The importance of having fun with Carmen Alfonso Rico
Make Space for Growth Podcast
You can feel the energy in the voice or the video. It is contagious. A breath of fresh air in a world that is almost afraid of joy. That is how I felt coming out of recording the new season of the podcast with Carmen Alfonso Rico. It is not every day that you meet someone who is unapologetic about having fun and enjoying what she is doing. Kicking off with politics Carmen wanted to be the US Secretary of State when she was a little girl. Note she was not a US national or living in the US, but that did not seem to stop her. Serendipity determined she would start her career in...
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Listening to Yourself with Samreen Ghani
Make Space for Growth Podcast
Before the summer break, I reconnected with old colleague Samreen Ghani to talk about her journey and her role as President of Moonbug Studios. It had been a long time since our M&A times together! And we end up finding ourselves in a similar life reflection on "how you measure your life"! The Early Days Samreen did not follow the expected path. Her earliest memory from childhood was spelling the word "doctor", which was exciting for her parents as she grew up. In Pakistan, her expected paths would have been doctor, engineer, lawyer or banker if she wanted to define herself...
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Believing in Serendipity with Rita Vilas-Boas
Make Space for Growth Podcast
Rita Vilas Boas first connected with me on Linkedin. After a lot of online engagement, we finally met in person last year to find out we shared . When she was a little girl, Rita wanted to dismantle things and figure out how things worked, but deep down, she wanted to be part of Fame, and dance on a Taxi roof in the streets of New York. Can you picture it? Different lives Rita studied biotechnology but soon found out about marketing, where she started her career. She threw herself into it and got a job at Loreal. For 20 years, she was a marketer in multinationals and large family...
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Finding your happiness with Sabine Tejerina
Make Space for Growth Podcast
When she was a little girl, Sabine wanted to be a businesswoman. In the middle of the pandemic, faced with economic distress in parts of the world and her day job helping large companies restructure and prepare for the economic downfall of Covid, she went on a life change. She became an entrepreneur and has since then been living the rollercoaster of start-up life. "It's not always the big decisions that impact your life", Clay Christensen Share ownership as a goal The idea for Upstreet started with a focus on rewarding customers for loyalty through company shares. Research shows that...
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A life dedicated to purpose with Daniela Barone Soares
Make Space for Growth Podcast
It is unusual to find someone who wanted to be something as a child that they are today. Daniela started volunteering at age 12 and she always knew her life would be dedicated to making the problems of the world better. These experiences increased her resolve to do something about it, even if she did not know how. A glide path "When you look back, it all seems to make sense" Daniela However, it was not so rational at the time. As Daniela was working in Private Equity, she realized her skillset was truly invaluable in the social sector and realized she could start making a difference in this...
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A life dedicated to purpose with Daniela Barone Soares
Make Space for Growth Podcast
It is unusual to find someone who wanted to be something as a child that they are today. Daniela started volunteering at age 12 and she always knew her life would be dedicated to making the problems of the world better. These experiences increased her resolve to do something about it, even if she did not know how. A glide path "When you look back, it all seems to make sense" Daniela However, it was not so rational at the time. As Daniela was working in Private Equity, she realized her skillset was truly invaluable in the social sector and realized she could start making a difference in this...
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Never waste a good crisis with Inês Santos Silva
Make Space for Growth Podcast
With a love for learning since early age, I have a feeling Inês will be learning for many years to come. She is passionate about innovation, and is not scared about solving a challenge. You just have to look at her resume to see this. I lost count of the number of roles and ventures in her profile. A fast-starter Ines assessed start-ups needed support way before it was cool to talk about accelerator programs. So she designed one. And expanded it to multiple cities. She determined there was a need for social ventures long before social impact was a concept. So she dedicated her efforts...
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Never waste a good crisis with Ines Santos Silva
Make Space for Growth Podcast
With a love for learning since early age, I have a feeling Inês will be learning for many years to come. She is passionate about innovation, and is not scared about solving a challenge. You just have to look at her resume to see this. I lost count of the number of roles and ventures in her profile. A fast-starter Ines assessed start-ups needed support way before it was cool to talk about accelerator programs. So she designed one. And expanded it to multiple cities. She determined there was a need for social ventures long before social impact was a concept. So she dedicated her efforts...
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Creating Space - Launching Season 3
Make Space for Growth Podcast
Today, I am bringing you the launch of Season 3 - Creating Space. In order to tell you more about the upcoming season, I feel I need to go back in time and explain my concept of word of the year. Because Space is my word of the year. For the last 3 years, I have been defining myself a word of the year. Why a word of the year? I already have goals, values, and even a vision board. I found a word goes beyond and through all that. A word gives me a true north. Believe In 2020, my word of the year was . And that belief helped me hold it together - do you remember the year of Covid? I acted...
