Christine Goodwin--From UMW Alumni to CEO

In this episode, I interview Christine, a technology leader and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience developing enterprise-scale software solutions across industry, government, and national security sectors. Named one of Virginia’s Top 50 Entrepreneurs, she currently works with Banduri, a government contracting firm focused on innovation and intentional design. Christine shares what motivated her to begin her entrepreneurial journey and reflects on the experiences that shaped her career. She also offers valuable advice for undergraduate students interested in starting a business or pursuing their goals, emphasizing the importance of curiosity, solving real problems, and staying adaptable in a constantly changing professional world.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, everybody. My name is Shams, and today I will be doing an interview with Christine Goodwin, CEO of Banduri. Christine, can you please tell me a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Wow, where'd we begin? Uh the highlight reel, grew up on a dirt road. My mom was an immigrant, dad was an American uh engineer, my mom was out of school at out of school by the age 14, lived a pretty interesting life. Uh not exotic because I grew up on a dirt road, but I had a I was a free-range kid. So um I think really wanted to be a good kid, got to college, discovered that I had uh different ideas about my life that I could really start to explore in ways that I didn't when I was living at home, not because my parents didn't let me, but it's whatever. Um when I went to college, started as an engineering student, figured out pretty quickly I hated engineering, uh, but took two years before I got out of that. And then um eventually quit school right at the outbreak of the first Gulf War for some pretty I had an existential crisis which came down to like what value do I have in the world? And never wanted to go back to college. Took about three years to do a lot of things. Some of them were crazy, um, some of them were just very mundane, and eventually got came here to Mary Washington to finish up my degree and started it. Uh I got a degree in liberal studies, but I don't I'd been coding since I was 10. Got my first computer when I was 10. And I was like, well, I don't want to make$16,000 a year with a liberal studies degree, so I'm just gonna go where there are gnarly problems and better money, and that was in engineering. I gave myself two weeks to get a job after I graduated, landed it, but started out technical writing, um, and then very quickly jumped into coding, and then from there, over the next 20 or 30 years, kind of had this crazy uh leapfrog where I went from doing stuff, coding on big naval platforms, to jumping out of the government, getting into industry, right? As the dot com boom was kicking in, started my own company. Um, was there when the dot-com bust happened? My first company was caught up in that, was a lot of lessons learned. Went back to working for people, had kids, was like at some point, I'm gonna give myself two years after the birth of my first daughter to get back into running my company, and then 15 years later, I actually did it, ran a startup community here in Fredericksburg in between to kind of scratch my edge and sort of keep my feet both doors. Was working day jobs and then uh got to the point where I was like, okay, I'm ready to start my company again, and then Banduri started. So I've had a non-linear, non-traditional path for where I am now. I think the one through line that's constant and all of it is um I really was curious and I'm willing to take some my risk tolerance is pretty high, but it's not reckless. Um, and I really wanted to make sure that everything I've done in my life, whether it be something as mundane as um, you know, cooking dinner for my kids or starting a company or briefing generals, really what the deal is is that I was present, you know, like I was there and showing up and persistently just trying to make sure that I was the version of myself that felt good to me. So that's kind of a long answer. Uh left out all the parts that shouldn't go out on the internet. Um, I will say that I feel like a big part of what allowed me to be where I am in this moment in my life was again growing up in that way where there weren't a lot of constraints, there were some simple rules, and uh it gave me the confidence to be curious, um, and it gave me sort of the I don't know, just the freedom to um lean into uncertainty in a way that even though it felt overwhelming, didn't feel like looking at uncertainty as a place I might want to actually focus my attention was meant that I was dumb or incompetent. Actually, I worry for the younger generation a lot right now. There's all this bullshit mythology out there, like if you haven't done this by a certain age, like you know, what are you, or you're not gonna be successful, or there's only one way to be successful, and that success only looks like how much money you make and what your title is. And I think a r a life well lived is a life where you can look back and be like, fuck yeah, I did that, and I live till it so that's kind of how I got here. But I think it all started with growing up in a family in a dirt road where we didn't I didn't fit in because my mom was an immigrant, um, and my father was highly educated. Um, and yet uh, you know, learning how to build a little ecosystem for myself and just allow like everything was interesting to me, you know. And then I would explore it, and then if it was no longer interesting, I could find something else, and I didn't have a lot of rigid structure saying you can't do that or why are you doing that? You know, the only time I got that shit was like when I didn't clean my room. Yeah. What do you mean you were doing that? I told you to clean your room, like, oh yeah, sorry, I forgot you said that. So I don't know. I think that um I don't know if that answers your question neatly, but it does definitely.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Yeah. What would you say motivated you to start your entrepreneurship journey?

