What if the way we talk about tech leadership is completely wrong?

In this episode, Telle Whitney - Silicon Valley chip designer turned CEO and co-founder of the Grace Hopper Celebration - joins us to break down the myths that hold technology leadership back. She unpacks the dangerous illusion of meritocracy, the myth of the lone genius, and why many CTOs and CIOs unknowingly lead cultures that silence key voices. Drawing from her book Rebooting Tech Culture, Telle offers actionable insights for building inclusive, creative, and high-impact organizations, starting at the executive and board level.

Listen to learn how today’s tech leaders can:

1. Rethink hiring and strategy for real boardroom impact
2. Build cultures that amplify innovation (not just output)
3. Spot the hidden signals that sabotage diversity and creativity
4. Lead with courage, even when you feel like an imposter

Chapters

00:00 From Theater to Computer Science

05:39 The Grace Hopper Celebration

11:27 Rebooting Tech Culture

20:12 Meritocracy and The Lone Genius

26:15 What a Company actually needs

32:44 Does Inclusivity Improve The Output?

34:28 AI4ALL

38:43 Taking Risks

About Telle

Telle Whitney is a consultant, senior executive leader, and recognized expert and advocate for diversity and women in technology. Telle has been called "a pioneer for the promotion of women technologists" and was named one of Fast Company's Most Influential Women in Technology. Telle served as CEO of the Anita Borg Institute from 2002 to 2017 and cofounded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference. Prior to joining the Anita Borg Institute, she was vice president of engineering for Malleable Technologies. She holds a PhD in computer science and is now a speaker and consultant helping executives and their companies create cultures where diverse teams thrive.

Where to find Telle

1. Telle Whitney's book: Rebooting Tech Culture: How to Ignite Innovation and Build Organizations Where Everyone Can Thrive
2. Website: https://www.tellewhitney.com/
3. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/telle-whitney/

Many of the icons, tech icons that I know here, they say that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. For them and for people who look like them, it often is.

I mean, famously, the PayPal mafia, which includes many of the tech pros that we hear about, like Elon Musk, several others that are very quite well known now, just say there's a meritocracy here. But When they chose their team, they chose people that look just like them.

Welcome to the CTO Compass podcast. I'm your host, Mark Wormgoor, tech strategist and executive coach. In every episode, we meet tech leaders from startup CTOs to enterprise CIOs to explore what it means to lead in tech today. They share their stories and their lessons so that you can navigate your own journey in tech. Let's dive into today's episode. Dr. Tally Whitney is a computer scientist, startup engineer who turned to nonprofit CEO, a visionary who founded quite some time ago, the Grace Hopper Celebration and led the Anita Borg Institute. She's a National Academy of Engineering member, an author, we're going to talk about her book, and a quiet forest behind the rise of inclusive innovation in our industry in technology. That will be interesting.

So this is a story about, on the one hand, hardcore engineering, leadership courage, and redefining who gets involved and included in building the future of tech. So from designing, she started actually in ship design back in the 80s, last century to redesigning culture and inclusiveness. From being one of the only women that used to be in the room in tech to actually building rooms filled with tens of thousands of women these days in tech. And her journey has been absolutely incredible.

So really happy to have you here on the show, Tali.

I'm looking very much forward to our conversation. Thank you for having me.

I would really like to start at the beginning because you started doing something completely different. I'm sure you get this question a lot. You started in theater, dropped out of college, and then found your way into computer science. That's quite a big change. What happened?

Well, I was in Utah. My family is from Utah, and I went to the University of Utah. I had no idea what I wanted to do, and I had enjoyed theater, and I started there. I was not very good at it, so I left that pretty quickly, and I didn't quite drop out. I considered dropping out, but my stepmother... Introduced me to this idea of an interest test.

So it compares what you're interested in to many different disciplines and programming came up at the top. I honestly had no idea what computer science was.

So I took a class. It was a COBOL class for those of your listeners that have been around for a very long time. I never really programmed in COBOL, but it was my first introduction. And I really did from that moment feel like I'd fallen in love. It really was where I belonged and I've been doing it ever since.

