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With cat-eyeliner and white streaks in her black hair, Cat Lincoln wasn’t a stereotypical banker. And the onetime vice president of brand marketing for a multinational financial services firm became bored in that role. She segued into work as an independent marketing project consultant and copywriter as well as co-writer of the 40 Whatever blog with best friend Stefania Pomponi. The blog aimed to inspire women of that pivotal age to dare to do whatever excites them. But Lincoln and Pomponi weren’t taking their own advice.

As she approached her 40th birthday, Lincoln was having coffee with Heather Thomson, who in 2008 had launched her <a href="https://www.yummielife.com/heather-thomson" target="_blank">Yummie Tummie tank collection</a> to help herself and other new moms hide their pregnancy weight gains. (Thomson starred in The Real Housewives of New York City from 2013 through last fall.)

“If you ever start an agency to connect brands like mine with the best women bloggers, I’ll be your first client,” Thomson told her. That idea propelled Lincoln out the door to call Pomponi: “We have to start our own tech company!” Breathlessly she added, “It’s a ‘40 whatever.’ ”

Pomponi, a freelance editor-writer-blogger, was in turmoil with a pending divorce and the prospect of becoming a single mother. It made some crazy sense to pull herself out of a downward spiral by doing something new and creative with her brilliant friend. With her connections and Lincoln’s marketing experience, why couldn’t they start a social media agency? They could play matchmakers to big brands and a vetted network of popular women bloggers who would be influencers.

If you can’t join ’em, beat ’em might have been their motto as they launched <a href="https://www.clevergirlscollective.com/about/" target="_blank">Clever Girls Collective</a> in 2009 with the novel concept “run it like a girl.” In Silicon Valley, with its blatant gender gap, their strategy represented a counterculture movement.

“All the things that are supposed to be so wrong with women—you talk too much, you’re too emotional, you change your mind all the time—we consider these to be advantages,” Lincoln explains. Clever Girls would work remotely and talk all day long, using the myriad digital tools that allow moms to work from home. The founders would nurture emotional bonds among their young hires and do psychological testing to tease out the unique talents of each employee. And they would feel free to change their minds until they hit on the right business plan. “When men change their minds, it’s called a pivot,” Lincoln says with a smile. “We went through three business plans in our first two years.”

<h2>Selling the Human Part</h2>

Within their first month, the two founders signed contracts with 100 writers with popular online communities. Most were young mothers eager to work from home for $50 to $500, depending on the campaign.

“We tried for 10 minutes to be a tech company,” Pomponi recalls. “Our first hire was a young tech dude who brought in two others just like him—all guys, lots of energy—and they insisted we needed to build a platform to run our agency.” This genius platform, the men promised, would automate the matching of brands with the right bloggers.

“But if brands want to connect with people, why would you let an algorithm do that for you?” argued Kristy Sammis, a friend of the founders. Sammis had designed dazzling events for <a href="https://www.blogher.com/about-this-network" onclick="window.open(this.href, '', 'resizable=no,status=no,location=no,toolbar=no,menubar=no,fullscreen=no,scrollbars=no,dependent=no'); return false;">BlogHer</a>, a pioneering network of blogs written mostly by women. She pointed out that the Clever Girls Collective wasn’t going to make money on selling its platform but on selling the human part of what the business offers—its women bloggers.

Pomponi asked Sammis to consider working with Clever Girls. The effervescent woman had recently given birth to her first child at 35 and moved with her husband to Napa Valley, expecting to devote herself to being a mom. But Sammis admitted she was beginning to feel isolated. Exhilarated by the idea of Clever Girls, she strapped her 7-month-old into the backseat of her Subaru and drove to San Francisco to meet with the two entrepreneurs.

The three women hit it off. All believers in the value of <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/7-qualities-of-people-with-high-emotional-intelligence" title="7 Qualities of People with High Emotional Intelligence | SUCCESS.com">emotional intelligence</a>, they laughingly admit to having compared their astrological signs, which boded well for compatibility. No one would be the boss. They would be a leadership roundtable. Using cellphones, Skype, Google Docs and Dropbox, they could be in more or less constant collaboration while continuing to operate the complex machinery of family life.

