I`m excited to be among these women and share my thoughts about what I`ve learned my experience of being a female co-founder.
Here is the link to the whole article:
99 “Limit Breaking” Female Founders Share the Top 3 Lessons Learned from Their Experiences
Or you can read a part of it below:
Here Is My Background
Marina Shumaieva, Co-founder and CTO at CruiseBe, Inc. CruiseBe provides cruise lovers with an amazingly simple cruise itinerary aggregator for B2C and SaaS B2B solution that proposes day-by-day schedule of a cruise with a complete list of attractions in each port of call and offline route navigation system on the ship.
I am experienced programmer, tech lead and travel enthusiast. I have Master degree in Computer Science and 3 years of experience as certified SAP Consultant. Among my interest are music and piano.
Being a female tech founder is not an easy thing to do when the gender gap is said to be the biggest in tech. I`m responsible for all the technology development processes in my company CruiseBe, in addition to programming 24/7, coordinating other male developers and at the same time finding way to look nice and pitching on the stage. The combination of charisma and technical knowledge sometimes helps to go beyond the standard perception of me as a woman.
Together with my husband Alex Shumaiev, CEO and co-founder at CruiseBe, we attend different entrepreneur`s events (like TechCrunch Disrupt in SF`17) and what I find amusing is when people always turn to my husband as he is CTO and treat me as ‘marketing person’. And almost always when we start talking to potential partners about the technical part, and when they realize that I have knowledge no worse than them or even better, then the gender boundaries and stereotyped perception are erased. So probably, the formula that helps to go beyond limits is theoretical knowledge, general erudition, charisma and a good mood.
Here Are The Top Three Lessons I Learned From My Experiences
1). Don`t be afraid and never give up. It doesn’t really matter which city or country you live in, it doesn’t matter what area you are passionate about, what industry you want to work in, and what market you are focused on. I realized all of that when I was starting my third startup as female tech lead in faraway Ukraine, creating a new company with the product for the rapid growing sector of the North America travel market — cruise industry.
I felt lack of knowledge and I faced various difficulties because there is no such type of traveling in my native country. Moreover, the way people run business in Ukraine is absolutely different. I had lots of doubts, I made mistakes, but I never gave up. Together with my co-founder Alex we have always supported each other. We overcame our fears, came to the US and successfully launched the company.
2). Dream big, dreams come true. No matter how trite it may sound, but dreams come true… sooner or later. Very often we are afraid to dream, relying on the pragmatism of the modern world, believing that dreams can lead us to a dead end or become our imagination. And this can be rather far from the true mercantile goals. But this is not true. It seems to me that dreams are such a secret female weapon, a clue of our subconscious mind, which sooner or later (if you really believe in them) lead to success.
3). The main lesson I learned would sound like an oxymoron, if I had to give advice to someone: “The main advice: do not listen to anyone’s advice”.
Almost always, friends, mentors, wise people around who give advice, do not have that full view of the problem or situation that you have, simply because they haven`t spent hundreds of thousands of hours over the “business of YOUR life”.This does not mean that these people were not right. It means only that when you are listening to their advice, you should carefully filter them, process, remember and make the right conclusions. Our intuition is a woman’s sixth sense and very often it helps to determine the main vector and to separate the wheat from the chaff. Therefore, always listen to people, always consider their opinion, but afterwards you should very carefully filter it and trust your intuition — it should not fail.