The SIP: Season 2, Episode 4 Transcript

Learn more about The SIP and its fourth episode of the second season, Helping Millions Find Their Purpose by Pursuing Her Own with Kathryn Minshew (2004), here.

Intro music

Chantelle George:

Yay, yay!

Kathryn Minshew:

That was fun!

Lauren O’Brien:

That was so great!

Carolyn Norton:

That was so good!

Chantelle George:

Awe. Kathryn, we’re a team, honey. Listen!

Kathryn Minshew:

That was fun.

Transitional music

Ericka Jones:

Hi Coke Scholar family and friends. Welcome to season two of The SIP, the podcast that shares a taste of the Coke Scholars around the world who are igniting positive change. My name is Ericka Jones, and I’m a proud 2011 Coca-Cola Scholar originally from Los Angeles and now finishing up my final year of ministry school in Northern California. I’m an actor, a poet, a storyteller, but most importantly, a lover of people. For those of you who are listening and may not be a Coca-Cola Scholar, welcome. We are glad to have you.

To give you a little background, the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation is the largest achievement based and corporate sponsored scholarship program in the country. Each year, it awards $20,000 to 150 high school students across the country who share a unique passion for service and leadership. It’s a competitive program to get into, but once you’re a Coke Scholar, the benefits go far beyond the money for college. You become a part of this bigger family for life. If you want to learn more, you can visit their website at Coca-ColaScholarsFoundation.org.

Welcome back to The SIP. It’s Ericka, and I am hoping that you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I know that it was probably a little bit unorthodox for some of you this year, but I’m hoping that you got a chance to tell someone that you are grateful for them. And if you haven’t, it’s never too late to send that text message or to make that phone call. In a really tumultuous year, I know that I’m personally grateful for world changers and folks that are set on building bridges. And speaking of world changers and building bridges, in our fourth episode, 2006 Scholar Chantelle George will be talking with 2004 Scholar Kathryn Minshew, co-founder and CEO of The Muse about her entrepreneurial spirit and her passion for helping people navigate their careers.

As the founder and CEO of Chantelle George Consulting, Chantelle brings more than 10 years of post-secondary experience in the areas of higher education, college, and career readiness and nonprofit leadership. A champion for student choice and success, Chantelle began her professional career in higher education, coaching and advising students through their journey to and through the college experience. To date, she’s built and maintains more than 30 strategic partnerships between K through 12 districts, institutions of higher education and nonprofits, all to improve and close the gaps that exist for underserved students in transitioning and persisting from high school to post-secondary education. Chantelle is currently pursuing her doctorate degree in higher education at LSU this fall. What a way to build bridges, Chantelle.

Now let’s learn a little bit about Kathyrn, a CEO and founder of The Muse, one of Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world. Kathryn Minshew spends every single day helping create the future of work. For individuals, this means helping over 50 million people use The Muse to navigate their careers. For companies, they help them to tell a more authentic data driven employer story and to showcase the unique employee experiences and values that make them special. Ultimately, the goal is to help both sides find the right fit.

Previously, Kathryn worked on vaccine introduction in Rwanda and Malawi with the Clinton Health Access Initiative. And prior to that at the management consultancy, McKinsey & Company. She’s an author of The New Rules of Work, a Wall Street Journal National Bestseller. She’s also the host of The New Rules of Work podcast. I’m excited to learn more about how Kathryn has re-engineered and re-imagined the way we think about work and the workspace. I’m equally as excited to hear about how she navigates her own world all while bringing healthy transformation to our work cultures. What a hero. Now without further ado, here’s Chantelle and Kathryn.

Chantelle George:

Hello, Kathryn. How are you?

Kathryn Minshew:

Hello. I’m excited to be here.

Chantelle George:

Excited to have you. So it is an interesting time in the world and I’m so happy to have the time to connect with you, for us to connect with each other. So let’s just start off with getting to know who you are. Tell us a little bit about your background, your upbringing, and what you’re working on right now.

Kathryn Minshew:

All right. Well, I was born in Dallas, Texas, but mostly grew up outside of Washington DC. And for a long time, when I was younger from probably age 13, 14, until really until late college, I thought that I was going to be a foreign service officer or a CIA agent, AKA, I wanted to be an international woman of mystery. I think actually I got the idea from that television show Alias that was really popular in the late nineties and early two thousands that Jennifer Garner played a total bad-ass kind of super double agent. But I ended up working at a US Embassy in Cyprus in the Mediterranean realizing that the career path I thought I wanted didn’t actually reflect what I thought it would be like.

