299: Building a Positive Workplace Culture as a Woman CEO: Ownership, AI and Leading with Joy with Anusha Iyer

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What does it take to build a workplace culture where people truly own their work and not just show up for it? Anusha Aya, founder and CEO of korsha, joins me today to talk about the unfiltered journey from being a software engineer to founder CTO to CEO, her leadership philosophy that underpins everything she’s built along the way, and how at korsha, she’s focused on machine to machine communications for the operational systems that run our world, from the AI agents that we’re all using to robotic controllers and critical infrastructure. She is all about solving some of the most deep tech, most important and unprotected problems in cybersecurity today. This woman is a powerhouse, but this conversation isn’t really about her technology. It’s about culture, the realities of founding a company as a woman, how to pivot without destroying your routine. Culture and why joy at work isn’t a soft concept, but a strategic one. Anusha gets into the AI thread that’s running through every organization right now, why diverse voices need to be shaping these tools while the models are still being trained, and why AI using it as an assistant rather than a replacement is where the big leadership decisions are being made. We’re going to be covering all sorts in this conversation, what it took for her to move from CTO to CEO, why she believes the E in CEO stands for evangelist, and what that means and what it took for her to become a founder in the first place. If you are curious about what it takes to be a startup entrepreneur, or you want to know what it makes to build a culture built on joy and passion and change, this episode is for you. So let’s dive on in.

Unknown Speaker  1:42  

Welcome to the leading women in tech podcast, the show that celebrates women in technology leadership. I’m your host, Tony Collis, and this podcast is the result of my passion for building better tech by diversifying the leadership of the technology sector. Join me on this journey as I discuss all things leadership, what it takes to be innovative, breaking through the glass ceiling be a great leader, and how to navigate the unique experiences we face as women in tech. So sit back, grab your headphones and get ready to be inspired to become a better leader.

Unknown Speaker  2:19  

Welcome to the show. Anisha, it’s great to have you here. Likewise, Tony, thanks so much for having me start by telling us about you, your journey, how you became CEO at korsha today. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, as as is true with many, it was a bit of a meandering path, if you will. So I am a first generation immigrant in the United States. Grew up in Ohio,

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obviously, very much coming from a South Asian background, pushed to go into STEM fields, and so went into computer science, worked through a number of different amazing opportunities, everything from, you know, working at the Naval Research Lab in the United States to working on the intelligence side, running DARPA programs. Have some fantastic stories of all of the places I’ve actually coded and done software engineering. And then a friend of mine reached out to me to start this company. And so we started it. And in fact, I didn’t start as the CEO. I started as the CTO. So I was the one writing the first lines of code, designing the product, all of that. And over time, we realized that, you know, being such a deep tech product in a in a space like this, that it made sense for me to not just build, but also evangelize. And so jumped into that CEO role a few years ago, and it’s been an awesome kind of learning, growing experience. To me, one of the biggest hurdles is when somebody steps from a technical role into a CEO role, because they’re very different beasts, but so I’m going to come back to that, but I want to rewind a little bit and talk about just starting the startup, because I talk to women every week about their dreams, and so often, one of the dreams for these women is I want to build my own startup. And there’s a but. The but is financial. It’s scary. What if it fails all those things. Did you go through that? How did you move through it? Like what went on when your friend first approached you? Or did you approach that? Was it your idea? Actually, he approached me, and,

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you know, it was his idea that we sort of brought to life together. And yeah, true on all of those fronts, right? Because more often than not, what happens is, you are working a good job, you have a certain income level. A startup is a lot of financial sacrifices, because you have to pour a lot of what you have into the company, right? Which was really.

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Really kind of a sacrifice you make for the potential, for the growth, all of it, and then it is scary. I think at the time my my kids were, I don’t know, maybe 12 and 10, right? And I went from a more traditional, maybe 4050, hour a week job to Hey, this is, this is a lifestyle. But there’s so many just incredible benefits out of it, if you push past the fear, like, not only for myself, but for the people around me, like the the connections I have made, the, you know, even for my kids, to be able to see what it’s like building a company and what it takes. So it’s, it’s been phenomenal, but 100% it’s scary and it’s a huge commitment. You just have to, especially as women, I think sometimes, you know, push past that fear a little bit, and it fails. It’s only failure if you haven’t learned from it. I saw a one a YouTube clip this morning, right? I spend too much time on YouTube. I’m sure I do. But it was something, it was an image of a woman failing at something, and it said, Congratulations for failing. Most people don’t even try Yes. And I just was like, yes, yes, yes, yes.

