Diversity Driven: Alysia Silberg’s AI Odyssey and Entrepreneurial Insights Unveiled – Tech.Strong.Women. EP 28

Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Techstrong Women, where we feature amazing women doing amazing things in tech. I'm Jody Ashley, executive producer here at Techstrong, and I'm here with my co-host, Tracy Reagan, creator, and CEO of Deploy Hub and Linux Foundation participant extraordinaire.

I can never keep up with all the stuff she's up to, so I'm just gonna give it one big title there. Um, before I introduce today's guest, I wanna give you a little update about what's going on here at Textron Wednesday, April 3rd, we have Textron Con 2024, another virtual event. We'll have more information coming soon for that.

And Monday to Thursday, May 6th through ninth, you wanna join us in San Francisco at RSAC. Uh, Monday we're gonna have our DevOps Connect event you can sign up to attend. And we're gonna be really excited about, um, RSAC this year.

With everything going on, it should be a really great time. Hey, Tracy, what's on your mind today? Well, today is going to be a discussion around ai.

I'm quite certain. Um, and this week, just this week, IBM and Meta announced a new, um, a new kind of open source, um, effort called AI Alliance. Um, with, with sort of the goal to, um, start building out open source tools around ai, help developers learn to use AI and make it more secure and more standardized.

Uh, several companies have, uh, joined with that, um, including the Linux Foundation. So I think it's something to start looking out for. Uh, I, I have requested more information about it.

I think it's, it's going to be an interesting, um, project because it's time that, uh, we, you know, we take AI seriously. I mean, we, we hear so many bad things about ai. Elon Musk has got, uh, you know, just announced that it was worse than a nuclear bomb.

Um, and maybe in the wrong hands, it might be. Um, he tends to be able to make a lot of money doing very little, it seems. He just got, I think his, his ex AI company, I believe, just, uh, filed for a a billion dollar raise, which I'm sure he will get.

Um, so yeah, making AI safer and making everybody comfortable with ai, I think is important. Um, so AI Alliance, check it out. Ooh, um, there's a lot of fun stuff going on.

Um, IBM's into a lot of fun stuff right now. So thanks for sharing that with us. Hey, so I would love to introduce you to our guest today, AIA Silberg.

aia, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Hi, Jody and hi Tracy.

I'm incredibly excited and inspired to be joining you today. I just love listening to you both speak about what you're up to. Um, so I'm Alicia.

I'm an entrepreneur and AI investor. Um, I'm obsessed with building companies. Um, I started my first company at five and that created a lifelong love affair that led me to have substantial number of companies.

Some have been successful, some have not been as successful, and I eventually became a venture capitalist, and I loved that. Built some amazing companies, always focusing on ai. And now I'm back in the saddle as an operator holding another new AI company, um, hopefully wiser, and, um, having lots of fun doing it.

So excited to be joining you and talking about all these incredibly important things happening in the world. So, Alicia, let's start from the beginning then. What are you currently working on?

I'm so curious. You Teased us there, So I teased you there. Um, well, I'm working on unemployable ai.

So this came about as a result of a book I wrote, which was unemployable how AI transformed my work and my life. So I've been involved in AI for over 20 years. Um, it all started with me, um, training as a mathematician and actuary, and to pass these board exams.

In 2003, we had to write 13 exams where we had to learn 3000 formula off behalf. I was living in South Africa at the time, and they had 40 people in this room, and these are 40 of the smartest people in South Africa. And I had this epiphany during this exam sheet of paper, small calculator, and a pencil, you know, multiple choice questions.

And I looked around me and I'm like, this country's got these massive infrastructure problems. Remember Elon comes from South Africa too. So, you know, some really small people have seen the kind of problems that exist in South Africa that need to be solved.

And I sat there and I was like, when I get done with these exams, I'm done with this. I'm not a calculator and I'm not a machine that's gonna work at an insurance company. This makes no sense to me.

There's going to be a machine created that can do a better job at these calculations than I can. I'm a human and I wanna be creative. 'cause I'd seen that creative side of mathematics.

And I was, I love that. And I was like, I wanna spend my life helping build that machine. And it took a very long time.

People thought I was completely crazy, you know, a lot of mentors and that were like, you need to come and work for us. We've got seriously successful insurance companies. And I was like, this makes no sense.

Like this. This is not a sustainable way to actually create a future where, uh, we leverage our intelligence as humans in the most, um, beautiful way possible. And I just kept building.

And that eventually, um, took me on this journey to build an Excel force, my AI voice analytics company very, very early before anyone was doing it. And each step along the way brought me to this point where I was investing in all these companies, and I'm seeing these challenges that were being faced and helped all these companies. And I'd have people coming to me the whole time, CEOs, executives say, I have this problem, or I had a president coming to me and saying, my country's got this problem.