And then, I mean, you said you started probing in COBOL. Still, you ended up in Silicon Valley designing chips. What happened. And that's for me, I mean, I'm a, infrastructure engineer, software by heart, but chip design even for me is like completely next level. How did you end up there?

Good question. Well, so the University of Utah is quite famous for its graphics work. And in fact, I just went, IEEE designated them as a milestone school because of all the work in graphics. And so there was a lot of graphics work around there. A man named Ivan Sutherland, who had co-founded a department at Caltech, had been at University of Utah, and I met him through another faculty member. And so I went to study with Ivan who had come from graphics, but was now taking that graphic graphics expertise and then applying it to chip design.

I mean, there's a lot of graphics work, at least especially at that point in trying to create these circuits. And so that's how I ended up going to Caltech. Caltech at that time was all about BLSI and, you know, how can you create chips? It's fascinating to think about those days today because, - You know, NVIDIA still wasn't around, but this idea of being able to have specialized chips is what NVIDIA is all about. And we were looking at that in those early days. -.

Wow. And you hear so much about Silicon Valley these days. I think back then it wasn't probably as well known. What was Silicon Valley...

Like back in the 80s.

Well, Silicon Valley, when I came here in 1986, I mean, it was based on silicon. I mean, that's where the name came from.

Some people tend to forget that these days as Google and Facebook and other places become the predominant tech places. But it was... The thing about Silicon Valley that was true then and is still true now is this entrepreneur spirit.

I mean, I love this idea of working with a small team of really bright engineers and creating a product that made a difference. And, You know, the startups in those days were all about creating different chips. There was design tools and chips. But for me, it was the excitement of doing something completely different.

Must have been so exciting back then. It still is today, but it's so much more mainstream, I would say, today than it was back then.

Yeah, so that's a great question. When I came to Silicon Valley, I was captured by this idea of being an entrepreneur. But I was very tired of being the only woman in the room. I had come from Caltech. There was about 12% women at Caltech when I was there. And so I systematically... Looked around and tried to find other women. And I met my friend, Anita Borg. I met her at a Halloween party with other women technologists out of Stanford that were around at the time, a woman named Amy Lansky.

And then And so she and I and other women, we would get together and really just talk about being a woman in technology. At that time, there were a number of groups throughout the country that were focused on celebrating the achievements of women, particularly the Computing Research Association. And out of that came this idea of the Grace Hopper Celebration. And it came out of a movement to really represent women. What women were doing. But I think that Anita and I created the conference and we focused on it being a celebration.

So it's so easy to get caught up in all the problems about being somebody who doesn't look you're the only, but in fact, you just want to celebrate some of the achievements of these remarkable women who spoke at the first Grace Hopper celebration.

Nice. And I've read somewhere that you had that first conference or celebration. And suddenly you walked into a room with 500 women in technology.

So. What was that like for you?

So, you know, it had been a lot of work. We had put this together and we were standing at the hotel and Mark, these women were streaming in.

I mean, just lines of women streaming in. I'd never seen so many women. In my whole life. And it was about 500. At the time, I really felt, you know, this is my tribe. I belong here. And it was a wonderful event. The National Science Foundation supported students to attend.

So there was a lot of scholarships for students to attend. And it was... Women, even in that first one, walked away feeling like I've been part of something different. And this can help nurture me as I continue my work.

Yeah. And I think these days, I mean, this was a long time ago. These days, it's normal. In Amsterdam, we have this Women in Tech conference and a lot of my co-workers would actually go there every year. I think it's almost an annual event that they attend.

So it's now more common. I think maybe because of what you scaled. You scaled that over. I think you worked there for, or you worked in this field from the Grace Holper Celebration to the Anita Bohr Foundation for over 20 years. How, where did it scale? Where did it end up? Where is it now actually?

Yeah, interesting. In those early days, this was a completely volunteer-led activity. And so for the first few Grace Hopper celebrations, It was led by volunteers. And neither... Founded a nonprofit to do some work. But she was diagnosed with brain cancer shortly after she founded a nonprofit within the first couple of years. She could no longer be CEO. And the board asked me to step in. At this time, I mean, nonprofits are all about the funding.

