Career Growth Advice from Lisa Spelman, business Leader | Career Tips for Women in business

2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 120
Featuring Lisa Spelman, CEO of Cornelis Networks

Episode Title: #120 Lisa Spelman, CEO of Cornelis Networks, Shares Insights for Female Leaders in Tech

Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Lisa Spelman



Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there. My name is Mary Killa-Olea. Welcome to the To Be Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. To Be Bolder was created out of my love for technology and marketing, my desire to bring together like-minded women, and my hope to be a great role model and source of inspiration for my two girls and other young women like you. Encouraging you guys to show up and to be bolder and to know that anything you guys dream of, it's totally possible. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the conversation.

Hi. Today we are so lucky to have with us Lisa Spelman. Lisa is the new chief executive officer of Cornelis Networks, a leading independent provider of intelligent, high-performance networking solutions. Previously, Lisa had executive leadership roles for more than two decades at Intel, where she was most recently corporate vice president in the data center and AI group and general manager of Xeon products and solutions. During her tenure, she expanded Xeon's capabilities to accelerate AI workloads, establishing CPUs as a leading inference engine across the industry. Spelman also held several senior leadership roles within Intel's IT organization, including infrastructure operations and engineering, as well as positions in finance, data center, product, brand marketing, and sales. Lisa is also well known for her advocacy of women in tech, volunteering her time generously to encourage and support the growth of women in leadership roles. Lisa, it's a huge honor to have you here. I know you've been busy traveling. I appreciate you carving up some time to be here. Just join us and discuss about your career journey.

Lisa Spelman (Guest): Well, thank you, Mary. I'm excited to be here as well. And it's always good to kind of take a pause from the day to day and spend a little time thinking and talking about what's kind of going on behind the scenes.

Mary Killelea: Awesome. Okay. So first off, congratulations on your new role of CEO. That's amazing and so well deserved. For those that are not familiar with your company and your new role, can you tell us about the company and kind of what attracted you to them to take on this new leadership role?

Lisa Spelman: Yeah, I'd love to. So Cornelis Networks delivers high performance scale out fabrics that are really the backbone of how AI workloads and high performance computing workloads can run in incredibly efficient manner and just increase GPU utilization and improve the time to train on models, improve the throughput of inference, deliver better, faster response times for things like weather modeling, for cancer drug detection, all those really high computational use cases.

And what drove me to this opportunity is actually a little bit what I was doing before, which was working at the compute layer of the system, if you will. And I had this awesome spot in the industry to see so many compute decisions get made, so much advancement on the GPUs, on accelerators, on custom silicon, on just a ton of change, an explosion of change in that space over the last couple years. And I was stepping back from the whole thing and sitting there going, you know what, the network is the next great optimization frontier.

I don't know if everybody thinks about it like that, but there is so much opportunity to improve the performance of every system by improving the network. And I just found, I started talking with the team and we were like really getting deep into it and meeting with the board and being interviewed. And what would happen was I was looking at different opportunities as well, but I'd be out on a walk or I just have a moment of quiet. And I kept finding my brain going back to what Cornelis and the team was working on. And I was like, “oh, you know what, what if we did this”? And I started using the “we” term in my head. And so that really stood out to me and I took it as a sign. I mean, this is where you're supposed to be, like you can help. And it's just, I love it. I'm with an awesome group of founders that have done amazing work to build the company.

My skillsets are complimentary and additive to theirs. And we make, I think a really strong team, a really strong leadership team. And then we just have this, you know, amazing group of employees, like the depth of their domain knowledge and experience and, you know, the way that they fundamentally understand how every single packet should move. Like it still blows me away every day. So, I'm really loving diving in and I'm really happy with the choice I made to join this team.

Mary Killelea: Oh, that's fantastic. Just in listening to you, I can see, you know, you appreciate the collaboration of the talent that's there and the leadership that you can bring to that. That's so cool. Okay. So, I know you haven't been there that long, but can you tell me what like a day in the life of is so far?

Lisa Spelman: Sure. Yeah. So I'm at three months and every day is something new. And actually, I love the variety. You kind of cover everything. Like it's the whole company. Like, you know, I led divisions before and all that, but there's a lot of support that happens when it's a division. And I enjoy that. And in a day, you know, I can have a really important customer meeting. I can have a discussion with an investor on either a current investor or a new potential investor about what we're building. I can have a deep dive with the architecture team. I can have some work on an employee policy. Like we just put in place our parental leave policy. Like we're big enough now and we want to support families. And so we sat down and said, “okay, how are we going to do this? What are we going to do”? And so every day has different challenges and opportunities that present itself.

