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OhHello - Radhika Parashar
67 Plays2 years ago
Joining us from "Across The Pond", episode 47 embodies our mission...
Kindness, empathy, inclusivity, courage, and adaptability --- are traits that this OhHello Inc. 🌞☕️ OhHello.io mentor holds near and dear to her heart.
Hailing from Moreno Valley, California by way of Delhi, India, this 'Hello' grew up in an ashram, was homeschooled from k-12, majored in South Asian Studies and English at UC Berkeley and was supposed to be a lawyer.
Somehow that combination of a background proved to be exactly what was needed to develop her career leading various training and sales enablement initiatives across global startups like ByteDance/TikTok and Couchbase while beyond grateful of cutting her teeth at TubeMogul, Inc.
At Figma, she has led Sales Enablement for the last several years, building and scaling the business (across APAC and EMEA) through its rapid growth.
This 'Hello' is grateful for the mentors that have paved the way:
Michelle Chen- (subjectively- a wonderful person and old friend) who took a gamble on a newcomer
🎙 🎨 Rick Rubin- for his act of being non-stop creative
🎼 A.R. Rahman- composer (Jai Ho - Slumdog Millionaire- vulnerability moment, as soon as we stopped recording I got schooled🎒! Jai Ho!!!! 🇮🇳
Thank you Radhika Parashar - this was a blast (and thanks for being so patient)! We're stoked to have you on the OhHello Inc. 🌞☕️ OhHello.io platform when we launch later this month!
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Transcript
Introductions and Greetings
00:00:09
Speaker
There we go. There we go. Nice. Oh, hello. Oh, hello. Back to you. Veronica, how are you? I'm doing well, Jeremy. How are you? I'm great.
Radhika's Professional Background
00:00:29
Speaker
It was really nice catching up with you before we started this, hearing about your journeys across Europe, across Japan.
00:00:38
Speaker
Growing up in California, your family, I know who you are. Why don't you tell our audience who I have the pleasure of speaking with? Wow. That is a big, big question, but hello, everyone.
00:00:51
Speaker
My name is Radhika Parashir. I am a human being, a creative, an artist who is also a sales enablement practitioner currently at Figma. So I lead a global team. I'm actually focused primarily on our emerging markets region, specifically in EMEA and our JPEG regions.
00:01:14
Speaker
I have the pleasure of working with a fantastic team of 10 sales enablement folks, and we together support our entire global sales organization.
Work Experience Highlights
00:01:24
Speaker
So that's kind of the quick summary of who I am right now. In previous roles, Jeremy and I have had the pleasure of working together at TubeMocal, which was acquired by Adobe, as we all know, Couchbase, another NoSQL database company, and most recently, TikTok by Dance, where I led global sales enablement as well.
Global Influence on Mentorship
00:01:43
Speaker
So you've been at some amazing tech companies, you've had global experience. How has that defined who you are? Tell us a little bit about who you are, about what defines you as a mentor, someone who's going to be part of the Oh, hello tribe.
Core Values and Career Journey
00:02:00
Speaker
Honestly, I feel like so much of the experiences that I've been fortunate to have been a part of have
00:02:07
Speaker
defined me just as much as I've been defined by them, or I should say they have defined me as much as I guess in some ways I've left my mark there in some sense. A big part of that is I think core values that are very intrinsic to who I am, kindness, empathy, any year for inclusivity, but then I think the sort of hard values, I would say things like courage, adaptability,
00:02:33
Speaker
the ability to sort of have that resilience to go through life experiences, go through the things that I've experienced in my background apart from just work that have allowed to kind of build on this whole career that I've had that has been just honestly the biggest blessing. It's just been the most incredible time. Get a little deeper on that to encourage the kindness, resiliency, adaptability,
00:02:59
Speaker
How has that defined you? Get deeper, like peel that one layer back from the onion.
From Social Justice to Tech
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I started my career actually in social justice. So I was in the nonprofit world actually all through my years at UC Berkeley while I was there. And then after that, I actually lived in India for a year before I transitioned to tech. So a big part of my background was I grew up in an ashram. I grew up as a Hare Krishna. I was homeschooled from kindergarten to 12th grade, a very sort of like
00:03:29
Speaker
a traditional background to kind of then be launched into the university world and be like, well, what's going on? This world is a place. But from there, I think having that background in social justice really gave me an eye and an ear towards everything that was happening in the world and feeling like, wow, not only is there so much that needs to be solved for, but right now in a capitalistic world, the way to do that is to as quickly as possible raise capital.
