Women in Tech Leader on Diversity and Getting Uncomfortable

Issue No. 1 Winter 2016 USD $15 TheBusinessMagazineforWomen.com 1
AGE OF FIRE
ELAINE LARSEN,
CURRENT WORLD
CHAMPION JET
DRAGSTER
TALKS STEM.
TECH
ERICA BAKER
OF SLACK ON
DIVERSITY AND EQUALITY IN TECH
BUSINESS:
INNOVATION CAN
BE RE-LEARNED
FINANCE:
MONEY DOES
GROW ON TREES
#FEMALEFOUNDERS
TAKE THE STAGE
#WOMENINBUSINESS
ACTION DEFINES YOU
Issue No. 1 Winter 2016 USD $15
TheBusinesMagazineforWomen.com

The Business Magazine
for Women
Issue No. 1
Winter 2016
USD $15
TheBusinesMagazineforWomen.com

If you are like me, you’ll understand what I mean by I just
couldn't read yet another article about women and what
women should do in the business world, written by a
man. I couldn't accept the fact that we, women, are
keywords, to be used after forward slashes (/) on websites
that are tooted to be the main business sites and
publications around. There is only so much you can take
as a woman, and not want to do something about it. I am
tired of not seeing women on the covers of business and
tech magazines. I am tired of having this forced narrative
being fed to us every time we go to the bookstore and
see the row upon row of business magazines featuring
men dressed in bespoke suits, and row upon row of
lifestyle magazines featuring very young women, semi-
naked supermodels mostly. I don’t believe that the world
is made up of only business men and supermodels, and I
don't want to see that in my media anymore. Actually, this
paradigm shift is long overdue.
Women are successful in whatever they chose to pursue,
and that shouldn't be something we have to explain, but
it is. And when we, women, make the money, take charge
and run our lives how we want, we still have to explain to
some women and men in our society that being
successful is not a male only prerogative.
It is time for The Business
Magazine for Women. It is long
overdue. We, women, are half the
world population, yet our voices
tend to be muted and distorted
by the male run media, and by
headlines like: "The love trick that
makes him want you more", or,
"You versus Cellulite", or "Are you
a money nag?". I thought we had
enough.
This magazine is for women and
for men. Women need to hear the
other women's voices. Men need
to see that there is a distinct voice
that has not been heard yet.
Women do business differently.
And every time I talk with a
woman that’s either started her
own business or is working
through taking over a senior
position in the corporate world,
the difference is clear. We run businesses differently than
men. And that works! The Business Magazine for Women
will focus on how women do business, how we start and
run companies, how we care for our constituents, how we
protect our communities, how we ﬁght for our country.
The Business Magazine for Women is the voice of
experts. Every story, every interview, every article is about
an expert in her ﬁeld. The articles are written by women.
The articles are edited by women. It is a Business
Magazine for Women, by women.
We hope you enjoy it and join us on our journey to bring
you the stories of inspiring women in business and tech,
STEM and sports, culture and politics.
With love and respect,
Monica Antohi
Founder and CEO
The Business Magazine for Women
EDITORIAL

#WomeninTech
Erica Baker on
Diversity p.6
#FemaleFounders p.11
#WomeninFinance
CREDIT WARRIOR ON P.46
MONEY
DOES
GROW
ON TREES
P. 50
CONTENTS
#WomeninSTEM
World Champion
Jet Dragster
talks STEM and
comic books p.24
VINA AND WEIRD BAR TALKS P.63
PERSPECTIVES & TEXTURES IN
ENTREPRENEURSHIP P.76
#WomeninBusiness
Innovation can be
re-learned p. 66
9-5 STYLE OR WORK FROM HOME
P.74-75
SO YOU FAILED. NOW WHAT?
TAKE ACTION NOW
SWISS MILLENNIALS. ARE THEY THAT
MUCH DIFFERENT?

“I DON’T WANT
ALLIES.
I WANT
ACCOMPLICES”
- DURETTI HIRPA
WOMEN IN TECH
TheBusinessMagazineforWomen.com

To hear about diversity and equality in tech is one
thing. The word is gotten overused of late. To
deal with those issues every day, is a whole other
thing. Ms. Erica Baker is the Senior Engineer at
Slack Technologies and advocate for diversity
and inclusion in tech, so when she speaks on
these issues, we better pay attention.
I met Ms. Baker at the Wired Business Conference
in NYC. To say that she’s an impressive woman in
person is an understatement. She took the stage
and had a very franc interview with Davey Alba,
staff writer with WIRED. You can see that interview
here. What you cannot see is how the room
reacted. What you cannot see is how the truth of
the reality of the condition of women in tech
reverberated throughout the room, a room filled
with over 1000 people, almost 50% women. The
interview was a bit uncomfortable. Which, like
Erica says, it’s actually a good thing. The infamous
google salary spreadsheet got brought up,
equality vs.
equity, but the
biggest topic
was the
business impact
that equality
and diversity
have on the
business world.
As the
conversation
got on the way,
the room got
cold. Ice cold.
People turned
quiet and were
watching the
interview
happen, and the
entire audience
became very uncomfortable. And you would
have, too. The reality of women in tech is chilling.
Women in tech make up around 25% of the
workforce, according to NCWIT. The somber
numbers come when you talk about diversity in
tech, especially talking about the number of
black women in tech. Facebook has a deplorable
number of minority employees, their black and
hispanic employees, at 2% and 4% respectively.
Slack is fighting the good fight, but it’s more
because of the efforts of Erica Baker that they’re
making a dent and growing their employee
diversity.
“GET COMFORTABLE BEING
UNCOMFORTABLE”
- ERICA BAKER
DIVERSITY AND
QBASIC WITH
ERICA BAKER
OF SLACK
#WOMENINTECH

In a room full of execs from the top tech
companies in Silicon Valley and across the
country, I’m surprised some didn’t walk out when
faced with the reality of those numbers. Ms. Baker
wasn’t there to simply talk on diversity and
inclusion. She brought actual suggestions on how
to combat this “white men only” paradigm. Tools
like increasing empathy! No, really! Not a joke or
soft skills tool. But an actual business tool. She
talked about putting yourself in the shoes of the
one black person, hispanic person, or asian
person in the room in a room full of white men.
Actually think about that scenario, and then start
an actual conversation about increasing diversity
in tech.
The on-stage interview was uncomfortable. The
points made, moving. At the end of that
interview, I ran out of the conference room, and
waited for Ms. Baker to finish, so that I can
actually have a chance to speak with her. And she
was even better in person. Her presence fills the
room, any room she walks in. She is impressive,
and you recognize power and self-assurance in
her, without any traces of conceit. Here’s what we
talked about.
The Business Magazine for Women (TBMfW:)
We are speaking to Erica Baker.
Erica: Hi...
TBMfW: You are Senior Engineer with Slack, and
you’re fighting for diversity & inclusion within the
company and the tech world in general. You’re
trying to bring a lot more women, a lot more
black women into tech. How are you actually
doing that? And how tough is it? Can you breathe
from the responsibility that you're under?
Erica: So, it's not really that hard! People say it’s
so hard. It's not that hard. The problem is that a
lot of companies haven't demonstrated that they
would be a good place for a black woman to
work. A thing that I did recently is a personal
thing, it sounds a little braggy, but there’s a
Facebook group for women of color in tech in
the Bay Area and there are about twenty-five
hundred of us in that group. I said to the people
in this group: you email me or email this address
with the job you want! Go look at their jobs page.
Find which one you want to do. Put your name in
the subject line with the jobs you want in the
body and then you attach your resume and I will
refer you. And I have been referring women of
color ever since. I phrase it to that group in a way
that's like, “I am here, I got in”, right?, and I'm not
going to shut the door behind me! I’m going to
hold the door open and let you all in too. So if
you approach women of color in that way, and
you say that we want you here, they will be more
likely to come to you. Tech companies haven't
been doing a very great job of proving to women
of color that they feel wanted and they're valued,
and so you have to. They have to show up. They
can't just do their same standard recruiting
practices, like: “Oh we're just gonna stand back
and let them come to us”. […] You have to go to
them.
“I DON’T WANT ALLIES.
I WANT ACCOMPLICES”
- DURETTI HIRPA
TBMfW: Alright ,so it's obviously easier to bring
somebody in, once you’re in, once you’re on the
inside.
Erica: So much easier.
#WOMENINTECH

TBMfW: When you're not inside, when you don't
have an insider, when you don't even have a
woman on the inside, in a company where there
are just men, how do you breach that, how do
you get there, how do you get them to see the
other side of tech?
Erica: Alright, that one is tricky because tech is so
network driven that you have to find some way to
get in their network and I'm not sure what that is.
I don't want to advocate any sort of bad
behaviors.
TBMfW: [laugh] No.
Erica: No. Maybe if it's all guys, you don't want to
go work there because they don't know how to
hire a woman. But if you really do, then find
people in your network and I don't just mean
your friends and family. LinkedIn has this thing
where it shows you a friend of a friend and
anybody I look at on LinkedIn, I'm only two steps
away. So taking LinkedIn out of the equation and
doing that with your own network, you’re
probably only two steps away from someone who
is in that company. If you really really really want
to go work there, even though it's just dudes,
figure out those two steps. [laugh]
#WOMENINTECH

