Profile

I steer the ship.  I’m the one who comes up with the strategic plan:  what we are going to do as a company and how we are going to do it.

On a day-to-day basis, I talk to our advertisers about working with us and making money with us.  I also talk to our investors about what is going on with the company.  We are venture fund backed by Sutter Hill Ventures and The Mayfield Fund.  I deal with the management team including finance, sales, engineering, and marketing people.  I try to understand how they are motivating their teams and the results they are getting.  I am also the face of the company.  I do interviews and go to conferences.  

It’s important to note that a CEO of a start-up is very different from the CEO of a big company.  I started this company from my apartment.  I’ve done everything from move servers to taking out the trash.  A start-up CEO needs to be able to dig in and do anything to get the job done.

It’s very open.  We are on an open floor with a bunch of cubes in a building in downtown San Francisco.  I have the only office with a door, because there are some conversations that I have to have with the door closed.  Otherwise, it’s a pretty open environment.

All kinds.  Most people speak Spanish.  My company is very ethnically diverse.  There are people from Russia, India, Mexico, Argentina, Canada and the U.S. 

One of the primary skills of a CEO is the ability to sell yourself.
You have to believe in yourself and your abilities and be able to communicate your belief to advertisers, board members and most importantly to your team.  You have to inspire and motivate your team so they will charge hard behind you wherever you want the company to go.

It’s jam-packed.  It starts at 8:00 in the morning with phone calls and meetings.  At lunch, if I’m not in a meeting, I’m having lunch at my desk, unfortunately, usually in under ten minutes.  Then I’m moving to the next thing.  I have a lot of internal and external meetings.  I spend time looking at financial models, reviewing legal agreements, and negotiating contracts.

It can go from 8:00 in the morning to 8:00 at night.  Sometimes I get out earlier but sometimes I work until 1:00 in the morning because we have a big proposal to get done.

I travel on a regular basis, which makes work even harder.  I primarily travel to Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Mexico and Chicago.

I love that I’m the boss

It’s a very people intensive job.  Sometimes advertisers can be cranky, the board can have a different agenda, and employees can be hard.  People are multi-faceted.  They have all sorts of issues and concerns that become mine.  People are also complex and it can be hard to find the right way to motivate them and make sure they are happy and doing a good job.

Creativity.  Passion.  Helping others.  

I want to help others understand that the Hispanic market is one they should value.  I want to be an example to my community of how to be connected to your culture and have it be an asset and not a liability.  

I am passionate about teaching young women, Hispanic or not, to know that they can take control of their destiny and create something.  They can survive. I am a survivor.  I’ve taught myself how to survive in a different way by teaching myself that I can create a company and make money on my own.

I have a CEO coach, Carole Robin, from the Stanford Business School. She gave me the best advice about fear.  She says that FEAR is an acronym for false expectations appearing real. There really is nothing to be afraid of but we turn a lot of things into stories that are not going to come true.  We think they are and create false expectations.  Fear comes from these false expectations.  When you break it down and understand that they are false expectations, you can push through your fear.  We all have these mental models that we’ve picked up along the way and they are not necessarily true.

“It’s impossible.”  “You can’t do that.”  I’ve gotten that a lot.  

I don’t think anyone can tell you who you are.  Only you ultimately know.  You have to trust that.  It can be easy to be influenced by outside voices that have a lot of power for you like your parents, siblings, boyfriend or best friend.  They may have a host of reasons for what they are saying to you.  You need to remember that it is just one voice, one input.  You don’t have to take it as the word of God.

If you look inside, you will always know the answer.

Spend as much time now, and in college, focused on learning who you are.  It may sound selfish and it’s a hard job but it is very important.  

One way to get to know yourself is by trying lots of different things and getting outside your comfort zone.  Figure out what works and what doesn’t work.  The only way you figure that out is to try and fail.  That teaches you a lot about who you are and what you can handle, what you like and what you don’t like.  Once you know that then you can truly be who you are.  

