Impactful Leadership: Leading with Purpose and Making a Difference with Sherry Shannon-Vanstone

On today's episode, we talk with Sherry Shannon VanStone, a trailblazing, successful serial entrepreneur.  Sherry is currently the founder of Profound Impact and the co-founder of Women Funding Women.

Sherry's career started with her being an accomplished code breaker, which she explains is just as cool as it sounds. She shares her insights and experiences on leading startups to successful exits, building a strong company culture, and the crucial process of finding a company's 'Why'.

Our conversation delves into the rapidly changing world of AI and Sherry's thoughts on its impact on businesses, as well as her thoughts on the future of AI and education. Sherry also talks about her experiences with mentorship, both as a mentee and a mentor, and how it has shaped her career.

Finally, we discuss Sherry's latest venture, Women Funding Women, a collective working to address the funding gap faced by women-led ventures.

Connect with Sherry
LinkedIn

Resources
Profound Impact
Women Funding Women
Find Your Why
The 51
Perimeter Institute
University of Waterloo

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Transcript

Sherry: 0:00

And I think that again, that goes back to women helping women, women funding women, women promoting women, women sponsoring women, women mentoring women. Let's keep doing it, but let's also step back every now and then take an inventory of the women in our life and the men in our life and say what can I do to help sponsor them to the next level? And I think we need to do more of that.

Amy: 0:27

Welcome to Voices of Leadership, the podcast that shines a spotlight on the remarkable women of the International Women's Forum. I'm your host, amy, and I'm inviting you on a journey through the minds of trailblazers. Each episode is a candid conversation with women leaders who are reshaping industries, defying norms and being instigators of change. Through these conversations, we aim to ignite a fire of inspiration within you, whether you're a budding leader, a seasoned executive or simply someone with a passion for growth. On today's episode, we talk with Sherry Shannon Vanstone, a trailblazing, successful serial entrepreneur. Sherry is currently the founder of Profound Impact and the co-founder of Women Funding Women, and she shares with us her wisdom about leading startups to successful exits, the future of AI, mentorship and so much more. Hi, sherry, welcome to the podcast. It's so great to see you.

Sherry: 1:21

Thank you, Amy. It's such a privilege to be here and I'm excited because I've heard of the success of this podcast and looking forward to the conversation.

Amy: 1:31

Oh, me too. Well, part of the success is when I talk to people, I ask them how they heard about IWF, and your name comes up frequently. So I think you're part of the success too, because we have such great members On that. You are involved in IWF currently as the membership chair of the Waterloo chapter, which is where we met each other. Can you tell us how you first got involved in IWF?

Sherry: 1:54

Yes, I met with Sarah Shortreed and we just had coffee. I'd never met her, which was strange. She reached out. I even forget how that happened. We had coffee. I'd never met her, which was strange and she reached out. I even forget how that happened and we had coffee when we finished our conversations. We were just talking more about women and leadership roles within corporations, where she's been in large corporations as a CIO, a CIO, and then at the end of the conversation she goes I'm a part of this group called International Women's Forum. Have you ever heard of it? And I said no, I have not heard of it. And she says well, here I'm going to send you some information on it. I'm going to email you some information on it. Think about it and let me know if you would like to be a member. At that time she was membership chair of the IWF Waterloo chapter and so I accepted the membership and started. And then, when I go to my first meeting, who do I see? A lot of people I knew from the community.

Amy: 2:57

So now you're on the other side, yes, and you're meeting with people and you're bringing them on board, which I think is great. Yeah, and it really is.

Sherry: 3:04

It is a good way to get to know all the members is be the membership chair. Not just the new members, but the existing members, because you're talking to them often. It's been a great opportunity for me.

Amy: 3:20

So I know you get asked this all the time, but I'm still asking it because I want to know. You've worked as a cryptological mathematician for the US government, which my understanding is code breaking, and I would like to know is it as cool as it sounds?

