Educate, Engage, Empower: A 4x Founder’s Guide to Modern Leadership w/Coco Brown

Jackie - 00:00:10:

Welcome to Season 10 of Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox, proudly presented by The Diversity Movement and part of the Living Corporate Network. I'm your host, Jackie Ferguson, author, business leader, and human rights advocate. In this podcast, we're diving deep into the stories of trailblazers, game changers, and glass ceiling breakers who share insights and professional success and personal development. Thank you for being part of this amazing community. Enjoy the show. You're listening to Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox. My guest today is Coco Brown, four-time entrepreneur, authority on modern leadership, and founder and CEO of Athena Alliance. Coco, it's a pleasure to have you here today.

Coco - 00:00:57:

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Jackie - 00:01:00:

Can we start by sharing just a bit about your background and what inspired you to found Athena Alliance?

Coco - 00:01:08:

Yes. Okay. So, well, I was raised largely in Oxford, Pennsylvania, a little bit in Malaysia, a little bit in France, and Oxford, Pennsylvania is Amish country, dairy farms. And so I, you know, kind of the first 20 some year, 22, 23 years of my life, I was in that kind of world. You know, just like a cultural, very, very multicultural experience. And in some ways, very, very different from each other, each one, you know, Southeast Asia versus Amish country. I moved out to California, the sort of very, everything they say about Silicon Valley bro culture world, 30 years ago, 31 years ago now, and have always been in the tech space. So my career has been. In some ways, very diverse in its experiences, but also very much myopically Silicon Valley.

Jackie - 00:02:20:

And then how did you get through that journey to Athena.

Coco - 00:02:26:

So I spent like, just kind of summing that up. It's, I spent the first. Seven, eight years on the HR side of the world. And largely, I went through three very big notable processes around compensation analysis and leveling and job, you know, job design and job, um, sort of valuation in the organ in organizations, um, Wachovia bank card services, net frame. I also did it, you know, at a, at a couple of different, um, uh, uh, startups through a consultancy I was a part of. So that was a really, really interesting background experience. Um, I was pretty much in HR. I was a psych major. So that seemed like a logical transition point. Um, and then in my late twenties, I ended up at a company called Taos. Which is in the IT infrastructure services space. What that means is like anything that you can think of as like the technology plumbing of the business is sort of one way to look at IT. The networks and the servers and the databases and the cloud and the DevOps and the, you know, AI and all those kinds of things on more of the internal IT side of the business, as opposed to the product side of the business. And so our customers were CIOs, chief information officers, and I was at that company for 17 years. And so one way to look at that, there's many different ways to look at this. One is 17 years, I was 27 when I started and 42 when I left. Actually 44 when I fully left. So I grew up there. And I grew up in this space that was very much super tech. You know, we had less than 20 of our consultants out in the field at any time were women, you know, because it was very rare to find women in the technology space over those, you know, early 20s or early 2000s decades. And I found myself, you know, first I was a vice president. I was running, you know, maybe two thirds of the business because we were a professional services company and I ran all of delivery. So everything delivery was reporting to me. And, um, then I became the president and COO of the company and then everything including finance and sales ended up running, reporting to me and I didn't have a background in finance or sales. Right. So here I am the president and the COO of the company and I'm running everything. And then, you know, working through a couple of different major economic cycles, um, I ended up diversifying the business into managed services and project-based services. I, I kept the company out of bankruptcy and I did all these things I never had done before. I didn't, I didn't know anything about. And the one thing that I suffered from, I did not suffer. I've never suffered from a lack of confidence. And I've never suffered from a lack of ambition and a lack of, like, even though, I mean, I should reframe that. I mean, I definitely had those moments where I've, lots of them, where I've, you know, beaten myself up, known I've done the wrong things, wondered whether I can handle it, you know, all those things. But in a general sense. I've pushed through. I've continued to say, I can do that. I can do that. I can do that. And so confidence gets shattered at times, but my resilience and my desire to keep going and my ambition can keep pushing me. But I did really find it very, very challenging to deal with my own version of intersectionality. Where women of color and let's say, you know, a transgender woman of color, she's dealing with at least three intersectionalities, right? She's a woman, she's transgender, she's of color. My own version of that was non-technical, very young woman. And I have that, like, I have empathy for this, you know, for intersectionality because of my own sort of, you know, sort of challenges with like, wow, it's not just this, it's this plus this plus this. And so I was finding it really hard to walk into rooms that were male dominated, much older than me, very technical. And hold my own in a way that not that I wasn't deserving, but that didn't have the initial thought process of like, why are you here? Until they got past that, until they were like, oh, now we see why you're here, right? But that pushing past the why are you here and those voices in your head and in their heads was really hard. And so I started a dinner group in 2005. And that dinner group grew and grew and grew and grew and eventually became the basis for Athena Alliance.

