Ep 21: Tara Reed: CEO and Founder Feels the Magic of Side Projects

Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University several years ago, Kollecto.com founder, Tara Reed, had no plan to enter the technology field in 2012. But an exciting internship profoundly changed her life’s mission.  Diva Tech Talk’s podcast with her examines that, and her current journey into tech entrepreneurship.

“I fell into technology by accident,” Tara explains.  “I was living in New York, and, of course, there was an emphasis on financial services.”  She accepted an internship for the summer of 2012 at venerable brokerage, JP Morgan, only to (“on a whim”) apply simultaneously to GOOGLE, and get an offer that was too good to refuse.  She was recruited to spend the summer on the “Google Offers” project, to help the industry giant compete with Groupon for an extended share of the small business retail market.  There, Tara learned good lessons from that project’s failure, while experiencing an enlightening summer in Silicon Valley (“with free lunches!”)

That project’s failure “prepared me well for building my own company,” Tara said. “Lots of start-ups and creative projects don’t work.  You learn, though, and take everything you learn and apply it somewhere else.”

Post-internship, Tara joined fast-growing Foursquare, a company dedicated to creating applications that help people keep up/meet up with friends, and discover great places.   There she worked on the marketing team, monetizing their apps for small businesses.  Most crucially, she met and cultivated life-changing mentors, advisers and great leaders in design and marketing, who helped Tara wander ‘outside the box’ in terms of  her own trajectory, “forcing me to think about what a career inside of technology could look like.”   Her lessons were to consistently learn to ask herself four hard questions, as she made decisions:

1. “Are you taking enough risk in your career?”

2. “Do you really want to do exactly what you are doing?”

3. “What truly motivates you?”

4. “How do you make an impact?”

From Foursquare, Tara moved to Seattle, to accept a role at tech industry behemoth, Microsoft, as part of the Windows marketing team. But she found that the Microsoft culture was incorrect for her.  It was a huge team; she was used to making a strong individual difference.

While there, she began a “side project” that has now morphed into her full-time company.   She looked at the question of why the process of acquiring visual art was so much different and harder than the process to acquire other kinds of art — like music or fashion, all very accessible from the Web.   There was a vacuum when it came to art that people put on their walls, and she knew she could fill that vacuum.  Her “side project” (Kollecto) was born.

Tara credits an initiative called Orbital (“a side project accelerator program”) for kick starting her success.  “What’s cool about Orbital is that everyone is encouraged to build things that others will find useful.”  She joined Orbital’s first boot camp, where she achieved her goal of moving from Step Zero (having a good idea) to Step One (just getting started!).  Her Step One involved creating a landing page to test the concept of how much potential users might know about art and how much help they might need or pay for.  Essentially this tested demand for her services and future products.  Orbital was key to Tara’s success, because as she admitted:  “Entrepreneurship is tough. Sometimes you have to go back a step to move forward.”  And the Orbital group has all experienced that, understands, and supports the circuitous journey.

Leaving Microsoft in 2014, Tara formally launched Kollecto.  Along the way, Tara has amassed knowledge that can help any budding entrepreneur.  Her advice is “build a service first” because it encourages dialogue with possible users.  Doing that for Kollecto enabled her to build the first application based on conversations with interested prospects.  “Hell is building fancy stuff that no one uses,” she comments.

Kollecto has two major components.  The main Website helps inexperienced art collectors buy affordable art by pairing them with personal expert advisers to find art and negotiates prices; and ArtCollectingSchool.com is a series of interactive lessons to acquaint novices with the art world, and teach them how to acquire art from $300 to $1500 for their walls, without other assistance.  The two segments organically comprise the company’s revenue stream, and are supplemented by Tara’s personal blog “BuildingKollecto.com.”

For Tara’s business, social media tools have been very important in expanding her client base, with almost 51% of Kollecto website’s traffic coming from social media sources.  A tool she uses to great advantage is Socedo.com, which targets users based on their Twitter comments.  Tara also makes a practice of “building out loud” as the company grows —using social media to engage in useful dialogue and debates that help her organization blossom.

