Silvina Moschini is the first Latin American woman to lead a company that achieved unicorn status in 2020 with a valuation of $1 billion through a Global Private Offering. She is President and Founder of TransparentBusiness, a cloud-based platform that transparently manages remote teams, and CEO and Founder of SheWorks!, a marketplace to hire professional women with flexible models.
I had the opportunity to interview Silvina recently. Here are some of the highlights of that interview:
Jill Griffin: Whydon’t you start off by telling me about your background. Where you went to school and how you got to this place. And I also like, “Work for it” versus “Wish for it.” So tell me how you came to be you.
Silvina Moschini: I was born in Argentina in a small city called Azul, in the province of Buenos Aires. My dad always wanted me to be independent, especially financially.
So, that, for me, was the starting point. I understood that independence always started with financial independence.
When I came here to the US, I came to study, and I started working for Compaq back before Hewlett Packard. So I used to lead Corporate Communications for the company Compaq and this is how I got into the technology field. I’m not a technology expert. I’m a communications expert who happened to love technology and what technology can do for people.
I became an entrepreneur and I founded the first consulting company that provided digital transformation for large corporations. And fast forward many years later, I was living in Italy, near Barona and had a global team. I had designers in Argentina, programmers in Tallinn, project leaders in the United States, in Colombia, and copywriters everywhere in the world, but I had no visibility of how they were working.
When you have global teams, your teams are always remote. So as an entrepreneur, I faced the challenge of effectively managing remote teams way before COVID. Way before. So as you know, scarcity breeds clarity, I needed to come up with a technology and a process that would help me manage my own team. So I developed Transparent Business.
It was about finding a solution internally to have transparency and visibility to keep people accountable no matter where they were working from.
This was back in 2012, I did this for myself, because I realized that I needed to be more efficient. And I needed to be able to tap into the talent, no matter where the talent was located. I developed this technology and as I was using it. I realized that it was a game changer, because suddenly I was able to see what my team was working on. How they were progressing and we were able to collaborate in real time.
And I realized that women were outperforming men.
I started to dive into the data and I could also see I was also attracting higher caliber women. I wondered why women were having a higher promotion score from our clients. They were receiving better feedback. They were rehired and recommended more often. Plus we were attracting women with very interesting qualifications, credentials and experience.
So I went back to my talent and started interviewing the women that were working for me as freelancers, as full time consultants and full time professionals from all over the world and they told me something that changed it completely.
I realized that I had something that could actually change the world. It was the fact that we were able to give through technology the flexibility in time and location, an amazing opportunity for these women to balance work and life.
So SheWorks was the name that the company that I created and took to scale. With the basis that I can do what I love to do and be closer to the people I love the most. SheWorks is a subsidiary of Transparent Business that sought to solve a massive issue that we found in the marketplace, which was that 51 percent of women with children abandon their jobs because of lack of flexibility.
Griffin: That’s so true. Is that what prompted you to form SheWorks?
Moschini: Yes, I actually launched the company at the General Assembly in the United Nations four years ago. I realized that if we want to truly empower women, we need to promote them. We need to hire them, and we need to fund them.
Griffin: That’s right. I love it! It takes money.
Moschini: Exactly, so put your money where your mouth is. Being an entrepreneur has been an amazing journey, because I have been working on this for several years. But when the pandemic hit, and they said, the universe needs to remain on lockdown, remote work became normal. So I didn’t have to explain why it was good for diversity or for inclusion, better performing teams or for having women included in the workforce. The remote workplace became the aspirin that solved the business and government continuity issues for millions of businesses around the world.
So suddenly, women have this opportunity to work remotely. But sadly, the pandemic also cut down on the day cares and support. Many women were affected by that and they lost 30 percent more jobs than men.
But I’m super optimistic because I do believe that with the care facilities reopening, with the vaccination, and mega mainstream businesses going back to normal, this progress will be resumed. Now they have proven to themselves and proven to their bosses that the job that they said couldn’t be done from home, can!
The pandemic has a silver lining in the digital industry.
Griffin: What are some of your upcoming projects in 2021?
Moschini: I launched a new show called Unicorn Hunters, which premieres on May 10th produced by the creators of the Masked Singer, to help entrepreneurs access money through doing global equity crowdfunding.
The show features Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of Apple, Lance Bass from NSYNC, Rosie Rios whose signature is on about 85 percent of the currency in America. She was former treasurer of the United States of America. My partner Alex, who is the co-founder of Transparent Business and our CFO and former political advisor for Joe Biden, Moe Vela.
Our mission is to help entrepreneurs access capital, because again, for us, everything is about business transparency, accessing talent, managing remote teams and now accessing capital.
I raised over 15 million and I took my company to a $1.6 billion valuation during the pandemic, using these tools, giving power to people to reach investors to raise the money that VCs would not give me.
Griffin: What trends do you see going forward? My readers would like to know.
Moschini: Many things are changing due to the pandemic. And I like to think it’s inspiring our culture, and causing us to rethink how we see ourselves and how we see the world. We will emerge from this pandemic stronger, because we hit rock bottom. It went very, very bad for many people. I was fortunate to have an acceleration of my business due to the pandemic, that is why I’m particularly extra committed to giving back because I was lucky.
I do think that this pandemic is building up a new generation of leaders, and women leadership is emerging as the new trend. Women leadership has the attributes of showing empathy, vulnerability, and the ability to see through the eyes of other people.
Griffin: I would really like to know more about the software that promotes this transparency and allows companies to lead a multi-faceted team.
Moschini: I see a lot more female entrepreneurs tapping into our global talent pool, building remote companies, and companies that are backed with a technology that is much more agile, proactive and cheaper. This is important because we are going to see a new wave of remote first digitally, companies that are by definition global. And when you have a company that is by definition global, you have a company that can be scalable to a massive scale.
Article Credit: forbes