The Female CEO You Should Know – My Hero

Originally published by Kara Goldin on LinkedIn: The Female CEO You Should Know – My Hero

There are a lot of incredible female CEOs who have gotten to where they are by transitioning already successful lives into something even bigger and better. That’s what I did when I left the tech world and started hint. Whitney Wolfe Herd did it when she left Tinder to start Bumble, America’s fastest growing dating app. Katrina Lake did it when she left the marketing department at Polyvore to create Stitch Fix, a fashion tech company that went public last year and is now valued at more than $2 billion. But my favorite story and my personal hero is Ty Stiklorius.

Ty is a longtime music manager (her biggest client being John Legend) and the founder and CEO of Friends at Work, a firm that combines traditional entertainment management services with social activism. Ty Stiklorius was a classmate of John Legend’s at the University of Pennsylvania and became his manager in the early 2000’s when his career really began to take off. Ty’s also an investor in hint, along with John.

After a few years of working with John on his music career and social activism, John came into Ty’s office and said, “I’ve got this movie script that someone wants me to invest in. But if I do it, I really want your help.” Ty explained that she’d never done a movie before, but John insisted she be apart of it.

Fast forward and that movie script was for a movie called La La Land, which swept the Academy Awards and Golden Globes in 2017. Ty suddenly she became a movie producer, and now has more scripts coming her way than anyone else in Hollywood.

The thing I so admire about her is that she was already a successful manager (she could have just managed John Legend and called it a day). Instead, she decided to step into her own and put it all out there. She didn’t just sit back and continue taking checks off of the gig that was going really well, instead she challenged herself. She’s a woman who has reinvented herself many times over. She had the courage to believe she could, to take the appropriate steps, and to see the whole thing through.

One thing Ty talks about a lot – she touched on it a little bit at the Marie Claire Power Trip Conference I attended in San Francisco late last year– is that she doesn’t care what people think and she shrugs off negativity. She simply doesn’t pay any attention to the haters. She focuses on what she’s creating and remains positive. I try really hard to do the same thing and look to her for strength.

Ty is truly one of the smartest and most down to earth people I know! On top of that, she’s extremely loyal. While at the Marie Claire conference, she made a point to acknowledge our friendship. She said, “I’m looking at Kara in the audience if you don’t know her, she is my girl crush.” She talked about her investment in hint and gave us the sweetest shout-out from the stage. She always makes a point to lift up other women and to me, that speaks volumes about her character.

PS - I'm on Instagram now! Are you? If you have any questions, send me a DM on Instagram, and I'll make sure to reply there! I'm @KaraGoldin!

Kara Goldin is the founder and CEO of San Francisco–based hint, a healthy lifestyle brand that produces the leading unsweetened flavored water and a scented sunscreen spray that’s oxybenzone and paraben-free. Listen to her podcast, Unstoppable, where she interviews founders, entrepreneurs, and disruptors across various industries and keep up with her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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