:15
SPEAKER_02: If you ask me all my positive traits, all my negative traits, I can list them all for you.
36:19
SPEAKER_02: And I will probably be brutally honest about it.
36:22
SPEAKER_02: But it takes time.
36:23
SPEAKER_03: Now I know why the chapter was called cutesy and concrete.
36:28
SPEAKER_03: I um I I want to come um come back to something you said, but first I want to say what I have loved about even supporting this book is you can feel the sense of community and camaraderie among the women.
36:41
SPEAKER_03: And I feel like you guys really also have that out in Silicon Valley.
36:44
SPEAKER_03: There's just like clearly this like contingent of South Asian women who have succeeded who want to turn around and lower the ladder down, but are also continuing to rise.
36:54
SPEAKER_03: It's not like we're not done.
36:56
SPEAKER_03: You guys are doing it as you're moving versus a lot of people tend to wait till the end of their career and then decide it's time to give back.
37:02
SPEAKER_03: What do you think is different about you guys compared to previous generations?
37:06
SPEAKER_03: I don't know that that's always been the case.
37:08
SPEAKER_03: And a lot of what I hear from women in our community is they often feel like their peer South Asian women are trying to push them down because they feel like in these corporate spaces there's not a room enough room for all of them.
37:21
SPEAKER_01: I have one answer and you might have another one.
37:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, I've worked in Silicon Valley 40 years.
37:26
SPEAKER_01: For the first 20 years, there were barely any South Asians, let alone South Asian women.
37:30
SPEAKER_01: Which is wild.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: Right?
37:32
SPEAKER_01: And even the men who were there were the coder in the room or the outsourced person who took away our jobs and so on.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: And so I would say slowly the men started to rise.
37:40
SPEAKER_01: And now you have managing partners at firms.
37:42
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, you have CEOs of big public companies and so on.
37:46
SPEAKER_01: So I think it's a relatively recent phenomenon to see South Asian representation at the tippy top highest levels.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: And I think for the women, they are such generous people.
37:57
SPEAKER_01: They are like, bring it, let the club just got bigger, let's celebrate each other.
38:03
SPEAKER_01: That just comes naturally from them, it's been my observation.
38:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean, and maybe our partner who's actually in the rooms will have a different answer.
38:11
SPEAKER_01: But I think that's part of it.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: There's been this instinct of let's just, the tribe is increasing, let's just celebrate that.
38:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
38:18
SPEAKER_03: And a rising tide lifts all ships.
38:21
SPEAKER_02: I do have a bit of a different take.
38:23
SPEAKER_02: Um, and she's not wrong, but from my experience, when I look at Silicon Valley now, especially in the tech sector, oh, I don't know that we are underrepresented minority anymore.
38:36
SPEAKER_02: We're not.
38:36
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
38:37
SPEAKER_02: Uh we're actually probably overrepresented in many places.
38:39
SPEAKER_02: And in upper management, if I look at all the VC firms out there, these are storied venture capital firms that were not, you know, founded by people of color.
38:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
38:52
SPEAKER_02: Definitely not.
38:53
SPEAKER_02: And now they are being led by people of color all over the place, mostly men.
38:59
SPEAKER_02: And that has become more mainstream.
39:02
SPEAKER_02: The woman in that role is not mainstream.
39:06
SPEAKER_02: It is a surprise.
39:07
SPEAKER_02: It is an innovation, if you will, it's a happenstance.
39:12
SPEAKER_02: And I think there is a bit of element of like, is there space for all of us?
39:16
SPEAKER_02: Uh I at one point I remember having a conversation through my career with a a female board member about, you know, if you're not gonna be an ally, then you're not a if then you're an enemy, you know what I'm saying?
39:30
SPEAKER_02: For women.
39:30
SPEAKER_02: That it's either binary.
39:32
SPEAKER_02: There's no neutral ground.
39:34
SPEAKER_02: If you are not an ally to fellow women, you are an enemy, which is why I will support even people I do not like personally, because it is the right thing to do.
39:42
SPEAKER_02: I think what is going on is in the valley, in particular, there are some organizations and some convening bodies, like Natri, for example, has created this, you know, it's for professional corporate Indian women.
39:58
SPEAKER_02: And it is saying outwardly, it is okay to support each other.
40:03
SPEAKER_02: There is room.
40:05
SPEAKER_02: Here are examples.
40:07
SPEAKER_02: Let's help each other.