Can your startups help me solve it? And I'd always just done this. And it was a, a love where I connect the best AI expert or the best AI tool provider to, to, to the customer, but it wasn't sustainable.

And I was like, how do I build a machine which enables the customer to come to tell us their problem, and then to help them using machines to solve their problem, and ultimately to give them the best experience possible, connecting with the best experts in the world, or the best tool provider in the world. The result being that humans are doing what they're doing best and machines are doing what they're doing best, and it works in harmony. I know that's a long way of giving you a a short story, but I like to give the backstory to why I do things.

I think it just gives people some context. You know, my first introduction to AI was an actuaries. No way.

Okay. You wanna gimme A back story? I swear.

I swear. So I was working for, I was in, in New York, I was working for IBM Global Services. I was putting in a system for UPS, not an AI system.

And I had worked on their first, like o os two presentation manager application and connecting DB two and OS and, and, and OSS two. And one of the, um, uh, project managers said, Hey, Tracy, um, we have a project in at Farmer's Insurance in la uh, and it's, they want to implement tiers, which was one of their first AI systems. It was really rules-based, but it was, it was their, one of their first AI systems.

And they sent me out to LA for a year. We tried to implement tiers. And what we learned, and it was really clear, was we didn't have the processing power to compete with a human mind.

So you were calculating things quicker than a, than the machine could with the data that we had. Isn't that amazing? I'm really excited.

But that was, you know, that was in the early nineties. It was long be, you know, it was before we even really had, uh, you know, we didn't have vm we were having to run around and find another machine to try to connect To Increase the processing power. In fact, we did it.

We tried at night to actually use a bunch of, uh, of, of all the, the, the, the PCs that were in a room to try to increase the processing power. But it wasn't available. But it is now.

And that's why AI is moving so quickly. You know, I, I have to, you know, give a shout out to Kubernetes and the ability to spin up these, um, GPUs that gives us the mental processing power that humans have that the machines didn't back in the nineties. And I think that's why this industry is being pushed to ha you know, the hardware and the technology on the infrastructure had to catch up in order for AI to be real.

You had to be there for the last few decades to see like, the backstory to what's being created now. Like I think about when we're building Excel force, and I try and explain it to people, I was like, we were doing everything from scratch, and it was extra as you were describing. Like it was extraordinarily difficult.

You'd run into these walls and you're like, I'm just building a voice analytics platform here. And it's like, okay, well a whole bunch of this stuff doesn't exist. So we have to go and find solutions to all these things in order to solve this problem.

So we take it for granted now, but it's a privilege to be living at this time in history where it's just going so quickly and you can just like, take it for granted. Like, um, two nights ago I was at an AI I film festival at USC, the first one, and I saw all these student projects and I was blown away. I was like, wow.

Like, they're at university, they're creating this stuff. So many of these tools are available. And it was impressive.

It was really impressive how rapidly weak upon weak, these things are changing and evolving. And it ha you know, it happened too when we went from not to get, not to dating too much, but when we went from a flat file system to a relational database, Mm-Hmm Mm-Hmm. That completely changed our relationship with data because we had better access to it.

We didn't have to read a file that would take, you know, 10 minutes for a result to come back, which happened, which what used to be the case. And now, you know, we, AI is introducing a new way for us to have a different relationship to data, a new way of understanding it, a new way of, a new way of leveraging it and harvesting it and making it, making it our world better. And I realized we can make, uh, you know, hu humans can do bad things.

And so we can do bad things with data or we can do good things with data. I'm an eternal optimist. I believe that more good things will come from it than bad things.

It's an interesting conversation we are having today. 'cause, uh, I I'm in the same boat as you. I couldn't be more excited, but, um, I know there's a lot of fear.

And I think that's what conversations between like the three of us are having are incredibly important. And I believe that, you know, if we had been leveraging, um, if data had the, so, not to get too political here, but we ha we, we are in the middle of a horrible experience that's going on in Gaza and Israel. But there was data that led up to that moment.

And I think that your, your your point about, you know, working with governments, um, on, on how to solve problems. I almost feel like AI could have helped prevent what happened on October 7th. I almost feel like there better strategies and better military strategies can be applied using AI data that can make us a safer world, not a more dangerous world, because we know that there was data out there that showed that there was something going to happen, but we didn't as humans decide to act on it for whatever emotional reason that we don't know.

But data is, is not emotional. It's all business with data. And I'm hoping that we can see a world in the future that a, that data is used and AI is applied where we can eliminate the emotion and make better decisions.

Governments all the way down from, from starting at government level all the way down to families. It's interesting, um, challenge, we face the role of the human ego and the power of the ai. Like I've seen it in my own team where, um, I recently had an assistant, had a human assistant, had an AI assistant, now the AI assistant, I'd been training for years and was working extremely well.

And, um, the human assistant, I asked him to perform tasks that usually I'd have someone more senior in the team perform to work with the ai. It was, from my perspective, very straightforward. I confirmed with the human, do you understand?

