Career Growth Advice from Dr. Tara Chklovski, Technovation Founder | Career Tips for Women in Technology

2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 125
Featuring Dr. Tara Chklovski

Episode Title: #125 Dr. Tara Chklovski founder of the world's largest tech entrepreneurship program for girls

Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Dr. Tara Chklovski


Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there, my name is Mary Killelea. Welcome to the 2B Bolder podcast, providing career insights for the next generation of women in business and tech. 2B 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 there. Thank you for tuning in. Today we are joined by Tara Chklovski. She is the founder and CEO of Technovation. Technovation is reshaping opportunities for young women in technology. Inspired by her experiences growing up in India and working as an aerospace engineer, she developed a widely adopted education model that combines mentorship, hands-on learning, and entrepreneurship to prepare girls to thrive in tech. Named by Techrunch as teaching the next generation of AI innovators, she has built Technovation into a movement reaching 400,000 people across more than 160 countries. Her research shows that AI education for girls could unlock a $200 billion opportunity for the world economy. Through Technovation and the AI Forward Alliance, she's preparing 25 million young women to lead in AI innovation and tackle global challenges. First off, I'm so inspired by what you do. It truly is amazing and an honor to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.

Tara Chklovski (Guest): Thank you Mary and thank you for all the encouragement. I definitely need it now more than ever. So thank you.

Mary Killelea: Absolutely. Absolutely. okay so your journey from growing up in India to becoming an aerospace engineer and then founding Technovation is like I said truly inspiring. Can you share how your early experiences influenced your passion for empowering young women in technology and kind of walk us through kind of how you got there? there. I know you talked about earlier like it's been 20 years in the making.

Tara Chklovski: Yeah, I think I grew up in India and it was an interesting experience because India as a culture is not very encouraging and supportive of girls but it's a very complex culture because there's also it's a poverty-ridden environment as well. Things have definitely improved. I've been here since when I was born but I spent my first 21 years over there which were sort of the shaping years. And I think the big message that the culture at that time gave to girls was that you don't matter. Your voice doesn't matter. your role is to support the men in your life whether it's your brother, your father, your husband and a girl is kind of prepared for marriage and so, just to give you a sense of it, I think from sixth grade onwards, I went to an all girls, , school, , we were taught home science, , where you learn how to run a house for your husband, all the way until, 10th grade. So that is a robust 5 years of two three sometimes four hours a week that you're spending learning how to cook food and iron lace, right? The boys on the other hand were given computer science. So that right away we didn't have an option. So it just kind of gives you the sense of what the culture is. But the really unique experience that I had personally was that in my family women were the primary bread winners and it was highly unusual and part of it is that we are a minority. We were Christians and so my grandmother started a school at the age of 65 and that school is still running today. And so she was an incredible sort of a very powerful woman role model.

Tara Chklovski: Then my mother trained as a doctor. She tried to set up her own practice but that was very hard then she had us she had to sort of step away from the workforce but we were struggling financially and so she joined the army at the age of 43 as an army doctor and so I had these very very powerful women in my life. But full credit to my dad he really brought me up to be a very technically minded girl which was a highly unusual experience because I think some of some of it yeah I was just lucky that my father and my family did not believe what the culture believed and so I grew up like we didn't have too many sort of financial resources was I had no dolls, but I grew up playing with engines and I learned how to drive a car at the age of eight because my dad was like, "You need to learn these skills." And so I learned Yeah. I learned to kind of do things with my hands and so mechanical things were very it was a fun space to be in. I wanted to grow up to be a pilot like my dad. And so that's how sort of the family values and cultural education is deeply valued because that's what gets you out of poverty. And so these kinds of values shape your identity. And when I came to the US I was just so shocked to see tremendous gender disparities everywhere and to me the most powerful nation in the world not opening doors to 50% of the population was a very shocking thing. That's a problem to be solved and I stepped out of my PhD program because it didn't feel as if that was the way to make the most impact. I started this nonprofit.

Mary Killelea: That's such an incredible story and it helps really h I guess define who you are and why you are the way you are and how fortunate you are to have had such strong women role models.

