Career Growth Advice from Sangeeta, Career Development Leader | Career Tips for Women in Career Development

2B Bolder Podcast – Episode 51
Featuring Sangeeta, Founder of Gotara

Episode Title: #51 Career Podcast Featuring Sangeeta founder of Gotara, a Global Career Growth Platform for Women In STEM - Women In Tech

Host: Mary Killelea
Guest: Sangeeta



Mary Killelea (Host): Hi there. My name is Mary Killelea. 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 there. Today's topic is relevant to all of us, and I am thrilled we're having this discussion. As we know, diversity fuels growth, innovation, and success for everyone. We are joined today by Sangeeta, the founder of Gotara, a global career growth platform for women in STEM. Before coming the CEO and founder of Gotara, Sangeeta has had a rich and diverse career in tech. She was the vice president of connections at Amazon, where she led an organization that develops and operationalizes products that reinvent management, science, leveraging big data, technology, and data science. Prior to that, she spent nine years at Nielsen in various roles, including head of global client operations, chief diversity officer, and global head of data science, and chief of business process improvement officer. Her experience also includes nine years working for GE Aviation, where early on she acquired 27 patents and was successful in leading different business groups to have high impact with huge business results. Sangeeta, thank you so much for joining us.

Sangeeta (Guest): Thank you for the invite. I'm looking forward to our chat.

Mary Killelea: Okay, well, looking at your life in tech and the various roles that you have had over the years, you've accomplished so much. What is your secret to success?

Sangeeta: Well, there are lots of people who have achieved success like I have, or maybe even more, but I'll share with you some of the things I did to get to where I am today. I think one of the secrets was really focusing on the job that I had and delivering on it and having fun while delivering it. So, you know how we talk about, are you passionate about this area, this field? Do you want to take this job or not? Once I took the job, I created a passion around it. And I said, I'm going to love it. And that's what helped me feel good about it and deliver, make the rest of the team feel good about it. And that creates a track record where you don't have to look for a job. In my whole career, I probably have looked for jobs maybe twice. And every time I was tapped on the shoulder to come and explore new things, and it has worked really well for me. And it requires less work from you too, because you don't have to look for a job.

Mary Killelea: So what is it like being a woman in tech, especially when you've been a minority in the room? Maybe you weren't encouraged to be a leader, or the business world didn't embrace you early on in your career. How have you dealt with that?

Sangeeta: So the interesting thing is my whole career in corporate world has been in aviation, energy, and technology. Very, very male dominated fields. And I just thought of it as a norm, right from college. In my college, it was ratio was one to 100 women to men. And graduate school, it didn't change that much. And when I went to my first job, it was the same thing. And so, I kind of just took it as it came. And I didn't really pay too much attention to it. People were people to me. It didn't matter whether I was the only woman, I was a woman of color, or the color person in the room. I think let it bother me. And I think that helped me, because then I was not focused on that. I just simply thought I didn't care whether you're a man or a woman or whoever else. I just focused on the job. And if you work for me, what mattered was how you work and how you deliver. So that helped me. And I think there are ways to get past this feeling that people have. And you have to teach yourself that and not let it bother you.

Mary Killelea: So there's some secret sauce in there too. But over the years, have there been particular roadblocks or roadblocks that have come up? What is your strategy in kind of navigating roadblocks?