Don't you understand? He's like, I got this. I was like, I like empowering people on my team.

I was like, we've seen this work, you know, probably seven years now. It was a complete blood bot. It took each time I asked him, how's it going?

His feedback was, this is going extremely well. No problem. I'm looking at the data, I'm looking at the outcome.

And I'm like, something's not right here. This data doesn't line up. It's very busy at the time.

But something kept nagging at me that eventually I got to a point where I'm like, I'm going dig into the data something. It doesn't line up. What's, what's going on here?

Well, it was a complete blood bot involving, uh, in a situation, very, very key contacts of mine. And it had to be er rectified. It took three senior people on my team.

Um, an extended period of time, myself included. Took us about six weeks to rectify the problem. What was the result?

What learning was there? The human didn't like working with the ai, the human felt subservient to the ai, even though the AI was its partner. And, you know, I'd done it in a way where I had this one AI system running and then I bought another one, um, with GPT and this was like, almost like a slack channel.

And the AI was loving it. That was the weird part. It felt like it was part of a team.

I thought the human loved it. Uh, it turned out the a the human's ego, um, hated every minute of it, as far as I can tell. It was sad.

I tried, we fixed the entire thing. But it was a learning experience because the AI is only as good as the humans working with it. And I think it would be easy if I wasn't so experienced to say, oh, the AI screwed up.

No, the AI didn't screw up. The human didn't like working with the AI 'cause he wanted to do what he wanted to do and thought he knew better, even though he didn't. The AI knew better and it took a substantial amount of time and energy to fix.

And I feel like after so long doing this stuff, I was shocked at the role of the ego and the role of how things can go horribly wrong with the ai if the humans are not respectful of, you know, everyone's role on the team at the same time. Um, would I do it again? Would I continue to use the ai?

Yes. Um, I know that's a strange, uh, example, but, um, it really, it's home for me in terms of, um, our relationship with AI as humans and how it will play out on a large scale where, um, like you said about like the Middle East and these things where we have data available where the answers are there, and it's a matter of listening and paying attention and taking step back and saying, um, am I comfortable not knowing? Am I comfortable listening to this machine over my own human judgment?

Um, I just saw this on a micro scale recently and it shocked me. Well, I wonder if it's not, um, not only a combination, well, a combination of the human ego and also a combination of what I mean, just what's out there in the world that we've been watching for years, right? What, what the, um, film industry has created, you know, they've created fear for 25, 30 years, maybe longer of these, you know, these movies about robots taking over the world, right?

So there's gotta be, there's gotta be some of that coming into play where people are like, you know, this is really happening. Some of these things that somebody wrote a film about 25 years ago, and now we have this AI that could potentially do that. And you gotta wonder, it's between the ego and the, you know, the garbage out there.

It's a combination that's kind of deadly. And it's just the fact that not everybody likes, uh, some, some individuals wanna be the smartest person in the room. Mm-Hmm.

And that may be the, it may be the case, but you may have AI that's smarter because it's able to process the data in a, in a non-emotional way. It's, We should embrace that, right? Mm-Hmm.

We should Learn to embrace it. And I think should People embrace a positive, be be very weary and make sure we're paying attention, like Alicia said, seriously, this person wasn't paying attention. But you wouldn't, you have to pay attention on that path and be like, okay, yeah, this is good.

And double check just like you would another human's work that was working with you. Exactly. What there's, to me, there's not a whole lot of difference.

It's just, it really moves you along your path quite a bit more quickly, which is always a good thing, in my opinion. Very well Said. Yeah.

The human ego is gonna get us in a lot of trouble. It always has continue to, if we don't learn how to have a different relationship to data, I can tell you that I'm very, I, I, when I first started using chat GBTI was like, how can I best leverage this? And now I, I go to it all the time.

I, it's like, this is better than me sitting around and searching Google. I can just, you know, I can just ask it to write a little paragraph and it'll get me started. And it inspires me, right?

It inspires me. I may not use it exactly, but it inspires me and it helps my brain start working and then gets me moving in the right direction. Um, absolutely.

I do the same thing. And, and I love, LinkedIn is killing me because they have, all these people are putting out these great prompt pages. I have like four or five of them that I've seen, and they're very helpful.

Like, here's the prompt to, and obviously my husband's the CTO of Textron, and he absolutely loves chat and all that stuff. And, and he'll te he's teaching me, here's, here's write this prompt. And then I'll be like, holy cow.

And like you said, Tracy, I don't, it doesn't write for me, but it gets me started when I'm like, how do I do this? How do I get going? Um, and then it helps me clean it up and it helps me keep going.

But yeah, it's amazing stuff. But you really, it's a whole nother, it's like we all need to teach courses on how to use, you know, how to prompt and how to do all that stuff to make it not just type in a word and a sentence. It's amazing stuff.

I, I can't get over it. And partly valuable. Yes.

