Global Women in the Start-up World

Conversations in Silicon Valley

Marta Zucker

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781947441699
• eBook ISBN: 9781947441705
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Activité entrepreneuriale

Global Women in the Startup World: Conversations in Silicon Valley is a selection of interview-driven stories told by the Polish female founders who successfully made it to Silicon Valley.

This book is written with the focus on female founders because although women are playing an increasingly important role in the technology and business worlds, they still face unique challenges and hurdles, which can be particularly acute in the fast-paced startup environment. The interviewees came from Poland to Silicon Valley and succeeded. They built their networks, followed their dreams, and mastered the art of running a global company.

Silicon Valley can be intimidating but with this book as a guide one can navigate the most challenging aspects of being a woman in the startup world. The stories in the book also prove that foreign startup founders are welcome in Silicon Valley and can achieve global success. It doesn't matter what country you are from-you can build your startup in any country: some of the interviewees live and work in Poland, while others decided to move abroad.

CHAPTER 1

SelfHackathon

Breaking the Code of Our Consciousness

Patrycja Slawuta—graduate of the Warsaw University. She studied psychology and sociology. Fellow of the most prestigious science institutions in the United States.

She analyzed aspects of genocide and the psychology of intergroup differences. She researched the emotions of shame, guilt, fear, hate, and animosity between various groups. She worked for two years on Wall Street. Now Patrycja lives in New York and San Francisco.

In Poland she cooperates, among others, with Geek Girls Carrots, an organization supporting women in IT; she participated in Waw.Ac—Warsaw accelerator program and is an active participant of many conferences on technology (ex. Magento.pl).

She is the creator of psychological workshops SelfHackathon, during which she hacks our minds. She cooperates with her sister Joanna Slawuta. Their workshops enjoy enormous popularity in the United States, Europe, South America, and Australia.

Patrycja covers not just human fears, but also long distances—she has run over 18 marathons. She runs all over the world. In near future she will be running in Tokyo, Paris, and Vienna.

We have to turn off the hang-ups. We need to understand how we had been programmed by our environment; whom do we let to program us. Sometimes such programming is toxic and does us harm.

We have to learn to reprogram ourselves, to turn off the brain in some moments and stop listening to critical voices in our heads and “just do it!.”

—Patrycja Slawuta

We are meeting on a sunny Monday early in the morning in a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Marina neighborhood. Patrycja just moved from New York to the West Coast. She is still fighting jet lag and for the past two days she’s been waking up at 4 a.m. “At least I do some more work!” she laughs. She enjoys telling me about her last weekend, when she ran across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and back—over 18 miles total.

She talks about things that are important for all of us and which we don’t want to admit even to ourselves.

Patrycja Slawuta—The slayer of our fears!

About My Research

I conducted lots of research in psychology of extermination and the remembrance of Holocaust in Poland. That was my first research. It was inspired by Neighbors, a book by Jan Gross of Yale University. I was interested in the reactions it evolved in Polish people so the subject of my Master’s thesis was collective memory in Poland. In my research I describe what actually happened, then what people remember of it and which part they don’t and how they selectively remember the facts.

In the fourth year of my studies I went on a scholarship to the Basque Country where I studied the issue of terrorism and its consequences, especially in societies, which directly experienced political violence. I was part of the team studying the complicated psychological and ­political ­situation involving the activities of ETA as well as the actions of the ­Spanish government.

New York

Living in the Basque Country I got news from a colleague of mine from the Warsaw University about a scholarship in New York, for which the application deadline unfortunately had passed… I decided to apply anyway.

Eventually the scholarship was awarded to two people—a young academic from Germany and me. As a research team we received a half a million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, one of the most prestigious science foundations in the United States.

The subject of our study was the issue of collective guilt: in particular determining what events lead to the feeling of collective guilt and collective shame. We were looking into issues involving the Guantanamo prison. We analyzed the behavior of people who were reminded that in the past the group to which they belonged had done something bad, committed mass crimes.

After two years of working in academia and writing scientific papers I decided to change my career path and left the university. Although I was passionate about science and research I was more interested in transferring the findings of that research into everyday life.

Wall Street

I chose to change my field. I got a job on Wall Street, where I worked in the years 2009–2010, at the exact time when the world economy was collapsing. I was at ground zero of the crisis. I watched people losing their jobs. I observed the downfall of the giants of the financial world. Those were very important experiences at the intersection of morality, behavioral economy, and anthropology of culture.

The Semantics of Emotions

Still, after two years of working in the financial world I decide to go back to university. I focused on the embodiment phenomenon. This is a notion that assumes that abstract concepts and more complex emotions in particular (such as shame) exist not just in the mind but also in the body. It is the semantics of abstraction, which the brain perceives as a sensory experience. For example, love is associated with warmth, softness, and warm colors. Feeling of guilt, on the other hand, involves the feeling of “weight” and the desire to hide from the view of others. Those physiological correlates of emotion are often culturally universal and reflected in colloquial expressions such as “weighed heavy on his heart,” “carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.” Scientists claim also that the question of embodiment is especially important to all concepts connected with morality. That’s why “good” and “evil” often have colloquial equivalents: white and black, high and low, or even left and right.

This is fascinating research, which helps us understand how out internal architecture of beliefs, opinions, and values looks like. This is especially relevant to the world, which is not renowned for its “introspection,” since there is simply no time for that—the world of start-ups.

Start-ups

I became interested in the world of start-ups. The world of people who do interesting stuff. How it worked out? I began seeing people who achieved a lot in their lives. They would come to me with their problems and it turned out they needed to talk about their fears, feelings of shame, and experiences of failure, which they did not know how to deal with.

In America facing problems of this kind you get a prescription or go to a yoga class. Yoga of course offers great supports, helps you to calm down and relax. But this is not enough.

The First Workshops

This is the origin of my first workshops. During the meetings we “hack” or “breaking into” our brain and mind.

So far we’ve held workshops in five countries on three continents, among others, in Poland, Spain, South America, and on both East and West Coasts of the United States.1 They always sell out, which is encouraging. I cooperate with many companies from all over the world. In ­Silicon Valley they include the companies in Y Combinator. This year we also “hack” in Asia, which will be an interestin...

Table of contents

• cover
• halftitle
• title
• Abstract
• Contents
• Ack
• Intro
• Open
• Word
• 01_Chapter 1
• 02_Chapter 2
• 03_Chapter 3
• 04_Chapter 4
• 05_Chapter 5
• 06_Chapter 6
• 07_Bios
• 08_Index
• 09_Adpage