Hello Sunshine.
Today on the bright Side, author and entrepreneur Brooke Markovicis is here to show us what's missing from tech today and how women are going to transform it. It's Monday, May sixth. I'm Simone Voice.
I'm Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine. All Right, how was the weekend?
It was amazing? Okay, you know how I've talked about my gaggle of GORP girls, the GGG. Yes, yes, So a founding member of the GGG was in town this weekend and she was staying at this really nice airbnb. I picked her up. We went to go get Margarita's and Mexican food for Cinco de Mayo. We had fun. We had a fun little Sunday.
I feel like the GORP girls always have fun together always.
That's the number one rule of gorping. Yeah, how was your weekend?
I had a preparatory weekend because you and I are headed to New York for the podcast upfronts. And I got a massage, a facial, I did a manny petty damn girl. I haven't had like that kind of a prep weekend in a while. It was great. Now I'm ready to go to the East Coast with you.
I see that fresh ballet slipper manny girl.
Yes, you know I've been getting this color for the last ten years.
You're a creature of habit Simona. Did you see that?
Ava Mendez told people that she was so happy she waited to have kids until her forties.
I am so glad that you brought this up, because I really want to talk about it.
Me too, because you know I have anxiety around it, so this already.
No.
I tell you to quell that anxiety, because you have plenty of time. You're only thirty three, and you can have a family.
I like wake up from my sleep every morning and I think about coffee and the fact that I'm running out of time.
Maybe you should chill on the coffee, maybe because maybe you'd feel like you're running out of time less.
Maybe that's the problem.
Yeah.
What was interesting here is that she said she took a lot of heat for starting a family at forty that people were really brutal with her, especially when she got pregnant with her second child at forty two, and they told her that she would be too tired to have kids after forty That's a common thing.
I hear every older parent, like every woman who becomes a mom later on in life, they all say it's fantastic. They all say it's great.
Statistically they live longer.
That's interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah, I became a mom at thirty three, at your age, and I'm so glad that I waited. I can't imagine being a mom in my twenties.
Would you have been ready?
No, See, there's this saying like, oh, you'll never truly be ready, BS. I think you definitely reach a point where you're like, Okay, I'm ready, and you're also you can recognize when you're like, I am totally not ready. I don't feel like I have enough structure in my life, enough stability.
So yeah, that age is different for everybody.
Yeah, definitely. But I think this is so cool that she's normalizing it, like she's doing things on her own time, on her own timeline, and I think that that's I think that's really refreshing, especially in an industry like Hollywood, you know, like we have this obsession with expiration dates for women, and I think we need to call BS on it.
Also, I totally agree with you, and I love that she's talking about it because I heard Hoda say that she thought that she was too old to be a mom, and then she saw Sandra Bullock do it. So when we see and hear other people do things at ages that feel maybe past, like the median age of doing stuff, it feels like, oh I could do it too.
Yeah, totally think about it. You have more money when you're older most of the time, hopefully hopefully, you probably have a partner that you trust.
Hopefully hopefully ciss your fingers.
But speaking of partners, I just I love talking about this family, Avia Mendez, Ryan Gosling. They are totally relationship goals. You know Ryan, can't you say he was your to hear me out? No? Now, No, Ryan is not to hear me out. Ryan is a straightforward crush.
Oh I don't think so. I think he's a hear me out.
Are you serious?
Yeah, he's not for me. This is not the point. Oh we'll get back to this.
Says the girl who's hear me out as Drake. Ye, your metrics are all off.
Good point, good point. I cannot be trusted.
Cannot be trusted anyway. So you know he's doing the rounds for his new movie, The Fall Guy.
Right.
So he came out and talked about how he's actually been turning down roles where the character is like too psychologically distraught or wherever the role is like too dark. And this is a decision that he's come to alongside Ava as he's become a dad, because he just realizes, like he doesn't want to put his family through that distress that often comes with doing those really heavy weighty roles.
And I just thought that was really cool, like again for a father now to be normalizing factoring his family into decisions in such a big way.
I feel complicated about this because, on one hand, I fully agree with you. I think oftentimes we hear mothers talking about how they're going to pause at work or make decisions for their family. It's super refreshing to hear a father talk about it. But at the same time, like a lot of people don't have these options, you know what I mean, Like, it's definitely a privilege that he has to be able to say yes or no to work, and you know, sometimes it's hard to hear that.
I think he's acknowledged the privilege, though he has acknowledged that, like I wouldn't be able to do what I do without my wife, Ava, who has made a lot of sacrifices as a mother and has decided to stay home and be more present with our family.
