Trupti Bahl

I attribute my success to having a very unwavering work ethic. I come from a family of immigrants - my parents both came on a student visa from India, first to Canada and then worked their way to New York. They worked incredibly hard to support their family, and education was of the utmost importance to them. Seeing how they worked so hard to provide for my siblings and me, and how much love they put into what they did for our family, helped me become the person I am today because they instilled those values in me as I was growing up. I grew up with the value that nothing is supposed to just be handed over to me - it was something I have to work for. It's all about creating relationships and bringing my authenticity to the table, being my authentic self, and asking what can I do to help another person. If I can be there to help somebody solve their problem and come in with a solution mindset, I'm already there helping to solve a problem. I did that from day one when I started, whether in school or my first job. I always tried to come in to any task to help solve the problem, and it was always something that was like a challenge to me, fun, almost like a game I was trying to solve for. I also want to set a good example for my kids and lead by example for them. If they see that I'm doing the best that I can and trying to be a good role model, trying to do what I can from a corporate standpoint but also from a community standpoint, and showing kindness towards others, they can see that through my actions, not just through my words.

The best career advice I ever received came from one of my former managers who has since passed away from cancer. He helped me convert from my engineering role into customer success, and one of the things he advised me on was that a job is a job, but really, one of the things to focus on is the relationships I'm creating throughout my journey. It's not just always about the opportunity or job that's in front of me, because I was so young and just starting out. But it's all of the relationships that I'm going to be creating throughout my entire journey that's going to matter the most, because the world is small and industries are always connected. You never know who you're going to run into, who you're going to need, and who's going to need you. So it's always really important to keep the relationships going. The titles are always nebulous - at one point, there's going to be someone that I'm reporting into that I'll have a higher title than later, and there might be a time where the person that was reporting into me might have a higher title than me. Those things will come and go. But really, it's how you work on building the trust, how you support the people, and how you create those meaningful connections. That's what's going to really matter. I feel like that advice really shaped how I lead my teams, how I network, how I approach my business today, and how I try to create an impact within the communities that I work with. It helps me approach things when I'm stepping into rooms with the mindset of I'm here to grow, I'm here to build a relationship, and I'm not trying to come in with a mindset of I know everything in the room. I'm here to listen and learn from the individual, and I'm only hoping that I can bring something of value and leave that room making that person feel something good afterwards as well. I want to bring that authenticity. I was very fortunate to have had somebody help me with that from the very onset of my career.

Women today, and this goes for women of all ages, feel like they have to take everything on. It's not the way it used to be back with even my mom's generation, where the roles were very split between men and women. In the last 10 to 20 years, women have come so far in what they are able to do, but women still have so much more now to take on because the traditional side of what women still do and the biological part of how women are built still hasn't gone away. In fact, we're doing so much more than what women, even our mothers' ages, were doing. What I would say to women entering the industry today is to really trust their voice early on. If they're not feeling 100% ready to take on a certain opportunity, they can work on prioritizing or do a checklist of what's most important to them at that moment and go through a priority list. They don't have to do everything all in one shot. Right now, it seems like a lot of people have this fear of missing out and want to take on so much all at once that everybody is going through this burnout process, and it's just too much. But if they could just take on a couple of things that are really meaningful for them, that's going to go so much of a longer way than taking on a hundred things because they feel like they have to do it all. I would encourage them to focus on those things that are most meaningful, do that first, and then build on the other things they want to take on down the road. There's still time, so not to feel like they're going to miss out on everything, but put a plan together for all of it. It's tough - we put a lot of pressure on ourselves as women, and we do a lot, and we're constantly feeling like we have to do it all.