Quick Win: The million-dollar moment that tested Catriona Wallace’s integrity

0:00IHOT podcasts. Get more podcasts, playlists, and live radio on the free IHOT app. This break is brought to you by Adobe Creative Cloud, the ultimate creative toolkit. With over 20 apps at your fingertips, there are always new ways to explore your creativity. Transform images with Photoshop. Design graphics with Illustrator. Edit videos with Premiere Pro. Or animate just about anything. No matter what you want to create, Adobe has the tools you need to bring your ideas to life. It's all in Creative Cloud. One million dollars. That is what they offered her if she would just take out her nose ring. And when Dr. Katrina Wallace told me that, I had to ask, did you even consider it? Because this wasn't a casual insult by someone. Katrina was the CEO of one of the world's first AI companies, pitching to investors,

1:00trying to grow a newly listed startup. And the condition for their million dollar investment was that she looked more like the kind of leader they expected. In this quick win, you'll hear what Cat did next and why her decision wasn't just about a piece of jewelry. And by the end of this episode, you will see how saying no, even when it costs you $1 million can become the clearest yes to yourself. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm your host, Dr. Amat the Ember. Tell me about your million dollar nose ring. Right, so this is another, I'm like mine. I'm just blowing time, stopping the moment. So this is when we had just been down to Melbourne. At that stage, we were sort of like the darling of the ASX

2:02because we knew where AI, it's all exciting. We went down and we pitched a number of investment companies in Melbourne in Melbourne Airport, flying home, I was there with my board of directors. And one of the directors got a call and said, and I could hear him talking, he's saying, what a million dollar investment, that'd be great. That's fantastic, thank you very much. And then, oh, there's a condition, right. Okay, okay, let me just check on that. So he sort of put the call on hold and he said to me, oh, Kat, it's very exciting. We've got one of the investment companies, the lead investors here and they are willing to invest a million dollars into the business. And I said, fantastic, we much, much, and we're really great pitch and that's all, really well. And then you can see the blood draining from his face. And he said, I'll bet that there is one condition. And I said, sure, you know, what's the condition? Is it revenue or reducing the cost of sale or expansion into another territory? He said, no, it's not that. He said, they will give you a million dollars.

3:04They will give the business a million dollars. If you the CEO will take your nose ring out. And again, I said, what? What? What the hell? And then I thought he was joking. And I could see like, more blood draining of his face. He goes, we're not joking. That's the condition. It's a million dollars, but you need to remove your nose ring. And right there, I already knew. And I just said, no, then we won't take the money. There's absolutely no way. Is he going to ask a male CEO to remove his tattoo? Like, and then my board member said, oh, you know, very conservative that people in his funds and I said, it's a nose ring. It's a nose ring. That's all it is. And so I said, no, tell him, no, we won't accept his money. And so again, which is very hard because, you know, start up, newly listed on the stock exchange. Of course, he want to take money, but there was like, absolutely not going to do it. So we said no. And then the next day, I had like a quite a conservative nose ring.

4:06I went down to Gleab Markets or somewhere and I bought like a really big nose ring. I bought like a pretty big nose ring ever since. Oh my gosh. Was there a part of you that considered it? Well, that one actually, some of the board members said, mmm, cat, you know, maybe it's a bit of ego that's, you're saying no, or maybe, you know, we've all got to make sacrifices. And this seems like a very, very small sacrifice, you know, it's essentially it's a million dollar note string. And I said, yeah, and still know, like still know for this one, Matthew was a strict no because it was also, I believe, the fact that I was a female, you know, I really believe that. And so it's like, I start compromising on this as a woman leader and the very few women leaders of tech stock at the time. Like what next is it going to be? And then I had lots of other times. I had, I once did a big investor presentation, I was wearing this kind of black and gold dress.

5:08I had an investor come up to me later and said, please never wear a dress when you speak again because I can't concentrate on what you're saying because I'm staring at your dress. And I've had investors ring my directors to say, if Katrina's going to present, we'd like her to brush her hair more because her hair's a bit messy. Like just staggering misogynist thing after thing after thing. And it was like, wow, this is in these capital markets. This is still live and well. And Amanda, I think in the thousand odd investors I would have presented to over the four years, four or five years I was running the company. I never had one woman investor in the room and she was remarkable. There's only one out of a thousand who I was presenting to. Wow. That just blows my mind. And just the critique of what you wear and you're hair, I mean, I look at you and I think you're the epitome of style and you've got gorgeous long red hair because obviously most listeners won't be able to see that.

6:09Did you change anything about your appearance based on the, let's say feedback and inverted commas that you were getting? No, never. I never would. It's just reminding me of another classic one. This is in America. This is not so related, but I just have to say it's come to mind. So our business is called Flamingo, Flamingo AI. And so the brand colors we had were hot pink, hot pink and white and black. When we were in America, we had an American CTO of a large fortune 500 company say he couldn't actually choose us to work with because the brand colors were so strongly pink. Oh. Yeah, that was another one. Wow. Wow. Like when you look back on this time and, you know, because I know that you advise and mentor so many young women, what are those big lessons that you then share? Because these stories are quite horrific, but I want to know like how have you then turned them into lessons

7:09that you've shared with others? Yeah. So I think it is particularly as women, just walking your own path and being confident that the way you express yourself is the way you express yourself and just to stay, stay that course. When you start compromising, oh, maybe I need to cut my hair. Oh, I'll change the stress so it's not so flattering or I'll take my jewelry out or I won't have a tattoo like I've tattooed is, imagine if they'd seen me now, right? I don't know if they'd seen things. Ah. Ah. Is the moment you start to compromise and change, then more things will compromise and change and I believe you could get on that path. So I think sitting strongly in yourself, as your true expression of yourself as a leader, is actually what's needed. And it can be hard because you, as I have been criticised, troll time and time and time and time again. But I think just staying the course and eventually that becomes noise and will drop away and people realise, oh, she's not going to change. She is who she is and she's doing a good job.

8:10Okay, maybe now we can drop those criticisms and look for some other criticisms, maybe some criticisms of how the business is running. That'd be good and I got plenty of those too. But I welcome those. It's like I welcome those. What stayed with me after Cat's story wasn't the million dollars. It was how calm she sounded when she said no. Cat's refusal wasn't rebellion for the sake of it. It was self-respect in action and when you protect your integrity even under pressure, people eventually stopped trying to change you. So the next time someone tells you to soften, to dress differently, to fit in, notice what they're really asking you to give up. And if this moment resonated with you, go listen to my full chat with Katrina Wallace where we explore how she built resilience in the face of a lot of buyers and built one of the world's first AI companies on her own terms. You'll find a link to that in the show notes. If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app

9:12to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangiri people, part of the Cool and Nation.