FIFT: Nathalie Molina Niño

Nathalie Molina Niño is the CEO of BRAVA Investments and the author of LEAPFROG, The New Revolution for Women Entrepreneurs. A technologist and coder by trade, she helps women make an impact in the world of work. Andrew Beattie caught up with her to find out more…

Tell us about the work that you do, and who you do it for.

I’m the CEO and founder of Brava Investments. We are an investment platform that focuses on businesses that can both provide great returns to investors as well as prove that they’re making an economic impact on as many women as possible.

What has been your favourite project that you’ve worked on, to date?

Some of the most exciting things that I’ve seen is software that works within a large enterprise that is designed to help both retain, but also elevate, women and people of colour. Because, certainly in the US, that is a group of people that are seemingly leaving the corporate environment in droves, and large corporations are having a hard time retaining them. The purpose of this software is to help large corporations to address this by doing things like peer mentoring, improved communication, and making sure that the new positions within the company are first and foremost shared with women and under-represented groups. That’s a company that we love.

What would be your ideal business collaboration?

We have a challenge that is not about pipelines. So, for example, and I think this is probably the case around the world, women are starting businesses in the US more than men; and in the US, eight out of every ten businesses are started by women of colour. There is a misconception that we need to get women to be more entrepreneurial, and that’s not true — women are exceptionally entrepreneurial, and especially women of colour — they are the most entrepreneurial of all. The challenge that they have is the majority of their businesses are small. I focus on businesses that scale — I’m looking for businesses that have hundreds of thousands of people, whether they be employees or be they consumers. We are going to be economically better off because of these companies.

Who are the business leaders that inspire you, and why?

There’s a woman by the name of Joan Fallon. Having been a doctor and having had a pediatric practice and seeing that there are more and more children turning up with cases of autism, she spent the past 20 years as a doctor turning herself into an entrepreneur. She now owns a pharmaceutical startup and she has developed the first ever drug for children with autism. She is going to change the world.

If you could recommend one book to inspire the next generation of business leaders, what would it be?

One of my favourite business books isn’t actually a business book. It’s by the world-famous choreographer, Twyla Tharp, and called The Creative Habit. I love it because a lot of the time, women, or people that are thinking about being entrepreneurial, worry that they’re not creative enough. We have a stereotype and ideas about what an entrepreneur looks and acts like — they tend to be extroverted and eccentric and creative — and, what she says in her book is that creativity isn’t something that you’re born with it’s something that you have to exercise like a muscle; she gives really descriptive ways about how you can develop that muscle and gives examples of how she does it.

Are you listening to any podcasts at the moment?

I tend to follow people and not podcasts. In my book there’s a woman named Arlan Hamilton, who is fantastic — I’ve listened to her make appearances in various podcasts. There’s a woman called Maria Hinojosa who runs a radio show called Latino USA — that is one of the few news sources that I really trust in a country where news sources are less and less trustworthy.

What inspires you?

What I try to do is get out of my world. My thinking is that if I’m inspired by people who are in my own industry then I’m going to be recycling the same ideas again and again. There is a scholar who works for the Brookings Institute called Andre Perry and he does amazing research which essentially quantifies the impact of racism on the economy. And so, if you think about a neighbourhood, for example, that is a perfectly nice neighbourhood and the values of the houses there have been consistently growing over the course of many decades. Then black citizens move in to that neighbourhood, and for no reason other than them moving in, the values of those houses drop. Perry does analysis on what the overall impact is on the economy.

What do you do for fun?

Keeping my foot, or one toe, in the arts is part of what I do for fun. It’s for fun but it’s also related to my business in some way, in that I’m in the business of empowering women economically; but what is the point of empowering women if we live in a culture that doesn’t know how to treat them with respect. Culture and the arts are really important to me, both because it’s fun, but also because it’s a part of what I’m trying to do with my business.

What are your tips for business success?

Other than the 50 I have in my book, the biggest thing, and the motivation behind writing the book, is that I think that women have moved forward and progressed by trying to be perfect — by getting perfect marks in schools and getting degrees from prestigious universities, and trying to follow the rules that were fed to us. I think that it’s time — and this is maybe my biggest tip for success — that we do what everybody has succeeded before us has done, which is that they didn’t really follow the rules; they took short cuts, or they got roles that were unpublished because they knew someone. I think we should take inspiration from some of those short cuts and find our own.

I think it’s time that we get over this business of trying to be perfect and get there faster because the World Economic Forum says that at the rate that we’re going we’re going to get to gender parity in 170 years and that is unacceptable.