Authenticity is your seat of power.  Once you know who you are, you become a powerful person.  And when you know your power you can do anything.

No.  The reality is that all of the things good and bad that have happened in my life have made me who I am and given me the strength and the skills to manage every day.  I have absolutely no regrets.  There are mistakes I’d rather not have made but at the end of the day they only helped me.

I’m a big believer that the universe provides and sort of guides you.  If you just give it up to the universe a little bit and not try to control every single outcome but be prepared for every outcome, you’ll find that your life just works out. I think that is what faith is about.  Life will turn out well. If you just have that in the back of your mind, it gives you a great foundation and strength to try anything that you want to

I am passionate about helping people in general accomplish what they want to do.  In particular, young women need to understand that they have a lot of power.  The world is their oyster.  They can do so many different things.

I grew up in El Monte, La Puente, and Montebello, towns in East Los Angeles.

My parents are from Durango, Mexico.  I am number eight of eleven children.  When I was a child we lived in a two bedroom home in Sun Valley.  We didn’t have a lot of money.

My mother never made it past the eighth grade and my father graduated from high school and that’s it.  I didn’t come from the most auspicious of beginnings.

We were very poor.  When I was four, my younger brother died of malnutrition.  My mother suffered from Schizophrenia but we didn’t know it at that time.  My father had a problem with alcohol.  My parents couldn’t manage our large family and it was broken up and the children were put in foster care.

My twin sister Maria and I were kept together when we were put into foster homes.  We were in about eight different foster homes in the span of twelve years.  

Maria and I took two different approaches to managing our lives.  Maria was more of an external person and I was more of an internal person.  I was a bookworm—basically a nerd. I studied a lot and I was very into school.  It was something that I could control and manage, what I needed to counter-act the chaos in my personal life.

Maria was into fashion and makeup.  One day she brought home a Seventeen Magazine.  She said, “It says that Stanford is the best college in California.  You’re good at school, you should apply there.”  I didn’t read Seventeen so I’m really glad that she brought it to my attention.  We both applied and both got into Stanford.

I had no concept that you could apply to college outside of California or that there were Ivy League schools.  Although Los Angeles is a cosmopolitan city, there are pockets where you don’t learn about college.  

I ended up attending Stanford and majored in Public Policy.  I picked Public Policy as a major because I was really lost.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do.  I just wanted to graduate and get a degree.  I wasn’t focused on figuring myself out or understanding what I liked and didn’t like.  If I had to do it all over again I wouldn’t have picked Public Policy.  But that was the choice I made at the time and it worked out for me.

At Stanford, I was very concerned about what I was going to do.  Not coming from money, financial stability was very important to me.  I was concerned that I was taking out a lot of loans.  Although I had scholarships, they weren’t paying for everything.  I wanted to make sure that I had a job where I could pay my school loans off.

Not knowing what to do, I went to a career development center.  I showed the career counselor my resume.  In high school, I learned accounting.  To help pay for college, I worked as a bookkeeper.  The counselor said that since I was familiar with accounting, I should consider investment banking.  I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d never heard of investment banking.  She said that since you are comfortable with numbers, this might be a career for you.  

The counselor introduced me to a program called Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, a program that was responsible for putting minorities in jobs on Wall Street.  Up to that time, Wall Street had been a bastion of old white males.  It was just starting to diversify.  

I applied for the scholarship.  It was an intense process with a lengthy application and a panel interview.  I was fortunate enough to be accepted in the program.  They sent my resume to Goldman Sachs in New York and Goldman selected me to work with them during the summer between my junior and senior year at Stanford.  It was a great opportunity.  I had to learn a lot very quickly.  I didn’t even own a suit.