TBMfW: Great points. I think a lot of companies
that are men-only would benefit from having a
woman in their midst.
Erica: Oh, yeah. Totally. Yeah, but it’s so hard to
be the first one, right? It is so hard to be that first
woman in the environment and they are all like
“oh, we can't make our jokes in front of her”, and
“oh, we have to go be different in front of her” or,
worst yet they act like complete assholes, so it's
really hard to be that one woman. You have to
have a lot of strength, you’ve got to have your
armor way up. But just to be that first one. If
you’re not build for that, then don't do it.
TBMfW: How did you get into tech?
Erica: I will tell you my origin story. I was a little
kid, 7 years old, playing with my mom's computer
and she did combat plans for the Air Force, so
she would sit me in front of her computer while
she was doing her work so I would click around in
QBasic. Later on, as I was getting older, I got
more interested in computers, I was playing
Oregon Trail, Carmen Sandiego, and all those
little games on the Apple IIe. And then when I
was 10, my school in Alaska sent me to this
[computer camp] thing. I don't know how they
chose me. I think my mom might have told them
that I was into computers or something. So I went
to this thing that was in the city, teaching kids
how to use HyperCard. I don't want to call it the
predecessor to the web but it kinda was, because
it did the whole hyperlinking thing but instead of
online, you would build things that are
hyperlinked to a document. So they sent me to
that and that got me hooked, and I was like,
WOW! Up until that point I was literally: “I’m
going to be lawyer”.
TBMfW: Really?
Erica: “I'm going to be lawyer” but at that
point I was: Maybe, maybe not a lawyer! “Maybe I
want to do computer stuff”. Yeah, I was pretty
good at debating especially with my mom, she
did not like that.
TBMfW: How do we get more black women in
tech? Can we reach to high school level? Can we
go to younger than that? How do we engage that
audience?
Erica: I feel like there are a lot of black women in
tech. They are just not in the Valley [Silicon
Valley]. If you go look at the companies like the
Coca Cola and Home Depot or the big ones that
are in the South, and places where lots of black
people live… When I was in Atlanta, when I was
at Home Depot’s headquarters, my boss was a
black woman and it's the only time in my entire
career that I have had a black woman boss in the
tech world. If you go to the places where they
[black women] are, you will find them! But tech
companies are so excessively white, [they can
only think]: “We are going to go build in
Portland”! Yes, so you’re just going to go build in
the least diverse place that you are going to find.
You’re going to go put your company, your new
office in the least diverse place that you could
possibly find! So I don’t think that there aren't
black women in tech! I just don't think that they
are in the [Silicon] Valley because the Valley has
'issues' that they need to address.
TBMfW: They’re working on it, they're working on
it. [laugh]
Erica: Hopefully! That crowd in there was very
cold. I got lots of stank faces, so I was like 'Okay
I'm sorry' - 'Not really sorry’. [laugh]
TBMfW: [laugh] So the last question was, girls 12
years old, 10 years old... How do we get them
interested in all things tech?
#WOMENINTECH

Erica: Oh, how do we get them interested...
TBMfW: How do we get them interested in all
things tech?
Erica: I think they are interested, like gaming!
They are curious. I feel like one of the problems is
that people like to stereotype really really early. I
have been doing my best. I have three nieces
from my sister and I have been doing my best to
shove science and tech stuff in their faces since
they were little. The oldest ones are twin girls,
Riley, is not into it. She's very: ”I'm gonna go play
with ﬂowers and I like to bake”. There is nothing
wrong with that. But Brooklyn, her sister, picked it
up and Brooklyn's like "I'm going to do math, I'm
going to do science, I'm going to learn these
things”. I feel like if nobody had put that in front
of her, she would not have known about it. So I
feel like it's important for parents to show up and
just present it as an option at the outset. Game-
Developer Barbie just came out (June). Kimberly
Bryant founder of Black Girls Code is one of the
advisers on that, which is awesome. So giving
that as an option, like, you can be a game
developer in a barbie doll form. That’s gonna be
huge. They didn't think about that before.
Final thoughts: This was a fun interview, and I
actually got a hug at the end. Yes, Erica Baker
asked if she could give me a hug. You should
have seen my smile. I love her, and I am pushing
her message as far as I can, and so should you.
This being said, I want to be Erica Baker’s
accomplice. Some women in business need
accomplices. Most women in tech need
accomplices. I aim to be every woman’s
accomplice. I want to help and make a difference
in every woman’s life. Reach out to me and to the
magazine and we will actually do something
together to push forward equality, diversity and
inclusion.
Interview: Monica Antohi
Pictures: TBMfW and Erica Baker
#WOMENINTECH

This issue we’re featuring 3 female founders in tech. As
they’re just trying to hit the big leagues with their startups,
we ﬁgured that it would beneﬁt us all to know more about
what they’re doing and support their mission.
#FEMALEFOUNDERS
#WOMEN INTECH

1. Who is Fevi Yu and What is Dogma.me?
I’m Fevi, Founder and Chief Pet Sitter of Dogma. I was previously a Small
Business Owner and we developed Search Engine Friendly Websites for
the Caribbean Market. I’ve created a previous Startup that wasn’t
successful and then another one which I was able to pivot and exit. I
love technology, it’s given me direction and purpose — if that makes any
sense without sounding dramatic.
FEVI YU
DOGMA.ME

Dogma is free neighborhood pet sitting.
Essentially, “I’ll pet sit for you if you pet sit for
me.”
The goal is to ﬁnd someone within walking
distance or a short drive from your house,
someone who lives in your neighborhood that
you can exchange pet sitting services with. You
don’t pay each other, you pay it forward.
2. How did the idea for the startup come about?
My whole life I have had pets / volunteered for
numerous pet rescues / shelters. I always
brought home homeless cats and dogs. My Mom
said ever since I started walking to school, I
would always bring home a homeless cat. A
friend from high-school recently told me that
when I visited him, I brought him a cat that I had
picked up going to his house! So my two
passions in life are tech and pets. But I never
thought of combining them because I was pretty
happy with my professional life.
It wasn’t until I was in a long distance relationship.
That relationship was expensive because I had to
travel a lot but at the end of year when I looked
through my books it wasn’t the cost of tickets or
hotel rooms that was surprising, it was the cost of
pet care! And in my mind I was thinking, if I was
having pet sitting cost issues and I make a
middle-class income, what are other people
doing for pet care when they are earning less?
When my partner and I moved in together, we
were looking for a pet sitter and we interviewed
four prospective pet sitters. Four. We liked one
of them but then she asked if she could bring her
boyfriend while house sitting for us. It was like
pulling teeth. Since we were new in the
neighborhood, our neighbor came over and we
asked him for pet sitting recommendations. Our
neighbor lived less than a mile away and he had
three dogs of his own. He said he would pet sit
for our dogs if we pet sat for his dogs. It was win-
win and you could genuinely tell this guy loved
animals and would never hurt our furry-babies. It
was a deal!
And because I was already making websites and
saving so much money, I thought, hey… let’s
build it!
3. What does it mean to be a female founder?
I kinda hit the jackpot with my family. My parents
let me do anything, everything I wanted to do.
Never said, “No, you are a girl, you can’t do that”
— so I’ve been blessed with the ability to think
that I can do anything.
Whether you are a girl or boy if you think you can
do anything, you can.
4. How are you improving the lives of women?
Most of our super active members are women :-)
I think women have the magical ability to create
love and caring within communities and I believe
Dogma is improving the lives of women by
connecting like-minded individuals who want to
pay-it-forward and build life-long friendships.
5. How do we get more women interested in
tech?
I think representation is transformative. There is
technology in almost every aspect of our daily
lives now and if we see more women in more
technology-related positions then it will come,
organically. A lot of women are nurses and
teachers and that’s because less than a decade
ago, that’s where women were largely
represented and now those industries are mostly
women.
#FEMALEFOUNDERS

How do we fast track this? Support women
founders by ﬁnancially investing in their ideas, ie.
Invest in Dogma! Ehem.
6. What’s next for Dogma.me?
I’ve been in tech for over 10 years now but this is
the ﬁrst year that I’m really delving into the pet
industry and I have to say, even if the market is
saturated with so many things (ie. food, pet care,
health care, toys, pet insurance, etc) — the lack of
quality in almost every aspect is startling. And if
the quality is there, it’s unaffordable. We want to
change that. Most pet owners want to give their
pets quality food but don’t know how to read a
dog food labels. Most pet owners want a good
vet but they can’t really tell if their vet is good or
not.
So Dogma is a community that provides quality
pet services and pet health information. We are
also going to do this in a way that enables our
users to understand the importance of diets /
exercise and such.
I’m also super excited about another product
that we are launching that works perfectly with
our business model but that’s top secret for now!

7. When can we expect to be able to use the
service, and Where?
You can use it now, wherever you are in the US.
It’s browser / web based and we are working on
our native apps for launch early next year.
For more information,
check out Fevi and her startup:
Facebook: FB/Dogma.me
Twitter: @dogmawebsite
Website: Dogma.me
#FEMALEFOUNDERS

1. Who is Kesha Garner and What is QReview?
I’m a strategic Project Manager with a
background in non-profits and start-ups. I
earned my Master of Arts degree in English at
Clemson University where I focused on post-
structural and feminist readings of British and
Irish absurdist dramas. After earning my degree,
I moved to DC to intern at LGBTQ non-profits.
After receiving my Project Management
certificate at Georgetown University, I started
working at a DC based startup.
KESHA
GARNER
QReviewApp.com
#FEMALEFOUNDERS

In short, QReview is the intersectional business
rating network for mapping and creating
inclusive spaces for the LGBTQ+ community.
While we focus primarily on LGBTQ+ folks and
issues facing our community, we recognize that
discrimination doesn’t happen in a vacuum —
that’s why our app allows users to rate and review
based on multiple aspects of their identities.
My best friend Kevin Hawkins and I are always
coming up with fun business ideas and when I
pitched the idea of an LGBTQ business rating
system, we were both shocked to discover that it
didn’t exist—that’s when we knew that we had to
create QReview. After many conversations, we
realized that it was important to make our app
one that doesn’t just focus on discriminations
based on LGBTQ+ status. We want to make sure
that consumers' dollars are going toward
businesses that respect all aspects of their lives.
For me, being a female founder is all about
representation. Not only are women
underrepresented in tech, but women have
historically been underrepresented in LGBTQ+
spaces as well. I am excited to be a part of a
movement that recognizes that women are
powerful and capable and necessary in these
spaces. I think it’s also important to mention that,
while I am a female founder, I’m also non-binary,
so I hope that I can bring attention to those folks
who are in this ﬁeld as well.
KESHA
GARNER
QReviewApp.com