And it got me fascinated by how people pick their careers, how people make decisions about what job they take, what company they work for. That led me about nine years ago to start The Muse, which is the business that I run today. It’s a job searching career platform. We have, gosh, about 75 million people every year who come to the site to find that kind of right fit. So that can be the right fit job, the right fit company, the right fit career path. And that’s me in a nutshell.

Chantelle George:

Awesome. Well, shout out to Dallas, Texas. I lived in Houston for about eight and a half years, so definitely call Texas a little bit of home. What you’re describing is just so important nowadays, especially when it comes to career, so careers for our students that are about to graduate, careers for young professionals, individuals that are thinking about shifting careers. What is some advice you would give to individuals as they are thinking about maybe starting a new career, especially now during the pandemic. Right? I feel like a lot of individuals have been opening new businesses or just having the time to think about some things.

Kathryn Minshew:

Yeah. Well, it’s such an interesting time for that. Any time you’ve got major upheaval in the world or in someone’s life, it brings up these questions of, should I be doing something differently? I mean, obviously we probably could write a book on advice for people changing careers. But a few of the top things that I always like to recommend. The first is I think the most powerful careers align with your personal values and goals. So I think before you jump into something new, it could be really helpful to just take a step back and think what matters to me? What sort of life do I want to live? What things are my non-negotiables, and what am I willing to give up? Because you can’t necessarily get a 10 out of 10 on every dimension, but you can maximize your career for the things that are most important.

So for example, some people might care about compensation, stability, prestige. Someone else might want creativity, flexibility, no two days the same. There’s such a wide variety of options out there. So I think it can be really helpful to go through an exercise to ask yourself, what are my values? And if you’re having trouble coming up with that list, you can think about when you’ve been in flow state, what sorts of activities attract you. You can talk to friends, relatives, colleagues, parents, professors, whoever you have in your life who’s seen you work and ask them what they think you value. But make sure that you don’t take their values as your own because really, it’s about what matters to you.

Then I think you can look at different career paths, different jobs, and start to assess do I think I would maybe be able to get that sort of experience out of this path? If you’re mid-career taking an inventory about what transferable skills you might have is always a really helpful place to start. Again, there’s a lot of different ways to do that. We actually probably have, I don’t know, 25 articles on transferable skills on TheMuse.com alone.

But one of the things I actually love to tell people to do is to go to a job search site. You can use The Muse. You could use one of the other ones, whatever, but find a job description for a role that is similar to the one you’re in now and then maybe a few job descriptions for roles that are aspirational, places you think you might want to go in the future, and then just get a highlighter. And for the one year and on, highlight what skills you have today in that job description, and then in a different colored highlighter, look at the others and highlight what skills you might need to acquire or develop.

That can just be a really helpful way of helping you say, “Okay, well, I’ve got a few of the things that I need already, but if I want to move in this direction, I should get some customer-facing experience. I should raise my hand to take on planning for a cross departmental initiative.” Whatever it is, that sort of literal job description by job description comparison can kind of help shine a light on what you might have and what you might want to develop.

Chantelle George:

Yeah. That is so important. Transferable skills. I had the opportunity to talk to some students today and we were discussing transferable skills of even if you are switching careers or changing your majors or trying to figure out what you want to do, there are certain, what I would call the soft skills, the basic skills that can be utilized in so many different professions, whether it’s using Excel or grant writing or public speaking. That is super important. As you have been reflecting and going through your journey and before you even started The Muse, what made you decide that you wanted to go the entrepreneur route, right? Because it is a special world being a business owner, as someone myself who just launched her business. Tell us a little bit about what that decision was for you to really kind of go off and branch and do your own thing. And how has that changed you as a person and the way you kind of think about careers as a whole, that difference between being an entrepreneur versus like actually working for someone?

Kathryn Minshew:

Yeah. Well, I had a couple of jobs before I went out on my own, in addition to the state department, which I mentioned, I worked for McKinsey & Company as a management consultant based in New York City, but traveling all around. Then I did a stint with the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which is a big nonprofit, part of the Clinton Foundation, mostly based in Kigali, Rwanda, and working on vaccine introduction. I’d had a couple of different kind of iterations of my early career. I honestly sort of fell into entrepreneurship almost on accident.

