[Music] Everyone loves talking about innovation until it’s time to actually fund it, build it, scale it, and let’s not forget turn it into revenue. Today, we are diving into the real behind-the-scenes journey of how emerging technologies move from R&D experiments to revenue driving products. Joining me today is Farah Ali, VP of technology growth at Electronic Arts, former startup CTO, investor, professor, and a leader who’s worked across some of the biggest names in tech from Microsoft to eBay. Whether it’s driving grassroot innovation, advising deep tech startups, or teaching future founders at the University of Washington, Farah has been hands-on with the full innovation journey. Welcome to the show, Farah. Thank you for having me, Rab. Well, um we’ll dive in with um you know, a bit of a reflection on your personal side of the journey. Let’s start with the non-LinkedIn version of Euphora. When when someone asks you, “What do you do for a living?” Um be it at a barbecue party. How do you answer that? I would say right now I I pretty much feel like a full-time mom all the time. I have a two girls. May my older one just finished her first year of high school, nth grade. Um so that was quite a journey. And then I have a younger one who’s just starting middle school. I think when it comes to my professional career, uh, you know, what I what I say is that I run a team at Electronic Arts that really focuses on how do you take future tech, emerging tech, find a way to apply it to how we build interactive entertainment. That’s one part of my charter like I run a research team called seed. The other two parts of my charter are around how do we find the connections with external tech. So building a partnership with big tech, with startups, with academia so that we can collaborate across what’s happening, what’s breaking, building research together. Uh and then you know if we find something that’s really exciting that could make add potential value as an acquisition or as an investment then kind of looking at that. Uh but the biggest part of my remitt um you know the more hands-on part of my remitt is really around the research uh and applying you know um looking at generative AI for example we do things like how do you take uh you know actors recorded speech and generate lip sync and facial animations from that so something that you can really apply to any number of game while I was you know going through your bio so for a you know you’ve done a degree in maths computer science then you traversed into gaming to M&A to startups to teaching how how did that career path happen for you? I think starting out it was more of a process of elimination. Like I I kind of was more sure about what I didn’t like as opposed to being really clear or like super passionate. And then you know somewhere along the way I just really realized I enjoy technology in general a lot. I like learning about it. I like you know doing new things with it. Um you know when I was actually uh starting out in my degree and starting to do like more experiential hands-on projects that’s when you actually get a sense for it. I think the academic piece of it is just academic and it’s very hard to understand how you can apply it. So when I got to actually do applied work, I got really excited about it because oh I can create things from scratch and I can build ideas from scratch. So it’s actually a very creative process. So that’s kind of I think how I got into it and then I think doing a degree in math or CS you know they are very they math teaches you you know abstract thinking right you think about computational thinking abstract thinking you look for patterns and computer science is much more practical. how do you take this idea and create something so practical scalable solutions. So together both of those kind of grounded me into how do I break complex problems into simpler parts and then actually create some practical outcomes. So so I believe that you still geek out on on the math problems probably with your kids now. Yeah. Yeah. That that but now it’s not as exciting. Now it’s more frustrating trying to explain someone how to do something who doesn’t want to listen to you. Oh yeah. That that motherhood can be difficult. I believe uh learned from my own mom. Um all right for us. So um you know if we um uh uh put a more light on the growth mindset you left EA built a startup became a founder and then came back to EA. What pulled you back and what’s one thing that startup for taught to corporate for that she didn’t know before? Yeah I think lots of things right. I think it’s it’s been great to have had like the high growth big company experience and the scrappy startup experience because you know as a founder uh in a startup because I was a co-founder as well as a CTO you really learn how to lead with urgency uh but with clarity right and you don’t have resources so you just have to be very scrappy these are skills that are just critical at enterprise scale too right but the the good thing is that you know you have more resources at your disposal so you can have that clarity and the urgency But you don’t have to be as scrappy. So you you can really approach a big company challenge with this builder’s mindset. You know, take all the good things, you know, prioritize what really matters, you know, the fail fast like how do you try something and then shut it down very quickly if it’s not working? how do you empower kind of smaller teams to move like startups, give them ownership, give them autonomy. Um, and then it also deepened my focus and purpose like how do I make sure that everything that’s happening ties back to real impact because you can’t just experiment and test things in a startup that you everything that you do has to have a meaningful output in a short amount of time. So I think that that piece was the most critical. How do you look at everything to make sure all initiatives tie back to real impact? because at a big enterprise sometimes, you know, there’s lots of initiatives going on that feel like they’re dragging on forever that don’t really seem to have an end goal. So, I think that part really really helped shift my my thinking. Was there like one career mistake that you were actually grateful for in that time? I think like lots of career mistakes. I think one of the big ones, you know, hiring. Uh I think this idea that A players hire A players is super critical. And you know, the minute you hire in your leadership chain a B player, you’re going to start hiring C and D players. And that sort of, you know, the impact of that, the cascading impact of that is way worse. You know, one bad hire can outdo three great hires. And so you really have to think about that. You know, it can be about culture. It can be about how they create a toxic workplace. It can be just about how, you know, they’re unmotivated so they’re dragging everyone down or they’re just someone who don’t believe in your mission. And that can be the killer, right? Like if especially when you’re in a missiondriven startup and you have people who