Sherry: 3:32

Yes, very cool. Not only do you break codes, you make codes. And so, yeah, I had the privilege to work for the US government for six years work for the US government for six years and in four of those years I spent in different offices doing different roles. Some were in more of what's called signals intelligence, where you collect information and then you work with that information in some way to make it understandable so that may be being decoded. If it's voice, it may be just looking at the voice quality, and then, on the other side, that there is the making of codes. Now, I didn't spend a lot of time doing that, because the codes are so sophisticated. It takes years to make a code and just not one person does it. None of this is done in individual. There may be some geniuses that were there that could do it, but most of the time I was in a group of people, which was lots of fun. We had different skill sets. Then I got to make codes and break codes.

Sherry: 4:39

So, and even then, when I left the government went to Silicon Valley to an information and cybersecurity company. I was able to work on some new codes there in the commercial world, and so that was still exciting, even outside of the US government.

Amy: 4:57

That's interesting. You don't often think about doing something like code breaking or creating outside of government. We often think it lives strictly in government. Yes, now I've read that you've called yourself a serial entrepreneur. What do you love about being an entrepreneur?

Sherry: 5:13

I love that. It is an opportunity to be impactful, and that's truly something that I want to do. You can start a company, create a culture which is very important to me, a culture of inclusivity, respect, diversity and then you can see it grow, just like you planted a seed and you can see it come to something. And then you would see what do you do with it after you have it to a certain place. Do you sell, do you go IPO? One thing that I haven't done, which I would like to do, is stay with the company and build it to a unicorn status, and so I've had two IPOs and two acquisitions, so I've left maybe too early in the process, but we can touch on that later. But, yes, I love it is that you're building something and you're involving other people, you're bringing together, creating a team, so that's what I enjoy doing.

Amy: 6:12

And you mentioned culture, which I personally like and I'm always very curious about. What do you think or what has your experience shown? What are the good seeds you have to plant to grow a good culture?

Sherry: 6:24

I'm always learning this because you know it's not one and done. You have to continuously work at this. I do want to preface this with. Why I feel culture is so important is that I worked in Silicon Valley and I worked in a very toxic environment.

Amy: 6:43

Now for me.

Sherry: 6:44

I worked in a very toxic environment. Now, for me, I'm a strong woman. I was a leader, already had a great reputation in information security when I came to this company and I could stand up for myself. So I didn't have a problem as much as other people had in the company, although me and the CEO had yelling matches in front of people. He was a kind of individual that liked to berate people, put them down, but he wouldn't get away with that with me, so I stood up to him. But what I couldn't do is I couldn't protect everyone. I tried to protect my team as much as I could, but I was in Asia Pacific, my team as much as I could, but I was in Asia Pacific in six months of the year, so I wasn't in the office. And so when I'd come back and I'd find out like the CEO did this and that I'm thinking, okay, anyway, I left. I left that company because of the culture, because I couldn't change it and I was hoping I could. Even as a leader, as one of the senior management and one of the only women in senior management, I still could not protect these people from this culture. So I left and that's why I came to Canada not necessarily for that specifically, but I came to Canada, interviewed several companies and then decided to stay and then that gave me an opportunity to help build inside as a foundation.

Sherry: 8:10

I believe it's a foundational part of an organization. I believe you have to start with it and I think it's part of your why. Just like Simon Sinek says, start with your why In an organization. It has to be part of your why. Why are you here? And then you build on it and then I think you have to keep coming back and looking at it, and this is what we do at my company Profound Impact. We keep looking at our why every year and saying is this still our why? Because your why does change and I think people should recognize that Now.

Sherry: 8:51

When I left Silicon Valley, my why was I wanted to build companies based on a foundation of culture of inclusivity, respect and diversity. So I felt, okay, that's it. But that wasn't my why when I left the US government, because I'd never started a company, I'd never been with a startup before, so that would change. So again, I'm answering this question in a very verbose way, but it's like. I believe it's quite important. I also believe with that is a foundation of philanthropy and giving back to the community is also, so our why encompasses all that. Now, who developed the why? The whole team developed the why, but as we grow, we can keep coming back to this is our why, and then if we need to change it, we do it as a group.