Tara’s primary personal challenge ( as we have found with other Diva Tech Talk guests ) is balancing multiple roles.  “Finding out how to balance your interest in being a creator, and in being a CEO/business person is hard,” she said.  “Creators are more likely to throw things away.   CEO’s and business leaders have to take fewer risks and concentrate on sustainable growth.”  From that, Tara’s final words of wisdom are:  “Select your hats.  Then find time to juggle your hats!”

Kollecto can be found at kollecto.com.

Tara can be followed on Twitter at @tarareed_ or you reach her via email at tara@kollecto.com

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Ep 20: Jillian Winn: Game On and Follow Your Passion

In this episode, we got the chance to sit down with savvy and generous entrepreneur Jillian Winn, who shares her insights into start-ups, gaming and women, and more.

Jillian was an only child until she was 15 years old. She remembers never being pushed into science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) fields, but remembers being taught that the “sky was the limit.” When she grew up and went to college, she studied Political Theory and Telecommunications focusing on web design.

 “You don’t really know what you will like until you do it,” Jillian said. Pursuing knowledge along two different (and seemingly unrelated paths) offered her a two-pronged way to explore her two biggest passions. After graduating, she considered many options, but settled on a graduate program for her master’s in telecommunications. While at graduate school, she also dove into gender studies in technology and gaming.

How do you get girls to like science and think it’s fun? She was involved in game research studies in graduate school which explored this question. Jillian said it helped her learn to be conscious of gender roles and women in technology. Some of the studies brought up the question as to whether women had or made enough free time to play games. Jillian’s research provided the first research evidence of a relationship between leisure time availability and how much digital games are played. 

The findings suggested one reason women play fewer games than men is because they are required to fulfill more obligatory activities, leaving them less available leisure time, which in turn makes them less likely to “make” time for games. It was found that not only do women report having less free time than men, but their free time is available in smaller chunks, and they play digital games for shorter periods of time than men. What programs are out there to get into gaming? How does it become a part of career? Jillian shares information on Michigan State University’s Game Design & Development program (http://gamedev.msu.edu), which is one of the top game programs in the country.

After Jillian finished her master’s degree, she entered the world of entrepreneurship, doing more research, and then working as Faculty at MSU in the Department of Media and Information (http://tism.msu.edu) (previously the Telecommunication Department) where she taught web and technology course, ran “game camps” and summer programs. She noted that, if you’re younger, there’s lots of pre-college programs (http://mi.msu.edu/camps/) around technology, web development, and gaming with some designed specifically for women, covering a plethora of different topics.

 “One of the things with games in particular ---  it’s one thing to play them,  it’s a different thing to make them,” she said. Lots of the kids who go to camps discover if they really want to pursue a career in gaming.

 Jillian reflects on how she really had independence to drive and create initiatives while at Michigan State University, a characteristic that helped her become a full-fledged entrepreneur. She subsequently co-founded a mission-oriented company called Signing Savvy (https://www.signingsavvy.com), a sign language resource, which aims to provide the most comprehensive online sign language resource for parents, educators, interpreters, students, or anyone interested in American Sign Language.

 “You type in a word like ‘apple’ and you can then watch a video showing you how to sign apple,” she said. “You can look up signs, you can study signs. It helps you learn.” Parents can use the tool to make word lists to share signs with teachers, kids, and other relatives to better practice sign language. Signing Savvy was built with a mix of coding languages, and is available online and on iOS and Android applications. Jillian stressed how passionate she is to help others learn and use their resources, providing some free access for users.

 What’s been the most rewarding thing for Jillian? She has seen over 10 million people use the Signing Savvy website, so far, and she loves to see and hear stories on how they are using it. Sometimes it’s a veteran who lost his hearing at war and needed a resource to learn sign language; sometimes it’s children and parents, but the tool can be used for any age.

 There are definitely challenges with starting a technology company. Jillian says it can feel lonely, and sometimes people don’t understand the work it takes.  “I have a website up; what more could you be doing?” she claims is sometimes a stereotype she hears. There’s often a misunderstanding on how long it might take to launch a technology company.

