Sheconomy Surge: Unlocking Growth and Innovation for Women Entrepreneurs

The Sheconomy is thriving, and Dr. Felicia Newhouse is here to break it down. With 20 years in tech and groundbreaking research from Harvard and MIT, Dr. Newhouse shares how women are driving historic entrepreneurial growth. From tackling burnout to leveraging AI for smarter, faster innovation, this episode is packed with insights to empower your next big move.

👉 Connect with Dr. Felicia Newhouse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/felicianewhouse/

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to She's Ambitious AF, the bold and empowering podcast that turns up the volume on female entrepreneurship. Join us as we dive headfirst into the wild world of boss babes, where we spill the tea on all things ambition, success, and the occasional hilarious disaster. 

Angelica Maestas (Host): Today I'm joined by guest Dr. Felicia Newhouse. Welcome.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Thank you. Happy to be here.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Well, why don't you give our listeners a little bit of background on yourself?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah, of course. My name is Felicia Newhouse, and my background spans about 20 years in tech. So I've been a VP of product marketing working with a lot of different global teams, launching a host of different tech products and most recently in AI. And also paralleling that work, I conducted PhD research across Lesley, Harvard University, and MIT that looked at women entrepreneurs and how, [00:01:00] We can really support them in starting sustainable businesses.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So we studied how women entrepreneurs build sustainability into their businesses what causes them to burn out and how technology also plays a role in that. And then in addition to that, I'm also the the founder of AI Powered Women, which is a summit at MIT. And we're kicking off next month on January 28th.

Angelica Maestas (Host): That's awesome. Well, you've done some really fascinating work. And I would love to dive into a little bit about the trends you've noticed as far as women owned businesses and their emergence since COVID. 

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, if you look at the data, right, so since COVID, we've really seen this big just spike and what a lot of people call the she economy. So this is kind of the period between like, 2019 and 2023 is where we saw the spike, and the data is actually still coming in. Since 2023, the data is always lagging in these [00:02:00] things with, you know, the institutions that do the research but basically that period, say, 2019 to now, there's been this really large, dramatic increase in female owned businesses with growth rates nearly double that of the year. The rate of their male counterparts. So particularly in 2023 to now, female entrepreneurship has surged about four and a half times that of men's. So that's really driving a lot of this economic growth that we're seeing that, you know, the small business sector has been growing. So you can look at the data there.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): That's not just women. That's the entire, you know, SMB sector really,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): and that's, that's really advancing gender equality. So there's a lot of interesting things to look at there too in the new trends we're seeing. And so some of the data here is women owned businesses are growing twice as fast. They're the, it's the greatest growth in women owned businesses that we've seen in history just in terms of the amount of time it's happened in as well. So it's been a pretty large spike.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Wow. And it's been [00:03:00] across all, all sectors, not any particular industry.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah, it's across all sectors. Yeah, the whole SMB sector.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Gotcha. Okay. And what was it about COVID? I mean, we know that it created a frenzy in all of us. Do you think it was the work life balance? What, what caused more women to step into entrepreneurship as a result?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah, so it's interesting. There's there's kind of this whole trend that people have been coining the, the great exodus. And so that kind of spurred with COVID. There's a lot of different, I guess, practices. thoughts around it. But the, when people started staying home, I think it caused a reflection process, really, to put it simply. People had more time to think and to be away from their job. I think our society has really sped up the past decade, especially. There's been so many new technologies and So many, you know, just the economy itself has sped up, and there's a lot of researchers that have shown [00:04:00] that our human brains are not really designed for that rate of growth and change in all of the different aspects of our economy, of our technology. And so. Overall, what that's getting at is there's burnout. A lot of people are burned out. And so that burnout really peaked during COVID is what we saw. And so in addition to that burnout, there's a reflection process. And for women in particular, caused them to really think about seeking more autonomy and flexibility were the big pieces that the research had shown. And, you know, there's a lot of the research pointing towards, you know, the glass ceiling like, experiencing microaggressions in the workplace as well having their judgment question Making it harder to advance in corporate settings. So a lot of those political pieces. And there's some aspects of hybrid work that also highlighted some of that. And so overall, women were seeking workplaces that offer more flexibility and prioritize more well being. And so those were some of the. of that. But I [00:05:00] think overall it really caused people, you know, men and women, all humans, really during that time, there was, there was a lot of reflection and just thinking about, is this really what I want to do with my life?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): You know, when you get to be home, there's more safety in your home environment and being in that environment for a long time does trigger a questioning and reflection process. And so kind of, Leaving of corporate roles. We started to see more of that spike starting to happen, which was called the great breakup, was coined in a report by McKinsey and company and lean in.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): org. And they highlighted that women leaders are leaving their their companies at the highest rate ever recorded. And so they're often seeking, you know, better opportunities and work environments that align with their values. So in some cases, this was just. know, women leaving for a better job. But in many cases, it was also that they just wanted to start a business and do something that they were passionate about, that aligned with their values. And so, you know, they wanted [00:06:00] that, they wanted to break through the barriers that they were seeing with and the overall desire for flexibility to really prioritize their well being.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): lot of discussion around mental health and that came out in the research as well. People are really wanting to take care of and nurture their mental health. And that comes out in the form of career choices.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Mm hmm. Yeah, COVID was, 