Jackie - 00:07:33:

Tell us a little about how that dinner group got started, who were members, how did it expand?

Coco - 00:07:42:

So the dinner group got started, you know, as... As everything does, you know, people don't give enough credit to all the other people that deserve the credit in the world.

Jackie - 00:07:54:

Yeah.

Coco - 00:07:54:

You know, there's always that, there's that saying that failure has many mothers and success only one, right?

Jackie - 00:08:01:

Yeah, that's right.

Coco - 00:08:03:

So. Athena has had many mothers. And so the very first thing was... I would meet these incredible women and they'd say, oh, I'm the only one in the Valley. And I'd say, no, there's Sonny Asaday and Maureen Monacho and Gina Gina Ray Haig or they'd tell me that one way or the other, we got that. And then Sonny said, you know, Coco, get us together. Let's have dinner. And I was like, yeah. So, you know, there's one mother in the process. Tama Oliver was another mother in the process. She's like, oh, I used to do dinners like this. And she's like. 15, 20 years older than me, you know, and she's like, I did these back in the 80s and I called them no name group. You know, and I'll introduce you to Gerri Martin-Flickinger. So there's another mother, you know, and these dinners just started growing and growing. And then expanding, you know, we're tired of having this conversation. Let's invite the CFOs in. We're tired of the CMOs doing this. Let's invite them in. And, you know, it just kept expanding. And then 10 years into it, I had stepped down from running Taos. I was on the board, but I, you know, stayed on the board two more years and then sold my interest and moved on. And I was figuring out what I wanted to do. And this beautiful community of women said, just stick with us. Just stick with us. Stick with us. And I'm like, what am I going to do with this? And so I just kept hosting dinners. Other people were paying for it. And then, there was this sort of magical moment where I, I got this trigger of a flurry of emails saying, Coco, you know, why don't you do this? Get us on boards. And it was following a meeting with Senator Mark Warner that a group of us had participated in where someone had said, like, why aren't we on boards? And so I got this flurry and this mandate. And so it started seven years ago as a... A singular mandate. And I really approached it the way you might approach a PhD, you know, like, okay. What's my thesis? You know, what part of this, like, what am I focused on? And it was the last mile. It's not qualification, it's access and presentation and competition to win. So What are my theories of change? You know, the theory of change is that we have to address these three points, the things I just said. How are we going to do that? You know, and so I spent four years with another bunch of mothers, Yvonne Wassenaar and Gina Ray Haig. You know, figuring out how to answer those questions and experimenting. And then eventually found a commercial model that went well beyond the boardroom and said, look, you know, the board is one thing. But there's this whole bigger thing that's your portfolio of impact. And so, you know, we started focusing on that. You as an executive, you as an investor, you as a founder, you as an entrepreneur, you know, you as an inspirer, not just you as a singular threaded sort of career line. And that's what Athena is today.

Jackie - 00:10:53:

That's amazing. Coco, you've built and led four different companies. What drives you to keep creating new ventures and how do you approach each journey differently?

