welcome to the backstage stories of women on stage a podcast by women on stage recorded live let's go backstage and amplify the voices of leading women in Tech from all across the globe get inspired and learn something new because if you can see it you can be it join us visit women onstage. hi everybody and welcome to the backstage story of women on stage a podcast recorded live by women on stage where we amplify the voices of leading women in Tech from all across the world my name is Moran Webe
r I'm the CEO and founder of women on stage and today we're hosting Keda kleinhandler who's the CEO of uh and founder of rooms and words a full stack marketing and strategy agency and today we're going to talk about how to discover your unique value and position yourself as an expert hi KVA how are you hi Moran I'm so excited to be here me too I'm so glad it's finally happening we've been talking about it for few months now and finally we're here seems like ages but here it's happening yay so we
lcome and I'm really really happy to have you here with us so um before we start could you share a little bit just uh tell us a little bit about yourself what you do how did you get here um a little bit that's the challenging part so I'm KVA I grew up between um New York and Israel um kind of having family on both sides of the pond uh and growing up in the K Ultra Orthodox Community I had a bit less access to higher education and just to people with interesting careers in general and especially
in Tech so it was less of a traditional path to where I am now uh but it did make it an interesting path I think or at least a not boring one um you know to live through um and that means I had like a very kind of weird way uh getting here so I started as a translator and an editor in the publishing industry uh with TV subtitles and books I went on to be a blogger and like the Gilded era of blogging in the beginning and mid 2000s uh and that led me to working with the lifestyle brands on cultiva
ting their brands and positioning online in the very beginning way uh days of Facebook and social media and later on Instagram and Pinterest uh um mostly working with the very very small and lowbudget brands in Israel and helping them get their voice out to audiences in the US and the UK but also somehow getting to work with really great Brands like Etsy and house back in the day um and then my passion led me through like made no sense was not in my bucket list or in my plan but I was just very
very passionate about women in the workplace uh like you uh Milan uh and that led me to doing a survey for women um in the workplace in 2015 uh which became viral very quickly um and later turned into my startup emerge which provided um internal mentoring and uh peer-to-peer learning tools inside organizations like meta before it was meta seens and growing startups um and I'm kind of I feel like I'm doing like the fast forward uh version but covid came we had to close the startup and then I I de
cided to marry my passion for marketing and positioning and branding uh from before uh and my passion and Newfound knowledge of tech and started rooms and WS which is a Global Marketing and strategy agency with an with an amazing team from all over the world uh helping tech companies from seed stage startups to VC and corporates uh get their voice out and uh help them with their marketing and strategy efforts I I think that like the the thing is that how you help Brands get their voice out and w
hen we do a women on stage that we help women get their voice out like it it totally fits and I think it's uh it's really interesting because since the first time I uh I spoke to you I felt like we had this click about getting our voice out so could you share a little bit how how is it um how is it similar and how is it different to get people voice out and Brands voice out I think that's such a an important and strong point Milan um because I am passionate about both of those things and also as
a woman in Tech and in the workplace I've I've I feel and I've felt those things right we we've all been there and I think the key thing is um there's a lot in common okay there's a lot in common between getting your voice out as a person and as a woman and getting your Brands voice out uh the thing is it's much easier to do as a brand not because it's easier technically but just because there's less there are less emotions involved and you have less imposter syndrome as a brand and it feels li
ke more okay and expected and like a job to do when you do it as a brand so you just bring less of your complexes into it right uh so it's just easier emotionally and mentally to do it the funny thing is as a brand no matter if you're a b Toc you know direct to Consumer brand or even an Enterprise brand you want to sound more like a person when you're doing your marketing right or your public speaking you want to get the complexity into your voice exactly and the emotions into your voice because
at the end of the day even if it's like the most boring corporate industrial product you're selling it to people and you want to connect and the only way to connect is when you hit on those cords of the emotions or the you know the need that they're facing or like finding this empathy or like speaking as a human being so a lot of our work at the agency with Brands is making them feel and sound more like just human beings right and like bringing the humans behind them to the Forefront finding th
e human on the other side Etc uh but just when we do it for ourselves even you know I've been in marketing and content and you know in different iterations for years for like at least 15 years I stop stopped counting at this point and even for me it's like it's easier for me to do it for a friend and tell her hey like I see like your value and I like of course you should write this and of course you shouldn't think about it twice and of course these are your unique you know value propositions uh
but when it comes to me it's much harder and it becomes harder the more vulnerable you know the position that you you feel you are right like if you're at a really good place and you you've just like accomplished something maybe it's easier but if you're already feeling vulnerable uh and maybe in you know today's market and you're looking for a job for example where a lot of when a lot of other people are looking for a job it can like add to like another layer of complexity uh but actually it's