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And I really think part of having the confidence to do something like a startup is having the resilience to be okay with failure, because if you don’t try, then you’ll never know if you can do it or not. And I also think failure sometimes we have more control over it than I think we think we do in that one of the things I love about running my own business, very different beasts to yours. I’m just a little little coaching business, but one of the things I love about it is it’s within my control. If I’m not making enough money to pay my team, I can go out and make more money. It’s within my control. Equally, as you said, there are incredible benefits to it. The ownership of the Beast is part of that, right? So in your mind, what are the benefits of being an entrepreneur, of being a co founder and now being a CEO? Yeah. I mean, I think first and foremost, it’s the people you surround yourself with, right? So, I mean, first my team, it’s, it’s incredible to be able to see people grow in their roles, right? And to be able to be a part of that, and then obviously, to have an impact, right? So for our customers to be able to go in and and change how they do their business, their jobs bring value to that. And then personally for me, like I have made so many amazing connections, through investors, through network, through, you know, other CEOs, both entrepreneurial and established that I would have never met along the way. I think that’s probably what I am just incredibly grateful for every day, is just you have this, this chance to kind of push past sort of an individual contributor role, and there’s a lot of opportunity that comes with that. Yeah, and I love that so much. I mean pushing past that individual contributor, but even just, I think when you’re an entrepreneur, it’s very different from being a VP in a larger company or even in a startup, right when you aren’t the founder, but you are responsible for delivery of a package of product, but it’s not your baby. You’re not lying awake at night. I’m not saying everybody lying awake at night. I really don’t want to scare the audience off here, but at the same time, there is a different feeling. You said, like you got in to see customers and change how they do their business. And I mean, I always like to see it as when you do your own thing, you have a real opportunity to change the world. Is that? How you feel about it? Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s you won. You’re writing your own destiny, right? But there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that. So, you know, I won’t lie. There are plenty of times where I stay up at night, and sometimes it’s okay. How can we do more? How can we do this smarter? And sometimes it’s like, okay, how am I going to fix this thing? Right? So, but the reality is that there’s, there is so much opportunity to bring innovation, and it’s really in and I’m sure you’re seeing the same thing with your business. It’s really in small businesses that a lot of the innovation is born, right? And that piece, I think, is, is what’s incredible to me is like, how much a small team is able to band together to have an outsized impact. I mean, it’s so fascinating you say that, because I actually do agree with you that I think a lot of innovation happens in small business. I coach everybody, from people like you startup founders all the way to people in big corporate right, starting at like big corporate senior directors and then more senior leaders in smaller businesses. And you know, there’s a there’s a different fit for everybody. I truly believe that there’s no one size fits all. Some people.

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Thrive in big corporate? I personally couldn’t anymore. Yeah, I’ve done my time. Wouldn’t want to some people like you thrive and the startup can like situation, and they wouldn’t Thrive elsewhere. But one thing I do see consistently is big corporate, they’ll buy startups. I’ve worked with enough people going through acquisitions to know that one of the reasons for buying a startup is not just the IP but the fast pace. But within two years, it’s gone every time. I’ve never seen big corporate actually know how to do that fast, rapid innovation. Now, it comes with its challenges. I sort of see a lot of startups where I personally experienced this in the startup myself, where it’s flip flopping. The rapid is an excuse to just flip flop and not make decisions. The decision is different every week. There’s 180s all the time, which is not good either. How do you find that balance? How do you find making rapid decisions but not flip flopping, not do we want 80s every week and tearing your team apart? Because that’s what happened to me. Like if me and my team were exhausted by the flip flopping when I was in a startup, yes, yes, yeah. It’s, uh,

Unknown Speaker  11:05  

yeah. It’s funny. You say that. I mean, I will 100% say that today, korsha, my company, is not doing what we