really don’t see eye to eye with your mission, they sort of bring everybody down with their kind of negativity. So I think hiring is a big one and it’s not easy. It’s not easy to find the right person like from the technical skills to like the fit and the behavioral skills. So just getting really great at identifying good talent I think is a super secret thing. I think the second is you know not always checking assumptions or not always clarifying assumptions. So uh you know with that urgency piece just going forward trying to do something uh and then later on realizing that you didn’t have all the information or you just made a lot of assumptions that you should have checked back and said hey I thought you meant this is that actually what you meant um because you may still be driving for outcomes but you know you could drive for the wrong outcome so I think those are like just two basic things yeah no that makes a lot of sense so you know another important facet of your life that you know you’ve been a professor and also a startup adviser so how does teaching entrepreneurship to students change how you show up as a leader at EA. I think the best thing about that is, you know, you’re talking to people and working with people who have a kind of fresh eyes on problems every day, right? So, you know, I’m meeting someone who is kind of not jaded or does is not sort of has that baggage of years of experience to look at a problem in a very specific way. They are looking at it from a new way. And so I think when you have a lot of those interactions, you’re building that mental flexibility and you’re bringing that back to work and you’re bringing that back to how you approach problem solving. So something that you may be looking at to approach a very specific way, then you’re like, “Oh, okay. Maybe let me change my frame and start thinking about this in a different way. Uh I think that’s been like the the one biggest no great. So so far now let’s move to you know um a bit more into the topic from concept to scalable impact. In your experience, what’s the most common myth about how emerging technologies move from R&D to actual revenue at scale? So the first thing is that you know you think that you know you have an idea, you need to get funding and then you can just go and you know get it done. I think that the real thing is that you actually need allies and you need champions. Nothing kills innovation faster than having this lack of allies and lack of champions, right? So you have to find ways to work within a tight budget, but you can do that. You can do tight timelines and tight budget if you have a strong advocacy, if you have leadership pushing for that idea, right? If you have everybody sort of understanding that what you’re trying to do is hard, that it’s not always going to succeed and that they have your back if something doesn’t work. But without that passion, without those passionate people inside the organization backing the idea, driving and defending the innovation, a big budget won’t even get you far, right? So it just means that you may spend multiple years on kind of a dead-end problem. So I think one is that the second is that you know how do you approach buyin like when you’re doing a startup you have to go talk to a lot of investors I’ve talked to a lot of customers all the time right and you know I would talk to and by the way I was the CTO but my biggest job was sales you know that was a big learning for me you know and it wasn’t something I was very comfortable with I eventually realized it wasn’t something I enjoyed a lot but you realize that as the founding members even I would say the first 10 20 people they’re your chief sales people because you’re talking to customers all the time and trying to, you know, sell them your product, but also trying to understand what they want and and so you need to be able to get that buyin across the investors and the customers. Similarly, in a large enterprise, you have to be really good at building relationships about communication and collaboration. So, you can build that buyin across this large swath of people. You have to involve key stakeholders in the beginning, listen to their perspectives, align the project goals with everything that matters to them because this is how you build trust. And if you don’t do that upfront and you can’t show them how the initiative supports their success or helps them achieve their goals or create the shared ownership and momentum, they are going to create blockers for you later on, right? And and so I think that’s those are kind of the some of the key things I would think about. And then I think just execution, right? You know, you can get stuck in analysis paralysis and endless decks of how to do stuff versus sort of like, okay, as long as it’s not a one-way door, it’s a two-way door. You can take a decision. Even if you go down the right path, you can change it. At some point you sort of have to get rid of the discussion and just start execution on the thing because the best way to figure out what you’re doing is right or not is getting something in front of your customers getting feedback and iterating right like software development is in essence a process of iteration and so I think trying to you know making perfect become the enemy of the good can have you have setback you know I was listening to your reddest podcast where you talked about the role of real time and historical data and decision-making at EA when you’re evaluating whether an emerging tech idea is ready to scale. How much of that decision comes from data signals versus instinct and experience? Yeah, I mean I think it’s a definitely a mix. I think when you are starting out, you definitely want to have a lot of data around things like you know why why are you doing this? Who are you building this for? Getting a lot of qualitative data as well, right? like you you can do focus groups and and you can put things in front of your existing alpha or beta customers and get some feedback but real quantitative data right like so it’s like is this moving the needle are people actually going to the thing you know so for example in gaming we do play test and what we do is when when people are playing we actually get their consent to you know when there their cameras on each screen and we can actually get all kinds of biometric information from them and we are basically instrumenting everything that they’re doing so for example if I’m a level designer and I built um you know a building and then it’s meant to you know it’s meant to go through it and you’re meant to go to every level and do certain things but if I see the majority of the players are going around the building and they’re you know just trying to avoid it you know my learning is the data tells me you know just remove that building or you know you were trying to build the game a certain way but that’s not how the customer is experiencing it so go and make that change right so when you’re actually in the process of active building that’s when that quantitative telemetry really