Amy: 9:35

Oh, I love that. I mean, I love why I love Simon Sinek. I love all of that, what you're saying. I was actually quite lucky. I saw him at this is dating myself, but a Profit Magazine top 100 event years ago. He was still using the flip chart and there were only 50 of us in the room and the whole thing and it was fantastic and I've been semi-obsessed with it ever since. So I love hearing you talk about that. That's fantastic. So you mentioned profound impact and you mentioned your why, and my understanding from your tagline is your why is centered around connecting people to do great things. You mentioned you grew it together and created it together, but what are the origins of that? Why?

Sherry: 10:14

I sold my last company in 2017. My last trust point was the name of the company, and we provided information security, cyber security for the driverless and connected vehicle. The company was purchased in 2017 by Robert Bosch, a private German company, and we could talk about that too, which is quite interesting. Why did I choose them and why did they choose me and our company? But I stayed with them for a year of transition and then, march 31st 2018, I retired officially or, as I said, I rewired, and I thought this is it. I'm just going to go and do my philanthropy and my community work.

Sherry: 10:59

But I was talking to the University of Waterloo Math Faculty, where my late husband taught, and I said what if we could measure the impact of this organization? This also really started with my sister, who wanted to write a book about my late husband and started it. He passed away in 2014. She started it and then she handed it over to me when I retired. But then I went back to the University of Waterloo math faculty and said I don't think this is about one person, I think this is about the organization.

Sherry: 11:35

So how do you measure impact individually and organizationally? And then how would you visualize that impact to encourage others to have impact. So this is really what Profound, how Profound Impact was founded was to do that, and it started out that and we built a product, a platform called we call it now Connection Impact, and this is where we bring together stakeholders such as alumni, faculty members, industry partners onto one platform. So that's where we came up with connecting great people, connecting them all together to do great things. So this is a global view of things. So that's where it started and we still have that same tagline, but we've developed different products around that.

Amy: 12:29

So first I'd like to say I loved what you said rewire instead of retire. I think that I know many people that could probably use that, that never really retire, they just rewire. That's fantastic, so I might borrow that at some point Now. For those not in the academic space, can you give us an example of how profound impact works?

Sherry: 12:51

Well, this is one way we did. It was through the platform and that means it became especially during COVID. We launched early, we're supposed to launch later, but it may 12, 2020,. The University of Waterloo Math Faculty says we have this event that we had scheduled, that we had to move to virtual. Could you do it for us? And we did it on the platform. So the platform was a meeting platform, not only a static, but also a dynamic one. At that moment, you know, zoom was just coming out and taking its position in the marketplace, so we utilize debt along with our platform. So that's one way we did it.

Sherry: 13:33

The product that we are concentrating on now is called Research Impact, where we connect researchers to funding opportunities, and sometimes those funding opportunities require an academic researcher, an industry researcher or industry partner and then the funding organization. So we use AI and big data to do that, to find a targeted, relevant match. So, again, we're still connecting great people to even do greater things, because there's a lot of inefficiencies in the research space. So what we're trying to do is target that, make it more efficient and eliminate the dollars that are not going to research. We want every research dollar to be spent on fundamental, breakthrough research.

Amy: 14:24

And it's so important because finding funding is such a big part of it and if you can ease the challenges with that, it's got to be so much better for the research. I assume yes.

Sherry: 14:35

And this is all it's about. It's about better research outcomes. The system is archaic and it needs to be shaken up, and that's what we want to do. We want to be a disruptor in this space. We're on the journey. I was going to say. What is it?

Amy: 14:54

like disrupting academia. That's got to be a challenge.