However, I do find you have to be pretty disciplined. And this is something that my prior experience has helped me with about really making sure you're carving out time for what is going to move the company forward. You can spend your whole day as an administrator. You can also choose to weigh in on everything. And that's not probably going to be getting the job done. Like my job is to lead the company to growth. Like that is it. And so putting us in a position to do that and to scale is really important. And so just by all those things that I love doing and that are really interesting, I really need to focus on culture and I need to focus on customer and I need to focus on scale. Like how do I scale all these big brains that we have and really put us in the position to win? So that's where I make sure I'm carving out time so that your day doesn't get consumed by just the millions of things.

Mary Killelea: Right. So your career at Intel was obviously very successful. You held many different roles there. Looking back, what are you most proud of from that experience?

Lisa Spelman: There's a lot of different things that we did there that were pretty cool. That's the thing about going back to the word scale. When you're at Intel, you're operating at a global scale across the whole ecosystem, every customer in the world. And one thing that always comes to mind is the work we did on the Xeon product line building out Intel's first profitable AI business. So that had some risk taking with it. And I've talked about this before, but you're taking up die space. You know you have software to move. You've got a lot of customers to convince and at the time that a couple of us made that decision to go that direction, we did not have full alignment across the company. We did have to push through and it was a big bet and it was exciting to see it play out like that.

I also have some really awesome memories of my time in IT and just cool ways we improve the user experience for our customers, which were the employees, our peers. But I think the thing I'm most proud of is the team and the culture that we created. I had a great organization that had a lot of fun tackling and solving hard problems. And I think when you can be part of a team that hard can still be fun, you're onto something. And a lot of us worked together for years and built an incredibly high trust relationships. And it just reminds me that it's all about the people. That's how everything gets done.

Mary Killelea: I 100% agree. Some of the fondest memories I have was working in a group where it was so intense, but the trust level that we had each other's back and we were in it all together just made the world of difference. It didn't seem like I would sign up for it again tomorrow if I had a chance. So I hear just through different various interviews of successful women that have achieved high levels of success, that they say it's lonely at the top. Have you experienced loneliness as your career has progressed up the ladder? And if so, I guess, what or how have you dealt with some of those situations and how do you focus on building that support network?

Lisa Spelman: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there is an element of truth in that. And I don't know if it's exactly loneliness, but it's high stakes and it's high pressure. And I think what sometimes they're really referring to is that accountability of like you own the ultimate decision. It's you. That's why you're there. That's why you have the title. That's why you're getting compensated for it. It's your job to be seen around the corners and helping. And sometimes that means you're a little bit on your own and out there. But I will say that in general, that's not been how I've been feeling, especially in this new role.

I feel so lucky to have just gotten into this group of a network of startup CEOs that I'm getting to know and I'm finding it hugely supportive. I bounce ideas off of them all the time. I ask for advice. We share best practices. I'm grateful for the community and we are all cheering for each other's success. And at first I thought, oh, geez, what am I going to bring to the table? I've been a CEO for one minute. And then I realized my experience at a large company is actually really useful. Some of these folks have never worked in an environment like that. And as they're trying to align and form partnerships or build ecosystem, I can provide advice there just as they're providing me advice as we approach our Series C funding round, which is my first time doing that.

The one thing back on the loneliness thing, though, that you do have to remember, yes, as a CEO, but also in lots of leadership position, is that you have to be thoughtful about how you do engage with your team and remember that your words carry a lot of weight. So you're not just a group of peers hanging out and having a chat. You can accidentally launch a thousand ships with an offhand comment and then have the team come back and be like, “okay, we've been working super hard to get this all put together”. And you're like, what? We were just chatting for five minutes before the meeting started. So you do have to be thoughtful and make sure that you're not accidentally setting direction.

Mary Killelea: I think that's so fascinating and kind of, I would think, a little exhausting.

Lisa Spelman: There is an element of self-control that comes with it. Like, again, it's that reminder, you're not just one of the team. And then I also have to remind myself, and again, you know, it happened a long, long ago, but you give up on being liked by everybody because it's just impossible. There's no way to be liked by everyone. You can be respected, but not always liked. And I've kind of cracked myself up a few times where I'm like, yeah, it's possible that I came up in a few conversations at home tonight knowing someone was like, oh, you know, she's driving me crazy or, you know, she gave me hard feedback or whatever. And you just have to be okay with it and be like, you know, it's just part of the role and it's part of how people process and figure out what they're going to do next. So yeah.