it's the same things and actually as human beings we have even an advantage because we don't need to to make ourselves sounds as humans we we already are there we can use our Humanity and we need to to mask that out um in certain places so can you share a little bit about your um can you share a little bit more about your startup I mean I think you had like a very I said before share um um just a few words but I want to hear more about it because I think your path to entrepreneurship is not a v
ery um is very unique and it's not something that you see every day um and I guess it even says that there's room for anyone in Tech so can you share a little bit more about about your your incredible journey and your startup and um whatever you want to tell us sure thank you so I'll I'll start from the startup itself and then I'll go back to to me and how I found myself in it um working uh you know with with lifestyle Brands and helping them Market in Israel and in the US and the UK I got to kn
ow amazing people mostly women and a lot of them have been in corporate or in Tech before they ventured out to starting their small lifestyle businesses and more and more what I saw was that there was like common thread in their stories in in a lot of their stories not everyone but a lot of their stories where after having a baby or two they found found that the corporate culture or Tech culture was not very um inclusive uh to women and to parents uh and we're talking about almost 10 years ago b
ut uh unfortunately I think I think there has been a lot of change and advancement but Pro and progress but maybe not enough and that really connected to me because I came from a closer Community um where I didn't have a lot of opportunities women uh women girls were not uh did not have access to SATs and to other um uh exams that could let them into higher education I got married at 18 um and it was expected that if I worked I would work in something that has to do with the community and that i
t would be work it wouldn't be a career um and I knew that I wanted a career I didn't know at the beginning what it would be um and so I experimented I told you a little bit about the different uh things I experimented with uh but I really found that one of the things that was most helpful was just finding uh mentors or even micro mentors and for me it was in a very different way because if you're if you go to university to to college or if you work in a large organization or even like not a sup
er large organization but just you know with more than a few people you can find people around around you who have more experience than you do or have different experience than you do and you can pick their brain I didn't have access you mean by micro sorry what do you mean by micr mentors so I'm getting to it so I didn't have a lot of access uh to that so I found myself you know when I took my baby who's now 17 to Baby massage classes and stuff like that uh the other women were not from my comm
unity so they were at the same place in their personal lives where they were like new parents uh but they were years ahead of me in terms of career and networking and all of that so some of them I would just like pick their brain um in a way that now I know to call micr mentoring which is like asking them a question here and a question that they're maybe not what we look at today like a traditional mentoring process where you have your one set mentor and you meet uh you know once a week or one o
nce a month and it's very you know structured it was more like hey I have a question and I just realized you've been uh a business owner for 10 years and I just started out can I ask you what to do when a client doesn't pay you know stuff like that um and some of those women are still some of my best friends and maybe mentors and maybe I've mentored them you know back during the years when I've learned and grown in different ways uh so when I saw around me uh women who felt like the workplace wa
s not an inclusive and good place for there and then they had to look for other um Solutions and they felt like even when they were surrounded by other people's knowledge and experience in the workplace they still didn't have access to it it really made me very angry and confused and that led me to doing this 30 question survey which was like very long and very very deep questions and at that time my business was doing very well I was I wanted to focus on that but it kept bugging me so I just di
d this survey because I said I'll just get it out of my system I'll send it to people nobody will answer it and then I can just go on with my life and business and forget about this not even knowing what this was at that point uh but I got this survey out and within a week more than 500 women from over 56 countries I think uh answered all the 30 questions and a lot of them many of them didn't just you know uh pick the right answer for them they sent me long answers and responses and messages and
a lot of them asking okay so are you working on something to make it better and then I found myself in this place of hey I am a business owner I am an entrepreneur it was already I was in on my second business right with my marketing agency for lifestyle uh Brands but I never built um a tech company or a product oriented company uh and I didn't even know exactly what the product will be but I did know that it would be some sort of a platform or an app that would help people get better access to
mentoring and through that to being able to be included and to succeed and Excel in their work no matter their gender their identity you know their uh stage in life Etc um so that was a huge huge huge learning curve first of all understanding how to build a team um that could build a product understanding what a product what building a product is um seeing myself as a tech founder um making other people see myself as a tech founder with all the attached biases of being a woman being a mother be
ing Ultra Orthodox which in Israel is a a community that is very under represented in Tech and in the workplace and people have a lot of biases like there are internal and external biases and also overcoming my internal hurdles of raising money even talking about money right asking for money and not looking at it as asking for money but as like giving you know the investors an opportunity to join me as as a Partners which is what it actually is um and then of course stuff that all founders go go