40:09
SPEAKER_02: It's uplifting, it's gratifying, it's leading the way, it's showing the way, it's demonstrating that you can succeed when you can help each other, even when you're still flying the plane, you haven't landed yet.
40:20
SPEAKER_02: There's no need to wait.
40:22
SPEAKER_02: There is so much room for so much more.
40:25
SPEAKER_02: When you start getting groups together like that with a common purpose, suddenly the mind opens.
40:32
unknown: Yeah.
40:32
SPEAKER_02: You know what I'm saying?
40:33
SPEAKER_02: You're not just meeting to go.
40:35
SPEAKER_02: I mean, not that going to the Diwali party is not fun, but you're not just meeting to go to the next Diwali party where you can just for social reasons.
40:42
SPEAKER_02: You can do fashion discussion and you can talk, you can talk about the latest designer, you can talk about the latest looks and whether something is too low-cutter, I blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
40:51
SPEAKER_02: And then you add a very substantive, meeting, meaty, soulful discussion on your career.
41:00
SPEAKER_02: It's beautiful.
41:01
SPEAKER_02: It's lovely.
41:01
SPEAKER_02: And I think more of that needs to be needs to happen.
41:05
SPEAKER_02: There is groupthink.
41:07
SPEAKER_02: When you're sitting alone thinking it's you against the world, it's alone.
41:11
SPEAKER_02: You're alone.
41:12
SPEAKER_02: You suddenly become very singular.
41:15
SPEAKER_02: When there is a group, you're like, okay, this is the art of the possible.
41:18
SPEAKER_02: I love that so much.
41:21
SPEAKER_03: I feel like what comes through in this book and has come through also in all these communities, I've observed, is the importance of harmonious partnerships, which you outline in your book.
41:31
SPEAKER_03: And as a 29-year-old woman, this is something that me and my friends talk about all the time.
41:35
SPEAKER_03: And that the ability of a lot of ambitious women, their ability to rise is so contingent on the partnerships they choose.
41:43
SPEAKER_03: Can you speak to your own partnerships at home and what you feel like has enabled both of you to succeed?
41:49
SPEAKER_01: We have another thing in common, Apartner, besides the fact that we're both South Indian originally, we're married to Muslim men.
41:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you were inner faith.
41:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, into faith.
41:59
SPEAKER_01: We've made that work.
42:01
SPEAKER_01: You know, in my case, I will celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary next year.
42:06
SPEAKER_01: So and I, you know, met my husband five years before that.
42:09
SPEAKER_01: So I've known him, it feels like most of my adult life.
42:12
SPEAKER_01: And the key question, I think, and I have daughters, we have daughters who are 26 and 32 who are in, you know, that phase like you of evaluating their, you know, possible life partners.
42:23
SPEAKER_01: And I think you have to know whether your partner is going to be your cheerleader and whether you two can be in the foxhole together, thinking of success as a family project.
42:35
SPEAKER_01: I think often one person or the other person's career, sadly, mostly the women's career, um, gets put on the back burner is because when the other demands of life come your way, then it becomes mostly the woman who does that and is trying to do it all, right?
42:51
SPEAKER_01: Is doing the caregiving, is doing the household stuff, the kids stuff, the birthday stuff, et cetera.
42:56
SPEAKER_01: But I think if you can think of success is a family project, both of us achieving our ambition, both of us fulfilling our outside obligations, actually means both of us have meaningful lives and meaningful careers.
43:11
SPEAKER_01: That's the place you have to start.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: And in my book, in the tips and tricks section, because of course 29-year-olds like tips and tricks.
43:17
SPEAKER_01: Yes, we do.
43:18
SPEAKER_01: I definitely have some questions you have to ask as you're evaluating a partner as a possible long-term, you know, life partner.
43:27
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
43:28
SPEAKER_02: I will just describe this 100% with what Comedy said.
43:32
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and yes, we do have this in common.
43:34
SPEAKER_02: Uh, it is not I I don't know how it is today, but even today it might be controversial.
43:40
SPEAKER_02: But definitely when we got married, uh, 2004, it was very controversial.
43:45
SPEAKER_02: My grandmother didn't speak to me for six months.
43:47
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
43:48
SPEAKER_02: Um, yes.
43:48
SPEAKER_02: And then she came, ended up coming to our wedding.
43:50
SPEAKER_02: I'm so close to my maternal grandmother for obvious reasons, you'll know from the book.
