WoVen: Women Who Venture

On this episode of WoVen, Nina Kjellson from Canaan talks to Sue Siegel, who, over 30+ years, has worked as an operator, leading innovator, VC investor, thought leader, and board member of industry-changing companies.

Sue has repeatedly been recognized for her leadership skills, and in 2020 she was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by Global Corporate Venture.

Today Sue shares how learning of her mother’s struggle and success encouraged her to fight for her own progress and achievements, and equally to celebrate others’ accomplishments. She imparts wisdom on building and sustaining top-class teams in order to produce the best possible work, and how her five ‘Ways of Working’ principles guide and strengthen the workforce.

Together, Nina and Sue discuss how business has progressed over the course of Sue’s expansive career, as well as a number of silver linings we can glean from the pandemic. These include reaffirming the importance of family time, technological acceleration, and positive, deliberate changes in recruitment, diversity, equity, inclusion, and retention.

Links:

Canaan

Nina Kjellson

Sue on LinkedIn

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Michelle Phan was a creator and influencer far before those were even a thing. In 2007, while working as a waitress and struggling to make ends meet to attend art school, Michelle began posting beauty tutorials on YouTube. Her infectious personality and creativity quickly garnered her millions of subscribers. She went on to found IPSY in 2011, a beauty sample subscription service that was valued at $800 million dollars in 2015. She also was one of the first creators ever to launch her own product line, which she did in 2013, launching EM Cosmetics in partnership with L'Oreal.

Michelle has received countless accolades, including being named to Forbes 30 under 30 and Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People. Yet, the demands of all of Michelle's fans and business partnerships, as well as the vanity as a beauty industry, led her to burn out in 2016. Faced with a choice of her career or her mental health, Michelle chose herself. She took a digital hiatus that shocked her millions of fans.

In 2017, Michelle came back to the public eye, but this time on her own terms. She exited IPSY and purchased EM Cosmetics from L'Oreal, relaunching it with full creative control and ownership. Today, she is completely self-funded and contract free for the first time in her more than decade long career. On this episode, Michelle talks about the importance of creative control and learning to say "no".

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Ginger More was a true pioneer in the male-dominated venture capital world of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, and she is who the next gen want to grow up to be. Born the second of three children to a schoolteacher and a fireman, Ginger attended the University of Bridgeport as a math major, and she married while she was still in school. She began a family as a military wife and also while working full-time at Wright Investors’ Service. She even completed the totally grinding three-year charter financial analyst certificate program on her own time with young kids.

In 1978, she joined Oak Investment Partners and became a partner there just two years later. At Oak, Ginger invested in a number of IT and healthcare companies, and she was responsible for Oak’s investment and board positions in market making companies like Genzyme, Stratus, and Compaq.

Genzyme went on to set new standards for the industry. At a time when rare diseases were completely neglected by the pharmaceutical industry, the company built their business to serve exactly that unmet need.

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Amy DuRoss was born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area and politically engaged at a very early age by lawyer-activist parents, as well as her Quaker school, both of which nurtured her strong social justice compass. She studied humanities at Yale, Oxford and Stanford, graduating with a master's degree in English, and then returning some years later to Stanford for an MBA.

Amy's career has spanned tech, consulting, policy and healthcare. With 10 years at really big organizations such as E-Loan, G.E, the World Bank and Life Tech, as well as in precision medicine startups from Gene Sage to California's Prop 71 initiative to Navigenics, and ultimately to the founding of Vineti, where she is CEO. Vineti is defining a whole new software category for precision medicine therapy management by enabling vein to vein supply chain documentation and analytics for these breakthrough new therapies.

Amy has been honored by fellowships with the Cora Foundation and the Aspen Institute, in fact twice, and she is actively committed to diversity and inclusion across business and in politics. With three young children and a writer husband, Amy is living the Bay Area dual-income, always -on chaos and is doing so with incredible finesse and stamina.

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Self-care: Last time we explored the power of resilience. This episode, we’ll dig into self-care, the yin to resilience’s yang. At a certain point, physically and emotionally, even the most successful women need to take a pause, step out of the ring, and take care of themselves. Our Co-host Laura Chau reveals the ways in which our guests decompress, find calm, and look after both their bodies and minds. From exercise and mindfulness practices, to quality time with family, we learn how these women find space for self-care among all the day’s demands. We sit down with Karla Gallardo, Michelle Phan, Amy DuRoss, Glo Harris, and Gail Maderis to hear how they look after themselves to prevent, or recuperate from burnout, and what it’s like to have to choose between your career and mental health.

Hosted by Laura Chau, WoVen : Women Who Venture is a podcast from Canaan and Edit Audio Inc. that represents a platform, a community and really a celebration of venturesome and adventurous women in healthcare, tech and business.

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