They tried to get meetings with venture capitalists, but were dismissed despite having major clients and revenue. “This isn’t a business that will scale; it’s a lifestyle business, a lady business,” one VC told them. When they talked with bank officers about getting a loan, “We were ‘cupcaked,’ ” Lincoln says. “Basically they patted us on the head and said, ‘You should be so proud of starting your own little business.’ ”

The founders realized they were indeed a lifestyle business, and that was good thing. Women have always communicated and influenced one another’s purchases. Social media simply creates a larger amphitheater for those discussions, and it turns out to be far more influential than ads. Their new business model would be “automated where possible, human where it counts.”

<h2>A Focus on Strengths</h2>

“But how did you get through that first year in business?” I asked, incredulous to learn that Pomponi had a baby and Sammis was still nursing. They laughed. “It’s an organic system,” Lincoln says. “You expand, you contract, and you work a little later.”

With no hierarchy or rigid workday hours, it was vital to hire people who could be trusted to pull their loads and had values in sync with the founders’. Once on board, newbies were asked to take the Myers-Briggs and StrengthsFinder assessments to learn their personality types and leadership styles. Who would be more likely to speak up, and who might prefer to give ideas one-on-one? Who’s more likely to love client interaction, and who would be better working on the back end?

The founders bootstrapped their countercultural concept with investments by friends, family and a couple of prominent clients. By their third year, they became a “C” corporation with revenues of $204,000, and by the fifth year, revenues were nearly $3 million. Profitable and privately held, Clever Girls counted Procter &amp; Gamble, Lenovo, Motorola and Kraft among its clients.

Their “winningest” campaign was pro bono, partnering with the local Make-A-Wish chapter to turn San Francisco into Gotham for Miles Scott, then 5 years old. He had been fighting leukemia for years. (It’s now in remission.)

Miles made a wish to be a superhero: Batman. Clever Girls volunteered to design a large-scale social media program to help. Clever Girls helped #BatKid go viral, and at its peak, the Make-A-Wish servers crashed and Wish.org tallied about 1,000 hits per second. On the morning of the event, after multiple news stations ran broadcasts, #BatKid was trending No. 1 in the world. Even President Obama jumped on with a message. Thanks largely to Clever Girls, #BatKid ultimately earned almost 2 billion impressions across all social media channels combined. The campaign garnered Clever Girls multiple prestigious awards, which spread awareness and attracted many new clients.

<h2>Culture of Trust</h2>

Reflecting on Clever Girls’ evolution, I ask what took the greatest personal courage in building the company. Lincoln remembers a pivotal moment in 2013 when the founders were discussing their culture code. They were stymied by how to create a year-end performance review form. How would they rank employees on being trusting, transparent and emotionally open?

Pomponi stopped them. “These are lofty words, but are we, ourselves, walking the walk?”

It was natural for the founders to be open and trusting with one another. They had a history of friendship. “But with our staff, how often are we still operating from our old corporate learned reactions?” Lincoln challenged herself and her partners. “That was a scary proposition.”

Why did they need annual performance reviews anyway? It wasn’t a legal requirement. If they wanted a truly <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/4-ways-to-be-a-more-collaborative-leader" title="4 Ways to Be a More Collaborative Leader | SUCCESS.com">collaborative environment</a>, shouldn’t they encourage their managers to ask their employees how they’re doing day to day? And to tell their leaders if they need more training or when they think they deserve a raise? “Why wait until the end of the year before we tell them what we really think?” Lincoln added.

That was the turning point.

After a call one morning the founders were giddy over agreeing to give a raise and promotion to a young hire who had hit the ball out of the park that month. They went further. Rules for private time off were eliminated. If an employee has to take a kid to the doctor or just needs an hour and a half to get her hair done, no one questions it—as long as the work gets done in time for the client’s deadline. The staff responded to this greater flexibility by being super-responsible.

