0:00 Shilpi Agarwal:

Next we have Kate Strachnyi. She is the founder of DATAcated; if you’re on LinkedIn and you don’t know her, you must be living under a rock, she’s super active! She is the LinkedIn top voice, she’s providing brand amplification for companies that are focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and everything under data. She’s also the founder of DATAcated Academy, delivering training on data visualization best practices. She has delivered several courses on data storytelling, dashboard techniques, and visual best practices. Additionally, Kate is the host of the DATAcated on-air podcast and the DATAcated conference which just happened two weeks ago, and I was honored to speak at the conference! Kate was appointed a LinkedIn top voice of data science and analytics in 2018, and 2019. Welcome. Kate. It’s a fabulous honor and pleasure to have you. I am just in awe of you! I follow you on LinkedIn, I feel like you are a great role model from having young kids to running your business, to actually doing the running like you’re running a marathon tomorrow! The list goes on and on; you have an academy, you are the LinkedIn top voice; I don’t want to keep our audience waiting, so I’ll give the stage to you.

1:50 Kate Strachnyi:

Awesome, thank you so much, Shilpi, thank you so much for that very, very kind introduction. I’ll share with you my DATAcated journey and I’ll basically walk through what inspired me to get into data analytics. Also, I want to leave you with some tips in terms of building your own brand, building your own community, whatever that might be. For example if you’re in voice tech, like John was just talking about, I could talk through some tips on how you build your brand in that space. I listened to a couple of other talks earlier today, I really resonated with Linda’s talk about finding women role models. That’s something that is very close to me as well, as I am a woman and I was always looking for those role models in my career. But more so, I also have two little girls age five and seven, to whom I hope to be a role model, and I really hope that they find the right role models for them in their careers. So briefly about me, I was born in Tajikistan, that’s something most people probably don’t know about me! I moved to the United States, when I was about nine years old and lived in New York ever since, although I just moved to New Jersey about two months ago. I’ve been living on the East Coast for the past couple of decades. My journey career-wise didn’t really start in the data science and data analytic space, it actually began with a finance degree. I always thought I wanted to do finance, whatever that meant, I didn’t really have a definition for what I wanted to do, but I studied finance and graduated in 2009. And for those who have been around and looking at the news since 2009, you know that we were going through a huge financial crisis. What that led to was a hiring freeze in all of the banks, and my dream job was to work for a bank and do finance – so I kind of had no hope there. But it’s very interesting how life throws you into different directions because it’s all sort of coming full circle right now. What I ended up doing was, instead of applying to jobs that ended up going into a black hole, I started going to events, as many networking events as possible. This was way, way before COVID, so events in-person were still a thing. Now we do this virtually and if you’re attending this live right now, I definitely recommend you engage with the other people that are attending even though you can’t see them. The more you comment, and the more you put yourself out there, the more people are going to be attracted to you and help you build your network. But back in the day, I used to go to events in New York, there were plenty of them and ended up going to some Risk Management Events. There I met a person who was looking to hire somebody in business development and he noticed that I’m social, and so he told me to send him my resume. Long story short, I ended up working for GARP, which stands for Global Association of Risk Professionals. I know that has nothing to do with data, but it was a member organization, it was community-driven. They had events, they had courses, and they had all these other cool things happening like conferences, and my job was to get them clients. Fast forward: I spent the next couple of years working in risk management, focused on learning my stuff there, ended up working in a consulting company for about eight and a half years across a variety of roles. It wasn’t until I was expecting my first child that I decided to make a career switch.

This is where things got really interesting and when I actually fell in love with data, it was thanks to my children, because they motivated me to look for something that provided a bit more flexibility of my personal schedule and my location; I really wanted to work from home which was not a common thing to do. You couldn’t really just go online and find yourself a work from home gig. But after several months of digging and searching, I was able to find something that allowed me to stay home. And because of that, I was able to get into the field of data, because the opportunity that was presented for me included data analytics. At that point, I had no clue what that meant, I didn’t really even use Excel that much! But what happened was, I was given the dataset, I was given that access to Tableau Software, which is this data visualization software for those who are not familiar. I truly fell in love with all things data. This was around 2013-14. Ever since then, I’m still equally as passionate about the space as I was in those early days. But my journey didn’t really stay with that company, because I also had this knack for entrepreneurship, I really wanted to start my own company.