Like Many Start where it went up in them a few years ago, it was at 30,000 people. So it was really a I mean, it met a need.

So many women came that came there sometimes to look for jobs. I mean, it became an important place to try and hire, but many came for the support for finding mentors and communities. And it's, it still has that need today. This year, I believe there was 20,000 people and there was still this feeling of this is where I belong. I'm no longer at the helm, but the friend of Darden Wilkerson is a new CEO. She's not so new anymore. She's been there eight years and she's doing a great job.

Nice. And it's a more global movement now? Is this only in the US still? Or do you organize the celebrations or any other events across the globe now?

Well, In fact, I think at this very minute, the Grace Hopper India Conference is being held. We held a Grace Hopper India from about 2010. We had local communities.

So there was a conference in Europe. And then a lot of times it was just local groups that had local conferences. And so there wasn't any direct financial connection, but it was, I mean. In spirit, you know, you want to support this work. And so a lot of local chapters have done work all over the globe. Absolutely.

No, I really... I enjoyed it. I think I want to move on to your book because you published a book earlier this year where you covered a lot of your own history and the leadership lessons that you learned. "Rebooting Tech Culture: How to Ignite Innovation and Build Organizations Where Everyone Can Thrive." Tell us a bit more about the book.

Well, so I love tech. I mean, I told you about the first one that I found, computer science. And this idea that we can create technology that could positively impact our life is something that has stayed with me since its early days. What has happened, unfortunately, in Silicon Valley is that many companies, it has hardened into myths about meritocracy. And lone geniuses that I think have detracted from doing great work in technology. And let me be clear, these are myths. In actual fact, all of the important technology revolutions that we've seen were done by teams.

I mean, people came together and created visions of a future in technology and came together and did it. And so this book, I interviewed 50 people. Many of them were executive vice presidents, VP of engineering, CTOs from Google, Facebook, and many of them talked about how they approached bringing a culture of inclusivity and innovation to their organization. And so I felt like I could talk about some of the lessons that I learned from the people who are leading technology in a visionary way. It's based on something called the six C's and we can talk more about that. It's, it is, Courage? And creativity? Communication? Confidence Curiosity and community. These are the six C's.

So, and, How do the six C's work into leadership? And I sort of get that, but how does it help leaders build a more inclusive community and actually build more successful teams as well?

Well, The book is all about building a culture. So these are characteristics that as great leaders, many of us want to embody. But a lot of what a leader needs to do is bring these same characteristics to their culture. And so let's start with at the top with innovation or creativity. There's a book by... The former CEO at Pixar that he taught him and Keith at Catmull and yes, who came out of the University of Utah. And, He talks about when you're doing great creative work, you need to make sure that everybody at the table feels like a peer. And so as the leader of an innovative culture, you want to create opportunities for your entire team to suggest ideas. One great example is at AMD, you know, this comes out of the chip industry that I come from. And AMD was always kind of number two to Intel for many years. They have a new CEO, Lisa Su, and her executive vice president, Mark Papermaster. And the two of them created a more creative culture.

I mean, they... They found ways to take ideas from their entire team. They focused on execution too. And they created a new set of products. That I mean, as you know, with the AI work that's going on now, They're part of what's revolutionizing our future. The thing about Mark and Lisa is that they were inclusive from the very earliest days. AMD had a very inclusive culture.

So people who worked there really felt like they could suggest ideas and at least some of them, if they had merit, were included in those final products. And I think that's a great example of how you create a culture of creativity. Curiosity is a second part about this innovation because if you think about innovation, Creating a culture. You want everybody on your team to be looking around and listening to podcasts like yours and finding ideas everywhere and bringing them back to the product that you're creating together.

I love talking to new people and learning about all these new ideas. It's one of the reasons that I started a podcast. I need to not just collect the ideas for myself, but really share them. Otherwise, it's only my own curiosity.

Still, I think these are, if you talk about those six C's, they're probably, if you ask any leader, there are things that they understand that they should embody, maybe want to embody, but the step going from there to actually doing that is quite a challenge. A difficult or challenging step.

So which of the six do you think most leaders struggle with the most today?

