Ximena Hartsock is co-founder and President of Phone2Action, a digital advocacy platform that connects citizens to lawmakers. Prior to founding Phone2Action, Ximena was a member of the executive cabinet of former Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and Washington DC Public Schools Deputy Chief for Teaching and Learning. A native of Chile, she holds a Doctorate in Policy Studies and Administration from The George Washington University.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
Everyday entrepreneurs
When business started difficulties overcame:
“one challenge that I saw later on was the way that investors related to me for being a woman. So, I do see that there is a lot of work that needs to be done about the introduction of investors and female leaders because there is not enough track record that they can relate to. I believe in terms of funding they tend to fund people that look like them. So, when somebody like me walked into a meeting there is a natural internal bias that I don’t think is racism or anything like that at all I just think it’s an internal bias that comes from the lack of track record. That was a challenge but now that our company has completed a growth round that basically allowed us to get to a very different level now, we don’t have pressures that we have with venture capital but we have the opportunity to grow this company exponentially and expand tremendously. I see now the opportunity that I am bringing to other women creating that track record that women need so venture capitalists take women more seriously”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- John Maxwell leadership books
- Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean Book by Kim Scott
- Ninja Future: Secrets to Success in the New World of Innovation Book by Gary Shapiro
- Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Businesses Book by Gary Shapiro
Favourite Quote:
“innovate or die”
Recommended Online Resources:
- Google LLC is an American multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services and products, which include online advertising technologies, search engine, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
- YouTube, LLC is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“believe in your gut and develop guts. Because we know more than we think we do and especially if you had a career before, you have a few years under your belt of experience. Every time we make a decision our instincts get sharper. And so, we need to try to make as many decisions as possible, as fast as possible and hopefully be as right as possible. And when we are not right, we need to try to assess why. A good entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur for the ones that I know including our own experience here tend to make decisions fast and have good instincts”…[Listen for More]
More About Ximena Hartsock:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
Robert Frost “The only way around is through.”
Other Quotes From the Chat with Ximena Hartsock:
- “we saved significant resources by those skills I was able to transfer from my previous jobs to this job. But the most helpful was my instincts were having all of those jobs before I had a lot of experience, a lot of mistakes, that experience that came from a lot of mistakes that obviously I made and so I developed good instincts about people, about decisions, I can make decisions quickly and I think that was the biggest asset that I brought in that I could test and sense trouble in a situation and make a decision about it quickly. My instincts they are pretty strong, they are pretty good and that’s served as well.”
- “Culture is everything. When the culture of a company is bad everything falls apart – the product, the customers, everyone can see it. Culture is the foundation of the company and you can sense it”
- “I do think that there are a lot of myths out there about success. One of those myths is if you work hard and then this will happen to you or get educated and education give you a better path. While for the most part those things help success is very relative and it means something different for everyone”
- “I think it’s knowing what success means for you and then having a little bit of a recipe of how to get there. You have got to know what you are trying to do”
- “innovation is the word that is used a lot but it’s at the core transformational change are the core of the evolution our world and the way humanity lives. Without innovation we will actually disappear. Innovation can stop us from extinction”
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