Sherry: 14:58

Yeah, it's not necessarily the academics themselves, it's the way funding is done and AI is changing that quickly. In the last 14 months I have seen many changes. What we're doing on this side I call it the first side, the vetting side and targeting side, then the middle side where the applications are being written ChatGPT can help with that. And then on the funding, the organizations and how do they vet those increase maybe 10, an order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude, the number of applications that they were receiving. We can use more technologies on that site. So that's what I'm saying disrupt you and then we can look at the inefficiencies also across this and the biases.

Sherry: 15:47

I want to talk a little bit about that. There are biases in the process because it may be built into the AI algorithms which we're trying to avoid. But with human beings we know their bias and my late husband was on the insert committees and he was on the peer reviews and it's often that the peer reviews are done the same way that they've always been done and that puts in maybe an unconscious bias in the process that women and minorities. There was a bias. I don't think it's conscious, but I know it's there and we hope, with AI, that we can help reduce that bias.

Amy: 16:33

It just sounds so important work and fascinating. I'm actually pretty happy you brought up AI because I have I'd like to know your thoughts on AI and education from you. Explained it how it's used, sort of at a high level research and vetting scenario. How do you think AI fits into more general education at the high school level or the undergraduate level, for example?

Sherry: 16:57

It is a tool like anything else. It's a technology that can be used for good and for bad. I always try to look at the good side of it, because that's what we're trying to do with. How we use AI in our products is to make a human being more efficient and so that they have time to do what we call the higher value work, the higher value task. Ingesting a 150-page document doesn't make sense for a human being, but a machine can, and it can get those important factors out of that document, and then we can do this targeting, matching with the academic, researchers and industry partners, utilizing it In the education space.

Sherry: 17:43

I believe we should be using that. It's a tool. It's just like we use any tool. There will be, and there's already, curriculum that is being developed on how to use the tool responsibly, and right now we're learning. We're using tools that other people have trained, but young people today you will be training their own large language models. They will be helping set up the training data, and that's where the biases can be reduced or I'm not saying eliminated, because I don't know if that's possible, because they're human beings. We're still always having human beings in the process, but if we could reduce the biases. So I think it's important one that we use the tools AI tools that are being developed in education at all levels, because I think it's valuable and the thing is that everyone should learn a little bit about AI, and I even took a course recently through Waterloo, the University of Waterloo Executive Program.

Amy: 18:43

What did you learn from the course?

Sherry: 18:45

I learned really what a large language model does, and that it's you know. Chatgpt is just one example of a use of a large language model, so there's many different out there. We use utilize AI. We use AWS Bedrock, which has 10 different large language model. So there's many different out there. We use utilize AI. We use AWS Bedrock, which has 10 different large language models. We do different models for different tasks that we do.

Sherry: 19:08

The thing is that at our stage, we're not going to go out and create our own large model and train it. We're going to come in to one of the steps and we're going to come in over here and we're going to fine tune that as much as we can for our own use, and there's now organizations out there that are working towards. Let's try to remove the biases. Don't make this just a black box anymore where we don't know what data it's been trained on. Let's be transparent and let's also police it. And there is, there's human beings involved in policing it and they go oh, that's a good answer. Oh, no, you can't say that. You know just being. You know like your grandmother says. You can't say that.

Sherry: 19:51

It's that kind of thing, so to me. I go back to your original question is that should it be used? Will it be used? Yes, should it be monitored? Should it be regulated? Yes, I don't know to what extent. I just go back to my own experience with information security. We did my company CertiCom. We did the security for the BlackBerry. We worked closely with Research in Motion at that time that we helped them establish one of the most secure devices out there. It was so secure the bad guys were using it.

Amy: 20:28

There's a tagline for you.

Sherry: 20:30

Yes, yeah. So that's the thing with technology the people who have good intentions will use the technology for good and the bad actors will be bad. But we built the most secure device out there that no one could break it.

Amy: 20:47

I know and I've heard that and I didn't know that that was you. That's so cool.

Sherry: 20:51

I love that. Yes, it was Certicom and my late husband. He has 450 patents.

Amy: 20:56

That's awesome. That's so interesting. I love it. Well, I'm glad that you said that because, as a mother of teenagers, I want them to learn how to use it, and it's not there yet. It's taking a long time to get into the classroom or the education system.