He's such a good feminist. I remember when he won, was in an oscar a golden globe and he said this is for my wife, and he talked about how she had like a brutal moment when her brother passed, and he's just he's a really family oriented person. Okay, So before we dive into our interview with Brooke, which I'm really excited for because you know that I'm not such a but she makes all of this really digestible, I have to bring something else up that we saw.
There's this trend that reminded me of our conversation with Courtney Quinn. You guys know her as color Me Courtney. It's called dopamine decor. So if you've been scrolling through TikTok or Pinterest lately, you've probably seen it popping up all over your feed. Basically, it's feel good decor. It's bringing back memories of carefree childhood bedrooms. So, like favorite celebrity posters playful signs, Lava lamps a deep sense of joy.
Why are you shaking your head? This is this trend gives me anxiety. I mean, there's no taste involved here. If you're bringing knowledge is about if you're bringing a lava lamp into your homes as an older person, like as an adult. Oh my god, major red flag.
All I wanted was a lava lamp when I was younger, and my parents would not get me one.
The keyword in that phrase was all I wanted when I was younger.
Have you seen hustle and flow?
Of course, lava lamp doesn't belong in a house that's owned by an adult. I am a minimalist decorator. My house is all neutrals. It's very soothing. I cannot imagine being surrounded by all these colors, these loud colors and textures. I wear my colors. Did you have.
Posters on your wall when you were growing up?
Of course? Yeah?
Who do you have?
JTT? Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Jonathan Taylor Thomas. I finally we agree on Finally. I kissed him every night before bed.
Is that how you learn how to make out?
No, it was paper, It would have gotten too socy. I didn't try. But yeah, JTT, I mean Devin Sawah Backstreet boys. I didn't have any teenage hear me outs because they were all.
No, when you're a teenager, you're allowed to crush on anyone.
They were all tiger beats, every single one of them.
No, for sure, when you're a teenager, you don't look at beauty in in like character or differences. You're just like, Oh, that's the guy on the magazine that everyone else thinks is hot. That's who I think is hot.
Well, I just liked pretty boys. I like these feminine pretty boys.
They all did.
They all had that like that, Like.
Jesse McCarn Yeah, Jesse McCarthy was such a pretty boy.
Yeah. So wait, let me just get this straight. You loved pretty boys as a teenager, but not into Ryan Gosling. What's wrong with you?
No, I grew out of pretty boys. Now. I like character in the face.
I like like.
A bigger nose, or bushy eyebrows, or like something different.
Just say you like an age gap, Daniell, Just say I like an age gap. That's the only way you get character in the face is time.
No, you just start to look at people like I like like an energy, I like a confidence. I don't even care about what they look like that much anymore.
Wow, I'm learning so much. What do you think about dopamine decorating?
You know what's funny? This is gonna sound strange because you know I like monochromatic everything. Yeah, I'm sort of for this.
Well, you're you have that library at your house where it's all rainbow colored books. They're all arranged in rainbow.
It makes me really happy. It's very home at it. I kind of love the idea of lava lamps, of candle holders, of tied I. I love tied I anything. I don't wear it a lot, but I really.
Do love it tied I in a home.
It's just so fun makes me happy. Maybe I need to have children and then they can decorate their rooms like that, and then I get both the best of both worlds.
Next up, we're going from brighter decor to a brighter future with tech founder, entrepreneur and author Brooke Marcovicis. Stay with us, We're back, Danielle. We are talking about women in tech today, and I feel like I often have a i don't know, like a physical reaction to that phrase because it's typically followed by all the ways in which women are underrepresented in the tech space. But this is the bright side, So that means we're going to
be focusing on the solutions. We are making a point of talking about solutions today and bringing you a vision of what tech in the world would look like if it were led by women.
If it were led by women, all right.
So.
Brooke Marcovicis is an entrepreneur, startup founder, and the author of the Future Built by Women, Creating a Brighter Tomorrow through Tech and Innovation. Her book is actually inspired by her own journey from nonprofits to having her company Alabi acquired. And what I love about the book, Simone, is that Brooke not only talks about how women are just as capable as men I mean, duh, but that we actually have an advantage in the tech space because we see
fundamentally different problems that need to be solved. So Brooke, welcome to the bright Side. Thank you.
I'm so glad to be here.
Your book even has a tagline with the word bright in it. You were meant to be here. Yeah, of course, the future built by Women. That's such a huge phrase. What does a future built by women look like?