Unknown Speaker  11:14  

originally set out to do on day one, right? But I think what you have to keep anchoring back to is, what are the problems we’re trying to solve and make sure that it’s actually solving real problems for real customers, right? So today, a large part of what we do, and, you know, granted that I think some of the hard part with initially, with a startup, is you don’t have customers, right? So you’re guessing a little bit right? You you hopefully get past that quickly. But in the very early stages, when you don’t have customers, you’re sort of saying, okay, the market needs this that I’m able to do and provide. But the minute that you’re able to bring customers in, they should really be the guiding light towards what you’re building. And that’s, I think, how you avoid the the flip flopping. Now, pivots over strategic pivots over time are essential, right? Because if we’re not adapting based off of what we’re learning and and being nimble about it, that’s not using the unique advantages that a startup has. But you don’t want to do it every day. You don’t even want to do it every week or every month. You want to be strategic about it and make sure you’re always solving like some some key problem that customers actually care about. I One of the things I’ve seen happen as well. It’s like, you’re right. Strategic pivots need to happen. They are essential. But, I mean, I’m thinking of a particular company I’m working with right now, and what I would say, I’m not working with the CEO, but that one of the challenges they’ve got is they chase every customer. I think every startup goes through this. They go through a phase of accommodate every single customer. And there comes a point, I think before you can move to Series B, definitely. But actually, I would even say Series A, you have to stop chasing every customer. You have to say, this is our core customer focus. We can’t separate everybody, and it’s okay. They can go somewhere else and get good at what you actually do, because otherwise you’re good at nothing. Did you go through that phase? How did you deal with it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100% so I’ll tell you a little bit about korsha to set the stage. So what we do is we actually secure machine to machine communications for kind of operational systems, right? So kind of the operational systems that run our world. So what that means when you say machine, think about all the different types of machines in the world like that could be anything from an AI agent to a cloud workload to, quite frankly, a robotic controller on a manufacturing floor, right? So it’s everything from digital to physical for us. I think the unique challenge that we navigated that really turned into an opportunity was which machines are we going to focus on which segments, right? So it was really only when we started bringing that focus that it became so much clearer. Okay, here are the problems we’re going to solve for these particular ideal customer profiles. And I agree with you, I think like the success of early stage is almost more importantly comes from saying no than saying yes. I completely agree with that. Have to say no. You have to say no. Yeah, the power comes from saying no. And that’s actually a leadership tool that I think more of us should learn just throughout our careers anyway. And I think as a CEO founder, it’s a must learn how to know, learn how to turn down money. Is a big one, right? Yeah, every, every entrepreneur, I think, needs to learn how to turn down money. Tell us. So you mentioned earlier that you’ve you know you’re not doing what you started out doing at cautious. So has it always been machine to machine? Community?

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Communications, and it’s just like, pivoted exactly what you’re targeting, or have you completely changed, like, what you do? Like, tell us, like, the journey. How long does it take to find your current niche? Is it still evolving? Yeah. So when we closed our first seed round, it actually was not around machine to machine communications. It was actually around, how do we improve multi factor authentication, right? So, like, you have a Google Authenticator app, Microsoft app, or something like that, and you’ve got to put in that annoying like six character code or hit a button or something. So our original idea was, how do we make that invisible? How can we tell that it is you Tony that is connecting into your mobile app or application, whatever it is, just completely invisibly. But in doing that, we kind of uncovered this much bigger problem of like, hey, machines actually don’t have a way to do MFA. Oh, wow, right, because there is no human there to put in a code or button or any of that. And actually, if we think about it right, when you go authenticate, when you log in, it kicks off this whole series of communications, interactions, data movement, behind the scenes and all the automation that’s happening in the world, machines probably outnumber us 100 to one. So it was a much bigger market space. And so that’s when we made the pivot, I think about a year or two in. And so we’ve been focused on that, but increasingly zeroing in on, well, actually, you know, the acute problem is around critical infrastructure, is around automation, manufacturing, where you take it even a step further, they don’t even have a notion of cyber security or how to log in, and so that’s the space that we’ve been really focused on for the past past few years. And think the you know, increasingly, as we’re seeing a lot of attacks against like critical infrastructure elements with everything happening in the world, it’s it’s been an important problem to solve, which is, really, you know, kind of what moves me is like, let’s, let’s work on the important, important problems that are getting a lot of love today. Well, I think, you know, as I talked about before, I think sometimes being the benefit of being in the kind of position you’re in is that you get to do something you think really makes difference. And that’s that means different things to different people. I don’t think there’s one size fits all, but, like, I all, but like, I really think, like doing something that fills you up in here is part of can what get you through on those hard days? Let’s talk real about being a founder, CTO now CEO, can you describe the hardest days? And I’m putting you on the spot here. I didn’t want you. I was gonna ask you this, give us a flavor of the hardest days and tell us, like, how does that compare to previous careers, for example? Well, I’d say, fundamentally right. The buck stops with you when you’re running the company right. And to me,