43:53
SPEAKER_02: She ended up coming to my wedding, and it was the the most ironic thing happened.
43:57
SPEAKER_02: Well, she came to the wedding because the re the resident.
44:01
SPEAKER_02: Matchmaker in Madras happened to be uh Juluanti, who was her cousin.
44:05
SPEAKER_02: And Juluanti was like, Are you kidding me?
44:07
SPEAKER_02: You're you haven't talked to her and you are not going to the wedding.
44:09
SPEAKER_02: You're an idiot because that girl loves you so much.
44:11
SPEAKER_02: It was very strategic of me through college.
44:13
SPEAKER_02: Every time I visited my grandmother, I would do the the old mommy, the mommy circuit, you know?
44:17
SPEAKER_02: The auntie circuit.
44:18
SPEAKER_02: The auntie circuit.
44:19
SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, the mommies, the mommies, the mommies, uh, the auntie circuit, or the actually in my case, the grandma circuit.
44:24
SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, all her friends knew me and her cousins knew me.
44:28
SPEAKER_02: So they were like, okay, this is really dumb.
44:29
SPEAKER_02: Like, you should go to this wedding.
44:31
SPEAKER_02: And ironically, my husband, I would I'd gotten a new job at Lehman Brothers and I was going to Hoboken.
44:36
SPEAKER_02: I was in the middle of training.
44:38
SPEAKER_02: I had to fly back for my wedding.
44:40
SPEAKER_02: And my grandmother and my husband stayed together for a month.
44:43
SPEAKER_02: And when I came home, like they were fast friends, and my grandmother's like, I don't know about this girl here.
44:48
SPEAKER_02: She doesn't do anything.
44:48
SPEAKER_02: You know, like you're the greatest thingess ever.
44:50
SPEAKER_02: It was the funniest thing I could have ever described.
44:53
SPEAKER_02: Fast forward, my father-in-law had come to visit, and he he asked my husband, you know, I'm not sure what she does.
45:02
SPEAKER_02: She doesn't do anything.
45:03
SPEAKER_02: Like, she's not cooking, she's not cleaning, she's not really taking care of the house in any way.
45:10
SPEAKER_02: You do the grocery shopping.
45:11
SPEAKER_02: Like, I'm I'm not understanding how this works.
45:13
SPEAKER_02: Like, what does she do as a wife?
45:15
SPEAKER_02: And my I wasn't there, so I wouldn't know.
45:18
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I was actually I was an investment banker this time.
45:20
SPEAKER_02: So my husband sat him down and said, okay, fair points.
45:27
SPEAKER_02: But this is how much she makes.
45:30
SPEAKER_02: So on a per hour basis, and if you count for sleep, she made sleep five hours a day, a night, if that's good.
45:37
SPEAKER_02: So if you take the sleep away, this is how much on a per hour basis, this is what she's bringing home.
45:42
SPEAKER_02: Should we, is it rational to have her cook, clean, take care of the house, do the laundry?
45:51
SPEAKER_02: I'm asking you.
45:52
SPEAKER_02: And my father and I was like, oh no, no, no, no.
45:54
SPEAKER_02: No, no, no, no.
45:55
SPEAKER_02: Wow.
45:56
SPEAKER_02: Please don't.
45:57
SPEAKER_02: And after that, it was so funny because every time I would change a job, he'd be like, Beta, is everything okay?
46:03
SPEAKER_02: And my husband would be like, I also work here, dude.
46:08
SPEAKER_01: But I met Rafik, and that's what you need.
46:10
SPEAKER_01: Rafik sat and told his father the truth.
46:14
SPEAKER_01: Often, you know this, there are mama's boys who'll fall into the trap and say, Yeah, well, actually, you should be doing more.
46:21
SPEAKER_01: It was the data argument.
46:22
SPEAKER_02: It was hilarious.
46:24
SPEAKER_02: But that is my husband.
46:25
SPEAKER_02: And to this day, he's like, he would be the one who said, Why are you making cookies?
46:30
SPEAKER_02: What is wrong with you?
46:32
SPEAKER_01: They are store-bought.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: They are good enough for our point.
46:36
SPEAKER_03: I'm like, there's some.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: But you make legendary ones.
46:39
SPEAKER_03: I feel like I have to share for our audience that what comes up in the book and even your ill your designated illustration in the book is a pie because you are a prolific baker.
