Kathryn Finney: Author and Startup Whisperer for Black and Latinx Women

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast. This episode's guest is the remarkable Kathryn Finney. She's an entrepreneur, investor, speaker, mentor, author, and pioneer.
She has achieved many firsts. She started one of the first fashion blogs. It was called The Budget Fashionista. MSN called it one of the hundred most useful sites on the web. She was the first blogger to be credentialed for the New York City Fashion Week. She was the first blogger to receive a major book deal. She was the first blogger to appear on The Today Show. She started the first venture capital fund focused on Black and Latinx women founders.
She was appointed by the Obama administration to the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and she was a White House champion of change. Kathryn has received numerous honors and awards such as the Grace Hopper ABIE Award, Working Mother's Fifty Most Powerful Mothers, Route 100 list, Marie Claire's Ten Women to Watch, Entrepreneur Magazine's Woman to Watch, the Ebony Power 100, Black Enterprise Forty Under Forty list.
She was inducted into Spelman College's Game Changer's Academy. Her current project is called Digital Undivided. Its goal is to create economic opportunities for Black and Latinx women. Its services include research, thought leadership, and education.
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast, and now, here's Kathryn Finney.

Guy Kawasaki:
Does your heart do back flips because you were born and raised in Minneapolis and it's kind of the epicenter?
Kathryn Finney:
Minneapolis is such an interesting place. I grew up there in the nineties - primarily the eighties and nineties. It was a place that was undergoing a great shift. There was a lot of immigrants who were coming in from Ukraine, from Somalia, from Laos, particular Hmong population, so it was becoming diverse.
It was this place that was very much not diverse in the middle of becoming diverse. Like, deeply Scandinavian. People eating lutefisk. I don't know if anyone has heard of that, but it's fish soaked in lye. It is the most un-tastiest thing ever. It was in this period of change that I grew up there, and I grew up with a really diverse group of friends, and the possibilities were always there.
I think at the same time though, it's easy to be diverse when it's not in your backyard. People were really struggling about, "How can we maintain these very Scandinavian, liberal ideas when it's in our backyard now. It's not just over there. It's like here. We have to learn how to live with it."
It's not surprising that Minneapolis would have these challenges and it's always had a history of challenges with policing. What I think is exciting is that Minneapolis is a place where the revolution can come from. The reason that I say that is you have this openness to be corrected in Minneapolis that is not something I see a lot of places.
If you can present something that's authentic and different, there is an openness to hear it in Minneapolis. This was a city that had Keith Ellison, first Muslim congressman and Michele Bachmann in districts right next to each other.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's quite a contrast!
Kathryn Finney:
And the Governor is Jesse Ventura. That's a pretty special place where you have all of that sort of going on. It's an openness.
I'm excited to see how people are rethinking things and changing the premise. The head of the city council in Minneapolis is the first openly transgendered woman elected official, right? You have this incredible of people willing to think of things differently, but it's a challenge. I'm really excited to see what comes out.
I have family members who are deeply, deeply involved on the ground with movement there, especially my niece who is Gen-Z and who is like ... I mean, these kids are so smart. They're grasp of policy. When I was twenty-two, was I thinking about policy? I thought I was smart, but not like them. They're taking it and then translating into policy, into action. All the things, the structures that existed before, they don't give an F.
I don't know if I can swear, but they really don't care about it. They're like, "So what? Why can't we do this?" I do think it's really exciting. I think this is an opportunity, and I hope that we seize it for true change.
Guy Kawasaki:
If your niece shakes you up, imagine how I feel because you shake me up.
Kathryn Finney:
Oh wow.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a compounding shake up for me.
Kathryn Finney:
Oh wow.
Guy Kawasaki:
We kind of went down this hole right away. Look, let's backtrack. Tell me the story of Budget Fashionista because I think that is such a great story.
Kathryn Finney:
Oh gosh. I started my career as an epidemiologist which has nothing to do with budget fashion, has nothing to do with startups, but was living and working a lot abroad. I had a sick parent, and also, at the same time, met my husband.
I was going to really faraway places. This is early 2000’s. I was going to Sinai. I wasn't going to Chicago. I was going to really faraway places that would take days to get to. I realized that I couldn't have a sick parent and be 8,000 miles away. I also couldn't be married. If I wanted to get married and travel three weeks out of the month, this was before FaceTime. This was before Zoom. It was before all the technologies we have now, so communication was just not easy.
I came back and was dedicating my life to save the world and realized I would have to figure out a different way to do that. I was newly married, and I was frankly bored and shopping a lot. My husband, who is an engineer said, "Have you ever thought about doing this thing called blogging?" I was like, "What the hell is that?" I had never heard. I'm like, "What is that?" He was like, "Oh it's a thing where you write online. You can talk about your shopping and the things you're finding. You can communicate with people." And so we started the Budget Fashionista as a hobby.