Sangeeta: So maybe I can give you a couple of examples that will help kind of look at the issues that we all deal with at times. One time there was a job that I was interested in. And the guy who was very supportive of me throughout my career just assumed that I had a little daughter who was five years old. I didn't want to travel. So, the job wasn't even presented to me. And when I found out, I told him, like, let me make that decision. Maybe I want to travel. Maybe I have ways for me to manage how I take care of my daughter. And I want to make that decision. And so that was helpful to have that clarity of discussion with your manager. So, they're not doing it intentionally to stop you from growing. They think that they're actually helping you in the process. And most of the men that I feel that I have come across in my career have not intentionally did anything to stop you from growing. You have to have the conversation when something happens. And then they realize, oh, okay. They didn't know. And sometimes you get some comments that are like, where did that come from? So I was talking to one of the senior HR leaders in the company at one point, and I was thinking of switching roles and I was just doing an exploratory discussion. And in that discussion, he made a comment that was just so off the wall, uh, where he said, well, most of the folks with Indian origin are software engineers. That was one. And the second one was they mostly are subject matter experts. They don't really go for leadership. So I actually told him, should I take that as a compliment or should I take that as an insult? And the conversation very quickly ended. And I decided not to have the conversation with that guy again, or look for the job in that. So it was their last night line. That's the way I saw it. So you got to apply different things to different places where you see there is an opportunity to educate. And then, uh, in other places where you feel that the bias is so strong, the tide is so strong, you might not be able to change it. And then you can go to a place that actually offers you a better environment.

Mary Killelea: That's great advice. I'm really excited to talk about Gotara. You left a very prestigious job to create a company from the ground up. What has that been like for you?

Sangeeta: So this has been a very exciting experience to transition. So, I have been in the corporate role over 25 years, very comfortable, then doing well, had really wonderful network. But I always had this in me that I wanted to kind of do something on my own. And 10 years earlier, I, I wanted to go in that route, but my husband was trying to launch his company. So he said, we can't both take the risk at the same time. So, I'll let you go first because you exactly know what you want and I'd be your financial backstop. And now he and his company are doing well. So I said, okay, now you be my financial backstop and I'll take that risk. And it has been very exciting to kind of combine two things. I have always been passionate about this topic of gender parity. And I have always felt that women can do so much more for employers or organizations for society then they are actually doing it today. How can I, can we get them to stay in the workforce? And I have done it one-on-one individually and doing the corporate life where people would come and tell me, Hey, that 15 minute conversation, a year ago, changed the trajectory of my career. And you think about, okay, how do you go scale that and do it in a big way. So you help them in globally and then combine my business experience and technical experience that I have to create a sustainable business. So it's not a organization that's always looking to raise funds, but is making money to actually create this in a sustainable way. So when I'm gone, Gotara lives forever.

Mary Killelea: I love that. And that's really amazing that you would think that far out how your company could live on and continue to do the work that your mission was originated from. Um, you know, I love that you're helping women stay and thrive in STEM with their careers and helping companies. I mean, I think you're feeling a big challenge that companies face for retaining and growing their STEM talent. If you had to say what your ultimate goal is by combining the two, what is that?

Sangeeta: So, you know, when, even before I launched the company, I wrote a business plan and in that business plan, I learned that from Amazon writing docs, uh, creating, uh, what they call it PR FAQ, uh, press release, frequently asked questions. And in that, uh, my ultimate goal is gender parity, gender parity of 50, 50. If, if from college we are graduating 50, 50 men and women and all CEOs, why shouldn't they be 50, 15, every level in the company and the organization? That's the ultimate goal.

Mary Killelea: Fabulous. So you started Gotara in the spring of 2020, basically during the pandemic, um, how long prior to that? Now you talked about your husband was able to drive his business and, and you've been thinking about this. How long prior to this had you been thinking on it and kind of reworking this to make sure that you had that differentiation in the marketplace? Because there are a lot of companies today that do serve women. How is your company different?

Sangeeta: Yeah. So I had been thinking about this topic off and on for about three to four years prior to launching that I felt like this was my second mountain. I needed to do something to make an impact. And I'm not one of those people who knows how to, uh, raise money for charity. So I know how to run a business. I know how to run a successful business. So how do you create a business that I'm really passionate about? So every morning when I get up, I'm happy. And this is why even at the tough times in my startup today, anytime I feel a little down, I just go back and look at my platform feedback from my members. And when you read the feedback is that this is why I'm here. We're making an impact.