QReview can directly impact the lives of women
by driving the marketplace toward businesses
that respect ALL of us. QReview pushes users to
recognize discrimination in any form- for
example, a bar may be LGB friendly, but their “All
Lives Matter” sign makes it unsafe for women of
color, or there’s no wheelchair access, or trans
women aren’t allowed to use the restroom of
their choice. Furthermore, while QReview can
improve businesses locally, we also want to
create a network of users globally and I believe
that there is power behind knowing that other
women are facing the same struggles you’re
facing.
tech?
I think the best way to get more women
interested in tech is to start young. Breaking
down stereotypes about what little girls are
interested in is one of the ﬁrst steps toward
empowering them to be interested in tech.
Representation is another important factor—
championing powerful role models and
providing mentorship and leadership programs
are great examples.
6. What’s next for QReview?
The next step for QReview is to raise enough
money through investments and crowdfunding to
build our app. We’re dedicating most of our
energy right now to ﬁnding investors and
crowdfunding so that we can begin app
development.
7. When can we expect to be able to download
and use the app?
Once we raise the money, we expect the
QReview app to be ready for launch within a few
months —we’re aiming for a goal of early 2017.
check out Kesha and her startup:
Instagram: @QReviewApp
Facebook: FB/QReviewApp
Twitter: @QReviewApp
Website: www.QReviewApp.com
#FEMALEFOUNDERS

1. Who is Marnelli Martin?
I've spent the last 15 years as a highly successful
jewelry executive -- which has been a fabulous path
for me, as I've been passionate about beauty and
ﬁne design since I was a little girl. My experiences in
the industry have helped me hone both a keen eye
for quality, and a business acumen that extends to
every corner of the industry; from product
development and marketing, to merchandising,
manufacturing, international trade, and everywhere
in between. Over the years, I've consulted with top
industry manufacturers and suppliers, and have
worked alongside retail giants from Bloomingdale's
to Walmart and many large retailers in between.
MARNELLI
MARTIN
LUXE30.COM

As a product developer and advisor for major
suppliers and retailers, I've had the opportunity to
lace the necks, ears, and arms of American women
with jewelry they love. When a woman is wearing a
bracelet, pair of earrings, and necklace she adores,
her eyes light up, and her voice becomes bolder -
both literally and ﬁguratively. She is both
empowered and elegant; representing herself to
the world through her style without even needing to
open her mouth.
Now, I am bringing my world-class experience in
jewelry/ accessories and luxury living to women all
over the planet through my wonderful startup baby,
Luxe30. The goal? To help busy, hardworking,
extraordinary women enjoy the little lavish delights
they deserve, every month.
2. What is Luxe30?
Luxe30 is a monthly subscription service for women
of all walks of life! This fast-growing E-commerce
company offers 3 pieces of jewelry and 1 surprise
luxurious gift every 30 days (with unlimited
compliments). All products are sent to our
LuxeLovers TO OWN for only $39/ a month. It truly
is an incredible value!
I started this company with two heartfelt
motivations: to both help the women of the world
feel as gorgeous, inspired, and pampered as they
deserve, and to disrupt the "traditional"
subscription jewelry boxes (which rent jewelry to
consumers with the expectation they'll send the
piece back, or overpay for a low quality item.)
Luxe30 delivers you every exquisite piece for keeps,
along with a top secret surprise, and a loving
missive to meditate on, and feed your soul.
As an entrepreneur, I’ve always dreamed of offering
exquisite products that both enhance the physical
beauty of a woman, and inspire her heart.
But I didn’t just want to offer any other jewelry
product or rental service. There are plenty of those
#FEMALEFOUNDERS

out there! Instead, I wanted to blend stunning pieces with matters of the soul, and help women
around the world look and feel beautiful inside and out - whether they’re wearing jewelry or not.
My dream is for women to aspire to be more grateful for
their lives, do more of what they love, and take exquisite
care of themselves first. Because when hardworking
women give themselves the gift of quality experiences,
they give themselves space and freedom to say a
resounding “Yes!” to taking their pleasures seriously.
Life is short. Before we know it, age and circumstance
can limit the real, fulfilling, yummy lives we were born
to have!
So there's no more perfect time like now to let a little
more luxury in.
For me, 2 major things came to mind about being a
female founder (based on my experience):
1.) Far more hurdles and challenges
2.) Feminine Leverage
As far as hurdles and challenges go, these are largely
because of the conflicting expectations on all sides
(partly thanks to society, and partly because of
pressure I put on myself).
Balancing the roles of a CEO and mother is a constant
dance between how your company is performing (your
subscriber count, revenue numbers, etc.)
#FEMALEFOUNDERS

Part of my job also involves travel. A woman with
young kids traveling for business is one of the
most difficult and expensive things for me.
Always has been. Meanwhile, most businessmen
can just book the flight and take off! Childcare
and the full household management isn't
necessarily on the shoulders of a male CEO.
And then, there's funding. I once attempted to
approach a potential investor while I was
pregnant in the middle of building my business,
and I was told to talk to him again after the
pregnancy when I'm all settled in and back to
work. Why? Because he "just couldn't see it
happening".
Still, it didn't deter me. I brought my daughter
into the world, and got right back to work with
her on my lap. And I loved every part of it. I
bootstrapped all the way instead (which was an
extremely tough direction to go) but I'm so glad I
did!
Now, to feminine leverage: What this means to
me is most female founders are very gifted with
intuitive leadership because we access our core
more frequently, and pay a bit more attention
as to how the flow of the business is aligning
with how we feel and how we want things to feel
in honor of our creation. I built this business from
the ground up using a lot of my intuitive abilities
with lots of logic and practicality of course (from
hiring, buying, branding & visuals, deals, etc).
And it's a very crucial skill to tap into when you're
running a business. In my experience
female leaders are the ones who don't waste a
moment. They get things done... excellently...
right now.
Jewelry industry alone is enormous for a
reason. A power-suit or a power-dress is
powerless without jewelry. Millions of women
know this. It's so amazing how little earrings or
a statement necklace or ring or stackable
bracelets can charge-up your superpowers.

As soon as a woman put on the right jewelry,
she's the crowned queen, and can take the
world! It can instantly change a mood.
Luxe30 improves women's lives by offering
affordable luxuries delivered to their doorsteps.
With my access to the world's best
manufacturers and suppliers, we only deliver
quality, amazing value and a really awesome,
luxurious experience in every box. And they
OWN it all! You can never find or buy this jewelry
and bonus surprises at this price point anywhere
else.
Aside from our gorgeous products, it's our
mission to inspire women to celebrate
themselves now. At Luxe30, there's no waiting for
the job or promotion, money or the man to
honor a desire. We encourage everyone to live
luxuriously now, while working for their other
dreams. We teach women to redefine luxury and
take exquisite care of themselves. Because
when we grant ourselves permission to indulge
in simple pleasures and self-care we empower
ourselves; as professionals, partners, friends, and
mothers. We’re happier, bolder, and more
deeply grounded in joy.
tech?
Tech is our amazing "present" and also our
incredible "future"! We simply cannot NOT
engage with technology. It's an integral part of
our daily lives which hugely impacts our
relationships, personal & professional growth,
our families, commerce, global economy and our
entire culture.
I think that first & foremost, we need to let go of
the notion that tech is solely a boys’ club. This is
one of the major barriers we faced (initially).
While it's currently predominantly men, there are
so many brilliant women who are already
stepping up and leading and influencing the
industry in ways that I am so proud of as female
founder. It's so inspiring to see women-leaders
rocking tech and e-commerce space.
Secondly, the world of technology still seems to
come with many invisible walls. We usually
equate it with computer engineering, math &
coding, software development, complex
programming, etc., and while I know brilliant
women in these fields, society has also raised us
with the belief that these are more "masculine"
career paths. For me, as a woman and a creative,
the thought of entering the world of tech gave
me pause.
Was I supposed to be there?
But thankfully, I corrected myself quickly. At this
stage, it's more of an applied science for me. I
think of "tech" as a vessel of life, art, love,
creativity and pleasure. I absolutely don't believe
that you need to have a tech background or a
masters tech degree to be part of the industry.
There are so many geniuses in the tech field
ready to work with you -- to design and code
your site, to streamline your systems, and more,
so you can focus on what you do best. Tech isn't
a barrier. For me, it's a platform; a very powerful
one that I must use for my business and reach as
many women in the market who will benefit from
what I have to offer.
So, there's nothing to fear! Almost every
product / service offering in the world is linked to
tech now so we have got to get our sexy-sass on
it.
And for Luxe30 in particular, I plan on hiring as
many women as possible in the near future. I
believe that it's one of the best things that I can
do right now to help others be more comfortable
in developing a career in this space. I'd love to
help expose my team to both service & great
livelihood through technology.
#FEMALEFOUNDERS

check out Marnelli and her startup:
Instagram: @Luxe30
Facebook: FB/Luxe30
Twitter: @LuxeThirty
Website: www.luxe30.com
7. What’s next for Luxe30?
Amazing, astronomical growth, exciting
collaborations, international market, and more
luxurious experiences for our subscribers. Oh, and
fun! Lots of fabulous fun. :)
Also, my team & I are so honored to be selected by
the THE NEXT WEB as one of only 60 startups in a
key position to breakthrough. We are attending the
TNW-Momentum Scale Conference in NYC and I
look forward to connecting with many brilliant
professionals, investors & inﬂuencers in tech and e-
commerce world.
8. When can we expect to be able to sign up for
the Luxe30 box?
Be pampered like a queen now by visiting our
home at www.luxe30.com
#FEMALEFOUNDERS

“The time of sitting
in the back of the
room is over.
Everybody has to
be accountable for
their actions.”
-Elaine Larsen
WOMEN IN STEM

AGE OF FIRE
NO DRAGONS.
JUST WOMEN RIDING
FIRE SPEWING JETS.

