Leading Women in Tech Podcast

The urge arrives late at night,  after the kids have gone to sleep and the laptop is shut: I could do that. And it can feel like that's impossible because of timing. But today's conversation shows you that starting a startup as a mom is not a timing problem.
Elisa Lu has never asked herself whether she should. She only asks how. She co-founded an AI hardware company with no coding background and no engineering training, as the mother of two young boys, while relocating her family to Germany for her husband's career, with co-founders spread across three time zones. That is three solid reasons that everyone would understand as a reason to wait. But Elisa didn't. She treated all of them as logistics to be solved for.
Elisa, today's guest, is co-founder and COO of Memoket, and her career before this was a deliberate walk towards the part of a business where decisions actually get made: supply chain at Procter & Gamble, building manufacturing facilities as a young graduate, then a deliberate move into marketing, because marketing was where the business outcome was decided rather than serviced.
In this conversation Elisa makes her journey sound so ordinary, so casual you think 'yes well, of course'. She makes the hard parts sound easier than I know many of us think they are. There is travel, there are weeks away, there are children who cried the first time and adapted faster than she expected. There is a husband with his own career and no assumption that either of them is the default parent. And there is a clear-eyed answer to the question of whether she ever doubts it, which is yes, at three in the morning, and her response is to keep moving.
We also discuss whether luck has anything to do with this, or is it something else?  It is worth listening for how often you use the word 'lucky' about your own career.
This is for anyone weighing a founder move, a side project, or any leap that currently feels badly timed.
WHAT'S COVERED
→ Why "should I?" is the wrong question, and what to ask instead
→ How to build in an industry you have no technical training in
→ What the logistics of founding actually look like with two young children and a partner with his own career
→ Why saying "I'm lucky" quietly erases the choices you made
→ The 3am doubt that every founder has, and what to do with it
→ Why "stay stable" is the worst advice she was ever given
RELATED EPISODES
Is entrepreneurship the right next step for you — https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/210-is-entrepreneurship-the-right-next-step-for-you-with-alex-batdorf/
The realities of leading as a young mom — https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/233-the-realities-of-being-a-leader-as-a-young-mom-a-coaching-conversation-with-madeleine-lambert/
Breaking out of your comfort zone and preparing for venture funding — https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/263-breaking-out-of-your-comfort-zone-emily-dinu-on-mindset-grit-and-preparing-for-venture-funding/ 
CONNECT WITH ELISA LU & CHECK OUT MEMOKET
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisa-lu-71757810/ 
Memoket — https://memoket.ai/ 
Ready to stop waiting for the right moment in your own career? Book a strategy call — https://tonicollis.com/lets-chat/ 
This episode was sponsored by our guest, Elisa Lu. Thank you Elisa and Memoket for helping to bring Leading Women in Tech to this community. Toni has been testing the Memoket Gem and talks about it in the episode.

It's nine at night and you're answering the email that could have waited. Nobody asked you to. That isn't a boundaries problem.
By the end you'll know which of the four engines is running hottest in you, and you'll have one change to make this week that your system can't talk you out of.
Somewhere early in your career, usually for very good reasons, you built yourself an operating system for achievement. Deliver more than asked. Own everything you touch. Never be the reason something drops. Prove yourself in every room, every time. That system worked, and it's why you're where you are.

Notice what it doesn't contain. No off switch. No definition of enough. No mechanism at all for protecting the person running it. It was built to produce output, and it will keep producing output until the machine it runs on breaks.

Which is why burnout at this level isn't a workload problem and isn't a personal failure. One client arrived convinced she'd lost her resilience. When we mapped what she was actually carrying, she was running roughly two and a half jobs on one human, using an operating system she designed in her twenties when the stakes were far lower. Her resilience was extraordinary. Six months later she wasn't working less hard, because she didn't want to. She was working on one job, deliberately chosen, with the absorption named and redistributed. Her performance went up.