I was fortunate enough to have the help of Jerry Porras, a famous professor at the Stanford Business School.  I was lamenting that I didn’t know what I was doing.  I got a scholarship to work for a summer in New York but I didn’t know how I was going to get there.  I had barely any money.  Someone said that I should go see Dr. Porras, who wrote the book, Built to Last.  He said, “What are you trying to do.”  I said, “I got an internship and I need to find a way to get to New York.”  He said, “How much do you need?”  I said, “The flight is like $300 dollars.”  Right on the spot, he wrote me a check for $340 dollars for the flight.  I said, “But I can’t pay you back yet.”  He said, “ Don’t worry about it, one day you will.”  

I got on a plane and went to New York.  I worked my butt off during the summer and got an offer for a full time position at Goldman Sachs.  

I was very lucky.  When I graduated I moved from Stanford to New York City.  I spent the next couple of years working as a financial analyst for Goldman Sachs in their Financial Institutions Group (FIG).  

Working on Wall Street was crazy.  It was a lot of hours, confusing and definitely not glamorous.  Basically, I hated it at the time.  Now I am incredibly grateful for it.  Some of my best friends are from that time and the name Goldman Sachs on my resume has undoubtedly opened doors for me and allowed me to get jobs at other great places.

The analyst program at Goldman Sachs and other investment firms is two years.  A group gets accepted into the program for two years and then you are expected to move on to some sort of graduate program.  I felt that after spending two years in finance and learning a lot about finance, I wanted to understand the picture better and the roles that people were playing across the table.  

In investment banking, you are dealing with mergers and acquisitions and initial public offerings (IPOs).  A lot of time, you are dealing with corporate lawyers.  I’m a naturally curious person and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go to business school so I went to law school.  

In my ongoing journey to understand who I am, I realized that New York City wasn’t a great fit for me.  I’m definitely a California girl.  During my first winter in New York I thought I was going to die.  I decided that I had to get back to California somehow.  Not knowing any better, I just applied to Stanford’s law school.

I believe that what helped me get into Stanford Law School was my score on the LSAT (the law school entrance exam).  The reason that I was able to score well on the LSAT was that I was able to afford a test prep class.  I remember taking the SATs in high school.  Then, I didn’t have the money to take a prep class. I did a fair job on the SATs but on the LSAT because I was able to take a prep course, I kicked its butt.  I had a fantastic score.  

I had to take on a lot of loans to afford law school.  It’s very expensive. As a result, I had to work during law school to alleviate some of my debt.  I worked at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR) in Palo Alto.  WSGR is very focused on technology companies.  Because of my previous investment banking experience, I was accepted to work during my very first summer in law school at WSGR.  I worked with the firm part-time during law school and then full time after I graduated.

WSGR is also where I learned that the old adage, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know that counts” is true.  I used to think it was so unfair but it is exactly how it works.  

When I was working at WSGR during law school, I got to know a partner who left to join a venture capital firm, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.  After I joined WSGR full-time, I ran into him in WSGR’s parking lot.  He asked whether I was interested in becoming an investment associate at Hummer Winblad.  I said, “Absolutely.”

At WSGR, I learned about venture capital firms.  On the corporate side, we helped venture capital firms start funds and invest in startup companies.  Compared to investment bankers and corporate lawyers, it looked like the venture capitalists had an easy job.

Venture capitalists (VCs) are a group of people who manage the money of private investors, usually wealthy individuals or institutions.  VC funds take their money and hope to grow it by investing in companies.  VCs also help the companies grow and get to a liquidity event which means that the company goes public on the stock market, gets acquired by a bigger company, or merges with another company.   Then, the VC fund returns the initial investment money to the investors in its fund.

Fund sizes can vary from around 50 to 100 million dollars. It doesn’t sound small but these funds are small compared the amount of money that is out there.  Most funds (VC firms) raise multiple funds.  For example, Hummer Winblad has over ten funds.  Each fund has between 50 and 100 million dollars in it.  The total amount is around a billion dollars under management.  They are dealing with a lot of money.