46:48
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
46:49
SPEAKER_03: So we can't we can't understate why you're making the cookies.
46:52
SPEAKER_02: I will tell you, for all the mothers out there, there is something to be said about when your kid likes your dish, you just want to make it for them.
47:01
SPEAKER_02: And so at some point I had to explain to my husband, yes, I know we can outsource pretty much everything but the loving of the children.
47:07
SPEAKER_02: But sometimes you just want to make it because it makes them happy.
47:10
SPEAKER_01: And to illustrate to you, you and I are both vegetarian, I make the best chema on the planet, apparently, which is a hardcore Pakistani beef dish.
47:21
SPEAKER_01: Get it?
47:22
SPEAKER_01: But apparently I make it really well.
47:24
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, when your kids say, Mom, I want your chema, you just make it.
47:28
SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's beautiful.
47:29
SPEAKER_03: Can you tease for our audience some of the tips and questions you encourage women to ask or people to ask about?
47:35
SPEAKER_01: Oh, you mean on the partnership or just in the is like, how are you going to respond when the criticism comes from the in-laws about, oh, she's not doing enough, or you know, she's dressing too racily, or whatever.
47:51
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, I have to be honest with you, Indians, I love them and hate them, you know, because sometimes the traditional families they do kind of undermine the daughter-in-law in the house, and as you know, sometimes with horrific consequences.
48:04
SPEAKER_01: So those are the scenarios you have to play because, you know, in church counseling, you get to discuss the three important topics finances, kids, and religion.
48:12
SPEAKER_01: But don't stop there.
48:14
SPEAKER_01: That is just table stakes.
48:16
SPEAKER_01: You have to ask the deeper scenario playing questions.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: Hey, what if I got a promotion and had to move, you know, across the country?
48:22
SPEAKER_01: What would we do in that scenario?
48:24
SPEAKER_01: You know, things like that.
48:25
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
48:26
SPEAKER_03: There's there's a core quote that you have in the book that I feel like encapsulates this sentiment, which is there are inheritances from your culture that uplift you, and there are inheritances from our culture that hold you back.
48:38
SPEAKER_03: I'm curious from both your perspectives, what is one of each?
48:41
SPEAKER_03: And what you really want people to take away from our culture from Lotus Leadership.
48:46
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
48:46
SPEAKER_01: So one that's uplifted me is, you know, I don't think it's only Indian culture, but there's certain, you know, broad Asian cultures that have a reverence for elders.
48:55
SPEAKER_01: We're seen as wise, not crones, not someone to be kept off to the side or, you know, not allowed to speak at parties or whatever.
49:03
SPEAKER_01: And that has really freed me in thinking.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: I always knew I wanted to write a book.
49:08
SPEAKER_01: Who thought I would get an idea when I turned 60 and deliver the book on my 63rd birthday?
49:14
SPEAKER_01: Many people are like, oh, you're way past your prime.
49:16
SPEAKER_01: You know, you thought you could write a book, you should have done it in your 40s.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: So that's been really freeing for me.
49:21
SPEAKER_01: Something that's held me back, which is why I, one of the reasons I wrote the book, is this stupid obsession with the evil eye.
49:29
SPEAKER_01: Like if you promote yourself, bad things will come your way.
49:33
SPEAKER_01: So keep your head down and don't say too much about what's good, because God forbid, the, you know, evil, you know, whatever, the well-wishers, the evil wishers will come after you.
49:43
SPEAKER_01: And that's kept a lot of us from just taking credit for all the cool stuff we've done.
49:49
SPEAKER_01: So I'm hoping that, you know, we let go of that a little bit.
49:52
SPEAKER_02: I struggle with this one because I think I've changed my mindset with age.
49:59
SPEAKER_02: There's no other way to put it.
50:00
SPEAKER_02: Like it is it's the experience that you get after a few years.
50:04
SPEAKER_02: I would have told you about 10 years ago, we have a lot of shastrams, a lot of ways in which we do things, traditions.
50:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, just not to be too graphic here, but like you're not allowed to go to Shabri Malay.
50:20
SPEAKER_02: Right.
50:20
SPEAKER_02: Right?
50:21
SPEAKER_02: If you're a woman of, you know, if you have your period and you have to be super sexually active or whatever.
50:26
SPEAKER_02: Or you are super young, um, you're not allowed to go to Shabri Malay.
50:30
SPEAKER_02: You're not allowed to go to the temple.