00:03:56
Speaker
gain
Skill Transfer and Challenges
00:03:57
Speaker
the experience needed to run through these kinds of experiences and these kinds of organizations. And then somehow in some future world, continue to have the impact, continue to try to support the organizations that are doing the work, but then more importantly, come back to give back in all of the opportunities that I can in the future and even right now to build on that sort of a background. So I actually left the social justice world. I left sort of doing nonprofits
00:04:25
Speaker
very much with the year of coming back, but with the experience then of being intact for X amount of years, having the management experience, being able to, because I saw that a lot of the people who were advancing in that kind of world tend to be like X McKinsey, X Google, X whatever, and they have the storied management background that I think a lot of organizations just want, you know, for the same reasons. And there's so many transferable skills, right? There's fundraising, there's the ability to write content, there's the ability to talk to donors,
00:04:54
Speaker
just basic admin skills that just translate across all of our realms.
Mentorship Impact
00:04:58
Speaker
So it was a difficult initial transition, but once I had the foot in the door intact, which was a complete stroke of luck, by the way. There was no real person to pull me through it. I think what happened was just to sort of spray and pray, like, okay, let's see who we can talk to, where we can go. And I was really, really lucky to have the opportunity to start my career off at two.
00:05:19
Speaker
It's awesome. It's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah. And having those kinds of experiences and starting off in the going from homeschooling to social justice to a very capitalistic environment to the global travel to sales enablement across different cultures, different regions of the globe.
00:05:38
Speaker
really opens up who someone can be. So that was obviously both a loaded question and a loaded answer, assuming that there is going to be a lot more to it. So I really appreciate you, you highlighting those components. Of course. Who are some mentors that have made a lasting impact on you, Radhika? Honestly, I have been blessed with a lot of incredible, incredible women throughout my career who have just shown not only through their example and paving the way, but also
00:06:08
Speaker
by opening those proverbial doors by helping me understand what it means to have a seat at the table, to help me show up in the way that I need to. So I'm grateful always to Michelle Chen, my first manager at Tube. Love Michelle Chen. Incredible, incredible woman. She really just, at that point in my career,
00:06:26
Speaker
I had studied abroad in university, but I had never experienced what it meant to be a business person in a global context. And she took a bet on me at a very early age to go build out programs in, at that time, Australia and England. And I think we were just chatting about this, but I think that those early experiences realizing that
00:06:46
Speaker
with the right resources and with the right facilities, it's not that different from running a program in America. There's obviously cultural nuances. There's all of the sensitivities that I think just having an empathetic background helps you kind of deal with. But the actual nuts and bolts of like how to run a program, how to train someone, what works, what doesn't work. That was the first sort of taste that I had of kind of going, wait a second.
00:07:11
Speaker
I could live here or I could move somewhere else and this, this would be fine. Like this wouldn't be this completely foreign experience. So
Inspirational Figures
00:07:18
Speaker
she's definitely one that comes to mind. Um, but outside of just a real human being who I know, I also want to just call out, I've been reading the Rick Rubin book that I think a lot of folks have been, uh, consuming recently, the creative act, but I've been a massive fan of just his work and who he is as a person for so long and what he stands for. But more importantly, this act of being creative.
00:07:39
Speaker
and identifying as one. And then A.R. Rahman, who's a music composer, an Indian music composer, I am absolutely in awe of his work, his body of work, and the way he shows up. So those are three that
Charitable Opportunities and Causes
00:07:51
Speaker
I would play. Awesome. I love that you just went across the spectrum of going from a business mentor, someone who's so empathetic and so just sweet, but also understands where the pockets move.
00:08:08
Speaker
to one of the biggest producers and creative minds in musical history, to then a musician who I'm not as familiar with. But now I need to look that up afterwards. But nonetheless, thank you for highlighting all of those. Of course.
Philanthropic Interests
00:08:25
Speaker
Within the Oh, Hello Platform, you're going to be able to donate to 40 plus different, not-for-profit, amazing causes. What's a not-for-profit that's near and dear to your heart? Well, I have left America.
00:08:39
Speaker
And I'm now in London. Yes, you are in London. From a philanthropic component, what's a charity or a cause that's near and dear to you? Well, so that's where I was going to come to, which is that a lot of the philanthropy that I was so close to in America, the bill organization, for example, NAACP, sorry, I was like, wait, there's an A in there. NAACP, these are organizations that I actively contributed to.
00:09:09
Speaker
While I was there, I still believe in the causes. National Society for Reproductive Justice was another one that was really, really close to me, especially with all of the Roe v. Wade overturning and everything else that was going on in the US when I left. Here in London, mental health has become such a massive cause for me personally. I think I understand it at a level
00:09:32
Speaker
not only just with my own experiences with taking care of my own mental health, but even the folks around me. I think the weather causes that, but also just the society too. So just it's something that's very
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:09:43
Speaker
top of mind. So there's an organization called Mind that I actively contribute to over here that I'm very fond of the work that they're doing.
00:09:50
Speaker
Awesome, awesome. Well, Radhika, I know that you've got to jump to another meeting. We appreciate you. It was so good catching up with you. Thank you so much for being part of the Oh Hello community. Thanks to everyone who's listening. We appreciate you. Thanks, Radhika. Thanks, everybody. Thanks so much for having me.