‘You adapt or you will be fired’
At that time, a classmate said that this is the industry with the highest starting salary and she was attracted to it. “I was so tired of being poor and I knew I wouldn’t be able to live a poor future,” she recalls.
In the end, the former Intel executive, now 60, chose to major in hardware engineering at the time and has never regretted the decision.
And Bryant has had a turbulent career path spanning several ranks at Intel and Google to NovaSignal, a health technology startup based in Los Angeles, where she is now is the Managing Director.
But Bryant had to work very hard to get great results when starting out as a homeless person, facing gender inequality in the workplace.
Homeless at the age of 18
Four months before she graduated from high school, Bryant’s father asked her to move out. He had a strict rule, by the time she and her sister turned 18, they had to live separately.
“I had to put all my belongings in my Volkswagen Beetle and leave,” she recalls.
She spent the rest of her senior year staying in her sister’s apartment, friends’ houses, and sometimes sleeping in the backseat of her car. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at American River College, a local free community college, and found an apartment near campus.
Bryant said of the whole process: “It was really messy, but I told myself to live well.”
Thus, from a very young age, Bryant had no financial support from his relatives – only his own courage and determination.
First big career
However, looking back on her life, Bryant found that at every stage of her career, she always had someone supporting and helping her.
Bryant worked three jobs as a waiter at two different restaurants and a hostess at another while in college. At one of the restaurants where she worked, a couple used to come every Sunday after church for a snack. They kept asking Bryant to be their waitress, sometimes they waited patiently for 20 minutes to be served by Bryant, because they thought she was quite nice and polite.
When her husband, Bill Baker, learned she was studying to be an engineer, he offered her an internship at Aerojet, a rocket manufacturer and one of the largest employers in Sacramento at the time. that point.
“That job made me a more competitive candidate for Intel – that’s when I realized the real power of having someone help.”
‘You adapt or you will be fired’
When Bryant first joined Intel in 1985, Silicon Valley was in an “era of difficulty and collapse,” she said – a time when women made up just 5.8% of engineers in the US.
Often Bryant was the only woman in the room and quickly realized that in order to fit in, she had to see herself as her male colleagues.
Bryant realized that “the only way to get them to work with me and be successful working with this all-male team is for me to leave them as they are. If I don’t adapt I will be fired”.
That means swearing more, hanging out with coworkers, and buying a BMW with a manual transmission (“engineers would never drive an automatic”).
Before Bryant left Intel in 2017, she held a variety of roles including product line manager and Intel Data Center Group manager.
But throughout her career here, she often asked herself: stay or quit? She loves her job but feels unable to move forward because managers do not give many opportunities to a woman and receive a lower salary than her male counterparts.
However, at the moment, she has two young children and is the main breadwinner of the family. Once again, Bryant used his bravery and continued to strive.
The secret of success
After leaving Intel, Bryant spent a year as chief operating officer of Google Cloud and served as an advisor and board member for several smaller startups before joining NovaSignal as president. and chief executive officer in 2020.
The transition from Fortune 500 companies to leading a startup came from a feeling of insecurity and a desire to have a “legacy” of my own: “I’m not young anymore, so so I wanted to make a really useful contribution to people,” she said. “I thought, ‘If work doesn’t contribute anything to society, the work won’t have much meaning’.
Andy Bryant, former president of Intel and one of her supporters, advised Bryant to do something she had never done before: Lead a startup and help it grow.
NovaSignal uses artificial intelligence (AI), ultrasound and robotics to measure blood flow to the brain, which can help identify blood clots and other neurological abnormalities such as stroke or dementia. According to Crunchbase, NovaSignal has raised more than $120 million.
“This is a job that requires greater empathy,” says Bryant. “We have to empathize with the patients we serve, the clients, the doctors, their standards of care and how to develop them. further develop”.
She also emphasized the importance of being an empathetic leader in order to “retain” people. “I could name each of our 125 employees, know what motivates them and what they need to succeed. A startup like us usually only has one or more people,” she said. two people for each title – so if we lose one, we lose the entire function of that department.”
But the most important skill she has gained from her experience working in senior positions at large corporations like Intel or Google is confidence – even if it sometimes comes down to trying to appear rude. so.
“In the early days of my career, I certainly lacked confidence, like most women in the office,” she says. “But you need to regain your confidence despite the doubt in your heart,” she says. doubt your own abilities and say to yourself “I will win, I will succeed”.
(According to CNBC)
By Business and Marketing
at Blogtuan.info – Source: cafebiz.vn – Read the original article here