through uh fundraising uh selling to Enterprise for the first time team building all of those things so uh it was a huge learning curve it was definitely um I think more than just a a business learning curve it was it was a personal uh learning curve because you I feel like as a Founder uh it makes you confront so many of your own demons and your own uh like I feel in my previous businesses I managed to play to my strength all the time and avoid the places that I didn't like like I don't like a
sking help from people I don't like uh you know I like C like I like a certain amount of uncertainty that's why I've always been a founder and a business owner but also I like to sell something that I'm already confident in so I always sold services or like workshops or stuff that already I could make perfect before as a tech founder you can't you can't wait for Perfection it just it doesn't happen uh if you would then you know your competitors will just get there first so it was it was a very i
t was a very you know uh was like five years of constant lessons uh not all of them fun but it was definitely exhilarating exciting and thrilling all the time would you do it again I would but I not in the not soon and not in the same way um I think um one of my strengths that as a Founder because I didn't know a lot of other Founders when I started and because I was kind of new and different and an outsider was looking at things differently however um because I was such an outsider I kind of to
ok it without a grain of salt that there's a very specific way of doing things that you need to run yourself to the ground that you need to um you know do your MVP within a very short time that these are like the steps that you need to take and I didn't question them enough which is unlike me because I'm a person who questions everything uh and next time when I do it but not soon it will happen but not soon soon um I will question more and I will do it on my own terms um even more so like one of
the things that I'm really proud of is that I didn't let like it changed me a lot and it made me grow as a person and as a business person and as manager and a lot of things but it didn't it didn't change my values and next time I want it to change me like I do want to leave room for it to like teach me things and to you know chat in a positive way but I want to be even more like within you know what I know is right and um if if it doesn't work it's okay a lot of startups don't work and we can
go to the next thing or we can build it in a different way um but just like stay true to how I know um I should do business I think I think your your story is so inspiring KVA and um it's not the first time that I hear it and it's it's inspiring just as inspiring uh for the second time and I think that you've grown so much from it and I think it really proves that there's actually even if it's hard even if it's a very very tough business it shows that there might be room for for everybody and ev
en if you're you you didn't have any traditional background in Tech or in the or in the workplace as a matter of fact and and you did it anyway and you got to the highest peaks of of your careers and you will get to even higher ones uh uh later on I'm sure so I think it's really it it's really really inspiring so um I think that if your story um demonstrate it it demonstrates that there's room for everyone so what would you tell someone especially uh a woman maybe even who's already working in t
ech for many years and and she has um enough experience but she feels like that she's not an expert on anything um just as an FYI there's only like there's less than 4% of uh CTO and startup founders with techn uh with a technological background who are women less than 4% that's that's really sad so what would you tell them what do you yeah uh so by the way one of the things that I was proudest of uh at aemerge my startup is that uh my co-founder and CTO uh is a woman was a woman um she's still
a woman but the this close uh and uh I think around 50% of our investors were also women which was incredible and very very uncommon uh I totally relate to your question and I think uh it goes back to how we picture our elves uh as you said Manan uh we a lot of times don't see ourselves as experts and I've seen it a lot with women and you know we should put things on the table yes there's also a pipeline issue of women getting into Tech and all of that but even with women in Tech or not in Tech
but or not in Tech um positions but in the tech world I've seen it time and time again where where I will meet or have coffee with a super super accomplished woman any man in the same position with the same amount of experience and accomplishments would be bragging about themselves would be you know happy to be on any public stage and we do have a perception problem that's external external other people's biases and how they see us but we also have our own internal uh biases about ourselves whic
h of course it all goes back to patriarchy and how we were raised and our culture it's not it's not our fault right and not putting the blame on on women or on other underrepresented groups but it is something that we have where we are more hesitant to see ourselves as experts as CTO material as founder material even women who have been approached right not women who like need to go and say like I'm now going to found something even women who have have been approached to join as a co-founder or
you know morani you would know more than me this is your world uh to speak right on a public stage a lot of times would would get cold feet or say like hey I'm not the biggest expert on this maybe you should talk to him or to her you know and even I have that you know when I'm approached sometimes um because I'm not sure I'm not sure I have anything to contribute but then you realize like she's a genius at what she does yeah and also I think we just judge ourselves so much more harshly because e