I actually like sharing that because when I was younger, at least being an entrepreneur or working at a startup was not a big thing that a lot of people did. I have this sense, first of all, that entrepreneurs knew from childhood that they wanted to be entrepreneurs. And that was not me. I thought I wanted to be, like I said, either a foreign service officer, maybe like an actor on Broadway. I had a lot of dreams. Being an entrepreneur was not one of them until I was in my sort of mid twenties.

Then secondly, when I first got involved in tech, everyone that I saw on stages, in magazines, they looked like the 22 year old white guy that dropped out of Stanford. That was also not me. I didn’t know how to code. There were all of these ways. Obviously I’m female. In so many different ways, I was different from the archetype that it took me awhile to realize this is something I can do too.

The abbreviated version of how I got into it is that when I was leaving McKinsey and moving to Kigali, I ended up having a couple of conversations with friends of mine who were working at McKinsey still. And one of them was, I mean, literally it was in a car on the way back from a bar where a couple of colleagues that had a drink after work. This girl says to me, “It’s so frustrating that women’s magazines are all about like what color of nail polish is hot for fall, but nobody’s talking about how to get a raise and how to be successful.”

Chantelle George:

Very true.

Kathryn Minshew:

And like 10 years ago, there was none of this content, especially for women, for young women that was very modern, very fresh, very relevant. So we started talking and she’s like, “I think we should start a print magazine.” To which I immediately said, “Oh no, I worked at a print magazine in college, but we should start a digital publication because it’ll be a lot more affordable.” It was much more aligned with our skillset. So we came up with this idea, let’s start an online website with career content for women. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. We ended up recruiting two other women, all early twenties. We started publishing this blog effectively.

It was not a quote unquote startup in a lot of ways at the beginning. We had no money. We didn’t try to raise money. We all had other full-time jobs. We were working on it, but I loved it. I loved it so so much. So when there came this sort of opportunity where I realized I probably should quit my job and focus on this thing full time if I was going to be serious. What I did is I basically gave myself six months to not stress out. I had been saving in my first job.

I was actually very lucky in that my best friend at the time was working in theater. So I basically decided like… We moved into this tiny apartment and I said, “I’m going to try and live on similar expenses to her and any amount I get from my paycheck over and above my basic living expenses, I’m going to sock away into a fund that will give me the freedom to do whatever I want after this consulting job.” Because I don’t know what that is, but it might not pay so well. And I just want to have freedom. So when I decided to start a business, I thought, okay, I can cover my living expenses for six months. And if at six months, it hasn’t worked out, I’ll have to get another job. But I’m willing to bet on myself. I’m going to invest that six months of living expenses in myself.

And I dove in. The funny thing is six months later, that business basically went up in flames. But at that point, I was so convinced in the opportunity of The Muse. I was such a believer that we could build a business that me and one of the other women from that first initiative basically started over, and we started The Muse. And the rest is history.

Chantelle George:

The rest is history. You know what? I was about to ask you, what steps do you take when you’re working a full-time job and then stepping into the business 100%? Which you just described was so key around saving money, getting your plan together, saving for six months. I think that is so important. The other piece is just being a woman. Just being a woman as a business owner, it’s difficult. I’m happy to see so many of us that are out there now, especially like being a woman of color myself, but it’s also very challenging. Can you talk to us a little bit about as a woman and a business leader, what are the obstacles that you’ve had to overcome? What is some advice you would give to some other young women who are looking to start their own business?

Kathryn Minshew:

Yeah. Well, I think that we still clearly have such a long way to go when it comes to equal access, equal opportunity for people of different genders, for people of different races and ethnicities. And I think that the tech industry has made some strides, but I’m also very frustrated by the data that shows that women, for example, I think still receive less than 3% of all venture capital funding. So my path was definitely littered with a lot of the obstacles you read about. When I started The Muse, I think I was about 25 years old. I looked young as well. So a lot of people patted me on the head, “Oh, that’s such a cute project people.” And by people specifically, I mean, older men were often still calling my business a project when we had a million dollars in revenue and 10 employees. I wanted to be like, “I’m pretty sure you’re not calling your other entrepreneurs’ businesses their little project.”