And the differentiation, you're absolutely right. There are lots of people, lots of companies doing different kinds of things to help. And they all should because they're all biting at that apple in some way or another. And it all gets us to that gender parity. What I saw the gap on is coaching or mentoring one-on-one is not scalable. And also it's probably not as safe space for sensitive topics. With the mentors within the organization, you kind of, if I were leaving a company within the company, I wouldn't talk to my mentor about leaving the company. I've talked about all the love business stuff, but not that. So how do you create, how do you re-imagine mentoring and upskilling in a scalable way that is not available today? And that that's where the innovation came for Gotara.

Mary Killelea: I know you're a very data-driven decision-maker and you love data. Uh, talk about some of the stats and research that it kind of awoke you to the problem.

Sangeeta: Yeah. So, there's a lot of data in the literature about women leaving the workforce and a lot of levers you probably hear about like the benefits that the company offers, the flexibility the company offers, of organization offers, having role models and things like that. Contrary to the popular belief that that's what helps them grow, that's what gets them through the door. So yeah, they'll say, oh, that's a good organization to work for, but that's not what makes them stay or grow or stagnate in the organization. What makes them stay or grow or leave is how valued they are in the company. If they're getting bullied by someone in the company, do they have growth opportunities? Are they getting dumped on at work? And what I mean by dumped on, we all talk about work-life balance and it's mostly with women. We have this conversation, but at work you get dumped on about organizing a meeting, taking notes. And I'm an engineer, just like you, a software engineer, electrical engineer, chemical engineer. Why should I be taking the notes and not you? And some women I have seen handle this really well and other women, um, I have trouble. And so we help them with this process. And as I think back in my career, um, some of those things that I talk about while women leave or stay and stuff, I have a thick skin, so I handle them well, but there are a couple of things I didn't. And as I look back and I could have done better if I had something like Gotara.

Mary Killelea: What is one thing about women in STEM that you have learned that you didn't know about it before kind of starting your company and starting this journey three years ago?

Sangeeta: One piece of data that may be very known across, but may not be, I'm not sure as I talk to employers, some of the employers know that pretty well, and some of them don't is about 40% of STEM plus women leave their career within five to seven years. And that is a huge loss to the employers. It's about $9 billion. And I'm not even counting the loss to the individuals. It's probably almost equal GDP loss and all the losses that you see. Now in most organization, when you think about that, you'll say, Oh, women are at this stage in their lives. You know, they want to raise their family. That's why they're leaving on the surface. It sounds maybe it is back as what is happening. And I thought maybe I was different. I don't know. I was different and I continued to work. And then I launched Gotara, I started interviewing. I started talking to a lot of people I knew who have left the STEM roles and also who I didn't. And lo and behold, I find that 95% of these women would have loved to stay in the workforce. They were pushed out because of the environment of the work. And maybe a few examples were because of home environment, but majority was work environment that could be changed. They wanted financial independence. They wanted the sense of belonging. They wanted intellectual stimulation and they regret it. But I mean, this is to the society. How can you say that for a woman, it's always hard to say, I love my job as much as I love my son and daughter. Fathers do it all the time. Why can’t be do it?

Mary Killelea: I always said I was a better mother because I worked.

Sangeeta: Yeah, I absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more. I think you're more balanced.

Mary Killelea: Okay, so talk to me as a new member to Gotara and what perks do I receive? What kind of support can I find?

Sangeeta: So, we have two sides of Gotara. One is B2C. The other one is B2B. The B2C, if you become a member, what we call, we have reimagined mentoring. So it's called just in time nanolink. So we give you bite-sized nanolining. As you come in, you may say, my manager threw me under the bus, and this is what happened. And I totally disagree with what happened. How do I handle this? You'll get something within 24 hours from us. And these will be from leaders who have lived in your shoes. So this is not an HR advice. This is not an advice from a leader. This is an advice from some person just like you who lived in your shoes, went through stuff like this, who responds back. So that's the biggest thing. That is where we differentiate.