ven when you ask me on some things I would say yes definitely I have so much to say on some things I would say like listen I think it's already been said um but a man in the same position a lot of times we have no problem saying something that's already been said you know even like if he has his unique take or even if he doesn't right so I think a lot of times it's it goes back to you know your question about marketing a brand versus marketing ourselves as people think about what you would tell
your best friend right it would be so much easier for you to tell them of course you should write that of course you should join that panel of course you should say yes to that offer to be the CTO um I think yeah I think we're it's it's a bit sad but we're really um we're not that sub objective when we when it comes to ourselves but in a bad way so uh we should definitely think about what we would say to a loved one so how do you do that so how do you position yourself as an expert okay so somet
imes you try to to go into uh your um to to put yourself in as as a friend and and it will be much easier but still it just I'm just here by myself question what do I do I think it's very you know it depends on your industry uh or your like you know vertical and it depends on you and who you are your personality what you feel comfortable with uh for myself what is really helpful for me uh I always find it easier and also I find that my strong suit is not when I say things in as an expert I can l
ike on some topics I I have a lot of expertise but I find where I can add a lot of value is actually in asking questions and in um bringing other people's voices uh but when I ask questions right and when I write about someone else or when I add my opinion about what someone else has said yes I'm giving them the stage uh and I'm amplifying their voice but I'm also amplifying myself because I'm adding my unique point of view I'm showing that I know what I'm talking about and I'm showing that I ha
ve my expertise on the subject and even just the way that I'm talking about this or making what the other person said or what an article said or whatever it may be accessible um to other people or to more people I'll give you an example this is something by the way that I understood in hindsight so it's worth taking a while looking back at your career in your life and seeing what worked for you uh if even if it's not in public speaking but in other things that may be relevant and kind of connect
ing the dots and hindsight like Steve Jobs uh said um so for me um when I'm looking back I started my blogs around you know in the 2000s right and one of my blogs that really really took off was an interior design blog that's how I got to Etsy and to house and to all those lifestyle brands that needed and wanted my help right um but when I wrote about interior design I wasn't trying to say I'm the world's you know best interior designer no I'm not I'm not even an interior designer uh I love inte
rior design but I'm not I'm not an expert in actually designing anything what I what I was looking at was saying like hey let's look at this room or this trend or this design and ask some questions about it and see what makes it work or let's interview this world-renowned architect or designer and ask them what have they felt and what brought them here and what lies at the foundation of this amazing thing that they created and what happened was that I became a de facto expert where Global Brands
and magazines came to ask me to collaborate and participate with them because they liked my voice and they liked how I thought about things okay the same thing happened with emerge uh I think part of my voice being Amplified was definitely kind of the novelty of me being very very different I was probably the second uh K woman entrepreneur in Israel and there are not a lot in the world either definitely not 10 years ago um nine years ago but also I wasn't trying to say hey I'm this huge HR or d
iversity expert because I'm not I'm just someone who's frustrated with the what what's happening in the workplace right now in the state of women and other under representative groups in in the workplace and I want to ask questions and I wanted to connect people so what I did was first you know literally ask questions I sent that survey right surve yeah and then I met I just read whatever I could put my hands on any articles any books any magazines in the world of future of work HR diversity tal
ent development and I met anyone I could meet and talk to them and ask them questions I didn't try to talk at them and share my big Vision I wanted to ask them but my questions made sense and the way that I asked my questions made them think hey she actually she has a point of view and another thing that I did was this is actually nowadays a common Trend but I didn't know that existed back then uh I did something that's called building in public uh are you familiar with that no I think you're do
ing that as well without knowing what it is uh so it's I I think it's very cool so building in public is the trend of Founders going on Twitter on Facebook and Instagram and sharing their journey and saying like hey like this week we had a really really hard week uh we had to um update our version and our servers collapse or whatever or wow this week I had a an amazing week I got to speak to this amazing expert right so I just shared my journey and I didn't do it uh in a totally kind of cognizan
t way I did it because I process things by writing them right but what happened was that people and it's more authentic yeah it's not like you're not building um like exactly I wasn't trying to brag exactly so people really uh first of all connected to just to the human being going through those things um and especially since I think in my case I think it's always a learning curve but in my case it was a very steep learning curve so they were like almost like a soap opera where they like oh wow
this is just a few weeks ago she didn't know anything about tech and then like two years later she's like meeting with the uh chairman of snap you know or something like that um so people became emotionally invested I think in this and also what happened was that people from the industry really could see my expertise because in the way that I was speaking about how impressed I was with a person that I learned from for example or talking about an article I read or talk and then of course talking
about how I implemented things that I learned into our product or just talking about my amazing team and how impressed I was with my CTO and co-founder and what she's gotten accomplished that week they could see my expertise without me kind of you know uh going and like shouting hey look at me right because I was talking about other people or I was talking about building something so a lot of people are not that comfortable about with talking about themselves and it's completely fine more than f
ine and I think it's actually much more interesting to talk about other things talk about your world work talk about the People You Meet talk about an article you read your personality and your expertise will shine through and this is of course not right for everybody like my uh comfort zone is writing so of course this was easier but if you're more comfortable being on video that's amazing you know we're in the age of Tik Tok and reals um and think about like try to to look at like to look back
at your dots from your career and connect them and see in hindsight where are the things that kind of set you apart and that you're more comfortable with putting out there those are like your your uh wow factors and it doesn't really have to be something um from your career it can be something completely different and I I really I love that I love the part where you say that even if you translate or amplify others then your voice Voice pops pops out that's a very interesting uh uh perspective a
nd I I must admit that I I um I can relate to that personally um and I don't know if our uh listeners or viewers um know my story at this at that sense because um other than being uh the founder of of uh women on stage and uh and um software developer I'm also a social psychologist and most of my career I I I studied com computer science and psychology and most of of my career I used to hide the fact that I'm also a psychologist because uh people thought I'm less Technical and maybe I'm not as q
ualified um maybe I don't get um maybe I'm not um um a very good coder if I'm a prle person like you can't have both so I used to hide that fact um but it was only um five or six years ago when I started with uh public speaking that I realized that this isn't something I should be uh embarrassed about this is something that I should actually be proud of because it actually makes me a better coder because I can understand how people read code how people interpret code and then I created a talk ab
out the combination between psychology and code and it went like totally viral I've G I've given that talk in in multiple text stages uh worldwide and it really um and it made me realize that that like vulnerability uh per se or something that I used to be very shy about and I used to keep that to myself that's actually my superpower so I should be proud of that and and it really and I bring all of that all of that knowledge into women on stage and that's like what I do today I use that um that
hidden part of my personality that wow factor that I didn't even see as a wow factor before and I combine all of these things together okay so so only when I realized what that secret superpower was I realized how to position it as a superpower and I'm using it every day so I really I I really encourage you all to find those secret superpowers in your Journeys and it can be anything I mean I I bet that you that you meet and you met a lot of women uh throughout the years that didn't even see thos
e uh those superpowers in themselves I can tell you a story from myself I started sewing um when my son was three so 14 years ago I was still in the publishing industry and I started one of my blogs that later became like the interior design blog and I wrote a lot about sewing and a lot of people in the publishing industry looked at it as like whoa like because before that I had like a very popular uh blog about books like why are you like dealing with those shallow things like sewing decorating
and I kind of refus to like agree with that um and I had a lot of I had a lot of um vulnerability about like doing a lot of different things like being in publishing and being you know in uh marketing for lifestyle and then being in Tech and not coming from Tech uh but when I looked back I saw that all of the things that I did whether they were in my career or just as a hobby they all really added to who I am also as a professional as an expert and I think uh creativity like you learn so many t
hings from these things whether it's your if you're running marathons or you're playing I know any kind of uh you know bowl or tennis or whatever or you're sewing or you're knitting you learn so many things about managing your time boundaries creativity um what annoys you what makes you tick sometimes you even learn thing about things about management um and I think it's really someone like yalan that has like this dual experience and background that is so often their superpower because that is
the edge because nowadays so many people have great education and great experience and we we're always looking how to you know how to position yourself as an expert that's like our topic today how to stand out so this added like point of view which can make someone double click or something or can add an emphasis to something that is so often the things that set you apart and once we just take like kind of a zoom out and look at it as if we would look at at like a best friend and not with us wit
h all our complexities and you know imposter syndrome and all of that we can see it we can see it for actually what it is uh so I really stand by what you said I love that and it can be anything it can be music or sports or cooking you know definitely so like it's the it's the fusions that makes it special and makes it memorable and makes it interesting and that's what makes you who you are yeah totally so okay it was really such a fascinating episode and I really really enjoyed speaking with yo
u and having you today with us thank you so much for having me Ron thank you thank you for being here and thanks for everyone who joined in we love to see you again we hope you enjoyed today's episode thanks to everyone who joined in we'd love to hear your feedback and your thoughts join us again at the backstage stories of women onstage visit women onstage. net and follow us on social media
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