Venture capital is a very difficult job to get.  It’s an incredibly small percentage of the universe. It is a very male dominated and traditionally a Caucasian environment.  There is not a lot of diversity, which is unfortunate.  Companies are started by lots of different people.  Markets have opportunities that involve lots of different ethnicities and ethnic groups that can be quite lucrative.  But if you don’t have someone from that background you may not be able to spot the opportunity.

I left WSGR and joined Hummer Winblad Venture Partners as an investment associate.  My job was to go through the business plans of different businesses and figure out what businesses were worth the investment firm’s attention.  Then, I did due diligence on the companies and researched the industry.  I tried to understand whether it was a company that the firm wanted to invest in.

I also worked at some of the companies in which Hummer Winblad invested. For example, I worked at Napster as the VP of Operations. I helped run the company.   I also sat on the board of directors for several companies.  I took over a venture fund and was the CEO of Zero Gravity Internet Group.  That fund had invested in seven other companies and I went on the boards of those companies.

Because it is such a small organization, there was no path to partnership at Hummer Winblad and so I left and joined The Carlyle Group’s U.S. Venture Fund.  I was looking at on-line advertising companies in general for the Carlyle group to invest in.  I saw there were a lot of on-line lead generation companies, ad networks, and publishers.  I thought about the different business models for on-line advertising and wondered why no one was targeting the Hispanic population.  

Thinking about the Hispanic market really coincided with a time in my life when I was really exploring who I was and what was important to me.   What I realized was that I was never speaking Spanish anymore.  I was speaking Spanish sometimes with my sister Maria but the only other person I was speaking Spanish with was the woman who came to take out the trash at work.  

It was eye-opening for me.  I realized I wanted to take all of the skills I had developed and my experience and couple that with who I was as a person.  Being Latina, being Hispanic is part of who I am.  I wondered, how do I combine all those and make them work?

I did some research at night and looked at a lot of different businesses.  It was quite an iterative process to figure out what I was passionate about and what I wanted to do.  I did a lot of things.  I went to a career counselor and talked to business owners.  

One day, it hit me that I could do an on-line advertising company focused on the Hispanic market.  It was an AHA! moment. I just knew.  I’m not married or don’t have kids but some people talk about when they met their soul mate they just knew.  I thought that was a load of crap until I had my moment and knew that I wanted to do an on-line advertising company.  Everything about me was at peace at that moment and I decided that it was what I was going to do.

Without knowing any better, I quit my job and started the company.  With an on-line company, you don’t need a lot of capital.  You can start one overnight.  That’s what I did out of my apartment.  

I started Consorte Media, a digital marketing and media company focused on the Hispanic market both here in the U.S. and in Latin America. We started in on-line lead generation.  We run landing pages that ask the user a series of questions about a service need or want.  For example, some people use credit cards too much and get into severe debt.  They need help with debt.  They may search on Google with the Spanish word for debt and see an ad for one of my landing pages.  If they click on the ad, they see my landing page and can enter in information about their problem.  What I do is connect them with service providers on the back end who can help them manage their debt. This is called a lead and I sell it to service providers.

We drive traffic to the landing pages through on-line advertising with Google and MSN and through media buys through publishers. We put a banner ad on their home pages.  We also run a third party ad network.  We went out to a bunch of Web sites focused on the Hispanic market and we advertised on their sites in exchange for a split in revenue.  We also own and operate our own sites.

It’s an area I knew nothing about.  I just jumped in and learned.  I dug my way out.

The biggest challenge I’ve had—and I think it’s a challenge everyone has no matter their circumstances—is to learn how to love and accept myself.   

Acceptance was made more difficult because of my external circumstances. Growing up in the foster care system made it hard for me to see that I was a person of value.

Every young girl has the challenge of self acceptance.  There is no way around it.  Part of acceptance is getting to know yourself, how you are similar and different from other people.  In the end, it’s important to understand that no matter who you are or what you do, you have value and are worthy of love.