Machiavelli for Women by Stacey Vanek Smith

Author:Stacey Vanek Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

NEHA NARKHEDE: True Grit

Neha Narkhede is one of the most successful humans in the world. Even more impressive, her success has been achieved in an arena that is notoriously difficult for women: tech. She is the founder of one of the legendary Silicon Valley “unicorns”—that is, a privately held company that is valued at more than a billion dollars. There are only a few hundred of them in the world, and 90 percent of them were founded by men. Neha is in the mythical 10 percent of unicorn founders who are female… a unicorn among unicorns! She is the founder of Confluent, a data-streaming technology firm that is currently valued at around $4.5 billion. Before that, Neha worked her way up the corporate chain at LinkedIn.

Neha grew up in India, where her parents encouraged her to dream big. When she was very young, tooling around on her first computer, playing games, and using Microsoft Paint, Neha’s parents began telling her stories about successful women from all walks of life, “from Indira Gandhi, who was prime minister of India, to Indra Nooyi, the executive of PepsiCo, to Kiran Bedi, the first female to join the Indian police,” Neha recalls. “Ceiling crashers. Women who were truly paving the way.” Neha says hearing those stories as a girl was a crucial factor in her drive and success as an adult.

Neha came to the United States for college and started working in tech after graduation. She saw the gender problems in the industry almost immediately: “You look around and you suddenly realize you’re amongst very, very few women.” Neha noticed that as she moved up in the industry, the number of women got even smaller, and she could easily see why: “You get the opportunities you deserve much later than a man. Men are evaluated much more on potential. Women are evaluated on experience, and it takes a while to gather that experience.” Neha ran into this the first time she asked for a promotion—to lead a team of engineers. “There were some initial questions and pushback: ‘Well, you know, it’s very hard’ or ‘You’ve never done it before.’ ” Neha saw that the men she worked with did not get this kind of pushback. In fact, they were actively supported and encouraged, and they thrived and took more risks as a result.

Neha saw that this culture in tech was not only slowing women down; it was also making them question themselves. “A lot of us have the impostor syndrome,” she says. “But it’s a lot more magnified for women because of the external skepticism that feeds into it.”

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