26
I came to the Larsen Motorsports on a
regular Friday afternoon, to talk to the
2 time National Jet Dragster Racing
Champion, Elaine Larsen, and check
out her shop. Well, it’s not a shop. It’s
a showroom, with an engine lab, a
body lab, massive jet engines around,
a few jet racing cars and a few trailers,
a bunch of awards all around, a dog
and quite a few college kids working
on different labs.
ELAINE
LARSEN
WORLD CHAMPION
JET DRAGSTER TALKS
JET ENGINES,
TEAMWORK & STEM

This is not what I expected when going to a racing
team’s garage. I’ve been a Formula 1 fan for a long
time, used to watch the Paris - Dakar rally too,
been to a few Nascar races, and who hasn’t
watched an episode, or two, of Top Gear? Not a
gear head, but I like racing. I’ve seen garages, up
close and personal, but that’s not what I found at
Larsen Motorsports.
It was more of a research facility than a racing car
garage. Yes, you get the racing necessities like the
enveloping jet fuel smell, the spare tires, the
stacks upon stacks of car parts, the paint cans,
sponsors banners. You get the idea.
But it’s Friday, and today they’re testing one of the
new drivers, as she (yes, you read that right) is set
to start up the jet car, and take it through the pre-
race paces. As I found out, it’s a mandatory step in
the How to Be a Jet Car Driver course.
We go outside to the parking lot/test area, and
there’s this massive jet car waiting on the tarmac.
Big… impressive… The team is there, and the
support team is mostly men, but you’ll get over
that quickly. As I keep conversing with Elaine, here
comes the driver, Kat, or as you’ll know her, K2, all
dressed up in the ﬁre suppression suit, aka, racing
suit, with the helmet under her arm. But if you
didn’t know that she was the driver, you would
never have put her in that seat. I say this, and I
hear my own biases. Sorry. Trying to forget I just
thought that, I get introduced to K2, Kate the 2nd,
the 20 year old race car driver in training.
K2 was 18 when she ﬁrst met Elaine. She kept
calling and following up, she kept coming to the
lab, and now she’s learning to be a #jetgirl. She’s
going to Florida Tech studying multi-platform
journalism with a focus on STEM education, and
she’s working on her jet racing license.
#WOMENINSTEM

Kat2 is in the jet car, and as she’s going through
the paces, we start getting a bigger audience.
There’s a big group of people that just pulled in
from the road, and you can’t blame them. The car
is jetting ﬁre out its back and it’s a sight that not
that many people have ever seen. Going through
the test, she follows Elaine’s signals like the pro
that she is, and the test is a success! K2 gets out of
the car & she does so on cheers and applause by
a bigger audience than she was expecting. That
girl was on cloud nine for the rest of that day.
It’s a very lively atmosphere at Larsen’s. Kat2’s test,
with fans coming to visit, the team celebrating with
some donuts in the parking lot, a Florida Tech
fraternity came and visited the garage. They were
all smiles as they got a tour of the shop
from Kat2. The fraternity boys were
looking around at all the boy toys.
Correction! Girl Toys! The reason for the
“girl toys” comment is that the Larsen
Racing Team is made up of 7 drivers, 6 of
which are women! Yes! That’s not a
misprint! That’s not a joke. The 2 time
World Jet Dragster Champion, Elaine
Larsen presides over a team of girls.
[smile] And boys, but the drivers are
mostly girls. And I mean girls. Barely out
of high school. But that’s not what you see
on the track. That’s not what you see in the
garage. That’s not what you think of when
you come in. What you see is a level of
professionalism that is near military
perfection. The cars are built by Florida
Tech students! The drivers are young,
barely out of high school, and mostly
girls! The level of research and
development that these college kids can
do is unrivaled. Hands on experience in
race car design is what they get. Making
dreams come true is what Elaine Larsen
does.
Elaine Larsen: That’s exactly what I want
people to think about when they think
about Larsen Motorsport. We work with
young kids, and we enable them to live their
dream.
TBMfW: How did you end up working with Florida
Tech?
I’ve been racing cars for 20+ years, driving a jet for
15 years now. We were in it to win it. I wanted to
win the prizes, I wanted to win the money, I
wanted to be the best. Six years ago when I
wrecked, I decided that being in it to win it had its
ups and its downs. We were talking about Formula
1. You have to calculate the risks. I was calculating
the risk, and the money that I was getting to win,
did not pay out. That wasn’t the end goal. As much
as everybody’s there cheering you on in the
#WOMENINSTEM

stands when you’re hurt in the hospital, who’s
there for you now? Who’s there to pay your bills
now? Who’s there to help you walk and talk, and
feed you and all that stuff? Nobody. And when
you’re up to your eyeballs in hospital bills, who’s
going to help you?
So we had to change our philosophy, and do a
little bit more with research and development. We
wanted to do a lot more with education for high
performance vehicles. We knew that there was a
need out there. So when Florida Tech said, Hey!
We’re interested. Can you come see what we do
on our campuses? We knew that we were a match.
What the Space Coast does, is exactly what Larsen
Motorsports does. All of our cars are set to the
same aerospace standards that an airplane would
be, so we build our cars exactly like you would
build an airplane. People don’t think about that
when they think motorsports. “Oh, it’s not as high
tech!” I’m gonna tell you, that our cars are just as
high tech as any airplane is! We literally take an
engine off an airplane and make it stay on the
ground. So we reverse engineer. Instead of
making it ﬂy, we’re making it stay [on the ground],
and stay stable. It’s fun and it’s interesting, and it’s
a way for the kids to get great hands-on skills that
they would never be able to get if they were to
work for another company, because you have to
prove yourself. Well, we’re a race team. Right now,
we’re working on our 6th generation car, but we’re
modeling out 7th generation car that won’t be
built for another year. We’re always looking
forward. I’m not looking at next year. I’m looking at
my 10 year plan. When I get older and I don’t want
to do this anymore, I’m looking beyond that as
well, to who’s going to take over the reins of
Larsen Motorsports. I’m 49, I’m not going to do
this forever. I still probably have another good 10
years left in me, but I’m looking at what it is going
to look like when I’m not in the driver seat, and
just coming in and collecting the paycheck.
I mean, I say that, but I love the game. I like to get

up for the game.
TBMfW: You’ve been racing for 20 years. You
have to love it.
I do. I love the game. I love pulling to the gates. I
love looking at the atmosphere, I love watching
the trucks and trailers pull in and watching the
audience go up, and watching the car get
unloaded. That to me, gives me chills because
there’s still something about it. I get just as much
of a thrill as watching Kat [K2] take the accolades
today, as I do for me. I can sit back and I can
watch her come in. That girl is going to be
walking on air for the next 2 weeks. That’s cool!
Is it cool to be the one people are clapping for?
Absolutely! I’m not ready to give that up yet.
But it’s even better when you’ve helped be a
part of making that happen.
TBMfW: How are you managing that, having a
mostly girl team?
We make it a very good environment for
women to come feel like they can come in and
ask: “hey, I’d like to be a driver”. I get girls come
up to me all the time saying: “I wanna drive a jet
car”. I look at them and say: Why? “‘Cause I
wanna go fast!”. Ok! You’re going to the end of
the line! [that’s race car jargon meaning, hell
no!] Because that’s not at all why you want to do
it! You wanna drive a jet car because you want
to make a difference. You want to drive a jet car
because you want to show what girls are
capable of doing, or what people are capable
of doing. You want to make a difference in the
world. You want to help people get rid of their
fears.
I’ve had so many people email me and say:
What would Elaine do in this situation? Elaine is
not afraid to get back in the car after she’d
wrecked.
Yesterday I ran a 5K. I’ve haven’t ran 3 miles
consecutively in 4 years. I ran it! Was it the best
time? No! I ran it in 34 minutes, and I’m dang
proud of that. [laugh] That’s not bad! I did not fall.
I did not get lost. I did it.
I mean it sounds silly, but common things like that
are scary for me. I do such extreme things, that
when I see people do [normal] things that most
take for granted, I’m like gosh, I wish I could do
that! And I did it. I didn’t questions it. I didn’t care
what I looked like. I went out there, probably ran
like a spaz, but I didn’t care.
But getting girls to come in is huge. I can get the
girls to come in, but ﬁnding the right girls. That
girl that has the spark, that girl that wants to give
and not take.
#WOMENINSTEM
KAT REDNER, A.K.A, KAT, K2

Now I’m a little tougher when it comes to
recruiting. There’s a little bit of a harder recruiting
process. It’s not as easy as it used to be. I’ve taken
a few knocks, and now I can smell it. I like
shoulders back, head up, but don’t kick your
head too far up. You know what I mean?
TBMfW: Where do you meet these girls? The
girls that want to be drivers?
At the racetrack. Or on social media, or when I’ve
been on TV, and things like that, and they say,
Your story is really cool! Toyota North America
featured me in their company conference about
Stepping Up To The Plate. How cool is that? They
emailed me and said: Urgent Need! The person
in charge of the whole conference said: I saw this
girl on Jay Leno, and that is the best of stepping
up to the plate that I’ve ever seen. And he said,
I’m going to feature her! and they said: But we’ve
wanted to do baseball! He said: Watch! And he
showed them the video, and they all said:
nobody stepped up to the plate bigger than you!
I’m like, OK [smile]! But, I’m just me. And there is
nothing extraordinary [about me]. Seriously! I can
put you in that car, and you can do that too. Once
people realize that there is no superpower that
lets you do that, it’s about having the guts to get
in the car. That’s the hard part. You know? Having
the guts to put the ﬁre suit on. A lot of people
think that they can do it. But the minute that I say,
suit up and sit in that car, people go [shaking
their heads], no. Mhm mhm, no! And it’s just
asking them to go sit in the car!
TBMfW: It’s about courage, especially when
you’re about to get into a car that’s got a jet
engine strapped to it.
#WOMENINSTEM

This is going to be my story about Kat2. I gave
Kat probably a 10% chance of succeeding. She
has blown me away. She has proven me wrong
every step of the way. This girl, for some reason,
pulls from a source that I did not see in her. She
said, very meekly: “I wanna drive a jet car”. I’m like
“Ok.” So I let that cook for a second. And she
goes: “But I really want to drive a jet car”, so I
said, “Ok, let’s do this. “
But when it came time to flip that switch [getting
in the car, and turning the jet engine on], SHE
DID IT! Her hand was shaking, absolutely. And if
it wasn’t shaking, I might have been thinking: Do
you fully understand what you’re doing?
TBMfW: What’s the process of getting the girls/
potential drivers from when they meet you, to
today, when they can get into the jet car, fire suit
on, and turn on the jet car? How long is this
process?
It depends on each girl, on each person. For
some people it can go very quickly. For Kat, it
took her about 6 months to get in the car to do
this. First, I had to make sure that she’s in it for the
right thing, which she is. And now I know. Kat will
start getting her license by the end o f this year
(2016), and will be a fully licensed driver by the
first of next year. Now she started the car. Now,
how it’s going to be when she starts seeing
speed? Is she going to be able to understand
where she’s at on the track? That’s another thing.
You can’t gauge that until you put them in the car,
and put them on the track. On the track, there’s
markers. There’s the 60 foot, 330, 660, 1000 foot,
and then the full .25 mile, and there are boxes
that give us increments.
So [once we get to the track] what I do is tell
them to start the car, do the smoke and fire, stage
the car, and I want you to shut it off at that marker.
So they have to know where they’re at and shut it
off at that point. Not one foot before, not one
foot after. I want it exactly there. I have to make
sure that they know exactly where they’re at.
Because once they start going fast, it gets 10
times harder. So when they’re going slower,
because they won’t light the afterburner, they’ll
go slow, her first pass will only be around 120
miles per hour, which is not fast at all. I know it
sounds fast, but it’s not fast. Then it gets real fast,
real quick. One of my guy drivers got lost on the
track a couple of times. He got lost. He thought
he was at the 330 mark. Instead he was at the
1,000 foot! It wouldn’t have been hardly any
distance for him to get off that track. I looked to
him, and I said: “Do that one more time, and
you’ll never get into one of my race cars again.
I’m saving your life. You will kill yourself in this
race car”.
#WOMENINSTEM