I’ve had an investor proposition me for sex. I mean, I’ve had a lot of crazy stuff happen. It has gotten better. I will say that. It is nowhere near where it needs to be, but it has gotten better. I think the things that have helped me get through it… And by the way, that’s not every woman’s experience, but I do think that for me, it was having an amazing community of other women that I was supported by, that I provided support for. Because it can be really hard. Frankly, being an entrepreneur in general, and you know this, it is just hard.

Chantelle George:

It is.

Kathryn Minshew:

It is brutally hard at times, no matter who you are, no matter what advantages or disadvantages you have. Then on top of that, you add all of these different ways that you might not be privileged. You might not look like again, like the classic Mark Zuckerberg model. And it makes it that much harder in terms of being taken seriously, getting access to capital.

Another thing that I think is so interesting is there’s a lot of really thorough research that’s been done in corporate environments about the difference between how men and women are promoted. One of the themes that comes out in almost every single research study is that men are often promoted based on potential, whereas women are promoted based on performance. A woman will need to actually demonstrate very clearly that she can do the job to get the chance to do it. Whereas often, particularly because leadership is more likely to be male, sometimes they say, “Oh, he looks like me when I was younger, I feel like he can handle it.” And they’ll give men that chance based on potential. And again, this has been documented by, I think researchers from almost every major university.

Chantelle George:

Right, right.

Kathryn Minshew:

What’s so interesting is the research into how those same biases play out in entrepreneurship is it’s a little bit less developed than in a corporate setting, but there seems to be very clear indications that when investors look at entrepreneurs, they look at men and they see the potential and they look at women and they say, “But have you proven you can do it? Can you convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt?” And the fact is most early stage businesses, nothing is beyond a shadow of a doubt because you’re trying to do something that’s never been done.

For me, again, it was surrounding myself with other incredible entrepreneurs and especially this really kind of incredible passionate, diverse set of women. We could help each other, trade advice, commiserate when something frustrating or really difficult happened. And then I’ve done a lot of what I would call like AB testing in my own day-to-day life. I tried wearing different things to pitch meetings. I tried different locations. I tried to pay a lot of attention what works for me. Because what works for another entrepreneur might not work for you. That’s okay. For me, it was like wearing black leather to pitch meetings, doing them in offices so I could be a little bit more serious and focused versus in a coffee shop where you’re like, “Oh, hi, nice to meet you. Would you like a coffee?” “Oh, sure.” You know? No. If I was already getting dinged for being young, for being female, I needed to show up ready to play and I had to pick environments and situations that let me do that.

I also discovered that when I pitched on stage, people were much more likely to invest than when I met them in a casual context. I mean, I could talk about this for like hours. I don’t want to bore everybody, but it was really thinking about it like a process where you’re constantly learning and tweaking and iterating and trying to figure out what’s right for you.

Chantelle George:

Yeah. That’s so important. Just having that support system, as you mentioned, is key as. For myself as well, I ask a ton of questions I fail forward every day is how I put it. I fail forward. But it’s a blessing that a lot of women… Before I decided to start consulting, I spent about three to four months just talking to different women to ask them about how did you raise money? How did you get investors? What were the challenges? What should I expect? And as you mentioned, it is not glamorous. It is not glamorous at all. It is a lot of work and it’s really, really hard as a woman, but we’re out here and we’re doing it. As far as you think of, if you think ahead in the next 10 years, what are you hoping to accomplish? Where would you like to see The Muse grow?

Kathryn Minshew:

Oh, I love that question because I think you’ve got to have a vision of the future that excites you to kind of push through all the challenges of building a company. For me, a part of that vision of the future is this idea of fit. It’s the right fit between an individual and the place they work, the job they work in and the career path that they’re on. I just think as a society, we have not done a good job of that, right? When I was in college, I want to say like, what 12 ish years ago? I remember going to my local college career center and trying to ask some questions about careers. And they’re like, “Well, you can be a lawyer, a doctor, go to Teach for America, work in iBanking, or we have this great book called 498 Careers for Liberal Arts Majors.” I was like, “That’s not that helpful.”

So I think that for me for The Muse, I want to give people a way to both answer questions and browse information to help them identify what do they value? What skills do they have? And what is the right job company and career that matches that? I think that I want to talk a little bit more about company, because I think that the match between an individual and the organization where they work is so powerful. Honestly, it’s a lot like a relationship, right?

Chantelle George:

It is.

