Charting Your Own Path

You are a tech leader and also a woman of color. Now that is a very, very small club in Silicon Valley. Can you describe some of the challenges that you have faced working in a male-dominated tech industry?

Yeah, a lot of challenges to be honest with you and a lot of it can be described—kind of how I describe being a kid, right? You look around and no one is like you. No one speaks the same language as you. And so you can feel very alone and feel very much like a mother.
And so some of the challenges I have faced is I have felt just different. When I am in a room and it is all men. And I don’t want to stereotype, but generally the men that I work with speak a lot louder than I do. I’m an Asian and I am pretty traditional in some cases in that I am a very quiet speaker. I love to solicit opinions of others which means I often put my own opinions last. I have a leadership style that is more collaborative and it is really good at building teams. But not really great at being the loudest person, a person can get in my opinion across. So, I had to learn how to adapt in certain situations.
But I would say that the hardest part is finding my true worth. When I look around me and I look above me at people I admire, most of them don’t look like me. And most of them have leadership styles that are not for me. And so in my early career, I would emulate people. And now I’m at place where I try to emphasize that that leadership approach does not work for me. So, how do I chart my own path in this industry? And, unfortunately, the challenge is I have to chart my own path which makes it a bit harder. But when I follow it, it feels more authentic. So, I want this way, I didn’t have a predetermined path.