Mada Seghete, Branch | CloudNOW 'Top Women In Cloud' Awards 2020
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2020-02-12

Mada Seghete, Co-founder of Branch, sits down with Sonia Tagare at CloudNOW 'Top Women In Cloud' Awards 2020 in Menlo Park, CA.

#TopWomenInCloud #CloudNOW #theCUBE

https://siliconangle.com/2020/02/20/women-tech-still-suffer-low-confidence-startup-ceo-solution-topwomenincloud/

Women in tech still suffer from low confidence, but this startup CEO has a solution

There’s a reason the saying “Crow like a rooster” means to stand proud, while “Cluck like a hen” is to gossip idly. Thanks to subconscious gender stereotyping, women are much less likely than men to publicize their achievements.

Studies show that’s a huge barrier to women attempting to climb the corporate ladder, especially in the entrepreneurial world of high-tech, where “go big or go home” has become a mantra. So how do women in tech bolster their confidence levels?

“One of the things that has helped me find balance has been having a group of female founder friends,” said Mada Seghete (pictured), co-founder of Branch Metrics Inc. “It’s really interesting to have a peer group that you can talk about things with and be vulnerable with.”

Seghete spoke with Sonia Tagare, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards event in Menlo Park, California, where she was recognized for her work in tech. They discussed Seghete’s path from small-town Romania to award-winning Silicon Valley CEO.

Seek out support early
Low self-confidence affects not only Seghete herself, but she sees its impact on her peers and the women she mentors.

“Society around us doesn’t necessarily believe that we can do the things that we can do as women,” she said. “So, believing in ourselves is incredibly important. Believe that you can do it. Believe that only the sky is the limit. Believe that you can do more than you think you can do.”

Seghete credits her peer group, who call themselves the Feministas, with helping her as she went through the stresses of building a successful career. Her only regret is that she didn’t build her support group earlier.

“I didn’t look for those communities,” she said. “I didn’t look for guidance. I just thought ‘I can do it.’”

With the wisdom of hindsight, she can see that was a mistake. She advises entrepreneurs “to start early and find a small group of people that you can actually rely on. That can be your advocates and your champions.”

These can be friends, investors and mentors — but not co-workers. The outside perspective is important to maintain balance, according to Seghete. Being part of a community where you can seek advice and ask questions without fear of looking weak within the workplace is important, she added.

Seghete’s personal journey is an inspirational tale of a young girl with a talent for math who ended up as CEO of a Silicon Valley startup. It started when she left her hometown in Romania to study computer engineering in the United States.

”I applied to 23 colleges and ended up getting a full scholarship from Cornell University,” she said.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Cornell, Seghete studied management science and engineering at Stanford University. It was there her entrepreneurial flame was kindled, and she stayed on at the university to gain a master’s degree in business administration with a focus on entrepreneurship.

Failure paves the path to success
Like most entrepreneurs, Seghete’s first attempt at starting a business was a failure: “We did what all business students do, which just started something that sounded cool, but maybe we didn’t have such a big market,” she said.

This venture pivoted into a mobile book printing app, called Kindred Prints, that was moderately successful. However, the company “had a really hard time growing,” Seghete said.

This issue was visibility: Seghete’s background in web marketing hadn’t prepared her for the mobile ecosystem. “The web is a pretty democratic system,” she said. “You are able to put together a website and make sure that the website gets found through social media, through search, through all these other platforms.”

In contrast, the app ecosystem is owned by platforms, and “we had a really hard time applying,” Seghete said. “All these things I had done to market the websites just didn’t work with apps.”

Kindred started to struggle, and Seghete and her co-founders considered shutting down. Then they realized that they had unintentionally identified a problem within the app ecosystem: It was hard for people to discover content within apps.

Kindred’s focus pivoted to this new challenge, and the team built a marketing platform for apps that made content sharing simple.

“Our mission is to help people discover content within the apps through links that always work,” she said. The company rebranded as Branch, and “it’s been a wonderful and kind of pretty exciting journey ever since,” Seghete concluded