Kris Jenkins: Amplifying Women's Influence in Tech and Venture Capital

Kris Jenkins of Mobly, a regular on the Elevate podcast, joins us in discussing the importance of women's leadership and elevating more women's voices. As a tech founder and a father to girls, Kris hopes that the tech industry will continue to improve opportunities for women. We talk about the indispensable role founders and investors play in knitting a fabric of opportunity that empowers women from the get-go.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:05

Welcome to Elevate, a Women's Leadership Institute podcast where we showcase stories, celebrate successes and shift culture. Welcome to Elevate a Women's Leadership Institute podcast. I'm your host, Patti Cook, and today we are with Chris Jenkins of Mobley. He often hops in and out of our podcast. He joins, he co-hosts, and so we want to do a segment to say who are you, Chris, how did you get involved with the Women's Leadership Institute, and kind of give a backstory to why we have you on the podcast so often.

Speaker 2 0:34

Awesome. Yeah, thanks, patty, appreciate you having me on the podcast again and this is a lot of fun for me. So kind of my background is I've been in Utah most of my life. Yeah, spent a lot of time here, in fact, the majority of that here in Lehigh, and so there happened to be some conversations happening kind of swirling around Utah around how women are treated in tech in Utah and specifically Silicon Slopes and Lehigh.

Speaker 1 1:01

In tech in Utah and specifically Silicon slopes and Lehigh, and treated not like in a positive they're doing great, but kind of in a not so great way.

Speaker 2 1:10

Yeah, in a very, to me it seemed very bad, and so I just and I have three daughters of my own, I want the best for them, um, and and I certainly believe that if they decided to stay here in Utah, hopefully we will have made some strides so that the experience for women in tech or here in Utah working and living is just a better experience. Yeah, so, anyway, that's why. So I started asking these questions like what's going on, why is it happening? And so many people pointed me to you, to the Women's Leadership Institute, no-transcript, and so far I've seen a lot of growth, just in me personally, but also those around me, because now they start to see why it's important. And I can go into a lot of details of like so many different stories where this has been impactful. But again, thanks for having me on and I can go into a lot of details of like so many different stories where this has been impactful.

Speaker 1 2:28

But but again, thanks for having me on and I'm excited to share some of that get involved when they start having girls specifically and their girls can't find jobs or internships or those kind of things and then like, wait, what can I do in this space? So I love that you brought that up, that there's a personal touch, and the other thing that we talked about when we first began this was how visibility is part of leadership, and there are so many good people doing good things that are not visible, especially women, and we want to share their stories here of what that looks like. What does leadership look like? What are they doing right? What can people learn from that? So I appreciate the visibility that you bring and the tech perspective that you bring. Let's talk a little bit about funders and founders and how maybe we can have this next generation of funders and founders understand the value of gender diversity without having it to be like relearned, just having them get it from the beginning.

Speaker 2 3:37

Yeah, yeah, I um, although you know I said that I've lived most of my life here in Utah, um, professionally. However, the companies that I've worked for have been all outside of Utah most of them, and what's really interesting about that is that the teams that I worked on, especially because they are large organizations with globally diverse workforces our teams were extremely diverse. As a white male, I was, you know, maybe 50 percent or less always on every team that I had ever been on.

Speaker 1 4:06

And in the beginning was that strange, Because that's not often how it is here.

Speaker 2 4:09

Yeah, you know, I don't know how strange it felt because we were so high performing and so I I really enjoyed it. I thought that was a great, and my managers were often women and and from different countries, you know, and so I I didn't feel too much like it was that odd, but it's definitely not the norm here. So now that I'm back in Utah and working for Utah companies, especially startups they tend to be, you know, very homogenous in in who runs and manages and even funds these organizations.

Speaker 1 4:45

Yes.

Speaker 2 4:45

And so when I started working for those kinds of companies, right then I realized, wow, we weren't quite as high performing as I had experienced on other teams, and they were just little things. And it was kind of hard to even bring those up, those concerns up in meetings, because it wasn't well understood Right how important diversity is or how or what really was the thing that was causing the problems. And so the more I worked at this and talked to different people about it, it became more and more clear that the reason, part of the reason why we were less performing than maybe others, was we just didn't have the diversity. We're kind of in an echo chamber all saying the same thing because we all have the same experiences, right. We're kind of in an echo chamber all saying the same thing because we all have the same experiences, right. So I so part of my interest in wanting to support the Women's Leadership Institute and the podcast, of course, and interviewing different women, especially the ones that I've worked with and I know really well, is because I think that, as we hopefully can have an impact on, or a generational shift in, the amount of diversity we have, that we can use that to make an impact in a much better way by changing how things are done, and that can be things like you mentioned funders and founders, more founders spending extra time looking for diversity and I'll give you a really good example.