And then we do Tara Talks, where we bring in some really smart, successful leaders to talk about a topic that is relevant to this audience. And you wouldn't believe that sometimes we are doing some of these Tara Talks at Pacific time, California time, and we would have people from Europe and Africa in the middle of the night joining, Asia. We also write Tara by blogs about topics that are relevant to them. We have just recently launched Tara techniques where we do workshop, like how do you brand yourself, stem them and have a hard time branding themselves. We are going to run that in a few weeks.

And then for the employers, we have additional stuff where we offer upskilling through nano-learning. So what are the skills they can learn and apply back at workplace to grow as leaders and to create the pipeline of leaders? And we offer constellations for them to engage with each other and to be able to do that. And then we also have a workshop where we have and learn from each other and obviously networking for everybody.

Mary Killelea: That's fabulous because I know some smaller companies or even mid-sized companies, even large, don't have the budgets or infrastructure dedicated to having an organization that supports women in that way. So, it sounds like your company has that training arm, if you will, for companies.

Sangeeta: Yeah, absolutely. And we are talking to a lot of companies, especially mid-sized companies, sometimes even larger companies. And I'm going to not name companies, but even some of the largest companies don't have great training programs. And so they look out to see how they can retain their people or they just keep losing for a very high rate, especially in the pandemic. It has gone up even further.

Mary Killelea: And what you said about someone responding, at first, I thought it was an automated response or some AI.

Sangeeta: It's a combination. So for example, if I came for an advice and I asked for a specific question, like, I'm going to present to the executive team and I've never done that. I'm a technical person, help me figure this out. So it's answered once. If somebody asks the same exact question again, what's the point in going and asking for this? So, we curate the best advice possible for them to serve it up.

Mary Killelea: That's awesome. And forgive me if you just touched on this, but I didn't hear the STAR program.

Sangeeta: Yes. So this was the employer programs are called the STAR programs. Okay. They are called Rising Star and North Star program, where they nominate these women to join our platform to go through the upskilling that we just talked about.

Mary Killelea: Okay. How does someone become a STEM career advisor?

Sangeeta: Very good question. So majority of the folks in the beginning were through our network, our leadership teams network. So we knew them, we had confidence in them. So, the few things that we look at for advisors is what is our need? What kind of people we need to make sure that we have representation of all different kinds of folks based on our audience of engineers and scientists and program managers and business process people and all that. So what's the need? And then what's the qualification of the advisor? What's their experience level? And what's the genuine style of providing advice? So we want some references. We want some, so people can dominate themselves too. So we have started to take on people who are really passionate about it, to interview them. And so we are onboarding a whole bunch of new advisors as well, because a lot of folks who come to join our platform, they say that I want to give back. And the interesting thing is some of the folks that who have given advice back, it's just awesome, awesome advice. I mean, I read it and I said, wow, this is, I mean, this person has only eight years or 10 years of experience, but look at their advice. So an intern who's just going to join the workforce.

Mary Killelea: That's a fabulous, fabulous feature. What are some of the popular challenges that you've seen come in that kind of get asked over and over again?

Sangeeta: Obviously there are themes. So the interesting thing is during the pandemic, a lot of people are thinking about changing their fields, changing the type of role they have. And everybody is kind of falling into new area because they feel like they can explore because it's now a virtual world and even sometimes different countries, different cities, which hasn't happened before. And so now a lot of that is happening. And then because of the pandemic, you also get a lot of questions on how do you grow when you are not there in person and how you can leverage the technology to grow. And then there are obviously lots of issues voice on the table. My ideas are being stolen by my manager. Things like that. My voice doesn't get, I mean, this happens a lot where somebody comes up with the idea, somebody else takes credit for it, or somebody says the, talks about their idea and it is unheard of. People just ignore it. And then five minutes later, somebody else says it and now it's a great idea. And so those are the kinds of things like your voice being heard at work, how do you grow at work and how do you explore doing different things? Those are some of the very common things. And then we get some very sensitive questions. We get actually sensitive questions where maybe you won't even discuss it with your partner or manager or friend, but you will share it here because we give you the opportunity to be anonymous. And even if I knew you and you asked for advice, I may not know that I'm giving you advice.