Coco - 00:11:06:

Yeah. Well, the very first one, I was 25 or six years old. And my then boss and I at the time, her name is Vivian Golub. And I think she's since very much retired. She was much older than me. She and I started a company called Ariel Consulting. And we decided, we determined very quickly that we wanted to go in two different directions. And I wanted to build a product. And so I went off and I built a product and that has its own little story that ended up in the product being acquired and there never being any real traction on my own. The second one was more about a refounder situation. I was asked to be the president, COO, and third owner of the business when Taos was imploding. We had crashed from $100 million in revenue to $10 million in revenue. And my mandate was keep us out of bankruptcy and turn this thing around. And so in that sense, I'm like, pull the phoenix from the ashes, refound the business, screw it back up to over 50 million in revenue. It eventually sold to IBM. The third was a consultancy that I still hold on to. It's what I do my board work through, my personal sort of stuff. And it was really about leveraging my skills and innate abilities and my experience as a CEO, as a... As an executive to help other CEOs build incredible strategies. And really great aligned planning processes. And then the fourth one was Athena. It's Athena And that's my most passionate one, my most excited, and I'm bringing the most of all my learnings too. And I think your question was like, what drives me to keep doing it? There's a couple things. One is I really don't think businesses are designed the right way for today's world. And, you know, businesses are designed around this sort of factory model, very much hierarchical organization designs. Very much command and control. There's still so much embedded thinking around like, what are your hours and, you know, clock in, clock out, like that sort of mentality. And I don't want that. I don't want it for the world and I don't want it for me. And so one of the things that keeps driving me is this desire to build something I believe in. And that is at many different levels. It's at what the business is and does in the world and can be for the world and how it functions. And when I was running Taos, I was at the top and I was able to say, you know, I'm going to drop the kids off or pick them up three times a week. I'm going to volunteer in the classroom. I'm never going to miss a field trip. I could say those things. I didn't always live up to them. But that was, at the end of the day, nobody else decided it but me. And I wanted to create a business where that, where I could penetrate that sort of, you know, like of different sense of flexibility and control. And I'm on the board of a company that operates under a holacracy, which is a whole other thing to talk about, but it's like, it doesn't have the traditional org structure. It's got more sort of these centers of excellence. It's much more democratic and really interested in that. And, and that the company's owned by the employees and there's certain structural things that drive me to entrepreneurship. And then there's the innate, just me. I just. Love to build and create and, you know, I can't help it.

Jackie - 00:14:40:

That's so great. Now tell us what a holacracy is. I don't think most of us have heard that word before and it sounds interesting and promising.

Coco - 00:14:51:

Yeah. It's interesting because we've sort of debated at what point do you actually have titles because there are a few titles that align to an org structure thinking. And largely that's for the outside world more so than the inside world. The company is called ArcherPoint. We do have a CFO, a CEO, a COO. We do have some titles, but for the most part, the way that the company executes is not like the way you might think of like... The domain ownership of like, okay, so all of anything related to technology sits under the CTO and anything related to sales sits under a CRO. Like it, it doesn't work like that. It's more centers of excellence. It's like, okay, we need to, so we have one center of excellence called New Logo. And so there's a, there's a cross section of, of people across the business that are part of that center of excellence. And that center of excellence has a, um, um, so that's like going after new, new relationships, right? That center of excellence has a, um, assigned leader. So the CEO and, and their, you know, sort of leadership team decides an assigned leader, but then they also, the center of excellence also has an elected leader. And so there's sort of these dual leaders in there, which is even more fun from the perspective that this company is also an ESOP, which is an employee stock owned company. Which means the founders decided to sell the company to the employees. So, you know, there's a lot to learn in these models, but it's super fascinating.

Jackie - 00:16:36:

That's interesting. Coco, what are some of the key lessons that you've learned from your experiences with your previous startups that have shaped how you run Athena Alliance today?

Coco - 00:16:48:

Oh, so many things. You know, one of the things I... Think about... And maybe, you know, I have a couple of different things I just believe in general, like that. As a precursor to my answer. One is that everybody's greatest strength is also their Achilles heel. And the other thing is, is that oftentimes with our greatest strength, we're never satisfied. Um, so with that in mind. One of my great strengths is that I push through. But I feel like in my early attempts, I gave up too quickly. I should have pushed through more. And I was maybe more feisty than I should have been. You know, like I think that great strength and Achilles heel together, right? Like great strength is. You know, when you're like, I have the answer, I know how to do this, you know, build, build, build, and I can do it. The other side of that is how do you bring people along and collaborate and make sure that. It's something that others not just go, okay, yeah, I can do that, Coco, but they own. And so sometimes slowing down to go faster. Those kinds of lessons were ones that took me time to really figure out. Some people are natural. Team players, right? Some people are natural team creators and I was not a natural team creator. And so I've had to figure out how to be that. And sometimes I still struggle and I'll point it out and I'll say, I'm not the one on the team who remembers how to celebrate. So who else can help me remember how to celebrate?