You gotta know where you’re at. Always. How
many times do you get in your car, and ﬁnd
yourself somewhere else. Wait a minute, how did
I get here?
TBMfW: Being present is important, especially at
those speeds. You guys are fast. Race cars are
fast, but this jet car is spectacularly fast. Seeing it
blazing down the track is was so incredibly
exhilarating, so loud, so quick, and all the senses
were engaged.
Sidenote: I went to a race day to watch Elaine and the team
race and qualify for the nationals, before the interview, and
she took me down to the starting lane. She gave me a set of
noise canceling race headphones and plopped me at the
starting line, before the lights, on the tarmac. The jet car
pulled up, did the smoke and ﬁre drill, and got aligned to
the starting marker. Lights went from red to green, and the
jet car punched through! It was like getting hit by a wall at
60 miles per hour. It was so loud! It was SO LOUD! Imagine
having an airplane engine NEXT TO YOU, with no protection
but a pair of headphones. The feeling was intense. It was
loud, it was windy, it was vibrationally intense. I felt my
insides vibrate. My shirt lifted from the intense air
displacement. I was told to hold on to my hat, so that was
still there, but barely. I thought that my not race regulation
clothes will get literally torn off by the air displacement.
Intense. The video I took doesn’t do it justice. Anyway,
going back to the interview.
Elaine: And when they light the afterburners, and
you’re there, [laugh]… I swear that there’s
something! A lot of cars go down the track and
#WOMENINSTEM

people are like, cool, high ﬁve. But when a jet car
goes down the track people laugh, people smile.
There’s something about it that just makes
people happy.
Either that, or you get the other reaction. My
friend waits for me at the ﬁnish line and she just
hates what I do. My friends and family are so
ready for me to retire. They just want to know that
come event weekend, I’m going to be safe. Every
weekend they’re on stand by. Is Elaine racing?
Where’s Elaine at? do I have to think about it?
And Chris [Elaine’s husband] always sends a
group text out to everyone: “Elaine is safe”. But
my one friend, she cries every time I go down the
track. “I just don’t want you to do this anymore.” I
realize that it takes its toll. My son, it takes a huge
toll on him. He’s ready for me to get out of the
car.
TBMfW: It’s dangerous. We’ve all seen the
wrecks. Nobody wants to think about what could
happen. But you have to think of it, every time
you get into a car. That’s the biggest rub! You
really have to be prepped for that.
You know that that could
happen. I don’t know if Kat can
know what is ahead of her, and
fully understand. I’ve had
people literally die right in front
of me in a wreck. Friends.
Friends have died. We have lost
friends. My kid was playing with
this guy’s kid 5 minutes before,
and then his daddy died. And
it’s heartbreaking. And you start
thinking I don’t want to get into
the car. It’s hard. We do it
because it’s not what we are, it’s
who we are! A race car driver is
not what I am is who I am. It
really is. I didn’t know that. I
don’t know if I hadn’t had met
my husband that I would ever
had known that. Man, wouldn’t I
have missed out on something
amazing!
Think about it. How many
chances people miss if they
don’t take that little bit of a risk?
I’m not a risk taker. I have never
a had ticket. I have never been
in jail. I’ve been pulled over a
couple of times, but I’ve
managed to talk my way out of
them, but I’m not a risk taker!
#WOMENINSTEM

TBMfW: How can you say that, when you’re a jet
car driver?
I calculate that risk. I calculate what I’m going to
do, I know what’s going to happen, and every
time that I get in that car, I think, ok, if I wreck, this
is what I’m going to do. I think of all the scenarios.
I walk the track, I look at the shutdown area. I take
away all of the questionables that I possibly can,
because there’s so many that you can’t possibly
prepare for. So I’m trying to get at all the ones
that I can prepare for, and get rid of them. This
way, I’ll know what I’m going to do, so there’s not
even a thought.….
TBMfW: How do they get from just starting out,
to where Kat is today, all decked out in a ﬁre suit,
turning on the jet car, and bringing on that
crowd? Do you have a simulator?
At this point, the simulators just can’t account for
that risk of death. The human factors are just not
there in a simulator. The good news is that a
simulator could prepare them, analytically, for the
race. I see simulation in our future, very rapidly,
like in 2017. We’re getting to the point where
we’re training too many people.
But for now, ﬁrst I have to walk them through it.
First they come to the track, and they have to be
my shadow. They have to see what it means to be
Elaine Larsen for a day. Yeah, it’s not all the shits
and giggles as you think it is. It’s not nearly as
glamorous as what you think it is. And then there
are days when it’s 10 times more glamorous, and
I get sent amazing things, and I get to meet huge
celebrities and that kind of stuff, but that’s one
day out of 365, and that’s one hour out of 24.
#WOMENINSTEM

TBMfW: How long is the actual race?
5 seconds.
TBMfW: So you put all this effort and energy into
those 5 seconds. That’s a tiny payout, time wise,
but the emotion that comes with it…
is so big! I think that it almost gets diluted with
Nascar, Indy and Formula 1, because you couldn’t
hold that sustained adrenaline. The fans can’t,
and the driver can’t the entire time. Whereas ours
[type of racing], is such a HIT, and then it’s gone.
And I think that’s the emotion that gets diluted
with a long race, because by the end of the race,
you would be spent if you could hold that level of
adrenaline though the entire race. I mean you
could get it at the very end if it’s going to be a
close race or something. Racing now has become
such spec cars that it’s not as entertaining to me.
What I like about jet cars is that it’s the true
untouched racing. They don’t regulate us nearly
as strictly as they do the other cars, and we’re
able to do so much more design-wise then any
other cars are. We’re not out there for
competition to the other teams, and there’s not
this huge group that goes and travels. We’re not
this big segment [of racing]. They have to
regulate them [Nascar, Indy, F1] because if there
were as many of us as there are of them, that
would be out of control. I see that if we get
bigger, then that could bring a lot more
regulations, and we’re ready for it. I don’t want it,
because I love that the kids can come up with
something so totally out of the box that nobody’s
ever thought about before. [The “kids” are the
Florida Tech college students that are working
and doing research at Larsen Motorsports].
TBMfW: Formula 1 is very regulated. They keep
bringing in new rules and regulation with every
race season, but they do have new technologies
coming in. If that’s the future in jet racing, what
are the implications?
It’s going to drive the cost up. And that’s the part
that I don’t like about it, that it’s cost driven. The
reason why Formula 1 is the most expensive
market is because of the technology. What these
cars do and how technologically advanced they
#WOMENINSTEM

are, is insane. My brain can’t wrap around that. Hit
a switch and adjust the wings, they can adjust
this, they can adjust that! Their steering wheel, I
would’t know what to do with all those buttons. I
just hit and go. It scares me because jet racing is
fairly economical. I know, you’ll laugh, but it only
costs me about $1,700 to make a pass down the
track. And that’s everything, for the insurance,
power to the shop to get the jet car ready, the
trailer that brings the jet car to the track, tires, jet
engine, to the jet fuel, and that’s not bad. Now,
the physical cost, if nothing goes wrong, is 25
gallons of jet fuel. And it’s all for 5 seconds.
[laugh]
We can fire a car for couple of hundred dollars.
Kat’s test today didn’t use the whole 25 gallons. I
think that was about $100 worth of jet fuel. We
fired it up yesterday 6 times. That’s $600. That’s
the cost of doing business.
Sponsorships for us run from $150,000 to
$200,000 a year for an entire sponsorship. It’s a
great value, and we can do this because our
engines are reused, over and over and over. The
expense of what we have is so much cheeper. I
worry about technology getting ahead of us and
us having to spend all that money to go catch up.
What we do for the year is a fraction of what they
[Nascar, Indy, Formula 1] do for just one race. We
can run that, AND eat steak. [laugh] Sure, we’re
not flying in a corporate jet, but I don’t know if
that’s the team that I aspire to be. I like
grassroots, I like driving, I like the people that you
meet at truck stops. I know it’s weird. I like to go
#WOMENINSTEM

see what’s going on, what kind of cowboy boots I
can pick up. I like it. I like FLyingJ coffee better
than I like Starbucks, because it’s what I know.
You’d be surprised. Truckers are becoming a lot
more healthy now. There’s fresh fruit now. So
sometimes I go in to pay for the fuel, and there’s
fresh fruit right there, and I’m like, oh, that looks
good, and there’s somebody that says, Let me
buy that for you! And I say: Thank you! [laugh] I
learned how to ﬂirt to get fruit. There. I said it.
[laugh] People on the road, people in general,
are just nice. They just want to know who you are
and what you do, and especially at truck stops,
and rest stops and hotels. You know, it’s different
from their life. I never want to be that person that
when they say: “What do you have in there?” I
say: “Ah, nothin’!” Instead I say: “I have a jet
dragster in there. Do you want to see it?” I don’t
want be that other person.
TBMfW: So, let’s talk about sponsorships. Is
Florida Tech a sponsor?
We do a partnership with them, and that’s
different than my sponsors, from Matrix and
Valspar and sponsors like that. Most of my
sponsors aren’t sponsors like you would normally
see. I want a partnership! With Florida Tech, we
work with them on their research, so it’s a give
and take. They may give us some of there
research opportunities and access to some of the
things that they have at the University and their
knowledge and faculty, and things like that, and
then we may give them student enrollment. It’s a
give and take.
Valspar, Matrix, right now we have the composite
lab that’s on that. US Chemical, they’re giving us
the ﬁberglass we need. We get to call them
#WOMENINSTEM