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it’s every day is there’s, there’s probably 10 things that go right, 10 things that go wrong, and as long as that sort of balances out at the end of the day, you know, we, we say this a lot here, where it’s like, okay, if we could get 1% better every day right? That’s constant improvement. And if we end the day better than when we start it, that’s a win. Some of the hardest days really have to do with again, it’s it’s doing right by our customers. Like, if there’s something that goes wrong with a customer delivery, like a data outage, like something getting damaged, like that, you know that’s tough because they’re, these are people that depend and trust you, and they’re taking a chance, particularly on a startup, right? And so that’s where, you know, it makes for a very difficult day. The other is, people, right? We, what’s really drives me is like the team that we’re building, and we we give out a little bit of a story here, I guess as part of our onboarding, we give out, actually, a book that’s called joy at work, right? And the premise around the book is that if we are finding our joy at work and we’re coming together to build something towards a mission that we’re going to be better together, and what we put out is going to be the best it can be, right? And so the premise around the book, actually fascinating story was, there was this CEO, believe of AES energy, which is actually quite a large energy company, and they wanted to kind of transform, so they’re going through this transformation, and realize that, you know, one of the challenges they were having is ownership, and so they needed to push ownership across the organization to every single person, right? Everyone owns what they are doing and has the ability to make decisions around what they’re doing.

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And that this, I say this a lot, their feet are walking in the direction that they want to be walking in, right? You know, when it’s there’s always going to be necessary aspects to any role, regardless of what you’re doing. Some that you know maybe are less joyful, some are more joyful, but we need to make sure that we’re anchoring towards the joy. So some of the hardest days are when I realized that people aren’t finding that joy at work, right? Maybe they choose to move on. Maybe they are having challenging interactions, and that’s when we really try to learn from those experiences, right? And even the customer pieces, as long as we’re learning, we end the day better than we started. Yeah, I love that. I love the fact that you give out a book that’s called Joy white without reading it. I love that I’m gonna have to get a copy of that book. I will try and find the link to that because, yes, I will try and find a link to that book in the show notes. Everybody. So if you want to go check that book out, go check out the show notes. I just that’s beautiful, and it’s a nice segue into one of my other passion points, which is leadership. Now you and I, before we hit record, had a wonderful conversation about your culture, direct work, being part of that. Just tell me a little bit about this, because obviously you shifted from a CTO to CEO, and that’s actually quite an unusual transition. I see a lot of founder, CEOs who double up as a CTO, but it’s unusual for somebody to move from CTO to CEO without going through some fairly fundamental transformation in their leadership. It’s one of the reasons I often step in because I think it’s it’s different to run a whole team versus an engineering team that is a very different hell of it. So how did, how did you come about that like, what made you step up into those shoes? How has your leadership changed? Has it changed? Do you think you were already set up to be CEO? Tell me a little bit about your leadership. How you’ve created the culture. You’ve got all that kind of stuff. I certainly the my leadership has evolved, right? I think owning more than an engineering organization where all of a sudden you’re owning sales and marketing, finance, operations, I think one of the things that probably hasn’t changed is kind of the the way I like to

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like to work with people, regardless of the role that they’re in, right? So one of the things that I think has been really helpful is maintaining that curiosity and a little bit of the vulnerability like I I think one of the places that maybe oddly is my strength, is I do not have any issue with saying I don’t, I don’t understand this. I don’t know. Can you help me understand this? Right? So showing that vulnerability, I think, is was made it possible to move into these roles, right? Because, I’ll be fully honest, like when I jumped into the CEO role, the number of times I’d have to look up financial terms to be able to read a profit and loss sheet, right? Like this is all kind of learning on the job. And you know, what’s been incredible is having the support system to be able to do that. So I have a fantastic set of investors, mentors, people on the board, even people on my team that you know we we really try to foster that culture of like, little bit of patience and learning and teaching, regardless of the roles that we are in, right? So I think that gives the chance for anybody to, you know, perhaps, move in the direction that their feet are walking. And the biggest reason that I think the company decided to go this route and I decided to jump into the role is, I feel like the E in CEO is stands for evangelist more than anything, right?