Jackie - 00:18:32:

Yeah, that makes sense. You know, I love that you recognize where your strengths are and also where your opportunities are and that you're willing to bring people in. To help. You know, bolster those needs and those necessary parts of a business. Because we can't be the best at every part of the business. We need to understand where we're really good. And where we could use some help from our team. So I love that. Coco, can you talk to us about some of the significant milestones that Athena Alliance has achieved and how they align with your mission?

Coco - 00:19:12:

There's a number of them. In the early days, when we were a nonprofit, so there was a nonprofit that eventually folded into another nonprofit, which to give props to, I love Yasmin Davidds nonprofit that is called Multicultural Women Executive Leadership Foundation. We melded the Athena nonprofit into that one. But during the time that we were a nonprofit solely focused on getting women on boards. We were very involved and very supportive in the process of addressing the California mandate to bring diversity to boards. We over, you know, carrying into even now, we still help women get to boards and we've brought over almost 500 women to corporate boards. I think the number actually is 483, you know, including big boards like Zillow and Bose. And some of these are collaborative efforts. But we've been, you know, able to say we were a part of that. And we, without us, that would not have happened. And so, or, you know, not in that way for certain, not that board, not that person. There's those kind of significant hard measures of success. You know, today we now, you know, other hard measures of success. We have 1200 members. We have 450 hours of original content, mostly created by badass women in our library. We built a tech platform. We've raised, you know, over two and a half million in funding. We, which, you know, is really kind of sadly still unusual for women. And we've delivered over 3,000 hours of coaching hours. We've delivered also, I think just about that same number of, let's see, no, it's not. It's 150 times seven. So about a thousand live virtual salons. Like we've done all sorts of things like that are hard numbers. And then, you know, the magical things is when you. I was just responding to a LinkedIn today where someone's like, I'm so grateful this happened and thank you, Athena. And like every time that happens, you know, that's, those are the magical things. There are ripple effects for people and being able to extend their world and have them say, I'm a better executive or I'm more confident because of you and thank you. You know, that's, those are the biggest things.

Jackie - 00:21:47:

That's amazing. I'm sure that. Makes you feel even on those tough days at work that the work is worth it. So I love that. I love that. Coco, in this ever-changing tech landscape, how do you stay ahead of the curve and ensure that Athena Alliance continues to innovate and provide value? It sounds like you're doing some amazing things. Can you tell us a little bit more about what Athena is doing from a tech perspective?

Coco - 00:22:19:

