Note: We’ve had two BIG launches last month!

1. The Mobile Growth Handbook 2022 is packed with incredible insights along with tried and tested strategies, this book is the perfect tool to learn from and hone your growth plans for this year. We feature hand-selected insights from the smartest mobile growth marketers.

We have over 100 pages of insights that can be accessed at all times (as soon as you sign up). Download the book now and get a head start on your growth strategies.

Download the book now and get a head start on your growth strategies. https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/mobile-growth-handbook-2022/

2. The Mobile Growth Slack: A community that was a part of our workshop series – The Mobile Growth Lab, is now open to the general public. Join over 150 mobile marketers to discuss challenges and share your expertise. More details are available here: https://mobileuseracquisitionshow.com/slack/

If you’re ready to join the growing community, fill this form: https://forms.gle/cRCYM4gT1tdXgg6u5

ABOUT OUR GUESTS: Allison Schiff | Aurora Klaeboe Berg | Colette Nataf | Faith Price | Mireia Rivero | Paula Neves | Peggy Anne Salz

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KEY QUOTES

Not all meetings for women are actually designed to empower women

I was a financial analyst at the Treasury Department for the United States government, we had a meeting at the Treasury for women leaders, and I said, “that sounds interesting, are you going?” She was like, “Why would I go to that? None of the men are going. All the people who I look up to, and want to have their jobs, are men.”

Managers don’t have to know it all

One was that when you’re a manager, it’s not all about knowing and having all the answers, or even understanding, specifically at a very deep level, what each of your direct reports does and what their business model is. Suzy was not familiar with affiliate marketing, which happened to be what I was working in at the time. But instead, it was about understanding what the employee needs to be successful.

Shattering ceilings in the 80s

I know this might sound cliche, but my mom. She’s retired now but she was an executive for around 30 years at a design and wallcovering company that was involved in some of the biggest corporate office decorating projects in New York City during the late 80s and into the early 2000s. She wore suits with shoulder pads and she rose to the top, broke through the glass ceiling, VP level, in a very male dominated industry. She went to building sites and talked to the construction workers. She worked with the unions. She worked with truckers bringing in the materials and she found that she had a very business focused mind, but she studied art in college. She’s a very talented artist. 

So it came as a surprise to her that she had such a good head for business. She followed where her interests led her and really rose to the top of her chosen field.

The importance of explaining processes

So the idea was they didn’t fail the UX/UI.  We failed in explaining it properly, and that has stayed with me ever since. I always think about that when some of my colleagues in the industry get full of themselves and the jargon, and they forget that we are human and our mission is to empower, enable, and listen.

The impact of support during the formative years

 I remember my parents were the ones that would show up at every sports event we were at, it didn’t matter if they had to drive for hours to get there. I was really big into art when I was in high school. So they would show up for every reception, for every juried show that my art would get into. And it was just making it this commonplace notion that you’re going to grow up to achieve something and we’re going to support you in that achievement. And I want to say, that was so important in my life that it really influenced me, because I never had a thought that I wouldn’t go to college and that I wouldn’t try to achieve whatever it was my dreams were.

Make sure to course correct as soon as you find something wrong

I’m a year and a half in and I think, I’m really good at school, why do I hate this? And it turned out that what I wanted to be doing was the thing I was doing part time, which was building my own company. I had a tutoring business, I had seven tutors working for me. And that was what I was doing with my free time while I was in grad school. Sometimes the thing that you do part time is the thing that you should be doing full time. So with that in mind, shut down, my tutoring business moved across the country and came to San Francisco, and the rest is history.

How negative circumstances can bring positive changes

Then the sudden loss of my mom in a tragic accident, connected me profoundly to my life into a journey of self discovery, to understand myself better, what makes me happy, what troubles me, my fears, what blocks me, since then, I think that I became a very resilient person.

Make use of resources available to improve your skills

How do you stay on top of your game? I was expecting some super complicated answer and that wasn’t what she told me. It’s all out there. You just need to see it and use it. That sounds really simple, but it is a moment of clarity where you say yes again, I am in charge of my own destiny.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Colette Nataf  

Question number one, tell us about a mentor or a guide who has been critical to your career.