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A Journey back through the Season
Make Space for Growth Podcast
For the Season Finale, I went around the world and down into my memory to pick the highlights of this season. What I learnt, what I discovered, what I was impressed about. There is no bittersweet taste in getting to the end of a season. In fact, it is exciting to look back and remember all the amazing women that crossed my path. After the hard to forget year of 2020, my goal was to bring to light in 2021, the stories of what are now almost 2 years of this pandemic, but more importantly, how each of us is looking to lift ourselves up, look forward and face life stronger and together. As for...
info_outlineAs I listen to the podcast I recorded with Khyati, I immediately get transported back to those last days in London before my big move. Khyati is an energetic inspiring woman, committed to changing what she sees wrong and going through the challenges life throws at her. Khyati is the CEO of Applied, after having founded (and closed) her own start-up Fosho post her Corporate Finance life.
Leaving Corporate Life
One day, Khyati looked around and found out she was not finding a path ahead in Investment Banking. Thinking about the future, she realized those 4-walls did not bear her dreams. As a reflective and impatient person, she believes she jumps into things before she is even ready. So when she left, she did not know exactly what she was going to do.
"Ideas are a dime a dozen"
After 2 years back to school she tried different ideas, put some through incubators, passed her ideas through people on the street and really went on an immersive experience. She ended up creating Fosho, an AI-based, machine-learning platform for sustainable supply chains. But it was too early, and after initial traction, the company did not scale.
Back to the recruitment market
After Fosho, Khyati went through an inflection point as she looked to go back to the market. She had decided not to go to big corporate, but she also did not have any other ideas to get started. When she started applying for jobs, it was devastating. Khyati estimates she must have applied for more than 200 jobs. As she spent hours working on her CV and cover letter she got told (when she got an answer):
"You didn't fit"
This message kept getting repeated back to her. And that is when Khyati realized that the recruitment market was broken. It was surprising, but also heart-breaking. Unfortunately, Khyati's story is not unique.
Finding Applied
This experience defined her journey in finding a company that would value her skills and the things that really matter on the job. She joined to run product and after a year became the CEO of the company. If you were wondering what company hired her on the basis of skills? Applied is an end-to-end hiring platform that uses 50 years of research about hiring, evidence-based information rather than proxies.
Applied provides a better structure for decision making and has had so far over 350 thousand applications in their platform. The company tests exclusively on skills and have built a unique database that is de-biased. How? The candidate receives a questionnaire rather than sending in their resume. And the outcomes are anonymised and randomised in multiple ways to ensure there are no flawed signals in the process and to avoid drawing any inferences about the candidate - you can only focus on skills.
Can you see how I could go on talking about this company for hours?
CEO into the Pandemic
Khyati became the CEO of Applied a month before the pandemic hit. And what was her first job? To close a fundraise. She barely remembers that first month of Covid-19 as she was so absorbed in ensuring the company had enough money.
After the close, she was shocked about how the business was getting hit and losing customers. They took a bet that hiring would normalize but imagined it would take at least 18 months. As such, they went into a cash conservation strategy, most unusual after closing a fundraising round. It worked out and the company became self-sustainable during that time and is now ready to invest as recruitment has re-opened.
Life in the Pandemic
Khyati was in London for lockdown and that was a difficult time. I was impressed to find out that she replaced her commute time with meditation time, rather than just working more, as many of the women I interviewed or encountered (self-included). During the times at home, (other than her family) she missed her gym and the routine it gave her. She worked out new routines into her day to help her with it.
Whilst the pandemic brought a lot of loneliness, it also allowed her to go on a personal journey which included more meditation and long walks to give her more grounding. She hopes to keep that in a post-pandemic environment. One of the tools she used to help her keep going with her exercise and self-care was an accountability buddy, which ensured she would not back out of it on the harder days. The part she could not manage as well was dealing with the distance from family, despite all the virtual encounters. Travel is the only solution!
As we finished and I thought I had so much out of the podcast, Khyati hit me with a quote that I seem to forget often (as she does). Be as water. After this amazing story, there was no better title for the podcast.
Khyati's List
- 2020 Advice: Be as Water
- 2020 Challenge: Distance from family
- 2020 Lesson: There are things you can't control
- 2021 Book: Managing Yourself, HBR and Invisible Woman
- 2021 Word: Energizing
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