Well, so one of the things that I learned as I was researching my book is that many tech cultures are not that creative. So I'd like to start with that because If you think about it, there's this command and control. Approach that many, especially larger corporations bring to their And if you really are looking at technology innovation, if you really are looking at changing the world and bringing a completely different approach to technology, You need to be much more open to ideas that are coming from many different places. The other C that I will just highlight is communication. Because...

I mean, I'm an engineer and many of the people who work on these products are engineers and they famously do not like to talk about their ideas. They just... They just like to develop them. And so developing the skill set to communicate your ideas to your boss, I mean, to the, you know, to the CTO in your organization, communicating them to your team. Communicating them to the world.

I mean, this is a skill just like anything else. And it's really important for leaders. To help their entire team learn to communicate.

So, and if you're a more junior leader or you really want to get... Or better at your leadership and then grow these skills, What's the kind of advice that you give people? Where did they start and how did they actually, because on paper it all looks nice, but then self-development is still... Art. What kind of advice do you give to people?

Well, staying on the theme of communicating, You need to speak up. You're sitting down a meeting, you have an idea and so many people just keep that idea to themselves. In the book, I talked about Kevin Scott. Who's the CTO at Microsoft. And he tells the story about how he's an introvert.

So he would sit at these meetings and not say anything. And as he became more senior, CTO and VP of engineering, whenever he looked like he was going to say something, the whole room stopped talking. And he learned that there were people in that room that just like him were an introvert. And so he learned to call on them. He would actually ask them to contribute.

I mean, that was one of the ways that he developed the skills of his team. I... I do think that one of the things that leaders think about is how different their team is.

I mean, confidence is another one. Developing a culture of confidence is not a simple thing to do. You can develop confidence in yourself, but what you want to do is have all your team members be able to speak up but exude that confidence that I know what I'm talking about. And that just takes practice. It's like anything else. It's a skill.

Yeah, that sounds hard. I think a lot of us even building confidence for ourselves already is difficult. We're all somewhere insecure.

So building that in our teams is... A lot harder and requires a lot of leadership skills, I'm sure. I did want to get back a little bit to the two myths that you talked about, meritocracy and the lone genius. What are they and why are they so persistent? Why did they stick around?

Well, so, I mean, going back to Silicon Valley that we were talking about, I mean. Many of the icons Excuse me. Tech icons that I know here. They say that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. End. For them and for people who look like them, it often is.

I mean, famously, the PayPal mafia, which includes many of the tech pros that we hear about, like Elon Musk and Trump. And read I mean, several others that are very quite well known now. Just say there's a meritocracy here, but when they chose their team, they chose people that look just like them. And you see that myth continue forward in Silicon Valley. Ask anybody that doesn't look like the white... Excuse me. And jam. I And you will find that they don't feel like it's a meritocracy. They feel like it's very challenging to have their ideas listened to.

I mean, for example, VC funding is about 5% into female-led So it's radically different in terms of the kinds of places that meritocracy really is based. True. And so, for leaders and for investors. Keeping a more open mind about what costs to take great technology is really what it's about. The lone genius, I mean, there's been a lot of books, including by Walter Isaacson, that debunks this myth of the lone genius, but it is still very true. People feel like there's this one person at their company that if they don't allow them to contribute, the company will fail. And I've heard many stories of, you know, abusive people behavior of all kinds of behavior that just is not appropriate. And that is the problem of believing that there's only one genius that will make or break your company.

So. Those are the two myths that is part of what I wanted to debunk with this book.

So, and if we're, leading a team, what I think it's, well, like you said, especially in the tech world, it's quite pervasive. We see all these long geniuses at the top and When we talk about those companies, we only talk about the leader and not the amazing engineers that work there, which probably persists the myth. What can we actually do to break it down in our own teams and to get rid of those?

Well, you, I mean, you have a particularly, way that you can contribute because you could have people come on your podcast that are not the top lone genius that everybody hears about. And hear the stories of people who are making a huge difference.

I mean, that's one of the places where I feel like we can all make a difference is that we highlight the work. Of the group of people highlight the work of the team.