It was so early, and you would appreciate this, we had to use a platform called Graymatter, which was founded by this guy, I think his name was Noah Grey. It was for him to sort of document some of the mental health challenges that he was having. It was like a public diary. He took it and he made it open source. We were using this open source thing.
I had to learn how to code. I remember going to my husband's office because they had a T1 line, and it was so exciting because you could scan and get things uploaded in three minutes instead of like ten minutes. Now, it's like instant, right? Scanning pictures of the shoes I was buying at Nordstrom's Rack and then having to code them in HTL and then to build by SQL databases in order to house it, all this stuff just for a picture to show up.
We started and about six months into doing it as a hobby, we were contacted by the Associated Press because one of the things that I had read about was this thing called search engine optimization. I was writing, but I was using keywords or I was holding them, all these little things. It was coming up on YouTube, Google. People were just really starting to get into Google, and they were using Google and this Associated Press writer found me on Google and was like, "I'm writing a story about people who travel and go shopping." I was like, "Oh okay. Well, let's talk about it." We did this article on sample sales. It came out January 1, 2004. It changed my life.
There was an old IBM commercial where a company puts there website up and then the first second it's one person, and then a couple seconds later it's 1,000. Then a couple seconds later it's a million. That's what happened to me. We weren't in the Cloud, so we had to figure out ... I mean, all this stuff that now, it sounds ridiculous to anybody who is an influencer on Instagram but all this stuff I had to do for pictures and things to show up. We had to have multiple servers because it wasn't the Cloud, and so we have to figure out how to link them so that when one got overloaded, it could scale to another. I mean, all of this stuff. It just grew. It became a thing.
In 2006, I published a book called "How to be a Budget Fashionista" with Random House. It's funny because Random House at the time and publishing didn't know anything about blogging. They were like, "What?" I mean, I was one of the top writers. They were just like, "What is that?"
I remember getting into an argument. It was a fight with the marketing team because they were angry that I was promoting Amazon links and not pushing Barnes and Noble and Borders. Borders doesn't even exist anymore. The argument was, I wanted to blog a book tour and I was like, "Any person who writes about it and puts a link to Amazon, even if they don't write good things, I don't really care, just link to Amazon." And the irony of it is that book is now in its 15th printing because of all of those Amazon links are still around but Borders isn't it and Barnes and Noble isn't.
I'm with Random House still, but doing more of the business in print. It's funny because we're laughing about it now, but in 2006, it was like, "What are you doing?" It just scaled and it became this thing. It was really exciting to see content and how it was growing, and people trying to figure out, "What is the business of the internet?” Particularly in terms of content, “How do you make money off of this? Is there money to be made? What is the direction?" It was a really interesting period to see and to see things since the beginning.
I discovered - and this was probably in 2009, 2010 - that this was going to be limited. It was changing. Blogging was very much service based pieces, sometimes personal diaries, things like that. It wasn't as visual because the technology wasn't really there yet. Particularly in terms of getting photographs from the camera to online. That leap didn't really happen until the iPhone. Really, until that, and then it became so much easier to people to put visual content online and then it started to really shift.
To be honest, I just don't want to take pictures of myself every day. I just don't. I want to be in the moment, and when I'm with my family and my friends, I don't want to say, "Stop let's take a selfie." I don't want to have to do that. I want to eat and talk and learn and experience and be present. I really thought about transitioning and how do I do it?
At the same time, I was part of the early incubator program in which I was the only person of color in the program. I was really met with some pretty harsh feedback and reality. It was the first time in my life that people had no expectations of me. I grew up in Minnesota. I was used to being the only black person, chocolate drop in the room. That was not a problem at all, but I wasn't used to people having no expectations of me, and even low expectations. That wasn't something I had ever experienced before, and it was difficult. It was difficult.
Guy Kawasaki:
These were the other members of the incubator, the entrepreneurs, or were they the people who ran the incubator?
Kathryn Finney:
It was everyone! It was so weird. I remember I got up and I pitched. One of the things is this incubator were calling it a pitch and randomly. That was the idea that you had to get up in front of this group of people and pitch. I was never once called on, so me being me, I was like, "Okay. I want to do it." And they were shocked that I was going to do this.
I got up and gave my pitch and it was like silence because they were surprised that it was so good. It was almost a birch box of sorts for black women. This was like 2010, so it was early subscription, early sort of that. Because I had the Budget Fashionista, I had relationships with all of these people. From Alexis at LearnVest to the founders of Rent the Runway because they had this platform and they wanted me to help promote. I knew all these startups that were coming up.
I remember their reaction when I pitched was one person asked me did I know of any fashion bloggers. And I was like, "But you know, I'm like the dean of the ... I know all of them!" One person said to me, "I don't know if you could relate to other black women." This was a white guy. Me being me, I'm like maybe he grew up in Harlem. I don't know. "Do tell. Do tell me how you don't think I relate." And he said because I had an accountant and he didn't think most black women had accountants, so how would you be able to relate?