SPEAKER_00 5:19

Well, I would say the short answer for that is uh being really honest with what I suck at. And I'm really I'm a really terrible employee. Um not because I want to be, and not because I I like, well, let me see how I can make somebody say terrible because I'm not gonna do what they say. My problem is that, um, or what I thought was my problem, was that I am not able to see normal things the way everybody else does. That doesn't mean that I'm a special. I know now, I know now why I you know I've talked about this, but so a recent diagnosis in the last couple years of ADHD, I'm like, oh well now I know there's an actual reason for it. But the way I used to say it when I was a kid was my brain just doesn't work like everybody else's. So my challenge is one of the ways my brain works is that I see lots of things and synthesize lots of things all at the same time, simultaneously, at scale, persistently. And so why that became problematic for me as an employee is I'd walk into a place I was really excited to work, great people, cool problems to solve, cool customers, whatever, and immediately would see all the shit that was wrong. And all the things that were just like wrong because it was preventing all the progress that everyone wanted to get towards. And I would be like, hey, I have this idea, we could do this, blah, blah. And what I why that became problematic was that, especially in places where you're an employee and there are other people who've sort of put structure in place and process in place and things in motion, you you are the a disruptor, and their view of how things are running is usually driven by a couple of, I think not the best metrics, but they're singular metrics, which is well, has this approach to how we've done things kept us profitable? And if the answer is yes, they're like, no, our shit's not fucked up, you are. And they're not 100% wrong, right? And what I mean by that is with time, like when I first started, I was like, oh, this is crazy, we can totally fix this. And um, and I didn't understand how to approach the the problem from from in a way that didn't sound like I was saying you're all fucked up. Can I cuss on this? I just can't, because you know how you know like that's the one problem myself. I'm I've tried my entire life to get better at it. I'm giving up, I've just I can't. Uh but so anyway, I would I my delivery of what I was seeing wasn't good. It was probably, but it was cut it wasn't because I I wanted to come in and offend, it was because I was so like I get I get so locked in and hyper focused, and and then it's like this the crazy part of my brain takes over, and and it's just and I've got to explain everything to everybody because I need them to understand what I'm seeing, and I know they're not seeing it that way, and so I would destroy people with these sort of word picture tsunamis, and they're like, Jesus Christ, not only did you come in and say we're all fucked up, but now you're destroying me because you won't shut up, and uh you lost me after the first 30 seconds and you're still going, and I just want to die, right? And so I part of the other part of the thing I had to learn, so I and I always felt that so their reflection back to me was also negative though, because they were responding from a place of complete overwhelm, and I didn't realize that my part in their overwhelm, but then the other thing that would kick in is that they didn't realize their part in the overwhelm either, nor did they realize that they were unwilling to see anything different. So this idea that um everything I talked about or would see or would try to go after quote unquote fixing was just really disruptive, and people don't like to change. They certainly won't change if if they're if the way they're being introduced changes, man, your shit's all fucked up, and you know we could do XYZ better. So I couldn't change people's reaction to me, and I had to took me years to learn how not to internalize their reaction to me as proof that I was terrible or fucked up or whatever. I had to make peace with the fact that I was always going to be seen as a change agent or a disruptor, and that most people see that in a negative way, and that I couldn't change who I was because it's just how my brain works. And I also find it interesting, like I find really gnarly problems interesting, and I didn't want to have to stop just because I was at work. So I decided, and I can't change other people. So I was like, well, how can I be better at leveraging how I can see things in a way that's more productive? And then what are my what's my framework and my metric for knowing that it's either gonna resonate and then we have a path forward together and we can be co-creative and collaborative around this idea I've brought to the table, or conversely, that they're just gonna shut it down because if we were going down, I was looking for early indications that when I got more mature about myself that if this was a nothing burger, like it was gonna go nowhere, well fuck it, I'm out. So where can I go where how I how my brain works, how I like to do things, how my curiosity is a force multiplier when we haven't solved big problems, where can I find a place with people like that? And so in my early career, if you looked at my resume, like it's I I job hopped a lot, and not for money, but because I was like, I did my research, I was like, oh, this is a place where I can take what I do and how I want to do it and refine it, learn, because I'll be around people who are like that, and then I can actually get what I'm really looking for, which is tangible proof that I fixed something, right? That I made it better, and and then from there continue to like do it with other people, and so my trajectory really follows this desire to keep taking being authentically who I am in the most like not just personality way, but like the most emotional and intellectual way, way my brain works, and figuring out how that didn't become something that worked against me. Like, how could I stop working against myself? And so the only way I found the truest freedom to do that was starting my own company. So I started many little companies, um, and and some worked out, some didn't, but I never worried when they didn't and was uncomfortable, like wasn't great, and I wouldn't be like, oh no big deal. But what I learned was that I have to be in creative control, and the only and I need a lot of control because for me, control equates to freedom, right? Not not most people look at control as like locking shit down and really, but for me, I needed creative control, which was a way of having the the means to create the most freedom-focused environment, but not without structure, so that I could I could make use of what I think personally is a component of how my brain is wired. It's actually uh again, it's it's a good thing, not a bad thing. Um, and then I'm also not creating disruption because disruption is unproductive. So my goal with creating a company was to, or all of them, but especially this one, was to say how can I have the creative control I need to get after building in accordance with my ability to see the structural problems and things, and my ability to very quickly understand all the components of that problem and then re-architect it like literally on the fly. And then how can I come into the spaces where these problems exist in a way that's more healthy and more productive for me and the people I want to help? And and as a CEO of a company, there's a there's a certain platforming, if you will, of capability that is more readily acknowledged and and desired than it is as an employee in a company, at least for me. So for again, it was about I think for me the the company becomes the platform, not just for myself, but I want to build, we I used to joke and say I like our hiring strategy is we build an island of misfit toys. And I don't mean that, I like I mean that lovingly, right? But like I want the company to be a platform for those kinds of people, you know, and I think there are a lot of us out there. Um, and not that again, not that people who aren't like that aren't special in their own way, it takes all kinds of people, but I have found that a lot of people who think like me and kind of exist the way in similar ways to me very quickly get heavily marginalized, especially if you happen to be a woman, get heavily marginalized in large sort of institutional places because the reality is disruption is can be unproductive, and and not a lot of places that have been formed up have um have the right kind of institutional structure to know how to adapt well to anything, much less disruption. And so ironically, that's what our company does, right? It's how we make a living, we help large institutions adapt to disruption and actually get ahead of it and like intentionally create disruption inside their own organization so that they can control their destiny, right? And not be waylaid by change. But I can do that a lot more successfully running a company that does that than I could. I had m some successes in companies as an employee, but I always hit a wall.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