I think that women love this idea of mentors and we really like this idea that someone is going to help us and guide us. And that’s great in theory, but it’s just not reality. The person who cares about your career the most, is you. Yes, there have been people who have given me great advice over the course of my career but I don’t have what I would consider to be a traditional mentor relationship with them. 

About one of my first bosses in my very first job, I was a financial analyst at the Treasury Department for the United States government, we had a meeting at the Treasury for women leaders, and I said, “that sounds interesting, are you going?” She was like, “Why would I go to that? None of the men are going. All the people who I look up to, and want to have their jobs, are men.” It really stuck with me, we’re all in this meeting together, and what’s the action item taken from it. That’s how I would approach any kind of mentor relationship. There’s no person in the world who is going to be your ideal companion through work, it just doesn’t exist. And by letting go of the idea that it was going to happen, I felt like there was a weight lifted off.

Who’s my mentor? Me, I’m my mentor, I make my own guiding path.I decide this is what I want for my next step in my career. When I took this job at MileIQ, I left my full time position in my own business, it was a big deal. There were definitely people who I called and talked to about it, but at the same time, the person making the decision at the end of the day is me. 

Here’s another story. When I was just starting out at Lightning AI, we were in an accelerator program. It was my first year of business as a CEO. We were doing really well. We’re making a lot of money. I was feeling pretty good about myself but, there are always insecurities, right? Like there’s always questions of are we doing the best job we could? 

One of the reasons I joined this program is because they said, we’ll set you up with an advisor who is going to actually act as a mentor with you throughout the program. And I was like, great. I love the idea of a mentor. I forget what he said to me exactly, probably because it was just emotionally painful and I wanted to distance myself from that trauma. But I remember I was bawling. I was telling myself “Don’t cry in front of this person. This person has a lot of money. He’s an angel investor, he knows what he’s talking about.” 

That guy was not the right person for me. And it’s okay. It’s okay that the person who was my advisor, was completely unhelpful, because at the end of the day, I managed to build a successful business, with or without him. And I was going to do that anyway. So if you’re crying in the elevator, or on a rooftop in San Francisco that you managed to climb up on the top of – that’s fine. Life happens.

Paula Neves  

Well, if I have to talk about a mentor, I guess I would want to talk about Lillian Grumbach. I’ve had some great mentors in the past, I’ve been very lucky. But Lilian was a great example for me, of a woman executive who had a super high maintenance job, and she worked 12 hours a day, and was raising a kid as well. And it was a really great example of a career woman who was paving her path, working really hard, and was able to raise her daughter very well.  Apart from that, she’s just one of the greatest people I know, with a huge heart and is super understanding. She’s a great example of a human being and a woman and an executive. So yeah, definitely, she taught me a lot.

Mireia Rivero  

I’ve had a few mentors in my career that have helped me to learn and develop my professional skills. But I keep good memory of these two. First, Chris Gayle, who trusted me in his first mobile advertising startup agency in London, in the early times of mobile in 2011. He introduced me to this industry, taught me the ABC and how to navigate in this business with a startup mindset. I’m very grateful for the opportunity he gave me to learn. 

Then Jacob Krueger at Social Point. He was the first manager in the gaming industry, I learned to understand the gaming advertising puzzle with him, and to enjoy the constant challenges of performance marketing. I also have a collection of great work colleagues and managers who inspire me and teach me lessons to improve every day.

Faith Price  

I’ve really been fortunate to have a large number of amazing women as marketing managers over the course of my career, and each one has taught me something important to help shape who I am, who I want to be both as a colleague, as manager and as a marketing professional. So looking back, just thinking about a couple specific ones. I think back to my days at Expedia, when I for a very brief time had a manager they brought in by the name of Suzy. 

She was not my manager for very long, because they recognized her skills and had promoted her to start a whole new department after only a couple of months. But during that short amount of time that I’ve worked with her, I realized some very valuable things. One was that when you’re a manager, it’s not all about knowing and having all the answers, or even understanding, specifically at a very deep level, what each of your direct reports does and what their business model is. 

Suzy was not familiar with affiliate marketing, which happened to be what I was working in at the time. But instead, it was about understanding what the employee needs to be successful. So she would ask the questions needed to help me figure out what the roadblocks were, we would talk through how to remove them. And she would really challenge me to think about and find the answers for the questions, and then try to provide the support and the resources I needed to be able to find those answers. 

If there were challenges with another department, talk through what would it look like to approach that department to ask for help or to collaborate. And so it really was how do you be a guide as a manager, not necessarily knowing all the answers, but helping people get to the answers. And then also, she really had a way of celebrating achievements and making me as an employee feel valued. That was one of the biggest impacts to me as to what a really good manager would be. 

More recently, I think back to Katherine, who is the VP of the advertising team at Big Fish Games. And this was another growth point in my career. She brought me into her office one day, and she was really straightforward with me. She had said, “you need to think about how you are working with and approaching other people and what their perceptions may be.” 

I will admit that I tend to have a QA perspective. And if you’re familiar with QA, especially in games, they’re the people who look at something and find all of the different challenges, the bugs and the issues. And so when I would look at a project, my first response would be “okay, well, here’s all of the challenges. And then here’s how we’re going to solve them.” Because the other aspect of my personality is I like to under-promise and over-deliver. And we’ll figure out how to get there. 

But what Katherine was showing me was that message, the “we’ll figure out how to get there, in the end, we will make it work” was being lost, because people would see the critical aspect up front. And so her challenge to me was, for the next couple of months, “just say yes, anytime somebody comes and says, let’s do this, just say yes. And then you’ll figure out how to make it work. But start with a premise of saying yes, and just see where that gets you.” 

I think that was really valuable feedback from where that has helped me grow and mature and who I want to be just as a colleague to people I work with. 

Aurora  Klaeboe Berg

Well, for me, it was Nick Broby Petersen. He was my colleague at Dirtybit and co-founder later at Mega Cool. We were classmates and he really saw something in me that I at least couldn’t see at the time.

Allison Schiff

I know this might sound cliche, but my mom. She’s retired now but she was an executive for around 30 years at a design and wallcovering company that was involved in some of the biggest corporate office decorating projects in New York City during the late 80s and into the early 2000s. She wore suits with shoulder pads and she rose to the top, broke through the glass ceiling, VP level, in a very male dominated industry. She went to building sites and talked to the construction workers. She worked with the unions. She worked with truckers bringing in the materials and she found that she had a very business focused mind, but she studied art in college. She’s a very talented artist. 

So it came as a surprise to her that she had such a good head for business. She followed where her interests led her and really rose to the top of her chosen field. She was also the main breadwinner in my family growing up. I’m a child of the 80s and we had a very atypical family setup for the time. My dad quit his job. and stayed at home to take care of me and do all the house related stuff and my mom went to work, but it just worked. And that’s very clear evidence to me that things don’t have to be done in a certain way just because that’s what everybody else does, or because that’s the way they’ve always been done. 

Peggy Anne Salz

I’ll share a couple. There was my high school teacher, Mrs. Wilmack Henderson. I was one of those people who  wanted to get an A and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get an A. I was literally near tears one time and I asked her, “What is this? I’m doing my best. I’m not getting that A.”  She said she wouldn’t do it. Because she thought that would extinguish the fire I had within me to keep trying and never give up. So if I achieved my goal, what would there be? So it has kept me on my path, since that time. 

Later in life, another woman taught me how to frame things very differently. So a call out there to Susan Dre, wherever you are.

You’re now president at Dre associates. I had the privilege of interviewing her when she was focused on human computer interaction in Africa.  This was probably 15 years ago and she told me a story that has kept me humble ever since.

And it was about testing user experience UX/UI. She was working on making it possible for villagers in some very remote part of Africa to communicate in pictures. They figured out the approach and she told me how they were working with focus groups and something about clicking the button.

Someone in the focus group told her that the directions she had provided were incorrect. It was about clicking the button and then you can do X. And he was like, “no, we’re not clicking the button because it’s the picture of a button.”

