Naima Jinnah

I attribute it to a willingness to build things from scratch and to stay close to the details without losing the bigger picture. Every role I have taken, three times as a Chief Operating Officer and now as the owner of my own businesses, has meant walking into ambiguity and creating the systems, the team, and the accountability that were not there yet. I have never been afraid of the unglamorous operational work, the models, the process, the hard financial calls, because that is what turns a vision into something real. I also learned early to translate between people who do not naturally speak the same language, the technical teams and the business, founders and investors, and being that bridge has opened almost every door in my career. And honestly, resilience: I have raised capital in difficult markets, steered an acquisition, and built a business from an empty site, and each time, the willingness to keep going mattered as much as any single skill.

The best advice I ever received was to run toward the problems no one else wanted to own. Early on, a mentor told me the fastest way to become indispensable is to pick up the messy, cross-functional problems that fall between departments and make them yours. I took it to heart, and it is a big part of how I became a COO: I kept volunteering for the hard operational messes, and over time that became my expertise. It taught me that meaningful growth rarely comes from staying in your lane. It comes from being useful where it is hardest.

Build real operational and financial fluency, and never let anyone convince you it is not your job to understand the numbers. In operations and leadership, credibility comes from knowing how the business actually works, so learn to read a P&L, understand the technology, and ask your question in the room even when you are the most junior person there. Take the roles that scare you a little, the ones without a clear playbook, because that is where you grow fastest and where you prove what you can do. Find the people who will advocate for you when you are not in the room, and then do the same for the women coming up behind you. Your competence will take you far, but community and sponsorship carry you further.

The biggest opportunity, without question, is AI. We are shifting from treating AI as a tool bolted onto how we already work to rethinking how organizations should be built when intelligence is part of the operation itself. For operators, that is exciting: the people who can pair real business judgment with fluency in these new tools will get to redesign how companies run. The challenge is doing it thoughtfully. It is easy to chase automation for its own sake and lose the human context, the judgment, relationships, and accountability, that actually makes a business work. What I care about is using AI to take the manual drudgery off people's plates so they can spend their time on the things only people can do. Moving quickly on the technology while keeping people and good judgment at the center is the real work ahead.

A few values guide me in both. The first is integrity: I want the way I do the work to hold up to scrutiny, so I would rather be honest and direct than easy, and I keep my word whether the stakes are large or small. The second is building things that last, not chasing a quick win but creating systems, teams, and businesses that keep working after I step back, which to me is what real ownership means. The third is resilience paired with optimism, the belief that most problems are solvable if you stay in the room long enough and keep showing up, and that belief has carried me through hard markets, an acquisition, and building a business from the ground up. And underneath all of it is care for people: my family, my team, and the women coming up behind me. I try to lead with generosity, to advocate for others when they are not in the room, and to remember that the point of building anything is the people it serves.