Fast forward to March 2020, at the height of the global pandemic, I decided to go off on my own. Because that’s what people do, right, we like to take risks, we like to have fun with it. At this point I can easily say that that was one of the best decisions I’ve personally ever made. It led to me being even more flexible with my career, with my time; I’m able to set my own schedule, set my own hours, choose my own clients.

All of that happened because I built the right brand on social media platforms. In the few minutes that we have left here together, I want to share some of my best practices, my tips and tricks on how to build your own brand. If you’re watching this either live or if you’re watching the recording, chances are you’re interested in something to do with AI or ethics or diversity; you’re interested in these topics. What Shilpi’s doing a great job with is bringing this community together – and she did a great job presenting at my DATAcated conference two weeks ago as well. All of that drives to building her brand, right? When I think of Shilpi, now I think of AI, ethics and diversity. So whenever an opportunity arises, that requires me to either go to an expert, or somebody asks, ‘Hey, who do you know in this space?’ – immediately, Shilpi would come to mind, because she speaks at conferences, she puts these events together. So she’s doing things right. Now, a lot of people have these aspirations of: ‘I’m going to start posting online’ – let’s say LinkedIn – ‘LinkedIn is one of my favorite platforms because it’s very professional; people tend to be very professional on this platform.’ But chances are, you’re going to leave the talk, and you’re not going to post anything, especially if you’ve never posted before. And that is mainly because of fear, even if we don’t call it that. We can call it lack of time, we can say, ‘oh, I don’t really think it’s important.’ But ultimately, I think it does come down to a fear of being seen by those who you know – what if your brother sees you posting, or your colleagues see you posting, what are they going to think? Other times, we have this fear that we’ll post something and nobody will see it – what if my post is so unpopular that nobody sees it? That was definitely me, at the beginning in 2014, when I was getting into data; that was also the same time that I was being more active on social media. I made a conscious decision to just put myself out there, because we do just have one life to live, right?

For me, it was an easier decision to start small with a text post, so I wasn’t really big on camera, I was very shy. For a talk like this. I would normally prepare a script and I would try to read it, which those of you who have heard scripted talks before will know are not as engaging, not as exciting. You can tell that the presenter is not fully there, not fully present. So I decided to improve on that, and the only way I found in terms of getting yourself to improve is to just put yourself out there continuously. Now, if this is something that’s interesting for you, a few tips I’ll say is, number one: be authentic. Be yourself and talk about the stuff that you want to be recognized for. For example, when people think of data analytics, data visualization, data storytelling, I want them to think of Kate, I want them to think of DATAcated, so most of my content that I put out there is all around that same topic. That doesn’t mean you can’t go away from that topic once in a while, but I’d say about 80-90% of the content you put out on social media should be on the topic that you want to be recognized for. Consistency is a second big part where you need to show up. I don’t mean showing up at 9am every single day and post some robotic message. No, I mean sporadically showing up, treating the social media platform like you would a close friend, somebody you would just call up once in a while and say: ‘hey, guess what just happened’, right? ‘I got this opportunity’, or, ‘Hey, I’m stuck with this problem’. Treating the social media platform as a friend really, really helped me. I actually ended up making friends on the platform because I treated it as a friend. So for example, at some point, I had an actual data problem where I needed to collate about 100 different spreadsheets into one. I could have Googled how to do this quickly, and  what’s the best tool, but I decided to just put it quickly on LinkedIn. Now, the thing with humans, we generally love to help. So if there’s something that somebody knows really, really well, and you have this question, and they know they can help you, and it doesn’t take too much of their time, chances are, they’re going to come in and tell you: ‘Oh, well, this is how I did it. Let me help you quickly’. So that post got, I don’t know, 1000s of comments of people telling me the various ways that you can collate spreadsheets; I actually learned about a lot of tools I didn’t know existed, ended up solving a problem for myself. So I’d definitely recommend putting yourself out there, starting today.

12:21 Shilpi Agarwal:

I know I’m interrupting, but Kate your story is so fascinating, thank you for sharing so many tips. On social media, sometimes I am authentic and I post a lot, but sometimes I look at your posts, and I feel like you really put yourself out there and you really share so much of your personal as well as professional life. You ask for opinions on everything, which is great. But like you said, it’s not easy to put yourself out there all the time, to ask questions, and be okay to fail. That’s one thing I’m learning from you, Kate.