really matters because people may say one thing they may say I love the design I love the architecture ure but then that’s how they are using it as true right so just like we say sales is the biggest indicator of whether you have a good product or not right people may say whatever but if they’re not buying it if they’re not willing to spend their money that’s telling you something so I think and then there’s the research piece that you do beforehand there’s a quantitative metrics that while you’re building and then once you’ve launched it when you’re once you’re in live service you need to have a few clear signals that tells you when something is either horribly wrong slightly wrong or you know can be ignored and those could be things like, you know, are your daily active and weekly active users, are they at the level that you think that they need to be? If you seeing a dip beyond a certain amount, for example, is it a is there an incident happening? Is the server down? Or is it just that, you know, maybe in that geography, it’s bedtime for people. So, they’re actually tapering off the game or whatever, right? What how much do they spend uh per person? What is their, you know, customer sat score? So, you’re looking at some things in life that are very important as well. So each phase of the life cycle requires you to look at different types of qualitative and quantitative data to make different kinds of decisions. So far up you know where do most promising ideas actually get stuck you know on the way to market? Is it is it usually the budget as per your experience the timing internal alignment or just plain organizational inertia? Yeah good question. I mean I think some I would say there’s a it depends answer right. It depends a lot on your culture the kind of company you are the kind of budget you have. I think when you’re, you know, when you’re a public company of the reality of shareholder value and showing value every quarter is very very real and so you know being able to balance with that is is very important. I think generally you know good ideas can come from anywhere in the or right so uh the first thing would be like do you have a mechanism for bubbling up good ideas right you may have somebody really low down in the chain who has no agency to share that idea with you. So how are you enabling people to bring those ideas? Right? Sometimes you may have those people but not the right leadership to bubble up that talent. So are there other mechanisms outside of just the leadership that you have that? So we for example have um you know innovation weeks. We have uh we have the science fair at EA that we run once a year where anybody in the company can come. I actually run that out a team uh called what if and you know anybody can pitch their idea and they you know they have a working prototype and they come and talk about it and we record all of the sessions and you know it’s in a searchable index so anybody can go and look at the last x years of great ideas and mine through that so there’s no dirt of good ideas so different companies can do different things you know people used to have these whatever message boxes outside you know their leader office where you could put in a good idea or a good suggestion or comment so I think the first thing is figuring out how do you make sure you get all the ideas from the grassroots level in an organization and and how do you give people that autonomy or or that confidence that they can put that forward. The second is like how do you take an idea that’s good and go from an experiment to like an actual business case right because that’s the the value of the idea. It’s about moving the idea from testing taking it as a potential serious business opportunity which means you have to do some evaluation of the commercial viability. So you know the the way that we think about it from a research perspective is you know you have this initial phase of exploration and you have to have some time box around that because that can go on forever. So figure out an early exploration to see even the practicality of the idea and then when you’re out of that you’re like okay let’s see now if I can find one use case to pilot this right so you kind of try this out you build an early pilot maybe it’s actual working code maybe it’s um you know mockups maybe it’s something else depending on what your product is maybe if you’re in the business of you know um if you’re a bakery and you have an idea for a new whatever kind of cake it’s like okay try to bake two or three iterations have some people try it out give feedback go back to the drawing board, right? And so kind of once you’re you’re done with that exploring and you’re out of that discovery mode, then you need to go and look at, okay, this could be a good idea. We have people who like it, but does that mean that it’s worth pursuing? Can it scale? You know, can you actually make money with it? So you then have to gather evidence around the value ad in terms of scale and commercial viability and what the ROI on the investment could be, right? And then when you look at that and you say, “Okay, yeah, it could, but maybe the the market, the TAM, it’s only going to be the small number.” And so you’re not ever going to be able to scale it out to anything big. And then you decide that, okay, maybe this just is a good idea, but it’s not something that we want to do at enterprise scale. Or you’re able to say, oh yeah, we can we can imagine a large target addressable market, and we think we can start with a smaller, but we can come up with a plan for how to resource it, how to scale it. And so then then you kind of work in that direction but you have to sort of have this you know you explore then you validate with the pilot uh and then you sort of look at the okay what is that path to scale and then what’s the path to sustain right because everything you do eventually becomes tech debt or a thing that you have to maintain and support and so you have to have a plan for doing that because the teams that are then going to go and explore further need to go back to doing that not get stuck in this cycle of you know scaling and and sustaining. So you know back when you started your own startup was there a particular approach that you went by for getting buy in you know across stakeholders. Um I think you know the first thing was when we were starting out uh you know we had an idea and that’s about it you know it was me and partner and so our first thing was like okay how do we you know do we want to go and bootstrap this start this ourselves without taking any funding with our own free time and our money and we decided that we didn’t want to do that that we wanted to take capital. So the first set of people we had to convince were venture capital folks right and so we went about it in a very sort of strategic way of okay what’s our who are the best VC firms that fund our kind of idea right so kind of created our list uh then started looking at okay who do we have in common do we know anyone can we get a warm intro and then we