39
and get their people come in and help the
students understand about composites. So it’s a
true partnership. Trust me, I’d love for someone
to come in and just write me a check, and say:
Here! But I found that when people don’t have an
afﬁliation with what you do, that money is quickly
come and gone. It’s easy for me to be a line item
that gets crossed of. I don’t want to be a line item.
I want to be Elaine Larsen! I want them to know
who I am, and I want them to be invested in our
company and I want to invest in their company. I
invest in their company as much as they invest in
mine. Like Miller. We ﬂew up to Appleton, WI and
we understood how each machine was made. We
understood the processes of each machine, and I
want to be a great ambassador for them. I don’t
just want to say: Buy Miller, ‘cause it’s good, and
make a commercial. I want them to say: You
should see the employees that work there, they
take this personal. When they put a machine
together, it’s personal for them. They’re just a
company that believes in good values and it’s
families who’ve been there. From great grand
father, to his great grand son working at the same
company, and they believe in those values. And
that’s why you should buy Miller, because they’re
a better company.
TBMfW: Ok, I’ll admit. I don’t know anything
about Miller. What do they do?
They’re Miller Welders. So
they do mid tape plasma
cutters, they do generators,
all made in America, and I
love it. I love that they invest
in their employees, and they
invest in their employees’
families, and I like the
company.
TBMfW: If that’s not
advertising for them, I don’t
know what is.
Yeah, I might not be able to
tell you how to weld, but I
can tell you about the
company. If they value their
employees this much, how
much do you think they
value putting that welding
machine together? A lot
more. As opposed to buying
from a company that has
“interchangeable people”,
do you want to buy from
someone like that? No.
#WOMENINSTEM

I can share that story. I’m not the technical side of
racing. I’m very much the business side, but when
I’m siting here talking about value and what you
get, and I’ve been to Matrix, and I’ve watch these
people make the paint, not watched it dry
[laugh], but I’ve watched it being made! It’s neat!
You see this airbrush artist, all tatted up, and he
made a gorgeous picture. And it’s like that guy
[Thomas Kinkade] on PBS that says “look at the
happy clouds”. [laugh] I mean, you don’t know
how it’s going to end, but you just sit there
watching. He is gifted. And you’d have never
thought that. You’d have seen him on a
motorcycle, with a bandana on, with a cigarette
hanging out of his mouth, and you’d never think
that he would ever have done something as
beautiful as this delicate flower that he just
painted, this little rose.
So, it’s a partnership, not sponsorship!
What we’re really trying to do is get our name out
there. We’re great in our industry, we do a real
good job with companies within our industry, but
I see so much we could with companies outside
of our industry. Like, with a makeup line. What
they do is great, but you want to see what
makeup looks like inside of a [race] helmet, or
you want to see what helmet hair looks like after a
race? Bed head? I give you helmet head! Ok?
[laugh] For real people. And I loved where Dove
was going with it, when they were showing real
women, and not just models. We’re real women. I
have dimples on the backs on my legs, and I have
this and I have that, and I might have food in my
teeth half the time, but I’m Elaine, and I own it!
[laugh]
TBMfW: What is your involvement with STEM?
STEM wasn’t around when I was little. We didn’t
say the word STEM, and it’s overused. I feel like
what we need to know is what is the career that
we like. So exposing people to different careers,
and finding out how people got there. For me,
that’s all business. To be a race car driver you
have to be athletic, energetic, and have a sound
mind, and be business savvy. But if you want to
design race cars, if you like looking at the body
shapes that they have on these new race cars,
and you’re fascinated with why they did this and
why they did that, like the new wing on the front
of the Indy car, the one that shatters into a million
pieces, if that fascinates you, then what does that
mean? It means that you’re good in math, and
you’re into aerodynamics, and this and that, and
that’s what I’m trying to push. All this happens to
fall into that STEM bucket. But I change it up a
little bit with: Science, Technology, Engineering,
ARTS and Mathematics. Engineers are really
artists, because they build and design amazing
things. Whether it’s civil engineering, space
engineering, mechanical engineer, I think that
anything they build can be a piece of art if you
look at it the right way. And I think that you
should take pride in that like it is art. We built
Speedy the Scarecrow. I like taking things out of
the garbage can, and making something new
and fresh out of it. He’s built from scraps. It’s
recycled. Chris and I were very poor when we got
married. We both made $3.35/hour, each. My
parents had money. His mom had money. That
didn’t mean that we had money. Neither of them
ever gave us a penny. Ever. There were times
when we didn’t have heat for the house, food for
the refrigerator. We did have our car, and the
money to be able to get it fixed. We sucked it up.
We did it. I’m glad that they didn’t give it to us. At
the time, I wasn’t happy about it, but it made us
better, so now we learned how to dumpster dive
and get what we need and live on that. I can live
on nothing if I had to. I have all this. But this can
#WOMENINSTEM
“You just need to own your
flaws, as much as you own
the good parts of you.”

go away tomorrow, and I’d be fine. I would find
something else. If this were taken away because
of something catastrophic, I’d build something
else up.
TBMfW: To me that’s a definition of success. It
doesn’t matter what you have and for how long
you have it. If something massive like that
happens, and you lose it all, if you can get up,
that’s success.
When are we considered successful? When we
have one team, two teams, three teams, four
teams? When does it stop? Success today was
looking out at Kat and seeing those guys go
“Woohoo” when she got out of the car. You can’t
take that away. We did that. So, can I build that
again? Abso-freaking-lutely, I can build that
again! None of this counts, my house, my cars,
my engines. I built it once, I’ll build it again.
TBMfW: How do we get more girls into STEM?
By making this look accessible. Make it look
attainable. Anybody can do what I do. I am not
special. I am not the best race car driver out
there. And if this is something that you truly want,
you can do this, too. That is the secret.
Make it seem accessible to them.
I remember as a little girl thinking about an
astronaut. I never dreamed that I could become
an astronaut! I didn’t think that! Making it seem
accessible to them [girls]. Taking the curtain
down and letting them see everything. Making
them see that sometimes I’m good, sometimes
I’m bad, letting them see your failures, just as
much as they see your successes, so that they
know that you are not perfect.
Being honest with the girls, and giving them
things to be proud of, and things that they can
take ownership in. I can’t even tell you how many
hundreds of students we have affected.
TBMfW: How do they come to you?
As an instance, we were at the Florida Tech
homecoming last year, and I had a parent
approach me and say: My daughter, Emily, is a
freshman at FIT, and she’s going to be a
mechanical engineer. Tell me about the jet drag
team. I want to see if this is something that she
could be into.” So I ask: “What is she into?” “She
really likes writing, she likes comic books” and I
said: “Oh my gosh, I have a comic book!” So
we’ve been keeping in touch, and when my
comic book started to take off again, Emily
reached out to me, and now she’s the author of
my new comic book.
TBMfW: When is that coming out?
I don’t know. I don’t want to set deadlines on that.
2017 at some point. We’re making the bios right
#WOMENINSTEM

now. We’re making what the girls are going to
look like, what they act like, and yes, it’s a girl
comic. It is. But we’re defining what people are
going to read and think. It’s about people, real
people, and it’s about what we do. Each one of
the comics, is bits and pieces of the kids that are
in working here, which is hilarious.
TBMfW: You mentioned that every one of the
girls in the comic will be in a STEM related field.
Within each comic, there’s going to be a lesson
plan, that the teachers can take back to the
students. Now we’re working on this, and you
know, it’s going to be set in space. Take the jet
car. A jet engine needs air. The more air it gets,
the faster is going to go. So there’s going to be
issues, with some of these areas where there
might not be enough air to sufficiently run the
engine. So how are we going to run around this
obstacle? There’s going to be an engineering
obstacle in very comic. Maybe there’s not going
to be fuel, maybe we’re going to have to come
up with a new type of biofuel, plant based on
plants in that area. Every comic is going to have a
lesson plan. It won’t be weird, like the kids won’t
want to read it. But at the end, they’d have
realized that they’ve figured it out. Now, here’s
the math behind how they did it.
TBMfW: You’re not going to have the math in the
comic book, are you?
No! That would be boring. It’s going to be after
the comic. But if you want to know more about
Blaze, and how they got the engine to work,
here’s the math behind it. That’s why I have a
mechanical engineer writing my comic.
TBMfW: Blaze is the name of the main character?
Her name is Hailey Sparks, a.k.a., Blaze. She’s so
fierce. She’s a young version of who I wish I was
when I was that age.
TBMfW: What’s next for you guys?
We’re partnering up with some different venues.
We’re partnering up with NHRA, and they’ll bring
high school students to the track and we’ll be
able to have a broader impact on these kids,
because we’ll be reaching to 12,000 kids just at
#WOMENINSTEM

the races, and these 12,000 kids are in STEM
related curriculum. We’re going to need to amp
our game up. That’s ok. We’re up for the
challenge.
We’re working on our new designs, that will be a
big one. The new designs cars, cars that the
Florida Tech kids have had a direct impact on
making. Right now they’re doing the spinners for
the parachute cans, and they’re building them.
We’ve run the 5th generation car for a few years
now, and we haven’t made any major
modiﬁcations, but we’re going to take it, and
we’re going to run real analyses on these cars. So
it’s not going to be, We think that it ran faster.
We’re going to have some of the kids run the
tests, and that’s going to be part of their thesis
projects. Again, that’s the partnership with Florida
Tech. What is that going to mean for us? Possibly
faster cars. But it’s going to mean that we have
data to push us forward to design cars for the 7th
generation and 8th generation. We’re in
partnership with Florida Tech, but this is a Larsen
Motorsports initiative. We’re using the braintrust
of the kids, which is an awesome part. Chris and I
are the oldest people here at the shop. The next
person up is 24, and that’s Brian, a graduate of
FIT with an aerospace engineering degree, and
he’s getting his MBA right now. Everybody else is
under 24. They’re the ones driving the train. Chris
and I are just funding it. They’re the ones in the
driver’s seat. The main goal is that they’re really
working on building this funny car. They’re
excited. They’ve spoken, and we’ve listened. We
have team meetings all the time, and we ask:
What would you like to be our next challenge?
And they say this, and this, and this. And we do
what they say.
#WOMENINSTEM