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, wait. What?! What?! Because you had an accountant you…?
Kathryn Finney:
I know! They said it publicly!
Guy Kawasaki:
... As a black woman, could not relate to black people? Walk me through that line of reasoning.
Kathryn Finney:
I have no idea. You would have to talk with him. But what's hard about it was, it was in front of this group of people.
Guy Kawasaki:
He said this publicly?
Kathryn Finney:
Publicly. As a person of color, when people say stupid shit to you, because you get it. I can't think of any other better word other than that, and you're in public and you have a moment and you have to think, "What is the cost of me going off on this person?" Because if I go off on them, this is what's going to happen. How do I handle this? This instant calculation you're doing in your head of how to respond. My response to him was, “This doesn't matter. I think we all can relate to money. I think that's what we all are here for, right? We're all here to build businesses and make money, so whether I relate or not doesn't matter as long as they're my customers and clients.”
But it was really difficult and it made me initially disillusioned with the startup world. I was like, "I just don't want to do this." When I kept building the Budget Fashionista and I sold it, and then I went on to Blogger and was the editor at large. I sort of built out their lifestyle segment that they were building with the fashion and the beauty people and learned about what it looked like to be in an organization, a startup, that was venture funded.
I didn't take venture or private equity for the Budget Fashionista mostly because I didn't want to stay. I knew that if I took those things, I would be kind of married to it for a while and didn't want to be known as the Budget Fashionista for the rest of my life.
I didn't take it and sold it, but went to Blogger and saw the other side, like, what happens when you get venture? How does it impact your company? How does it allow you to scale? I learned an awful a lot from Alissa and Joey who are all still great friends of mine and mentors about that and how do you build. It was while there, I went to conference.
I think one of the first time I went to South by Southwest, I was actually on a panel of yours. I had never been before, with my dear friend Patricia. I was just seeing how black people ... We just weren't in the room. Where were we?
That really inspired digitalundivided and the founding of it. It was, "I know we exist. Why aren't we here? Where are we? Why aren't we here? What are the barriers?" Because I don't have the fear gene as my husband tells me, I don't have that gene that tells you not to do something, I was like, "Okay. I'm going to just start something. Why not?" And received early support.
The first supporters were of course Blogger, which gave me the first trunk of money and gave me a lot of mentorship and assistance on how to actually start it off as a conference. Andreesen Horowitz gave us our biggest check. I used some of the money from starting my startup. Ogleby at the time had a free space in New York. They had a sort of event space on 47th and 10th, and I had a friend who was an executive there, and they had never really done anything in the space, so she was like, "Would you like the space?" I'm like, "Oh my god, yes." And, "You can have it for free, and we'll also give you some food." We're like, "Oh word. This is great."
We did our first conference in 2012. Our keynote speaker was then mayor Cory Booker who had a startup called Waywire and one can remember about it then. It was amazing. It was about fifty black women founders, many who have gone on to pretty major things and major positions both in tech and also in the startup world and investors of all stripes. It was incredible. We knew we had something. We did it for three years.
We wanted to expand the part that was the most successful which was to the mentorship, the virtual accelerator, that meant we were testing in 2012, 2013. We had some partners who were interested but had no data. At the time, no one had really collected data on women, let alone black women. It was just, "Yeah there are some women in startups." You would say, "Okay, how many?" There are some women in startups. They didn't actually tell you the numbers. I was really, I didn't know what to do.
My husband, who is very pragmatic, as only engineers can be, was like, "Didn't you go to Yale and have a degree in epidemiology? Can't you just pay that thing off? Why don't you try to use that because you paid it off? Use it, do something with it." I was like, "Oh my gosh. I know how to do this!"
I think as women, even those of us who should know better, even as smart as we may be, sometimes we look outside of ourselves for the answer because we're often not trained to look within ourselves. I had the answer to my problem. I just didn't realize it but I had it.
We did our first ProjectDiane in 2016. The numbers were shocking. We did it originally as an internal report. We were going to use this a base to make this an argument about why there needed to be gender-focused accelerator incubator program. But the data was so stark, at the time we had only identified eighty-eight black women led startups using the sort of Steve Blank definition. If we had gotten super real, it would have been even less. We had to even be a little more liberal than Steve's.
It was shocking. We kept testing the number because we couldn't believe that was it. Anecdotally what we noticed was when we would go out to VC - We used VCs, we combed, we did a lot of primary data collection. We combed the entire Crunch base database of like 60,000 startups. We went to every VC we could know of. We asked them to send in, we're like, "Send us everyone you think is a black woman." Like literally, that's what we said. "Don't even question it. Even if they have a dark tan. Send us everybody and we will figure it out later."
What we found was fascinating. It was this sort of bias in which investors were trying to test us and they would say, "Well do such and such." And we're like “yes,” and the next investor we talked to would say, "Do such." Like the same person the other person said.