 Jillian likes to volunteer and connect with others who have an entrepreneurial spirit. She’s an active leader in the Lansing area technology scene and a Co-Founder of the Michigan Technology Network (http://lansing.mitn.org) She’s also a third-generation MSU “Spartan,” and loves to teach and give back to the university when she can.

How has being a woman in tech affected her? Jillian says she was fortunate to have women bosses at her first two jobs at the university. She says it’s rare to get to work with mentors and successful women in tech; so she’s grateful that for her, it was twice in a row at the start of her career.

 Her advice for women in tech:

• Take risks
• Find what you’re passionate about
• You can’t be afraid of failing

Jillian reflects back on when she was one of the first female pole vaulters in the state of Michigan. It was a very male-oriented event, and she was one of the first woman participating in the pole vaulting segment. It taught her not to be afraid to try new things or to be the first to do something, but also helped her to be a team player.  “I really believe you always need to think in terms of a team aspect and how the team can succeed,” she said. Volunteering often helped her show her this too.

“Be humble and help others. You’re not going to reap all the rewards, and that’s a good thing. You want everyone to reap the rewards. Together, we make things happen,” she said.

From pole vaulting, to gaming, and starting a tech company with an incredibly worthwhile mission, Jillian said she’s most lucky to just have followed her passion. That passion has created a tool that helps people and knowing that drives her forward each and every day.

To learn more about Signing Savvy go to: signingsavvy.com. 

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Ep 19: Maggie Lohnes: From Hospital Administration to Entrepreneur

In this episode, we had a great conversation with Maggie Lohnes, Founder of Sound Informatics. After a long and strong career in Healthcare IT, she successfully started her own company.  

Maggie calls herself a lifelong nurse. When she was a kid, she always knew she wanted to be a nurse so she went to nursing school straight out of high school, and specialized in critical care.

“I also knew I was attracted to machines and technology. I had the informatic bug from the beginning,” she said.

After working for 8 years as a critical care nurse, she was chosen to be a subject matter expert for the first electronic healthcare implementation. Maggie reminisces about the era when nurses were using punchcards, and how technology helped to change that. Maggie took time off to have children, and when she went back into it she was drawn to Nursing Informatics. She  was hired and created one of the first roles for Nursing Informations at Huntington Hospital. At the time, no one really knew what nursing informatics was, but Maggie decided she wanted to find out. She soon moved to a management role and spent 15 years at Huntington, where she eventually became an information systems manager.

“This was back in the day when we had cobol programmers, pre Y2K,” she said. Maggie managed the team working on that, which was a challenge. Maggie said she observed, first hand, how important it was for nurses to work with engineers to improve critical care.  Later, she moved to Washington State and was hired as an administrator at a 5 hospital, 200 physician health system.

Throughout her career journey, she participated in HIMMS, the Healthcare and Information Management Systems Society, as a leader for one of the local networks. At one point she was chair of the national policy committee, during the time when meaningful use legislation under the Bush Administration was being enacted to spur electronic records. She worked for two years at the Meider corporation, a think tank that works with the federal government, and then moved to giant health care software provider: McKesson.  Eventually, Maggie took a risk and started Sound Informatics to offer sound advices and services to organizations.

Maggie shared with us how she worked with engineers, and learned to translate engineering models and frameworks to healthcare models and frameworks. For example, she found comparisons between the body and the computer. The pituitary gland can be compared to the CPU while a brain can be similar to a hard drive. With her clinical background, Maggie could see connections from both worlds that helped her during her career. Persistence and confidence also helped Maggie grow as a leader.

Challenges always come during our divas’ careers, and Maggie shared with us how she overcame her biggest challenge of learning how to manage a team of engineers for the first time. Eventually, they became a cohesive unit, and friends. Other advice she offers:

• Don’t sugar coat reality with your team

• Share as much as you can with your team

• Help everyone grow in their careers

• It’s okay to say you don’t know something

If you want to contact Maggie, feel free to email her Maggie.Lohnes@soundinformatics.com.

