WorkBoard CEO on Corporate Board Diversity

founder of the Enterprise sas Company Workboard. They work with Comcast, Cisco, Microsoft, GE, so many well known companies. She joins us on the phone in Silicon Valley. Dadre, nice to have you here with us. I'm going to jump right in because Bloomberg has done a lot of reporting on women and the VC world, and I just kind of want to start there that just two and a half percent of all venture capital back startups have an all female founding team. Why is it so difficult still in the startup world

for women to find funding? What was your experience? This is my third company where I thought funding and got funding in CC world, And I'll say, you know, with some embarrassment, that it hasn't improved much in a few decades that I've been working on it. I think part of it is, Um, we don't look like what the prototypical founder should look like, right, the archetect that people have in their heads. Now, that's changing, I think now

in very meaningful ways. And there's a lot of organizations driving change, including for example, all rays And what you see today which you just wouldn't have seen five years ago as much less ten years ago, is women partners at really every quality firm has real women partners making real investment decisions, uh and driving those investment decisions in in the VC firm. So I think we well it

takes a bit of time. I think we actually finally turned a corner on getting women partners in the venture firms that actually fuel those startups. Well that that gives me hope. Um. What about corporate boards though, and I know this is something that you've certainly been keeping an eye on. Corporate boards still mostly white? Uh white? Are eight in ten directors at spmpanies at least in are still male. What's going on with corporate boards? Why is

it so slow? Especially when we you know, we know the research when it comes to diversity. Mackenzie's done it, so many others have done it that when you've got a diverse board, when you've got a diverse senior leadership, you do better financially. Yea. I think there's a couple of things that are shifting there and that will accelerate some sense of sort of accelerate post. But a couple

of those. One is, you know, I just added to women independent directors to my board, Margot gr Judds who was a former CEO of Ancestor and Kathy Bengo, who is a former vice chair of Deloitte, both really senior talented women, And as I was doing the search to add them to the board, I used a search firm

that was focused on women executives. And so what they've done, which is something I think hadn't been done in the past, is actually build the database of candidates, build the pool so that when you want to find talent, you're looking at a pool that is enriched by women leaders and women executives, versus the same old database of the same old pool that looks the same old way it's always looked. And that's what people and that's what's going on to

a lot of companies. Right, everybody's going back to the existing pools, the old ones exactly. But I do think that executive search firms are now quite mindful of opening the aperture. The other thing, and probably more interesting, is in my work with senior leaders. Most of them are looking beyond their own sector for expertise, for insights for how other people are changing the game. And most of them are acutely aware of the extreme disruptive opportunities and

for the risks and face their business. And I think that what we'll see is this enormous generation of direct to consumer leaders, many of whom are women who created fantastic companies grown them, have real go to market leadership skills and are very disruptive thinkers. If I were the CEO of a mainstream company looking for diversity of thought, provocative ideas in a way to enrich the conversations I was having at the board, I would look to those

disruptive leaders coming out of d C, DTC. What is for what forgive me? And what is it about d to see that you think really puts them out there ahead of ahead of others. Their business models, the way they think about reaching their customers, the way they think about serving those customers. It's a a lot of it is just blank slate, right, not bogged down by the way we've always done it, and started instead with what would be awesome? Like what would what could we imagine?

And then that's a pool of many many women in those organizations as co founders, as CEOs and clos and CFOs right, women in different roles there. So I think it creates a pipeline of diverse talent that has the kind of disruptive thinking and phenomenal success that you'd want

around you in the boardroom. Because I do wonder too, and you probably have a lot of experiences this are are a great person to talk to about this is that you know, money always talks, and I do wonder if there's at some point somebody's going to be like, wow, look at this company, uh, the diversity that they've got, and look at how well they're doing, and so what's the common denominator? What is it that's getting them to

that point? And I know there's a lot of factors that play that make a successful venture or institution or company, but we but we know the research and I do wonder at some point is it just people are like, this is the smart thing to do financially if you're publicly held or anything. Yeah, I think until its leaders perceive CEO is perceive it as the smart thing to do financially. Until they perceive it as when I bring those different voices on that different experience to my table,