Kathryn Minshew:

It is. And when it works, it’s beautiful. People love their jobs, their colleagues, the culture. They feel successful, supported, et cetera. When it doesn’t work, it’s demotivating, frustrating. And when you think about what is one of the first rules of dating, it’s different strokes for different folks. People are very different. People are looking for very different things. You’ve got to be yourself, you’ve got to find someone else who’s being themselves. And you got to see if those two things match. There’s no idea of like, who are the 10 best people to date in New York City? That’s silly, but we still have all these lists right there that are like, “Oh, the 10 best companies to work for.” Those lists honestly are bull. I don’t know if I can say that, sorry, but I think the idea of some sort of arbitrary objective, every company rated on exactly the same factors is just so silly, frankly.

So a part of my vision for The Muse is to really get much better at articulating and helping organizations articulate specifically, what are they like to work for? What is the good? What is the frustrating? What is the quirks, the personality? And then helping someone on the outside say, “Yeah, yeah, I’d like that.” Or frankly, “No, no, that is not for me.” Great.

I have to tell the HR partners that we work with because most of how The Muse makes money is companies that buy a subscription to our platform to hire great millennial and gen Z talent. And we can talk a little bit more about the business model because I had to do a lot of trial and error to figure that out. But I have to tell HR and talent leaders all the time, if somebody is looking at your profile on The Muse and they decide not to apply to your jobs because it doesn’t seem like a good fit, that is great. That is incredible. That means that they have saved themselves time. You and your team have saved yourself time because you want to get someone who likes the job that they accept. Right? One of the things I’m proudest of is that compared to a lot of other job boards, we’re both far more efficient in how many applicants it takes to get a hire and our hires stay longer. And to me, that should be the whole point of hiring, right?

Chantelle George:

It is. The retaining. Retaining high level talent. Then that is so key in something I think about as someone who’s worked in so many different places and I’ve worked at awesome places, not so awesome places, just depending. It is like a relationship. It could either be a sweet dream or a beautiful nightmare, as Beyoncé would say. It could be one or the two. I’ve looked at where I’ve had some tremendous opportunities and some amazing managers and places that have had great culture. But that is not the case for everyone. And it’s so important to find the right match because it is such a headache to have to constantly rehire and the turnover. That is so important.

Kathryn Minshew:

It’s not good for anybody, right? It’s so-

Chantelle George:

It’s more expensive to have to rehire. Exactly.

Kathryn Minshew:

Absolutely. And you think about also all the institutional knowledge when somebody moves on. Especially, I mean, I tell a lot of our employers, the worst thing that can happen to you is you hire someone and they leave in three to six months.

Chantelle George:

Oh yeah.

Kathryn Minshew:

You’ve invested a lot of time, a lot of money.

Chantelle George:

A waste of time.

Kathryn Minshew:

Exactly. And then they’re gone. You want to hire someone and have them stay for a couple of years. Honestly, I think that the way that we’ve measured the success of hiring processes is really not serving us because most of the companies that I talked to, their recruiting teams are still gold on cost and time. Which means how fast did you make the hire? How cheap did you make the hire? But again, that is not the number one point of a hire. And that’s like a get the butt in the seat kind of mentality.

So a big part of what I’ve been advocating for in the broader industry around the future of work around careers is that as employers, we should measure things like are the people that we’re hiring happy? Are they productive? Are they staying? Would their managers hire them again? That’s what a successful hiring process is. It’s not just racing to the lowest common denominator or the bottom line. Those things are important, of course, but there’s sub bullets after you get the hire right. They’re not an excuse to get the wrong person in the door.

Sorry, by the way, the last thing. One of the reasons I care about this so much is sometimes I think companies or recruiters feel a pressure to tell candidates things that aren’t true in an effort to just close the role. “Oh yes. We’re very innovative. Oh, we’re so diverse.” No, you’ve got to be honest because if you sell people a bill of goods to get them in the door, you’ve just got an unhappy and disappointed employee on your hands. And again, that does not serve anyone. It doesn’t serve them. It doesn’t serve you.

Chantelle George:

It does not. It does not. I’m going to shift gears a little bit. So obviously one thing that connects us is that we are both Coke Scholars. If you could rewind to your 17 year old self, pre Scholars Weekend, what advice would you give the 17 year old Kathryn?