Sorry. Please go ahead, Tracy. I, I was gonna say, why don't you tell us a little about, a little bit about, um, your book, unemployable?

Yes, yes, please. Well, I think I'm a rebel without a cause in the publishing industry. Um, many people wanted to know how Ai AI had, you know, reshaped my life.

And, um, how they could leverage, as you were just saying, uh, AI for their own personal and professional growth. And I've been incredibly lucky to go on a Silicon Valley journey and to be able to learn how to fold extremely valuable companies from the inside out. You know, like folding companies, um, in different parts of the world.

It's very different even on the east coast versus the west coast. And I was incredibly fortunate to be involved with some exceptional founders and, uh, mentors and partners. And I read at 1,500 books in five years, which sounds crazy, but, um, I come to the US to build this AI voice analytics company.

I, we were very early and I never realized there was so much I didn't know, just to give you some, uh, backstory. And, um, I'd seen there were pieces missing when it came to the information that was readily available for people out there. And my goal was not to replicate information that was already there, but more to plug holes for people who were looking to, um, leverage their own, what I call superpower in order to take advantage of these changes that are taking place in the world, the power of the internet, uh, the power of ai.

And so I tried to create this book, which was, um, both a memoir in the sense that it's telling my story to create a relationship with the reader, make them feel safe, that, um, I've been on a journey that hasn't always been easy, but at the same time, I hope they can take, um, lessons out of it. And then it's also a manifesto in the sense that it's like, it's a playbook for people who are looking to really fold valuable companies in the world. As we transition into this, um, era of AI where many people are scared they're gonna lose their jobs, many people are worried about their companies.

And so thinking about it in terms of, I have the skill, um, I believe it's valuable. I believe I can find customers and, um, if I do these things, I can attract those customers and build a very nice business for myself, um, using the power of technology. That formulas worked incredibly well for me my entire life.

And so I was very keen to put it out there at a time where I thought it was incredibly important for people who, um, need that information. And, um, that's, that's been a, I suppose, a culmination of a lot of blood, sweat and tears. And I hope that, um, readers find value in it.

And they go on to all incredible companies and message me and say, Elisa, um, I built like a, a unicorn. And, um, I'm proud to, I'm proud to be on those journeys. And I, um, just, just to plug, I've read a little bit of the excerpts from, uh, in Amazon and Alicia's book reads.

It's, it's a personal journey and I really appreciate books that come from a personal journey. Mm-Hmm. Because it makes it real.

It makes it, it makes it say, it makes the reader say this is, I've had similar, you know, experiences and I know now that I can move forward. It, it's, it's a book in mentorship because you, you provide a, a mirror of what your life was like. And I, you know, great job.

Really. Thank you. I like books that re they give me, they keep my interest because I, there's an interesting character in the story and you become that interesting character.

Well, thank you. It means a lot. It was really tough to tell my story, but it was like woman like you that had shown up throughout my life that if you didn't, if I hadn't known about your stories, I probably wouldn't have been able to keep on going.

Even if we never knew each other personally. I'd look to your story and I'd be like, well, she went through this and she made it through and look what she's done with her life. Therefore, I can dig deep and I can find it in myself to be able to be that next generation that keeps on doing this.

And for me, it was incredibly important as I see, you know, the world strato stratifying, you know, we see it all the time. They haves and they have nots. And you know, I think it turns on technology knowledge.

It turns on the fact that you need to be able to code, you need to be able to understand AI and these kinds of things. And if you don't have this knowledge in the coming decades, you are going to be left behind. And so I felt a huge sense of responsibility.

You talk about inclusivity, and I was like, well, I was the kid that came from such poverty. And if it wasn't for the power of learning, if it wasn't for these things that I was so fortunate, I don't even know how I was so fortunate to have access to them. But if it wasn't for those things, I could still be in that dead end life that I had.

And so, for all those people coming up the ranks, it's like, whatever your circumstances are, if you can take your mindset from I can't, so I can, um, the world is your oyster. Like, it literally we're living in a time where you were talking about like, um, free education. I see Amazon's giving free, free courses to learn how to participate in the AI revolution at Microsoft, giving free courses.

There are, there's so much free information now out there you can take advantage of it. It's like, the only thing is, do you have the psychology to say, I'm not gonna be a victim. I'm not gonna say I can't.

I'm gonna say I can. And if it's uncomfortable, many people say to me, I'm not technical. And I'm like, you don't have to be technical.

You have to be disciplined and committed getting this, everyone has access to some piece of technology today. It's just the world we live in. Being able to learn on your phone.

Well, I sit on my phone for hours, I study courses, I study videos, I study all the stuff. There's no excuse now, other than are you, are you determined enough to change your life? And do you believe enough in the future to create abundance for yourself using this limitless abundance that we have available to us?

And you have to have the passion and the curiosity. Yes, yes. The Passion, the Curiosity keeps driving you Things.