I ﬂy out to L.A. in November, and so Chris and I
are going to take a few days and hangout. Life’s
been pretty fast for us the last few years, and it’s
nice that we’re taking a few moments to just smell
the roses. We went to watch the sunrise the other
day. We just take moments out for us, because
we realize that if we don’t, before you know it,
those moments are gone. Once a week we’re
trying to take a moment just to enjoy why we’re
working so hard to achieve.
And that, ladies, is how you are the World
Champion Dragsters, and run your own business,
and inﬂuence thousands of college kids into
coming into and pursuing careers in STEM.
#WOMENINSTEM
Text: TBMfW
Pictures: TBMfW and Larsen Motorsports
For more information about Elaine Larsen and the Larsen Motorsports team:
Elaine Larsen www.elainelarsen.com
Twitter: TW.com/LMSJets
Facebook: FB.com/LarsenMotorsports
Instagram: IG.com/LMSJets

“If I’m doing
what I love,
I’m approaching it
in a way that
makes me
feel full.”
WOMEN IN FINANCE

THREE
THINGS
ABOUT
CREDIT
EVERYONE
SHOULD
KNOW
AND NO
ONE TALKS
ABOUT
In my work in credit repair, there are
three things about credit and credit
scores that come up the most that
cause people the most grief and
confusion.
1. Number of Credit Scores:
You don’t have one credit score. You don’t
even have three. You have around 40 of them
and I have seen them vary over 100 points
between scores. Most people think you only
have one score from each of the three credit
bureaus (Experian, Equifax and Trans Union).
You actually have 30 scores based on the
FICO model, and three scores based on the
Vantage 3.0 model, plus an insurance credit
score that is used for determining your
insurance rates.

None of them are your real credit score and none
of them are wrong, but the only one that matters
is the one your lender uses. The more dings you
might have on your credit score, the more the
odds are that your score varies across all models.
If you’ve got no dings and perfect pay history,
than you have less to worry about.  
 
The credit scores that you get for free from Credit
Karma, Wallet Hub and your credit cards all come
from the Vantage 3.0 model, but I’ve never heard
of a lender actually using that score, despite
Vantage’s claims they have 50% adoption. For
example, mortgage lenders use Experian FICO 2
scoring model, the Trans Union FICO 4 and the
Equifax FICO 5, also sometimes referred to as the
tri-merge. You also have six scores for auto
lending and any number that can be used for
credit cards. The most commonly used score is
the FICO 8.
Should you care? Yes and no.
If you want the least costly options to monitor
your credit health, pull all three of your credit
reports for free at www.annualcreditreport.com
and then watch your score on Credit Karma for
free. Credit Karma will only give your Vantage
scores for TransUnion and Equifax, but it will give
you a general picture.
If your credit is less than perfect or you’ve had
any kind of financial trauma in the past (divorce,
bankruptcy, exes that might have messed with
you or a common name) and you would like to
make a big purchase like home or auto or you’re
looking for a business loan, it’s a good idea to go
to www.myfico.com and spend the $60 pull their
3B report. That way you can see all thirty of the
scores. I know people whose common FICO 8
score wasn’t high enough for a mortgage, but
their actual mortgage scores were high enough.
Pulling your scores saves you a hard pull on your
credit from a lender, and it gives you the time
you might need to address any errors, negotiate
any unresolved items, or go through credit
repair. The internet is rife with stories of people
looking at their score on Credit Karma and
thinking it was 700, which is good credit, and
then going to a car dealership and finding out it’s
only 600 and being turned away. Time is on your
side when addressing credit issues, and
knowledge is everything.  
#WOMENINFINANCE

If you’re trying to improve your score, going
through credit repair, or just like to keep a pulse
on things, www.creditchecktotal.com is an
Experian company that will give you your FICO 8
scores. Their service is $1 for a 7 day trial, and
then it’s $30 a month. You can’t cancel online, but
when you call to cancel they will offer you $15 a
month. This seems to be the best option out
there for actual credit scores used by
underwriters.
2. Having a good credit score is
about cultivating positive pay
history and usage.
You actually have to use credit to have a good
score. Not having any credit that reports to the
bureaus will put you in the 500 to low 600s, and
that’s the same as many people who have
defaulted on credit cards or gone through
bankruptcy.  
 
You obviously don’t want to be drowning in
credit card debt, but usage of a credit card that
shows you’re responsible and reliable will give
you the best score. You want 10-30% balance of
your total credit reporting over time. The balance
that reports is your statement balance. It’s
generally calculated by the balance three days
after your payment is due. It’s essentially what’s
left after you pay, so even if you’re paying in full
every month, if you use it all month and make
multiple payments, you still want the amount
reporting to be low. Under 10% is best, especially
leading up to a big purchase, but no balance at
all can hurt you as well. 
 
The difference between a maxed balance and
10% usage reported can be a 100 point
difference, just in one cycle. That’s the difference
between a 3% rate on a car loan and a 15% rate.
It’s the difference between getting the dream
house and not qualifying for the mortgage. So
yes, pay on time, but also watch your reported
balances. You can always call your card and ask
what day the balances get reported.
3. The worse your credit is, the
better it can get.
Seems counter intuitive right? But the truth is, the
lower your score, the more dings you have that
can be contested and removed. The worst thing
for your score is to have unpaid judgements,
collections and charged off cards or loans that all
report a balance. The good news is that most of
these accounts will settle for 30-40 cents on the
dollar, and once they are settled you can often
get them removed. When someone works with
us for credit repair, we contest every negative
remark on your report, because the burden of
proof is on the creditor doing the reporting. If
they can’t or are unwilling to prove that
something actually happened, then the credit
bureau has to remove it.  
We recently had a client who had been a realtor
and when the market crashed in 2009, she didn’t
get a paycheck for a year. She wound up giving a
BMW X5 back to the bank, and she had a $5300
bill that was haunting her. We negotiated a
$1580 settlement, and the account now shows
paid as agreed. All the negative language has
been removed. She’s gone from an average 523
to 680 in six months. Another six months of on
time payments and low credit card usage and
she will be over 720.  
#WOMENINFINANCE

On a similar note, we had someone with 26
judgements and collection accounts from a
business gone bad when an office manager
ran off with her money in the middle of the
night (literally). We were able to clear about
eight of those accounts without her paying and
the rest we negotiated payoffs and got all but
two deleted. She also saw a 150 point jump on
her FICO 8 scores, and she’s dreaming about
buying a house, something she had written off
as impossible.
Credit is complex, but it doesn’t have to be
terrifying. You can only start where you are, so
don’t beat yourself up if you’ve had some
issues. Everything is negotiable and
recoverable. First step, get educated. Second,
forgive yourself for anything that’s gone
haywire. And third, use your knowledge to
create better financial health for yourself.
Cassie Price is the founder and
fire-starter at Wealth Generation
Collective, a credit repair, debt
negotiation, business credit and
tax help company. She and her
business partner Erik have been
repairing credit and getting
people out of sticky situations for
a combined 20 years. You can
find out more at
WealthGenerationCollective.com
Text: Cassie Price
Pictures: TBMfW and Cassie Price
#WOMENINFINANCE

MONEY
DOES
GROW
ON
TREES

Financial literacy,
empowerment and wealth
building are all big topics
for any girl and woman to
master. In the following
interview, we’ll be talking
about the financial
education of girls, and
specifically of girls and
women of color, and why
there’s such a difference
between what we are all
being taught. I came across
Chloe Mckenzie quite
randomly, and I was so
excited to see what she’s
doing, and how she’s doing
it.
Yes, she’s a #FemaleFounder. Yes, she’s a #WomaninFinance. She is also young,
highly educated, and highly interested in bettering the financial future of little girls
and women. Check out the interview below to see how she’s doing it all.
TBMfW: Who is Chloe McKenzie?
I’m Chloe McKenzie. I grew up in Maryland, which is an unique space and I think it
helps me figure out why I ended up going into finance. The demographic that I
grew around, it was black people that actually had the wealth and most of the
power in the community. Then, I went to Amherst College where I studied Law and
German, and after I graduated college, I become a Securitized Products Trader.
Most people know securitized product traders, because these people blew up our
economy in 2008, trading mortgages. So that was a very interesting experience
trading mortgages post crisis. After that, I pursued an education fellowship where I
worked in an inner city charter school in NYC. Kinda throughout the process, I had
seeds planted in my mind on how I can start bridging, or marrying the financial
and the education world. That how I came up with the idea for Black Fem Inc., and
things have blossomed since. I’ve taken the things that I’ve learned from the
financial world and the education world, and put them together.
#WOMENINFINANCE