Yeah. Well, we're a full-stack engineer platform. We've really built this incredible platform and we are leveraging AI. Our plan is to leverage it more. The way to think about it from a technology standpoint is when you join Athena, you log in, you're behind the firewall and there's this incredible ecosystem. Part of the ecosystem is a directory style experience, sort of like LinkedIn, where you can find people, you can connect with people. Another part of the ecosystem is a Netflix style library. So literally like hundreds of hours of content explored by categories, continue where you left off, bookmark things, what's recommended for you, new releases. Our categories aren't like drama and family and comedy. Our categories are financial acumen and legal acumen and board success and your career portfolio and things like that. And then we have pathways, and our pathways are sort of like season, you know, a series. So, you know, you have a series called Game of Thrones with 11 seasons and whatever episodes, right? We have Path to the Boardroom is 11 seasons and 73 episodes. We had Advancing to the C-Suite, Navigating Transition. We're constantly adding new ones. We have a whole Athena Academy where you can engage in cohort-based courses, seven-week, nine-week courses. We have peer groups, 20-plus peer groups. We just launched Black Leaders Thriving, I think it's called. So there's the affinity peer groups, but there's also the comp committee peer group and the serious investors peer group and various other kinds of peer groups. We do 80-plus in-person meetups. Now, that's the one thing that's off the tech, that's not tech, right? But all the rest of it. And we also have a matching system for matching our members to board opportunities and advisory roles and some executive roles. We have a whole coaching ecosystem. People can discover and buy additional services for coaching services and schedule it right there on the platform. So all of that. You know, we built. The AI piece of it that's coming into it is right now there's more sort of like intelligent communication. But the next phase is to really, if you imagine we have thousands of bios, hundreds of hours of transcripts for our videos, trusted individuals that we trust to bring other information in from the outside. Imagine AI, like a private ChatGPT type experience inside Athena, faster access to connections, to insights, to new content that's generated off of going across the content, etc. So that's where we're headed. The world is moving way too fast for the traditional course style, university style, institutionalized learning kind of style. Even like... Masterclasses, you know, like it's, the world needs a faster way of learning fast, fast, fast, fast, fast, super Socratic, bring in experts, you know, don't make it over complicated. Don't make it hard. You know, I think that's why podcasts work so well too. It's like, it's dynamic. It doesn't require a lot, but you can. And so, we're really about. Learning. Every month we do a session called Ripped from the Headlines. And it's like a deep dive into what's going on in the world that all of the leaders need to know. Every month we interview a prominent CEO. Every month we interview a prominent chief people officer. We have all sorts of topics that we bring in on career care as well and on governance. And we're constantly learning together. And I show up to most all of that.

Jackie - 00:26:22:

Wow. I think that's so amazing. And you're right. Learning in these small kind of bite-sized ways are so important because so many of us have so many different things going on, right? And so we can't sit in a traditional classroom and learn in the style that we did when we were in college. We need to be able to learn in between the things that we're doing. So I love that Athena does that and makes that important. Coco, speaking of that, as a multi-time entrepreneur and leader, how do you manage to balance your professional responsibilities with a personal life?

Coco - 00:27:10:

It's a constant juggling act. It's a constant juggling act. I was working this morning and my daughter popped in and she... Plopped like sort of over that, that way, you know, like just in, in eyesight and you know, it's like. And then you think, okay, can I take a break? Right?

Jackie - 00:27:31:

Right. No, I can't.

Coco - 00:27:32:

But you do anyway. And you look up and, you know, I looked up and I'm like, hey, you want to go water the plants? And she's like, yeah. So we took 15 minutes and we went outside and watered plants. You know?

Jackie - 00:27:42:

I love that. I love it.

Coco - 00:27:44:

So, I mean, you have to, you, you have to. Tell yourself like, I have to do this now. I have to, you know, like in the same ways that we say to ourselves. For our work, for our business. I have to do this now. I can't break away. We have to do the same thing with our family life, with our, whatever our family life is. We have to give it the same kind of. Attention, urgency. And so, you know, it's like being interrupted by that really important email, you know, like I got to get to it. Well, I just got interrupted by this really important person who popped in and I'm like, well. Okay, it's going to extend my day in some other way. You know, but, you know, let's go water the plants together and chat about, you know, this podcast you're listening to, which she's actually listening to a podcast.

Jackie - 00:28:32:

That's so great, Coco. And you know, you're right. And so many of us struggle with how to manage both successfully and how to integrate personal and professional. Being mindful of keeping urgency on your personal the way you do on the professional. I love that. I think that's such good advice. Such good advice. How would you describe your leadership style and how do you think it has evolved? Over the course of your career Coco?

Coco - 00:29:02:

I would say my... Leadership style is very direct, transparent. Open and, um, demanding and not really nurturing. However, on the other side of all of that. I would say that The way I... Take those things and make them things that people are like, oh, that's positive, right? Because you can say demanding and... Super like direct, right?

Jackie - 00:29:41:

Sounds a little scary, right?