Tara Chklovski: So, but also male male supporters.

Mary Killelea: Oh, you know, and thank you for bringing that up because allies are huge. Whether they're in your family or outside your family, allies along the way are tremendously important. So you were interested in aero and aerospace engineering which you know sometimes that's an incredible thought itself and then you transitioned to you know developing this nonprofit. What in your brain beyond having those role models of older women in your life who were able to do such impactful work late in their careers? What empowered you to believe it's possible?

Tara Chklovski: I think there's a model of self-efficacy right like successful CEOs. I think I have three character traits that set them apart. I think number one is being very risk tolerant, right? Number two is openness to new ideas and then the third is that you have a very strong locus of control where you feel that you can make a change and I owe a lot of that again to my parents especially my dad like I think in the self-efficacy model is a very key part of building your sense of self-efficacy that you can do big things is having cheerleaders who have very high expectations of you and you may not know that yourself that you get capable of doing that but if somebody is constantly believing you and say you're destined to do big things then you start to believe that rhetoric right and I think that's what my dad did for me where just have very very high expectations and as human beings we're geared to please other human beings and so I think as you start to do harder things and you're successful that just builds a very nice kind of snowball effect because then you're like okay I can do more I can do more. And so I think building on that as from childhood doing really hard things, succeeding and then I was like I had a big ambition to do things that help a lot of people around the world and that was a long journey of sort of figuring out education is a very powerful lever to help ease the suffering of many people and so that's what sort of got me onto that path.

Mary Killelea: What advice do you have for people who don't have that support infrastructure who are listening to this and say that's great if I had it but where do I find those people how do I

Tara Chklovski: in books everybody has access to books I get so I learned so I've I've taught myself almost everything I know from books and sort of modus operandi is I study everything I can lay my hands on about a particular subject and then I identify who are the world's experts in that and then I reach out to them. I tell them this is what I'm trying to build. Almost everyone will come and support you. So you can build your own support network. There's no such thing as oh I don't have this. You don't need to have a deficit mindset.

Mary Killelea: I love that. I love that. That's such a huge quote. You don't have to have a deficit mindset. Let's talk about the impact of AI. Obviously, you know, you've been working on AI education long before it became a hot topic in the news. What's the opportunity here and what are you working on with AI and training and education with the girls?

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Tara Chklovski: I think it's a moment of deep reckoning actually, where I think humans if you have to survive and if you want to thrive in this age you have to really take a hard look at what are your skills what is your role in this world where AI has taken over all the prestigious white collar jobs and the pace of change is something that I hadn't expected nobody had expected and So I think that the humans are the bottleneck here and our abilities to process change is a huge bottleneck. And so I think that in the past usually I spent about 3 to four years studying a space and kind of like I was saying like really read everything about it and then figure out where we are headed. That's why I started studying everything about AI back in 2016. So almost 10 years ago and piloting programs and understanding what is our role. We don't have that kind of lead time anymore. Whereas I think the place where I see us is again like being open to risk, being open to learning new things and having a strong locus of control. I think that individuals can do much more than they ever could possibly do before because we have such powerful tools. But what are going to be the limiting factors is a lack of ambition and a lack of potential empathy where you are not thinking about sort of easing human suffering at a global scale. But if you have a planet size ambition and goals to help others then you actually have the tools by which an individual can launch and do very big things. That kind of power was never accessible to us before. It requires a completely different set of skills and ones that schools are not at all thinking about, not at all geared for. And so it's going to cause a lot of disruption soon where young people are going to come out of education systems unprepared for what the workforce demands.

Mary Killelea: So let's talk about the programs that you have in your organization and what type of things you teach young women, young girls.

