A Totally Different Life

Let's talk some more about your impressive career. You were a rocket scientist for NASA. You were an engineer. You had an award-winning career as an entrepreneur in STEM. You've also held executive and engineering roles at companies like Apple, Dell, Autodesk, IBM. What made you want to go from a career in tech to becoming CEO of the Girl Scouts?

That's a really a great question because I love being an engineer. I love also being a tech exec and I had been part of an entrepreneurship organization, a company that we sold and we had a successful exit. And at that point I could have gone back and gotten into technology, but I had this fateful opportunity when somebody who was a researcher at Stanford was looking and, looking in their archives, and they had determined that I was one of the few male or female Hispanics that had ever gotten a graduate engineering degree. So they called me and they said, you know, we kind of find it interesting because we really weren't recruiting from that part of the country where you grew up, so how was it that you knew about Stanford? How is it that you were prepared and then you got in and you excelled and then had this great career? How did that happen?

And the more they kept interviewing me, the more it all kind of went back to when I was a young Girl Scout and that really fateful moment when I was camping and my troop leader showed me, saw me looking at the stars and she showed me that there was a constellation and that there were planets and I didn't know that. I just thought they were like these twinkly lights up there, right? She encouraged me to earn a science badge and I did it by making a rocket, an Estes rocket, and that took me trial and error to make the rocket, so I had to you know learn how to problem-solve. I had to learn how to make it work, but when it finally did, I really just felt so good about that and so I started really realizing I could do science. I could do math and I started taking more science and math. And as a kid, the more you do something, the better you get. And the better you get at it, the more you want to do it because you're good. And, you know, I did it so much that I became rocket scientists good at it. So you know...

That's awesome.

I know, so that at that moment I realized wow, you know, that experience and a couple of other things about creating opportunity and also not taking the first no until you've heard no at least three times, I realized that Girl Scouts had been that inflection point in my life. That's what made me so different than a lot of my family members. And at that point I thought, oh my gosh, you know had it not been for Girl Scouts, I would have had a totally different life.