What we realized is that they were counting the one black female founder they knew more than once. But it was only one or maybe two, but they were saying their names over and over again. Sort of, in my mind, when you hear the name over and over again, you start to think there is more people. It was really just one or two, which was really, really amazing.
We also found in 2016 that only eleven black women had raised over a million dollars in venture funding.
Guy Kawasaki:
Eleven? Four years ago?
Kathryn Finney:
Eleven. Yeah. Yeah, this was four years ago.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Kathryn Finney:
Yeah, eleven. Needless to say, it was a point where we were really small staffed. What do we do with this because this is like so bad. What do we do with it? Where do you go with this? We received a little bit of funding to start our first incubator program. We started in Atlanta. We had decided that we were going to release this information because this was so - it was information that needed to be out there. A lot of people think data wants to be free. This was information that wanted to be free and needed to be free out there for people to see.
I did not expect it to have the impact that it had in changing things. That has been super exciting to see how it falls through discussion, especially now.
There was an update done in 2018 which also had some interesting data. In 2018, it was over thirty-seven black women who had raised over a million dollars. In a two year period, it was quite significant. A lot of that happened to do with the first ProjectDiane because I think when it came out, it was a little bit of panic. The number of VC firms, the number of LP's who called me and were like, "We've got a problem. What do we do? This isn't good. How do we solve it?" Was quite significant, so to see in that two year period the increase was great.
Guy Kawasaki:
With reflection, what do you see as the main causes? Was it out and out racism? Is it the explanation would be, "Well our pipeline of black female entrepreneurs is so small? That's not our fault that nobody comes to pitch us." Was it systemic? How do you explain that?
Kathryn Finney:
You invest in what you value.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Kathryn Finney:
People didn't, and probably still don't, really value the work of black women and the work of black people. I would even extrapolate that to even the work of black and Latino communities. I think it's not just racism, it is in the fabric of our country.
Our country was built upon free labor – forced, free labor for many, many years, right? Here you have the group of people for whom you had free labor now assessing value to their labor, and they want the same value that you assess to yours.
I think it's hard, even now in 2020, for people to let go of that structure. To see the work that I do as equally as valuable as the work as a white man does. It's the same product. It's the same value. And maybe, in some cases, maybe even more valuable because I'm a woman and I have access to different markets and knowledge that you may not have.
I think that's really, really hard. I think that's the discussions that we're starting to have about, who do we value in America? Do we value everyone's contributions? Truly, do we value everyone's contributions or do we still value some contributions a little bit more than others? I think that's the discussion that we're starting to have.
Guy Kawasaki:
If I were a white female entrepreneur listening to this, would I be saying, "It's just as hard for me." Or would I be saying, "Thank god I'm not black and female."
Kathryn Finney:
Well, you know there's this interesting video that goes around and it's, I forgot her name, she's a really famous white lady who's been educating on race for like sixty years. She has a really famous video with kids and dolls from the 1960s. She's talking to this group of mostly white people in the audience and she says, "How many of you here would trade places with a black person?" And no one stands up. I think that kind of answers that question. No one would trade places with me, right? No one would want to be sort of in my skin.
Most of my white female colleagues and friends that I know of, they acknowledge the benefits that they have received, and that they're able to get further along than I am. That doesn't mean that they get as far as white guys, but they're able to get further along because the value question comes back again.
Me, white male VCs, their daughters, they have daughters, and they have people that they love, who are women, that they want to see succeed. If someone comes in and reminds you of your daughter, it's not hard for you to see the value in them. It's not hard for you to see their humanity. They benefit from that.
There's very few VCs who I will remind them of their daughter. Even though I might have similar backgrounds to their daughters, when I come in they're not like, "Oh my gosh, she looks like Genie or whatever." It becomes again back to this value. Who do you value? Do you value my economic output as the same rate as you value others?
I love to read, I mean, obsessively, and one of the things I was reading about Harvey Milk, the great gay rights activist from San Francisco, and I was reading about how he kind of helped get the sodomy laws turned in California. One of the things he did was he had members of the gay community call their loved ones in Orange County. This was in the seventies so Orange County was even more conservative than it is now. He would have them call him to come out because the idea was it's really hard to be mean to someone you know and love. It's really, really hard to not see the humanity in someone you grew up with, someone you may have birthed, right? It's really, really hard to do that and once people knew someone gay, then it was really hard to criminalize being gay.
I think one of the things, particularly in the investment world but in sort of the world in general, is not very many startup leaders actually have relationships with people who are black. If you don't have a true friend who is black, if you've never really talked to someone black, and you never really talked to someone who's a black woman, I mean intimately, not just someone who is in a servant position to you, they're serving you. But really as an equal, as a friend, as a colleague. Then it's a little bit hard to see humanity and it's hard to see the value. You don't actually have that connection. I think that's one of the reasons why we also see challenges.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think therefore that the pandemic has made things even harder because of a lack of analog personal connections or you think the pandemic has leveled the playing field so everybody is just a little box on Zoom?