I mean, I mentioned AMD. I mean. Both Mark and Lisa talk extensively about their team when they're covered. And so I think that that's one of the things that leaders can do. Another hot topic is the Zoox card that just came out by Amazon. The head of that is a woman named Aisha Evans. And she, I mean, she joined Zoox and has really taken it to a new level of impact. But she always talks about the team. It's not just her. She talks about all the people contributing. When you hear her.

Interviewed. That's probably the biggest thing is make sure that your team is seen. Each of your team members is seen and it's not just about... You as the long leader, it's how you talk about your work.

Well, yeah, if you're the lone leader and you want to change that, I mean... The issue is, of course, that You...

And for the book, you said you had quite a number of interviews with tech executives. You had this survey of around a thousand people. What were the results of that survey and how did that shape your book?

Well, it was great because I sent out to interview many of the leaders in tech, but I wanted to have the voices of the engineers. And so that was the reason I did the survey and I was very pleased. It was 50 men, women from a very diverse set of companies. And You see some of the same characteristics women Didn't... Often didn't feel like they knew how to advance, where men were much more likely to feel like they knew what they needed to do to get that next promotion.

So you saw some gender-based differences. You saw some of the people that responded If you were from an underrepresented group, you were much more likely to feel like you didn't belong, that you couldn't contribute. And so we saw some of those kinds of results from the survey, and I wanted to be able to talk about that in the book.

Yeah. So, and then I think this comes on to my next question. You mentioned in the book that we often overlook talented candidates because we're looking for that one person. And I think you said in Selling a Valley, but it happens everywhere that we try to hire people or hire a team of all the same people because we know that we have this one person in mind with this one skill and we want to hire them for the team. But I think you talked about rethinking the skills that an organization actually needs and what talent looks like and where to find it. What does that mean? How do you do that?

Well, you need to understand the skills that actually help you get the product out the door. And, you know, if you're talking about from a technical expertise, you need to look at Voice recognition that doesn't recognize women's voices.

I mean, crazy things or does a much worse job with women's voices. So there's some technical characteristics that you need to build into your product. But... You also want to look at the product itself and who your customer is. Famously, the iPhone, when it was first launched, it was meant to fit into a pocket of a male engineer.

I mean, that's what it was made to do. They're But then there's also, there's the tax skills themselves. There's once again, it's... How the product is evaluated.

So having people that are part of your team that can provide different voices. I mean, Right now, we see this with AI.

I mean, there's products that are released that have some pretty serious Consequences And If you had people on the team that represented those different customer bases. You would find much earlier in the product cycle the problems that your current product has.

I mean, so for example, years ago, Amazon had a recruiting tool that it used all this data about who it recruited. And it became incredibly biased because All the people they had hired in the past were men.

So when it went to hire people, it was looking for... People that were consistent with his past.

So it actually killed the product at the time. This was a number of years ago. And I mean, you see things like that right now with the new AI tools where they don't quite work for certain segments. And so that's one of the reasons you want a broad team.

Yeah. And my own experience with that, I think it's slowly getting better. But about two years ago, I was trying to generate this image of a CTO.

I mean... CTOs probably, I mean, 70, 80% are men, 20, 30% are women. If you ask an AI to generate that image, always male, right? You will never get a female image back. Even if any of you ask it to, it has no idea what to do or how to create that picture. It's so weird. It's very difficult for an AI to generate that image. In my world, it's not perfectly balanced, but at least there is a balance between my...

It's such a great example, Mark, because it is true. That's exactly what I'm talking about. When you try and look at, you predict the future based on all the past, it's always, I mean, you're right, CTOs, pretty much all men there's a few there's some pretty spectacular ctos that are women but It's still pretty uncommon.

Yeah. And I'm trying to bring some of them on as well. Actually, just because I didn't feel what I wanted them for January.

So really looking forward to that one. Good. Okay.

So trying to build that balance here. But still, you learn on the one hand for over-reliance on data and fixing culture. And I understand that because data has a lot of bias that maybe we shouldn't be looking for. On the other side, we have human intuition but that's very biased.

I mean, as humans, we tend to be very biased. How do we fix that?