Unknown Speaker  23:42  

I’m kind of the the chief evangelist, both outwardly and inwardly, for for the company, and so that’s probably the biggest motivator. Yeah, I do think one of the things that CEOs need to be good at doing, and there are a few exceptions, but those people tend to surround themselves by other people who can do this really, really well, and lots of them are not afraid to share. That is the evangelism. Ultimately, you’re the face and the voice of a company, and you have to be a good communicator, a somebody who can be hard. And I think a few too many founders think they’re good at it, and they’re not. And I just kind of, I wish everybody who was doing this would go and get some public speaking training, for example, just you know, because I think if you’re a founder, you have passion for what you’re doing, and so you should be great at evangelism, but it’s not a natural trait for everybody. Have you found that hard? Have you learned how to step up and speak, or did it just come to you naturally? Oh, it’s always hard, right? Like every time you step on a stage, every time you step on a podcast, there’s still a little bit of butterflies, right? So

Unknown Speaker  24:53  

that’s a good thing. I mean, it’s a good thing to feel that, because it shows you care. I mean, the way I tried.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  

Overcome it as preparation as much as possible. So the more you feel prepared, the more you’re going to be able to do it. But I completely agree with you. In fact, you know, I was going to ask you for this after the podcast is like good links to training for communication, because I think it’s, it’s not at just C suite levels like one of the things I’m trying to do within the company is have everybody that joins take communication training, because if we’re able to communicate with each other, think how much better those interactions are better. The outcomes are better. The Productivity is so much of it is, especially for engineers, is we have such good and I say we because I’m still an engineer by heart. But of course,

Unknown Speaker  25:48  

we have such good ideas, but sometimes it’s hard to get it out right. And if there’s some training for everybody around how to communicate, and you know, you find sort of the ways to speak in an organization, I feel like it’s it’s huge for what we can accomplish together. I love that you talk that way. I mean, I’m a huge believer in the communication training the whole way up, and it’s one of the reasons when the executive coach, I will just say, for anybody listening, I have a dear friend who actually trained me in public if you want public speaking, so it’s very different from internal communication work. If you want public speaking, I’ve got a dear friend, Emma Wayner. I will put her link in the show notes. He was a public speaking coach. She taught me public speaking. I did some public speaking, and I was okay, but she made me way better. So there’s that, but I love that you’re like, it’s not just you, it’s not just you evangelizing, is actually the whole team, and it’s something I talk about every single day. Communication is what makes a group work together. Especially, one of my biggest concerns about our move to AI focused companies is, are we removing the human communication? I mean, I’m a big believer in like, if you’re struggling to write an email, ask AI to draft it for you, but then make sure that you read what it’s written, like, yeah, like, it can help with the blank page syndrome, but don’t remove yourself from the equation. And I just worry that, you know, we’re trying to build the first billion dollar companies that are one person, and we’re moving the human element from it, and ultimately, all of the stuff we build as a species is for the humans, or the stuff we the planet that we sit on, whether we exist on, and we shouldn’t remove the humans from that, right? Oh, gosh, I couldn’t, I couldn’t agree more. I feel like, and I, you know, sort of tell,

Unknown Speaker  27:35  

tell our team this, a lot of you know, don’t discount your expertise and what you bring to the game, right? So I feel like that’s, to me, one of the most dangerous pieces of it’s so easy to now put into a GPT. Hey, give me this plan, right? Or give me this like strategy. But where’s you? The value is, is you Right? Like your expertise, your experiences, like what you bring to it, and it’s so obvious now when things are just AI generated without the thoughtfulness. So, you know, like, my big thing is use AI as an assistant, not as a replacement, right? Like there’s so much value that we have to bring as humans, honestly, like it’s, it’s an evolution that that does scare me a little bit, that we’re trying to navigate very intentionally. So like, for us, we are, we’ve taken the stance of being a hybrid company, right? So we actually have people come into the office three days a week. We’re based in the DC area, and there are obviously pros and cons to it, right? So I love the in person collaboration. There’s so much energy to it, but then there’s always this little nickel of, are we sacrificing getting the best talent anywhere? Yeah. I mean, I as a leadership coach, I have to say that I think if you’re a good leader, you can lead a remote team. It is. It’s more work for the leaders, and I think that’s why so many companies are going back to the office, because you have to have good leadership. You cannot lead a team if you’re not a good leader and they’re remote, you just can’t. But when you have a remote first team that’s led, well, they will always outperform an in person team, because you have to have that great leadership to make it work, and you can choose the best talent. That’s my two cents worth.