“We all live for our Google group-share calendar,” Lincoln says. “With our emails and calendars connected, we’re aware of when each member of a team is available. This encourages everyone to check email first thing in the morning and to send instant messages before taking the kids to school.”

The key to all these trust-based policies is to hire only competitive A-players. But they are forewarned not to compete with one another. They vie as teams, competing to produce the best results for the company, which also rewards them with bonuses. It sounded too good to be true.

I had to ask, “Doesn’t anyone get fired?”

“Sure,” Lincoln says. “If they don’t fit with our culture code, they’re terminated. We don’t drag it out.”

She disabuses anyone who thinks the company is a pushover. For instance, if prospective clients say they can’t give Clever Girls the same discount they would for a large company known to be all male-led, Lincoln has no hesitation about insisting on the same terms. As she likes to say, “We’re not lambs. We’re WOLVES!”

<h2>“Kumbaya Circles”</h2>

Today the company works with hundreds of clients; among the big names are Toyota, Capital One, Dove, Yahoo, Chevrolet and Green Giant.

By offering young people a strong sense of belonging, plus recognizing and rewarding them for their unique talents, the founders say they cultivate innovation, creativity and productivity. This result is verified on the global level in the latest study by Catalyst, the leading research organization on women at work. When employees feel a sense of inclusion, they take more risks, make more innovative suggestions and become better team citizens. These findings held true in China, Germany, Mexico and Australia, as well as in the U.S.

As the Clever Girls Collective enters its seventh year as a prospering company, the 30 employees meet once a month to renew tribal bonds, celebrate, critique their progress and collaborate on future goals. They call these their Culture Days. “Kumbaya circles” is how the chief financial officer, Frank Schneider, fondly describes them.

Gathering in a rented Airbnb space for the day, most team members are 20-something white women, although some are Latina and Asian. They hold degrees in communications, advertising, business management and even art history, but they have learned to be facile in using social media tools.

There are other men on the team besides Schneider, including a “new Clever” introduced on this day. He’s Eric Rodriguez, husband of Vice President of Client Services Edita Rodriguez. After seeing how happy she has been in four years with a company “run like a girl,” he wanted some of what she has.

Pomponi’s boyfriend, Adam Juratovac, is also on staff, serving as network manager for a new athlete influencer group. He prefers this environment: “It’s a lot more friendly and open than male-dominated companies where you have to watch your back every time they bring in a new guy who wants to steal your job. Here we all care as much about the people as about performance.” Two more men were brought on before the end of last year.

The highlight of Culture Day is the emotion-releasing sessions in which Lincoln announces weddings, births, anniversaries, birthdays and promotions. Everyone applauds. But it’s when each staffer reads a shout-out to anyone on her team who helped her through a crisis or offered a solution that eyes tear up and hugs happen. These written notes are treasured recognitions.

Lincoln winds up the day with a progress report, including the news that the company hit $1.5 million in the second quarter of 2015. “By August, we are tracking to more than double our gross bookings by the end of this year, $6 million.” Cheers and finger snaps. “That’s a very exciting milestone!”

Eager to enjoy a celebratory dinner with her husband, her co-founders and their partners, who were also planning a trip to Mexico together, Lincoln pauses to reflect on this extended family. “This Culture Day gives me chills because a lot of our employees are young. They’re starting their careers with this kind of inclusive environment where they feel important and part of something big. And they will pay it forward.”