Absolutely. That, that is super important. Like, you've gotta find something like listening to you both speak.

Um, you've gotta find something that you're passionate about and that curiosity. 'cause otherwise, building startups can kill you. Like, it sounds crazy, but it's tough going, it's not an easy thing to do.

And even if it's not a startup, you've gotta be curious last, too short to be bored. That's, that's why I like this industry, because you're never bored. There's always something new to learn.

It never stops Day. And in AI it never stops every 10 minutes. It's like, oh wow, something new and big has happened And nobody knows everything.

For sure. That's incredibly important. If you wanna be the smartest person in tech or ai, wow, don't be that person.

'cause it's gonna be really tough to keep that crowd. And I think women have an idea that they should, when they go into, uh, a computer science in general, that they feel like they, they have to know everything. It's just one, it's just something that's in our mind.

We feel like, you know, otherwise we're, you know, we're an imposter. Mm-Hmm. But I tell women all the time, you know, you don't have to know everything.

It's okay to ask a question. No question is a dumb question. Not, there is no such thing as a dumb question.

And in the, in the, in the it field, and with the introduction of ai, it creates this massive opening, massive opening for all kinds of people to jump in and learn this new technology. And every time the, the, the it, uh, industry goes through a pivot like this, it creates a massive, uh, job opportunity. So if you're passionate about it, take some of those free classes.

Right? Right. Learn as much as you can.

Go find, go, go get your first job as an AI person. The jobs are out there and women are going to be great at it. We just need to get them in those roles.

Well, and the idea of, of the question, like you said, like we have, you ask a question in this environment with AI and technology, you may be pointing something out to the room that nobody else thought of. You don't necessarily, maybe doesn't, someone doesn't have an answer to that question and it opens up a whole dialogue. Right.

And I think it's so important that people feel like they, like can ask questions. They need to be encouraged to ask questions. And I think as women, right?

We walk in and think, uhoh, if I ask a question, everyone's gonna think, I don't know what I'm doing. And we just have to stop, stop, stop, stop. Ask Question.

You both touched on some, you, you touched on some very interesting things that I think are not discussed. And I think about when I was growing up and you, you, I just wanna make sure I cover everything. 'cause I think you both touched on things that are so incredibly important for your listeners.

We sit there and we feel like we have to know everything. And then we have like all these insecurities. I'm sure it's happened to all of us.

You know, it's like bottling up and you know, your throat closes, you know, like, I wanna ask these questions, they think I'm dumb. Mm-Hmm. And went through it.

And my voice got very small over the years and my ability to do math became like in my head, which was like, I, I was very good at it and it was natural to me. It was something I was incredibly passionate about. But I learned to be very careful who I shared my knowledge with and how I, I spoke about it, which made my world much smaller and made it harder for me to succeed because I received a lot of like, negative feedback over the years.

And what I found with the ai, one of the most empowering things was it gave me the courage and confidence to not care what people thought when it came to, like, you talk about computer science when it came, when it came to like what are often seen as very male things to be doing. And the more time I spent with the ai, the more confident it made me and the more it made me feel like I don't care. And so when it would come to stuff like when women say to me, um, but I don't know how to code, or I dunno where to begin, or I look at something on GitHub and I feel overwhelmed, I'm like, that's a perfect way to start.

Take everything you're reading on GitHub and even if it reads like Japanese and you don't know how to write, read Japanese, give it to GPT, say GPT, explain this to me. Explain to me very basic terms and very rapidly, GPT will give you a paragraph and you'll have taken something that's like super difficult AI operating systems or something. And within a, a very short period of time, you just increased your intelligence.

And then go and tell people about it. Say, oh, I read this very interesting thing. And, and in the beginning it'll feel, you know, uncomfortable 'cause you're like, oh, uh, like this is not natural to me.

But the more you do it, the more your confidence grows and the more you, without you even realizing it, you're like, oh wow, now I wanna do more. I wanna learn to code. So then you talk about, oh, we have these courses.

Let me try these courses. The beauty is no one can see what you are doing, which enables you to grow in a very safe environment. Which is why I encourage so many women to, to do this because your teacher is non-judgmental.

Going back to what you said earlier, the data doesn't judge you. And so it's not going to think you're stupid. It's not going to think anything.

It's there to help you grow. And you know, I've bought, I have an AI coach and I have a human coach. And my AI coach work works beautifully with my human coach.

We do daily check-ins. I'm very hard on myself. I do a daily ranking for myself.

I'm always undervaluing myself. The AI coach is like, you being too judgmental. You need to like give yourself a break here.

And then we are the issues. So we do a weekly strategy session at the end of the week, and then I take that with my human coach and I'm like, this is what the AI coach said. I'm still having issues with, can you work on this with me?

