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36: Breaking Through the Bamboo Ceiling as a Asian Female Leader with Vestwell’s Head of Enterprise Sales and Strategic Partnerships, Michelle Tran

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If you're a female or minority leader, this episode is your beacon of empowerment. Michelle Tran, Head of Strategic Partnerships SVP at Vestwell and Co-Founder of NYC FinTech Woman—a thriving 10,000+ member organisation, is a passionate advocate for diversity in leadership.

Join us as we discuss the challenges faced at the intersections of being female and a person of colour. Michelle highlights the alarming funding disparities, revealing that institutional investment in female founders is a mere 2%, dropping even lower for female minorities. It's time to amplify diverse voices and bridge the gap in entrepreneurial support.

Michelle touches on her personal experiences of the impact of perceptions on Asian Americans in leadership, the significance of names, and the inspiration behind Tiger Collective, a venture she co-founded with Liang Zhao.

This really is an episode you won’t want to miss. Tune in to gain insights, challenge perceptions, and be inspired by Michelle Tran's commitment to reshaping the landscape for leaders of all backgrounds.

This Episode Covers:

  • Leadership challenges as a woman of colour
  • Empowering women in fintech
  • Challenges faced by Asian female leaders in various industries
  • Diversity and inclusion in leadership roles
  • Leadership, networking, and mentorship

Episode Highlights:

“I'm passionate about providing access through technology. And so what we do at best well, is really help small businesses offer retirement solutions to their employees in a really digital forward way. And we all know kind of in that, you know, financial services, retirement space, if you don't make it super easy, super digital, people are not going to do it. ” 01:23 -Michelle Tran
“That's something we talk about a lot and FinTech women, and that's in our mission for a very specific reason is that you need to brand yourself, you need to promote yourself, and others need to help you in that as well. So the amplification effect of promotion is huge. So one thing that we've put in place to tell everyone is try to promote and try to amplify someone at least once a week, right?” 18:34 - Michelle Tran
“People tend to think of Asians as good workers, not as good leaders. So they're are a lot of inherent issues when it comes to showing equality in Asian leaders in the space” - 19:54 - Michelle Tran
“Our long term goal is really to potentially raise capital and help these female founders, Asian founders in general, take that extra step and get into the market as an entrepreneur, where we're really seeing is there's the leadership component, right at all different company levels, and different company sizes and leadership.” - 32:41 - Michelle Tran
“The stat for institutional investing into female founders is 2%. And it's actually gone down in the past year or two, I think, 1.71 point, whatever the number is, it's ridiculously low. And so, you know, and for minorities, female minorities, who are female founders, the number is even lower, right, in terms of getting VC money.” 33:43 - Michelle Tran

Links & References:

Constellary: https://www.constellaryhq.com/

Suzan Bond: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanbond/

Michelle Tran: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellektran/

Vestwell: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vestwell/

Tiger Collective: https://www.tigercollective.co/

Asian Hustle Network: https://www.asianhustlenetwork.com/

Gold House: https://goldhouse.org/