Sherry: 21:12

But it is happening. People are developing that and they're developing the tools. We need to understand that this process will continue. This is not a oh we do one tool and it's fixed for the next five years. The technology is improving so much and it's rapidly changing and the applications are huge in how we learn and then what we learn. It's going to be affected by.

Amy: 21:38

AI. It's great, it's great advice to hear from you. I appreciate it, thank you. So we've talked a little bit about profound impact, but I would like to talk a little bit about a newer venture of yours called Women Funding Women. Can you tell us what that is and why you started it?

Sherry: 21:54

Women Funding. Women is a collective to get more angel investors to support women founders and their pre-seed and seed financing routes. So that's our mission. That's what we are. We're not a fund. We are a supporter of the ecosystem. There's a study out of the 51, which is a group out of Calgary, and the 51 stands for 51%. Women are 51% of the population. So the 51 published a research paper last. Last year I started a research study. It was a study with a lot of research done behind it and it said that if we could get women to invest the same level as men invest, we could inject $3.22 trillion in the available capital markets.

Sherry: 22:49

Right now, only 1.9% of all VC capital goes to women-led ventures. We have to change this. So I'll tell you a little bit about the genesis. That's what we are now. So I was raising funds for Profound Impact last year about this time and this was a tough raise for me. Now I understand a little bit. The economic environment is different, but also maybe it's me, because I've been a successful entrepreneur, but in the information security space, so maybe I don't have the same credibility in the AI space. So I didn't have any problem raising money in the past, but I did this time and also I've I had never pitched to angel groups before because I never had to. I people come to me to want to invest but I mean I did talk, go out and talk to individual investors, but I didn't pitch to a large group.

Sherry: 23:51

It's a different process. It's a different process and I feel that it is somewhat broken. There needs to be some revamping and disrupting. One group that I pitched to there was not a single woman angel at the table. Still, that's just crazy.

Sherry: 24:09

And then what I received my feedback was Sherry, I think you should go and get some pitch coaching. It was just like I'm going Don't you want to ask about my go-to-market strategy? Don't you want to ask about my team? So I listened to them and I did, and I didn't send them a little note saying I went to Communitech, I went through this class and my pitching got 100, got an A plus, got a whatever, and they didn't even respond to me. Oh, I'm so sorry. And I said well, thank you for taking my advice. We appreciate that you are coachable. And I said you know what? I'm not pitching to men anymore. I'm not pitching to these groups anymore.

Sherry: 24:51

So I was able to engage with a family office in Toronto and they brought in.

Sherry: 24:58

There were men in the room too, but they brought in women of wealth that had never invested but could, had the capacity to invest, and so I was able to close a $3.25 million round with the majority being female first time angel investors. So that's just what we went out, and Deborah Rosati, who is also the chair of Profound Impact's board and an investor in our company, was with me on that journey and she's been in startups for years. She was a VC and she's going wow, what's happening here? So then we said you know, we need to do something about this. We need to be a catalyst for change. We can't just talk about it anymore. So we reached out to a lady named Lara Zink and the three of us got together with several other women around the table and we said we want to do something, we want to start something, we want to have an initiative. So how do we work as a collective across Canada, coast to coast to coast, to change this? And we just launched last week.

Amy: 26:06

I know, I saw, which is why I wanted to ask yeah.

Sherry: 26:09

And the first night was just introducing everyone to the concept and Joanna Griffiths from NICS was our keynote speaker and she spoke about her journey and you might know our audience might know that she sold her company for the highest amount of any female founder. It was awesome. She talked about her struggles, her journey, her personal struggles. It was a great kickoff, a great launch. Then the next day, we came together for a founder roundtable where we brought in 18 founders female founders, across all industries. We had consumer products, we had security and privacy. It was a whole gamut.

