Creative Coast

Girls Rule the World

August 04, 2020 Traverse Connect and Airloom Media Season 1 Episode 6
Creative Coast
Girls Rule the World
Show Notes Transcript

Growing up, Katie Horvath wanted to take on the world. Now she’s the only female CEO of a big data company. This episode features Katie Horvath, CEO of big data company Naveego

(START THEME)


There are -- according to Google --  976 top big data companies in the U.S.


00:02:41] data is everywhere and it's become really the new gold. 


It’s so omnipresent it’s hard to even define what a big data company is anymore. 


There are so many companies that are niche in a particular industry that consider themselves a data company. 


But … of those big data companies that we know of .. there’s only one with a female CEO: 


Katie Horvath from a Traverse City based company called Naveego. 


00:03:49] I keep asking people, can you please prove me wrong and nobody can. So we're going on with it! 


When Katie was young she wanted to take on the world. And she has. 


But it hasn’t always been easy. 


 I have a no assholes rule at this point in my career. 


I’m Tommy Andres and this is Creative Coast. 

 

 (THEME POST/FADE)

 

Katie Horvath was born near Chicago but grew up in Traverse City. 


From a young age she wanted to be the best -- at whatever she tried her hand at. 

 

00:05:55] I was always very competitive. Yes, I am the oldest child in my family. Yes, I am a type A. 


When she was a kid she had her sights set on dancing. 


I started off not being very good and wanted to be the best in the class and, you know, really just work my way up to even being a teacher. 

Tommy [00:07:14] So did you actually think you might dance for a living at some point? 

00:07:18] Well, I did. But my my father sure didn't. 

00:07:34] You know, at that point in time, apart from the prima ballerina, you know, people could make more money from sweeping the stage after the dance show than from professionally dancing. And your body gives out and, you know, you're pretty much done at a very young age and needing to have a different career you change to usually that's gonna be in business, whether owning a studio, teaching classes, choreography. But when I was in high school, I had an injury, too. And so at that point in time, it really kind of solidified that I needed to do something else and dance could be a fun hobby. 


And that something else was law. 


00:08:24]  I grew up living next door to Dean Rob. 

 

Dean Rob was a prominent civil rights lawyer who spent his life fighting for equality and against racial discrimination. 

 

As a small child, I called him Robin Hood, which he absolutely loved because it fell in line with his moral code and philosophy and all of the wonderful things he did to make our world a better place. 


(START MUSIC)


Dean inspired Katie to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer. 


But first she needed to go to college … and choose a major. 


My father told me that I had to have a marketable undergraduate degree. He was tired of watching people graduate from college and, you know, work in a job that they could have done if they hadn't graduated from college. 


Katie studied the numbers. 


So at that point in time, really looking at the market, it was nursing or engineering were the two hot careers, you know, where you could get a great job just after having an undergraduate degree. And I don't usually like the sight of blood and faint from needles so nursing was out. I knew. 


So she settled on engineering. 


I have a lot of engineers in my family, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandfathers. And so I was really following them in the family mold to pursue that degree. That being said, I didn't like it. I never liked it. 


Katie enrolled at the University of Michigan. 


And she couldn’t wait to leave home. 


00:04:59] I remember in high school thinking I've got to do everything I can to get out of here. And, you know, part of it was in the middle of the cold winter where my car didn't seem to heat up the whole way to school. Right. And I'd just be pulling into the parking lot with icy fingers and toes feeling like I wanted to get out. But more so than that. It was just, I guess, an ambitious desire to take on the world.  


(MUSIC POST/FADE)

 

Katie and her dad were right. When she graduated from U of M she had a lot of options. 

 

I was comparing job offers with law school admissions and some of the job offers actually sounded pretty interesting. But law school had always been what I wanted to pursue. And so I made the decision to go to the University of Notre Dame. 

 

And even though Katie hadn’t loved engineering … her degree did not go to waste … she decided to specialize in patent law and after passing the bar started working in Silicon Valley. 

 

00:10:56] It was a great way to be able to combine my law with my technology background. I think that this area of the law you deal with optimists, usually inventors are excited about what they're inventing and I've been able to, over my career, represent the person who invented MP3, for example. 

 

(START MUSIC)


With her background in engineering and patent law, Katie was scooped up by Microsoft. 


In 2004 she moved to Washington.


The hot issue for the company from the lawyer's perspective was intellectual property and specifically patent law and patent litigation. 

  

It was a really busy time for Katie and the 3 other in-house lawyers at the company. 