Mary Killelea: That's great. So in reading, kind of doing some homework ahead of this meeting, you graduated with a degree in finance and marketing from the University of Washington. What led you down the tech industry B2B path?

Lisa Spelman: You know, the best way I can think to describe it is that it wasn't so much that I found tech or hunted down tech. It's a little bit more that tech found me. Then once I was in, you know, the environment, like what kept me on the path was the learning and the pace. I love learning new things. I get bored if I'm not learning new things. I like pushing boundaries. And each of the roles that I have taken has put me on that exact journey. Like I did start in finance and then I moved into marketing and then I moved into technical sales and then I moved into IT doing infrastructure, you know, operations and engineering. And then I moved into product management and then I became a GM. Like I've never taken the same job twice. And then I became a CEO of a network company after spending a lot of time in compute. So I think you can kind of clearly see just so many people that does not look like a linear straight line path to where you ended up. But for me, it kept me learning and growing. And just each one was an expansion of my exposure and skill set.

Mary Killelea: Did you have a mentor along the way that kind of helped you with that career path?

Lisa Spelman: Oh, tons. Definitely. And the other thing is, you know, mentors, I have like a really strong belief, like they can be spot mentors, and they can be long, long term and both are valid and they can kind of come in and out of your life. So, you have people that are really have a great expertise, maybe in a particular area or something you're considering doing, and they can be incredibly helpful. That doesn't mean they're looking at the arc of your career, but they can help you along the way. And then you have others that are like more maybe consistent throughout the whole time. But again, good mentors aren't usually telling you what to do. They're kind of asking you questions, figuring out how many think through what you know you want to do. You just might need to do a little self discovery to get there.

Mary Killelea: So I was reading according to strongdm.com as of this year, women hold approximately 17% of CEO positions in technology companies.

Lisa Spelman: Okay.

Mary Killelea: And so this means for every female CEO, there's about five male CEOs in the tech industry. One, that's staggering. And again, we're so proud that you're taking it and you're out here showing other women that it's possible and sharing your story and insights. So greatly appreciate that. But what is your superpower in winning that role?

Lisa Spelman: I don't know. Maybe I should ask some of my team members and things like that, what they see. Sometimes you try to have good perspective on yourself. But I do think as a leader, one of the things that helps set me apart is that working with people, building teams, using a lot of logic in decision making. And I know a lot of people say things like, oh yeah, build a strong team. Okay, cool. How do you do that? What does that mean? But I think really respecting people for their domain expertise, calling on people for their opinions and perspective, making room at the table for more ideas.

I do feel like I found that over the years, I am pretty good at building teams for cohesion and output and can do the one plus one equals three type of math in order to drive forward even in really difficult circumstances. I do think there are some elements of natural or innate personality that draw people towards different functions as well. I was the team captain of the volleyball team and I was the captain of the softball team. And I held leadership positions in college and things like that. So, I think there's an element of being drawn to it. And so, it's a lifelong skill, not a one day you wake up and you're like, okay, now I'll be a leader.

Mary Killelea: Right. That's so well said. Okay. So, on the topic of career progression, many women struggle with advocating for themselves because one, either their uncertainty on what is the clear pathway for various roles, kind of that don't know what you don't know kind of thing, or because they're one unaware of the qualifications required for that role. What advice do you have for women on developing a career strategy?

Lisa Spelman: Yeah, well, this might not come as a surprise to you after I'd outlined kind of what my career path was. It's not a huge believer in the straight line path there. So, do you sometimes think people look, they search too hard for the, if I do this checklist, then will I be guaranteed something? Right. And like so much must come together for an opportunity to be the right one at the right time. And so you can really drive yourself mad and get really frustrated if you're looking at it like a check, you know, like a checklist or check mark off certain things you you've done, or if you get kind of super obsessed with the qualifications I have for sure earned and garnered roles that my resume wouldn't have said that I was ready for or that I just like had the right experience for.

But I ended up being very successful in them because I had people that had seen my work and I was sponsored into those roles saying, “yes, here's this portion of the job she doesn't know, but I've seen her do this”. And so, I know she'll be successful. There is value in kind of exposing and sharing your skills and experiences with people so that they know about what you're capable of and what you can do. And that's how they think about you.