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah. Yeah.

Angelica Maestas (Host): health and the impact it had there. And so I think women naturally being in tune to others, but also more in tune to ourselves and our emotions, I think have reached a level of awareness of. Something has to change. Something has to give.

Angelica Maestas (Host): And I wonder too, is it maybe just the tolerance for the BS and the glass ceiling and all of the things that corporate culture maybe it's just people are like, eh, kind of had enough. I'm just going to go do my own thing.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head and that's kind of what the research was getting at is like people have been on [00:07:00] autopilot for a long time, right? And economy because, and I won't get too down, too far down this rabbit hole, but our economy has, because of technology and the advances in it, everything has sped up. Time has sped up. Our experience of the economy, of technology, of our work, of our jobs has sped up. And so what that has caused on a more of a micro level is you're experiencing the expectations for the average job has actually gotten higher. So you would think that some of these technologies and AI specifically are helping to automate processes.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): But what's interesting is it's actually raising the bar and expectations. So what. What you had before was, you know, teams doing different projects and, you know, more hands on, you know, people to people. Now you have the bar being raised exponentially around well, the, the competition bar is higher.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): We need to grow faster. We need to innovate more. Right. And so that [00:08:00] process is exponentially speeding up. And so the, the burden also comes down to the humans that are behind, you know, these innovations and these technologies. So. So that, that's, I think, a challenge for people too. So I think that burnout really started to show up during the pandemic.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And, and I think it's also important to highlight that the rate of technology was also starting to speed up quite a bit during that time too.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't considered that because you think of advancements in AI and use of technology as. Making our lives better, making things more manageable and easier. But I hadn't thought about how it's now just creating more pressure. Hadn't considered that. 

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Just even the tech stack, right? If you look at the average tech stack stack for any enterprise, I mean, it's it's quite large now. And so for any given average, you know, like when I was a VP of product marketing, I mean, we had to think about all these different tools. Each tool had its own login.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Each [00:09:00] tool had its own dashboard. Each tool had its own analytics. And every team has its own, you know, Preferred tools as well, right? So the product team versus the marketing team versus the sales team and the cross functional pieces of how do you communicate with the teams within an enterprise on, you know, access and sharing data?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And I mean, it gets very complex very fast. So while in some micro forms, it has automated and created efficiencies. It's also created a lot of redundancies in some ways and also siloed information, and just more complexity of like, how do we even. Yes, we have all this new data. That's so cool.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): But now, how do we actually ingest that data and synthesize it and, you know, make sense of it and most importantly, apply it,

Angelica Maestas (Host): yeah, 

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): that's, I think, a big challenge for a lot of the companies now and without going too down a wormhole with AI. I mean, you know, if you look at the past century, [00:10:00] right, and, and look at humans in their role with just data and knowledge, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So if you look at just the knowledge economy and how that's evolved, right? You had turn of the century, you've got, you know, things like books, you have the printing press, right? You have the media and newspapers. And then that then goes into computers and then personal computers that evolve into mobile phones.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And now we're getting into, you know, more artificial intelligence, right? Generative AI.

Angelica Maestas (Host): right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): if you look at humans and the role they've played through that, they've played an interfacing role. So, you know, I am reading that newspaper. I'm absorbing that knowledge and I'm going to go over here and repurpose it and, you know, put it out into something else. Or I'm going to take that data from the computer I'm seeing or in that software and I'm going to make sense of it. Now that's going away. So now our role is actually being less and less of an interface and More and more questioned around what, what role are we playing, [00:11:00] especially with, you know, autonomous agents and generative AI

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): going to play that interfacing role, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Like we don't have to play that role as much anymore with all this huge amounts of data. So when we get to the point where we do flip into more of a, an autonomous AI role, AI is going to completely take over that interfacing role. We don't have to play that role anymore,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So So that's pretty cool, but then where does that leave us?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Right. And so

Angelica Maestas (Host): Cool, but scary. Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): yeah, cool, but scary. And so I think right now we're in this awkward growing pain phase where it's like, we're kind of straddling the line of like, we're still playing an interfacing role, but it's becoming too overwhelming. Right. Cause we haven't gone autonomous on AI yet.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So

Angelica Maestas (Host): Right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): in that like awkward teenage stage of like, it hasn't flipped into completely autonomous and completely just, you know, AGI, that's still going to take some time. I think we're still trying to figure out where we fit in and that's

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah,

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): a big part of the [00:12:00] struggle for a lot of people right now that we're seeing.

Angelica Maestas (Host): yeah. And, and we're figuring, well, it's evolving so quickly that a year from now. I mean, what is that going to look like in the next five years? 

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah.

Angelica Maestas (Host): I'd love to, to talk about some of the differences by gender of, of using AI and comfort being comfortable with using AI, especially in, in a business. And we talked about how it can make life easier, but it can also add some stress.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah.

Angelica Maestas (Host): have you, what have you found in the data?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah. So I think as far as the data goes. I mean, when we look at I guess when we look at men and women, right, and how they use AI, I mean, first off, only a third of women use AI in personal and professional life, while over half of men do. So it's just kind of the overriding stat. So, there's a lot of factors behind that.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And this goes back to like, Early childhood education and STEM programs and like 

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): That go into all that, right? It gets complicated just

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah. Mm

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): sociological standpoint. So this has always [00:13:00] been a challenge, right? Of like women adopting tech, women being in tech, women being in engineering, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): There's always been large disparity in that. And then even in In tech management and leadership, right? I think it's still like in leadership positions in tech. I think women only make up. I want to say it's like 25 30%. I'd have to check on the staff there, but it's still pretty low. Just in terms of their leadership, just in the tech space in general. So then if we look at a I and the actual adoption of it. We can break it down in different ways. We can break it down in how you adopt it in your personal life and how you adopt it in your professional life. And so we're still seeing men by far in a way lead the charge on that. And men do tend to in most cases be the early adopters of most technologies. So that, that is a huge challenge. Now, Some underlying factors and some of the data disparity that we're seeing is and this goes for a lot of technologies that we see. But obviously, is the [00:14:00] huge one that's underpinning society right now. women often. hesitate to ask questions in male dominated environments, which technology is right

Angelica Maestas (Host): hmm.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): and so that impacts their skill development. So overall there's lower tech confidence, right? So that's number one. Number two is there's a historical education gap. So like I said, women's gender representation in fields like STEM, it impacts their comfort with tech. it also impacts just their education, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Like, I mean, there's a lot of aspects of AI that are getting quite technical quite quickly. And if you don't have some of those more foundational tech skills, it's harder for you to jump from point A to point G, you know,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): don't have that kind of more technical foundation. And then the third piece is Women, interestingly, have more skepticism and understandably more skepticism about AI's fairness and decision making, which is slowing their adoption as well.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And I think the source from that was Pew [00:15:00] Research and they did a study on AI and gender perceptions. And so that kind of highlights the gender bias and skepticism, driving that. gap. So those are some of the key pieces. And then you have the small business sector, which we were talking about before and the growth in that. And overall only 3. 8 percent of small businesses effectively use AI. So the positive, the positive, like light at the end of the tunnel of all this is if women do make it a priority now, like

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): because this is all moving very quickly,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): make it a priority to join you know, support groups if they hire advisors, if they hire coaches, if they take online classes, whatever they can do

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah,

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): themselves immersed in environments where they feel safe. Maybe these are women only groups. I don't know. It depends on the person. But if they immerse themselves in these environments for learning they [00:16:00] do have a huge opportunity to really get ahead of their competition because so few businesses are still actually applying this. We hear a lot about AI right now, have to remember, these are a lot of the pioneers in AI, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Like, these are

Angelica Maestas (Host): right. Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Sam Altman, you've got Chachi B. T., you've got Claude, you've got all these, you know, big LLMs and it's very flashy, sexy news headlines. But the reality is for your average, your average small business owner, they are not integrating this stuff.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): They're way behind. And that's a challenge, but it's also an opportunity for, you know, any woman entrepreneurs that are listening to us right now. That's a huge opportunity for them to kind of seize the moment. And if they do take the time to learn these skills and close the gap for themselves and band together with other women entrepreneurs to do the same thing it's, you have a very high likelihood of, we're talking light speed, light [00:17:00] years ahead of your competition, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Because the exponential rate of change that's happening, if you are even delaying that learning curve by a month, two months, six months, right?

Angelica Maestas (Host): Oh, yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): quickly this stuff

Angelica Maestas (Host): You're so far behind. Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): far behind.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah. And it doesn't have to be heavy lift to get yourself up to speed. I mean,

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): right.

Angelica Maestas (Host): YouTube tutorials. But I think probably the first thing that that women listening or thinking about is, well, What is, what is the AI tech stack look like that I should be looking at for my business?

Angelica Maestas (Host): How you said only 3 percent of businesses, small businesses are using AI.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah.

Angelica Maestas (Host): should they be using it? I know how I use it personally. And a lot of it is content creation, social media, sometimes they use it to synthesize research. But what are, what are you seeing? What are our ways that small businesses can use AI?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that could be [00:18:00] a whole podcast in and of itself. But I can highlight some, some key use cases, I guess, that I see that are common. And I think effective, because AI is not effective for everything right now. Like, for example, I have people that, say, want to write a book or something.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): It's, it's not common. Like, you don't want to use AI to, like, write a book,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): if you have, you know, ChatGPT put together an entire YouTube video transcript, not great at that. You've got to break things down in small chunks. So, there's, I guess in answering this question, one, there's the strategic ways in which you use say something like a ChatGPT. And how you interface with it. And I would say from that standpoint get yourself educated on smart prompting and, getting your way around a basic LLM. So for a chat GPT, that would be things like, Like you know, personalizing it training its brain. So getting in and training it with your own personalized business information going into the custom [00:19:00] GPTs and playing around with creating those based on your own data, uploading your own data.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So so thinking about priming yourself to, you even start bringing all these technologies and think about what are all the aspects of my business that could be turned to data. Right. So think about customer avatars, your your different customer segments, right? So who are all the different types of customers you target and how deep can you go with what you know about them? And all the data around those subsegments and and turn that into data, turn it into word documents or PDFs or anything. You could have slide where you could have customer conversations. You could have TXT files. I mean, Anything that's data, right? And so think about converting all of the knowledge that you have in your company and centralizing it in your own in your own knowledge document, you know, create folders.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): It could be in a Google drive. It could be something as simple as just folders with you know, these documents in them. [00:20:00] And then from there, once you feel like you've really understand your own data and have it organized, then go into an LLM, like a chat GPT, or then go in and, you know, go into a Zapier and.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Do a chat bot. Right? So,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): I guess just from a priming yourself standpoint, that's how I would think about it first. And then from there, I would say once you have really mapped out your own data on your business then think about the areas of your business that could be automated that you find yourself losing energy in. So as an example, and this is a different answer for everybody, but what are the areas of your business that feel like it's robbing you of your creative energy? Right? So as an entrepreneur, we, most of us are entrepreneurs for a reason. It's, you know, it's usually a unique, you know, Set of people that tend to go into entrepreneurship.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And anyone listening to this will understand what I mean

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah,

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): that.

Angelica Maestas (Host): bit crazy.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): [00:21:00] a little bit crazy, a little bit ADD, a little bit like, you know, creative mad scientist.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): but that's the beautiful part of entrepreneurship is it is, you know, being able to channel that creativity into innovation and into new products and new services and new ways of solving problems in the world and having a positive impact. So. You want to really map out in your business any areas where that creative energy is just getting lost. Like think about areas where it's just drudgery work, you know, where you're just losing time, you're losing energy, you don't like it. So I would say first and foremost, after you have your data kind of mapped out, then the second step would be, you know, where are you losing energy and where could you automate?

Angelica Maestas (Host): Mm hmm.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So are you doing any sort of record keeping? Do you hate writing blog posts every week? Are you just losing a lot of time with video editing? You know, are you finding that you're just taking a lot of sales calls and it's just, like, taking the life out of you because you hate sales, [00:22:00] right? So these are all areas that very easily and very quickly can get automated by AI. So some high level use cases, I guess, might be Autonomous AI agents. So you have, you know, these I won't even say autonomous, it's getting to be autonomous, but you have different agents. You have different chatbots. You have companies like make Zapier that can build these chatbots, where you can upload your own data and that can help you deepen the personalization and the relationships of people on your site. And it's not like the old school chatbots where you just have these You know, kind of automated robotic responses. This is a

Angelica Maestas (Host): Right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): now, right?

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): feel very personal very human and very you,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Mm hmm.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): on these chatbots as your as the founder and you know say this is literally me.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): This is You know, this chatbot is fed with my information and my data on my business. And I'm not available right now, but I'm here to answer questions just like I would if we were in person. So you can do things like that. There's [00:23:00] also another interesting use case I've seen as a therapist, people who are in therapy work and psychology. They can't be with their clients all the time. And so they have these private chatbots that they're creating for their clients the time. are trained with the information that they've worked on together. Like maybe the therapist or coach is coaching them through some issues. They can map out all of that data in the chat bot and have a personalized and private chat bot that can help coach that person and keep them held accountable to their goals to any bad habits or negative

Angelica Maestas (Host): Oh, interesting.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Things like that, that, that keep that therapy relationship active in between the human to human sessions.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): think that's where AI can really beautifully enhance our humanity and our relationships with our clients rather than replace it, right? It's just augmenting it.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): it's actually deepening that relationship because before you might wait. A week or two to meet with a coach or a therapist or business advisor, a consultant or whatever, right? But now you can speed [00:24:00] that learning and that integration cycle up in between meeting with those clients. And really when you think about any sort of business it really comes down to for humans in any field, it comes down to learning and integrating, right? And so if you can layer AI on top of whatever that process looks like for your business and your industry I mean, what's cooler than that, than helping people learn faster, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And integrate faster. And so that's not replacing the human relationship that you have with your customers, your clients. It's, it's speeding it up and it's actually deepening it. So when you do drop in together in that human level, it's that much deeper and that much more efficient.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Mm hmm. Yeah. And I so as you were talking about the applications what, what stood out to me is that I think just having a foundational knowledge of the possibilities of how you could use it, and then you can, then you know enough to say, okay, I may not develop the chatbot myself. But I know that I could use [00:25:00] one and how it would be beneficial to my customers.

Angelica Maestas (Host): So I can hire someone to do that. It's just knowing what's, what's out there versus having to necessarily do it yourself. Those, some of these listeners may very well do that.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the beautiful part about like these chatbots and agents and everything right now. I mean, they're so easy. I mean, if you go into a chat GPT right now and go into the custom GPT all that takes is 30 seconds to upload.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Really?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): wanted to do a a competitor tracker. You could upload any. PowerPoints you've intercepted from competitors. You can shoot. You can train it to go to your competitor websites. You can have it look at trends. You can upload all that data that you have on your competition. use case I've seen is If you join like a, I don't know, online webinar that your competition is, is, you know, hosting and there's a thousand people in the chat and they're all, you know, active on the chat and asking questions and things like that.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): You can download that chat from the webinar into a TXT file, [00:26:00] upload it into the brain of your, you know, custom GPT on chat GPT. And then you can have it analyze it for any areas where your competitor didn't properly or not properly, but just didn't. didn't meet that customer need,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): those responses for, Oh, you

Angelica Maestas (Host): Oh, wow.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): the mark on these customer needs.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And maybe this is an area you could uniquely fill. So it helps you analyze the competition in unique ways as well. So there's so many ways you can you can really customize these, these chat bots and these custom GPT's and these agents and,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Wow.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): and to get them to work for you and also to work with other agents and other GPT's.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): They

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah,

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): as well. So.

Angelica Maestas (Host): cool. I've been I've been thinking about it in the context of LPs for my fund and, you know, they get quarterly updates and I was speaking to one perspective LP and she said, you know, I want more than quarterly. Like, I just, I want to know, I give you a check that's significant to [00:27:00] me, whether it's 50, 000, a hundred thousand, I want to know a little bit more than quarterly what's going on with the portfolio companies.

Angelica Maestas (Host): And I thought about. Automating a way for LPs to have access to be able to query, you know, cause I'm tracking all the data. I've got progress of the, of the, the startups and just make it away where that's accessible real time

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah.

Angelica Maestas (Host): having to answer a question or an email or try to do more frequent reporting, which is just more demand.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are all things that are very easy

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): and integrate. Yeah. Yeah.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Well, I want to talk a little bit about some of the, the frameworks that you've developed. And I know that you've got the, the MIT conference coming up. And so I imagine you're going to be showcasing some of that, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah, yeah. So we have a conference coming up next month on January 28th, and it's actually available to anybody around the world through live stream. So we do have live stream tickets [00:28:00] available and they're very affordable. I think we're charging like 150 bucks for them. And that gets you all the content, all the speakers. Slides. So yeah, anybody in the world can sign up for that and still be a part of it during the live stream. And then, you know, get the downloads after we have, a free online academy to with like a I tools and a prompt library and all that kind of stuff. So people can continue learning and then a networking as well that's private to only the woman that registered. So it'll be really fantastic place to collaborate. And yeah, as far as my work goes I mean, I can share my screen real quick and

Angelica Maestas (Host): True.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): some of the things we'll be covering in that conference and with the entrepreneurs. Let's see, can you see my screen here?

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yes. Mm

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So so this is kind of, you know, a little bit about what we were talking about before.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So we have the development cycle, right? If you think of any entrepreneur, whether they're in the early stages of building an actual company or they're an established company and the early stages of building a new product or an offering or even, you know, a new blog post [00:29:00] or marketing campaign or whatever. You're always going through some sort of product development cycle in any industry with any company, right? And so this is something we're talking about a lot at the conference and that I talk about in my business, business to human doing AI advisory for women led startups. And so we, we look at this chart and just really look at you know, the traditional, you know, Curve here is you brainstorm the concepts.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): You have a hypothesis and you revise the hypothesis through experimentation, right? And then you go out and build the thing, right? So you explore the problem, you build the right things, you build the thing, right? So this is kind of, you know, how design thinking and lean startup and agile methodologies work together. And so. In past years, you know, this process could take months. It takes a long time to like research a new product or a new offering. And, you know, look at the clear market need and the product market fit and hypothesize and experiment all the different angles on it and then build it. And then, oh no, it didn't really, wasn't really well received.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): You got to build it again and go back [00:30:00] again. Right. This whole process has sped up in unbelievable ways, just even in the past few months with AI. And so this is a point I really want to underscore for entrepreneurs is and for women, this, this right here, this image, and layering what it allows people to do is it speeds up that experimentation process.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): The number one reason why startups fail is because they haven't been able to find a product market fit fast enough,

Angelica Maestas (Host): hmm.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): through experimentation and experimentation is what mitigates the risks, right? So if you're able to. the experimentation cycles, then you can lower the risks, right? If you have a marketing campaign, well, if you can do little micro iterations of that and you can have 25 different marketing campaigns that all took you like two minutes each to brainstorm and research and, you know, get out with AI, then

Angelica Maestas (Host): hmm. Right. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): six months. So that's [00:31:00] number one. And number two is for women entrepreneurs, it's really the best time in history to start a business because that risk is, is lowered. The barriers to entry are at its lowest in history. The size of the team that you need is at its lowest. Because you can use and chat bots and, you know, all of these various LLM s and tools to, you know, string them together and have a tech stack and have a set of solutions.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): It just, you know, allows you to do this testing and experimentation and launching quicker. And so that is, I think a really beautiful area to look at as a product. Place of opportunity for women if they can really even on a basic level, learn some of these A. I. Tools and string them together to solve some of the areas of their business that are slowing them down and, be able to scale faster, and automate areas of their business and In addition to all this business automating efficiency stuff, like, enjoy your life more, like, have [00:32:00] more, more joy and more connection and more creativity and more depth of connection with your human customers, right?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Because that's,

Angelica Maestas (Host): hmm.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): what we're here to do. Like, isn't that why we start businesses? Because we have a problem in the world that we care about that we want to solve, right?

Angelica Maestas (Host): Right.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So I'll just leave it at that. And then one other piece I want to mention with this image is I was just a judge at MIT Media Lab last Thursday at their AI Venture Studio, and I was judging 24 different grad student led teams at the Media Lab that were given one semester, 10 weeks, and I can just get out of this as I'm talking, but they were given one semester, 10 weeks to, you know look at a problem in the world that hasn't been able to be solved enough quick, quick enough by humans. Look at how they can leverage AI to solve the problem. And do that in 10 weeks. And

Angelica Maestas (Host): Ooh.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): class in 2022, right? Right when AI launched. And the first semester they were able to get from Concept to wireframe. In one semester, 10 weeks. Great! [00:33:00] They got from concept to wireframe. They could start, you know, beta testing their products and their ideas and their businesses and the market leveraging different AI tools. Now, fast forward two years, so this is a semester, same thing, 10 weeks. Most, the majority of the ventures in 10 weeks got from concept to revenue in, in one semester.

Angelica Maestas (Host): What?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And so

Angelica Maestas (Host): Oh my gosh.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): underscoring this image, right, of the reason why that's the case, because AI is speeding up the development cycles for, for these businesses whether they're early stage or established, it doesn't matter, it's, it's speeding it all up and so there are a lot of opportunities for businesses to solve problems in our world that much faster, so.

Angelica Maestas (Host): That's wild. That's, gosh, that's incredible. Well, this conversation has been, one, it's been delightful for me because now I'm, my brain's going some, some other ways where, you I'm going to spend the weekend thinking about some other ways that I can use AI and my business just to kind [00:34:00] of free me up in some, some other ways that I thought was a little, a little bit more time intensive to learn myself.