Unknown Speaker  29:26  

I like that. Yeah. I mean, I have been, like, candidly, thinking a lot about it lately. I think that’s, that’s the one piece that I think disconnects us a little bit, right? And then now you add this whole AI revolution, and it feels like it disconnects us even more from that human to human interaction and communication. I completely agree with you. The way to to handle it is really intentionality, right? So leadership, being intentional about what expectations are, how we’re going to engage.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  

I, you know, routinely, like, we will say that, okay, I used AI to help me generate this, and these are the pieces I added. So forcing people to kind of communicate or express that, I think, brings a level of like, ownership to it. Yeah, hundreds. I mean, ultimately, if you’re using AI to generate something you got away and what it’s done. So you’ve got to see, wait, you’ve got to see if you agree with it, bare minimum. I mean, AI can do great things. I am not against using it, but I think it’s so easy to just be like, generate this thing. But equally, I’ve had clients in just the last week, they’ve worked really hard, backwards and forwards with AI generating a really good strategy, way better than they would have done by themselves in their own words. And their boss says, AI wrote that I don’t care. And I’m like, did you read it?

Unknown Speaker  30:48  

You know, and that, equally, like this, should be a tool that elevates us. Which brings me to, I really want to ask you this final question. I know we’re running out of time, but something you mentioned to me before we hit record is that you have previously held yourself to extremely high standards, which caused a lot of pressure. And I know that you and I agree that women in general, on average, is always generalizations which are dangerous. But on average, women tend to be held to these higher standards. We tend to hold ourselves to these higher standards. And what’s going on here, especially with AI, is this making the situation worse? Are we holding ourselves to even higher standards here than we were before? Is AI making that worse for us? What’s your two cents on that? Yeah, I see here, AI is kind of an opportunity, right? So, yeah, I mean holding ourselves to higher standards, I think, like one high achieving people sort of do that right, like in these roles. But then also, particularly women, I think we talked about this before of you know, take even hiring and resumes, right? So more often than not, and there are numerous studies now that show this, that if a job rep goes out and it has so many qualifications that are written, which today, how many of those are generated with AI, which is one of the challenges, right, that women will not apply unless they satisfy 100% of them. But in general, men will apply when they’re at that like 70% mark. If that right, and there’s a little bit of I’ll figure it out that I think is, is challenging and it but it’s also an opportunity for us to push past and say, okay, I’m okay applying, because I know AI generated, I can figure this out, and maybe that’s a little bit of the mindset shift that we have. I also think it is extremely important for women, other minorities, other perspectives, like the whole diversity aspect of it, to engage with AI, because this is the time when a lot of these models are getting trained. Our voices need to get in there. And so having that diversity of perspective and what goes in is just, it’s critical. 100%

Unknown Speaker  33:07  

I completely agree with that. I can just, I use AI a lot, and I feed it all the training scripts I’ve ever produced, a lot of the podcast transcripts as well. And the quality of what it comes out with is so different once I’ve actually just moved to a new AI in the last three months, I spent a lot of time in January and February, training it up, and the quality of what it produces now is so different because it has learned, you know, I talk about women in tech all the time. I talk about what holds us up all the time. I talk about the challenges we have. If I asked it the same question through the training lens it had before me, it would have given the male oriented answer, very narrow answer we need. Okay, I’m not training the model. I wish I was, maybe, but I’m training my GPT, and that hugely helps if you aren’t doing that training. By the way, anybody listen to this? If you this? If you aren’t doing that, don’t expect it to know how to help you properly. I’m just gonna say that

Unknown Speaker  34:09  

any final thoughts on any of that before we move on to the quick fire round. There’s so much here I could talk to you about all day long. Is there anything else that you’re like, Oh, I wish I’d said this as well, not, not that I could. I mean, yeah, I mean, I’ll just reimpress, like, reinforce embracing, AI, embracing these technologies, you know, kind of pushing past the uncomfortable. I know for myself, I’m always a little reticent to try out something new. But it is. It’s a transformational time. It feels like, and, you know, it’s, it’s really important to sort of embrace it, to to stay on the train, if that makes sense, 100% 100% Well, let’s move on to the quick fire round, because I know you’ve got some like little nuggets of wisdom on this. Start by telling me the best, sorry, yeah, the worst piece of advice you’ve ever been given. I like to start with that one. It’s.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  

Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So what I’d say in retrospect, on the worst pieces of advice I think has actually shaped my leadership style. My father would always tell me, you know, you’re great if you can learn from your wins, but importantly, from your mistakes, and similarly, from other people’s mistakes, right? So I had a very early a manager that I was just getting into leadership. In fact, I had been an individual contributor, and then the next day, they were like, you know, can you take over this whole division? So it was taking on about like 20 people all of a sudden. And so I go to my VP, and I’m like, you know, I’m a little nervous about this. I’ve never been in management, and the advice was, you don’t have to worry about anything. You’re a mother, right? You know how to take care of children.

Unknown Speaker  35:50  

I would say that was probably the worst piece of advice, because, you know, as a leader, I never view the people that work with me is working for me or as children, right? Like we’re all team members, and I’m just there to maybe guide that shit, but we’re peers effectively, and that’s kind of how you have to engage. It’s one of the tenants of that joy at workbook. In fact, it’s, you know, I’m going to engage with you in the role that we’re playing in the moment. So if, if in that moment, you’re my end of internal customer, that’s how we’ll engage. It’s not about titles. I love that I wish more leaders took on board. I mean, I’m the first to say it’s not democracy at work. Sometimes you got to put your foot down on a decision, but treat these people as peers at the same time and have a level of respect and also negotiation, I think if you can bring your team along by negotiating, that will always serve you better than putting your foot down. Sometimes you have to put your foot down, but at the same time, sometimes treat them as peers and get everybody aligned. It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. I love that. I love that you turn that around so beautifully. On that note, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given, if it’s not that one from your father, yeah. I mean, I think this probably resonates with a lot of women and a lot of different roles, right? Is believe in yourself. It’s just, I think as humans, we are capable of so much more than we actually think we are. So starting with that belief 100%

Unknown Speaker  37:25  

you can go a long way with believing in yourself. This has been a fabulous conversation. Anisha, so where can people connect with you? Find out more about what you and korsha do. Where can we find you? Online? Absolutely. So we’re on LinkedIn. Our website is korsha.com

Unknown Speaker  37:40  

and yeah, come, come read a little bit about what we’re doing and some of the, you know, unique problems and spaces that we’re in. I definitely, I know that some of my listeners, some of my clients, work in cyber security of various flavors, and probably will be quite interested in what you’re doing. I had not appreciated, I still wish you’d go back and solve that problem of being able to do

Unknown Speaker  38:03  

multi factor authentication without me needing to get my phone. I would love that, but I grant you, there’s other issues out there. Any final thoughts you want to leave us with today? Just really appreciate you having me on Tony, and I will say again, like, you know, I know there’s a lot of of women out there in different fields, I would definitely, I have been sort of in STEM and tech from the very beginning, and would definitely, if you’re looking for advice or stories or just need someone to talk to feel free to reach out to me. It’s, it’s a fun journey, if you, if you stay through it. And it’s so important to have diversity of you know, thought in this space 100% and I’m on a mission to help do that. And I was so glad you were here, helping cheer women along the way and building a fabulous team. So thank you for joining us. I just want to leave listeners with this. I if you have been thinking about starting a startup, I get a few startup entrepreneurs on the show, but I really want you to step out of your comfort zone if you’ve been listening to this. I know so many of you are a little bit nervous about doing it. Now. It’s not for all of you. I know many of you listen just purely for the leadership, in which case, go read that book. Joy at work. What a beautiful way to lead. But if this is the slight, gentle kick you needed to realize it’s okay to be uncomfortable and start your own business. Maybe take today’s episode as your nugget to move forward. Go and write yourself a short business plan, one pager. Just go. Get started. And if you’re in the middle of the mess, there is sunshine on the other side, there really is sunshine on the other side. Go out there. Be the evangelist, like Anusha is. Go inside, surround yourself with incredible people. Allow your team to grow, and they will do amazing things for you. And I’m sure you can go out there and change the world. I will see you all next time, it’s episode 300 next week, I cannot believe we’re nearly there.

Unknown Speaker  40:00  

So I hope to see you all next week. Thank you and bye for now. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai