An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Don’t let it backfire: you can’t just capture demographic data, you need a plan of action. For diversity to truly increase your bottom line, your words must be backed by action. Research the history of exclusion and marginalization in your industry. Understand the inequities you are addressing. Then you should launch surveys to collect demographic data and feedback from your team in regards to your inclusion and belonging initiatives, but don’t stop there. You must have a plan to address the issues that your surveys bring to the surface. Create a system of support that accommodates all. From there, you can begin to see the benefits of a flourishing diverse team.
As a part of our series about “How Diversity Can Increase a Company’s Bottom Line”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nikita Gupta.
Nikita Gupta is an entrepreneur with a degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Cornell University. At Cornell, she launched Girls Who Code in Ithaca, NY and was heavily involved with Women in Computing. She has previously worked with Apple Inc., Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Martha Stewart, and a few startups as a software engineer. Nikita is currently the co-founder and CTO of Symba, a platform to help companies manage and design remote internships. She was recently awarded Forbes 30 Under 30 in Enterprise Technology and is a Halcyon Fellow.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive into the main part of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you share a bit of your “backstory” with us?
I’m Nikita Gupta, co-founder and CTO of Symba, as well as a Forbes 30 Under 30 member in Enterprise Technology and a Halcyon Fellow. I studied computer science and engineering in college at Cornell University and am passionate about using technology to drive positive change. My background includes working and interning as a software engineer at large corporations like Apple Inc. and Bank of America, as well as a handful of startups. When I was in college, I was passionate about internships and how they helped me decide what I wanted out of my career. After I met Ahva, who is my co-founder and Symba’s CEO, I got really excited about using remote internships to help companies recruit top talent and increase the accessibility of these critical early career experiences.
As a second-generation Indian, my family’s culture has been a huge part of my life. I grew up quite religious, always surrounded by Indian food and a large and supportive community of Indian family and friends by my side. Much like every other desi kid, I was taught the value of hard work and discipline from a very young age. This has helped me adapt to stressful situations and challenges I face as an entrepreneur.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us the lesson or take away you took out of that story?
One of the most memorable moments I have is from an investor meeting we did virtually when we were raising our seed round. Once my cofounder and I joined the Zoom meeting, the investor asked where the CTO or Head of Engineer was to see if he/she would be joining the call with us. I was able to make a joke out of it and say that “Hi, yes, I’m here! I’m the one who has built the Symba product, and I have a Computer Science degree!”.
I wasn’t too surprised about this, but it does go to show that there needs to be more awareness and openness in the space around the possibility of a female technical co-founder who too knows how to code!
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you tell us a story about how that was relevant in your own life?
It’s not a direct quote, but a phrase I live by is to “follow your gut, don’t follow a recipe.” Cooking gives me the space to be as free and creative as I want to be. As a young entrepreneur, sometimes you are provided with an overwhelming amount of advice and mentorship. What I have learned is that you don’t have to follow through with all the advice you receive, but listen, evaluate, and learn what and when to implement.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?
My biggest cheerleader to this date is my father. He is the one who has been super supportive since day one, in a way funding my original startup journey by allowing me to come back home, giving me shelter and food, and empowering me in incubate Symba. And since he’s an entrepreneur as well, I’ve been able to take a lot of lessons from him and apply them towards my business; anything from basic business management all the way to engineering. He’s taught me how to manage remote engineering teams and has helped me throughout my journey in becoming a technical leader. He’s the person that I get to talk to about Symba’s highest highs and the lowest of lows. I’ve learned a lot from him.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
One thing that helps Symba stand apart is that we are entirely women-founded, and the founding core team are all daughters of immigrants. Being children of immigrants, especially in the cultures that we grew up in, including South Asian, Middle Eastern, East Asian, and Latin America, instilled in us a strong sense of discipline, hard work, and good ethics. But just 2.3% of women-led startups received VC funding in 2020. Women of Color received even less. We’ve had to build an exceptionally strong business plan to work against heavier pushback from investors.
I deeply value having many different perspectives in the workplace; it makes working at a startup even more exciting and gives us creative space to implement a variety of ideas. At the same time, we are united in the experience of being women and are aligned towards the same mission, to democratize access to the workforce, which allows us to grow the company together. On that note, Symba stands for symbiotic relationships, and our raison d’être is to foster mutually beneficial relationships between managers and interns, as well as healthy relationships between Symba and the customers that we work with and our partners in the workforce development ecosystem.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
As the CTO, I’m planning to take our product to the next level and launch the next version of Symba in the next six months. I am looking forward to incorporating a lot of fun features to provide our customers with rich insights and to make it more engaging for our users, especially in a remote or hybrid setting.
We’re also implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning models to provide internship program insights to our customers that they never had access to before. This data will help them not only hire the best talent, but really understand the success of their program.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Creating positive global change is the entire purpose behind the technology I have led my team to build. Symba originated from an action project with late Congressman John Lewis. One of our favorite quotes that we took away from that experience is to “get in good trouble.” We fully embrace being those troublemakers that are bringing goodness to the world!
Symba is tech for good company on a mission to #OpenUpTheWorkforce by transforming the talent development space. Our platform helps companies deliver internship experiences remotely and, most importantly, scale their intern seats. Coming from a technical side, scaling is the number one metric that I enjoy looking at — it’s instant gratification. When I see that our customers have the bandwidth to bring on more interns because of our technology, then I know our product is providing a positive impact on access to the workforce. More positions mean more opportunities for people coming from all different backgrounds and geographies.
In addition, we only work with companies that pay their interns. By helping employers make their programs more accessible financially and geographically, and increase the size of their programs, we open more early career experiences for underserved talent. It is our goal to power more than 1 million job opportunities in the next 5 years.
Can you articulate to our readers five ways that increased diversity can help a company’s bottom line. (Please share a story or example for each.)
1. Greater diversity allows for more creativity and profitability at the company. By inviting different perspectives, you welcome fresh ideas because you’re pulling in people who have had a range of life and professional experiences. Having different locations, genders, ages, beliefs collaborating can lead to some out of the box solutions. Good news for those working on international teams, social scientist Adam Galinsky has found that people who have deep relationships with someone from another country become more creative. Looking at the lens through gender, the Peterson Institute for International Economics finds that companies with 30% of its leaders being female earn 6% more in profits compared to those without female leadership. If you put the same cookie cutter person in a company, you’re always going to be traveling in one direction. It’s going to make your company more narrow minded.
2. Having a diverse executive team is a recruitment and retention strategy. Your early talent needs to see someone that looks like them in leadership positions to be inspired to continue working at the company. When it comes to recruiting, GenZ, the future workforce, is prioritizing DEI and companies that “walk the talk” even before they consider the wage you’re offering them. In a recent survey by our partners at RippleMatch, they found that 60% of Gen Z talent said that diverse leadership is important in illustrating a company’s true commitment to DEI. And 83% of Gen Z candidates said they consider an organization’s commitment to DEI when selecting an employer. Simply put, if you don’t have a diverse team you won’t be able to hire and retain diverse talent.
3. Diversity can introduce new skills to your team’s toolkit. Do your candidates have skills you don’t already have? One thing that we always look for when we’re hiring new people at Symba is their unique talents; we want people to be coming in with new skills, so that way, they can contribute new ideas and help grow the company. We trust them, and their experience. It’s not about hiring people that look like you and can do what you can do. You need to hire people that have something different to offer.
4. Tap into talent from all different states and countries around the world. Being remote first opens the door to the HR advantages of a geographically diverse talent pool. Currently at Symba, our team members in the US sit in all different time zones and we have team members abroad, including India. As a fully remote team we aren’t restricted by an office space that people must come to, which means that we can hire from all different cities, states, and countries around the world. Ultimately, we get to care about the talent we’re hiring, we’re not necessarily limited by where they’re living. And we can invest the dollars saved by not having a brick-and-mortar HQ into our people.
5. Don’t let it backfire: you can’t just capture demographic data, you need a plan of action. For diversity to truly increase your bottom line, your words must be backed by action. Research the history of exclusion and marginalization in your industry. Understand the inequities you are addressing. Then you should launch surveys to collect demographic data and feedback from your team in regards to your inclusion and belonging initiatives, but don’t stop there. You must have a plan to address the issues that your surveys bring to the surface. Create a system of support that accommodates all. From there, you can begin to see the benefits of a flourishing diverse team.
What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees to thrive?
First, and this is especially important in a remote setting, is to make sure your employees feel appreciated and engrained in the company culture. Opening the floor for shoutouts during weekly team meetings, offering weekly mindfulness sessions, and hosting monthly socials can create opportunities for your employees to connect. At Symba we’ve called in sommeliers for virtual wine tastings, cooked ceviche together, made DIY candles, and carved pumpkins for team socials. If you’re remote, the goal is to create an environment where all team members feel appreciated from whatever part of the world they may be in.
On top of these fun activities, give people space and the funds for professional development and continuing education. We want everyone to feel like they can sign up for a virtual college course or a fellowship or certificate program. Encouraging your employees to learn new skills can also help them become better at the job they’re doing.
What advice would you give to other business leaders about how to manage a large team?
Transparency, as appropriate, is number one. Loop leaders among your large team into important conversations about the company. With that, be highly communicative and inform employees about next steps for the company, like upcoming new feature launches, sales processes, and exciting events or campaigns coming up. Lastly, trust your managers to take full ownership of their teams. Give your managers across departments the autonomy to set budgets (which you’ll of course review) for social events, conferences, or professional development so they can build cohesion within their departments.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this 🙂
Kyle Henderson, the CTO of Slack. I’m just amazed at the growth they’ve experienced! I’d love to ask him; how did you create such a sticky product that now I can’t imagine life without?
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Connect with me on LinkedIn. I’ve been fortunate to have had awesome female mentors that have helped me along my journey. I embrace a pay it forward mentality and am always open to hopping on a call and sharing my advice.
Thank you for these excellent insights. We wish you continued success in your great work.
Nikita Gupta of Symba: How Diversity Can Increase a Company’s Bottom Line was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