So with your really extensive um history, um what's like one piece of advice you would give like undergrad um students like wanting to create their own business or like succeed in their in their entrepreneurial. No, you're fine.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

Okay. Uh so the first thing I would say, and this is this is probably not going to resonate with young people. Um I don't recommend starting your own business until you've actually worked in the real world for other companies for a while. Not because you don't have a good idea, you could eventually monetize, but but business is one word that describes a large set of complex dynamics that uh occur in places where we have a density of human interaction. And and if you go off starting your own business when you're young, a lot of people um don't first of all running a business is really tough. Like it's so tough. It's even harder when you haven't experienced what it means to operate within the context of a business. And and so I recommend first that you get a little experience in another place. I don't care if it's three months or six months or a year, it doesn't have to be ten years, but get a little bit of experience because the reality is no matter what type of business you have, I don't care if it's a mall and pop shop or it's a thrift store or it's a you know a medical facility that you're building or you're a tech startup or your unicorn, I don't care, you're into finance. There are core components of running a business that are the same no matter what. And expertial learning is significantly uh more compounding than um than textbooks learn textbook learning is, but if you just start out alone, you don't know what you don't know. So it'll actually take you exponentially longer to run a business in accordance with your vision for it, because you'll spend exponentially longer just learning some basics. Where if you came in as an employee somewhere that already has basic structures, HR, finance, uh, business capture, marketing setup, you'll you'll you'll learn very quickly by seeing what's going on. And then you could dip and be like, I learned a couple things there, and I'm never gonna do that again because that was stupid, or hey, what a great idea. Reading about it isn't the same. The other thing is that a lot of people who are young who want to start their own business uh tend to want to go it alone. Being a solopreneur is almost completely impossible. If your goal is to really hit a scale that is really profitable, it is completely impossible. And my thing that pisses me off is you know, a lot of the mythology around startups, all the unicorn companies, right, the and and their founders, the Mark Zuckerbergs and whatever, fucking Elon, all these people that on some level I really don't like. Um the myth that's out there is that they singularly did the thing that got them to where their company is right now, or at that point where a movie was being made about them, and it's such bullshit. Um and people don't understand what we'll talk about Facebook as an example, right? Mark Zuckerberg uh had a cool idea. So many people do. Many cool ideas are stupid, and we should never turn them into companies. So the other thing about it too is you have to know before you start a company is it's don't start a company because you have a fucking idea. Like, for the love of God. I mean, you know, we've walked through this before. Don't most ideas are stupid and they're not things that are gonna revert to cash, and you aren't a company if you don't have cash and can't make cash. Like, bottom line. But the other part of this is Zuckerberg's idea had been validated on campus because he had people who were like, oh, the an online yearbook, that's cool, right? Really, he started it to stalk, not cool. Explains a lot about the fucking model of Facebook and that how they use data, but I digress, right? Build a stalking tool, still a stalking tool. But what people don't understand is that he had intentionally been into it put into an environment over summer because somebody thought that was a good idea, and in that environment he went into, he met through other people, uh, venture capitalists who immediately understood the monetizable value of his dumb college yearbook idea, which wasn't super dumb, and knew how to scale it. And Facebook didn't become Facebook until those people, with their network, their money, and their know-how turned Facebook into a company. So, not to diminish the brilliance of Zuckerberg, quite frankly, as the CEO of that company and all the things, but I think you need to get some experience, learn from others, don't go it alone. But before you start a company, be very clear that your idea is monetizable and there's there's a whole bunch of ways you can learn that online on your lunch break while you're getting a real paycheck. Um, because the other thing that we want to think about too is don't chase the money, chase the problem and understand if it's a problem at scale. And does that scale in that scale, are those people do they care enough about the pain that problem is to cause you know that they would pay you for the thing for your idea, your idea to fix it? Because if they don't, you don't have a good idea and you don't have a company, and it's hard to learn on your own. So that is a long winded answer too.