Speaker 2 6:02

I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really good example. I think that's a really and I've had a couple examples recently like this, where it's very easy for us to hire friends initially right.

Speaker 1 6:21

Or people that are close to us, yep.

Speaker 2 6:23

And that's kind of what you lean on, because you can trust and you know, and there's just Right, and that's partially why we get into these teams the way we do done. Just, I've gone just a little bit further to say, instead of just, we, you know, initially didn't put out a job description, didn't put out a job, you know, we were like we were hiring anything, right, I didn't post it anywhere. I, literally we just said, hey, who do you know? Yeah, we all just reached out to people and we got an influx not really an influx, but the first few were all white males and and that's just normal, yeah.

Speaker 2 6:58

So then what I did was I was like, okay, I think this is okay and we probably have some great candidates. What if I looked a little bit further? And where do I go to look? I hadn't really done that here in Utah, and so I asked a few friends of mine, women in these positions, and said, hey, where do I go to connect with people, connect with women specifically, that would be willing to apply for this job? And I found a few different Slack channels, I found a few different people that suggested places to post the job, and then we used a tool that now I can't remember the name of the tool, but it basically takes out gender bias from a job description, and so we threw in the job description.

Speaker 2 7:36

It took out the gender bias, and then we posted that and I was surprised that we got close to 10 women applying for this job, it mattered, it mattered a ton, and now the quality of candidates that are in our pool now has been lifted, and it's not because they are women, it's because we have more people in the pipeline and we can start to see that, yeah, the ones that we had have less experience than the ones that we now have, and that's been a really cool thing for us to have. I think for me specifically, just going out and finding more, doing that little extra effort effort.

Speaker 1 8:18

Yeah, that's a great real time example, and I love that you brought up the point of it's not just women or men, it's about talent and allowing your pool to include more talent. Right, because you're more likely and we talk about this with golf all the time that business deals are made on the golf course or it's like, oh yeah, my son just graduated from such and such and he needs a job, let's bring him in, or which. There's nothing wrong with that. But those are often conversations that women are not in. We just many of us just don't network like that.

Gender Disparities in Venture Capital

Speaker 1 8:45

So I love that you took that intentional thought to kind of go above and beyond. I remember when Davis Smith of Cotopaxi, when he was going to leave his company and he was looking for someone to come in, that he posted on LinkedIn and did all the things, and then he came back and said I'm surprised I don't have more female candidates, and he spread his net wider to say, ok, what woman do you know who'd be interested in applying? But he had to do that personal touch of reaching out to other people, and that's a great example of what you just said, too, of being deliberate. Talk to me about other things that you've seen in this, but we've talked to close to 200 or just over 200 venture capital firms over the last year ish.

Speaker 1 9:43

Yeah.

Speaker 2 9:43

And and trying to raise money, and there have been, you know, very few women in those conversations. The majority are men, yeah, but what's interesting is and this is just my own, you know sort of anecdotal evidence. Sure, there's I'm sure that it's not the same for everybody, but the depth that the different women that we worked with was significantly more than the men in trying to understand our business, and and I thought that was really interesting because how do you quantify that?

Speaker 1 10:17

Because they ask more questions, or how did? What does that look?

Speaker 2 10:20

like. So generally, a lot more questions, and that may be just, it could just be that they don't know the business as well as maybe other people did, but certainly they wanted to get, they wanted to be able to, in the room, be able to answer the questions and have a lot of confidence in their decisions, you know, along the way. And so that was that was really interesting to me. We got quite a lot more questions from the women and then the. It seemed like the depth of knowledge of those women as well when we'd get back into the room was really helpful. But often and this isn't hasn't been always the case, but in several instances were the, the women in at times were the quietest in the room and I don't know if that was just them observing the situation or not, or waiting for their turn, I don't know exactly, but it was interesting that it felt like they had the most information but then spoke up the least amount in the conversations. Sometimes that could be just job title and personality, but I did think that was really interesting. Is in the room personality, but I did think that was really interesting.

Speaker 2 11:20

Um, we've been, we, and we got really lucky here towards the end, because as soon as we, you know, closed our round, um, or got really close to closing our round, we we got one other firm that came in at the last minute. That was an all-female run fund, okay, and managed out of chicago, called vitalize VC, and I think the due diligence that they went through, the time that they spent with us, the detail orientation that they had it was tremendous. We had two other options of VCs we could potentially go with at that time and we were most excited to work with them for those reasons, just because of how far they went into our business.