I'm a smarter leader. When they think that, then they'll make different choices, which I think that's actually more than money, which is which makes me feel better, Like I hope that that's what they were doing, to be quite honest with you, right, because it's it's the right thing to

do to represent more voices. What do you do specifically at work board when it comes to your own leadership, like how are you getting them your you know, your management to think about diversity and make sure that it's not just checking the boxes but it's really a productive form of leadership. You know. We our first four people in the company were incredibly diverse. So three women, one man, and of the three women, one was from Central America,

one's a native Hawaiian, I under I'm the other. Uh. We started really as a diverse group of people and what is you know fabulous about that? Is you never have to go backwards and fix it. You never have to go backwards and clean it up or make it

an overt effort. It sort of spawns from there. And so I think we enjoy an incredibly diverse team in the level of experience in the age, which is another enormous one, in ethnic backgrounds, in educational backgrounds, and gender diversity, really broad spectrum, and I think that is something that we think of as to be celebrated, and we're try and put a fair bit of ritual around celebrating and valuing it. And of course when you celebrate it and

value it, you get to build on it. Right, it shifts forward Women in every layer and every level the organ and people with diverse experiences and perspectives likewise, in every layer and every aspect of the ward. Well what's interesting too, is um I mean California, right, I mean it was because of a lot of pressure among the California public that really pushed them to pass a law requiring diversity and public boards. But do we is that what we need? Because I feel like things are moving

so slowly. I talked about this, uh, just in the last hour or so with the CFO of s. D. Lawder and the executive VP of Finance at st. Lawder about how many conversations we've had about improving boards and so on, and yet here we are and people put out uh dates by when they're gonna have more parody, and it's again several years from now. You know, is it? Do we need to have states with laws saying Okay,

it's time to do it, let's do it. Yeah, good question, and I don't I don't know the answer, to be honest, I'm not a fan of regulating it. And I actually find that that has the potential to hollow out the value of the purpose of boards, and so I don't love that. I would say, in um, if we we look at i'll call the leading indicators, kind of we measure the upstream progress rather than the downstream progress, and the downstream progresses. We've got diverse boards everywhere that that

undoubtedly takes time. Like there's not that many board seats. They don't come up empty every year, right, Some people sit in the same board seat for quite a long time, and that there's goodness in that. So it's not that the number of chairs up at any one time is so huge that we should dis measure how full they are, Right, we might instead start to measure and focus on the

indicators of change and diversity of further upstream. So, for example, in California in particular, how many venture company venture funds have diverse partnerships and who do they invest in? And are they investing in founders and co founders that are diverse themselves? Right? Because in California in particular, the number of companies created far exceeds the number of open board seats this year, right there. And so if we start

lay upstream, what's that look like? We might look at how many co founders are women and how that's going. We might look at how many executive leaders, right are not just the co founders, but of the executive teams of those young companies, how diverse are those? And those of what I think give us better headlights on are we going to see meaningful difference in the few board seats available being allocated to the best candidate, including the

candidates with diversity. Well, if there is one piece of advice you would give to leaders out there in terms of thinking about more women, more everything at your company, I mean, what is it? How do you start? What do you do. I think I would go back to the common I think about the drive real change, which is two CEOs. What is the breadth and depth and diversity and disruptivelopment of thinking that leads to a smarter

conversation about how your company serves as customers well. And so, if you happen to be a company that only serves men, then by all means you just keep going with the boards you've got. If, on the other hand, you depend on women talent in your organization to drive value, to behalf of your customers as women, then you're probably not serving either your talented team members nor your customers well enough if you've got a board that doesn't reflect those

buyers and that talent. If you really focus on how do I have the smartest conversations about building the best business I can? And then diversity pools a day right right, And increasingly we're seeing you know, customers, whether it's your business customers or you know customers like me buying merchandise that increasingly, you know, you want to see what the company stands for, what the diversity is, and that's you know, going to be an element that really matters certainly going forward.

Um Ddri, thank you so much, really appreciate it, and hopefully we can check in with you again in the future. Dedri Pucknachiese, chief executive officer co founder of Workboard, on the phone from Silicon Fowl. As we mentioned, she has started up three tech companies, including one that she sold to IBM, so really great to get a gut check with her when it comes to VC and UH, the investment world and the tech world.