So the idea was they didn’t fail the UX/UI.  We failed in explaining it properly, and that has stayed with me ever since. I always think about that when some of my colleagues in the industry get full of themselves and the jargon, and they forget that we are human and our mission is to empower, enable, and listen.

And finally, It’s all about being human. And therefore I have to give a shout out to Jennifer Burrington who is currently in BizDev at T-Mobile. She probably wouldn’t know what she did when she took some time out to speak with me at a low point in my career. But she told me about how important it was to bring our whole self to work.

It was about being real authentic, and it taught me how important it is to be true to myself, to cultivate these qualities. And I think of her when I connect with women who are in a similar situation, now they might just need some honesty, a frank discussion, a little bit of perspective to unlock the remarkable women they are.

it just also underlines the importance of listening,  sometimes it’s all we need to do to help someone be who they are, or just reach up the next rung. So thank you, Jennifer.

Tell us about an inflection point in your career or life that shaped who you are. 

Allison Schiff

Honestly, it was when I had a very difficult female boss. She was verbally abusive, not much of a mentor, to say the least, and extremely critical, without being constructive. But over the course of that job, I came to realize that she had her own past and she was a damaged person and in certain ways, she needed me to manage her. Over time, I learned a little bit about why she was the way she was, why she acted the way she did and I started being able to better navigate that relationship. 

Eventually, we ended up having a pretty decent relationship. And it was through that whole experience, because it was really hard going into work every day, that I learned that women should be helping other women, they don’t always. I learned many reasons why people act the way they do. Being empathetic is so critical and can actually bestow a lot of power on the person who was being empathetic. If you make an effort to understand someone, they also really appreciate it. And that was one of my first jobs. And it really was a trial by fire. But I learned the art of empathy at work. And it’s really, it served me very well.

Faith Price  

So I want to talk about actually one of the biggest influences in who I am in my career that started before I ever even had a career. My family, and specifically my parents and my dad. I didn’t come from a family that had a lot of four year degrees. In fact, I was the first out of my siblings and my parents to get a four year degree. But I remember growing up my dad saying to me when you go to college, or when you graduate from college, and he just set this expectation that it was a common everyday assumption that I would go to college and graduate and do whatever in the business world I wanted. It was really that expectation and following that up with their support and everything.

 I remember my parents were the ones that would show up at every sports event we were at, it didn’t matter if they had to drive for hours to get there. I was really big into art when I was in high school. So they would show up for every reception, for every juried show that my art would get into. And it was just making it this commonplace notion that you’re going to grow up to achieve something and we’re going to support you in that achievement. And I want to say, that was so important in my life that it really influenced me, because I never had a thought that I wouldn’t go to college and that I wouldn’t try to achieve whatever it was my dreams were. 

Looking at the future, and how we can support the next generation, it’s really giving them that foundation that we expect them to achieve. And we’re going to help them achieve we’re going to support them achieve whether it’s your kids or your nieces and nephews or whoever it is you have some sort of influence with really just providing that expectation that they can achieve what they want, that they are supported, and then letting them go on and do that. That for me was really one of the reasons I think I went to college and I got into business and I got into marketing, which it turns out I love and was able to move forward and continue it.

Peggy Anne Salz

I’m going to have to go back to my mother who passed away some 20 years ago this month in March. She chose to divorce her husband at a time when leaving an abusive relationship meant that you were on your own little support. What shaped me was her decision years later to enroll at a local college in Pittsburgh and deal with being the oldest in the class, being the least tech savvy, being the least cool in the class and earning a degree to teach computer science and accounting.

 Watching her make her own way from her beginnings convinced me that you can do what you are determined to do.

Colette Nataf  

Let’s go back to my treasury days. If you are a person who likes working in startups, a place I would not recommend working is the government. I was super unhappy. It felt like there was nothing for me to do. I was constantly looking for projects, no one had any. It felt like no one had work for me to do. What I didn’t realize at the time is that when you’re a very junior employee, even taking what feels like a minor amount of work off of someone else’s plate is actually worth the salary that they are paying you. 