Mary Killelea: Yeah, the things that you touched on, sometimes you hear about them and you're like, oh, those can't possibly happen. But if they do happen, and it's so great to have women who have been in those roles or lived it, turning around and saying, here's what I did, or here's what you can do. What about pay? How does the topic of pay get talked about within this community? Because to me, no one talks about what they make. So you don't know what to strive for. You don't know how to compare yourself.

Sangeeta: Yeah, that's actually a good point. But we get a lot of questions from pay. We get a lot of question and compensation, how to negotiate for compensation, then you're starting a new job, or I've not had a raise, how do you go back and ask for a raise? So we do get a lot of questions. But you know, you Google some of the stuff, you can actually find it. I mean, as a founder, as a CEO of my company, as I was beginning to open roles and look for what is the right level to pay somebody, I could do that search and find out so you as an individual can do that search and research to know whether you are at an average or above or below. And so yeah, it doesn't get talked about. But Glassdoor, a bunch of other companies do the survey all the time.

Mary Killelea: Great advice. Okay, so when you reflect on your career, what are you most proud of?

Sangeeta: This is something that dawned on me only recently. I mean, I can talk about my launching a new company and a bunch of other jobs. But what I went back to was I was actually speaking at a university at Texas A&M about innovation, like how did I get these 26 patents kind of thing. And as I was putting my pitch together, I put in a, I was talking to a friend put in a slide on my daughter, because my daughter was born right before all of that. And so as I started looking at that, and, and I said I've been telling the story to when I go to these forums, and people talk about when you have a kid, you kind of take a step back and you take any you're okay with it, because you have made that decision. My husband and I both did that we saw colleagues move forward and we were okay with it, because I did decline a bunch of jobs because they required a lot of travel and I didn't want to travel when my daughter was an infant. But what I saw was from innovation perspective in a different way, I'm 40 years I got 26 patents and two books. I don't think I was more productive in any part of my career than that. So that's what I'm proud of now. My first few years of my career.

Mary Killelea: That's amazing. Yeah, the patents, we could have a whole conversation on how to go about doing that.

Sangeeta: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Mary Killelea: What does to be bolder mean to you?

Sangeeta: You know, I love your podcast name. Board, I'm sure you've heard of the book Board by Peter Diamandis.

Mary Killelea: Yes.

Sangeeta: I loved that book. And I, in fact, required my team at the time and data science to go through it. I said, we need to be bold, we need to be doing this, that, the other. I have a mantra called no risk, no gain. And I apply that to my career. And I have done that a few times. I was the first person in my family, extended family, to come to US from India. And some of the twists and turns I've taken in my career, people say, Oh, why are you going from R&D to marketing? What's that? And I even I felt that. But looking back, I'll do it again. And launching a startup at the stage that I did a lot of my family and friends and colleagues said, What? What are you gonna do? And I just, I find adventure to be the biggest motivator for things to come in the future.

Mary Killelea: Couldn't agree with you more. Where do you see yourself and Go Terra in five years?

Sangeeta: So I'm hoping that in five years, we would be part leaders in this field of gender parody and how to drive that gender parody. And we would be the go to resource for women in STEM and their employers. That's what is our hope. Do-ably.

Mary Killelea: That's amazing. Well, I believe you can do it. Because I love what you're doing today. And I think it's only going to grow the more people who know about it. Thank you so much for being on the show. How can people learn more?

Sangeeta: Thank you, Mary, for hosting me here. People can actually join up at GoTara.com and message me on the platform and ask for advice. We'll get connected.

Mary Killelea Thank you.

Sangeeta: All right. Thank you.

Mary Killelea: 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 two, little b, bolder.com.