So on the uncertainty on career path, I tend to encourage people to instead of focusing on, again, this like linear line of start here end here, really do self-exploration and every time you face a job change or an opportunity, or if you need to push yourself to pursue one, to think through what did I love about that last experience? What did I not like? And how do I get more towards the things I love? Again, it doesn't have to be your passion. It doesn't have to be your passion. It's just like what activities of that role did I love and how do I bring more of that into my life? And that's kind of what's always worked for me, even if the job content was quite different between them.

Mary Killelea: So, I've known you for years and as long as I've known you, you've been an advocate for women in tech and I've attended many events where you've spoken and helped us women in the audiences. What do you see as the biggest obstacle or challenge that we must overcome in the short and long term in order for more women to want to seek out a career in tech and stay in tech?

Lisa Spelman: Yeah. These are challenges and there's not really a one answer. I do see that there's still some unconscious bias that impacts women and minorities. And there's lots of women that come into tech and then bow out at a certain point. It can be demanding, and it could be a time commitment issue. It could be challenges when you first start a family right at that point when your career is starting on this acceleration path. And it could just be that it's become uncomfortable, so much so that you pursue another role, or you start to get held back by those expectations. There's a lot of reasons that can derail people out.

When I talk about the unconscious bias and I see it as, I think it helps to not think of it as primarily ill-intentioned. It's usually not. But I've been in so many opportunities when there's been reviewing of promotion candidates or advancement candidates, even if it's not full promotion or for new opportunities. And it really is true that women and minorities receive far more subjective feedback about how they conducted themselves or how they appeared or what their presence was like. And in those areas where there's these higher expectations of perfection there versus focusing on the output, the accomplishment, the thing that was done.

And by the way, it's not just men who carry those unconscious bias. Actually, women carry those unconscious biases of other women as well. So there's no singular answer there. I do think having brave people that are willing to call that out is generally quite helpful. And you can do that in a lot of gracious ways that allow people the chance to correct for that. Just gentle reminders about, oh, I see we veered a little off topic of the accomplishments we were talking about. So, let's actually refocus on that. It doesn't have to be how dare you bring this up. I'm the unconscious bias police. You can course correct and move back to the topic at hand and that focus. And you can also ask questions about, “well, what are you concerned about? What would be the problem with giving the person this opportunity? What would go wrong”?

Because again, people are pursuing perfection. And if you really push them to think about what's the worst thing that happens out of taking this risk, if you will, often the answer is a very, very low risk. So, you can help open doors for people by guiding those conversations back towards more possibilities.

Mary Killelea: That example was helpful, the re-guiding. So, regarding pay gaps, that's another hot topic. According to Wikipedia, the gender pay gap in the United States tech industry found that despite applying for the same jobs at the same companies, women received job offers that paid less than their male counterparts 63% of the time. How can women advocate for themselves to get higher wages and raises?

Lisa Spelman: Yeah, it's such a bummer. But I do think, again, negotiation is important. It would be nice if there was a way for this problem to be solved for women, for minorities, but it's probably not going to just magically happen. So, is it totally fair that it falls onto the candidate then to figure this out themselves? Maybe not, but it is. And each of us take our best shot and push for what you want and what you expect and what you think you need. So, part of the way that you can do that is asking, oh, thank you so much for this offer. I'm very excited about joining the company. If you wouldn't mind, I would appreciate you taking it back and doing one more review against the last five people that you hired into this role and making sure this is at parity and that I won't find anything surprising when I join the company and engage with my peers because I'm really excited about this opportunity.

And so that people think negotiation is this like hard charging, like, you know, thing. I mean, just literally listen to what I just said. There's nothing objectionable in there. It's a reasonable ask. You're not asking for a boatload of extra work. You're not demanding to be paid more than anyone. You're not bringing up the pay gap or anything like this. You're just saying like, “I really want to be here. And I really want to be happy today when I say yes. And in 30 days when I'm one month in, just help make that happen”. That's all. So again, I think there's ways to approach some of those challenges and help close some of those gaps with a little bit of advocacy that does not have to be this like head to head hard charging type of sometimes uncomfortable for people activity.

