Pledge 1%'s #WomenWhoLead series celebrates female leaders who are paving the way for the next generation. While our featured leaders come from a variety of backgrounds and industries, they are united in their efforts to promote equality for all women in the workplace. We’ve asked them to share a bit about their journey to success, as well as lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Shilpa Sharma
Co-founder and CEO, Flyte
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
What is your current role? Briefly describe in 1-2 sentences.
I’m the co-founder and CEO of Flyte. I manage sales & marketing aspects of our business while closely working with my co-founder on brainstorming product priorities and planning. As a startup founder, legal and hiring are a substantial part of my job so I closely work with our legal partners as well as coordinate with universities and other agencies to hire the best talent.
What’s the best part of your job? What do you enjoy the most?
I’m always fascinated by tech and how it is helping every aspect of our lives. By being close to customers, I’m able to gather the latest trends and challenges that our customers are facing. This helps me visualize our product roadmap and marketing strategy. I truly enjoy interacting with our customers and building trust with them to deliver the best platform that can help them build their pipeline faster.
We’ve all faced personal and professional challenges these past two years - what motivates you to keep going?
Past two years have been challenging for everyone and there were repercussions on people’s jobs, personal lives and many other aspects that we can’t even imagine.
In these challenging times, the one thing that keeps me motivated is the passion for what I am doing. In the past two years, people came much closer through technology and there were so many programs that supported startups through online mediums.
We were fortunate that we became part of accelerators such as Founder Institute and Techstars that not only guided us in the right direction but also provided immense support through mentorship from accomplished founders and leaders.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
If you strongly believe in what you are doing, keep going! Persistence is the key!
What does generosity mean to you?
Give the gift of education! Make people self-sufficient!
How do you feel businesses can play a larger role in solving today’s biggest challenges? Do you have any specific stories or examples from your work or colleagues you can share?
Things done with passion and grit always make an impact.
Businesses are built with a goal to create something that can solve problems people are facing in day-to-day life. With tech businesses, be it in hardware or software, companies have been able to achieve 30-40% more productivity through automation resulting in higher revenue or extra time to do innovative tasks. Not just the process level efficiencies, businesses are helping economies generate more jobs and building an ecosystem for next generations.
For example, with Flyte sales and customer success teams can save >30% of their time by automatically logging call notes and improving success rate through advanced analytics. Sales teams are the oxygen for a company and by making them more efficient at their day-to-day work, we’re not only helping a company bring more revenue but also engaging their workforce in more innovative tasks rather than spending hours in documentation.
If we think of a workflow from a CEO or CRO perspective, they’d want to understand the direction their organization is heading into. Through a fully integrated platform, Flyte can provide revenue intelligence as well as customer insights that can help them make key decisions on sales techniques, product priorities and marketing campaigns to achieve better conversion.
We promote education initiatives by pledging to contribute 1% of our time towards non-profit organization.
If you could describe yourself in one word what would that be and why?
Fast learner! I have done things for the first time and did it so well that people who were skeptical about my performance in the beginning, appreciated what I achieved in the end!
If you could pick a song to guide you through 2022, which song would it be?
I like violin and guitar instrumentals!
What are you looking forward to this year? Are there any goals (personal or professional), activities, or experiences you are excited about?
I am excited to take Flyte to the next level so I’m able to contribute further towards non-profit organizations. I’m passionate about promoting education initiatives across the globe.
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