Kathryn Finney:
That's an interesting question. I think the irony of the pandemic - I don't even know if I would say it's irony - it's impacted the communities that are probably the most essential the most. Meaning, imagine our world if we didn't have Amazon factory workers, if we didn't have the delivery folks from Amazon, if we didn't have the Target cashiers or the cashiers at our grocery stores, most of those people are people of color. Most of those people are not people who necessarily have college educations, right?
What I think is interesting, it's shown how vitally essential we are, how important our work is, for just the movement, the daily motions of America. Most of the home healthcare aides are women of color. Nurses. The people who were keeping it at America's lowest point in recent history, the people who are keeping things moving were mostly black and Latino women.
Guy Kawasaki:
Does that mean with greater exposure, there's greater appreciation or it sticks them in a stereotype at a low compensation, low kind of position?
Kathryn Finney:
I think it's more so communities of color and particularly women of color were starting to realize our power as a result of that. I don't even know if it's really about white people anymore. I think it's kind of about us and realizing exactly who we are and our importance and that if we didn't exist, you probably wouldn't exist.
If we didn't exist, you would have to go out and get your own food. You would have to kill a chicken if we didn't work at the meat packing plant. All of these things. I think it's now as communities of color, we're starting to see what our power is and we're starting to make demands as a result of that, because we are so essential, we're the most essential of employees, to the health of our country, for us to even survive as a country, it's important for us to do well and to be healthy, happy, and whole.
It's in the best interest of white people that we are healthy, happy, and whole because, again, you would have to go out and do your own things. I think that what I'm seeing now is this discussion of the power that we have because we have a lot of power. We are not powerless. We never were powerless, but I think the structures wanted us to think that way and believe that and now we're realizing, "Oh wow. We're really important."
We don't want your policing anymore. We don't want your poor schools. We want healthcare. We know we need childcare. If you want us to come and still work at your factory, if you want us to come and still work at your warehouse, then you need to make sure that we're good. The next time this comes up, we may not be here. You can do it yourself. I think that's the interesting discussion. That's the discussion I find more interesting than…
Guy Kawasaki:
Well let's hope that discussion continues and grows, but there is a faction who is fighting that tooth and nail. The demographic trend is not their friend, but they're not exactly going with the flow nor taking advantage of this. What happens now? Is it that you just have to swamp them or is there ever going to be a time when enlightenment increases and they see the handwriting on the wall?
Kathryn Finney:
I'm not sure if there are enough incentives for those people to change on their own. To be really honest, I don't think I care about them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Kathryn Finney:
Mostly because change is going to happen. It's forward momentum. It's physics. You can't do anything about it. It does not matter what they think in terms of where this is going. In the short term, sure. They can be disruptive. They can cause all sorts of things and we're seeing that. But in the long-term, it's moving forward. History is moving whether you wanted it to or not, and so you have a choice. Particularly for them, how do you want to be remembered?
I was reading something about Ruby Bridges who attended a desegregated school, I think it was in Arkansas. You know, there's a famous Norman Rockwell picture of her walking as this little black girl and the Army next to her - a really famous picture.
There's one picture of this white lady who is probably like twenty-seven or twenty-eight at that time, yelling at this six year old black girl. If you can imagine how yelling at a six-year-old is hatred. There was an article where they went back and talked to that woman because history has captured her in this way. She had years of depression, a hard time reconciling that is how history remembers her. For her entire existence and even, I think she might have passed away, the world remembers her as that.
For these folks, do you want to be remembered as that? Because you're being recorded, and this is how the world is going to remember you when you're gone, is like that. The world is moving forward. It's not going to go back to where you want it to.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think Donald Trump spends a nanosecond thinking about how he will be remembered?
Kathryn Finney:
Oh, no, no. He doesn't care. I think, actually, you know what? I actually think he does care what people think about him, but I think it's people who he sees as valuable. That's who he cares about, and I don't think, people like me, he doesn't give, he doesn't care about what I think at all, but I think for people who he admires and who he thinks are valuable, he does care.
What the Gen-Z’ers and the K-pop fans did for him that's past me, was probably the biggest blow they could possibly do, right? Someone who really cares about being perceived as this strong, capable person who is in charge, and they literally took all of his power away from him for everyone to see. I think those sort of things, it's why I just ... I mean, I just love Gen-Z. I just love how they just don't care. They're just like, "Whatever. We're going to-"
Guy Kawasaki:
That's what I say about you Kathryn!
Kathryn Finney:
It's really weird. I'm a late millennial, early Gen-X. My role as being kind of almost like an elder now even though I'm not super old, but I am an elder. It's like, for my nieces and her friends it's like, "Look. You are doing exactly what you should do at twenty-two. You should be out on these streets. You shouldn't be doing these sort of things and my role is to bail you out.”