 

At that point in time, Microsoft was such a ginormous entity here in the United States. We were the deep pocket target defendant, you know we were the number one company that was filed against for cases. And so we had more than any other company in the United States. Second in line at that point in time was Hewlett Packard. And they only had I think it was like a quarter of the cases that we had. 

Tommy [00:15:25] What kind of numbers are we talking about? 

00:15:28] gosh. it was probably 40 to 50 active litigations at any moment in time. 

Tommy [00:15:36] Wow. Yeah. That has to be a lot to keep up with! 

 

The stakes were high. 

 

00:17:57] we're talking bet the company cases. You lose the case. Your company has to go out of business. millions, if not billions of dollars at stake depending on who the client is. 

Tommy [00:15:39] did you meet Bill Gates at any point? Did you work with him? Was he different than you would have thought? 

00:15:46] I did. The first time I met with him, we had a meeting to update on IP issues. It was my first week on the job. And I remember walking in and and feeling like I knew enough to know that I didn't know anything yet. And, you know, I was trying to sit in the least obtrusive place. In fact, I walk in, there's this huge boardroom and there are chairs and rows behind the table. And I like picked a chair in the back corner and I was told, nope, nope, you're sitting at the table. Which surprised me. I was just low key little me from the Midwest, right. From Traverse City. And I'm like, OK. 

00:16:21] So I ended up at the table. And, you know, Bill is extremely wicked smart. His father's a lawyer and he liked to know about the law and really would dig in on things. And so it was fun. You know, sometimes you work for a client that doesn't want to know those issues But he really is such a curious person in general that he digs in on many different things. And that was just one of them. 


(MUSIC POST/FADE)

 

Career-wise things were going well for Katie. 


Then, in 2005, she gave birth to her daughter Elena…


And her priorities changed. 

 

00:18:42] and decided at that point I wanted to come back and raise her here in the Midwest where she could be around family. 


That was important to Katie because she and her husband had split up…


And she was raising her daughter on her own. 


But there were other reasons the move made sense. 


One: the great public schools in northern Michigan. 


And of course there were the lakes. 


00:19:01] I also I've always loved the water. I have a passion for water.  

00:19:09] And one of my rules, no matter where I've lived across the country, is I wanted to be in an area where there was water. However, you know, living in other places it might as well not be there because nobody can afford to actually get to the waterfront unless you do have a lot of money. And that was one of the benefits of being here with Michigan, having public access on lakes. You know, anybody can go out and enjoy it. 

 

So in 2006 Katie left Microsoft and moved back to the town she had been so eager to leave all those years before. 

 

00:20:51] You know, at first I wasn't sure how long I'd stay here. I knew that, you know, traction energy business was West Coast, but I was offered an opportunity to work remotely to a law firm in Beaverton, Oregon. And so they didn't care where I lived in the country. And that allowed me to be here. I used to say thank goodness for the airport and the Internet to make it happen. 


(START MUSIC)

  

Katie settled into Michigan life. 


But in 2013 she got some bad news. 

 

00:21:59] I was in for my baseline mammogram and they I kept getting called back oh I'm like I'm called back for different tests. And I you know, at the time I'm like, oh, this happens. This is routine. And younger women are known for having denser breast tissue where the screening sometimes is difficult to find things. And so I figured well I just keep getting called back for the next round and here I am in biopsy. Now, you know, this is just typical. This always happens. 

 

But unfortunately... Katie was diagnosed with breast cancer, just a few days before Christmas. 

 

I was just floored, shocked, terrified. The idea of what, you know, what could happen to my daughter. I'm raising her alone, not being there for her. It was just terrifying.


(ADD a post here)


She began treatment. 


00:28:28] I elected to do a bilateral mastectomy. And that was really tough to adjust to identity wise. But also it's an amputation. It's like a major amputation. And I hadn't really thought about it in those terms until after having the surgery. 


She also started chemotherapy. 


00:28:10] I always had thought if I ever catch cancer or get cancer, I will never do chemo. And when it came down to it, the type of cancer I had, that was the only viable treatment. And so without question, I was gonna do that. I wanted to be there for my child. 

Tommy [00:24:23] Yeah, cancer treatments are blunt and brutal, to say the least and they change your body as of Of course, you know. So what were some of the most difficult things to grapple with for you personally? 

Katie my body did not like chemo, I'll say that I was pretty sick from it. And there were days when I felt like I must be in my 80s. And here I am, you know, 40. And I just could barely move my joints. Didn't want to move. And so there was that. And then the other big physical thing was the emotional and mental toll with anxiety. 