50:33
SPEAKER_02: You may not, you know.
50:36
SPEAKER_02: My father just passed away, and my sister and I did a puja for him in our my house.
50:40
SPEAKER_02: And the first thing the priest asks is, Do you have a brother?
50:43
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, nope, no brother here.
50:44
SPEAKER_02: So it's gonna have to be us girls.
50:47
SPEAKER_02: But it's that, it's that mentality.
50:50
SPEAKER_02: I struggle with it because it is a that kind of mentality, it perpetuates that women are different, that there's something biological about us that needs to be put in the corner, we need to be put in the corner, that we're somewhat less than.
51:03
SPEAKER_02: I struggle with it though, because the way the priest explained some of the shastrams or the traditions or the rites that he was doing for my father, he's like, you know, I'm responsible for the soul.
51:18
SPEAKER_02: And I need to make sure the soul departs appropriately.
51:23
SPEAKER_02: This is the duality of our inheritance, right?
51:26
SPEAKER_02: Oh, another sexist ism where he's asking me from my brother, my brother, like really, there's no brother here.
51:30
SPEAKER_02: But I thought to myself, oh my God, he feels an insane sense of responsibility to my father, to my sister and me, who he's he's found out our sad story and he really wants to support us.
51:42
SPEAKER_02: Um, and he feels this responsibility, and that's why he's asking these questions.
51:46
SPEAKER_02: And that's it just hit me like that's why they think it's okay to say no to Shabri Malay or no to something else.
51:54
SPEAKER_02: It it's a struggle.
51:56
SPEAKER_02: It's like the it's it's the empathetic side of the Shiva Shakti.
51:59
SPEAKER_02: It's the it's the Shakti and the Shiva, but the empathy that's with it.
52:04
SPEAKER_02: Um it's a strong, I have not, I don't have the answer for it.
52:08
SPEAKER_02: I don't have the answer for it.
52:09
SPEAKER_02: But it is, it is a a call to go and understand why.
52:13
SPEAKER_02: And once you understand why, to change what you don't like about it, but not to write it off right off the bat.
52:19
SPEAKER_02: It's to examine that inheritance and understand the wisdom.
52:22
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
52:23
SPEAKER_03: I love that because for both of you, it just sounds like it's an evolution from from what you've grown up with, what you've seen, what you've experienced.
52:30
SPEAKER_03: I want to end on our rapid fire, but first, the last question I have for both of you is how do you define success for yourselves today?
52:36
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm in a season of abundance.
52:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm so lucky because I just did my first talk last week at Uber with a bunch of young women in the room, and a couple of them have posted about it and written to me privately and just said, wow, you know, you asked us this one question, which we haven't given given enough thought, and we're going to, which is, what is your one superpower that no one else can mimic?
52:59
SPEAKER_01: And they're like, we're gonna go think about it, and that's gonna drive our career.
53:02
SPEAKER_01: So I just feel like I'm beginning to already see the legacy of the thinking and writing that I've done.
53:08
SPEAKER_01: So that's who I, you know, that's where I am, and I'm in my season of abundance.
53:13
SPEAKER_02: I will say, for me, success looks like always having butterflies when I'm about to embark on something new.
53:22
SPEAKER_02: If I look back on my career, I was I'm a very planned person, career-wise, if you will.
53:29
SPEAKER_02: Um I might be very cluttered, but I know where everything is, for example.
53:32
SPEAKER_02: But I'm a very sort of, you know, you go to law school because you know you can pay for yourself.
53:36
SPEAKER_02: You um at the end of it, there's a job there.
53:38
SPEAKER_02: And you know, at the end of it, um, you know, you don't, I don't, I don't necessarily take risks with my career easily.
53:46
SPEAKER_02: But then if the the duality of it, when I actually look back at my career, I've been taking risks all day long.
53:51
SPEAKER_02: I want to say I would have never guessed that.
53:53
SPEAKER_03: I mean, even you quitting investment banking.
53:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and committing to tech was yes, it was a total there is no recruiter that has ever given me a job.
54:02
SPEAKER_02: It's always come kind of, it seems like it's random, but actually, if you think about it, it's not.
54:07
SPEAKER_02: When I joined this job at Intel, I had butterflies here too.
54:11
SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's 77,000.
54:13
SPEAKER_02: My comps person is gonna tell me I gotta get the number right.
54:16
SPEAKER_02: It's between 77 and 78,000 people at Intel today.
