Kathy Keating (Apostrophe)

About this Episode

In this episode Kendall, rachel, and Kathy Keating discuss:

• Kathy’s path to leadership/management as a result of her willingness to be willing to do something that nobody else knew how to do and try and solve the problems nobody else was willing to try and tackle
• That Kathy’s company, Apostrophe, is going to solve healthcare, whoah!
• Just how meta Kendall can get :)
• The happenstance of making connections--rachel always looks at peoples' shoes too!
• How learning to stand your ground, especially as a woman in tech leadership, to say what you believe and recognize your own value was Kathy's hardest lesson to learn
• The biggest challenges of tackling the health care industry: working with archaic infrastructure and processes, the amount of data that must be secure, working within the existing ecosystem of the industry as it has evolved over the years, having to be willing to accommodate technologists who don't know what an API is
• FTP servers, they still exist!
• The importance of making sure the folks you recruit, both employees and investors, believe in your company’s mission and values when the problem is as hard and widespread as affordable healthcare
• Kendall's jaded worldview about why people work for Google :)
• The importance of keeping the audacious goals and values at the top of everyone’s mind
• Kathy’s view of having authority is that leadership is a support role, that it's proven out by the folks who come to work for her at multiple companies
• How working for a CEO who just told her to do what he told her and didn't want to hear her thoughts led her toward a more collaborative approach, and founding her own company
• The fact that no one was more shocked than she was to learn she's 100% introverted per Meyers-Briggs, and how she figured out that if she works on something meaningful, she has meaningful conversations, which bypasses the introversion issues
• How senior leadership means moving beyond just protecting and serving your own team to seeing a bigger picture within an organization
• That Kathy sometimes trains her teams to adapt to change by changing lots of things all the time, and it's important to make it not scary--experimentation vs fear of failure
• The rules of cat ownership

Find Kathy on Twitter @kathkeating

Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3