I think it's one where we're using our innate abilities as women with empathy and kind of our intrinsic problem solving abilities to create something that we don't have right now, something that's brighter that we want for our kids, for ourselves. We've leaned in, but I think now it's time to really build instead of just focusing on leading, how can we also get our hands a little dirty and start solving the problems in ways that women can kind of dive in a little bit deeper to Maybe we're going
to bring more empathy to the table. Maybe we are going to bring problems that need solving with women's health that hasn't been addressed in a long time. I think that we want to dive into issues that men are not solving.
Brooke, I want to rewind a little bit and talk about how you discovered your why So you actually had an entirely separate career working in nonprofits. How did that work lead you here?
Yeah?
So, I think that women oftentimes have these career pivots and jumps because we discover new things that we want to achieve, that we want different impact. For me, I was always fixing everybody's tech problems in our nonprofit, so I was always the one everybody would call and say, Brook, can you come to my office? My computer crash and
I don't know what to do. But the thing that kind of flipped the switch for me is I was watching a video about how Microsoft was setting up tech centers and third world countries, and I was like, Wow, there's so much power in giving people the ability to use technology. It can allow them to increase their income, it can get them out of poverty, it can do so many really amazing things, and why are more people
not using tech for good? And with that nonprofit background, I was like, there's a lot of problems that need to be solved.
And so that's really.
Where I decided to kind of take that leap into tech and found that it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be and that there was a lot of potential to do good with it.
How did you take that leap? Because I think one of the barriers in people's minds to getting into tech, if they aren't already in it, is how do I even learn those skills?
I think the first thing I did was kind of reframe it for myself. So I did go back up pretty traditional route, went and got my master's in computer information systems and dove in from there because I felt that I needed that education label to be able to step into tech. But what I would discover as I went through is there was a lot of things that I could learn and hack together as I was going
just by purely focusing on solving a problem. And so I stuck with one programming language that I learned, focused on and taught myself called Rubyon rails. I saw that that was kind of the one that a lot of platforms were using to build fast. And they have a cool thing called gyms, which is pre programmed code that
helps you build faster. So we always look for those little things that we can do to build faster, move faster, get our leg up in our career, and for me, I found that that would help me to build what I wanted to faster.
Did you have moments of feeling discouraged along the way, Yeah.
I definitely struggled a lot, especially in grad school. There were hardly any women there that were learning tech to begin with. I had all male professors except for one, and it was really easy to just want to throw the towel in. My husband's an engineer, and so I'd often be like, can you just help me with this assignment? He's like, no, you need to figure this out yourself. Wow, that's tough love, bro, It's tough love. But if he had just helped me, I never would have learned it.
And so I am really appreciative that he kind of forced me into figuring it out myself. But I always was asking just where are the women? And it's because we didn't see it. We didn't see it as a path when we were younger.
When I was younger, I think I was in fifth grade, my teacher had us do an exercise where we all had to draw a picture of a scientist, a business leader, an engineer, and everybody in the class drew a man. And I think we have this picture in our mind that men are business leaders, men are venture capitalists, men are engineers, And you are really trying to disrupt that by having us picture a world in which women are
the people we imagine in those positions. What do you think makes women such great leaders?
Yeah?
So I am the same way. You know, growing up, I never saw that path to being a builder. Then, so what I hope that we can kind of see as women is that we have just as much ability as men to build and to learn how to code if we want to go that route, but we also have these abilities to take a problem, Like I see different founders right now, like Rushmasu Johnny, who is the
founder of Girls Who Code. She saw a problem with paid leave and she worked to advocate for it and try to solve it in Congress, but that didn't happen yet, and so she took AI and started to build an AI platform to help with getting people paid parental leave
in the New York State area. And so taking these small problems that we see that are facing our communities or facing our society on a daily basis and saying okay, I can use technology to make an impact right now, whereas maybe a male founded company would be like I want to get a burrito to your door faster, which
I worked at Postmates, so I can say that. But we're the ones that you know are at pick up and drop off often, we're the ones that are helping in our commun unities and we see the issues that are being faced and we want to step in and try to solve them. I think that women have this innate ability to keep going. I know that for me
becoming a mom. I always say that it was a superpower for me and helped me step into entrepreneurship because you just get it done as a mom that you just have to figure out a way to get it done.
In a lot of ways, the Future Built by Women is a response to some of those hurdles that you faced launching your own company. Who did you write this book for?
As I dove into really writing this book, I was like, what do I always share with people? And it always came back to these stories. It is hard out there. There aren't very many women that are building. There aren't that many women in tech. Less than twenty seven percent of women enter into STEM fields and so like less than that actually end up and doing that in their career. And so I really wrote it for the woman that
is wanting to make an impact. Maybe she is looking to switch careers right now and she's trying to figure out what's next for her, or she's just jumping in after graduation, but she might be faced with a lot of problems. And so I really hope that as women dive into this book, they're able to see that there is a framework. There have been people that have led before us, that have been building and that it is
possible to build a brighter future. We just really need to collectively kind of lean into each other for support and encouragement as we dive in.