So I’m doing that and thinking, this is really not what I wanted. I’m gonna go back to grad school. And that was an interesting choice that I would also not recommend for people who are really interested in building startups, it was not the right fit. So I’m a year and a half in and I think, I’m really good at school, why do I hate this? And it turned out that what I wanted to be doing was the thing I was doing part time, which was building my own company. I had a tutoring business, I had seven tutors working for me. And that was what I was doing with my free time while I was in grad school. Sometimes the thing that you do part time is the thing that you should be doing full time. So with that in mind, shut down, my tutoring business moved across the country and came to San Francisco, and the rest is history.

Paula Neves  

There were many, but I would like to talk maybe a little bit about the moment I graduated college, I actually did a bachelor’s in psychology. So after a five year degree, I sort of knew that I really didn’t want to pursue psychology. And I went to do an MBA in marketing. I completely reinvented myself and that’s how my career actually started. And at that point, I knew that I reinvented myself, so everything I put my mind to would be possible, I would achieve anything, as long as I could work really hard and learn the new skills, there was nothing I would put my mind to that it couldn’t do. 

So that was a really cool inflection point for me in my life. And in my career, I guess it’s when I started doing talks. At the time, I lived in Brazil, and some of the talks outside of Brazil – international conferences, those really shaped me as a person who loves to collaborate and share knowledge. So I guess those two moments were really important for me.

Mireia Rivero  

Two experiences in my life became important inflection points that shaped me as a resilient and self confident person. First moving to London in my early 30s, to live and work abroad. Joining the mobile advertising startup agency and an international bubble industry. Seeing me capable of this big career change gave me strength and self confidence in my learning skills. 

Then the sudden loss of my mom in a tragic accident, connected me profoundly to my life into a journey of self discovery, to understand myself better, what makes me happy, what troubles me, my fears, what blocks me, since then, I think that I became a very resilient person.

Aurora  Klaeboe Berg

Back in 2012-2013, I was really driven by moving to the US and surrounding myself with people that successfully started companies over and over again. I strongly believe that you truly grow and learn if you surround yourself by people that seemingly know how to do it. So I had this plan to work as a consultant for six months to earn money to be able to afford this, and then just go and see what would happen. I presented this plan to my classmates, and Nick came forward and asked if I instead wanted to join him in his startup on their international exploration. And because at the time, their startup Dirtybit had launched a game called Fun Run, which was doing really, really well. 

I said yes and I’m very happy about that. Because two years later, we had reached 65 million downloads, and had reached over 15% of the US population. And at that point, we had not expanded physically to the US yet. So we decided to start another company together, which was Mega Cool, pun intended, that would tackle challenges we had. So I’d say that was pretty critical for me.

What do you think are a few critical skills that women should pick up or learn? 

Faith Price  

Over the past several years, especially as I’ve progressed in my marketing career, the ability to be able to gather and interpret data and use it to tell a story has become a really powerful skill. As marketing professionals, we are called upon to make predictions about the future, to devise strategies and tactics to make choices between partners and channels, to do all sorts of activities to help grow the business. 

Oftentimes, it requires being able to collaborate with other departments or teams, tell a story, get buy in, and really being able to use data to be able to interpret data, and then in a simple way, present that data to show the direction that makes the most sense or the direction that you think will be successful is a really important skill to have. We use it on my team probably on a weekly basis, because we have meetings with stakeholders. 

I think that’s something that is not automatically intuitive. And it’s something that you should work on and build up. So if that’s not something that is part of your toolset, I highly recommend trying to look at data, look at trends and start building stories of your own, when you think about the different tactics and strategies and initiatives that you want to work on.

Mireia Rivero  

In a business world dominated by men, I feel we need to empower our self confidence, and believe we’re capable of anything we want without any limitation. And I also think very important that women should capitalize more on our natural female strengths confidently as enablers of an efficient leadership style.

Peggy Anne Salz

I’ll stick with the basics because the basics run like a thread throughout our lives. Adapt and learn and stay focused on your goal.  I am very fortunate being an analyst and a journalist  because I’m able to chat with a lot of amazing people. And I had a chat recently with Jasmine Donka.

She’s a UX evangelist and UX designer at Mainframe Industries. We were talking about design because design now is at the center of everything. It’s great game play. It’s effective advertising. It’s storytelling. And it’s very different, right? 