Guy Kawasaki:
Literally?
Kathryn Finney:
I just want to ... I'm not new. Whatever you do, know that on the other end you have a safety net. You have someone who is going to bail you out. You have someone who if you want to talk strategies and things that I tried in the past, you want advice, or you don't want advice, I'm here. That's really, really my role. Then also figuring out how do we continue to do structural changes.
I'm really inspired by them. I'm inspired by the changes I see people doing. Inspired by, even people who are trying to figure out, "What can I do?" Right? What can I do? This is a really hard complicated problem that is embedded in the fabric of our nation.
It's not going to just be money that solves it. It's not going to be solved in a month. It's going to take some real discussions about who are we? It's going to take some real discussions with white people. Sitting down - what does it mean to be white? What does it mean to be American? Like really, what does it mean? What do we stand for? Who are we? Who are we as a community or communities? And that's not discussions that are easy to have.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can I just ask you, what should a sixty-six-year-old Asian American man do to help?
Kathryn Finney:
There's a couple of ways to help. I think one, listening. I think it's really important. I think, two, most people, I think in this world, just want to kind of be left alone to succeed or not succeed based upon our own skills, right? I think particularly for other people of color who have their own challenging histories with America, when you see things, calling it out, very clearly - especially someone like you, for whom you really do have a voice and people really listen to you, and calling out and saying, "Eh. This is not good."
One of the things I think too, is there are some ally shiftings I saw that were really interesting. A couple of years ago, Anil Dash who's an amazing guy, he's the CEO of Glitch now, he for, like, a year only retweeted women. Only retweeted women. He never tweeted, never tweeted an ad, never anything like that because he knew that people who were on his Twitter feed never had access or linkages with women. He knew that if he was only retweeting it, then all of a sudden on their feed, they would start to see because they were following him. I just thought that was a really tiny, simple thing, but I got a ton of followers as a result of it and people who discovered me who would have never, ever had me in their spear, with a simple thing of saying, "I'm just only retweet women for a year."
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. This is what we should do. I love this idea! Why don't I let you take over my LinkedIn account?
Kathryn Finney:
I would love that!
Guy Kawasaki:
Just keep accessing my LinkedIn account. If you looked at my LinkedIn account, you would see how political I am. It's not about, "Well, this is how to optimize your resume in order to get a job." My LinkedIn account is, oh my god, you should see the hatred I ... Yeah, yeah. Let's do that.
Kathryn Finney:
I would love that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's do that.
Kathryn Finney:
I would love that. I would love that.
There was something a friend of mine Luvvie Ajayi who is really, really well known commentator by New York Times, like an amazing best seller. She did something where a group of white women allies, black women took over their feeds.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kathryn Finney:
It was like Julia Roberts participated and others. I thought, "I would love to do this where a group of black women took over the feeds of some white guys."
Guy Kawasaki:
You know I'm not white, right?
Kathryn Finney:
And other dudes, not just white dudes but other men in power ... Yes, I know. But men of power-
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Done.
Kathryn Finney:
In fact, would that not be awesome and how many people would be-
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so-
Kathryn Finney:
... I would love. Let's do it! No, I'm serious. Let's do it!
Guy Kawasaki:
I have I don't know, a million and a half on Twitter. I have three million or so on LinkedIn. My Instagram is mostly personal pictures, but you could take over that too. That's, I don't know, 85,000? Do you want them all or do you want to take them one at a time? How do you want to do this?
Kathryn Finney:
No, we could do, LinkedIn and Twitter would be fine because if I show up on your Instagram, it's a bunch of pictures of like a black woman and they'll be like ... Do you want to tell them?
Guy Kawasaki:
Can I-
Kathryn Finney:
Here's the thing. We are able to do a lot because people always undersell us. People always discount us. The thing about it is when you are really, really smart and people discount you without knowing that you're really, really smart, you're able to get a lot of shit done. You're able to do a lot.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Kathryn Finney:
Before people even realized it because they're discounting you on something that has nothing to do with your intellect or who you are, so by the time they discover who you really are, you're all the way down the road, and they're like, "Wait. What just happened?" No, I never said I wasn't smart. You just assumed that. While you were making your own assumptions, you were over here, I was doing all of this stuff, and you looked up and you were like, "What the?" That's what makes us powerful.
We don't have any super powers. We're not mythical or magical or anything. It's just we're constantly discounted. We're constantly undersold. We're constantly overlooked. As a result, we're able to just get shit done because we don't have to deal with the other stuff.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think that black women should be large and in charge, not having to sneak around.