Speaker 2 12:00

They seemed interested Very very interested in our business.

Speaker 2 12:03

So I guess the one thing and kind of key point that I would make from all of this and it's not to say anything particular about one gender over the other, it's just in these observations there just needs to be more women in the on the funding side of the business, because that's going to have a big impact on the founders and on how founders think about diversity and how founders think about the impact that that women and others can be on on in your business. If I have a board that exists of just the same group of people, the same type, right, then it's harder to have or even think about the things outside of what we normally, you know, think is normal and I and that's, and I think that's why, to me it's a. It's a. It's so important that on the funding side we have more women and then on the founding side it's and there's a lot of data on this and we could spend a lot of time but that women founders are not getting as much funding as male founders yeah.

Speaker 2 13:00

And and how do we change that? I don't know exactly how we change it, but I think it's. It is critical that we get more funding for female founders.

Speaker 2 13:08

So, yeah, anything that I can do. This podcast the efforts that we're trying to make as a startup, hopefully as a community in the startup world, to try to make this better in the future so that when my daughter says, hey, I think I want to start a company, how do we get funding that they can do that and feel that they're getting that support. That's what I want to be able to support and help with.

Speaker 1 13:28

I love it. You are such an ally. It's always such a pleasure to talk to you and see your perspective.

Speaker 1 13:33

A few things we often talk a lot about brain chemistry and the complementary differences between men and women. So it's interesting about the funding and the founders that you talked about, because we know that 86 percent of consumer decisions in any industry are made by women. So you would think that they would want to fund things that women know are important. Right, like that seems to make sense. Yes, but we all know it's very layered and complex. The other thing is that men tend to think front to back, whereas women think cross, cross hemispheres in their brain, and one of the things that comes out of cross hemispheres is that community gathering, that data building, that question asking that how does this part relate to this part and what does this look like and what is this outcome? So I love that. That showed up in your example of the all-female VC company that you worked with. Often that is taken by men in particular, as women are not decisive because we take a while to come to decisions sometimes. But that's not true. We just have complementary differences.

Speaker 2 14:42

Yeah, there's like a at least in in startups that I've seen a bias towards action.

Speaker 2 14:48

Yes, they want to see people taking action and moving forward and in some cases it might look like if a founder is doing all the work to understand everything before making a decision, it can be seen as a weakness and seen as, like, your company's not going to continue moving forward in the way that it needs to move forward. And I can see that, because when part of the equation and I'm not, I don't fund companies and haven't done that just before Mobley I can't speak perfectly, but after speaking with 200 VCs like one thing that they always said is they look at the founding group and see are they going to be able to succeed in in this effort? Are they the right team, right and and so and that's big too.

Speaker 1 15:29

It's huge Intentional teams yeah.

Speaker 2 15:30

But if they're, if they're leaning on like bias towards action by itself and it might look like, you know, the women aren't the ones making or doing. You know, working, moving going forward outward actions because they're thinking too much about it.

Speaker 2 15:47

That can be seen as a weakness, and maybe why, I don't know for sure. But it's interesting to speculate on some of that stuff, just because somewhere we have to make some changes so that we can understand as VCs that hey, that's actually a strength that we have that either that leader or that on that team, and not a weakness.

Speaker 1 16:07

Yeah, I love that bias towards action. That's a great phrase. As we wrap this up, you and I could talk for a long time about these issues, and we have talked about many things, but I want our audience to get to know you personally, a little bit Like tell us something that you love to do, a hobby, a book. Tell us something personal about you.

Speaker 2 16:26

Yeah, right now, especially in Utah in the winter, I'm loving the skiing and taking my kids skiing, so I'm teaching them how to ski. That's kind of a little bit of a hobby of mine.

Speaker 1 16:38

Are you a skier from way back or is this a new Nope?

Life in Lehigh

Speaker 2 16:40

This is fairly new. We're kind of learning together in a way. The last five years or so I've gotten into skiing and so I try to take them as much as I can. I've got six kids. We live here in Lehigh.

Speaker 2 16:55

It's hometown to me. I went to high school here, so it's interesting to still be here, yeah, and I think the thing that I, besides skiing, like what I do with my spare time is really just spend time with my kids and my wife. That's all we have outside of Mobley, so it's been very busy doing the startup.

Speaker 1 17:13

Lots of relationships there right, either family or professional, that's right. Yeah, that's very good. All right, well, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure, chris, yeah.

Speaker 2 17:20

Appreciate you having me and always will be here.

Speaker 1 17:23

Awesome. Thank you, yep.