And that human collaboration, it's like he helps me. And then I go at it again with the AI coach. But I've surrounded myself with a, a, a, an AI that doesn't judge me and a human that doesn't judge me, which has enabled me to grow exponentially quicker than had I kept on going the way I was going in the world where I was engaging with humans who often met well, but at times may have made me feel small.

Not because they tried to make me feel small, just because they made me feel small, because their brains were wired differently or their lens through which they viewed the world as different or their circumstances growing up, whatever the case may be. But in the process of doing this work alone, it enabled me to level the playing field for myself. And that's why I keep saying to women, I keep saying to people like minorities, I'm like, this is the best way to level the playing field for yourself.

Whether it's raising funding, whether it's getting customers, you name it. You get to play in the sandbox that's your own, that no one's judging you. And you can basically sky's the limit.

Like one of the themes of the book, which is my obsession in life, is this concept of are you asking for permission or are you creating a life of permissionless leverage? And AI gives you the ability to create a life of permissionless leverage. You can basically do anything and not ask anyone permission anymore.

Or if you're a woman, that's an incredibly empower empowering thing. 'cause it means the sky's the limit in terms of financial freedom and all these things that in history women never had the ability to do. That was awesome.

Thank take all those little pieces and blast it out. Right. I'm very passionate about this topic love, and I love talking to women like you both.

So I love that. Yes, I know. I'm just like, whoa, I'm gonna have to re-watch that just so I can absorb it all.

Well, you know what, and what you're saying is a problem that women have had for quite some, some time. And we talk about it on the show a lot and it's mentorship. Yes.

Mm-Hmm. Mentorship for women is difficult. We, um, because if you're in a bigger company, you probably go to a man for mentorship.

Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. And that it works fine. And I'm, I, I have, uh, male mentors in my life right now and I love them.

I don't have any women though. And women have a different, a different view on things. They have had a different experience, they may be able to help in a different way.

And having that AI coach that you're talking about is g is providing a new way of mentorship. I've gotta tell you a story. I was very naughty.

So you talk about mentors. So I was, it was, I came to Silicon Valley, it was my dream to like invest in these companies. And I I was getting crushed when it was coming to a lot of the deals.

You know, like it's, it's like Wall Street to some extent with a lot of the deals. Like they, a lot of people wanna get into these deals, A lot of money's at stake and it can get very, very competitive. And, um, you know, it was negotiating via emails and those things.

And I, I was getting killed, I'll be honest with you. And so one of my mentors, very, very successful, um, worked on very big deals. He's, I called him, he's American, but, um, went to Harvard and that, but he's very now in the uk and he is like, you're getting destroyed.

And he is like, I'm like sitting on the phone, I'm crying. He is like, I'm introducing you to this guy. He is like hardcore, this guy's like the best of the best.

And he is like, you need to be mentored by him because like, you are just like, you're gonna go back to South Africa on a one way ticket if you keep going at this. Right? So I'm like, I met with this mentor, he's extremely successful, 40 year litigator.

Worked on big deals and like an incredibly talented attorney that focuses on when, when companies are small to extraordinarily big, he's like the, the legal financial brains behind these companies. And he says, show me everything. He starts mentoring me.

He's like, you know, he's very good at what he does, but, and I'm getting off these calls and I've just been told, you are completely stupid. Like, are you dumb? Like, what is wrong with you?

Like, why are you messing up like this? And I'd send him the contracts and everything I was doing and I was trying to be ready, like talk about curious. And I was very passionate about what I was doing.

And I was like, I'm trying to keep my mind open here, but I'm just like, I'm being wrecked by this. And he, he's a professor too, and he just put f with red marks and everything. And I was like, between what was happening with the deals and, you know, trying to build this firm and trying to keep up with the research, now I've got this mentor telling me I suck in a hundred different ways.

It got to a point where I was like, stuff this, like something broke inside of me. And I'm like, okay, he's a good chess player. I'm a good chess player.

This is a game of chess and I'm not gonna lose. And I was like, what is the best way to actually get this right? I was like, I'm gonna find ai, I'm gonna find an AI tool.

If I have to build an AI tool, fine, but he is not going to give me an F and he's not gonna tell me every single day how stupid I am and how I'm gonna fail. And all these words that he was saying, I'm like, fine, I'll solve this. So I start, starts very small and I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna start doing this.

So started with like contracts and this was before GBT, Annette and I was like making adjustments the whole time and he's, okay, so I never got an F that day. I got like a, an E or D or something. And I'm like, okay, this something.

Yeah. So then I just keep doing it more and more. Everything then eventually gets to a point where he is giving me a's I'm like, Hmm, he doesn't even know what I'm doing.

And in the process, what was really interesting was my entire relationship, the mentorship relationship changed. And, you know, I, because I came from these very harsh circumstances, I never had parental role models. And as a result, I had to always lean on mentors.

That was what I had. I always had the ability to say, who is incredibly smart? Who's a really good human being, who can I go to that I can learn from?