I really love that you focus on women's stories in this book, because, at least for me, tech sometimes feels unapproachable, and hearing how other people have done it feels really inspiring. There's this one case study that you talk about with a computer programmer. Her name's Ada Lovelace. Why did you profile her and can you share a little bit about her story.
Yeah, So in the beginning of the book, I talk about several women that made an impact in tech that we don't often talk about. There's so many that actually led the way. And Aida was the original programmer in many ways. She was a mathematician by trade, and she this was, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago,
but she led the way for all of us. And so Aida is kind of our like Queen Bee when it comes to programming, and she was the first one, but we don't really talk about that women were actually the first one of the first programmers. There's also a key study about the Eniac team, which was a team
of former secretaries in World War Two. That are actually who developed the programming language for one of the first computers that we ever saw that came up in World War two, and their stories were kind of buried because the men took the credit for it. Yet they were the ones that wrote the code for why we probably won World Were two.
I love that you brought up the history of programming because this is something that I nerd out about. Tell me if I get this right. I remember learning that women made up the majority of programmers in the beginning and STEM at that time, and then with the onset of the eighties, certain toys that were marketed as STEM toys were marketed directly to boys instead of girls, and that's where we started to get excluded from STEM.
Yes, so STEM is science, technology, engineering, and math, And yes, you are correct, and honestly, as I researched so much for this book, I could have written a whole book on the history of why women were left out of STEM.
It shifted significantly in the eighties, and the reason that it was prominent even during the World War two era was because women were brought back into work because men were fighting in the war, and we also had paid childcare which was a huge reason why women could go to work, and so, yeah, it definitely shifted significantly back
in the eighties. We went back to more of the focus on the family unit as well, and so society really shifted and left women out, even though there were tons of women that had been working on STEM careers at that point.
We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we're talking about how we envision the future built by women and the incredible female entrepreneurs already paving the way.
We're back, so brook thinking about the impact of those images in our society, in media, in advertising, movies. What needs to change in order for us to really realize a future built by women.
Yeah, that's a great question. We as women right now it could look really bleak. And I think that if we focus too much on trying to fit in to the way that tech is going, it's going to be hard for us. It's really hard to get venture funding. We get less than two percent of funding. I was one of the lucky ones that was able to raise funding, but then it hit a hard time when I couldn't raise funding.
We really need.
To lean into building bootstrapped companies as much as we can leading into working together to build because I've seen a lot of really great female founders shut down their companies because they focused too much on trying to raise funding and didn't have a focus on bootstrapping that company and building that product in another way, because it's just the money is not there for us. The system is not set up for us, so we need to figure
out ways to build around it. And I think that we really can if we lean into building together.
I think of all the tech founded by women that I utilize, I think the not comes to mind. All of my friends say that it revolutionized the way that they plan their weddings. Vote dot org was founded by Deborah Cleaver, which simplifies political engagement and uses technology to do so bumble like change the way women date. I didn't know this, but the founder of Canva, Melanie Perkins, which changed so many people's lives in terms of graphic design.
There's so many of these examples. What tech founded by women do you utilize? What's changed your life?
Well, Melanie's one of my favorite people, and I'm convinced that you could do anything if you have Canva. I can make presentations, I can completely market myself on a regular basis. And I also absolutely love event Bright and always have. I think Julia's genius for bringing that platform to life, but seeing that it stayed around even in this era of the pandemic, but also in all of these different platforms that came out, event Bright always kind
of stuck there. They knew what they were building was solving a major problem. And all of those women have had such successful companies that lasted. They didn't just you know, hit unicorn status and fall apart. They've lasted the test of time and continue to be amazing companies.
Will you quickly share what unicorn status is? I just learned about this.
Yeah, so there's a lot to unicorn status, but ultimately it's where they've hit this like multi billion dollar status, either through venture capital funding or through actual revenue. So like Serena Williams is known for investing in tons of unicorn status companies because she sees that potential. She knows what grit is and so she often invest in those gritty women.
You have something in your book called the entrepreneurial equation. Can you explain that to us?
Yeah, so it really is this passion and purpose plus technology really will equal that impact for you. So this can look different at different times. For me. As I dove in to building my company, my last company out would be I had this really big passion to solve flexible work for women. I did not see a platform out there. There were all kinds of different ones, but they weren't really hitting on the issues that women were facing.
