Initially, I aimed to be just another technical co-founder and preferred to stay behind the scenes, avoiding the spotlight and public discussions. I often felt that my opinions were irrelevant and not worth sharing publicly. I believed that simply having an opinion didn’t justify speaking up.

Women in Tech Leadership Roles

However, as I engaged in conversations with friends and colleagues, I realized that my position came with a responsibility to address certain issues. One significant issue is my role as a female CTO co-founder. During a recent discussion with a friend, it struck me how remarkable it is that women in the U.S. only gained the right to vote a little over a century ago, in 1920. Despite entering the workforce in large numbers starting in the 1940s, women still do not occupy 50% of major stakeholder positions in significant businesses. It’s rare to see half of the countries at the UN led by women, and it’s even more uncommon to find an Asian woman serving as a technical co-founder.

Throughout my career, I’ve had several coaching calls with other industry leaders.

Inevitably, they asked if being a woman had affected my ability to lead or altered others’ perceptions of me. I understood that these questions were not intended to be discriminatory but rather considered gender as one of many factors. Nevertheless, it bothered me that my gender should matter at all. This question shouldn’t even arise. That’s when I realized that to normalize women in technical leadership positions, I couldn’t remain passive and silent. I needed to speak up.

I firmly believe that leadership positions should be awarded based on experience and merit, regardless of gender. However, the image of today’s leaders serves as an inspirational model for the youth. On several occasions, when I revealed that I was a female technical co-founder, I sensed hesitation from the other side. I despise the notion that my gender or appearance should influence business discussions.

Despite my inclination to stay quiet and focus solely on technology, I recognized the importance of using my position at OdeCloud to inspire young girls. I want to show them that they, too, can be successful and not limit themselves. This realization motivated me to start writing on behalf of OdeCloud. My co-founders and I founded this company with the belief that we could make the world a better place through our resilience and determination. We wanted to be the change we wished to see.

Through my work, I hope to demonstrate that women can excel in technical leadership roles and to encourage a more inclusive and diverse future in the tech industry.

The post A Voice from the Shadows: Vanielle Lee’s Journey to Inspire Women in Tech appeared first on OdeBlog.

I often told myself that freelancing would be my limit. It was hard to imagine being a leader, let alone a co-founder of a venture like OdeCloud. However, my perspective began to change when I realized the potential impact of a platform like OdeCloud.

So, I want to discuss some things I have learned over the years while attempting to build this company from the ground up with the other co-founders, leaders, and engineers on the team.

Building a Business from the Group Up

All in all, I think there is an art in trying to build a platform where you have to balance the following: technical prowess, user happiness, meeting deadlines, balancing technical debt vs. new features, and balancing new features vs. fixing bugs.

And then, outside of that, because a company consists of people working towards a common goal, being able to understand and empathize with the people we work with is crucial. This includes both praising their achievements and empathizing with their mistakes. Furthermore, everyone’s intrinsic motivation is different, and understanding everyone’s motivation is important.

Leading by Example

I have always wanted to lead through positive reinforcement or by example. This sometimes doesn’t always work out with fantastic results, but from my personal experiences, people might listen to you since you are a voice of authority, but it is very hard to motivate them to do more or do fantastic work just because you are their voice of authority. But I do think if you enable the right people and give them enough ownership over a project or let them know that you trust their expertise since that’s what you are hiring them for, then great results are bound to happen.

Leading a Remote Team 

Another detail I want to point out is that as a remote team, we miss out on many social cues. Things like leg movements, where your toes are pointing, if that person is folding their arms and on the defensive when talking to you, if that person is smiling or their slight reaction or the twinge in their movements when you say something. I think one of the reasons why companies like Loom, Around, Slack, and others who build social communication tools for remote teams understand is that despite working remotely through a monitor and camera, at the end of the day, we as humans want to talk and socialize with other humans and experience other human gestures as much as possible since these social cues have been with us since the beginning of time. So rather than just ignoring these cues, you try your best to build these cues into your product.

On other notes, communication is a big topic, especially for me. So there’s the delivery and the message, and then the audience. But what happens when you are on a call where the audience is both technical and non-technical, and you want your message to get across in a timely manner, all while keeping the audience you are talking to engaged and understanding, which is the delivery? I haven’t quite mastered this yet. I think it is a forever battle trying to figure this out as an engineer since there’s no clear function that you can trigger to resolve this issue.

Conclusion

And on that last note, my learning so far at OdeCloud as a technical leader is that the team depends on me for the best technical decisions, but those technical decisions are sometimes hard, sometimes they can cost a lot of money, sometimes they might extend the deadline, and sometimes they will make certain stakeholders happy. But at the end of the day, you have to trust your gut and make the call anyway. Then don’t be afraid to back out and say “sorry” if things didn’t go according to plan. If my intuition backfires on me, then at least I can be honest and upfront with my mistakes.

As mentioned, there is an art to leadership that I am learning every day on the job while building this amazing platform, but the journey has been extremely rewarding, and I feel very fortunate to be able to work on the things that I care about with people who inspire and support me.

The post Leadership Insights from OdeCloud CTO and Co-Founder, Vanielle Lee appeared first on OdeBlog.