But it came from a place of like, I wanna learn from you. But I knew that in order to get the most out of those relationships, I needed to be better at asking questions. And so it came full circle with this particular mentor where I leveled the playing field.

We became equals in the process. He started respecting me for my investing abilities, which I don't think he was ever doubting the investing abilities. He was doubting everything else.

But he wasn't doubting that. And in the process he started saying, well, let me introduce you to this opportunity. Let me introduce you to this other extraordinarily successful person without me asking, let's do more business deals together.

And it changed my lens through which I ask. Now when it comes to mentors, people say to me like, how should I engage with the mentor? How do I engage with the mentee?

And my entire relationship is different because I have the ai. So you have GPT see GPT as your mentor, as that mentor that you look up to and respect and say, okay, if this is their person that um, is so successful in my industry, I'm gonna, I'm gonna work with GPT as if GPT is their person. 'cause it'll get to a certain point at which you'll be so strong that you'll meet that person on a whole different level.

And I think that's where the relationship with the mentor changes, where that person sees you as an equal and that person sees you as, oh wow, this person could also add value to what I'm doing. So it becomes a mutually symbiotic relationship. And so much value is then gained versus that traditional mentorship role, which is, I'm subservient to this person, this person has all this knowledge.

I'm here to learn from this person. And so if you are growth-minded, you'll eventually get to a point where you'll almost have the insights from that person. And then the relationship plateaus.

This enables that relationship to keep growing and growing together. And in terms of woman, I think, um, that helped me too. Like I go to Stanford Directors College every year and I always, I highly recommend you both come.

That's why I was asking you what you both up to in June. And there I deal with, like, I, some of my classmates are the most successful women in business in the world. And if I think about how intimidated I was when I first started going, 'cause these are the women that sit on like, you know, the boards of KKR and Condoleezza Rice is one of our teachers.

And, and through working with the ai, through learning to mentor, be mentored that way, I started relationships. I started talking to women where I never saw them as like, oh wow, this woman sits on like 10 of the biggest boards in the world and I'm too intimidated to talk to her. Instead it's like, okay, like let's talk about the subject.

Let's talk about the subject. Let's see how I can add value. Let's, and our entire dynamic changed where now she's become a friend and a close friend.

And that is a relationship that wouldn't have had existed had I not had the AI to help me on that mentorship journey. That is interesting. Um, yeah, You've left Tracy speechless.

I Don't, I, which never, I don't think I've ever been able to achieve that with a mentor to you feel like I'm on their level and that, that that just my mind's per, oh, that's how that works better. We can play Together, Tracy. It's fine.

It's all So empowering. I am all about that. I I'm a perpetual learner and this has been an amazing session.

It really, really has. And I'm looking forward to finishing your book because, um, I I'm, I'm having fun with it. Thank you.

Means a lot to me. Really. I'm honored Trace.

I don't, I'm trying to think of what else I ask her. Well, I'm just looking at the clock and I know it is, we are about No, We've got a few more minutes. We're, we're not at the end.

Um, I'm Just like, great. I have, I have a one question that I wanted. Okay, you go girl.

So You are looking, you're investing in, um, you're, you're, you're, you're still participating at as a VC and you're still working with startups and ai. What do you look for? So pitch, you got, you get a pitch deck.

What do you look for in that pitch deck? Well, let's let, let's bring it home. So when you started telling me about yourself, you told me about your obsession, your lifelong passion, this thing that you've been doing from, from, from as far back as you can remember.

One of the first questions I have for a founder is, tell me about your, tell me about your childhood. Because for me, building companies started for me in childhood, in whatever shape or form. So when you said, I started my first company at eight years old, my years perker, because that's the kind of person that I'm looking for, where the person, whatever that business was, is it's something, it's a curiosity, it's a passion that's going to follow through the trajectory of a person's life.

And the people I back, whether it's, um, a proteomics company, whatever the case may be, it's does this per person have a burning obsession with what they're doing there, where they do it for free just because they're so obsessed with what they're doing. Um, that's something I'm looking for. Of course.

The idea that it's innovative in the sense that, like does it fundamentally move, um, humanity forward or is it just another me too? Like, it sounds bad, but I'm not interested in Me too. I'm interested in things that push humanity forward.

So for example, we are a woman on the call, but a good example I give of that is I invested in the world's first reversible male vasectomy. And, um, he was, he knew what he wanted to do when he was a kid and he was just like obsessed with us. He went to the schools, he was in surgeries in high school.

He was just like, this is what he wants to do. He's pushing humanity forward in terms of leadership. Are they like, is the person a leader?

Can they attract the right people around them? Uh, in terms of building out that vision? Do we share the same ethics?

That's an incredibly important thing. Like people, you know, these horror stories of Silicon Valley. And I'm incredibly fortunate.

