Crazy Ideas

So what is some of the feedback that you have gotten, and why has that been so important to your leadership potential?

Sure. So I would say being vulnerable is one of them. Like I mentioned, being able to express how I'm feeling and being able to tell my team I'm overwhelmed or I'm stressed out or I need your help is so critical. I would also say having more patience is something that I've received feedback on. Whereas I have the mentality of we should have done this project 10 days ago or a year ago, and sometimes it takes my team to have a little bit more of a timeline to get there. The last thing I'll say is, I do consider myself a visionary in the sense that I have these grandiose plans and vision sometimes, and I know my team gets overwhelmed by the vision.

Reel it back in there.

Exactly, reel it back in. I can share some stories about the crazy things that I've put out there, but it's--

Sure, share some of those stories. What crazy things have you put out there and your team said, "Daniela, you might want to rethink that"?

So I'll give you two examples. One example was I wanted to put on a gala in San Francisco the first year that SOA had ever existed in San Francisco. Everyone told me, "You know, only well-established well-known organizations put on such high caliber events." And I was like, "Oh no, we're having a gala. We're having it at California Academy" which again, they're like gorgeous venue in San Francisco. And again, it was one of those things where the team was like, "Maybe in year five you can have a gala." But at the end of the day, we had our gala--

You did?

We did. We raised over 200k in funding. We were able to get our entrepreneurs on stage to pitch to investors, and it truly enabled us a way to be better known in the Silicon Valley area, which was a huge success. And so that was one of them. And then the second one I'll share with you is, we have an accelerator program each year, where we bring entrepreneurs to San Francisco or we used to before the pandemic. And so I had this vision of taking these entrepreneurs and putting them on a boat, and taking them to actually experience the world that they're trying to protect. And so I suggested to my team, why don't we take everyone on an expedition to Alaska for a week and then bring them back to San Francisco to go through the program? Again, another crazy one of my ideas, but we did it.

But it doesnÕt sound too crazy. Were they concerned about funding or liability or what?

Well, I think it's the fact that we're a very small team and most people don't realize that.

How many people are in the team?

At the time of the boat situation, we were about five people.

Oh, that is small.

We currently have 14 people now. So we definitely have grown in size, but it's always been about the capacity of what five human beings are able to do. And now, again, as our team expands, the more ambitious I'm hoping we get with our plans.

Well, but hey, the flip side of that is that if you haven't had these grandiose visions, none of that might have happened and people might have not realized that they did have the potential and did have the capacity to accomplish those things.

Exactly, exactly. And I think that enables them also to grow themselves and step outside their comfort zone to then have these crazy grandiose ideas themselves. That's the type of mentality that I want my team to develop, right, to see themselves as being the visionaries too and finding ways to bring more people in.