Angelica Maestas (Host): But what you were describing when you were kind of walking me through an example of customization, I'm thinking it's maybe not as difficult as I was thinking in my head.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah, I would encourage people to go to, you know, ChatGPT is an easy LLM to get around, you know. It's free or 20 bucks a month. I encourage people to just pay the 20 bucks explore it. Go to Zapier. Zapier and Make are great automated workflows that you can do endless things to string together to solve business problems for small business owners. And then just, just start there. You know, check out what they have. It's very easy just in there, like, you know, their, their help and support pages to, you know, kind of teach yourself. And there's lots of free resources online too. Universities like MIT have free classes and, you know, free events.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): And there's lots of free resources for people. So,

Angelica Maestas (Host): Okay, that's awesome. Yeah. I didn't realize that MIT offered free courses. Thank you

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): hmm. Yeah.[00:35:00] 

Angelica Maestas (Host): Very cool.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): yeah.

Angelica Maestas (Host): I'm going to transition us to some rapid fire questions.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Great.

Angelica Maestas (Host): All right. Margarita wine or mocktail

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Ha, mocktail.

Angelica Maestas (Host): best way to celebrate a win.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Ooh. Best way to celebrate a win. Ooh. I would say just go out for a night of dancing. Like, just fun dancing. Especially if it's with a team. Just some good music and dancing.

Angelica Maestas (Host): If, if your professional journey had a theme song, what would it be?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Ooh. I would say that Katy Perry song, how does it go?

Angelica Maestas (Host): Roar.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Yeah, roar. Yeah, that one.

Angelica Maestas (Host): I was like last Friday night. I don't know. It could be a lot of things.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Could be a lot.

Angelica Maestas (Host): One AI tool you can't live without.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): I'd say chat GPT for sure.

Angelica Maestas (Host): Yeah. Same

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): would

Angelica Maestas (Host): best piece of advice you've ever [00:36:00] received.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): to just be present with each step in life. Don't look at the whole staircase. Just look at the step in front of you and be present with it. Yeah.

Angelica Maestas (Host): And last but not least, what can our listeners do to support you?

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Oh I would say to while supporting me will be supporting a lot of different entrepreneurial women by signing up for the conference, or we even have a link on there where it's called a spread the love ticket. So you can even if you can't attend, you can donate to help a woman

Angelica Maestas (Host): Oh,

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): attend. And so we're working with a lot of organizations to make sure women in need who are entrepreneurs can also attend. If you give it a chance to attend this great event and if you are able to attend on the live stream It's going to be a powerhouse group of women. talking entrepreneurs and researchers from MIT and Harvard and AI ethicists and we have an astrophysicist and

Angelica Maestas (Host): Wow.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): researchers looking at mental health and AI and just [00:37:00] incredible woman pioneering the AI space and futurists.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So it's going to be really just a fun day. So if anyone's able to join you're going to learn all the stuff we talked about here, too, like how to implement AI use cases, you've got Zapier talking about chat bots, we've got Salesforce talking about, you know, how you can close clients faster with, you know, automations. We have copy. ai who's talking about You know, content creation and we've got a lead prompt engineer who's talking about the art of prompting, so it's going to be really tangible, tactical use cases that you can apply and integrate in your business, which in our opinion is really missing from a lot of the conferences out there.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): They just over complexify everything. And there's a lot of tech bro jargon. I'll admit. We are skipping over all that. We're making it super simple, super easy. And this conference is led by women for women. And it's just going to be a really great team effort for everybody. And we're keeping the price low.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): So it's accessible to to entrepreneurs and just, you know, looking at the positive impact. So [00:38:00] awesome.

Angelica Maestas (Host): will be out in time for folks listening to be able to register too.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Awesome.

Angelica Maestas (Host): but once again, thank you for being on. I learned so much and I appreciate the work that you do.

Dr. Felicia Newhouse (Guest): Thank you. Thanks for having me.

And that's a wrap on another episode of She's Ambitious AF. Remember to dream big, hustle harder, and show the world that when it comes to success, we're not just ambitious, we're Ambitious AF. ​