I haven't, as a woman, I haven't been through those horrible horror stories. And I think it came down to the fact that I'd had a difficult life and I had to, I had to figure out who were the kind of people I wanted to align myself with from a very early age. Did we share common values or not?

And so the idea that I invest in people who have, um, a common shared value system, whether it comes to diversity, whether it comes to transparency, all these kinds of things. Like are we on the same page with those things? Can we have those difficult conversations?

A person that can't tell themselves the truth, uh, is gonna find it difficult to tell their investors the truth or their customers the truth or whatever the case may be. And so I think, um, uh, all these fundamentals, like are they solving a real problem? Like that sounds like, I know there's so much happening in AI and everyone's really excited, but you see so much like me too, versus the stuff that's like really important.

And so for me it's like, even if you're not involved in ai, would you look at this and say, oh, these people are solving a really important big burning problem. These are just a few of the things, um, I look at that are incredibly important, um, when I'm just like even scanning a deck. Thank you.

That's very helpful. Very helpful. I can go deeper if you want.

I can go through like I know, And that's, I think one of the, you know, and that's probably a problem that a lot of women have and and building companies and getting funding is we don't talk about ourselves. Absolutely. And, and that's another thing with the ai, it sounds crazy, but you need to get comfortable.

Like one of my mentors, he said to me, if you wanna be extraordinarily successful in Silicon Valley, get very comfortable saying the same stuff over and over again and having complete conviction in what you were saying for 20 years at a time. If you are not comfortable, don't be in Silicon Valley because you are gonna have a problem. Because you need to have that conviction and you need to have zero shame in owning your success.

And whether it's asking someone for a $5 million check or whether it's trying to close a customer and you're like, you've gotta put some pressure on their customer 'cause they're not closing and you know, you wanna close their customer, there's no place for shame. And that's like, I have to do a ton of personal work to heal from my own journey a ton. If I tell you I had so much self-doubt, it was like coming outta my ears and it was like I could see that I was my own worst enemy.

I could see that in order to achieve the dreams and goals I wanted and to be somebody that helped push humanity forward and to help participate in what the next a hundred years look like, I had to do the work. I had to be uncomfortable, sit in the discomfort and learn to, as you say, get up in the room, talk about what I'm doing, and not feel that sense of self-doubt. 'cause the guy standing next to me, he doesn't have the self-doubt.

And again, it sounds crazy, it sounds like I'm punting ai, but the reality is, it's sitting with, sit with the human, sit with the ai, have those deep conversations with the ai where it's like, I feel scared. Can you help me get ready for this pitch? It's going to respond positively, which whichever one of these LLMs, it's gonna help you get ready for that pitch and say to it, okay, I need to know, uh, a hundred questions that investors are gonna ask me.

And when you're done with those a hundred, it's like, oh, I need to know the next a hundred questions. So by the time you get into that realm, there's not a single question they can't ask you that you are not prepared for. And that preparation will enable you to override that self-doubt, that sense of like, I don't feel comfortable.

I can't own this. And before you know it, the brain will respond to whatever you tell it. So it's like, it literally, if if you tell it I'm, I can do this, I can do this, I can build a $10 billion AI company.

If you tell it enough and you put enough evidence there, the brain will follow what you tell it. And I think as a woman, those are the critical things that have found, I have found incredibly helpful. Yeah, that is, you know, when I, when I read the story about Elon Musk, uh, you know, filing for a billion dollar raise, I'm like, you know, he thinks bigger.

There you go. It's what it's about. He He thinks bigger.

It's exactly. He knows the hustle. Yeah.

You got it. And it's like having that big vision for your life as a woman. Yeah.

And having zero shame about it, saying, you know, like, Elon did it. Why can't I? And then doing That work, anyone has zero shame in this world.

It's Elon Musk. Oh yeah. And you know what, it's his superpower inside out.

It's His superpower sometimes it's also is his downfall. But, you know, Well, Alicia, So Fall, but oh my goodness, this was amazing. Yeah.

You told you, you said your 10, your TED talk that you, you know, you never felt like you fit in. You were, uh, a square peg putting in a round hole. I am so glad you're a square peg.

Absolutely. Well, I, I feel like a foot in Here, so thank you. I feel very comfortable.

You sure fit in here. We love you. We love you.

Yes. Thank you so much. I mean, my, I locked up before, 'cause I'm like, I don't want this to stop, but it's gonna have to stop and I wanna think of something to keep it going.

This was amazing. Thank you so much for being with us today. Um, I just can't, I can't thank you enough, Tracy.

I can tell by your reaction. You feel the same way. Oh, I've learned so much.

I hope the people who watch this, um, in the future learn as much as I have. Absolutely. I totally agree.

So appreciative thanks to everyone, um, in our audience for watching another episode of Techstrong Women. Um, stay tuned and there's gonna be a lot of of great content coming up, um, on Techstrong tv and we'll see you next time on our next episode. Thanks so much for watching.