This episode maps the four engines driving ambition burnout in high-achieving women, gives you five changes that rebuild the system rather than layering self-care on top of it, and ends with the argument that moves high achievers when nothing else does: your team inherits your pace, and the women watching you are doing arithmetic on what your job appears to cost.
WHAT'S COVERED
→ Why "just get better at switching off" treats the symptom as the cause
→ The two stories, denial and shame, that keep capable women stuck
→ Four engines: proving, over-functioning, the invisible load, and success escalation
→ Why the fourth engine is only dangerous when it sits alongside another
→ Five changes that rebuild the system, starting with a written definition of enough
→ Why your calendar is your team's curriculum, and where the pipeline actually leaks
RELATED EPISODES
Part one, why this is so hard to see in yourself: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/318-quiet-burnout-high-achievers
What burnout-proof leadership actually requires: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/294-burnout-proof-leadership-women-tech/
Boundaries for women in leadership: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/268-boundaries-for-women-in-leadership-how-to-lead-without-burning-out
The invisible load and what leadership shouldn't cost you: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/254-the-invisible-load-leadership-shouldnt-cost-your-wellbeing
Bravery, grit and confidence, the leadership energy model: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/312-bravery-grit-confidence-leadership-energy-model/
Leader as coach, the skill behind delegating capability: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/314-leader-as-coach-coaching-skills-transform-leadership/
RESOURCES
The Burnout to Balance Toolkit: https://tonicollis.com/burnout-to-balance
Book a complimentary strategy call: https://tonicollis.com/lets-chat/
#WomenInTech #SustainableLeadership #TechLeadership #Leadership #WomenInLeadership

Everyone tells you you're doing great. Nobody tells you the standard you're actually being held to. Why women in tech careers stall on feedback nobody gives.
By the end of this you will know what that unspoken standard usually is, and how to ask for the feedback that names it.
Sharon Lynch has been asked more than once to lower the standard for women. Her answer has been no every time, and not because she wants fewer women in senior roles. The moment the bar drops, the whole organisation reads it as proof that women could not clear it, and every woman hired after that carries the diversity hire label whether it fits her or not.
She is CEO of Modus Create, and before that she ran Slalom's product engineering organisation across the Americas, a team of more than 1,400 people.
What she describes in this conversation is the quieter problem underneath. Managers, often men but women too, are afraid of how developmental feedback will land, so they soften it or skip it altogether. The result is that women are held to a high standard nobody has articulated, evaluated against a bar nobody has described, and passed over for reasons that never get said out loud. When Sharon left her last role, a colleague's first question was not about the org chart. It was who is going to give us the hard feedback now.
Women in tech careers rarely stall on capability. They stall in the gap between how well she performs and what anyone is willing to say about it.
The rest of the conversation is about what closes that gap. Sharon's route to CEO ran through the business fundamentals: utilisation, expenses, revenue, how money is actually made. She is direct about why this matters. Functional leaders know their own function extremely well. Executives tie everything together, and you cannot do the second without understanding the first. That shift from individual contributor skills to an executive mindset is the one she watches most women stop short of.
She also talks about asking her way into rooms she was not invited to, why asking your team to explain the data is not a failure of trust, what leadership legacy looks like when it is not about you, and why a title reveals the leader you had already become rather than creating one.
 
WHAT'S COVERED
→ Why "you're doing great" is the most expensive feedback you can receive
→ What happens to every woman in the room the moment the standard is lowered for one
→ Why understanding utilisation, expenses and revenue changes how executives look at you
→ How to ask your way into the rooms where the numbers get decided, without signalling that you don't trust your team
→ Why being right the fastest costs more than it wins
→ What a title actually changes, and what it only reveals
 
RELATED EPISODES
How to give feedback as a leader — https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/152-how-to-give-feedback/ 
The promotion gap for women in tech — https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/290-women-in-tech-promotion-gap/ 
The shift from tactical to strategic leadership — https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/292-executive-leadership-for-women-strategic-shift/ 
CONNECT WITH SHARON LYNCH
LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharondlynch/ 
Modus Create — https://www.moduscreate.com/ 
 
Ready to stop guessing at the standard you're being measured against? Book a strategy call — https://tonicollis.com/lets-chat/ 
This episode was sponsored by our guest, Sharon Lynch. Thank you Sharon and Modus Create for helping to bring Leading Women in Tech to this community.
#WomenInTech #TechLeadership #WomenInLeadership #Leadership #LeadingWomenInTech

