Being too vulnerable can make you a weak leader. Here's what you should do instead.
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Heather Shoemaker was used to being the only woman in the room, both from her experience in graduate school and later working in artificial intelligence, where women make up only a quarter of the industry. But she didn’t expect the blatant gender bias she experienced when attempting to scale her company Language I/O, an A.I.-powered SaaS platform that provides real-time, multilingual customer support in more than 100 languages.
"I talked to so many people that were just a nightmare," she says. "I don't know why they think what I'm doing is easy."
Shoemaker could tell that the VC firms were not used to seeing a woman, especially one with technical skills as opposed to an MBA. During one meeting in Silicon Valley, a partner learned that Shoemaker was pitching hard tech and had written the original code herself. He asked, "How hard can it be to replicate what you coded?" Shoemaker says--insinuating that if a woman programmed the software, it must be simple for any other developer to copy, making it less valuable.
Read on for more about how she dodged the crude insults and got the funding her company needed. | | | | | | | | | | | Here's what else I'm reading today: | | | This newsletter was written by Inc. associate editor Brit Morse. How are we doing? Send us ideas and feedback on Twitter.
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