13:14 Kate Strachnyi:

Thank you so much Shilpi, that’s very kind of you. You make a really good point about sharing your journey; a lot of times when I tell people ‘hey, you can get started on LinkedIn today’, one of the main things they come back with is ‘well, I don’t know what to say’, or ‘I don’t think I’m good enough’. They just have this sense that their story, their journey isn’t as important as, let’s say, somebody who has 20 years of experience, and is an expert in the field. My opinion is, and I think this is very accurate, is that that’s not true; people care about your story. Let’s say you’re a student, or you just graduated college, and you’re in this space where you’re interviewing for jobs, or you’ve just started a job; there are so many people that are in the same boat as you that would love to hear your journey. Not everybody wants to hear about the biggest success story of somebody who had everything go right for them, and they’re multibillionaires on boats somewhere, riding around never having to work again. A lot of times people want to know that, ‘wow, this person is like me. This person also has fears and struggles, and if they can do it, maybe I can do it’. If I leave you with anything today, I think if you’re wanting to start building a brand, it’s authenticity, being consistent, and starting today. There’s nothing that stops you from doing it, right? Doesn’t mean you have to post every day; consistency really means just showing up and caring about the content. So Shilpi had a good point when she said I post a lot of things and ask people for opinions. I never post something just to post something; when I post something I truly care about the feedback. So when I ask a question about, for example, which logo should I use for the DATAcated circle, which is this new community thing I’m launching next week, I actually care because I’m, a team of one. I just hired a couple of people to help me out, but I don’t have a huge team of people who I can ask ‘hey, what do you guys think about this versus this’, I have to rely on this community to get their input. And if my work that I’m focused on serves the community, I might as well bring them on that journey with me and get their input along the way. So Shilpi, if you’ve got questions, I’m happy to take them.

15:43 Shilpi Agarwal:

Yes, Girish says “I like Shilpi’s statement, ‘it’s okay to fail’, and love Kate’s approach of using social media as a platform or path to connect with others. Ask for advice, tell stories and learn”, and you do a fantastic job at that, Kate.

16:02 Kate Strachnyi:

Yeah, I think of LinkedIn as my personal diary, where people can also, you know, give me their feedback on that as well.

16:14 Shilpi Agarwal:

Muniesh says: “Wonderful reflections, you are an amazing mentor.” So I know we wanted to connect on the community thing, so we’ll connect right after this is over. I heard that you’re already launching it next week. I’m eager to hear, what platform did you finally narrow it down to?

16:34 Kate Strachnyi:

Yes, I finally narrowed it down, and that was another question I asked the community. I ended up going with Circle. It was very interesting because I’m calling my community ‘The DATAcated Circle’, and interestingly, I came up with that name before I ever discovered the platform called Circle! I’m very excited about that, we have about 55 members in there now. They’re  our founding members, but we’ll open it up to the broader community.

17:04 Shilpi Agarwal:

Please do let us know, we’ll share it in our community as well. One of my other friends from Growth Blazers, a community vessel, has also used Circle to build his community. That’s how I just learned about this brand new platform, like a month ago. I’ve heard great things, so it’ll be awesome. So what made you think that you need an actual community? I know, there is LinkedIn and all of that, but what made you realize you needed more of an inner circle?

17:41 Kate Strachnyi:

Yeah, that’s a great question. You said inner circle, there’s going to be something that comes out a few months later that I am calling ‘the inner circle’! You mentioned in the beginning I have this DATAcated Academy where I have courses, and then I have my email list, and then I have all these social media platforms. I don’t have as much control in terms of what my community sees, or things that I think are a priority. And I also wanted to make sure that I serve the community and really talk about the topics that they care about, so what I decided to do was bring all of that altogether. Even the course content is all going to sit on Circle. That’s going to be a premium membership where you can pay an annual fee and then be in that inner circle where you get to see all the content, whereas you know, the broader, wider circle can still have all those engaging conversations.

18:34 Shilpi Agarwal:

Yeah, that was exactly the reason why we chose the Mighty Networks platform for DataEthics4All. You can have groups, private groups, public groups, secret groups, you can have the Data Institute there, we have the courses there. It’s an all in one platform for all our community members, premium, freemium, everything’s there. I’m so looking forward to your community, and good luck with your marathon! All the best for Circle, DATAcated Circle, and whatever is in store for DATAcated next.

20:32 Kate Strachnyi:

Thank you so much! Bye.