Kathryn Minshew:

I love this question. The thing that comes to mind first is I wish I would have told her like, “Chill out. You’re doing okay.” I think sometimes young people who are passionate, who are motivated, they put so much pressure on themselves to get it right right away. I remember agonizing in high school about which college to go to and in college about which job to take. There was a part of me that acted like if I don’t get it right, my life is over. The reality is we live in a world where are going to change careers often six to eight times in their lifetime. Exactly. Sometimes 10 plus. There is a lot of flexibility.

So I often encourage young people to one, take a deep breath. You’re doing fine. Two, think about what you can learn, perhaps a little bit more than what you get. I would always encourage someone to take a job opportunity early in their career where they think they’re going to learn and grow tremendously over one that pays a little bit more money unless there’s a very specific reason that you must have that money. Otherwise you will be able to invest the experiences and the skills that you gain into a higher salary and a better career path later on.

I also think, I guess last thing I would tell 17 year old Kathryn is… And actually I feel like I actually did a good job of this. It’s like your early career is a great time to take risks.

Chantelle George:

Yes.

Kathryn Minshew:

Now, in your mid thirties, for example, if I was like, “Oh, I want to go like intern and brand marketing,” that is hard. It is complicated. You worry about maybe being embarrassed in front of people who know you as like really, really good in one industry and now you’re… And you can do it. I think people should do a career change, frankly, at any age. But I really tell young people, you don’t realize the gift you have in being able to just try. So take an internship in some super random field that you think you might be interested in. Look at me, I’m going to build my career in technology. I’ve been in technology for nine years, 10 years almost. But my early career experiences were vaccine introduction and global health in East Africa, working in New York City and across Ohio and Michigan and Missouri and management consulting doing a lot of mortgages.

All these random different things, but I love those experiences. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. And I’m so grateful that I had the ability to just try and fail and test different things out at that stage in my life because it really is such an opportunity to sort of spread your interests at wide.

Chantelle George:

Yeah. That is so important and so key, even for myself, I’m like, “You know what? The sky’s the limit.” There are so many jobs that I find out about that I’m like, “Man, if I would’ve known that 10 years ago.” And I was sharing with students too, I’m like, “The jobs that are available now, in the next 10 years, there’s going to be more jobs that are going to be available to them within the next 10 years.” And so I agree, I believe in taking risks and seeing what happens. Throwing a bunch of things up at the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s never too late to change your career. I started off in healthcare. I was a cancer researcher for the first three years right out of college. Loved it, but knew it wasn’t really my passion and my jam.

Then I shifted careers completely to higher education. I’ve been in this college access space and I probably will stay in this space because it actually is the reason why I was put on this earth. I’m convinced.

Kathryn Minshew:

I love that. What a gift to know that.

Chantelle George:

What a gift. Exactly. It’s what I want to wake up and do every day.

Kathryn Minshew:

Absolutely and probably some of the same things that drew you to be initially interested in healthcare are probably, I would guess, still true in-

Chantelle George:

Supporting people.

Kathryn Minshew:

Exactly. They just manifest and show up in very different ways.

Chantelle George:

Exactly. All right. A couple of questions left. If you were not in your current role as far as business owning The Muse, what would you do? What other job would you want to have?

Kathryn Minshew:

Well, I’m going to… Well, okay. So restaurant critic, if that were an option. Being paid to go around and eat delicious food, that sounds terrible. Don’t make me do it, but no, I’ll give you actually a slightly more serious answer, which is I love supporting women entrepreneurs, and I love learning about women entrepreneurs. I want to encourage more women to start businesses and step out on their own. So if I were not doing this, I would either… If I had some sort of experience like this, I’d love to advise, invest and help other women entrepreneurs. Honestly, also made so many just like stupid operational mistakes in the early days of The Muse that I would love to help another person avoid some of those and just be able to focus on their product and their market and their vision. So that would be one.

The other thing I’ve always thought would be really fun would be to convince a television network to let me do a TV show for them where I fly around the world interviewing female entrepreneurs and sort of shining a spotlight on just amazing women creatives and business owners all around the world. And also, it would scratch my secret itch for travel. So if anybody’s listening to this-

Chantelle George:

Please.

Kathryn Minshew:

I’m interested. I mean, I need like like five to 10 years, because I’m pretty into this Muse thing, but come back to me later.

Chantelle George:

No, I love that idea. I personally want to have my own talk show. So at some point I’m hoping to do that. So I agree.

Kathryn Minshew:

Okay. We’ll do it together.