54:20
SPEAKER_02: That is big.
54:21
SPEAKER_02: We're Fortune 100, maybe in the 80s range, I think, depending on where the market cap is.
54:26
SPEAKER_02: That is big.
54:27
SPEAKER_02: It's a behemoth, it's in a transformation, it's hard, it's loving, but it's super hard.
54:33
SPEAKER_02: Um and I have I have butterflies.
54:37
SPEAKER_02: I'm scared.
54:38
SPEAKER_02: Success is constantly doing that.
54:40
SPEAKER_02: And I would say the second thing is my dad, my grandpa, my fat mother's father used to say, do your best and leave the rest to God.
54:50
SPEAKER_02: If you can do your best, you can unequivocally say you left it all on the table or on the on the field.
54:56
SPEAKER_02: You left it all on the field.
54:57
SPEAKER_02: You just tried your best.
54:59
SPEAKER_02: And then you're like, okay, yeah.
55:01
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
55:01
SPEAKER_02: Peace out.
55:02
SPEAKER_02: You know, that is success at whatever you're doing.
55:05
SPEAKER_02: If you hold back a little bit, it's not success.
55:08
SPEAKER_03: I love that.
55:09
SPEAKER_01: I love the butterflies.
55:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, me too.
55:11
SPEAKER_01: I love the buttons.
55:11
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep that one.
55:13
SPEAKER_03: Before you both we finish, I would love for both of you to read a little bit of your section together.
55:19
SPEAKER_03: Okay, because I think that'll make for a nice moment in the book.
55:25
SPEAKER_02: Hi, I'm Uprana.
55:27
SPEAKER_02: Um, I'm one of the Lotus Leaders in Comedy's Lotus Leadership book, and I'm gonna read you a couple paragraphs from her book about myself.
55:36
SPEAKER_02: So I had a whole design of an entire garden, which my dad said required$200,000 to implement.
55:49
SPEAKER_02: You know, in Michigan, you have bigger sized lots.
55:52
SPEAKER_02: It's a lot of grass.
55:53
SPEAKER_02: And I was in charge of the entire outside.
55:56
SPEAKER_02: And I would do it all so prolifically.
56:00
SPEAKER_02: Back then, her dad balked at the price, but according to SEC documents, Upperna's pro promotion to Zoom COO came with a multimillion dollar pay package.
56:09
SPEAKER_02: She can certainly buy her own flowers now.
56:12
SPEAKER_02: That was her Shiva Shakti bubbling up in its rawest, earliest form.
56:17
SPEAKER_02: She couldn't just bake cookies, she had to master the recipe and become renowned for them in the Michigan Indian diaspora.
56:24
SPEAKER_02: Pick up a magazine on gardening at the library, and she'd wind up sketching out a$200,000 redesign of the entire property.
56:32
SPEAKER_02: This tendency would hit a boil by the time she was in her 20s, building her career investment banking.
56:38
SPEAKER_02: But her Shiva Shekti duality was unsettling to men in the environment.
56:43
SPEAKER_02: It's particularly jarring in a male-dominated environment because I look a certain way.
56:49
SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm five foot two.
56:51
SPEAKER_02: Nah, I'm really five foot one and three-quarters, let's be honest.
56:54
SPEAKER_02: Indian, kind of young looking, a cutesy girl, if you will, and then I open my mouth and it's like stainless steel, and concrete comes out.
57:07
SPEAKER_01: That was beautiful.
57:10
SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Kamini Ramani, and I'm the author of this book, Lotus Leadership, which by the way was just named to the USA Today bestseller list, so I hope you'll go out and read it.
57:23
SPEAKER_01: Yes, this book is for you.
57:26
SPEAKER_01: For the next 250 pages, you can think of me as your hip, wise but brutally honest Indian auntie, who will tell you about these stories over some chai and show you how to live a better life.
57:40
SPEAKER_01: She's called Apa, Bua, Chachi, Chitti, Mami, Mausi, Periyama, Thai, and more, depending on which part of India you hail from.
57:52
SPEAKER_01: But she's simply auntie to all.
57:55
SPEAKER_01: In our culture, your grandmothers indulge you, your mother pleads with you, but your aunties are direct.
58:04
SPEAKER_01: They tell you what you need to hear, but are also there for you when you stumble and can't tell anyone else.
58:11
SPEAKER_01: They are both parachutes and safety nets, sharing expertise on what to wear, whom to date, when to cut bait, and how to thrive.