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Ep 18: Deb Swink: Selling, Testifying, and Transforming the Industry

The Diva Tech Talk team is excited to share our interview with Deb Swink, Vice President for CSI Leasing, an equipment leasing corporation with 70 offices worldwide, and leasing operations in 36 countries. Deb has had a long and successful career in the male-dominated field of information technology leasing.

Deb’s career started in accounting as part of the accounting and marketing department at another technology leasing company. The  IT leasing field got its start with a 1950’s consent agreement from IBM and the Department of Justice. IBM had a monopoly on the market. But this ruling forced the tech giant to open up its technology to allow for buying, selling and leasing.

The market further opened up in the 1970’s, and companies like CMI and CSI were able to get their start. At that time, CMI was about 40 people and grew to 400 before Deb left for her next opportunity. Cash flow was very tight in their rapidly growing company. One day a manager called her up to thank her for handling the flow of requests well.

“You really handle the cash flow issue very elegantly. We have a situation where we’d like to do business with the federal government,” he said. “We’d like to tag someone to do that. We think you’d do a great job.”  At first, Deb hesitated, but her colleagues believed in her and inspired her to accept the role. She frequently traveled to Washington DC, and little by little she saw successes blossom.

Deb left, for a moment, to have a son in the late 1980’s. When she returned to work she asked if she could work a 4 day work week, but was denied that flexibility. So when an offer came that better fit her needs from National Computer, she took it. That company was later bought by CSI, where she still works today.

What helped this industry boom? Deb said it was pure economics. Leasing was very important. Customers couldn’t afford the cost of a mainframe system in the 80’s that might cost  upwards of $1.5 million dollars. The memory and capabilities of those systems are almost in a flash drive today.

“I feel fortunate to have seen the ebb and flow of technology,” she said.

By the mid 80’s, the market was established and Deb was making bids and closing sales for CSI with the federal government. However, she noticed bids started to get turned down asking for brand new technologies that weren’t necessarily needed. Many businesses, it turned out, were frustrated with this issue. When she filed a complaint, a protest started, and Deb found herself becoming the face of a movement.

At eight months pregnant with their second child, she had to go to Washington DC to testify.

“It was pretty nerve-wracking. But we won. It was a landslide victory that opened it up for more companies to participate in the marketplace,” she said.

Deb was offered a new opportunity in the 1990’s to offer sales and leasing to corporate accounts in Michigan. Technology leasing allows companies to save costs, stay ahead of the game with changing technology, and more. CSI now has 40 offices in the U.S. alone, and subsidiaries all over the world.

The top challenges Deb sees her customers face are developing a technology lifecycle for their business, managing suppliers, and managing assets that are in play. CSI also helps companies get rid of technologies they don’t need anymore.

The leasing industry has always been male dominated. Deb said that, for many years, she was only one of two saleswomen at CSI. “She and I broke the mold. We were successful individuals, so we showed that we could equally succeed in the industry,” she said.

Now, CSI has a number of women executives and sales team members. Deb says that being a woman brings a natural strength in nurturing skills. She truly cares about her customers and she pays attention to all of the details.

Deb Swink was one of the early leaders for the Michigan Council of Women In Technology, an organization now numbering over 700 members. She was one of the few people who have stayed consistently active since its inception and she says it’s really helped her to network and grow as a leader. Networking and giving back are two important practices that MCWT has helped her cultivate.

Deb’s leadership advice for women and being a sales leader include:

• Discipline, stay the course and have a strong work ethic.

• Integrity, and reputations are the single most important traits of a leader. You must have integrity to develop trust.

• Develop and hold to your beliefs;  you need to have passion and belief in yourself and your contributions.

Deb offered some great advice for us on this episode. She closed out by reminding us all to do the right thing, work in a place you believe in, and the money will follow. She can be reached at deb.swink@csileasing.com. She’s happy to meet and talk to any listeners anytime

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Ep 17: Carla Smith: Healthcare Champion and Technology Translator

In this episode we interviewed Carla Smith, the Executive Vice President of HIMSS, a global cause-based nonprofit organization focused on providing better health through information technology. She has nearly 25 years in policy development, 20 years of healthcare experience and a passion for translating “technospeak” for everyone.