Kathryn Finney:
Well, hopefully we will be. Hopefully we will be. We have our own faults too, but I think it's this thing of our mental capacity is great and the reason being is that we're trained to ... Like I said, those calculations I had to do when that person was saying this in front of this whole group of people and how quickly I had to compute what I was going to say based upon, and assess all the different possible scenarios in my head within a three second timeframe, we're trained to do that because of the societal structures. We have to think in that way.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Kathryn Finney:
I call this person an MF in front of this group of fifty VCs, I'm not going to get funding and probably no other black woman is going to get funding ever from these people. Let me recalculate another way of responding. How do I not yell and scream? How do I not get angry? And that's the super power. That's where that ... It's really just capacity to assess a number of different situations all at once to figure out what is the best.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just remember that I put you on a South by Southwest panel before. I was way ahead of my time, right?
Kathryn Finney:
You were! You were. It was great. I love the idea of like-
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so-
Kathryn Finney:
... Takeover. I would love to do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know about how to organize more, but I can only speak for my account. When your episode goes live, I'm going to announce in my episode that ... How long do you want it for?
Kathryn Finney:
Just for a day.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just one day?
Kathryn Finney:
I think a day is like-
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Okay.
Kathryn Finney:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going to announce in the episode, when this goes live, that you are now large and in charge of my LinkedIn feed and Twitter feed, and you can post whatever the hell you want and just go for it. Okay?
Kathryn Finney:
I won't put pictures of cats.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't want any unicorns or pixie dust.
Kathryn Finney:
Right? No, I would love that. I'm actually going to reach out to Luvvie and see if she would be interested. That could be some help that I could use, of getting some named white guys to allow – and it's not just random black women that will take over their feeds. It's like ones that, maybe someone you've invested in, someone you know.
Guy Kawasaki:
Someone remarkable!
Kathryn Finney:
Someone remarkable! There's a lot of women out there that I think could be incredibly powerful, particularly in the space of tech where people are trying grasp. Get Serena Williams to take over Jack Dorsey. I mean, you know?
Guy Kawasaki:
Let her have mine too. I can go with that.
Kathryn Finney:
Right? That would be pretty amazing and we'll see if that could happen, but I think it would be really super powerful.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right. Done.
Next question. I haven't asked many questions, but next question. With all you know, your background, everything, total picture, what's your advice to black people? Particularly young, I would say, what kind of mindset should they have? What's the right perspective to be successful today?
Kathryn Finney:
There are no rules, and old people don't know anything.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's all they need to know?
Kathryn Finney:
That's what I would say to them. No, the reason why I say that is that we're at a time when information is accessible in ways it's never been accessible. We have tools to organize that we never had before.
If you could imagine what Martin Luther King could have done with Twitter, and he was probably the most masterful PR person we've ever seen in history, knew how to use visual media like no one's business. Imagine if he had Instagram back in the day and what he could have done with that.
A lot of us older people, particularly those who are pre-internet generation, all the things that they're going to share with younger people are probably going to be wrong, and they're all old sort of structures. They're all old structures of how things had to be, what we would call respectability politics. That if you just do this, then they're going to do this. It doesn't work anymore. We've seen that doesn't work.
I say to young people, "Look, you guys have tools that were not available. You have access to information that was not available. Use it and develop, and what us older people,” and I'm talking about older as really anyone forty and over, “what we can do is, we can bail you out. We can give you funds to build it. We can provide you some advice on people because we've lived a little bit longer, so we know a little bit more about human nature. We can give you some advice definitely on that. But in terms of structures, there are no rules anymore. You are not bound by anything anymore."
As soon as Donald Trump was elected president, all bets were off. Anyone can be president. Anyone can. You don't even have to - I mean, all of the rules, you don't have to be Obama perfect anymore, all of the rules no longer exist so you get to create what it is that you want to see, and that's incredibly exciting.
They, actually, and this is for all young people, not just black young people or Latino young people, you get to create the world you want to see now because all rules have been disrupted thanks to Donald Trump. I think that's probably his greatest legacy is because he became president and all that he stands for means that every rule that we were told growing up of, "You have to go to college. You have to do this. You have to be this in order to succeed." All those rules no longer exist, and you can do whatever the hell you want to do now. You can rebuild this in any way you want to do. That, I think, is the most exciting thing.
People can see that being mediocre is not a barrier to success, then that means that you can - I mean, all rules are off!
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my gosh!
Kathryn Finney:
Go for it. I love that they're like, "Yeah, I don't have to listen to this. I don't have to do this." Who says that this is the structure we should have to do things?
The whole idea of, I can't even imagine five years ago people talking about, "Maybe we don't need to have police or at least we don't have to have it in the same sort of way." Why do we have police responding to mental health challenges? Why do we have doing traffic tickets and checking meters? Do you need that to be police that does that? Like why? All these things, but if you could imagine, I wouldn't even say five years ago, a year ago, would we have even been questioning these sorts of things?