You're the one person your boss never worries about. That's exactly why nobody has spotted your quiet burnout.
By the end of this you'll know the five stages of the spiral, why your own self-check keeps missing it, and the external instruments that break it.
Quiet overachievers are the last people anyone worries about, and that is precisely the problem. If you feel burnout at work but you are still delivering clean work on time with no fuss, every system your organisation has for detecting trouble will read you as thriving.
The reason this stays invisible to you is the question you use to check. High performers are relentless self-monitors, but the question is always "am I still delivering?", and delivery is the last thing to fail. Sleep goes first, then patience, then curiosity, then everything outside work, then your interest in the work itself. Delivery holds through all of it, because you make it hold. By the time that check finally fires, you are a long way into something that was visible in other measures months ago.
What is workplace burnout when it takes this form? It is a loop rather than an event. Invisible excellence, early depletion, compensation, concealment, isolation, and then back to the start, faster each turn. The accelerant is stage three: you notice yourself slipping, you interpret it as a discipline problem rather than a fuel problem, and you respond by working harder. It works, which is the cruel part, and that guarantees you will use it again next time, harder.
This episode maps the shape of corporate burnout in the people best at absorbing it, names the three beliefs that keep women inside the loop, and gives you five exits. Every one of them is external, because the whole argument of the episode is that your internal read is not currently trustworthy.
WHAT'S COVERED
→ Why "am I still delivering?" is the worst diagnostic available to you
→ The difference between loud and quiet overachieving, and why the quiet version costs more
→ The five stages of the spiral, and which one turns a hard patch into a loop
→ Why performing wellness is a second job that nobody hires you for
→ Why your manager cannot see this, and why waiting to be caught is not a plan
→ Five external instruments that break the loop, starting with one sentence to one person
RELATED EPISODES
⏹  What burnout-proof leadership actually requires: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/294-burnout-proof-leadership-women-tech/
⏹  The early indicators of burnout high performers are best at overriding: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/248-recognizing-the-signs-identifying-early-indicators-of-burnout
⏹  The invisible load and what leadership should not cost you: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/254-the-invisible-load-leadership-shouldnt-cost-your-wellbeing
⏹  Bravery, grit and confidence: the leadership energy model: https://tonicollis.com/leading-women-tech/312-bravery-grit-confidence-leadership-energy-model/ 
FREE RESOURCE
Signs You're Leading at an Unsustainable Pace: https://tonicollis.com/resources/is-this-unsustainable/ 
Book a complimentary strategy call: https://tonicollis.com/lets-chat/

"If I wanted someone who would commute, I could have hired a man from New York."
That's what a private equity partner said to Kimberly Williams while offering her first CEO role. She took the job anyway, delivered results he couldn't argue with, and changed how he saw women in leadership.
Kimberly is Chairperson and CEO of Absorb Software, and before that grew CST Holdings more than five-fold in seven years, taking it from fifth in its market to first. In this episode of Leading Women in Tech Kimberly shares the career advice that took her from a strategy role at Boston Consulting Group to the CEO seat — including the single piece of guidance she gives every ambitious woman, why asking for help builds supporters rather than doubts, and how she thinks about AI transformation as a sitting CEO.
What we cover:
Why one small comment from anyone in your life can change a trajectory, positively or negatively
Boston Consulting Group as the first true meritocracy she'd worked in
The accidental route into running a business: a $4.3 million business case
"If I wanted someone who would commute, I could have hired a man from New York"
The importance of your support network, and why this may be the most consequential move you make in your career
The career advice Kimberly gives every woman: fight for roles that carry numbers
Why asking for help creates supporters — the cognitive dissonance effect
Humility as a CEO strength: your job isn't to have the answers
AI transformation: why AI serves your strategy rather than being your strategy
Pick projects that could make your company great, not 1% more profitable
Testing agentic outbound sales outside the core business
Useful Links
Connect with today's guest and sponsor, Kimberly Dolan Williams, on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlydolanwilliams/) and find out more about Absorb Software at https://www.absorblms.com.
This episode was sponsored by Absorb Software. Thank you Kimberly and Absorb for helping to bring Leading Women in Tech to this community!