Mary Killelea: That's such good advice. I have another question stat conversation here for us. According to Accenture, the proportion of women working in tech now is smaller at 32% than it was in 1984 when it was 35%. So today women hold just 16% of the engineering roles and 27% of the computing roles in companies in the US. So ,these are definitely specific to more tech jobs. But why do you think that is? And I think we kind of touched on it with maybe, you know, work time and other pressures, but it's got to be something more that a woman can control and help manage so that she doesn't feel like she's just another stat.

Lisa Spelman: Yeah, it's not just, you know, again, like work time or families or whatever, things like that. One of the things I think that we can do to help as a collective is to try and be conscious about how we form teams so that people don't find themselves in a situation of being the only one. So if you're managing, I'm just going to use simple math, but if you're managing a 100 person team and you've got 10 teams of 10 and you have 10 women, again, just go with me on this, right? If you put one woman on each team of 10, she's the only one there. And then you can say, “oh, look at, I've got diversity on every team I have”. Yeah, you can, but you didn't necessarily create maybe the best environment for welcoming and attracting more.

So, I think there's value and validity in saying, “yeah, some of these teams are actually going to be, the structure of them will end up being men only because I'm going to build teams that have two or three women on them”. And then when they have five, we might restructure a few things and work is always changing. It's not like some big gender balance restructure, it's just life, stuff change, people move around. So, you might branch off too and adjust another team and kind of grow like that because humans do pursue being surrounded by comfort. What is comfortable to them? Where do they feel connected into? And I know to some people, they think that sounds crazy. They're like, oh, I don't care. I treat everybody the same. Like, that's great. And it's awesome that you do.

But it's more just asking for that moment of someone who says that to sit in the person's shoes. That is the only one. So it's one thing to say you treat everyone the same. It's another to have spent day after day, hour after hour, week after week, being the only one. And there's a lot of people that haven't had that experience.

That said, I do think we need to pull more women into tech and keep women in tech. These are great paying jobs. They give tons of cool experience. You get to be citizens of the world. You get to have like a really cutting edge view of change and what's happening and see so much cool stuff being built. And I think it's a great place for anyone to build a career.

Mary Killelea: I love asking these kind of hot topic questions with you because I like your perspective. I think it's fresh and maybe not as widespread as it should be. So, with AI transforming business across all sectors, there's lots of fear jobs will be eliminated. What can women, both young and older women who are, I don't want to go into ageism because that's a whole other thing, but how can we scale up as women in this new area of AI?

Lisa Spelman: Yeah. I don't think that I have anything that's gender specific in this space. Honestly, like it's an everyone change that we're going through. I do believe that more jobs would be created than lost. They might be different, but you know, growth begets growth has been my general experience. So, we'll see if time calls me a winner or a fool on that. But you just must start using this stuff. Like you do not need, not everybody that's in tech needs to learn how to build the next foundational model. You know, that's right. You can leave that to some experts, but there is zero excuse. There is no excuse for not being a user of these tools.

And if you aren't using them and if you aren't trying them out to improve your efficiency or double check things or maybe do the basis of some research or to learn more about a domain area or something you're going into, then maybe you shouldn't be in tech. Honestly, I know that sounds kind of harsh, but like you have to keep up that's on you. And there's a lot of great and helpful tools and capabilities out there. So those that do not embrace this, I do, I genuinely believe they will be left behind.

Mary Killelea: I agree completely. And I think it's a ton of fun, but there are very, a lot of people who are apprehensive of it. We've only got a couple more questions while I've got you here still in the hot seat. Let's talk about work-life balance. How have you dealt with it over the years and what advice do you have for other women in just setting boundaries?

Lisa Spelman: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I am quite a big believer in is investing in yourself. And sometimes you invest in yourself before you actually feel like you're financially ready to, and that can take a lot of different forms. So that can be things like saying, I am going to hire help for certain activities. Those activities might be like keeping the house clean, maybe taking care of yard work, things like that, that can consume your weekend or your, you know, after hours time, it might be help with grocery shopping or just whatever the things are in your life that have to get done. And this is one of the ways in which I have created more time, meaning more of my time away from work is able to be meaningful time with connection either with my family or with friends or with a hobby that I care about or love versus just the day-to-day life of getting stuff done.