Chantelle George:

I love to travel too. Partnered in crime. There you go. All right. To end this, I have this little game we’re going to play call the Fast 5. So I’m going to ask you, it’s like the really quick whatever comes to mind on these questions. Are you ready?

Kathryn Minshew:

Oh boy. All right.

Chantelle George:

Here we go. All right. The first one is what are two apps or websites you can’t live without?

Kathryn Minshew:

Instagram because it’s how I keep up with my friends and their babies. And then Pocket, because I like to save articles to read them later.

Chantelle George:

There we go. All right. Number two. If I looked at the music on your iPhone or iPod right now, what would surprise me?

Kathryn Minshew:

There’s a lot of country. I’m a huge country fan. It’s so happy. It’s so awesome. There’s also a lot of Taylor Swift. That probably wouldn’t surprise you. Yeah. I would say-

Chantelle George:

I like Taylor.

Kathryn Minshew:

And actually a lot of Broadway, some Disney, some Hamilton.

Chantelle George:

Hamilton.

Kathryn Minshew:

Again, I don’t know how surprising. Yeah. I could probably sing it end to end. I’m honestly-

Chantelle George:

I love Hamilton.

Kathryn Minshew:

… I’m not sure that there’s any part of that musical that I haven’t committed to memory at this point.

Chantelle George:

I saw it twice in Chicago by myself, literally like rolled up there the day of, got a really cheap ticket, like second row and lived my absolute best life. So I’m here for the Hamilton.

Kathryn Minshew:

Oh my gosh. It’s amazing for entrepreneurs, by the way, because I think seeing the story of how the United States was a bit of a hot mess in the early days really made me feel better about the evolution of my company in the early days as well.

Chantelle George:

There you go. All right. Favorite book or piece of music or art that has helped or inspired you in your life?

Kathryn Minshew:

So Hamilton is often a candidate for this. I saw the show within the first month after it went on Broadway and it was very, very meaningful because of what I was going through as an entrepreneur, as an individual at that point. But just to throw something else out there, there’s a Tom Stoppard play called Arcadia. It was written in 1992 and it sort of concerns this idea of like, how do you know what happened in history? I don’t know. There’s like chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics. It’s a really ridiculous play, but I fell in love with it when I was probably 16 years old and it’s been a favorite all the way through.

Chantelle George:

Arcadia.

Kathryn Minshew:

Arcadia.

Chantelle George:

I’ll have to check that one out. All right. What quote or motto do you live your life by?

Kathryn Minshew:

If I had to pick one, I’d say, “Everything worth doing is hard.” I don’t know if that’s exactly a quote, but there’s a Walt Disney quote. “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” There’s a phrase I often use around like, “Look, if it were easy, everyone would do it.” I think the idea that really worthwhile things take effort. They take time. They’re challenging. That’s probably the idea or the concept that I most resonate with.

Chantelle George:

Very true. What makes the Coke Scholars program or network unique?

Kathryn Minshew:

The people. I have just loved being part of this incredible community of other scholars. Just the opportunity to meet and have this immediate common ground with so many incredible, brilliant, awesome, hilarious, interesting people all over the country is really special. It was special when I joined in 2004 and it’s special now. So yeah, that would be my answer.

Chantelle George:

Awesome. I echo all of that as well. We are a family. Kathryn, thank you so much for the time. I enjoyed it. I’m sure everyone who listens in will enjoy it. And how do people find out about The Muse?

Kathryn Minshew:

Oh yeah. So you could go to The Muse.com T-H-E-M-U-S-E.com. You can Google The Muse. We should be number one on Google. You can find us on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on all the channels. But I would definitely encourage people to go to the website, check it out. You can tweet at me @KMIN. K-M-I-N. Let me know what you think. And yeah, just very excited to hear feedback. And thank you again for having me.

Ericka Jones:

We hope you enjoyed the fourth episode of season two of The SIP featuring Chantelle and Kathryn. To learn more about The Muse or other things they discussed, check out our show notes or Coca-ColaScholarsFoundation.org. And if you have an extra minute, we’d love for you to rate the show or to leave us a review.

Check back in two weeks when 1992 Scholar Sue Suh talks with 1990 Scholar Jason Feldman, who co-founded Vault Health, the first company to provide specialized healthcare for men at home. They also provide at-home COVID-19 saliva testing for everyone, which is amazing. See you next time on The SIP.