Francesca Augustine

I attribute my success to my parents, who both had very unusual paths and taught me perseverance and creative problem-solving from an early age. My father grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, dropped out of school in 8th grade, joined the military at a young age and was sent to Korea, then came back and used the GI Bill to go to college and get his master's degree. My mother grew up in Jones County, Georgia, graduated from high school but never got her degree, and came to Miami to be a waitress. They met when my father handed my mother a duffel bag full of money to put in the bank for him, and she did it. They started their own business called Interaction Research Institute, working with companies like IBM and government contracts out of our basement. I grew up watching them persevere, not because they were the norm or followed the rules, but because they really knew what they were doing. When I was young, I even answered phones and pretended there were multiple departments to make the business seem bigger. These were lessons really early on about how this works. I've been channeling both of my parents throughout this whole experience with Neftwork. My mother actually built distributed ledger technologies with IBM in the 80s, long before the tech bros were doing it, though she got no credit because it was all the men who took the credit. She taught me to look at blockchain as a technology that has capability, not just as crypto.

The best career advice I ever received wasn't meant to be advice, but it changed everything for me. When I was 16, I was working as a breakfast cook at a 5-star bed and breakfast, making $6 an hour. There was another high school girl working with me who decided she wanted to quit, but instead of just quitting, she decided to ask for double her pay - $12 an hour - thinking maybe she could get unemployment if they fired her. She marched in and demanded double her pay, and they just gave it to her without a blink. I watched this happen and I was like, oh, they will pay you as little as they can, but if you're valuable, demand it. This is especially important for women, because women are always waiting for someone to see how hard their work is. I've been in positions where I've said, this is where my value is, this is what I need to see, and they were like, we're gonna go in a different direction. You have to be prepared for that. My friend was ready to walk away. The next year, my old boss started talking to my new boss saying that letting me go was the worst mistake he ever made. Even if that one job says no, the fact that they recognize the absence is important. I'm not devaluing myself, and if they don't give me what I deserve, then they feel the difference.

I'm going to use an anecdote to answer this. When I was 5, I had learned in school that you can do anything, and I said to my dad, I think I want to be a doctor, but women can't be doctors. I said this because I'd never met a doctor who was a woman. My dad told me no, you can be whatever you want, and went on about how women can do anything and I can be a doctor if I want to. As he was saying that, my childhood best friend, who was also 5, was walking up the stairs and said she wanted to be a doctor too, and I told her, yeah, you can't because you're a woman. The advice is this: yes, you can do anything you want, but society is constantly going to tell you that you can't, and that's hard. But it's just noise. That noise can often be yourself, right? Like, oh, I don't see any other female tech CEOs who started off as an artist making it. But it's just noise. Ignore the noise.