Sherry: 26:54

So the founders stayed and the VCs and funders moved around and each founder was able to meet with four different groups and the whole objective was to learn from it learn how to talk to VCs, learn. And the VCs were there to help them. If they didn't even feel that, they said you know, this is not the right investment for me, but I know this person and I know this person and I can connect you. So it was really there to help each other. And then the angel investors were there, because this is what we want. We want to get more angel investment in these precede rounds and almost everyone was at a precede round the founders. So there was a lot of energy, high energy. Everyone felt like, okay, this is great, this is what we should be doing more of. Now we have to figure out how do we keep the momentum going.

Amy: 27:44

So how would women-led companies access the potential funding available?

Sherry: 27:51

Well, the first thing I would ask them to do is connect us with women funding women via LinkedIn. And then what we do is we're putting together resources which will list all the founders and we're sending that out to the VCs and to these women-led funds or women-focused funds. There's several of them there's Sandpiper out of the East Coast. There's Spring Capital out of Vancouver, a VC area. There's the 51 out of the East Coast. There's Spring Capital out of Vancouver, a BC area. There's the 51 out of Calgary. There's the Firehood Phoenix Firehood and the Firehood in the Toronto area. So what we do is we want to disseminate this information, to say, okay, these founders are out there looking for funding. And then we also want to encourage the angel investors. So what we're doing is also want to encourage the angel investors.

Sherry: 28:39

So what we're doing is I would call it a big directory. We're not a matchmaker yet. We might utilize maybe even utilize profound impacts technology to do some of the matchmaking in the future. But I just thought of that. Write that down right now. Yes, anyway, we just launched. We would appreciate anyone who wants to become a part of this. It's Women Funding Women. You can find us on LinkedIn. There's a way to reach out, to message us, so please do that.

Amy: 29:06

For sure. Yes, that would be great. I mean, it's such a fantastic venture. I didn't know much about it. I waited to ask you, but I'm definitely going to dive into it because I think that there's lots of people that could benefit from what you've put together. So thank you for doing that. So I was listening or reading I can't remember about you which there's lots out there and I heard you say there is a talent battle. Today we are seeing digital transformation across every industry and with that, there is huge opportunity and challenge. Can you tell us some of the challenges and opportunities that you see and what you meant by that quote?

Sherry: 29:42

There's a lot of movement. So that's the challenge. So when we set up, we started our Y and we put together our OKRs or KPIs we call them OKRs and we said we want to have every team member stay with us for at least five years. Now the next year we had to say let's have 50% of our team members stay with us for five years.

Amy: 30:11

Because what we?

Sherry: 30:11

found is that because we also have a virtual company, so that allows us to hire all across Canada and the US. We don't right now have anyone outside North America Canada, US working with us if we found the right person, but we found that by doing that, and also because we are a virtual company, coming together, especially during COVID, was very difficult, Well, impossible. We found in that first couple of years we were losing people, and I don't blame them, because they get to come in. They're young people and they have an education. Of course, in the relevant area. They don't have necessarily any of the experience, but we were able to give them experience with AWS serverless architecture, which was brand new, and now AI tools getting to play with all the latest ones of that.

Sherry: 31:09

So, of course, within a year look at their resume it's like, OK, I'm going to go out and shop around and see what else I can do, and we're a startup, so they go that maybe they felt that they needed more security with a large organization one of the banks, Anyway. So that's the challenge, because this is the future of work People are not going to stay five years with you and so we found that. So that's the challenge. Now the opportunity is that you get an opportunity to really train them, and that makes it impactful. So, everyone that has loved us since we started in 2018, I send a quarterly newsletter to them, a letter an email.

Amy: 31:52

I love that. That's so great idea.

Sherry: 31:55

It's more than a newsletter. It's a personal email asking how they're doing and telling them what we're doing, because maybe they'll want to come back sometime and we're part of their journey. They're part of our journey and just because they left, they're not the enemy, and even if they would go to a competitor, they wouldn't be our enemy. They're still one of us, they're part of our alumni association and so that's an opportunity and that's an opportunity to give. We trained them and they learned a lot, and then they went on and they utilized it somewhere else. So I think that is a huge opportunity. I think people should accept it.