Coco - 00:29:42:

Sounds scary, right? And then to say, and I'm not particularly nurturing, right? Like to say those three things, you're like, I don't want to work for her. Those things are true. And the way that I, because I'm the same with my kids. I'm very direct. I'm demanding. I would say nurturing is very different in that context. As a mother, I'm definitely very nurturing. I, I, I'm aware of what the, the counterbalance to that needs to be. And the counterbalance to that needs to be like, if you're going to be very direct, you also have to be very transparent. If you're going to demand a lot, you also have to be very transparent because when people can see, they understand better, you know, where you're coming from and they can, you know, they can resonate more with what you're. On about. But if they don't, you know, if you're, if you're like, like, for example, I'll take a kid example. I never say because I told you so. I never say because I'm the adult. I never say, you know, I'm the older one. I know and you don't. I never say those things, ever. My kids have never been in a timeout. So there's certain things where I'm like, I don't do these things, but I do do these things. So I try to, with my team, with my leadership style, transparency comes with responsibility. And I think I'm given a little bit more leeway in how much I expect and demand because I am transparent. And at the same time, the other thing about being demanding is on the other side of that is that I'm also, I don't, I don't subscribe to anyone being in charge of your career or your time other than you. And so I don't ask people, where were you this morning? I, you know, I, I don't, yeah, I, I focus on the work and the output, not on the process as much. So I think to be, and I'm always a work in progress. Everybody is. And I think, I'm creating a team that works really well together. And part of the way to do that is to be constantly thinking about your responsibility in it. Like, what did I own? I say I'm sorry a lot, by the way. And I own it. You know, if I messed up, I come back to it. And I'm like, I messed up. I said, you know, I shouldn't have said it this way. I was wrong on this, you know.

Jackie - 00:32:17:

Yeah. That's part of that vulnerability and transparency. With high expectations, you do offer that flexibility. And I think that's great. And one of the things that high performers are looking for, right? They don't mind the high expectations, but they want the flexibility to do their job in the way that makes sense for them. So I think that's great. Coco, what's next for Athena Alliance? Are there any upcoming initiatives or expansions that you're excited about?

Coco - 00:32:49:

Yeah. Well, we're fundraising right now, which... It's not the first time. And it's a really nerve wracking process because Fundraising puts you in this place where you're constantly... Showcasing and then getting rejection. And so like, you know, you're constantly like, what do you think of my baby? Right. And, and, and then getting judgment, judgment, judgment on the other side of it. The other part of it that is. Part of what makes it it's almost like, like makes me neurotic in a sense is like, on the one side, you know, you're constantly dealing with the... The risk aversion around. Fundraising. And so everybody's asking you all these like negative questions or sort of looking for the flaw. Whereas on the other side, we're doing so well, right? And it's like, we've got so much to be proud about and we're so excited. And like, and so you're holding two truths at the same time, like, you know, this one side that's like, so what's wrong with you? And this other side that's like, wow, it's amazing, you know? And so that process is going on right now. We're fundraising so that we can. Really invest in this technology roadmap I was mentioning. And that's really exciting. You know, we know exactly what we would do technologically and it'll take us to the next step. And we've got some really great things that from a member value perspective, we want to invest in around our ability to deliver in what we call Athena Academy space and more peer groups and more in-person meetups and all that sort of stuff. So we're... We're very excited about the future. And our expansion is really, it's, it's. And I think our members would be very, very happy to hear this. Like we're not thinking about expansion and like, how do we go grab market share, market share, market share, like just going crazy wild big. We're thinking about the three dimensions of um, new members plus retention of existing members plus added value to existing members? How do we manage those three things. So The growth trajectory over the next... Couple of years is going to be big. But it's going to be within a patient sort of sense, right? So we will double, double, double, we'll be able to grow revenue without having to like open up new offices and go to new, like we're not going to have to do something crazy to do that. And so it's not like I could say, oh, we have this huge new ambition. Like that's not what's happening. It's incremental. It's every one of our members is a snowflake from our perspective. And so really digging in and adding value is what will allow us to scale in a sustainable, proper. Lasting way.

Jackie - 00:35:45:

Yeah, that's amazing. And Coco, before we wrap up, is there anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners about your journey, Athena Alliance, or your vision for the future?