How does she adapt to this: there’s boundaries, blurring everywhere and teamwork evolving. You have to be multidisciplinary. How do you stay on top of your game? I was expecting some super complicated answer and that wasn’t what she told me. It’s all out there. You just need to see it and use it. That sounds really simple, but it is a moment of clarity where you say yes again, I am in charge of my own destiny.

So she tells me, you know, there’s loads of videos on YouTube. In fact, that’s where she learns a lot of the new skills she needs.

They’re insightful blogs and podcasts like this one, for example, the Mobile User Acquisition Show, there are slack channels. So the good news is, what you need is within your reach. So set your course, follow your star. Adapt.

Aurora  Klaeboe Berg

If I were to go back in time and try and work more on specific skills, it would definitely be storytelling. That’s super critical, especially as you’re fundraising. I would also challenge myself and develop better skills around taking a tough stance making decisions that are unpopular at times. And then I would also focus more on forward momentum, and stop caring as much about what other people think and say. So do not dwell in the past.

Allison  Schiff

One that I’ve actually struggled with, is realizing that being proud of something, or even just referring to an accomplishment is not bragging, it’s healthy. You don’t have to apologize for yourself or minimize your achievements. But by the same token, it’s okay to say when you don’t know something. There was a point when I was a bit younger, when I would pretend that I knew what someone was talking about, even if I didn’t, because I was embarrassed to say that I didn’t know. But there’s nothing wrong with asking a question. That’s how you learn, especially in my job. And I’d also say that it’s really important to have your own vision for what success means to you. And to know what you want to accomplish. You don’t have to be Sheryl Sandberg, or take any specific route in order to be successful. However, you want to define success.

Paula Neves  

In terms of critical skills that women should pick up or learn, I think the main one would be the power to negotiate. Negotiating is seen as something that’s a very male right. And women usually don’t negotiate in any shape or form in any part of their lives. And I think it’s really important. It’s a show of self worth negotiating not only a salary or higher salary or a higher position, but in life, being able to put your foot down, and believe in yourself and just reach for something that’s a little bit higher and not be afraid that you’re being aggressive, right? Because women are seen as aggressive when they negotiate. So yes, do negotiate.

Colette Nataf  

Understanding how you receive feedback best is one of the most important things that you can understand about yourself, but also that you can communicate to your peers, we all want to help, we want you to be happier, we want to be successful. Knowing how you receive feedback well allows us as managers to give that feedback to you in a way that is valuable.

 I think it’s also really important to just know how to give direct feedback. And this is definitely something that I have struggled with. And I will caveat this. I do think women are taught to not give negative feedback and are expected to say positive and nice things and let the Simon Cowells of the world be the mean ones, even if we agree with them. It’s okay to give negative feedback. It’s useful. You need to learn how to have a hard conversation, even if it really sucks.

Things I don’t think you need to learn how to do – how to be loud and interrupt your male colleagues when they talk over you. I don’t think you need to learn how to pretend to steal their ideas when they just said the exact same thing. I don’t think you need to learn how to mansplain. But you do need to learn how to deal with those situations because they’re going to happen and you need to be able to communicate and advocate for yourself about what you want. If your boss is not listening to you, or your peer is taking your ideas and repeating the exact same thing, you got to call them out on it. 

One of my coworkers was constantly taking my ideas and it was really frustrating. What I found is that he was doing it intentionally and that I was just a little bit faster on the uptake. What I did was proactively try and solve it with him. But I do think there is a little bit of expectation that you need to stand up and advocate for yourself because no one else will. So think about what you can do to change it and you don’t need to be the one changing. Most of the time other people need to be alone changing, but you can be the catalyst that starts to change. 

If you could spend an hour with an inspirational figure and ask them any question you wanted to, who would they be? And what would you ask them? 