Amy: 32:32

Good for you. I mean for recognizing the need to adapt how work is and how people will move between companies. I think that's going to hinder some companies that get upset when people don't stay for 30 or 40 years like they used to.

Sherry: 32:46

Yeah, but I think that every company has to realize that, yes, there's the 100-year life cycle. I think you've heard of that. Yes, I have. You know, we have to be prepared as employees, but we also have to be prepared as an individual. And if you're 20 years old right now, you most likely are going to change jobs and even change areas of expertise in industries and you're going to work longer because economically it makes sense and intellectually you want to be challenged longer. And because we're going to live longer, you think, okay, it's not going to be, I'm going to be educated, then I'm going to stay on this job, then I'm going to retire and then that's it. No, it's going to. I'm going to be educated, I'm going to take a job, I'm going to get more education, get another job and then and then, then. So we all know that this is happening. So an employer cannot have that mindset. The other thing that this allows this huge opportunity and talent is the culture. They will demand more. Employees will demand more. They want to know what they're going to learn. They're going to know what the culture is.

Sherry: 33:56

Are we giving back? Are we taking from the world? Are we giving back to society? So these things matter, and so I think that's the challenge and, again, a huge opportunity, because look at what you can do. You can say, ok, you're going to come and this is what you get to learn while you're here. And then, furthermore, this is our philanthropy. We do a social impact report every year and people can download it from our website. What we do, so we measure, we're trying to measure again, you know that's what we believe in measuring trying to measure impact. So we do, as a company, a social impact report that tries to address all of these things our DEI and belonging strategy to our philanthropy, to our carbon footprint. So, yes, so we have. We have all of this as a responsibility as companies and, I believe, even a company as small as us. Because it's foundational, it's very important to get it set up immediately.

Amy: 34:58

Don't wait until you're a 100-person company. What you can accomplish with a little transparency is remarkable, I think, yeah, yeah. So I'd like to talk a little bit about mentorship. You have worked tirelessly to promote women in STEM and you have inspired and been a mentor to many women over the years. But I've heard you speak about Linda Hassenfras being a mentor to you over the years. What have you learned from her and why is it important to still have mentors later in your career?

Sherry: 35:24

I learned a lot from Linda. She is a she's gracious with her time. She's a very busy and a very successful what she's done at Linnemore. Of course, her father founded the company, but she went from working on the factory floor all the way up to becoming CEO and president and what she did and she brought that company to multi-billion dollar company. And what I learned from her is they acquired a lot of companies.

Sherry: 35:54

So it's about not trying to do everything yourself, as the saying says. You know you might be able to go faster alone, but you can go further with others around you. So building up teams she was doing that through acquiring, because you can't always build it up eternally. The other thing that I learned from her was and I wrote this down because it's important this is not the way she said it, but this is the way Ted Lassa said the best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting when we can, and if we keep doing that, we'll always be moving towards better and this is what I am still trying to learn. Please ask for help, and I say this because I was in conversations with Linda Hasselfrath about our products at TrustPoint, because they were in the automotive industry and we were cybersecurity for the automotive industry and I never once asked her would Lenimar be interested in acquiring us or investing in us?

Sherry: 37:04

I never asked the question. Why didn't I? I was in conversations with her. I had many opportunities to talk to her about this, but I didn't. So after I had signed my letter of intent with Robert Bosch, I get a call from Linda. Now she doesn't know that I just signed a letter of intent and I just kicked myself saying we could have kept this Canadian. I needed a bigger player because I couldn't accept the T's and C's of the large OEMs like GM and Ford. So I needed that a tier one. It's called, but I never asked her. But she was there. So my advice to everyone is to ask more and I have to tell myself that every day. Ask for help.

Amy: 37:54

It's a hard thing to do and it's something you have to continually do or you'll go out of practice.