kind of went down the list of like 15 plus VCs right and and so we had our pitch deck to start and then the first time that we did the pitch you know one person would be doing the pitch the other person would be watching the room looking at the feedback, taking notes, jumping in to help elaborate a point or answer questions, and we’d go back, we’d discuss it, we’d tweak the deck, we’d, you know, we’d see what didn’t land well, and we tweak, tweak, tweak. So, by the time you had the sixth or seventh call, you know, we were much better, much sharper. We’re able to tell our story better because it’s really all about storytelling, right? How are you connecting with your audience? Are they getting your story? you know, we could tell like then in the first, you know, one minute of the conversation that the other side gets it and they’re excited or we’re saying, oh, they’re just phoning it in because they get it, but they kind of don’t care about the idea. But I think that going back iterating like never thinking that your pitch is done you know you have to constantly work on it and you have to take that feedback as like valuable gold you know like those sitting in those meetings and g getting that even that how people were reacting to it you know physically was very helpful for us to go change some of the language we were using some of the graphs we were using you know like never use pie charts nobody likes pie charts you know like just things like that that you you know and yeah and so you know we we were able to crystallize our story refine our story and then get our first yes then get our second yes so then we were able to get you know our our first check into you know once we get our lead investor then we could find you know much more easily second and third investors as well you’ve also worked with lots of startups trying to partner with e right so what’s one mistake you see over and over when early stage founders pitch enterprise buyers I think my opinion I think there’s there’s multiple things there uh but I think the biggest one that I would say is you’re you try to pitch your product and you try to say like I’m my product is amazing. We built this thing. It has these 200 features. It uses AI. It uses big data. It uses state-of-the-art tech. And what you have to understand is you’re talking to someone who has a real business problem. They’re not looking for you to sell your product. They’re looking for a solution, right? And so I think having that mindset of like pitch your solution, not the product. You know, don’t try to wow them with like here’s my features, here’s whatever. I’m an amazing tech person, so I build this. Don’t lead with your tech. Right? forgetting to connect stuff to real pain points inside the company or with the investor with your customer is what I think kills the pitch. So you have to really go in with like this deep customer empathy like what are their pain points you know what keeps them up at night what’s a painkiller versus a vitamin right it’s like if you have a headache you are going to take something for it versus like yeah I know I should be having more vitamins I just yeah it’s nice to have a supplement I don’t always remember to have it right I don’t see the urgency of that so understanding that and making sure that you are speaking to them about what’s important to them and not selling your product and selling the solution in any large organization for example you know enterprise, they’re not really looking for cool demos, you know, same with VCs. They’ve seen it all, right? They’ve heard it all. So, they’re looking for strategic alignment. They’re looking for like what’s is it easy to integrate? Is there a clear return on investment? We the builders understand their priorities and their constraints. Do we understand that we may have to go and build some stuff custom for it to work? Like, you know, we may have like a really great pipeline to solve problem X, right? Let’s say that it’s a it’s a tool that takes their code and optimizes it to run at a much lower latency, right? And everything about this tool is awesome and we show it end to end. But if the it doesn’t integrate very easily into their existing systems, into their build systems, into their, you know, source check-in systems and then they have to do a lot of extra work to do that, they have to understand why, you know, what’s the benefit, right? So you come in with, you know, and this is amazing because, you know, we have this very flexible ways to integrate with your existing pipeline. It’s very pipeline agnostic. Here’s how you plug it in, you know. So, you have to go tell that value story. So, yeah, innovation doesn’t just speak for itself. You know, just because you did something cool doesn’t think that everybody will automatically see it. Uh, you have to make sure that you are clearly showing the business results that you can get with it that you’re empathizing with your customer and they see how you align with their strategy. Uh, so that right incentives both sides. Yeah. So you know you sort of did hint upon it previously in our conversation as well but for the leaders at big companies listening to this conversation what’s your playbook for keeping innovation moving you know fast enough so it doesn’t get buried in meetings committees or endless stakeholder reviews I think um sometimes we mistake that you know innovation or working like a startup means that things have to be fast right you shouldn’t mistake agility for being scrappy and startupy right big companies often try to act like a startup how they think a startup should They’ll they will have a pilot team. We’ll do we’ll cut this process and all of that. Whereas maybe the underlying issue is is that you know they have these big teams with like hierarchical structures and so if you kind of go do this other thing but you haven’t empowered your teams. You haven’t empowered people to make decisions on their own to shift decision- making more down to the the team rather than it’s always has to go all the way up to the top. You have to pitch to one person and they’re the bottleneck. you know, you’re still not going to be agile cuz you’re going to have to go back and get a yes for every single thing. And so, how do you set up your teams? How do you create that autonomy? How do you empower teams to shift the decision-making more down to the grassroots level? I think is very important. The true startup agility comes from ownership, right? I feel a deep ownership of the thing that I’m building to the point where something goes wrong, I feel personally responsible for it, you know? So, I feel that pain of my customer and I feel that ownership of that this is my company. I’ve built it. I need to do the best job. And then trust. There has to be this this trust on all sides, right? You want to get this done. You’ve got the right people now. You let them do their work and get out of their way. And leave the door open for mistakes, right? And but trust that they will correct it. And then that bias for action, right? There has to be a