What we talked about
Welcome to Prevetted Podcast, a blend of tech and leadership!
Show notes
Welcome to Prevetted Podcast, a blend of tech and leadership!
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:01.572) Welcome to Prevetted Podcast, a blend of tech and leadership. Today our guest is Elisa Camahort-Page. Hello, Elisa, how are you doing today?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (00:12.504) I’m great, how are you?
Federico Ramallo (00:15.013) I am doing great as you can see. I took you outdoors so it’s a beautiful day. So, sorry, it’s Elisa or Liza.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (00:18.786) Yes, I love it.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (00:28.071) no, you were perfect the first time, Elisa.
Federico Ramallo (00:30.372) Right. I always, you know, I’m concerned about mispronouncing my guest’s name. So I apologize.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (00:35.918) I only recently, I used to accept anything close to my first name, but in the last few years, I’m like, you know what? I’m gonna correct people if they got it wrong and you got it perfectly.
Federico Ramallo (00:48.783) Great, great, amazing. So she co-founded Blocker, Elisa co-founded Blocker. She grew it from a bootstrap startup to a VC backed 30 million media company, which is an amazing achievement. Congratulations. It must not have been easy, but it’s an amazing milestone. And currently you’re working on optionality.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:04.866) Thank you.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:08.599) in the devil.
Federico Ramallo (01:18.373) Get shit done as a growth guide, right?
Great, great. So before we get a little bit more on your projects, how about you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:34.254) Yeah, absolutely. So I am born and raised in California. You’re not too far from me right now. But both my parents were immigrants and so I’m a first generation American. And actually, I think one of the most important things to know about me is that my first career that I wanted to pursue and what I studied in school had nothing to do with either of my next two careers.
I was a theater major and a vocal minor and I moved to New York and I pursued like the starving artist lifestyle. And when at the age of just 25, I was like, you know what? I don’t actually want to be a starving artist, emphasis on the starving. And I really missed California. So I came home and I took a job to have a job, you know, with the friend of the family in the commodities industry. And I knew nothing about it.
and I ended up learning on the job and I stayed in that industry for about seven years. And at the time, this was pre, you know, really pre internet usage so much. And so when I wanted to continue advancing in my career, I looked around and figured out the commodities business was centered in New York and Chicago. I didn’t want to move there.
So I’m like, I need to do something else. And I kind of looked around and I said, well, this, tech thing seems pretty important here in my home area. So why don’t I figure out if I like it and if I’m any good at it, if I have any aptitude for it. And there was no reason really to think that I would my, you know, my own pursuit was very liberal arts oriented, very arts oriented. Certainly my dad and my brother and my sister were all way more,
you know, technically inclined and all of that, but, not me. Um, but I had already kind of figured out that I could learn on the job and that you need to learn on any job you go to, you’re going to end up needing to learn the specifics, the particulars. So I got started in a really traditional, like newly public hardware company, hardware focused hardware and semiconductor. And I started at the bottom and in the marketing department, because I figured that was a foot in.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (03:53.11) Now I happen to have really great timing because that was during the dot com boom. It was the mid to late 90s and things were just hopping here. Like if you worked hard, if you were smart, if you had ambition, you could go pretty far. Of course, that meant that I also lived through the dot com spiral down, which was a lot less fun. But once again, I kind of figured out I knew how to learn. I could learn on the job and
The second really important thing in addition to confidence in myself was confidence that wherever you go, there are people who would love to help you understand what they do more. And it’s that Mr. Rogers thing about find the helpers. You know, a lot of engineers, if you want to sit down and learn what they’re working on and the guts of the technology, they would be so excited to like whiteboard for you exactly how that works because they’re passionate about it, you know, and they appreciate
someone coming in and having interests. So between knowing I could learn and knowing I could find people who would be happy to help me learn, really served me well throughout my years, all the years pre-blog her when I was working in that industry.
Federico Ramallo (05:09.335) Very, very interesting, yes. So you were mentioning that you studied theater, right? So how does theater help you further down the road in your career?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (05:27.134) thank you for asking that question. I love that question. You know, a lot of people will say, I like to hire people who worked on sports, you who did sports because it’s team building and leadership and, you know, understanding, you know, whatever it is. And I’m like, you want to, you want to experience team building, try doing a collaborative art, like theater, music, orchestra, dance. the thing is,
It’s also a huge, you’re creating something from nothing. A team comes together, they create something out of nothing. They have a limited timeframe and it’s deadline oriented. There’s a performance out there, two months or whatever, you gotta do it. And the other thing about theater is that theater is a place, especially when you’re younger, where a lot of folks who maybe don’t fit in a lot of other places coalesce.
because there’s a job and a role for everyone. There’s the backstage crew, there’s the actors on stage, there’s the orchestra, there’s the people out in the front of the house, maybe the designers. These are people who all have different skill sets, bring their different strengths to the table. Often you have a lot of people who maybe are not super, you think that all theater people are gonna be extroverts, but they’re not. There are lots of people who are…
awkward or misfits out in the regular world. And so you learn not just to build a team, but you learn to build a team that is full of people who are not just like you and how you all pull together. So I think there is very little you can do to match what you learn from creating theater and creating art and working together to make something out of nothing. That’s the startup journey, right?
Federico Ramallo (07:08.566) Right, right. You know, while you were talking about that, I was thinking it’s, you know, it’s both magical and brutal, right? And, you know, it’s when the, you know, when the curtain goes up, you know, that’s it. You have everything on the game, you know, and one single mistake can screw everything, right? And the show must go on. Yes. Yes, yes.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (07:14.924) Yeah.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (07:27.586) You have to think on your feet. Yes, you have to think on your feet and you have to, something goes wrong. You keep going, you know, and you figure out a way to fill in the gap and you, I’ve been on stage and forgotten my lines. I’ve been on stage and somebody else forgot theirs. I’ve been on stage and had a costume malfunction. I’ve been on stage like where someone doesn’t enter when they’re supposed to. You just kind of like, there’s very little that stops the show. And everyone,
Federico Ramallo (07:49.652) Yeah
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (07:56.15) And sometimes that’s, you know, an orchestra leader. Sometimes the singer skips a whole verse. They get confused and they skip and the orchestra, 30 people have to be like, okay, flipping through the pages. I’ve seen all these things happen. And so it also, that’s a really good point. And thank you for adding that to my list for later, but yeah, you got, you got to think on your feet. You got to keep going. You got to figure out how to fix the problem in real time.
you know, while you’re like fixing it sort of at the underneath level while at the surface level you’re still, you’re continuing to go.