Well, I.

Mean, so if you go back to what your creativity and curiosity, I mean, you... You aren't going to be able to fix it out of the gate.

I mean, because we all walk in with our biases. I mean, I know certainly I've watched myself RUN! Fully and completely into my own biases. When you see somebody that looks a little different than you expected them to, and the real... Progress is that I can at least see my biases in real time when they're happening, and so I don't have to act on them. And so I do.

I mean, the point of my book is, yes, you have intuition. I mean, somebody with intuition is often because they've been working in the field for a lot of years. And so they have some intuitive ideas that. We should listen to. But they may or may not be the great idea. Data, once again, I mean, if you look at data, it will help inform any decision that you make going forward. But if you open it up to your group, I mean, if you have a team of, I was just speaking to a group of 25,000 people, some of these people will have ideas that are going to be unique. To your product.

I mean, they may be working on an infrastructure part that they have some creative ideas about how to do it differently, or they may have an idea about the product. So it's really providing a way in which ideas can, be surfaced and evaluated and considered. I go back to curiosity too, because if I'm, One of my favorite people is the CEO of Open Water and she goes to different fields.

You know, she takes, she's, she has, she takes electrical engineering and physics and computing. And she takes ideas from these different disciplines and that has been part of the product that they offer, which is in the health space with sensors.

So I do think that that's ways in which you can break through the biases of your AI as well as your own biases. Okay.

And I think there's a lot of leaders that do want to increase their impacts, that want to grow, become better leaders. But in the end, we are as leaders measured by the results. How much do you think, and maybe you have stories? But inclusive culture actually improves those results.

Improves the product results?

The outcome are basically the results that a leader has measured, like which can be like product outputs. It could be, right. Anything that leaders get measured against business impact.

Well, I think so. The book is filled with different stories about people that included the more inclusivity.

I mean, I've already mentioned AMD, which I think did exactly what you were saying. Alan Eustace was the head of search at Google for many years, and he always brought his curiosity both to the product, but to the team. And so as he, as you know Google search became more and more impactful in our everyday lives, he was very much committed to listening to ideas from his entire team. He was very supportive of people putting themselves forward for promotions that often he found that people, he saw the good ideas in them. They didn't realize that they could be the next generation leader.

So what he saw was his job was encouraging them to apply for a promotion, to put themselves forward to a promotion. And he saw the results in the product that he was leading at the time, Google search.

Nice.

So stepping up. We talked about AI a little bit already, but I do want to get into it a bit more because you're on the board of AI4ALL and I saw one of your posts yesterday. Tell us about what AI4ALL is and what it does.

AI4ALL, it was a non-profit. It came out of Stanford. Fei-Fei Li, who I'm sure you know, and her student, Olga Rogikowsky, and Rick... There was three founders and they came out of Stanford. We really believe that We want to create the next generation of AI leaders. And we started with students.

I mean, we're taking students. We started first with high school students. Now we work mostly with undergraduate students and we're creating this set of students that we expect to be the next part of our next AI leaders. Companies are supporting it because they both want to support these students growing up and hiring them. But There's ethical AI is built into everything that we do.

So right now, as technology always goes through this phase where you want to focus completely on the technical aspects of a product. And with AI, we need to think about it ethically throughout everything that we do. And that's part of what we hope to do with AI.

For All. And we see a lot of So not unethical behavior, but we said a lot of issues that AIs have that maybe isn't the best output for the humans that are using them.

So how can these leaders actually, what do you teach them or what do they learn that could change that?

Well, so, I mean... Yes, we've all seen some of these product features that At least certainly I don't believe in it. But think about this. If you have these young leaders who were part of that team, And they were doing some of the qualification of the product.

I mean, it's speaking up. And I have to say that we do see this in some of the AI companies, Anthropic. Has made this a commitment from its earliest days. And so it's both focused on the technical expertise, but in being more ethical and then holding itself accountable to its customers.

So I do think that at least some leaders see this as important. And part of what AI4ALL will provide increasing numbers of people who can be part of that Next.