Colette Nataf

Okay, I have two answers for this. So if I could ask anybody anything, hands down, it’d be Bernie Sanders. I would ask him how he is so cool. If I could spend an hour with someone, and there are two people I’d wanna spend an hour with. One is obviously Barack Obama, I’ve seen him talk three or four times and every time it’s been great, quick on his feet, super down to earth, seems like a great guy. The other person want to talk to for an hour as Kris Jenner. I think she is a genius. She turned her life from making workout videos in her basement to a billion dollar enterprise for the Kardashians. And honestly, that’s incredible. There’s a lot of work and talent and know-how that goes into that. And it’s really impressive.

Paula Neves  

I would go for Carol Shaw, who alone put together River Raid the game – she’s a big inspiration for me. Not only because she’s in the video games industry, which is the industry I love, and I built my career on. But she was alone in the 80s & 70s, where it was even more male centered and male dominated where there was more prejudice. And she built River Raid by herself. So she’s a huge inspiration for me. And I guess I would ask her, How did she do it? What did it take? And what were her main struggles at the time to do this herself in such a male dominated world?

Mireia Rivero  

If I could spend an hour with an inspirational figure? It is difficult to think of someone specific, but what comes to my mind is highly inspirational people who dedicate their lives and professional careers to save other lives, like doctors rescue teams. The question that I would ask them is, how do you cope with the fear of not succeeding with your purpose in every new case?

Aurora  Klaeboe Berg

I’m really impressed by entrepreneurial and creative women such as Shonda Rhimes, and Reese Witherspoon. If I got to spend an hour with them, I would really want to understand how they have been working through their imposter syndrome, as well as how they manage their creative process and how they’ve scaled themselves as the needs around them change.

Allison  Schiff

For me, it would be the British novelist Doris Lessing. She was brilliant. She won every writing award you could possibly imagine, including the Nobel Prize in literature. She was not obsessed with fame at all, adulation was completely unimportant to her. She wove a lot of her own life into her novels and there’s this very interesting interplay between what is fiction, and then what were her real experiences in a lot of her work. The first book of hers that I read – The Golden Notebook, I just pulled off a shelf with no context and it really blew my mind. 

There are some people who are born to write and they’re born to see the world and translate it using the written word. I aspire to that even though I just write about ad tech for a living, but what would I ask her but I think I’d ask her whether writing for her was a pleasure, difficult or a compulsion? Basically what drove her to write and you know, did it feel like work? I’d love to know what her process was.

Peggy Anne Salz

There are many of them. At one end of the spectrum, would it be Niki Lauda perhaps? the formula one racer who escaped a horrific crash and then gets right back into racing, not giving up when many of us would.

Would it be the rebels, the men and women who founded Fairchild Semiconductor? I was inspired by the fact that they rejected the hierarchy of the day and ultimately laid the groundwork for several hundred companies and the spirit of Silicon valley.

Or would I just want to go back in time, ask great inventors what inspired them to keep going against all odds? Then I thought about the type of people who inspire me and there’s a common thread. They have vision, determination and they adapt to what life throws at them. 

And then I thought, wait a second, how fortunate am I? Because I know people like this in the industry, and next time I’m in a conference or just over coffee. I’m going to have a deeper conversation than just asking about the industry and dealing with the lack of identifiers.

So Gessica Bicego at Paired. How are you a championing brand in an app marketplace accustomed to one hit wonders, Melanie Zimmerman at Wooga. What strength do you draw from to excite your peers about storytelling and combine that with performance marketing and Dariia Opanasiuk – I absolutely adore you. You’re the CMO at Impulse and I would like to know what drives you to join the Harvard Kennedy school women’s network to improve your leadership skills? And at a time like this, you’re based in the Ukraine – What are you telling yourself every day to get through it, when there’s fighting everywhere? 

And I just have to say, I’m fortunate to know so many inspiring women and I’m going to make the most of those opportunities going forward.

A REQUEST BEFORE YOU GO

I have a very important favor to ask, which as those of you who know me know I don’t do often. If you get any pleasure or inspiration from this episode, could you PLEASE leave a review on your favorite podcasting platform – be it iTunes, Overcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast fix. This podcast is very much a labor of love – and each episode takes many many hours to put together. When you write a review, it will not only be a great deal of encouragement to us, but it will also support getting the word out about the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

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Thank you – and I look forward to seeing you with the next episode!