I recognize that's not necessarily economically viable for everyone, but we're talking about people that work in tech. Like these are generally well-paying jobs. And I would argue there's certain sacrifices that are worth it in order to buy back time. And so, you know, I think that's important on the, you know, work-life balance and the boundaries stuff. I will say it's a constant, you know, battle. I find that people are generally pretty respectful about, you know, a certain thing, you know, “oh, I have this specific thing tonight. I'm going to be doing that”. Or “I have this important thing I'm doing”. That's fine. It is hard to get really far ahead in leadership positions or in leadership technical positions without putting in some amount of the hours though. It's just the reality because it's not only the work that you're contributing, but it's your leadership perspective, meaning you need to have time to both talk to people and help grow them and advance them and advance your ideas. And you also have to have time to have the ideas and do the work.

So I haven't found some world where there's a lot of senior leaders that don't put in extra hours at work. Again, it's not for everyone. And that's okay. You just have to understand you're making a choice. And I like, again, I had a, I remember this conversation that was, you know, years ago, but it was someone who was frustrated that they weren't getting a promotion and a greater amount of responsibility. And at the same time had stated that it was very important to them to drive their kid to school and be home every day. This is before the pandemic, when people work from home, be home every day when their kid got home from school. And, and that if there was ever an issue at school, they were the ones that was going to be called and go, you know, pick up or do whatever. That's fine. That is a choice though.

It is hard to be in a really senior leadership position with those type of constraints on your time. And like, the reality is, and some people would be uncomfortable with the school never calls me. They're just like, “oh, she won't answer”. That's terrible. Some people might be like, oh my gosh, what a horrible mother. That's fine. It's just a, you know, it's a reality. It's a choice. I might be in the Bay area. I might be on the East coast. I might be in Europe. I might be wherever. And so that's not how my family's structured is to rely that I'm the one that's going to answer the phone every time. And that is again, a choice and a decision that has allowed me the mental space and capacity to be operating at this level.

Mary Killelea: Again, I think what you're saying is needs to be heard. You know, it seems like, you know, everyone has different, I don't even know how to, I just, again, haven't heard too many leaders, especially women leaders, come out and say truths like that because that is a truth. No matter male, female, it's just a choice.

Lisa Spelman: Yeah. And I think it makes people uncomfortable sometimes. And I recognize that. So it's like, if you can sit through the discomfort and think through it a little bit, you can say, like you said, is this actually true? Like this is the reality of what these trade-offs are. And then you just got to get comfortable with the choice you're making.

Mary Killelea: Right. And what career advice would you give your younger self?

Lisa Spelman: Oh, gosh, I don't know. I did, you know, lots of cool stuff. I'm glad that I was, you know, bold and carefree and was like, okay, yeah, sure. I've been in finance for a while. I should definitely do marketing. I'll figure it out. And then, oh yeah, you know what, I gotta get into sales. Let's do technical sales. I've never done that before. Of course. Let's do that. So, I don't know that I have like, you know, big thing that I look back on and go, man, I should have done that different. If anything, what I've tried to maintain is as stakes get higher, this mindset of you're betting on yourself. There's nobody better to bet on than yourself. And so again, you know, be bold, go do the thing you want to do and just recognize like, it's gonna work out in the end.

Fear is our greatest enemy of progress. It holds us back from so much the fear of the unknown or what's coming. It holds us back. If you can just either embrace it or grit your teeth through it and just say like, I am so deeply uncomfortable that I'm doing it anyways. I like there's always good on the other side.

Mary Killelea: Fantastic. Okay. Last question. What does to be bolder mean to you?

Lisa Spelman: Well, I think actually I kind of just hit on it. I know it is. Yeah. Like, but you know, I'm serious, maybe like this, you know, concept of being bold enough to bet on you. Yeah. Nobody's going to bet on you bigger than you're going to bet on you. And then when people do bet on you, you're going to, you know, go and do a great job for them. You know, like, I'm not going to let these people down. And so I really always want to encourage people to be creating space and time in their lives to think about like, is this, is this it? Is this the thing I want to be doing? Is this where I want to be? And don't be afraid of both small and big changes to make that happen for you.

Mary Killelea: Thank you so much for being here, Lisa. It has been so fun talking to you and hearing about your new role. I'm excited for the future.

Lisa Spelman: Thank you. Yeah. It's great to have a chance to catch up. And hopefully, you know, we gave people a couple of things to think about.

Mary Killelea: Exactly. Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guests. If you liked our show, please like it and share it with your friends. If you want to learn what we're up to, please go check out our website at 2bbolder.com. That's the number 2, little b, bolder.com.