We have a pandemic that no one has ever seen before. I did some talks since the pandemic has begun with various group of people from young to old, and I say, "All rules are off because we've never, there's no one alive who's been through a global pandemic right now. No one alive has ever been through this before." Except there was like one person who was like I think 105 or something.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kathryn Finney:
But it's like maybe one person who's been through this before, but for the most part, none of us who are currently running and managing things have been through this before, so anyone who tells you, "Well this is the structure and this is how it has to go." They don't know because they've never been through it either. They're making educated guesses maybe on history and some data trends, but they literally don't know. All rules and bets are off.
There's a Sikh philosopher, Valarie Kaur, and she says, "What if we're not in the darkness of the tomb, but in the darkness of the womb?" Meaning, we're in a darkness right before birth, and that's where we're at right now.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, let's get some Pitocin and get on with this.
Kathryn Finney:
Yeah. I mean let's do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Or a C-section. Whatever it takes.
Kathryn Finney:
I'm excited.
Guy Kawasaki:
Kathryn, I'm going to end this recording now because it ain't going to get better than this. I just loved having you.
By any chance to do you know Symone Sanders?
Kathryn Finney:
I don't know, know her, but we've been in a room together. Do you mean the political person?
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my god. You would love her. I love her
Kathryn Finney:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Talk about a large and in charge kick ass black woman.
Kathryn Finney:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my god. You've got to get to know her. You would love her. Yeah, yeah.
And I looked at your Twitter feed and I saw this tweet about the first black female NASCAR pit crew member? Also a great story!
Kathryn Finney:
Yeah, I did. I mean that would be a great movie. I can only imagine the stories that she has. Would we have ever thought we would be in a world where NASCAR is saying Black Lives Matter? I mean I'm like, "Wow. We have really"-
Guy Kawasaki:
And John Bolton is the good guy?
Kathryn Finney:
... Turned ... We're in a different, it is a different space right now. We're in a very different space. My only concern is that this is probably not infinite. It's probably finite. We probably only have a short period of window to do things. I hope that we, while people are open and kind of uncomfortable and they're in this space and wanting to get back comfortable, that we kind of redefine things while we can.
That's my only fear, is that we're going to squander this and do small tiny incremental change but not anything big or bold that really is what we're going to need to do if we don't want to have to deal with this again. You know, so we'll see.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know if there could be a more interesting time to live in. That's for damn sure.
Kathryn Finney:
It's very interesting.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Kathryn Finney:
I'm excited to see - I live in the South mostly. I live in Atlanta which many parts are still fighting the Civil War here. They haven't gotten the memo. Now, tearing down some Confederate statues in Atlanta. I'm excited to see what happens.
America, you know it's almost every 100 years that we had a revolution, right? Like 1776, then the Civil War, and then the Civil Rights Movement. But now, it's only fifty years between the Civil Rights Movement and this movement. Probably because of social media, it's probably going to only be like twenty-five years before the next movement. It's going to be really exciting to see what changes happen and if we can get more of it right. Like get a little bit bolder.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. It's probably a few weeks process to get this edited and all that. Then I'm going to contact you. We release on Wednesday mornings and I'm going to contact you about a week in advance and say, "Okay, so next Wednesday you are Guy Kawasaki for a day."
Kathryn Finney:
I loved it.
Guy Kawasaki:
God help you.
Kathryn Finney:
I love that. Oh my god.
Guy Kawasaki:
Here's a couple of reviews for you, "Brilliant and Refreshing Podcast. No ka oi five-oh. This is Guy 2.0 at his finest. These podcasts are direct, no holds barred, and insightful. Guy manages to bring up personal insights about his guests, that they would only share with someone that they trust. Guy's podcast on innovation is like a greatest hits album, digitally remastered for both his loyal followers and new fans. Thank you no ka oi five-oh."
Here's a second one, "Awesome podcast by Guy." Puni from East Coast. "Guy Kawasaki is a remarkable person holding podcasts of all remarkable people. His podcasts are awesome. He structures them very nicely and there is so much to learn from these podcasts. Guy, please keep them coming." Puni, I promise you that I will.
If you like my podcast, please go to the Apple podcast app and review it. Maybe I'll read yours next week.
Back to Kathryn Finney. Did you get the impression that Kathryn is a kick ass kind of woman? You'd be right about that. She is loud and proud and has every right to be.
I was so enamored with this interview, that I offered her my social media platforms. For twenty-four hours from Tuesday at midnight to Wednesday at midnight, she has all my platforms at her access. Go and check out my accounts at LinkedIn and Twitter, they're both “Guy Kawasaki,” to see what she's posting. If you are a woman entrepreneur, be sure to follow the work of Kathryn Finney. As we discussed, her latest project is called digitalundivided.
Speaking of undivided, Peg Fitzpatrick and Jeff Sieh are part of my undivided team in providing this podcast to you every week. My thanks to both of them.
Also, for this particular podcast, Alyssa Camhorn-Page helped me make this interview possible.

I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. Wash your hands, maintain social distance, wear a mask, and listen to scientists and doctors, not politicians, and let's all get through this pandemic together. Mahalo and aloha.

This is Remarkable People.