Federico Ramallo (08:33.963) Right, right. And what I’ve done, chorus for seven years and, you know, same thing, you know, it’s, we organize events, we have dinners to collect funds for, you know, to pay the, not the teacher, the director, right? Everybody was a volunteer, voluntaries except the director who paying a salary. So, you know, we will organize dinners.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (08:39.16) Mmm.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (08:45.228) Yep. Yep.
Federico Ramallo (09:03.093) concerts and we go to churches to sing you know they have the best acoustic ever right and you know and every time you get on the stage every time is different I mean you you’re thinking well the experience will you know make you you know tough and you know brave and I mean in a way it does but every time you get there every time you you you get on the stage you get nervous
You you start sweating, you start doubting of yourself. All of that happens and then the difference is we experience, you know how to process that rather than freaking out, right? So it’s not like it goes away, right?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (09:51.628) Right, right. Because it is so new every time, but that’s the thing. That’s why I find it so helpful for working, especially in a dynamic industry, like tech is and like media is, is that every time you tackle it, you could have a lot of the same team members. could have a lot of the same, like I’ve done multiple Sondheim shows, so it’s the same composer, same director, a lot of the same performers, but you’re still tackling something fresh.
And I feel like we get, that’s one thing I really learned from my startup journey was that, you know, what worked before you got, got to constantly remain open to the idea that some of that is still going to work, but some of that is always going to need refreshing. You know, it’s dynamic. You cannot do the same things and get the same results every single time when it comes to really anything you’re doing, certainly not sales.
and marketing and certainly not, you know, even engineering, you know, being in, being in, digital, you know, we started out when we started blog, her really, there was no social media. was blogging. were some online communities like tribe and Yahoo groups and stuff like that. but it was all blogs, you know, and it was mostly written, there was flicker existed. So there was photography going on. YouTube was founded the same year we were, but you know,
But as time went on, we had to adjust to, you know what? Now there are these things called smartphones and people aren’t looking at everything on their bigger monitor. Like how are we going to be mobile ready? Then video started to become really important. And so even in that business, like you had to constantly be revisiting what are we doing to accommodate how the market changes, how our customers change, how the technology changes.
And that means you have to be open to the idea that what was perfect is now insufficient.
Federico Ramallo (11:58.079) So what do you think has been the biggest things you learned while scaling BlogHer?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (12:07.454) so we did some things great and we did some things that going back, I wish we had done a little differently. And I’m not, I will say right up front, I’m not a big person when people say, if you could go back with everything, you know, now and do things differently, what would you do? And there are very few things I will say. Qualified for that answer because I didn’t know what I know now. It’s very hard to put yourself into that situation. We did the best we could possibly do me and my two co-founders, Lisa Stone and Jordan.
with our knowledge, our experience, our expertise, the market, like everything is very, very, can kind of think it’s a fool’s errand to try and say, but if 2025, at least I went back 20 years, you but one thing I will say, we put off fundraising for two years and boots dropped. And I think that was smart. We established value, especially as women who we know are held to a different standard in getting funding.
you know, the, number when, when we raised our first round in 2007, only 2 % of venture dollars went to companies that were wholly funded by women, like just women, one, two or three women, whatever it was, that number hasn’t changed like at all. It’s still 2%, right? So that’s still a lot of money out there for women to go out there and get, you know, it’s not like there’s no money. It’s just the odds, you know, and what you, the standard you are held to. So I think it was
the right decision to bootstrap, to build a team, to support ourselves, figure out our revenue streams, have multiple revenue streams. And we had a revenue stream that we developed and then decided, no, this is not a scalable revenue stream. So it helped us get through the first year doing consulting about blogging, but it wasn’t part of a scalable business. So we abandoned that. But doing all of that, let us go into the funding conversation with real world numbers.
real ideas of how to scale the business very precisely. Like we came in and we knew what it would take. So that was super smart. When we raised that first round, I wish we had raised more money right upfront. We, you know, it’s funny because you don’t always remember things exactly the same as other people who were there. So I’ve talked to one of my co-founders about this and she kind of felt like, we raised back then, 2007,
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (14:29.772) We raised $3 million and that was a series A. Today that would be like a seed round, right? It’s just the metrics have changed so much, but that was our series A. And her recollection was like, we only got 3 million. And she was not remembering the part of it I remember, which was that, we thought 3 million was gonna be sufficient.
Like we were like, oh, we know what we’re doing. We got the, we were a little cocky. think we’ve been doing this for two years. We know how it’s going to go. That’s going to get us right into cashflow positive and profitable. Like we don’t want to give away too much of the company. Um, so 3 million is just right. Well, that was 2007. As you may know, 2008 was the year of the financial crash, which rippled through entire industries because if
Federico Ramallo (14:58.396) you
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (15:19.054) consumers aren’t buying, consumer companies aren’t buying advertising or sponsoring. It was across the board.
Federico Ramallo (15:26.023) Right. It affects everything and building that trust to two, three years at least.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (15:34.178) Yeah. So, you know, so if we had raised more, we wouldn’t have been in the position of raising again so soon and in a not great environment, you know, because our board was really cool. I mean, they were like, we don’t believe, you know, with what’s going on in the market, we no longer believe your projections for this upcoming year. You get one shot. This is the only time we’re ever going to tell you, you get to go back and do it again and bring it down because we want you to like succeed.
because we had kind of made our 2000 and probably was our 2009 budget before things got as ugly as they got, right? so, so, you know, we, we, we needed to raise again and pretty quickly, and that is not a power position to be in and conditions weren’t great in the market. So I tell people when I like advise entrepreneurs today, I’m like, first of all, you’re really going to need to prove to me that VC funding is the answer for you.
Like, do you know everything you’re signing up for when you raise VC funding? And is that really necessary? And then the second thing I say to them is, okay, how much money do you really need to get to your next major milestone that proves the next thing? And can you get that money any other way? Because the more milestones you have hit, the more traction you have, the more proof you have, the better funding conversations you’re going to have.
and so.
Federico Ramallo (17:03.868) The more on a position of power you are.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (17:07.074) Yes. So don’t tell me you need 3 million, but it’s to achieve what seemed to me like pretty modest goals to hit the most important of those modest goals. How much do you really need? If it, and then can you get that another way and then go have your funding conversations. But on the other hand, if you do walk in and you know you need VC and we needed VC because we needed to scale big because we had the major women’s media companies realizing that blogging and ultimately social media were going to be a thing.
and they had deep pockets and they were gonna come in and just leapfrog over us with money. So we really needed, the point we raised, we really needed to be able to grow quickly. We could have grown organically, that would have been perfectly fine, but to get big enough to stave off those competitors, we needed to grow more quickly than we had the manpower to even handle. But if you’re gonna raise, tell me the number you think you need and double it and go out and try and get that because you do not wanna have to go.
back to the well because raising money is time consuming and it’s brain, it’s brain consuming and it’s heart consuming because you are going to get so many nos, you’re going to have so many people not understand. You’re going to have, if you’re a woman, you’re going to have so many guys say, let me talk to my wife about it. You know, like, like they are incapable of understanding a business model. If the target user is a woman, you know, so you’re going to have, it’s just going to be so draining on your time.
