Natalie Van Gelder

I think finding a balance, truly. Finding a balance outside of work is critical because people think of sales and they think of car salesman, or they think this is a very difficult, very thankless, very ongoing 24-7 type of job. And if you can't find a way to free your mind and to give yourself the ability to sit inside the confines of the pressure cooker, you'll burn out. Being able to find those outlets that provide you that time to sort of self-reflect, or perhaps not think of anything and just focus on what you're doing - that's incredibly valuable.

Stand by the convictions and things that you know about, and don't let others demean the power that you have and the ideas that you bring to the table. I'm generally the only woman in the room, or one of very few. It's very male-dominated, and there are a lot of, especially when you work in startups, there are a lot of contrarian voices in the room. Women, by our nature, are not meant to be as confrontational as men. Men will try to drown out the voice or make their voice more heard than a woman, and that doesn't mean that a woman's idea is anything less. You need to develop a thick skin. Don't let others make their voice more heard than yours just because they're louder or more confrontational.

I think the challenge is that the AI market is moving so quickly that I don't think there's any mastery. It's just a matter of, can you keep up with the newest developments? Everybody claims to be an expert, but the market is moving so quickly. Most of us have already incorporated it into our daily lives as a part of optimizing our business rules to be able to do things faster and gain insight more quickly so that we can spend more time on strategizing rather than the mundane work that we have to do. The opportunity is that you can choose to be at the forefront of it. Nobody has mastery because it's just like a huge wave that's just sucking up people as they go. We don't know if it's going to continue to build or crash. Being able to dedicate yourself to continuous education around it, and being open to listening to new ideas is critical, because as soon as we solve a problem, we create one as well. It's about being able to go with the flow and to dedicate yourself to understanding and learning as much as possible so that you don't get left behind. You have so much opportunity, but we also get very busy in our daily lives - how can you learn about it in an optimal way that allows you to incorporate it to move yourself forward?

Being honest and transparent is really important to me, and it's tough in business. A lot of people are not honest and transparent, and not because they choose to be - it becomes part of whatever the makeup is of their job. But being open, being honest, being responsible for what you say and what you do is critical. And then also how you treat people - I think that one gets left out a lot because everybody's chasing something, everybody's on a deadline, and I have seen a resurgence in bad behavior come into the workforce that I thought was gone long ago. That type of engagement, regardless of if it's male to female, female to male, male to male, so on and so forth - the toxicity around being able to behave badly hurts everybody in an organization, period. As I used to tell my son when he was little, treat people the way you want to be treated. That couldn't be more true now in business. If you are deceitful and you are mean, it's gonna boomerang. It comes back. It's karma.