strong bias for action everywhere. Not just the people executing, but all up the chain. Right? So if you have leaders who are like, “Okay, it’s a great idea, but show me more data. Show me more data. Give me this. Tell me that. Convince me.” you know, looking for again that perfect plan before any code can be written. That’s just going to kill um your innovation right there, right? And so it’s not just about moving fast, but it’s about learning fast, it’s about failing fast, and it’s about having the culture change that goes with it. So the rituals of a startup, it’s not just theater, right? You’re not just creating this theater within an enterprise, which I see happen, but you’re truly pushing for transformation. And so you are changing all the rules around how you do innovation. Yeah. So you know in your career was there a time or you know a moment when there was a certain idea that was brought to you and where you know you could clearly see through that this has real potential versus this sounds exciting but sort of won’t survive first contact with reality and how did you sort of navigate um through the feedback process of it. It’s a hard lesson but you know not every great idea or not even every good idea will get immediate support or will actually see the light of day. Uh and that’s okay right? I think innovation requires that patience and perseverance. So that’s the one thing that I think I would say you know to someone pitching to me is like you know what you’re going through and having to kind of go through the hoops to actually pitch your idea is part of the process where you actually learn the persistence. You actually take the feedback and you go back to say okay I now can talk about this in a way that aligns better with how the company strategy is. So you have to balance that you know pushing forward with knowing how when to pause when to pilot when to manage expectations differently. You know, again, the biggest reason why I think some of these ideas fail or or don’t get the support is because, you know, you’ve not been able to tie the the R&D thinking with real business impact. So when you’re talking to business leaders and they’re thinking about the business and they can see your focus and clear goals, they don’t see the clear measurable outcomes that you’re going to look at, you’re not really bridging the gap of sharing your idea with how does this solve a real business problem or how does this create real value. It’s just never going to come to pass because the the people you’re pitching to are going to be mostly business leaders, not your tech leaders. They’re not going to be the the product people even, right? And so they’re thinking about the customer. They’re thinking about the bottom line. You’re thinking about the technology. You’re thinking about cool innovation. You have to tie the work that you’re doing to what is our company’s, you know, north star. What is important for us this year and the next year? How is what I’m doing going to really help add significant value to the bottom line in the long term? Because I think that’s the other piece of it, right? you could do something and it could be very short term but like how is this creating value in the long term for us to actually back this with resources and and how is this balancing the customer needs along with the company priorities. So, so those are I think the lens where a lot of the people that you’re pitching to or like even when people are pitching to me that I’m looking at it and so yeah, it kind of sucks to be the idea killer. You know, somebody people come up with some great ideas and I think the the challenge really is people get so tied up with their own idea, they get so hung up on it, they get so married to it, like it becomes all about the idea and it’s like it’s about the customer, it’s about the problem you’re trying to solve, you know? It’s always about that. And so yeah, it’s it’s never uh easy or pretty, but I think that that’s the thing you have to do for the business is you can’t waste your time and resources and doing things that are not going to add value to the bottom line. Yeah. Because, you know, I I think that people get more emotional about things rather than seeing it from a rational point of view. So that could be even, you know, difficult to be navigating being in a leadership role because you don’t want to kill dreams or hopes eventually. But then, you know, it’s it’s at times really hard to get across the idea. para now we’ll be talking you know a bit about women in STEM leadership and the idea of giving back so you’ve held leadership roles and been the only women in rooms in tech more than once a leadership philosophy you’ve built from those experiences I think probably even going back to you know you done a degree in CS and sort of even in those rooms there was very few women in your classrooms in your project and so I think just kind of the persistence that that requires to stick around and when you don’t see role models or you may not get the right kind of support. I think similarly um you know you have to put in a lot of situations or you see a lot of things where you really have to develop your confidence very deeply. You have to be very sure about who you are and what you want. And so I think that’s been something that I’ve been able to do because of being in those places. That’s been very helpful overall in my life, my career. The ability to advocate for yourself to speak up. I think that’s something I think is a huge thing. I I actually really work on that with my with my daughters, you know, just from this stage to helping them, you know, when they’re unhappy about classes going or a grade like don’t call me, I’m not going to come talk to your teacher. You go figure out how you talk to people, how do you solve that problem, right? So being able to speak up for yourself and advocate for yourself in a respectful manner with data is very very important. So I think that’s been something especially when you’re uncomfortable, right? So how do you speak up for yourself when it feels uncomfortable and and do it in a way that you’re not burning any bridges? I think that’s very important. You learn how to be clear and assertive. You do that in a way where you’re still not losing empathy. You’re still holding on to that authenticity, that humanity, but you’re also like, I’m no nonsense. Like, I’m here to work. I’m here to, you know, do a good job. I’m here to be heard and, you know, I’m not just going to kind of go along with things because I have a mind of my own and I have ideas of my own that I think are equally important. And I think that the thing that a lot of people miss out, especially young people, building strong relationships. say life is a game of relationships and you know being able to connect with people on a personal level so that they understand you you know like once you and I have talked and let’s say we’ve had a friendly chat the next time we have a meeting where you disagree with me you’ll it’ll be very hard for you to be mean to me it be very hard for