Tara Chklovski: I think that's one of the main reasons why we have been successful because we've been focused so much on future skilling and real world problem solving. So really focusing on real world problem solvings and then teaching girls to use the most powerful technologies to solve those. That's what's helped us keep relevant right instead of in contrast you could say oh we are a coding program and you teach girls how to learn Python and guess what that's not needed anymore right to some extent. So, I think that the real problems are still there. I think girls, we are the only program in the world that has long-term data showing that when girls go through this program, 76% of them actually go into STEM careers. There's no other program in the world that has that kind of longitudinal data and that global scale. And I think we need to keep re-evaluating that because these tools are becoming so powerful. So over the course of 3 months, girls learn to identify meaningful problems that sort of align with their values that are big in the community. They work in teams. They're supported by a mentor and then they actually launch a startup. So it's an accelerator because it's accelerating their ideas into the real world into execution. And so these this u journey of an entrepreneur is such a powerful journey of self-growth that it's unforgettable and that's why when you were saying what if you don't have these mentors and people and this experience this is that formative experience so that we want to provide all girls with that really open they don't have to become entrepreneurs but it's that mindset that I can make a huge change and I can use technology. So I think those core elements of expanding human potential in very practical terms I think that's what our organization does and at a very large scale.

Mary Killelea: That is such a fascinating approach and one that like a light bulb moment went off in my head when you said that you know you're developing that muscle of women or young women thinking of creating hypotheses. You know that cultivating or solving problems because as you're as you made clear is that some of the technology is going to be replaced because of the rapid pace of iteration and advancements. So I'm literally getting chills hearing the work that you're doing and your approach in it because I do think it is innovative even though you've been doing it a while.

Mary Killelea: Okay. So, let's talk about one thing that, you know, I'm very passionate about is women having clarity on knowing where they want to go, how they're building themselves or carrying themselves in their careers and, you know, developing a personal brand along the way because I think women struggle on, you know, articulating their voice, feeling like they add value. Do you have advice for women or words of encouragement on kind I guess building that muscle?

Tara Chklovski: I don't have that same view honestly like I think you can have it's a sort of an American point of view where where it is like I matter so much and sometimes we take it too far in my point of view I think what's more important is what you're working on because that defines you and that's what's interesting to somebody else because why would somebody else care about your personal brand I mean that's just my point of view so yeah no

Mary Killelea: And I think that is the shift that personal brand is evolving into. It's not that you're a thought leader. It's what is your voice or contribution that can help expand the topic or area of interest that a lot of people hold back because they fear judgment on what they have or their skills might not be worthy of a platform.

Tara Chklovski: Focus on innovation, right? like focus on what is going to help your organization or your company or the problem and everything else will follow. But if you focus on some of the superficial stuff, I don't know, it's just adding a whole bunch of noise to the system.

Mary Killelea: What have been some of the biggest challenges that you've had to overcome in building your business?

Tara Chklovski: I think staying relevant, right? like when you're building something and you're staying you so firstly solving a really really really big problem and then no country in the world has gender equality and like I think 160 countries legally discriminate against women right so this is a very big complex problem so it's going to require a very long-term effort and so most people myself included right like after 10 years of battling, right? Like you lose energy, you lose motivation. And so how do you figure out what is how do you build a vision where you're innovating and you're figuring out where where are things headed and where can you position your organization so it's relevant in another 101 15 years like that takes tremendous amount of effort that doesn't come naturally because naturally what comes is being responsive to external pressures of like your day-to-day your your team and responding to emails because if you focus that's the easy stuff, right? Like it's very certain. What's very difficult to do is to deal with the uncertainty of the future and to try to map out what is going to happen, what is big. Like literally when I started the AI initiative at Technovation, there was so much push back from the organization team itself because nobody was talking about AI. It feels so uncomfortable. No fun was interesting because they were like, "This doesn't make sense." But so you got to stay true to that, right? You have to stay true to your own self and recognize that this is going to be uncomfortable. So innovation doesn't mean people hate change and innovation is change. And so you're going to get a tremendous amount of push back if you're trying to innovate. So I would say that to me has always been the hardest thing where you are trying to look into the future and aim an organization to be relevant when the environment is changing so much. Of course you have all the usual challenges of an entrepreneur. That's the reason why many organizations or many many founders step away after 101 15 years because they actually don't know where they should take the organization next and then the current stuff is boring. Doing more of the same gets boring after 10, 12 , and 15 years. So they step away. So then you lose the opportunity to really make that organization into something much bigger. Now we are currently the largest female tech talent network in the world. If that comes after really like sticking in the game for a long period of time, right?