<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/can-women-crack-the-code-of-brogrammers" title="Can Women Crack the Code of Brogrammers? | SUCCESS.com">Never underestimate the staying power of women whose DNA is coded for progress. Read more about how women are changing workplace culture.</a>

&nbsp;

This article appears in the <a href="https://store.successcom.wpenginepowered.com/by-media/magazines/success-magazine-january-2016-sara-blakely.html" target="_blank">January 2016 issue of</a><a href="https://store.successcom.wpenginepowered.com/by-media/magazines/success-magazine-january-2016-sara-blakely.html" target="_blank"> SUCCESS</a><a href="https://store.successcom.wpenginepowered.com/by-media/magazines/success-magazine-january-2016-sara-blakely.html" target="_blank"> Magazine. </a>

The new Silicon Valley counterculture, courtesy of Clever Girls

The new Silicon Valley counterculture, courtesy of Clever Girls | SUCCESS

How to 'Run It Like a Girl'

How to &#8216;Run It Like a Girl&#8217;

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How to 'Run It Like a Girl' | SUCCESS

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Sheehy is a journalist, lecturer and best-selling author whose books include the groundbreaking Passages and her recent memoir, Daring: My Passages.

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Gail Sheehy

<div>
Women are hungry for good news about how to play like the big boys in tech. That was evident at the <a href="https://www.watermarkconferenceforwomen.org/about/watermark/" target="_blank" title="About | WatermarkConferenceforWomen.org">Watermark Conference for Women</a> in Silicon Valley last winter. Five thousand people turned out for the first-ever enclave of female tech aspirants to hear how to crack the code of neo-sexism among brogrammers who act like recycled “Mad Men.”
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Cindy Solomon, organizer of the conference, bemoans the return of overt male sexism. It’s happening with the rise of a new Gen X brotherhood of managers. “They never went through the basic ‘Let’s call stupid, stupid’ gender bias training of the ’80s and ’90s,” she says. Solomon, who is a speaker, trainer and consultant, has been training leaders for more than 20 years. She says those working in technology companies deal with micro-aggression every day, rarely getting the good assignments, being socially ostracized and even penalized for promotion if they take maternity leave or breastfeed. “It’s a slow whittling down of confidence, motivation and soul.”

She foresees little progress even in companies like Intel that promise robust campaigns for diversity. “They’re going about it in the same old way, throwing money at the same human resource people who couldn’t fix it before.” What is really necessary is a whole mind shift, retraining current male leaders to recognize and correct their unconscious bias, and rewarding them not just for hiring but also for retaining women who will add value to products that appeal to at least half of all consumers.

How did the hottest industry of America’s 21st century become so regressive?

“We women who started out in tech in the early ’80s thought nothing could stop us,” remembers Germaine Gaudet, a sales and marketing expert I met at the conference. “I was coding until a manager urged me to switch to sales; I worked in three countries and moved to Silicon Valley in the early ’90s, believing the world was getting better and better for women. But after the dot-com collapse in ’97, things got worse and worse. Women weren’t being hired anymore.” Instead, she says, tech companies began hiring young Asian men who had come to the U.S. on temporary visas sponsored by their employers. Many were willing to accept low salaries, she says, living up to a dozen in one apartment, while working 12- to 18-hour days. “I&nbsp;saw the [venture capitalists], all rich white boys, were more than happy to run sweatshops in Silicon Valley and exclude women,” Gaudet says.

As the ecosystem became more locker-room smutty and socially inbred, it was harder and harder for Gaudet to force herself to go to work. She spent half her energy trying to watch her own back. Her ideas weren’t valued. She stopped advancing until she became a dinosaur by Silicon Valley’s youth-skewed standards. In such a hostile environment, she just wasn’t having fun anymore. She bailed out.

The ubiquity of her personal story is borne out by data. In the mid-1980s, women represented 37 percent of computer science graduates. But when IBM introduced its first personal computer in 1981, it was marketed toward boys. Thus began the rise of the bro-grammer culture, popularized by the movie Revenge of the Nerds. The model was not only brainy geeks, but social misfits who worked all the time, their fear of girls masked by a nasty streak. In the ’90s, many women lost confidence that they could succeed in a field where the early dot-commers were male graduates of Stanford’s historic class of ’94 who founded companies with other men just like themselves. The slice of females studying computer science has shrunk by almost one-half from a high in the mid-1980s to just 18 percent in 2015.

