TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I'm DOING

Once again, thank you for listening to TRUST ME I KNOW WHAT I’m DOING and sharing it with your friends, and for following us on social media. If you’re enjoying it, please take a moment to submit a rating and review, as it’s very much appreciated. So okay - I’ve been thinking a lot about these two questions - how does it feel to break through a barrier and what structures need to be in place in order to actually break through that barrier? People are finding new ways all the time to disrupt existing models and often from a messy mixture of ideas and risk and capital and are born some of the most elegant and exciting innovations that give us profound breakthroughs. But those breakthroughs can’t actually be sustained or even happen in the first place without rooted structures and policies that allow for that messy mixture to even be possible. And in thinking of women entrepreneurs, particularly in tech and science, are the structures and policies in place to help bring more women into positions of economic power and long-term success? This is a question that Shelly Kapoor Collins is asking everyday. Shelly is a venture capitalist working and executing change at the intersection of tech, innovation, and policy, focusing on investing in early-stage companies led and founded by female entrepreneurs. She’s a partner at Sway Ventures and has built her career around meaningful experiences in Silicon Valley with over 10 years of work at Oracle and founding and running her own companies. Her leadership in both the private and public sectors have been superb especially in the political and civic engagement arena , serving as a tech advisor to the Obama 2012 campaign and to numerous efforts led by Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Gavin Newsome. Informed by her work as a founder, investor, and advisor, Shelly launched the Shatter Fund in 2017 to have a more significant impact on the emerging market of female entrepreneurs and to enable female founders to become 100% participants in the innovation economy. She is a huge advocate for STEM education and pipeline development, and started the Shatter Foundation to benefit underserved girls by providing them educational tools, grants, and mentorship. And this past year, Shelly partnered with the US-India Alliance for Women’s Empowerment to organize a Shatter Summit at the US State Department, as a forum for government and private sector leaders to spotlight the critical need to economically empower women and girls in India. We caught up recently to chat about how she is helping more women and girls break through, about her own journey through it all and some of the lessons learned, and thankfully we both were able to meet in person nearby where she grew up in Maryland having returned after a long time in California.