Mary Killelea: How can companies get involved?

Tara Chklovski: Thank you. I think number one is funding us because in the current environment we just need as much support as possible to enable us to bring our AI accelerator to as many girls as possible. Our program is completely free. We provide a world-class curriculum, research-based curriculum and mentorship over the course of three months completely free to all girls. So that just requires funding. But number two, we need mentors. We need volunteers. Every year we recruit roughly about 15,000 volunteers across industry, across different sectors. They serve as mentors for these teams. When a girl is matched with a mentor, she has a 95% chance of finishing this program. And if you were to compare that with online course retention numbers, that's 10%. So it's the human that makes the huge difference in a girl's sort of identity journey. Those I would say are the two most powerful ways to get involved. Okay.

Mary Killelea: So, you know, obviously wanting to be a mentor would be something that I would seek out, but what tells me what is involved or what type of training goes into becoming a mentor?

Tara Chklovski: It's a fabulous experience and I used to be a mentor I think for almost like eight or nine years because it is so rewarding. There's training, it's a couple of hours online completely. You go onto our platform and basically you can see who are some teams in your time zone. You can list your strengths and then you can. Our algorithm will match you with potential girls who speak your language, are in a similar time zone and are looking for that kind of skill set and then either you can meet with them in person depending on whether they are local or not. Then you can partner with another mentor to kind of reduce the load on you and so you typically will meet once a week possibly for 2 hours or so and help the girls walk through this curriculum that we have. You identify a problem, you build prototypes, you test it with users, build your business plan and then submit the pitch video and the business plan and the code. So for most mentors, they don't need to know how to code. And so it's the first time you are learning how to build a data set, how to train an AI model. So it's an incredibly engaging way for you to get a handle on AI and how to launch your own AI startup. So the first woman who participated in Y Combinator was a Technovation mentor and she said the Technovation mentoring experience gave her the courage to even apply for Y Combinator. So it's a very powerful upskilling hands-on way to learn all about A and entrepreneurship. But of course the real value is that you're an incredible mentor. You're encouraging the future generation.

Mary Killelea: That's fantastic. And what are the ages of the girls?

Tara Chklovski: 8 to 18. We will be launching an accelerator version for 19 to 24 in a few months. So those girls will actually be launching real startups that we'll get seed funding and so if you were to think about it's a very broad age range 8 to 24 but curriculum for each division.

Mary Killelea: Fantastic. What does to be boulder mean to you?

Tara Chklovski: Think our strategic plan was really that where after co it was sort of a moment to take stock and I had done like four strategic plans before each one of five years and each one had been sort of like an incremental growth over the past like project 20% growth and it didn't feel right to do the same because we were such a different organization where we have survived co we have such a huge talent network. We've learned so much. And so I did sort of this top down kind of modeling. Well, how many adolescent girls are there in the world? And what would it take to bring this kind of research-based experience to each of them? What would that do to the world economy? Then bottom up modeling of what could we as a small organization, how could we scale up and what kind of scaling could we expect? Because there's no way that we as a small organization could reach 600 million girls. So the two models resulted in the strategic plan which is like a 15-year strategic plan and it is to reach 25 million girls. So that required so much courage.

Mary Killelea: Mhm.

Tara Chklovski: Because to to firstly get everybody on the team adjusting to this absolutely crazy bold vision, but secondly to begin to believe because if you don't believe then don't do it. This is possible to do. It has taken boldness and courage at every step of the way.

Mary Killelea: Fantastic. It has been an extreme honor to have you on the show. I loved learning about your organization. I will include a link to it. Thank you for what you do and thanks for being a guest on 2B Bolder.

Tara Chklovski: Thank you, Mary.

Mary Killelea: Thanks for listening to the episode today. It was really fun chatting with my guest. 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 bbolder.com.