 

Katie looked for support groups hoping to find other young cancer patients who were going through the same thing. 


But there were no services like that available locally. 

 

I really put together my own way of coping and my own program. I found online support groups of people with the same type of cancer and also young patients. I put together nutrition plans trying to put together diets that are, you know, anti cancer and healthy and also help you get through treatment. And I had really turned to yoga and yoga. I did for the stretching piece because I as I mentioned, I was so incredibly sore with my joints. But the benefit to me that was surprise was the mental and really the meditation aspect that comes along with that. 


Katie also had to figure out how to talk to her daughter Elena about what was happening. 


Tommy [00:22:49] I imagine had to have a conversation with her about this, too. So how does that play out? How do you approach a seven year old talk about something serious? 


00:22:58] I think that since my daughter is an only child and it's just the two of us, we've been closer than I otherwise would have been with her. And she also has been around adults a lot more probably than than kids who have lots of siblings and play together. 

And so I my approach in parenting with Elena has always been honesty. Yet at the same time, trying to give her just the right level of information that she can process, understand. 

And so I told her, you know, this is what I have and this is what I'm doing about it. So, you know, not just presenting a problem, but presenting the plan for fixing it, which also helped me to prepare her for treatment, because, of course, you get a lot sicker before you get better. 

 

(MUSIC POST/FADE)


Katie’s decision to move back to Traverse City had never seemed so right. 


Tommy [00:28:51] So the other thing about cancer treatment. Chemotherapy is that it takes a lot of your time. Right. So how do you stay on track in your career and as a mother while you're also balancing this treatment? 


00:29:07] Thank goodness I moved home. I relied heavily on my family to help with my daughter, driving her to school every day and career wise had to take a pause. Just push the pause button. 


Tommy [00:30:52] Did it help being in northern Michigan, obviously, you talked about having your family network there, which was obviously huge in this situation, but as you're balancing sort of being treated for cancer and your career and being a mother, was there anything about just being in northern Michigan like atmospherically  that you think helped you through this process? 


00:31:12] I think having such a strong community where it's not like you're living in a big city where you're anonymous, having neighbors willing to drop off meals … and just the healing aspect for me, nature is very healing and having that in abundance around us. 

 

Katie fought hard. 


And when she finally came out on the other side of treatment she heard that local businessman Casey Cowell wanted to fund a cancer center. 


(START MUSIC)


Casey Cowell is a local legend in Traverse City. 


He co-founded the company US Robotics in 1976 when he was just 23-years-old … 


It went on to become one of the world’s biggest modem makers. 


But Casey and Katie had something else in common besides their ambition and success in tech.


They were both cancer survivors. 

 

And so called him up, met with him and talked about what I had learned and what I had put together for myself and how I would like to share that with my community. Basically putting together, you know, integrative and supportive services to help you get through treatment and really rethink things about diet and exercise. Just for a healthy lifestyle. I wanted those to be available to people going through cancer. And I also felt like when I went to the gym, you know, to the gym, I was the only one with the headscarf. And that, for some people might make it so they didn't want to go exercise. And so it was important to have peers and have services like exercise classes geared and meant for cancer patients. So it becomes supportive atmosphere and almost a support group in that sense too. 


Katie impressed Casey Cowell so much with her ideas that she was hired to work on the project. 


In 2015 the Cowell Family Cancer Center opened and continues to provide, what they describe as ‘coordinated’ cancer care to patients in Traverse City. 


Their aim is to treat the body and the mind … traditional medicine combined with the meditation, exercise, and nutrition classes that Katie had found so beneficial in her treatment. 

  

Tommy [00:32:38] did cancer change you as a person? I mean, did it change your outlook or your philosophy or anything like that? I'd imagine going through something like this has a great deal of impact on, you know, just who you are as a person. 

 

00:32:52] I mean, I've always been one to sweat the small stuff and, you know, very detail oriented and worrying about everything, trying to make it as perfect as possible. And that, in part, is why I've been successful in my career. Coming through cancer. It put things in perspective. You know, I'd like to say that I'm still only looking at the big picture every day and really thinking, you know, this is not not cancer about everything. And there's some of that still in my life. But that definitely probably was the bigger change it helped me to to not be as anxious about things that in the grander scheme just don't matter.


Tommy [00:33:30] And did it change the trajectory of your career at all? 


00:33:33] after building it, Cowell Cancer Center. I went to work with Casey Cowell on some of his startup company initiatives. And so that completely did change me going into business as opposed to going back into law. 