you to raise your voice against me right so it’s really just even about that like normal human psychology getting to know people you know being nice to them like they’ll have a hard time being nasty to you know what I mean so most people anyway right and you know and people everybody wants to come in, have autonomy, have fun. So, like if you’re working with someone and you’re enjoying yourself, that actually enhances the experience for everyone. So, it’s actually a win-win. And then I think finding mentors, like learning early enough that like who are the people in the room who kind of see something in you or want to be your ally and so being able to have that relationship with them, having them, you know, as sounding boards, you know, when you’re in a situation, you’re like, am I crazy? can I go talk to this person who has been in this situation or was in the room and like just checking in and knowing okay no I’m not crazy the way that I’m perceiving this is actually how it is and it shouldn’t be that helps so yeah so I would say like just that confidence and clear and assertive you know communication the ability to speak up the ability to build relationships and have mentors and then finally I think resilience right how do you navigate setbacks how do you navigate uncomfortable situations without losing focus how do you stay focused and not get emotional about things. I think these are all just great life skills, you know, not just work skills. Yeah. So, for for young women in STEM, what’s an underrated advantage they actually have but do not realize? I think kind of a little bit going back to my pre the previous question is, you know, if they’ve they’re in STEM, they’ve already kind of been through probably a lot of setbacks, a lot of situations where people they’ve been the only or people have either directly or through like passive aggressive ways let them feel like they’re not enough. And so somewhere they’ve already started cultivating this, you know, how do you deal with that sort of behavior? How do you why do I, you know, get all of this negative feedback and still go and still like study and still ace my test, right? So something about that they’re already building without realizing, you know, without giving it a name, they’re already building that those behaviors and that mindset. So being aware of it, you know, being conscious of the fact that like you have these tools that you can tune out certain people, you can tune out certain situations and just go and focus on what’s important, what you need to get done and go get that done. I think that’s that’s a very important kind of hidden talent that I think all of us people in STEM have and and that we should kind of double down on. And I think the second is because you were in that area, I think we naturally have a better ability I feel for problem solving and for kind of datainformed thinking. So that’s your advantage in leadership too because you can you know once you have great problem solving skills you could you see problems everywhere that you could solve. Um and you’re not just going by gut feel you you you have this inbuilt mechanism of like okay but what does the data tell us? Is this actually a problem? How big is the problem? So I think that’s an hidden advantage as well. And I think that that ability helps you get even more confident then. Right? So it’s this great virtue cycle of like, oh, and I’m good at this. I do this. I actually have great outcomes. That helps me build my confidence. Um, making decisions based on facts, getting that feedback, which is, you know, getting negative or positive feedback is also helping my confidence. It can be really powerful when leading teams. So I think and that really all of these qualities and lead into very effective leadership, right? If you have all of these things, uh I think the third I would say is if you’ve figured out the ability to be the calm in the storm, right? And every when everybody else is losing their mind or again when you’re in situations where you know it’s maybe combative or difficult, but you’re still able to be calm and composed and get your stuff done. You know, that’s a really really important skill for leadership, right? Because a lot of the times the leader is the person that people look at to sort of just be that guiding star when things are rocky, you know? Um, and so if the person who you’re looking at is panicking and out of control and yelling and crazy and, you know, changes their mind from one day to the next, that means that just puts everybody in this weird emotional like roller coaster, right? So being that person who can like hold the fort, so to speak, is super important. So I think that’s a pretty important skill. Yeah. No, these were some of the great insights that you shared. You’ve also co-ounded Pakistani women in computing. What was the tipping point that made you say, “Okay, this needs to exist. this problem needs to be fixed and I’m going to make it happen. Interesting. I think like 2017 or 2018 um I don’t know kind of what exactly was the the thing that you know poked the bear but you know I I just had always seen in the US a lack of representation of of women you know Pakistani women and then even when I was uh back when I was in Karachi and you know when I was interning there was a lack of women even them I think there’s more in Pakistan in fact now than there are here so and um you know and I went to school with a bunch of these women you know and I knew a lot of these women like all the people at top of my class was always some girl that I knew, right? It was always my friend Sonia or my friend Sana and you know these were the people that you would go to to get help with a question or you’d be like please be in my group project because I know I’ll do well, right? Like so I knew all these people who were way better than me at math and science and they were just the top of their class and they went on to college and were at the top of their class. Um and I’m like where are they? Why are they not here? Why are they not represented? So I just started kind of having that nagging feeling and and so I just thought that maybe I I need to start some initiative where we can start just highlighting these people are there and giving them visibility through a a supportive community. At that time I met Homa Muhammad who was also trying to do something similar. We’d both basically created a Facebook group and we found each other’s Facebook group. We’re like, let’s just come combine. I’m like, yeah, good idea. And then from there, we just started talking about it and so we eventually we were both going to this Grace Hopper women in computing conference that happens every year. It’s like the largest conference for women in computing started by um uh you know the Anita Borg Institute and Dr. Telly Whitney is one of the pioneers. We were both like fangirling over her. Um and so we’re like yeah let’s go go go there and Anita Borg Institute Gracehopper they also have this sisters concept where all these different communities have a sisters