Federico Ramallo (18:29.754) Ha ha ha ha.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (18:34.962) on your and on your soul. so make sure you don’t have to go back to the well so quickly, not just because of the power factor, but because of it, distracts you from actually running your business, right? Who the first couple of rounds we did, the three of us really raised pretty much together, but then we did, two more rounds and those were really led by our co-founder who was the CEO when, know, we sort of, that was her job eventually. And it was a job like she spent half her time.
working with investors and doing all the stuff and eventually managing our &A experience. And there were other things that she was brilliant at that she didn’t get to spend as much time on as would have maybe been helpful for us because that’s a job. that’s some of the stuff I learned about. Like on my current project, like, I don’t want to raise VC. I don’t want it to be that. That’s not what I want. I’ve done that. That’s great. But I don’t need to do it again.
Federico Ramallo (19:34.823) I’ve been bootstrapped all my life, right? And I always thought that I was not worthy of busy money in a way, right? You know, being a Latino, being, you know, not living in the US, you know, some things that, you know, like YC wants you to move here to the Bay Area, right? So, you know, I have a family, so do I really wanna do that, you know, kind of thing,
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (19:43.949) Mmm.
Federico Ramallo (20:04.348) a little bit of not worthy, a little bit of not willing, right? And then on this trip, I happened to found a VC event. was like, I’m building a platform called PreVetted.ai, which is the name of this podcast, right? We did it mostly for branding, but I should call this podcast, know, Federico is looking for friends. That would be a better, more suited name for the podcast. Anyway.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (20:07.532) Yes, yes.
Federico Ramallo (20:34.351) But going back to this, so I went to this Meetup Summit, if you like, with a few VCs, mostly asking for feedback for my platform, not necessarily raising money, but I was thinking, well, if I can raise money, can build faster, I can do this. Instead of my resources, I have more resources, right? But as you’re saying, it’s a…
it’s very time consuming and very demotivating because the amount of no’s that I was hearing were a lot. And some were real VCs, some were judges that were acting as VCs giving feedback. So there was not real money behind it, but still they had really good advice, tough questions.
So it was very interesting to see because I haven’t been to any of those before. So now I’m wondering, do I really need to raise money? And what you’re saying is pretty much aligned to what I was thinking. The cost of that, is this is worth it?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (21:47.63) Well also, you know, the incentive structure for VCs is geared towards a very particular outcome. And it’s not that everyone they invest in gets that outcome. In fact, the vast majority do not. And so I think with anything, like it’s similar with publishing a book. Like I wanted to publish a book with a traditional publisher to have that credibility.
And what I experienced with that, and I had a great experience making the book, but it was the aftermath of promoting it and distributing it that I was like, book publishers are very much like VCs in that they do take the risk and they invest and pay advances, these traditional publishers, they pay advances to a swath of books of which maybe 10% really show return. I’m probably being generous when I say 10% on either the VC side or the publishing side, right?
And so they are constantly trying to figure out who’s my hot star, who’s the one I want to invest additional time and money into promoting and helping. They’re trying to pick their horse basically. And everybody else gets maybe the leftovers, but also sometimes gets, especially my experience on the VC side is that a lot of times your investor will be like, you need to talk to this other company that we’re
of our other portfolio companies, you guys should partner up. Well, it usually turns out that one of you is the hot person, the hot company. They’re trying to get all their other portfolio companies to partner up with. But what it really means is it’s helping. They’re trying to help the horse that they’ve picked. And for the rest of us, it becomes like, this is actually, yeah, this is not that helpful to us. And it’s a waste of my time. And it’s again, a waste of your time and energy. So,
Federico Ramallo (23:33.933) an anchor.
Federico Ramallo (23:41.719) Ha ha.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (23:42.358) So I feel like, and I always tell folks sometimes say, you shouldn’t be thinking of the exit. You should be thinking about building a great product and service. And I’m like, bullshit, man. Think about the exit and think about a quick one. Doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. But take those early offers more seriously than you’re likely to. I would say that if we had taken earlier M&A discussions more and pursued those,
Like we might’ve ended up with a better outcome for us personally. I don’t know if that’s equal to, would have been a better outcome for all the many, many people that we helped with our company and who made money through our company. Because the thing is, there is an undefinable quality about valuation. Yes, there’s the multiples and yes, there’s the income statement, but there’s also the people want to back the hot horse again.
And you think if you keep going and you keep growing and you keep scaling and you keep doing what you say you’re going to do that, of course, your valuation is only going to go up into the right to right. It makes sense. You’re doing all the things you’re making money. You’re but that’s there’s that doesn’t take into account that are you now perceived as having been around a while? And if they were going to have a hot exit, wouldn’t they have already had a hot exit? And, you know, maybe there’s someone around the corner.
who’s like gonna be the new hotter version of that, right? So you stick around a little too long and all of a sudden you’re doing what you’re doing, but the perception of your value is going down because people naturally expect there’s gotta be something hotter and better. If they’ve been around six years, like wouldn’t they have already done something, you know, been acquired by Meta or Google or whatever the hot companies are in their space?
You know, so I’m always telling entrepreneurs to think about the exit from day one, take every conversation and don’t count on, your valuation will only grow as long as you keep growing. Cause that it’s not true. It’s not how it plays out.
Federico Ramallo (25:57.344) Interesting. I haven’t thought about it that way. I mean, I built my company not to do an exit, but to give a job to my people, right? And help them grow and grow together with them. Again, it was a service company. We were doing recruiting, we’ve been doing recruiting and staffing, right? And this new platform is something new that we’re So this is new.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (26:10.382) Hmm.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (26:26.392) But once you take money, you are obligated to find an exit for those investors, right? So if you’re not building for an exit, why are you taking someone else’s money? You’re promising them, you’re going to get this money back. So there are only a few ways to do that. IPO, sale, or you buy your company back, you pay them back yourself because you’ve grown so much, but you don’t want to do an IPO or sale. But like you’re making a commitment. It’s not, they’re not giving you money because you’re
Federico Ramallo (26:32.086) Yes.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (26:55.534) They’re not giving anyone money because they’re great people who deserve to keep building They’re giving the money to make a return and that is the risk they take I’m not I’m not discounting the risk they take but they’re also most of them risking other people’s money most of the time So, you know the limited partners
Federico Ramallo (27:10.038) Yeah, I read Peter Thiel from zero to one, right? And, you know, he talks about these unicorns companies, but what he’s not telling on the book, and I think that this is truth for most VCs, if not all, is, and you’re kind of, you know, validating what I’m thinking is they have these unicorn companies or these companies that are going to…
100x or whatever, right? They’re going to generate enough revenue for the losses of all these other 10, 20, 50 companies, right? And then you have founders that have been working on those companies for work on this company for five or 10 years or whatever. And what they get after 10 years is less money than if a minimum salary, right? Or taking, you know, they would have
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (27:47.128) Correct. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (28:07.381) make more money if they’re a corporate job, right? Less fun, right? But more stable, right? So that’s what they don’t tell you on the book, right? Or you see Messi, right? You see Maradona, right? Big, big football players. I’m a Argentinian, know. Maradona was an asshole, but still, he was a good football player. But you see that guy, but you don’t see all the hundreds and thousands of people that
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (28:15.5) Well, yeah. Yeah, for most founders.
Federico Ramallo (28:37.674) get dropped in the middle, right, in the process.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (28:40.418) Right. But, you know, you brought up something which actually speaks more to my current project optionality because you said, it’s more stable to get a job job. and I’m not sure that’s, I’m not sure that’s true anymore. Like we’re at least if you’re talking about tech and media, I think the most stable thing you can do is even if you have a job job to be building your other lines of revenue, to be thinking about.
Federico Ramallo (28:51.39) Good job, Joe.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (29:10.036) what other ways you can leverage your expertise and knowledge and to be having irons in the fire and to not sacrifice your life for a company that would lay you off tomorrow and often not even for a really valid reason. Like I just think the whole my whole philosophy you know about what is stable versus not stable is that people who stay in a job and then don’t have the job often feel a lot more lost.
about what to do about it often feel their identity tied much more. I think because I changed careers so often and learned new things and tried new things, I don’t feel like my identity is what I do. I don’t feel my identity is where I work. I’m just a whole bunch of things. I’m not trying to pretend I’m one person on LinkedIn and a different person. Like, I, do I?
craft my the way I talk a little differently maybe but I’m like you can go online you can know everything about me personal political professional that’s all I’m trying to be and that that means that anyone who works with me is cool with all that stuff about me like and and they need to be right because I’m not going to stop any of it because I’m a human being with a full life and I think people who have committed to the job job as the most stable thing I think
Federico Ramallo (30:17.814) Right.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (30:32.674) their risk is really high if something happens to that job job. They have only a few routes they can go because they’ve cemented a path. And I’m like, break up the, you know, just like blow up the single path you think you’re on that’s up and to the right and advancing in a company, which before I left the hardware company, I left in 2003 and eventually started BlogHer, that’s what I thought. I mean, my role model was my mom who was a
you know, second wave feminist started as a part time research associate at a firm and became their first woman VP. Like I thought that’s what I was just going to do. And then the dot com bust happened. I realized I was miserable in my job and had hit the ceiling where they were never going to let me advance past a certain point. And I was like, this is not the answer. Like, so I never planned to go into business for myself. I never planned to be an entrepreneur at all.
I planned to like climb the corporate ladder, but I realized luckily pretty early that that was way too dependent on other people and a small number of other people seeing my value and agreeing on my value. And if I diversified what I was doing, I was more dependent on myself and had more opportunities to find other people to like have value and offer me value in the form of
revenue, you know, so.
Federico Ramallo (32:02.857) Right, right. Yeah, I I agree that diversification, it’s a much better strategy. The company man, company woman, it’s falling apart on both sides, right? So yeah, what I think that, what I draw the line is on that subject is people now are doing, they call it over employment.
and basically they’re taking two remote full-time jobs, with the same arguments that you’re saying, but I think that’s unfair, that’s unethical at least, probably illegal, almost, because you’re selling your time twice.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (32:33.932) Yeah.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (32:53.006) Well, that brings up the whole interesting question. Are they paying for your time or are they paying for your deliverables? Like I don’t think I would do that because I don’t think I want to work two full-time jobs and have the responsibilities like that. It doesn’t sound fun to me at all. I’m more of a fractional, like let me be your fractional, you know, CM or CO or whatever it is. Let me have really strong articulated boundaries around what deliverables I’m.
Federico Ramallo (33:15.092) Right.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (33:22.508) I’m signed up for and then I can make a good decision about how many fractional gigs I can really carry at one time. And you learn over time that what you think your capacity is isn’t really what your capacity because deliverables don’t reflect all the undefined communication and thinking and planning around those deliverables. But I do think in general that people, you know,
there. think that the idea of giving 110 % to one company is kind of dead because they do not give 110 % to you. You are not protected. There are no more pensions. There are no more like there is, you know, and I think companies have built a world where people don’t trust the idea that giving 110 % to a company is worth it. You know, I spoke to someone a couple months ago.
many years at one of the big, you know, I’ll just say it at Meta. And when they laid people off, they said it was for performance.
when it wasn’t. And that just seems purposefully harmful. Why did they feel the need to harm these people? And that’s the same thing they’re doing in the federal government here in the US, like trying to pretend it’s about performance when it’s not. I don’t think the biggest employers, which the federal government is one of the biggest employers in the country, I don’t think the biggest employers are creating or fostering an environment
where people trust companies and are therefore willing to trade 110 % of their capacity for that company. And what that’s doing is actually more damaging for smaller companies and medium companies because the bigger companies can probably afford to pay people enough and get people to come work for them and give great benefits. And so they’re hedging their bets that they can treat people like shit when they want to.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (35:26.146) But when they want people, they can make it worth their while. But if you’re fostering a whole environment where people don’t trust full-time employment, I don’t think that’s great for the companies that don’t have the pocketbook to just pay what it takes anytime they need to and then treat people terribly and still recover from it. There’s only a few companies that can really behave that way and they’re doing it. They are taking advantage of their size and their cash on hand to do exactly that.
Federico Ramallo (35:57.255) Yeah, I agree with you. mean, it’s what’s the point of saying that it was low performance when it was actually wasn’t. I mean, if they’re layoffs, they’re layoff, right? I don’t see there is no there is no benefit for the company either, you know, only just for the employees. Right. And and I think that’s that’s unfair because I mean, yeah, I mean, what when I mean, I started my company boot strap. So when you know.
When I started hiring people, I had the experience of working for a company, startup that stopped paying salaries for four or five months. I was a college student, I was there for fun, for the experience, and they were paying me. So my cost living was very small, so almost zero. So for me, everything was great. I mean, each.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (36:34.658) Wow.
Federico Ramallo (36:54.77) It did affect me, but I didn’t have to support a family. That’s what I’m trying to say. But I saw on the people, because they were my friends, my colleagues, people’s faces, that relationship were off. Actually, they owe me like three or four months. So at one point I came to the CEO and I said, well, you owe me this money, how about?
you pay me with this computer, right? The computer that I was using, right? So for them, it was like, yeah, sure, whatever, you know, just small money for me was a great win because now I had a computer to work on, right? So, you know, for me, I was able to get away pretty well with that, but I was in that position, not everybody. So when I built my company, I owe to myself not to…
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (37:35.618) Yeah. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (37:53.026) do that, right? Not to be that asshole. So what we’ve done is we built months of buffer, right? How many months without revenue can we pay the bills, right? Because when somebody joins as an employee, they are basically putting their financial stability in our hands, right? That’s how I see it, right? And I tried to
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (37:55.438) All right. Well.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (38:05.752) Thank you.
Federico Ramallo (38:22.234) Respect that and value that right? And then you know people can do can have good performance people can have bad performance, right? But that’s a whole different thing right and then what I do I do get upset is when I see bad actors people that act in bad faith, right that either they lie that they have another job a full-time job or they they you know they
break the computer that we give them because they leave him outside and it rains, right? And it’s like, they don’t care, right? Because, it’s company computer. that’s what upsets me, right? And then, people lie to my face, right? But when I see people that are doing the best they can, and then the outcome is not
what I was expecting then you know even though it it upsets me that we didn’t achieve whatever but I try to be as supportive as possible because you know they they are they’re doing their best right
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (39:34.284) people management is not so different from the whole marketing funnel, which is that when something doesn’t hit the way you want it to, know, is it the fact that the promotional, what you were offering your marketing language, your channel, whatever it is, wasn’t the right one, or was it that it worked and people came to look at your offer and get more information and where they landed wasn’t great.
and didn’t explain it and didn’t convert them. Like when you’re looking at every step of the marketing journey, there are different points of touch points with, with the customer, right? And you, what you’re challenged with is figuring out which part of this journey didn’t work. Where did we lose people? The same thing in web design, know, where are people dropping out? Where have we made it too hard for them? So I think we need to have the same introspection and that gets more complicated when you have, you sold ads.
to media and is it their fault or you used a third party programmatic ad company, is it their fault? You used a web designer, is it their fault? Like whose fault is it? And eventually you come back to, I articulate the problem? Did I review the solutions? Did I make the right choices on vendors? Like there’s a way when you’re the leader, there’s a way you can always end up looking in the mirror and say, well, where did I go wrong?
A lot of times I have found with people management, it does come back to how did you pick them? How did you vet them? How did you prepare them? How did you communicate what you needed and wanted? How did you keep an eye on it? How did you manage them? How did you respond before the big let down, you know, and what, what of those things could have been fixed? So it wasn’t just about them being bad at their job. Sometimes people are.
Like you say, sometimes they’re not actually putting the effort in. I’ll never forget the first person I ever had to fire for cause. You know, I checked with this years ago, nice guy, product manager for one of our products. And he just, and I had hired him and liked him and he just at some point stopped performing. Like nothing was happening. I felt like nothing was happening. And,
Federico Ramallo (41:50.253) Wow.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (41:54.23) I felt like I wasn’t getting reporting from him adequately. I felt like he wasn’t moving things forward. And I had, and I talked to HR before deciding to finally terminate him. And, and I showed them these, these email threads of me being, okay, like I need to have, this is when the deadline is for that. need to have like being really clear, trying to be really, really, really clear. And they were like, you’ve been more than clear. If he’s surprised that’s on him. Right. So.
In the conversation, when I go to let him know today’s your last day, like this has not been working out. He comes to tell me that his dad had been diagnosed with cancer and he had been going up to Sacramento to take care of his dad. And you know, this whole long story. Now for a while I was like to myself, I was like, why didn’t he ever come to me? Why didn’t he ever tell me? But then years later, I think about it a little differently. And I’m like, why did I never say
What happened at this point where he was doing fine and then things went off the rails? Why did I never say what’s going on in your personal life? Like what’s happening is do you need support? Do you need a leave? Do you need like, I didn’t find it out. He didn’t offer it. He never, never once mentioned anything about it, but I also didn’t make it safe for him to do so because I didn’t ever do anything but harp on like,
This is what I expect and you are not delivering on what I expect. You know, you really need to do X, Y, and Z. so contrast that with like 15 years later, uh, one of our really, really valued employees offered her reggit resignation and she didn’t report directly to me anymore. had grown and I was like, this is not okay. And I asked the person like, why? And, um, she was like, oh, she just, she needs to move on and whatever. She seems pretty upset on it. Right.
And, know, HR sometimes will train you to not, if someone’s already given notice, they’re unsalvageable, right? They’ve made up their mind. That’s a message you get a lot to not try, but I was like, my God, we will really, this will be a loss. So I called her up and I’m like, I do not accept your resignation. Like, why don’t you tell me what’s going on? So it just turned out that she wanted to move back at the time we were, had some remote days, but most people
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (44:17.794) Half our workforce worked in the Bay Area and came into the office at least some number of days a week. We had a New York office, bunch of people were out there. We had some early employees that were all over the place, but she had been hired to come into the Bay Area office and she came into the Bay Area office. so it turns out she was tired of living in San Francisco. She wanted to move back down to Southern California where her family was. She wanted to go to her next stage of life. She felt like…
When she got married and had kids, she wanted it to be in Southern California. So why is she going to stay? You know, she’d gotten older. We hired her when she was like 25, you know, and it was six years later or something. And her life was just, and I’m like, so what made you think you couldn’t still do your job from Southern California? And she had just made, she had made assumptions about that we would not be okay with this. And I was like, let’s try it. Like it’s totally worth trying it, but I feel like why wouldn’t that work? Plenty of people work remotely.
Federico Ramallo (44:50.296) the city.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (45:14.54) She moved down to Southern California. She stayed with us another, well, until past when we were acquired. She stayed for a while. I don’t remember if she left before I left the acquiring company, but you know, she stayed a good long time after that conversation and she got married and she had her kid and she lives near her family. I mean, and I had just learned that just ask the questions, you know, and really care and really care about the answer.
Like I know sometimes people ask you questions and you don’t feel like they don’t really care. Why am going to tell them? Why am going to be vulnerable? Why am I going to be open? You know, if you got to, if you’re managing people, you have to sincerely care about the answers. If you ask someone a question, you have to sincerely care what the answer is. And, you know, maybe it would have been a reason we couldn’t have managed around, but it wasn’t at all. I was in fact, I was shocked. She felt like that was her choice. Like I thought we had.
Federico Ramallo (45:54.264) Right.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (46:11.778) Wow, we have remote employees. Why doesn’t she assume she can be one? But she just had gotten into a way of thinking about her job that we needed to adapt on both our ends.
Federico Ramallo (46:24.855) Right, right. Yeah, I mean, sometimes, you know, employees don’t realize that they have options and they can do different things. So very interesting that you can, you know, recover a good employee with, you know, by just connecting with people.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (46:40.898) Yeah. The conventional wisdom is that you don’t want someone’s given their notice. Like even, you know, yeah, they’re done. And sometimes people, course, sometimes counter and stuff, but, but they, their mindset is that they’re not going to take it or if they take it, they’re still a short timer. And then they treat them that way. And then they, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know? So I’m like either sincerely try to retain them or let them go, but don’t try to retain them and then judge them for the fact that they
Federico Ramallo (46:45.997) It’s done.
Federico Ramallo (47:01.825) Right.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (47:10.144) ever put you in that position. I think that’s what happens.
Federico Ramallo (47:14.059) Right. I’ve been able to, you know, throughout the years, do better on recruiting and screening. What we’ve been doing is technical screening. I started with people that I know, that I personally know, right? Because I’ve been working towards providing the highest quality candidate at the lowest possible cost, right? You know, people in Mexico, working in companies in the US, that’s what…
I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, Setting the right expectations, right? Sometimes a candidate doesn’t quite have all the skills. So we build a plan to get the people to the level. We build a commitment with the candidates. We present the opportunity to the manager. We say, this guy is missing this and this and this, but I can offer you a 50% discount. This guy commits to work on it. In six months, we can, you
we can get to the level that you need. I know I can do in a month. I know somebody else can do it in two or three months, whatever, right? So we build plans with contingencies to exceed expectations, right? And the managers loves it because it’s a great opportunity, right? The candidate loves it because you’re giving me the opportunity to learn and get up to speed. They appreciate it more, so they stay for longer.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (48:13.784) Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (48:41.548) and they get up to speed, they learn whatever they need to learn. And we have people like that working for six, seven years in our teams. And for me, that’s amazing because you were talking about the misfits. So I found some misfits that are great people, they have great skills, but they lack on personal communication. They get distracted.
time management issues, right? So, you know, to one of that guys, I actually sold him my car in, you know, a interest free loan, right? So he could visit his son. So he could be on time to our meeting. So he could, you know, have more freedom and basically support him, right? You know, he was living in the city and
His family was an hour away, two hours away in another town. you know, his son was having through some difficulties. was eager to see his dad, right? I could see it on every company meeting where the meeting family would show up. So I tried to help him as much as possible. And he stayed with us for seven years, right? And he’s been, you know, really great, right? He was like,
He was fired less than a year one job after another, right? Because he would not fit, right? So I work with him a lot, right? On his personal, you know, communication skills, So, yeah, I understand what you’re saying. Sorry, I’m going off topic, but yeah. So I wanted to ask you a…
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (50:30.904) Yeah, no, that’s a great story.
Federico Ramallo (50:39.435) a question about hiring women and tell you a little bit my experience what has been.
Federico Ramallo (50:52.563) At one point my approach was, I want to do 50 % women, 50 % men, right? But the percentage of female engineers is like 3 % or 5%, at least in Mexico. It’s very small, smaller than in the US. So if I was going through that route, the quarter route, I call it, we were going to hire less qualified candidates.
That’s for sure, right? Because if we said 50%, I mean, we’re a small company, but if we said 50 % towards a 3 % market, you know, we were going to hire.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (51:31.982) many engineers are we talking about? How many do you need to hire?
Federico Ramallo (51:38.198) 50, we have a team of 50 people, So, you know, between multiple roles, right? Not only engineering, we have admins, have, know, my wife is the co-founder of the company. We have, you know, so we have some women on the team, but I wanted to achieve the 50%, right? So that was my first approach. I saw the flow. That was the flow that I saw on that approach. Eventually we tried the feedback that I got from
current team is we post a job and then women apply only if they fit 100 % of the requirements. Men only 30, right? And then we will screen based on that, right? So for me, what I didn’t want to do is like lower standard to hire women, right? More women. So we did another job post with different language for women, right? To be more approachable.
And that worked a little bit.
Eventually, I got to the conclusion that we shouldn’t lower the standard to hire more women. We should say, OK, this is a standard that the job requires and encourage women to get to that level. So what we did is we started a community called IT Girls.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (53:06.552) I would say encourage women who are at that level to see you as a place where they want to apply.
Federico Ramallo (53:13.93) Yes, yes, we did both actually. we did a community called IT Girls where we invite senior engineers, product managers, designers, people that made it, if you like, right? They never made it. They’re still working on it. Everybody is, but… And then we invited women from students to juniors to…
The junior the better because the whole ethos of that is you can do it, she’s done it, you can do it, and go for it, apply. These are the things that people are looking to, these are the resources you can use to learn more. These are the things that we are hiring we need.
we encourage you to apply even though you might not feel 100%. So with that, we saw a surge on applicants. But mostly we saw the same people showing up on the meeting, some women showing up on the meetings. I try to organize everything and just stay behind, not be the face. So again, you know.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (54:39.906) Right. Right.
Federico Ramallo (54:43.187) to not, know, I encouraged my wife to lead the meetings. I encouraged my female recruiter, head of recruitment to organize the events and talk to them. And I just stand back, right? And, you know, they were able to open up more, share more of their concerns and their ideas, right?
And it’s been great, right? So that was my experience. And my question is, what has been your experience?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (55:20.91) Well, I have so many thoughts. So first of all, like when it comes to this 3 % number, I think something, it depends what that number represents. In the United States, the women in STEM degrees in college peaked actually, and it’s gone down a little bit. And so I think it’s 30 something percent right now, right? But that’s 30 % every year.
So it’s not 30 % of all the people out there. It’s that every year there are new people coming into the workforce who are women who have gotten these STEM degrees, right? So you have a cumulative effect. Even if it was three per, there are only 3 % of your STEM graduates in Mexico are women, that’s 3 % every year. That’s probably hundreds and hundreds of people.
So no one is asking anyone to lower their standards in order to hire to quote us. But what I will say is you never achieve anything that you don’t put a goal around and incent. So a lot of people say we have a goal around parity, but they’re not judging any manager on how they achieve that is your recruiter. And you can start by saying, who are you interviewing? Who are you screening? Who are you interviewing at every step of the process where, and it’s like the marketing thing, where do people fall away?
Right? And how are people incented and rewarded for finding more people for you to choose from? Because you just told me a whole story about a guy who was not really good at personal communications, which is a soft skill or leadership skill really, that’s very important, including in engineering, because engineering is not just code. It’s explaining, you know, it’s negotiating and validating around what the path is going to be and then figuring it out. Right?
You know, you went through a whole process to bring that guy along and help him when he had been having problems. So he didn’t have 100 % of what you really needed for that role either. You had to develop the place where he was lacking. And so we easily do that for some people and for some things. So, you know, where are you, how are you setting goals? How are you rewarding people for achieving goals? And what is the accountability if you don’t achieve goals?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (57:33.158) And some people might tell me, well, that’s just a quota after all. But I’m like, well, everything we do in business is a quota. We set sales goals. We set all kinds of goals, right? And the fact is, if you don’t put a goal around it, you don’t achieve it. And part of that is this idea of who we, and we encountered this all the time with, we had conferences where we needed speakers. We had a website where we needed writers.
We hired people and so much of how that works is people put out a call for speakers. People put out a job posting for writers and for roles and all of that counts on people coming to you and finding you and knowing who you are and knowing that that’s a good place to want to work or write or speak. And if you know.
And where is the room for you’re not finding someone who doesn’t know you exist yet, but who’s perfect for you. And so some ways that companies achieve that here anyway, is they go out to conferences for women in engineering or the HBCUs if they wanna hire more black people. The Grace Hopper Celebration Conference has a huge recruiting arm because thousands of women in STEM go to this conference in the US every year.
And most of the companies that sponsor are doing so from their recruitment departments. But they are going out into, so it’s not just trying to bring people to you and assuming if they don’t apply, they must not exist. If they don’t apply, it might be that they don’t know you exist, right? So how do you, so it’s a smart tactic to say, we’re gonna create this group because through creating this group, they’re gonna learn that we exist and that we would be a great place for them to work.
But again, it’s not like I would say, I want to have 50 % of my engineers be women right now. But I might say, I’m going to insist that an interview group, that when we’re interviewing for people, that you can pick a number. Maybe it doesn’t start as 50%. But we are going to interview, know, X % of our candidates are going to be women. And we’re going to talk to them.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (59:49.228) Because if men are applying when they’re at 30%, you’re not telling me that every man that you interview is at 100%. Some of them are not, right? So, you know, so I think it’s about kind of rethinking about the milestones in the journey of getting to a very totally worthy goal, especially who are your customers? Are your customers a lot of women? It’s great to have engineers and developers who are developing, you know, that match the customer group that you’re working with, right? They bring a different perspective that might be helpful.
Federico Ramallo (59:58.576) Yes.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:00:18.732) So I would think about these things as how do you set a goal? How do you reward? How do you hold people accountable? And how do you get yourself out there so you don’t just wait for everyone to come to you? You go out and make yourself known and you go to them and you figure out where they are because every university has probably a women in engineering cohort or a women in physics cohort.
at every school that is, you know, every college and university. It’s not hard to find out where these people are, where your next great hire could be. And I always say with engineering, like with tech, nobody five years out of college, 10 years out of college is doing what they learned in college because technology evolves and moves and like,
You know, my, my spouse is an engineer and their last job was at one of the very, very, very big tech companies. And he worked there, you know, he’s basically retired now, but he worked there 16 years and he ended up programming in a language he hadn’t used before because they had shifted what kind of language they were going to use. and he like learned it and, and they had confidence that he would learn it, you know, because he had.
Federico Ramallo (01:01:38.405) Yeah.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:01:42.478) and all these other languages and done all these other adjustments throughout his career for the technology that he was working on. And so I always remember when I first started blogging and taught myself HTML, little CSS, but mostly HTML, and I would get so frustrated with myself because I could never remember the HTML command for adjusting the height and width of a photo. That was like the thing I always seemed to like. What is it again?
Federico Ramallo (01:02:09.477) You
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:02:10.71) And I would go on the internet, you know, and I would search and I would find it. And so one day I was complaining to him and I was saying, I can’t remember this thing. And he, he, at the time it would be different today, but at the time at his desk, he had books like all these programming books. And he goes, do you see all these books? Do you think that I remember every command and all the languages I work in all the time? No, these are reference materials. And sometimes I need to pull down my reference materials and remind myself.
how to write a command that I’m looking to write. And of course today he would do it on the internet too, like there’s no books lining his desk anymore. you know, so he says that’s what people do. Like they can’t, they use reference materials and they, if you don’t remember something, you look it up and then it’s knowing how to use it. It’s knowing what you wanna do with it. It’s knowing what you wanna say, right? So, and…
So I think on the one hand, starting this group and providing real value for people is a great idea. But I think on the other hand, I would kind of remove from your lexicon the idea that you won’t sacrifice quality for diversity because no one’s asking you to. What they’re asking you to do is to create goals, have rewards and incentives lined up to support those goals and start.
treating it like you would any other business issue, which is figure out where you need to go to get what you need and, figure out what, what are the core things that you’re willing to work with someone on, and help develop them. And what are the core things that you’re not? And, and, because the reason women, I mean, this is the thing that always kind of gets passed over. Yes. Women wait till they’re a hundred percent.
before they apply for things or put themselves out there for things because they are not rewarded when they don’t do that because there is a legacy of, know, putting yourself out for something and having the person who would accept 30 % you know, qualification from a guy without thinking about it and assuming they could figure out the rest, but they will nitpick on the 10 % the woman doesn’t have and use it as a reason she’s not qualified. I’m not saying you do that. I’m saying
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:04:33.132) statistically, you know, the people that is what happens, you know, women go into a VC meeting and they’re asking men all sorts of questions about promise and potential and future vision. And they’re asking women about how are you going to handle it when this goes wrong and when that goes wrong and when this goes wrong, it’s like, proven, you know, they want proof versus potential women versus men. And so you have to start by asking yourself, where am I?
Federico Ramallo (01:04:48.974) Hehehe.
Federico Ramallo (01:04:55.032) Right.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:05:01.752) carrying that thinking and how can I blow it up?
Federico Ramallo (01:05:06.52) Yes, yes, I mean the.
the situation you were talking about, your employee that wouldn’t speak up, right? I think that coming up from a position of care allows you to understand better. So I think that that’s different than, we’re going to ask you to do less because of your gender, right? That’s completely different, but the result is
is similar in the sense that if you go from a position of care, then you can have a better understanding and then from there you can help, you can facilitate the other person to achieve, to move forward, right?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:05:53.294) I mean you you described a whole process where you you Convinced a company to hire someone who wasn’t all there because you had a plan for them to get there
on something they were lacking, something you didn’t think they were quite qualified at that moment for this element of their job, but you had a plan to get them there. When I joined, when I was first a product manager, which wasn’t my first job in tech, started out, like I went to, I started as an admin in a marketing department and then I became like a marketing associate. And then because it was the dot-com boom, I had to hop, I hopped to another company and went right in as a product manager. And…
I did not, and the technology at the new company was different than the technology at the first company. So I had to like learn it, but I had other skills that helped me do that, which is communication, which is negotiation, which is asking the right questions, which is, you know, yes, I had an aptitude, right? I had proved that in my first role that I had an aptitude to learn this stuff and talk about it and translate it into good.
Federico Ramallo (01:06:37.321) Yeah
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:07:00.312) good copy for marketing and product marketing materials. And then I just had to do it all over again, learning a new technology, finding a new guy who wanted to sit there and explain RF engineering to me or physical layer technology when the other one had been like, know, fiber optics and digital. You know, was just, I just had to find the people who would help me develop and keep going. that was a great time.
because two things, it was a great time because being the boom that it was, people needed people really badly. And I think people hired people, like if you meet someone and you say, they’re smart, they’re gonna figure it out. They’re smart, they’re hungry, they’re gonna figure it out. And people were hiring people who just were smart and hungry. Like they just wanted to learn, they wanted to advance, they wanted to do a great job, right? The second thing that was great is that,
Before, I kind of lay this at Google’s feet, before Google, product management was more of a, was kind of housed in the marketing function in the tech companies. It was like product management, yeah, product management, product marketing, marketing communications was kind of the spectrum. And then product management was the role that interfaced between engineering and sales to help translate needs into features and translate features into selling points, right?
Federico Ramallo (01:08:10.897) really?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:08:27.34) That was the role product management. Google was really, from what I understand, Google was really the first one that was like putting, making being an engineer a prerequisite to be a product manager. So there were tons of women product managers. When I was a product manager, I mean, I actually, I was often the only woman in the room, but I knew other women product managers. knew quite a lot. And then we just tech went through this phase where it was like a culling mechanism and it kind of gate-kept.
this function, is really about communication and translation and negotiation and compromise and like all this kind of stuff and turned it into another engineering function and gave, because these were such engineering centric companies. I mean, you hear that a lot about like the early days of all these internet companies was that they just, they considered themselves engineering driven. That’s why so many of them didn’t have that much of a business model, even when they started, they were just working, you know, they were just.
developing the tech anyway, that’s, like Silicon Valley history, 101 but, so I would just, know, you’ve got all the right ingredients and ideas, I think, to put it together and, and get to where you want to get eventually. But if you don’t set a goal for how that happens, then I think it’s, it’s just pretty hard to say you’re going to achieve it.
Federico Ramallo (01:09:29.282) Ha ha.
Federico Ramallo (01:09:50.133) Right, right. Yeah, mean, what we’ve done is we’ve done that community. I learned a lot by just listening there. It’s a different dynamic on the conversation. It’s a completely different dynamic than when you have a bunch of male engineers, right? It’s completely different, right? And because I was actively trying not to participate, right?
and just listening, I learned a lot, right? And that allow us to do better on the hiring side, right? So that has been better. We haven’t achieved 50-50 and I don’t think that’s necessarily a relevant metric per se, right? But rather than giving more opportunities, helping them achieve more, grow more, right? Because some of these women eventually ended up on other companies, right? So for me, that’s a win.
Maybe not a win on the company, but a win on the initiative. So that worked. And the female employees that we have in the company are amazing, are one of the hardest working people that we have. there’s that. So that’s kind of why I wanted to incentivize more women to get into tech.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:10:53.986) Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:11:19.711) Yeah. Awesome. So to wrap it up, because we exceeded a little bit the time, I appreciate your time. What do you want to achieve this year in the next 12 months or so?
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:11:36.396) Yeah, so I’m working on this project, Optionality, which is a community for people who want to lead a more optionality driven life and develop that ability to have a portfolio career, to have many irons in the fire. Ultimately, the goal would be to start to evangelize that even big companies should adopt that and not in a gig worker way, but in a way that is if you’re a fractional employee, you get fractional benefits, you get
proportional because right now it’s very binary. You’re either a full-time employee and you get access to ownership and benefits and PTO or you’re a consultant or contractor and you get nothing, right? None of that. And it’s, there’s no law that says it has to be that way. So ultimately that’s the vision that you, you purpose hire people and they get purposely, you know, proportional benefits across the spectrum and it would be better for companies and
workers. And when we started it, we thought, it’s going to be a bunch of, I started it with one of my BlogHer co-founders. We were working together again and we thought it’s going to be for people like us who are pretty seasoned. We don’t want to go back to working full time. You know, we want to keep our options open. We want to have many irons in the fire. But what we realized is that Gen Z is coming into the marketplace, having witnessed how, the workplace has changed over the last five, ten years. They walk into the, the job market.
feeling like they wanna have their options open. They want to have many irons in the fire. They want to have Optionality. Really, I think this is the now, people talk about the future of work. This is the now of work and a whole bunch of companies aren’t really accepting that yet, but optionality.life is the URL and its content and convening, bringing people together and creating connections and helping people build.
build this life. And that’s what I’m focused on. The other thing I’m focused on is politics because I don’t know how you can live in this world and not care about politics. so I like to do a lot of research oriented, like dig a little deeper and explain things a little differently than sometimes I see it. Online discourse is a trip, right? So I’m just trying to be like one little calm voice who talks about data and stuff.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:13:53.094) but about politics. So that’s my, that’s like my avocation. That’s my passion. And my vocational passion is talking about optionality and, you know, in helping entrepreneurs. And I coach and consult with entrepreneurs and I’m advising a couple of companies. And, you know, so I’ve got a lot going on because I have an optionality driven life. I have a portfolio career and you can find me at AlisaCp.com.
Federico Ramallo (01:13:53.897) Hahaha!
Federico Ramallo (01:14:19.722) Yes, we’re going to put the links on the description of the episode so people can reach out. And that way they can connect with you. And I’m very interested to see how optionality, I hope I pronounced it correctly. Optionality, yes. It’s growing because it a very interesting project. We did hire some people fractional.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:14:31.15) Sounds good.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:14:38.595) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (01:14:49.447) It’s been interesting. Again, it’s like when you’re hiring full time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work, but most has been a positive experience. So I encourage other people to do it as well. Great. Great talking to you, Elisa. Thank you very much.
Elisa Camahort Page (she/her) (01:15:02.382) Awesome, great. Well, it was great talking to you.