Real Talk | Reimagining Work

What do you get when you mix a pandemic, hundreds of social and cultural uprisings throughout the world, a record number of acres destroyed by fires in California, and an increasing divide in the American political system?

The year 2020.

As each new situation evolves, businesses are faced with new questions, expectations, and opportunities: how they support their employees and community, how they can impress change in a flawed system, and how they can continue to learn and grow.

Sarah Milstein is the Sr. Director of Engineering at Mailchimp and comes with 20 years of experience in tech and media, leading startups in setting strategy, developing products, and improving operations. On this episode of Real Talk, Sarah will join Laura Crescimano, co-founder and principal of SITELAB Urban Studio, Tricia Wang, a global tech ethnographer, and Kathryn Finney, CEO, Founder and named one of the most influential women in tech by Inc. Magazine to address ideas and advice for business leaders of today.

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In a time when listening is more important than speaking, we want to amplify the voices of those who are influencing change. Real Talk is focused on bringing people together through different channels to share, inspire, and create. It features leaders respected in our communities for being the first to adapt and innovate in today’s rapidly evolving world. From a wide range of industries, each episode will feature a personal perspective, advice on leadership, and ideas for shaping our future.

Sarah Milstein is currently Senior Director of Engineering at Mailchimp and site director for the company’s startup Brooklyn office. She was previously Head of Sales & Marketing for 18F, a young tech consultancy within the federal government. Before that, Sarah was CEO and co-founder of Lean Startup Productions, a successful media startup, and co-author of The Twitter Book, a popular guide. She has also held senior management positions at O’Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb, where she launched and ran profitable media properties, and has also held high-level roles with a number of tech startups.

Named by Inc Magazine as one of the most influential women in tech, Kathryn Finney has made her mark as an entrepreneur, social media visionary, “women in” advocate, investor, writer, and television correspondent. A White House Champion of Change and a past member of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (NACIE) appointed by the Obama Administration, Kathryn is the founder of digitalundivided (DID), a social enterprise that fosters economic growth through the empowerment of Black and Latina women entrepreneurs using innovation as a tool.

Laura Crescimano is co-founder and leader of SITELAB urban studio. Laura is an expert on urban design and entitlements, with an emphasis on the public realm and social power of space. Designing both processes and places, Laura’s projects range from Pier 70, where she led a multidisciplinary team through the design and community process for a 35-acre mixed-use waterfront development in a historic industrial district in San Francisco, to leading the design for Google’s first proposed mixed-use neighborhood located at their headquarters in Mountain View.

With astronaut eyes and ethnographer curiosity, Tricia Wang is obsessed with discovering the unknown. She is a global tech ethnographer living at the intersection of data, design, and digital. Her passion is to help organizations uncover how our bias towards the quantifiable comes at the expense of profits and people, and how to fix it. She is the co-founder of Sudden Compass, a consulting firm that helps enterprises move at the speed of their customers by unlocking new growth opportunities in their big data with human insights in their digital transformation.