Leadership Journeys [94] - Rosemarie Diegnan - "Your lows are when you learn how committed you are."

This is the Leadership Journey series on the Choosing Leadership Podcast.

I believe we all have a lot to learn from each other's stories - of where we started, where we are now, and our successes and struggles on the way. With this series of interviews, my attempt is to give leaders an opportunity to share their stories and for all of us to learn from their generous sharing. If you know a leader whom you would like to see celebrated on the show, please send me a message on LinkedIn with their name.

In the interview, Rosemarie shared her interesting journey from being a lawyer to a tech startup co-founder. She has just joined the Founder’s Pledge to give a percentage of her proceeds to charity. She shares her love for working together in person and adds that we are denying us something if we do not work physically together.

You can find Rosemarie at the below links

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdiegnan/
• https://twitter.com/rdiegnan

In the interview, Rosemarie shares

• started out in the tech world as a technical I'd always had an intent to go to law school. So after doing that for a little while, I went to law school worked as  a lawyer in the US for about five years.
• Decided I did not wanna be a lawyer and tried a bunch of different things. Actually, I I thought I wanted to go. I was looking into going into the charity sector and worked for about two years between being a lawyer and getting full-time employment 
•  did various things including working as a volunteer attorney for an organization addressing women and children's issues. 
• after about a year of doing HR consulting I'm was at an event and I met someone who was the c e o of an HR software company, and I convinced him to hire me as their first product manager without actually really knowing what a product manager was.
• But so started that, did that for a while. I was involved with a couple of startups in the US and about 10 and a half, 11 years ago made the decision to, I was able to get my Irish citizenship through my heritage. My grandparents were born in Ireland, so I decided now's the time to take advantage, and I came to the UK to check out the startup scene here.   
• like giving back has always been a big motivator for you, like when you started as a lawyer also, can you share a bit about. ultimately it's something that is important to me and hopefully in the future I'll be able to do it more effectively. But particularly children and opportunities for children have always been really important to me 
• when I was in California, I joined an organization called casa, which is court appointed special advocates. And basically what it is they train volunteers. So  I happen to be a lawyer, but you don't have to be one to do this. They train volunteers to represent the interests of children who are in the foster care system.
• And I've just joined an organization called Founder's Pledge where essentially what you do is you pledge to give a percentage of the proceeds from your. Your startup, your scale up once you have an exit and then it can be, it gets given to charities. 
• I think that one of the biggest things that hold people back is fear.