But there is new hope.

Grassroots efforts have started to reverse perceptions that women, blacks and Hispanics are technologically unfit. Women of color now in their 30s and 40s—born too early to find access to STEM careers (in science, technology, engineering or math)—are taking it upon themselves to excite young girls to challenge old-think. These activists aren’t burning their bras or protesting in the streets. They are politically savvy social entrepreneurs who have been priming the pipeline by recruiting girls as young as 7 into coding programs and summer internships, dazzling them with visits to the most glamorous companies, pairing them with mentors, and preparing the millennial generation of women and minorities to become a gusher ready to fill the new tech talent pipeline.

One of the earliest of these activists is Reshma Saujani. Born of parents expelled from Idi Amin’s violent Uganda because of their Indian ancestry, she grew up in Illinois watching <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GHH9HUE/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B00GHH9HUE&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=sm0fe-20&amp;linkId=QW3XLCDTFC6KSKOT">L.A. Law</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000TGURZ8/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B000TGURZ8&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=sm0fe-20&amp;linkId=ZO2D6OUNEMBTNF4I">Ally McBeal</a> and dreaming of going to Yale Law School. It never occurred to her to try to break into the tech field.

After receiving degrees from Harvard and Yale, she achieved her goal with a career in business and law. Then she discovered her mission, founding the nonprofit <a href="https://girlswhocode.com/about-us/" target="_blank" title="About Us | GirlsWhoCode.com">Girls Who Code</a> in 2012. Its summer boot camp for high school girls has tripled its impact in less than three years. With charm-coated drive and valuable political connections including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, for whom she had served as deputy public advocate, Saujani has attracted an all-star lineup of corporate partners that include AT&amp;T, Accenture, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Twitter, Viacom and Verizon.

Laura Weidman Powers, a 32-year-old brainiac in San Francisco, sees an advantage in having been born the daughter of a black mother and Jewish father. That’s because she sees the future. Around the year 2040 the U.S. will cease to be majority white, according to expert predictions. Why, Weidman Powers asks, don’t the masters of the tech universe see the rapidly expanding population of educated women, blacks and Hispanics as the new 21st century workforce? Already, California has a dominant minority population. If companies don’t start training and hiring outside the advantaged white male gene pool, the available talent pool will thin out.

In 2012, Weidman Powers and Tristan Walker co-founded a nonprofit, <a href="https://www.code2040.org/mission/" target="_blank" title="Mission | CODE2040.org">CODE2040</a>, dedicated to attracting and training black and Hispanic college students and selling diversity as a business advantage. I saw the future of tech when Weidman Powers threw a party in San Francisco’s Impact HUB to celebrate her organization’s third year. She showed off her millennial talent—dozens of minority techies who weren’t shy about pitching themselves. “Half the people at this party may never have been in a room with so many cool young people of color,” Powers whispered to me. But that didn’t stop funders and executives from Google, Twitter, Dell and LinkedIn from tripping over each other to chat up the recent graduates of CODE2040’s internships.

It will take a long time to change a workplace culture dominated by brilliant and privileged white men, but never underestimate the staying <a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/7-women-who-rock" target="_blank" title="7 Women Who Rock | SUCCESS.com">power of women</a> whose DNA is coded for progress.

<a href="https://successcom.wpenginepowered.com/article/how-successful-women-make-the-most-of-their-time" target="_self" title="‘How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time’ | SUCCESS.com">Find out how successful women make the most of their time.&nbsp;</a>
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[node:summary] - Never underestimate the staying power of women whose DNA is coded for progress.

Women are hungry for good news about how to play like the big boys in tech. That was evident at the Watermark Conference for Women in Silicon Valley last | SUCCESS

Can Women Crack the Code of Brogrammers?

Can Women Crack the Code of Brogrammers? | SUCCESS

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Gail Sheehy

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How to ‘Run It Like a Girl’

Can Women Crack the Code of Brogrammers?