So we were leaving our nine to fives, oftentimes having kids, and we wanted to still stay in the workforce, but we wanted a place that added community plus flexibility to it. And so I wanted to solve for that problem. But I like to break that down in the book to remind us it doesn't have to be a complicated thing. That we could be working on a problem without even
knowing that we're an entrepreneur. And so in the middle part of the book, I literally talk about how to build how to be just dangerous enough with technology, And so I really wanted women to be able to reframe that and see that. So there's a ton of ways that you can use that entrepreneurial equation.
What did you mean by that when you said I want women to learn how to be just dangerous enough with technic That sounds really sexy. Can you elaborate on that? So?
I think that technology is not as complex as people make it out to be, especially in this era of AI. You can literally ask it to code you just about anything that you want. You just need to go to it with the right question and problem that you want to solve. I think that if you know just enough, just enough of how programming works can help you solve a problem if you just note these core concepts.
AI is one of those spaces that you mentioned that you want women to show up in more. I think a lot of us right now are so mystified by it or even fearful of it, but we need to change our attitude around it. Right what would you say is the attitude that we should be adopting around AI.
So I've been using AI for over five years, way before Chad GPT came out in January of twenty twenty three. But one thing that I want to encourage women is that we were not there when a lot of the era of technology took off with social media apps prior to that, which was generally the World Wide Web, and we've been left out. We've been left out in the data, we've been left out and how products have been built.
And I don't want us to be left out in AI, because AI is going to completely change the way that we work our society, and if women's voices are not a part of it, and women's data is not a part of it, we're going to be in trouble in the next ten years. And so I encourage women to make it really simple. Open up chat GVT at least once a day and start asking it questions for things that you're stumped on. Maybe you're trying to write an email or an article, or you are trying to figure
out what place to travel next. Just start using it and asking it questions. And one that's going to allow chat GPT to hear more women's thought processes and things that we're interested in and looking into because it keeps all of that data. But it also allows you to see how fast you can do things with AI and how much faster it can help you to move forward and save you time.
Danielle, you know that experiment that you were talking about when you were in fifth grade and you had to draw what a leader looks like, Well, that is exactly what's happening with AI right now. The images that AI is producing of leaders are predominantly men. Even the prompt of a productive person, let's say, AI will generate a
man and predominantly white men. So if women don't get involved, now we're going to get left behind with this technology as well, and we're not going to be able to implement the change that we need to see here.
There's huge gender bias already. I mean, I think of autocorrect actually a lot, because that's AI, and it doesn't recognize certain words specifically, like names of people in minority groups. Like all of this technology is completely informed by the people creating it, And so I think we're so with you, Brooke, Like it's so important to use chat GPT so that it recognizes women's thought processes.
I see the cover of your book, The Future Built by Women, and the pink It makes me think of Barbie. And when I think of Barbie, I think of the matriarchy that we saw represented in that film, and I honestly have never experienced a matriarchy in real life. We just have never had that in America. And I'm curious when you think about what a future built by women might look like, what are the images that come to mind for you, what do you envision.
I envision that we look at women as the builders where we don't even have to do exercises. We're in the classroom for you, Danielle, that it's just an automatic thing that women can be what we want to be, and that we get the credit for what we're building. I think we need to continue all so to tell these stories. We need to talk about Julia and Melanie and all of these people and name drop the heck out of them so people can see that that is possible and that they can build these things.
You know, there's this meme online that says, surround yourself with women who would speak your name in rooms where you're not, And I think about that all the time. It's so important to speak other women's names. You're doing that so well in your book, Brook, and you know you continue to do it in your work, so thank you so much.
Of course.
Yeah, I think that's a huge thing.
I've been lucky that women have spoke my name in rooms, and I hope that we can continue to do that. And I think a lot of times we can put too much ego into it. As women, we try to like be too masculine in many ways, and I think one of our big traits is that empathy, but also that community building, and when we can lean in and pull each other together and help each other get to where we're going, I think it can be a really
beautiful thing. Women want to support each other, and women want to see a future where we're all included and where we're talked about and where we're lifted up.
Thank you so much, Brooke.
Thank you, it was so great to be here.
Brooke Marcovicis is a tech entrepreneur and author of the Future Built by Women, Creating a brighter Tomorrow through tech and innovation.
That's it for today's show. Thank you to our partners at Airbnb, and tomorrow we're joined by Hollywood Royalty y'all, Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe winning actor Regina King and her Rockstar producing partner and sister Reina King.
Listen and follow the bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Simone Voice. You can find me at simone Voice on Instagram and TikTok.
I'm Danielle Robe on Instagram and TikTok. That's r O B A. Y we'll see you tomorrow. Keep looking on the bright side.