Coco - 00:35:58:

Yeah. I mean, I think the thing to think about, and I think about this topic, you know, diversity beyond the checkbox. I think... Something really, really important for us to think about is the average age of the female leader is 45. And by the time, and that's not to say that everybody is, I was 28 when I became a VP, right? So it's just that if you look at a bell curve, right? So for those listening who are like, I'm a leader and I'm 28. That's fine, right? But the average age. Is 45. And by the time someone hits 45, as a woman in particular, or as an underrepresented individual in particular, let's say. And intersectionality definitely compounds this. But by the time you've gotten there and you've got like 20 years of career behind you or 25 years of career behind you. At that point, you've been told you've been passed by. You've been told you didn't raise your hand. You've been told that you waited to check all the boxes. You were hoping that people would see your performance. You've been told all the things you did wrong. Plus, by the way, you know, you may have slowed down because of, you know, this sort of other side of you, a family, or maybe you opted out and then you can't, you're coming back in or you powered through and shame on you, like shame on you no matter what, right? And by the way, and the worst one. The worst one is you're running out of time. That's the one that I think I want to like. Talk about for a minute. And that is that, you are not running out of time. I started Athena and raised money after the age of 50. I know so many women creating incredible things in their 60s and 70s. You are not running out of time. And, you know, the idea of retirement, retired, tired, right? Like the word tired. Yes, we're tired. And we're tired of all those things that we saw behind us, particularly as people who struggled harder, more got past all those things. Yes, we're tired, but we're tired of all that, you know, but a lot of us are inspired by ourselves, right? Like by the point you're at your, in your forties, maybe for some people much earlier, but by that point, you are like, I'm a badass. I've got so much to offer. I'm, I've got like, as long as my brain and my body continue to cooperate, I'm on fire. And there's so much more of me, right? So don't let anything else tell you that you're running out of time or that you can't be that, or, you know, so the thing that we focus on as Athena is like, look, you're not one thing. You're not one singular career. You're not a board seat. You're not the podcast you lead. You're, you know, you're a whole. Portfolio and that portfolio involves lots of things. And, and I'm just talking about the professional portfolio set aside the, you know, the, the fabulous personal portfolio, but your port professional portfolio, you know, you can be an entrepreneur. You can invest in next generation companies, even if it's a $5,000 or $1,000 check, like you can do things to generate and expand professional impact and go teach at a local university so that you can fund this other thing you care about and, you know, but think about yourself holistically and take that linear view. You've been thinking, you know, that vertical view, flip it horizontal or flip it horizontally. And ask yourself, what am I biographically? What am I as a brand? And how would I approach my next 20 years that way, rather than letting anyone tell me that I'm aging out or whatever? I should get a VP title now or whatever it is. You know.

Jackie - 00:39:50:

That's such great advice. Thank you for that, Coco. How can listeners learn more about Athena Alliance and connect with you?

Coco - 00:39:58:

Yeah, connect with me. First of all, I'm really easy to find on LinkedIn. I'm grateful for my parents for many things, and that's one of them. I'm Coco Brown. So if you look Coco Brown up on LinkedIn and then you connect with me, when you connect with me, make sure you say you heard me speak on the Beyond the Checkbox, Checkbox, that would be another one, Beyond the Checkbox, Beyond the Checkbox podcast. So say that because that is meaningful to me to know, like, why are we connecting? With Athena, it's athenaalliance.com. So Athena, Alliance. So two A's in the middle there, athenaalliance.com. And yeah, please do check us out.

Jackie - 00:40:45:

Coco, thank you so much for a great conversation, for talking to us about Athena Alliance Alliance and the amazing work that you're doing there to support women professionals. Thanks so much.

Coco - 00:40:57:

Thank you.

Jackie - 00:41:02:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Diversity: Beyond the Checkbox. If you loved this show, please take a moment to share it with a friend, leave a rating and review, and subscribe so you'll be reminded when new episodes are released. Become part of our community on Instagram, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, and TikTok. Or subscribe to our newsletter at beyondthecheckbox.com. This show is part of the Living Corporate Network, sponsored by the Diversity Movement, and edited and produced by Earfluence. I'm Jackie Ferguson. Take care of yourself and each other.