community so we’re like let’s register as a sister community there and they have a certain format of how you name the community so Pakistani women in computing was you there’s Nepali women in computing and Irani women in computing and so forth right so we were like let’s create ours and so that’s where kind of it began and then you know when people started hearing about it women they were reaching out it was just crazy the amount of women that were reaching out and like that had ideas and millions of ideas and they’re like, “Hey, I want to go do this in Islamabad. Can I do it? Can I do this in Lor? Oh, I’m in Aabad. Can I do this? Oh, I’m in Norway.” You know, we hear from all these women around the world. It was really really cool. Personally, it was like, “Okay, yeah, see there are a lot of us.” I was right. And so, yeah, so we registered a nonprofit and we decided to kind of, you know, go big and and then, you know, we we started to like just figure out like how do we build a team? And so, we we did all of that kind of learned that along the way. And we also learned that different locations had different challenges. So, you know, I think a lot of like in the US, a lot of the women that I was talking to, they were talking about, you know, they had a career break because they came maybe they had it was hard for them to find a job. They maybe the qualifications weren’t, you know, equivalent or whatever or then they had kids or they had parents to look after and so they had this break and they didn’t know how to go back and so we built some programs around what we call it returnship. So, how do you help someone trying to get back into industry after 7, 10, 15 year break? So in other locations we had other things. So yeah it was you know how do we create a supportive community? How do we share resources with each other? How do we grow together? How do we have a safe space to come talk about things that are difficult for us at work or at home or balancing things and help each other like inspire each other by just showing what exists. These are some of the great initiatives that make you sort of believe in that not every women incorporate will bring down the other women because you know you do see certain cases like that but then there are communities like these like the ones that you’ve created which do give you the assurance into the idea of sisterhood and raising women rather than the other way around. another side of the questions for our where I did see that you’re you’re going to be volunteering this weekend at a career youth fair with your daughter right so you know what is it like preparing for moments whether you know where you’re not just leading at work but also helping shape your own kids see career leadership and giving back to the community I think the first thing is just you know being an initiative taker right I think a lot of people have ideas and a lot of people want to do things and you know we have we all have these what do you call them drawing room conversations right where we sit and We complain about the state of the world and we complain about the politics and this and that and then you know I think I just am someone who really believes in okay if I really am bothered by something and if I can do something about it like let’s do it you know because nobody else is going to and that’s been my experience like I have not had that good fortune of having someone go fix problems for me or you know so I’ve done that so I think um that behavior of taking initiative you know uh is kind of that first step because a lot of people again goes back to innovation thinking to you have good ideas, you can pitch it. Who’s that person who takes the idea to the next step and then has a persistence to stick with things when they’re hard and stick with things when they’re in that early growth stage. And then I think it’s just having confidence in the ability like I know what I’m doing. I understand these problems. I know how to execute on it. And then I think for me like you know this thing that you’re talking about it just again it started like Pakistani women in computing was kind of a passion project. This is kind of a passion project I’ve been thinking about for a while and you know how to build something for the youth as well. And so initially actually we talked about doing something as part of PEIC like a BIC youth and then one of the challenges with that was when we were doing reachouts you know we would only get sort of women and we were trying to do this kind of for everyone right uh you know the young it’s just as important to educate the young men as it it is to educate the young women on some of these things. So the youth initiative really I wanted it to be kind of very expansive. Uh and so I’ve been thinking about that and then you know talking to my daughter and kind of seeing the kind of issues that she has. I was like, “Okay, especially for their social emotional learning, these kids here, they need to see each other. It’s the same concept, right? They’re kind of all across, but they’re all very different, but there’s a threads that connect them. And there’s things that they’re doing. They’re very inspiring. And how do you build that? How do you show that, oh, this this this person, you know, this there’s this one female who she just graduated out of high school, got into John Hopkins for computational neuroscience, right? And I was like, okay, having her come and talk to all these ninth graders, eighth graders, it’s going to be so inspiring for them, right? and I can say whatever, but when she talks to them, you know, she speaks their language and she dresses like them and she’s cool, it resonates in a different way. So, just kind of like this was another passion project. Let’s get the youth together and help them build a community for themselves. Then they can talk about what are their problems and how can they help each other. And I think again kind of with PIC as well like the other behavioral piece here I guess is I truly do believe like I’m a very optimistic person and I I believe that you know people want to help each other that people don’t gatekeep for just any reason right it’s just that we don’t know how to ask or some people don’t even know that you need that information right like this this girl like probably nobody had ever asked her like can you come talk to a group of kids and tell them about your high school journey and your college application journey and what did you do and we just asked her and she gave very specific like this is what I did and I did this research thing and this is what I you know and kids were asking are like okay how do I join that or how do I do that research right so I think it’s like amplifying voices and inspiring is important but also building collaborative communities where we lift each other up we’ll help each other we create ways systematic ways to help each other is very important for the next generation and for our ourselves if we’re growing in our community together I think in peic for example there’s so many women