Episode 46 | Are You Making Me Money or Saving Me Money? | Maria Colacurcio

So I'm gonna switch gears just a little bit.

We're gonna come back to pay, of course, but you've built a couple of companies and you've also thrived inside of giant ones.

And now as the CEO of an enterprise SaaS company at maybe the hardest moment SaaS has ever had, what's the pattern you keep recognizing across these rooms? Like what does it take to succeed today?

I think this notion of... you're just not going to give up.

So I think about, I'm in a cohort called Journey to Lead, which is this incredible organization that Patti Sellers and Nina Easton founded coming out of all the work they did in Fortune's Most Powerful Women.

And the objective they had was to figure out how to give women the networks and the opportunities in terms of the counterparts.

There are also CEOs going through things that are similar.

And this incredible network of women who are all in similar positions as I am.

They're growing, scaling companies.

They're going through SaaS to AI transformation.

And our mantra is keep going.

It's these two words that are so simple but so powerful because it really is persistence and grit and resilience and also curiosity.

I think you have to want to be, in this moment in particular, a lifelong learner in order to thrive.

And you have to be able to do that in ways that are true and authentic, not just hype and talk.

Because if you're not walking the walk and actually learning, it's clear so quickly to your employees because you're asking them to do things.

If the mountain upon which you're standing is just hype and not actual experimentation and experience with a lot of these tools and technologies, it crumbles so quickly.

It's just that resilience, that grit, that persistence, but also this idea that you're You authentically love learning and you want to continue to learn so that you can push yourself forward.

So you're role modeling a couple of things that are really important to Amy and I.

Your point about bringing together expertise and innovation, your point about thinking about how to persist, but also include curiosity and learning.

And one of the things that you are embodying but not using in words is the thing that is really top of mind for me, which is intellectual humility.

The thing about leadership today, and whether it's leading a SaaS company that's disrupted or leading a traditional company that is just navigating overall volatility, the reality is we're all in this moment where our expertise needs to be applied differently than it might have been in the past.

And when you mentioned that people can tell if the difference between leading by pontification or bloviating versus leading from experience, I think one of the ways they can tell is this thread of intellectual humility that you have been willing to be new and to try things, and you have been willing to learn and to maybe get things wrong.

Help me understand, like, how do you show up for your team who is also trying to figure this out for themselves and the broader organization? What conversations are you having around this to help bring people along

with you? It's a great question.

And it's not only those of us scaling AI companies that are thinking about this.