Carla says she “fell” into healthcare technology. She was working in information technology in the manufacturing world for the State of Michigan. When Governor Engler came to office,  he shut down the work on which she was focused. So, Carla applied to an ad and took a position in communications for health IT.

Carla’s new communications focus was to help nurses and physicians understand what IT is all about, and this is now her niche. She studied English and Communications and now helps translate “techno speak” to the layperson, as well as translating policy issues.  

How does this work for policy? When there’s a piece of legislation, for example like one currently for cybersecurity, Carla visits Congress members to help them understand how cybersecurity threatens healthcare. There’s a lot of data available right now on security in information technology, but she’ll help to translate what this actually means for the health sector.

Carla’s role currently at HIMSS is Executive Vice President of North America. HIMSS is a global non-profit organization for better health through through the best use of information technology, providing thought leadership, networking, and education. She is the Executive responsible for HIMSS's focus in North America. 

What sort of impact does this make for the community? For those who consider information technology in the health sector, HIMSS helps them become better educated to make business decisions at their hospital, clinical practice, or agency. Carla says the end goal is safer care, more cost effective care, care that’s of higher quality, and increased access to care, through the best use of Information Technology.   “Technology is the tool, not the end,” she said.

Carla reflected back on her very first job, when ATM machines were first emerging. Her job was to educate consumers on why you’d want to use an ATM machine. She remembers, in the late 1980’s, hanging out with a friend who was the first to pull out her card for the ATM machine. It was mindblowing to see for the very first time!

She enjoyed teaching people how to use ATMs since it was all about helping the consumer understand how technology could be a valuable part of his or her life.

From banking, she went to the manufacturing sector. At the time, the “big three” auto companies were heavily focused quality assurance. There are many small and mid-sized manufacturers in Michigan, and they didn’t understand what information technology could do for them. Carla felt it was absolutely crucial for these small businesses to understand and get access to key technology like CAD CAM, as one example. “You can transform your entire way of thinking if the technology becomes available to you in a way that makes sense to you,” Carla said.

She subsequently moved to the healthcare field, and this is where she’s stayed. At the end of the day, we are all patients and the right care is so important to Carla. One of the ways to ensure people are receiving the right care is through opening up the pathways through policy and education to drive change. But this all boils down to having the right information to the right person at the right time.

Was it a challenge for Carla to study communications and jump into the world of IT? She thinks not. Instead, it helped her bring something unique to the field.  “I have never been sorry for the degrees I have,” she said. “I’ve met too many people who know so much, they are so smart, and they can’t get it out! They can’t express either in writing, or verbally, what they have to offer.”

Carla sees herself as a champion and a technology translator, but there are challenges she had to overcome. Being a wife, executive, and a mother, she found wonderful. But the challenge has been to juggle all her roles. As a mother and an executive, she found she’s more empathetic to others. There are ways to enable women on her team to be true to their professional needs and still fulfill their needs as mother.  She can empathize since it’s big challenge she’s had to face.

What advice does Carla offer for women in technology or women seeking leadership roles? Carla says it’s silly to have gender expectations.  We can simultaneously meet our need for a career balanced with our children, our significant others, and our personal needs! While that’s a lot to balance, her advice is to think of everything in seasons.

“Sometimes in a certain season, your job comes first. Sometimes your personal needs come first, sometimes you family,” she said. “You are going to cycle in and out of those and it’s okay.”

Other advice she offers:

• Stand up for yourself in a non-defensive manner. You’ll be able to receive constructive criticism and communicate clearly.

• Listen. Seek first to understand, before you try to be understood. You will learn so much about the other person. It will make you smarter and more effective.

• Take every opportunity to better yourself like listening to these podcasts!

Through Carla, you can find out more about HIMMS. You can email Carla any time at csmith@himss.org, and connect with her on twitter at @carlamsmith

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