that you know because of this you know I got a job or I got my promotion you know so that’s Just lovely to be a part of that to be able to say hey my experience is negative or positive once I’m sharing those or helping you like I told you all the negative experiences so you can avoid that mistake and you can make new mistakes you know so I think that’s been very helpful so so those are some of the behaviors around really believing in collaboration and believing in amplifying and inspiring voices community voices yeah and I believe you’re inculcating the same values in your daughters as well have you have you had a chance to work with Jenz Yeah, I mean, you know, read a lot about Jenzi. I think I don’t know. I think they’re misunderstood. I don’t feel like they’re the slacker generation that doesn’t want to work or whatever. I think they’re I just feel like I mean, again, it’s it’s hard to generalize and you shouldn’t generalize, but you know, if I were to generalize, I think they’re just much more sure of themselves than than we were than, you know, I’m kind of a millennial, I think. Yeah. You know, I stumbled into a lot of things. I didn’t have clarity of purpose. I didn’t have maybe I didn’t have the resources or whatever, you know, but I didn’t have that. and they have this clarity of purpose. They kind of know what their values are. They know what’s unacceptable to them. Um you know they lead with a lot of integrity. So the this idea that they don’t want to you know be a corporate slave doesn’t come from them being uh lazy. I think it comes from them understanding their idea about life is very different. Life is not just about climbing the corporate ladder or making more money. Life is about you know living meaningfully and you know leaning into your relationships and you know having your mental health. I mean that’s actually not a bad idea, you know? It’s like it’s kind of I guess sad that we can’t create workspaces that can also be like that, right? Like why? So maybe it actually makes me hopeful. Maybe the future of the workplace and of the world is going to be gentler because of these people, right? Like who wants to work in an aggressive cutthroat environment? Nobody does. You can get great at it, but you know, at the cost of a lot of sleep and sanity and mental cycles if you don’t have to. If you know the way that I talked about community, that’s how everything in our life was. It would be amazing and I think we’d all be doing our best work because you do your best work when you are mentally in a better place. I think so. I like Jenzi. Yeah. I don’t no I love how honestly you put it all out there and you know how how you exactly you know put it together about them giving more value to their life and morals and not compromising on the corporate slavery values that you know millennials ader to and they feel that they are okay but you know it’s amazing I’ve had I’ve had a lot of lineup of guests and I’ve I’ve been asking this question from a lot of the people which are sort of the one of the first guests who has sort of you know um looked at it from that particular lens. So I I absolutely loved your honesty. I think I think it’s because you know I do like because a lot of gamers are kids and then I you know as a teacher I actually get to you know see these students come in and you know like I I see like I talk to them. I have long conversations with that group and you know and then the spring um community that I’ve started like the high schoolers and then the college plus very different from us in a and I think a positive way. Well, Farra, finally, um, for anyone sitting on an idea stuck halfway between R&D and real impact, what’s your blunt, no fluff advice for, you know, getting it over the line? Um, I think I don’t think I’m going to say anything so different than what I’ve been. We think that innovation has to speak for itself. That’s just one big misconception. I’ll have a great idea and everybody will see it. That’s not true. Ideas don’t drive business results. Uh, outcomes do, right? And so unless your idea is backed by strategy, is aligned with strategy, the right incentives are backing it, you’re championing it with all the right stakeholders, you’re able to go through the messy middle and champion through that, you know, I think that’s the way to make it real, right? So you could drive business results with your idea and you can actually show that it’s serving a real customer pain point and it’s not just a cool idea for the sake of it. I think there’s a space in life for cool ideas for the sake of it, right? And so I think there’s a the way that we do it or the way that I’ve done it is you know you create like these pockets like okay I’m going to give you a hackathon weekend or a hackathon week. Go try get all of your innovation cool ideas out of your system but then it’s like okay there’s the we want to innovate. It has to start with a business case not with a research paper right so it’s and the research paper comes later on how do you implement it but you don’t start with the how. You start with the why. You know so whenever you you’re an innovator you’re trying to get an idea pitch start with the why. Why are you doing this? you know, who are you doing this for? What’s the value we’re creating for them? What is the long-term upside to this? And then you go into the how. I think we go into the how and we have the idea and then we try to do the why. And that’s wrong. Like that’s the wrong way out and you’ll just waste a lot of time. If you go to the why, you will also, you know, create a fail fast mechanism. You will kill all the bad ideas much faster and you will come up with the right idea at the end. So yeah, start with the why. And any advice for our women listeners in particular, you know, over something that you’ve also learned the hard way in your career. Lots of I guess lots of things say that, you know, I I don’t second guess yourself. You know, I think one of the things that happens is, you know, all the different inputs coming at you from your personal and professional life. You know, if your interactions, let’s say you have 10 interactions in a day and nine of them are negative. I think it just, you can’t help it, but you start becoming a negative person. You start seeing things in a negative light. So, just know that. Take the time to reset yourself and don’t second guess. Right? People saying stuff, feedback is just feedback. It’s your job whether you take it or not. And what do you do with that feedback, right? You know whether the feedback applies to you and you can apply it if it fits. And if it doesn’t, just throw it out. If an opinion doesn’t apply, throw it out. You don’t have to take everything and keep it with you, right? So throw it away. You know, if it’s not serving you, you don’t have to put it in your bag. You know, don’t keep that baggage. Well, Farah, thank you so much for sharing your journey and your insights. You know, it has been just lovely listening to you and your honesty. Yeah, great talking to you, Rabia. Thanks. [Music]