Sherry: 37:59

Women, I think, are harder because we think we need to be. We can't show that we're vulnerable, that we need help. We got to feel like we need to do it all by ourselves, and that's where it's even important in this collective the women funding women is that we need each other, and I think that's very important. So I've learned from many mentors and I have been a mentor too, and still am, to men and women.

Sherry: 38:25

I have one mentee that I've been working with for 30 years since I first came to Canada, and I ran into him the other day and it's awesome to just say you know, I've been a part of that person's life and he's bounced off so many new ideas and new technologies and new companies that he's been involved with. So that and the young women that I have an opportunity to work with. Formerly, I was part of Lawrence Scholars as a mentor and then something called FORA it was called Girls On Board, get On Board, but now they're called FORA. So there's many different roles I've taken on, especially, of course, women in STEM and young women in STEM and mid-career women in STEM, and then those research chairs in STEM. So all of this has been a wonderful journey for me.

Amy: 39:20

Well, we thank you all of the people. I know who you've mentored. Well, I don't know all of them, but I know that you have spent a lot of time doing that and I think we could have a whole podcast series on the people you've mentored and all the great things you have helped them with along the way. So I'm sure that all of them would thank you for all the work that you've done. So what's next for women in leadership then? Do you think?

Sherry: 39:43

I think working us helping each other. I think we can continuously do that. We can be mentors, we can be mentees. We can be mentors, we can be sponsors. Now, a sponsor is not the same as a mentor.

Amy: 39:57

Okay, tell us a little bit about that.

Sherry: 39:59

A sponsor is somebody who will go back for you and recommend you. So I find this interesting because sometimes we forget who we're surrounded by. You know, we're very lucky, amy, that we're with the International Women's Forum, these awesome women, and it's really a very safe place to be because you don't feel like you're competing, no, you feel like you're there to celebrate each other and to really promote leadership, and I think we need more of that. Why I say that is that sometimes we forget to do that, we forget to sponsor. So, for example, I'll tell you, I meet this lady through a friend of mine. Her name is Nancy. Now, nancy doesn't know me that well, but she sees who I am. She sees what the work I'm doing at Perimeter with the Immune Neuter Council. She puts my name forward for an honorary doctorate at Western. Now, I'm not affiliated at all with Western and she did that not really knowing me that well. That's why I said maybe my friends wouldn't do that, but she did and I'm thinking she sponsored me. And I think we need to do more of that, where we put people out there. We say you know what Amy's looking to be on a board of directors and I am going to look around and see if there's any boards that I know.

Sherry: 41:26

I think we as women leaders need to do more of that. We need to say how can I help you? Maybe I can't help you myself, maybe I can't put you on my board, but I can introduce you to someone else. And I think that, again, that goes back to women helping women, women funding women, women promoting women, women sponsoring women, women mentoring women, women, women promoting women, women sponsoring women, women mentoring women. Let's keep doing it, but let's also step back every now and then, take an inventory of the women in our life and the men in our life and say what can I do to help sponsor them to the next level? And I think we need to do more of that and I think, as I said, I think we need to be intentional. I'm going to do this every quarter or every six months. I'm going to sit down and look who can I sponsor and how can I help them and help raise them up and promote them.

Amy: 42:23

I really love that. I love the intentionality of it, because when we're intentional, we accomplish a lot more For sure. Yes, thank you so much, sherry. This has been a wonderful chat. I've learned so much about you and all of the things you have done and all of the things you're going to do, and I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much for being here.

Sherry: 42:44

And thank you, Amy, for this opportunity and thank you to the listeners. Please reach out to me.

Amy: 42:51

I'm on LinkedIn. Everything will be in the show notes, everything you talked about. It's going to be the longest set of resources we've had yet. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and subscribe to our podcast. Please take a moment to rate and subscribe to our podcast. When you do this, it raises our podcast profile so more leaders can find us and be inspired by the stories our Voices of Leadership have to share. If you would like to connect with us, please visit the Voices of Leadership website. It can be found in our show notes.