Generation. And there's a lot of, I'd say, normal tech leaders, the people that aren't working to build the LLMs, but that are working in regular technology organizations or in startups that are implementing AI that are just built or using AI models in their organizations. What can those leaders or even the boards and executives of those businesses do to make sure that their AI is ethical? That's.

A great question. And it depends a lot on the product. But there is increasingly numbers of places where you can go and find people Yeah.

You know, ideas and test your AI against some of these up and coming ideas ethical scripts that tell you whether or not this caused a problem. And What I see is that some of the AI companies are rushing out the door.

I mean, there's this crazy competition that's happening right now. And so I do think that Some of them are skipping some of the steps and we see the consequences of that. But what the leaders can do is just pay attention, make this a priority, make sure that the people who work on their team know that it's a priority and make sure that as you get ready to release it, that you're testing for some of the corner cases that cause.

Harm. Incredible advice. I think a lot of leaders could take that advice to heart because there is a lot of risk with AI and even implementing a standard AI application within your business. Yes.

Like recruiting that we already talked about. Right. Going back to your personal life, one of the things that you said is that your only regrets from this past year is not taking enough risks.

So give us some examples. Why did you say that?

Well, so I mean to... So I do think that taking risks is something that has been at the heart of my story.

You know, starting with going to graduate school and just leaving everything behind. I didn't even... I had never even considered going to graduate school. Going to Silicon Valley, I was at a startup where I was employee number four. And writing a book was a big risk.

I mean, I knew nothing about writing a book. And so Setting down and figuring out how to do that, I mean, it pushed away my own... My own fears.

I mean, I struggle mightily with imposter syndrome today. And, Every very senior woman I know suffers from imposter syndrome, as do many men. And so I want to do, I mean, getting back to what's most important to me.

I mean, that's what I focus on right now. The book was a message that I wanted to do. To say you can do it differently. We can approach technology development differently and you can do that.

So that's really what I wanted to say.

Nice. And it's incredible, I think, for a lot of people listening and for me that even people at your level with your experience and everything that you've done and achieved over the years still suffer from imposter syndrome when they go and do something. Else something outside of their comfort zone.

So I think it's comforting for a lot of us here as well.

Well, thank you. Yes. Yes. People don't talk about it, but it is part of more people than you might imagine.

Yeah, I fully recognize it as well. So starting a podcast is out there for me as well. It gets better after 10 episodes, but absolutely. And especially then getting to talk to people like you as well. It doesn't help the imposter syndrome, but it's getting more and more helpful. That's good. If you're a Giving advice to rising tech leaders now. Basically, they want to be, they're still junior. They still have to learn. There is so much to learn about leadership, about I think everything in your book, but there are so many books on so many topics. What's like the best two three piece of advice that you give them to just grow, be visible, be heard, be impactful.

The most important advice I can give is to embrace your own courage and to go for it. I mean, all of us have these moments where an opportunity is presented to us or that we hear about an opportunity and it feels like I can't possibly do that. And you need to just embrace your own courage and go for it anyway.

So, yeah. That to me is the most important thing that you can Yes.

Do. Knowing what needs to be done and doing it anyway, even if it's really uncomfortable sometimes. Yes. Sally, it's been absolutely incredible having you here. I loved all your advice. At the book, we're going to absolutely share the book and your personal website in the show notes. But apart from that, where can people go and find out more about you or just about rebooting tech culture in general?

Well, you can find me. I have a website, tellywhitney.com. It's pretty easy to find. I have a unique name.

So if you search It comes up pretty quickly. I post pretty regularly on LinkedIn.

So you can find me there. And I'd love to hear from you if you are on LinkedIn.

So that's probably the best places to find me.

Thank you so much, Sally. It's been absolutely incredible hearing your story and hearing about your book.

Best of luck to you, Mark. Thank you for having me.

As we wrap up another episode of the CTO Compass, thank you for taking the time to invest in you. The speed at which tech and AI develop is increasing. Demanding a new era of leadership tech. Leaders that can juggle team and culture, code and infra, cyber and compliance. All whilst working closely with board members and stakeholders. We're here to help you learn from others, set your own goals and navigate your own journey. And until next time. Keep learning, keep pushing and never stop growing.