58:21
SPEAKER_01: You can complain to them, confide in them, and collaborate with them.
58:27
SPEAKER_01: What you cannot do is push them out of your life, as they are only there to help you sore.
58:35
SPEAKER_03: Yay.
58:36
SPEAKER_03: Thank you guys so much.
58:38
SPEAKER_03: This was so great, Sydney.
58:39
SPEAKER_03: Okay, a rapid fire.
58:41
SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna say a sentence and I want you to fill in the blank.
58:44
SPEAKER_02: It's like Mad Lib's comedy.
58:48
SPEAKER_03: My kids would describe me as nosy, hilarious.
58:52
SPEAKER_03: Loving tough means Mama Bear.
59:00
SPEAKER_01: Uh surrounding you with uh warm blanket and a steel glove.
59:05
SPEAKER_03: And for those of you who don't get that, it's in the book.
59:08
SPEAKER_03: Something I'm still learning is uh you go be comfortable with myself.
59:19
SPEAKER_01: Something I'm still learning.
59:21
SPEAKER_01: Wow, I know everything.
59:23
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I have to come up with an answer now.
59:26
SPEAKER_01: Uh just to be in the moment.
59:29
SPEAKER_01: Be in the moment.
59:30
SPEAKER_01: Something I'm unlearning is to let go of the evil eye and to go practice what I preach.
59:41
SPEAKER_02: Using filler words and sounds.
59:43
SPEAKER_03: Um uh that's very practical.
59:47
SPEAKER_03: Good.
59:47
SPEAKER_03: A hot take I have is feedback is a gift.
59:52
SPEAKER_03: Oh, you don't think it's a gift?
59:54
SPEAKER_02: I think it's a gift.
59:54
SPEAKER_02: Oh, you think it is a gift?
59:55
SPEAKER_02: It's a hot take.
59:56
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
59:56
SPEAKER_02: It's important.
59:58
SPEAKER_01: I don't have I don't know.
59:59
SPEAKER_03: You have hot takes.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_03: I have hot takes?
1:00:01
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:00:02
SPEAKER_03: Uh your nuzher one is definitely a hot take, but another one.
1:00:05
SPEAKER_03: Okay, another one.
1:00:05
SPEAKER_02: Well, hot take is opposite.
1:00:07
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I didn't know that.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: Hot take I have is that uh Indian aunties are always right.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_04: Oh can I redo my hot take?
1:00:19
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:00:19
SPEAKER_02: My hot take is I'm always right.
1:00:23
SPEAKER_03: Wait, that's so good.
1:00:24
SPEAKER_03: Don't tell my children though.
1:00:26
SPEAKER_03: They didn't they didn't hear the thing.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_01: Hey, this is getting broadcast.
1:00:29
SPEAKER_01: Your children will hear.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_01: Nobody ever asks me about my first job pounding the pavement, selling books in Bombay.
1:00:41
SPEAKER_01: If I'm ever scared.
1:00:43
SPEAKER_03: Are you scared?
1:00:44
SPEAKER_03: All the time.
1:00:45
SPEAKER_03: All the time.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_03: And one word through which you would define lotus leader or trailblazer.
1:00:57
SPEAKER_01: Abundant.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_03: Badass.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_03: I love this.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_03: What is one thing you both hope people take away from this book?
1:01:05
SPEAKER_03: You in writing and giving voices to all of these women, you in the stories that you've shared and your Shiva Shakti profile.
1:01:12
SPEAKER_01: I just hope people know they can be more than one thing at the same time.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_01: Don't fall into the either-or tyranny, just reject it and be who you want to be.
1:01:24
SPEAKER_01: Even if it's conflicting, even if it's multiple different things, just be in your abundance.
1:01:31
SPEAKER_02: You can do anything you set your mind to and use the wisdom and the inheritance to your advantage.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_03: I love that.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_03: Thank you both so much.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_03: This is so special to record.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_03: It was so fun to be here.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_03: Love you, Communi.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_03: Love you too, my dear.
1:01:50
SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for tuning in today.
1:01:52
SPEAKER_03: I hope you'll join our community at SouthAsianTrailblazers.com.
1:01:56
SPEAKER_03: Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter and follow us at SouthAsian Trailblazers on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and any major platform.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_03: Here at South Asian Trailblazers, we're dedicated to elevating leading South Asians.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_03: Until next time.