(MUSIC POST FADE)


Casey Cowell was also involved in funding startup tech companies. One of his investments was a big data company called Naveego. 


Katie started doing some work with them.

 

00:34:39] I was initially asked to go in and help them kick start some new strategy ideas around sales and marketing. And from that, just really fell in love with the team and the company. I have a no assholes rule at this point in my career. 

00:36:08] It's very important that I don't have a work situation where you have to deal with egos and personalities. And really the team at the Naveego, very humble, yet very brilliant and so humble geniuses surrounding myself with that was a definite goal as well. 

  

Katie liked those humble geniuses so much that she never left.


She also saw a huge opportunity for the product.


So what Naveego does … we connect to all the data sources, anything and everything. We create a golden record of all of the data together so it stays consistent across a company. We get rid of the errors in it. We get rid of duplicates and things. And then that stream, once it's cleaned up and it's the golden record, it's ready to feed into analytics, it's ready to feed into dashboards. It's ready for executives to be able to rely on trusted information to make decisions. 

 

In 2018 Katie became CEO of Naveego … the only female boss of a big data company that we know of. 

 

And while the tech world has made some strides it’s still largely a male-dominated industry that has a long way to go to achieving gender parity. 


00:47:49] when I entered engineering program, it was at a time when one out of every four women in the program would actually graduate from it. Everybody else would drop or change majors for whatever reason. And so I know that they you know, since then things are better. And they've done a lot on trying to figure out, well, why is that? Is it because, you know, a woman feels isolated when it's a male dominated career or is it based on their upbringing? You know, boys play with Legos, girls play with dolls kind of thing. Or, you know, there are a lot of different theories. 


It’s something Katie is doing her bit to try to address. 


00:49:31] I'm trying to lead by example and get out there … sometimes  I speak at high schools or I'm, you know, out there in industry to just really trying to to be an example of a woman in leadership in high tech. And our company overall, we're over 50 percent. What you would consider diversity hires, whether that's racial, ethnic, national origin or women, are considered diversity higher still in my industry. 


And to get those diverse hires Naveego is pulling people in from all over the world to work in Traverse City. 

 

00:41:38] We have pretty rigorous interview process. Kind of like what Microsoft is known for with tests, coding challenges. And so one of the things that's happened almost like a secondary benefit and a privilege of recruiting nationally and having national talent apply for a job with us is that the people who are floating to the top with the best skills are very diverse in their backgrounds, which is great. It makes us a lot stronger as a team. And I'm really pleased that we're able to participate in increasing diversity in Traverse City. 

 

One of the many things Katie is proud of. 


(START END THEME)

 

[00:43:45] I am proud of being able to create jobs in Michigan and and be a big piece of hopefully a big piece of the new technology industry here in Traverse City. I'm very proud of that and I'm very proud of my daughter, really, and that she is the, you know, basically very attuned to social justice and I just really look forward to seeing what she decides to do in life. 


Tommy [00:44:17] How old is your daughter now? 


00:44:18] She's 14. She is just finishing up her freshman year. 


Tommy [00:44:22] Has she talked to you about what she wants to do for a living yet? 


00:44:24] Oh, she wants to be a horse trainer. She loves riding her horse. That's, you know, that's typical at this age. So it'll be funny to see where she goes. 


Tommy [00:45:23] I'm curious as a mom now, so you had your experience with your dad where he sort of helped usher you into a more practical field I will say. You know, are you gonna have that same conversation with your daughter it seemed to work out pretty well for you. 


00:45:44] I think that probably because my dad said he would only pay for college if I followed his advice, I'll probably be more lenient than that. 

00:45:52] But I am trying to say, OK, well, let's figure out a way to take your interest and put it into a long lasting career. Think about the business end of what you would like to do. And so perhaps you want to have a big stable and a training program. I don't know. But I'm trying to direct her strong sense of social justice, her advocacy and business mind in that way. No, she probably won't be an engineer, but I'm OK with that. 


(THEME POST)


Creative Coast is a podcast series brought to you by Traverse Connect…

 

the Grand Traverse Region’s Economic Development Organization…

 

and is produced by me, Tommy Andres, and Maria Byrne for our company Airloom Media. 

 

That’s spelled A-I-R.

 

The music is composed by Josh Hoisington. 

 

This podcast series is made possible thanks to generous support and funding from the Michigan Film and Digital Media Office at Michigan’s Economic Development Corporation. 

 

You can visit Traverse Connect’s website at traverseconnect.com. 

 

(THEME POST/FADE)