TBMfW: How did Black Fem Inc come about?
And what is it?
We’re a 501-c3 non profit, that has a mission to
provide permanent access and opportunity to
women and girls of color to build and sustain
wealth. When I was at JPMorgan as a trader, I
also became a financial counselor for a few
homeless families, and that was very profound to
me. I went to an all girls Catholic high school,
and that was the greatest thing that ever happen
to me. I really got to understand why doing
service was so important to me. Doing service is
something that I did in college, and wanted to
do once I entered the work force. Recognizing
that for some people, being a financial
counselor at JPMorgan was a way to get
promoted, to be honest with you. So I watched
theses other people [the homeless people]
interact with some wealthy people [financial
counselors] that would come in with their
tailored suits, and really not be able to make
financial planning and principles accessible to
theses people, not even on a social level. I think
that that’s where I started to think of the idea
that, Wow, I feel like I could do this better. I
could make accessibility to wealth building and
financial planning something that people want,
not feel afraid of, but build confidence through
empowerment.
In poor communities of color, accessibility to
curriculum is actually one of the biggest
obstacles that teachers face. Understanding that
we have to make curriculum accessible not just
for the kid, but for the family at home too. So I
found it really profound to be able to work on
how I can refine myself. Yes, I can teach all these
great things, but am I making them accessible
enough so that it resonates with the person that
I’m teaching? Really understanding who you are
as a vehicle when teaching, or consulting with
somebody. BlackFem Inc, came about when I
kinda just had an inkling to myself. You know
what? You’re ready! [laugh] I was trading
student loans, I was trading mortgages, trading
credit card receivables, and I said to myself, It’s
very weird to me that JPMorgan can make
millions of dollars off of someone’s inability to
pay, say a $700 mortgage, in the middle of
Nowheresville, Iowa. And I said to myself, I
wonder if this person actually knew what we
were doing with their loan agreements and the
securities interest that they have in this property.
So from there, when I started to develop
curriculum, because I started generating
curriculum for teaching, I then said to myself,
you’re ready! So, on a whim, I decided to
#WOMENINFINANCE

look at what incorporating would look like, I
talked with some colleagues of mine, and it kinda
just happened in a way. But I do think that, like I
said, there were seeds planted the last few years
that allowed me to feel empowered enough to
start saying, you know what, our communities
need this, and they need this right now!
TBMfW: It seams like you’ve been primed for this
your entire life. Can you please delve a little
deeper into why you have chosen to focus on
teaching financial terms and knowledge? And
can we touch upon the lack of education for girls
in finances?
When I started Black Fem Inc., the way that I like
to operate my business is coming up with a
bunch of different hypothesis about what the
community needs. I will let my workshops and my
interactions with families in these communities
be the definitive conclusions that I need to know
if it’s working or not. So I wanted to know cold
hard statistics about what wealth outlooks were
like in communities of color. And I think we can
all just guess what it was. Of course, white men at
the top. In terms of median wealth, surprisingly
enough, black men fall next. When you’re dealing
with the intersectionality between race and
gender, gender is going to win often times.
#WOMENINFINANCE

So then, white women, and then women of color.
Of course the US Government didn’t do any
statistics on the Asian demographic at all, but I’m
sure we can kinda think of where they would fall.
So, I know we’re going to target women and girls
of color, because we all know that at the end of
the day, they’re at the bottom of the totem pole of
every aspect of our society, socially, economically,
politically, we’re always at the bottom. The truth in
that is that we’re under educated, even though
we’re going to college more often, but that
actually means that we’re having more student
loans, so that burden and enslavement that you
have with debt, is holding us back from actually
being able to enter into this financial system,
which frankly, was not built for us.
Knowing that, we started to develop curriculum
that wasn’t just about money management. The
issues that I have with other financial literacy firms
or organizations, don’t get me wrong, they’re
great, but their focus is on getting rich. For me is
about rich versus wealth distinction. Being wealthy
is where we get our freedom. Being wealthy is
where we have opportunities, and we can provide
opportunities and privilege to generations that
come after us. And that’s something that women
of color systematically don’t have access to, not
even build it. Our point is we want them to build
it. We want them to sustain it. And that’s where our
curriculum comes in. Being rich can go away if
you lose your job, if some of your assets go away.
Wealth is how long can you sustaining your
lifestyle without having to go work. And that’s
what we want to provide to these women and girls
of color, because that’s true freedom, that’s
opportunity.
Again, we are different, not only because we
focused on being wealthy instead of being rich,
but also because we focus on making sure that
our curriculum is accessible. A good example of
that is we worked with a cheerleading squad here
in Harlem, for a lot of lower income girls, and we
taught them how to trade stocks through
cheerleading! So instead of going in with this
financial jargon that they wouldn’t understand, we
used their terms. Your IPO, you’re just going to do
a cheer, but you’re not allowed to use your arms,
your legs. It’s about how eloquently you can say
this cheer, and then we let somebody invest in
you. Maybe they will think about how cute you
are, “I know that that girl is a tumbler”, so they’ll
invest in you. So that’s your IPO. At that point,
they’ll use that money that they got from their IPO
to make their product better. So really one of the
big market movers for stock prices, is your profit.
Really, we gotta make them have a profit. Then
they got to buy leg motions, and music, and
pompoms, and listen to market sentiment about
what is going to be something that people want in
the market. Ok, so maybe they’ll invest more
money in getting the top level pompoms. After
that, they [the girls] had another performance,
which was analogous to how the stock would
perform in the market, and they saw the lessons
there. I see the risk here, but I’m going to do all of
this, not knowing if this is going to make me build
me a profit, and then calculating their profit and
loss from there. So this really resonated with them.
These girls love to cheer. So why not teach them
some financial literacy through cheering?
#WOMENINFINANCE

TBMfW: You’re going to teach them financial
literacy based on concepts that they already
know and understand.
Exactly. What I say to my girls is that, finance is
personal. If you know who you are, then you
actually know who you are as an investor. And that
actually brings a lot of comfort and confidence to
these girls and their moms as well, because if you
understand that, ok I’ll always go to buy the
newest iPhone, but maybe instead of spending
that $600 on the new phone, I can take that $600
and invest in Apple itself. I know all my friends are
going to get the Apple iPhone, so it’s likely that
[Apple’s] profits are going to go up. If their profits
are going to go up, then their stock prices are
going to go up. So that’s how I think about it.
Follow your own money. You are intuitively smart
enough to be a great investor. And again is about
creating a curriculum and the opportunity to start
creating wealth.
TBMfW: Financial literacy, if it’s taught how you
just taught the cheerleaders can become
accessible. But you’ve done an even better job at
creating curriculum and teaching the even
younger girls.
We have a program called Money Does Grow on
Trees, which is our pre-k to 2nd grade program. I
was asked by a non profit in D.C. called
ArtworksNow, to do a financial literacy workshop.
So I asked about who are the people that we’ll
serve, and they replied with one caveat: the
audience will be as young as 4 years old.
We hadn’t generated curriculum at that point
that could target a 4 year old. The big thing
about our curriculum is not only that it’s
accessible, but I refuse to write curriculum that is
dumbed down! So, I’m going to allow my 4 year
olds to work with $100,000. I’m going to allow
my 6 year olds to work with rent that is $2,000,
and keep on using the same financial terms.
So, what do you learn in kindergarten and pre-k?
Not to over simplify, but you learn about
gardening. So let’s take this analogy of how an
apple would grow on a tree and equate that to
how money grows in your savings account
through compound interest. So we ended up
creating a workshop where kids would get to
pluck real dollar bills out of trees, so long as they
plant their seed, which is their initial deposit.
Their initial investment is where they dig into the
tree, and put a real $10 bill, and each tree
represented a different bank, and every bank has
a different interest formula. The kids would pluck
$1, and if they chose to reinvest that, they would
bury it back into the tree, and then next year, they
got to pluck $2, and then $4. Understanding that
it multiplies, without knowing what multiplication
really is.
#WOMENINFINANCE

We needed to ground this into something real, so
my co-teacher Sarah Vistocco and I, wrote a
children’s book called Money Does Grow on Trees.
The book follows this brilliant protagonist, Kira,
who really wants all of these material things, which
her mom can’t afford. And her mom tells her: what
if we can explore some of these financial tools
that will allow your money to grow without you
having to do anything?
That’s where our very youngest programs have
come from. It’s been incredibly successful
because we have this engaging curriculum, but
then we also make it look like what they would
learn in kindergarten.
TBMfW: What I really like about the program is
that you’ve taken a saying that is wrong on so
many levels “money does not grow on trees” and
you’re reattaching that the proper way! For that
alone, brava! Yes, there’s a really good lesson in
that saying: work hard! Absolutely. But to tell a
child that money doesn’t grow on trees and it’s
hard to get by, it’s not really the best financial
advise you can give to a kid. Tell them that hard
work is important, that’s how you’re going to get
anywhere, but don’t tell them that it’s impossible.
Don’t destroy all the good seeds in there.
Exactly! You can empower them to think about
how these things work. And by starting with
compound interest at such a young level, by the
way, compound interest is also one of the most
compelling reasons why people invest in the
market, so by starting them with the concept that
their money could grow while they sleep. That’s
what a lot of financial planners say. You want to
develop something so that money will grow while
you’re asleep. So thinking about that idea can
carry us through all of our programs.
When we teach some of our older kids how to
start investing, they’re already aware that
compound interest is one of those super
compelling mathematical and financial tools that
gets them the money that they need and from
there, helps them build and sustain the wealth.
TBMfW: I cannot wait to see this book. So we
talked about pre-k to 2nd grade. What is the next
step up?
The next step is our Time is Money program. That
is for 3rd through 8th graders. This is where things
really get fun. We started off this summer with
piloting this program where we had a number of
3rd-8th graders come in, and they’re learning for
3 hours a day for 5 days a week. In reality, it’s just
15 hours to bring all these new financial concepts
to them. But it ranges between understanding the
difference between a credit card and a debit card,
what’s on your credit report, to how do you look at
a financial aid package and start at planning for
your education right now. So if I’m 10 years old, I
have 8 years before I may need to pay the
expected family contribution. So how can I start
#WOMENINFINANCE

saving? Is that a viable option for me? What the
girls actually found out is: If I save $20 a month
from here until when I’m 18, I would be able to
cover a couple of thousand dollars worth of an
expected family contribution, if I don’t get all the
loans, grants and scholarships that I need.
So that was again, another empowering moment.
Yes, college is expensive, but if you plan correctly,
you can get there.
We ended up ﬁnishing with a performance
assessment, which is our way to quantify if they’re
actually getting ﬁnancially literate. The girls loved
this because they got to be the bankers. So I came
in as this disheveled woman who needed a
$10,000 loan. They looked at my credit report, they
looked at my assets. They looked at the
delinquencies, they looked at my FICO score, which
in this case was 580, that is bellow average, and
then they would tell me if I’d got the full loan
amount, they would set my interest rate and tell me
why. One girl even went as far as giving me variable
interest rate because I was one of her least
trustworthy borrowers. [laugh].
Again, it was absolutely incredible to watch these
girls! The empowerment! Those were some of
those moments when you saw in their eyes: “look at
how much power I have, because of all this
knowledge I can bring to the table.“
It was fun. And we don’t need 5 month long
programs. If you teach it the right way and it’s
accessible enough, these girls were in the program
for 15 hours and were able to walk out of there
speaking more eloquently than some bankers that
you can go to some branch to.
#WOMENINFINANCE

Women in Tech Leader on Diversity and Getting Uncomfortable

Women in Tech Leader on Diversity and Getting Uncomfortable

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