Transcript
Speaker: Anna, hi. I'm excited to get to run this conversation with you. Thanks for doing this. Thank you so much for having me on. For anyone who doesn't know you, can you say who you are and what you do?
Speaker: My name is Anna Aniston, and I would say that I'm a serial entrepreneur. So I have three different things that I'm currently working on Two of them I've been doing for a decade.
Speaker: I have a marketing agency, and we specialize in B2B, SaaS, deep tech. So some of our clients are like Oracle and AWS and those kind of folks. So the things that make AI work, that's what we market.
Speaker: And I also have a nonprofit. It used to be called Data Science Salon, and now it's called AI Loves Data. And it's a community for technical folks that are working in AI and data. And we have 225,000 members in our community.
Speaker: And we do events, webinars, everything's free. It's really focused on getting rid of bias, not only in algorithms, but in the industry. So we've always been focused on being the most diverse, putting people forward that don't have a lot of voice. So those two things I've been working on for a decade. And then recently, just last March, i launched a podcast called I Want Her Shoes. And we're just about to hit half a million downloads. And we've been number one on Apple on fashion and beauty for the last two months.
Speaker: On Spotify, we're also in the top five for pop culture and beauty since they don't have, for some reason, the fashion category yet. But it's been really awesome to see that grow.
Speaker: And really, I wanted to launch that because I've want to get out of deep tech. And I've always been into fashion, into really elevating women and what that podcast is about. It's not just fashion. It's really more about interesting stories of women who have walked in amazing shoes and sharing how they've used fashion and shoes as part of their journey.
Speaker: I'm about to drop episode 80. So it's been a lot of work, um but consistency has paid off. I'm finally talking to sponsors. Congrats. Finally. My goal is to really build that into a community next. So I'm really excited to be working on that now. I'm grateful. So that's just a little bit about me, but I'm also a mom of two boys, Misha and Vasily, six and three. As a single mom, I do a lot of things. So not just run businesses, but I have to run a whole household and all of that. I'm really busy, but I'm really excited to share my day with you.
Speaker: And I do have good help. So obviously I cannot do all of this by myself. It's funny you say that because in particular when prepping for your interview, I was like, I can't wait to ask her what her day actually looks like. Two businesses, one podcast, two boys.
Speaker: I'm excited to get into that. And I also want to say, first of all, B2B SaaS, I spent like 13 years of my profession. you know about this. What a space. But I also wanted to say congrats. You've been featured in a couple Inc. lists. And in particular, I saw, I think it was the Inc. 500 female founders list that I saw you on. Yeah, that was just this year. I'm really grateful to be on that list. And that's for my nonprofit for AI Loves Data.
Speaker: And then also i noticed on your LinkedIn, you were named one of the 23 female founders leading the next big AI breakthroughs. Congratulations. You're really killing it in that particular state. The funny thing is that I'm not a technical person. I had to really be in the space to really learn what the stuff is. And now it's paid off after almost 13 years in this space now and seeing how it's evolved from just spreadsheets to now AI, which has been amazing to watch. I'm very interested to talk more about your podcast because I have to say i love fashion too Fashion for me is my mental break from work.
Speaker: But in the past year, unfortunately, I feel like they converge a little bit. And I've had a few thoughts. I'm curious to get your take on too, which is that Since a lot of the work we do is with execs or founders and a good chunk, like a disproportionate amount of our clients are women.
Speaker: Clothing is such an important part of how you present yourself and your brand and how other people perceive you like first impressions. And I think for a really long time, even though I loved fashion, i would like almost disregard it or I'd be like, it's not actually substantial. It's not important how someone dresses.
Speaker: It's frivolous. It's like about the person in the work. But that has shifted for me. And especially as I focus more and more on brand in the past few years, I actually think how one dresses is so important because presenting yourself the way you hope other people will understand you to be, especially for women, i think is so important. And actually, we have a bunch of stylists that we now work with at Medbury where I'm constantly referring clients to them and being like, yeah, this person's great. This person's great because it comes up. Like if you optimize someone's profile on LinkedIn and are talking about their voice,
Speaker: how they show up on a professional platform, how they show up in a newsletter or how they show up on a panel, what they wear comes up a lot. Just tell me everything about your podcast. I love the topic and I'm so curious to understand like all the details.
Speaker: What we talk about is that piece of how has your style journey evolved throughout the years, right? So you just gave me your story that now you feel more connected to fashion as part of presenting yourself or anybody, right? And a lot of the women that come to the show, they say that they either had a time where it wasn't as important to them like a lot of women when they had their kids. You kind of forget about that part and then they had to rebuild their wardrobes or when they moved from New York to Miami. There's a lot of those folks, right? Where you have to, again, figure out how to present yourself different because the climate is so different. We've had a couple stylists on the show and I have a lot of different
Speaker: interesting stories and also hearing that it's really a big part of your identity. When the podcast actually takes place in my closet, so I ask people to bring a pair of shoes that has the most interesting story attached to it.
Speaker: So that's so cool to see what people bring and what they pull out. And we're actually releasing two episodes of one has Manolo's in it because that's the most popular shoe that I've seen from 65 women. There's so many interesting stories, but some stories are just like you could see the excitement and how that just stuck with the person, right? And like that pair of shoes just means something different to them, right? Than just a pair of shoes.
Speaker: And then we talk about their journey. A lot of them have very interesting stories and a lot of successes. And a lot of people are actually going through transitions, believe it or not. I don't know if you hear that on your podcast, but a lot of people are either starting their own businesses, they're leading careers, their kids are moving out of the house, or they just had kids. The stories that I hear is a lot of transition.
Speaker: And at the end, I ask women to pick a pair out of my closet that represents them. And then I take a Polaroid that they could take with them so they can remember that as well. And it's very interesting what people pick. And there's some shoes that just get picked over and over again, too. And I don't know why, but I'm going to look at all that data and I want to see if I could find some correlations and things because I'm very data driven. But Really what you said, it's true. It's really like a big part of how you can lift yourself up.
Speaker: And that's why I really started this podcast because it's really about real stories. It's not for celebrities. Again, I would love to have a celebrity on there, but it's really about real women where you can just quickly listen for like 20 minutes and be like, hey, i'm very inspired.
Speaker: And I want to go put my best shoes on right now. The whole idea is just to leave you with that thought, right? I'm inspired. I could do this and let me go get dressed up. And that is just what the message is that really you should take a little bit time for yourself.
Speaker: It sounds like you've always loved fashion, but like what's your personal fashion or style journey? My journey actually goes all the way back to my grandma who I just lost. Unfortunately, she just passed away.
Speaker: But we had an amazing relationship. I grew up in Russia, in Moscow, and she was a socialite actually. And she had the most beautiful fashion. And a lot of it she actually copied from the designers because they didn't have access to anything because it was communist back then. They used to take pictures and they used to sew their own clothes. So I was very... inspired. And then when she moved to Europe, she got into all the designer things and she got me my first Louis and Chanel and all those things. So that was my real inspiration because my grandmother was such a big influence in my life, but also sex in the city. I'm not going to lie. When that show started, I was very much more hooked on fashion. hey
Speaker: Knew that someday, and maybe somehow I'm going to end up being in fashion, but it just took me a little while to figure out how to maneuver myself into it. Because I'm not a designer. I'm not a stylist. I'm just somebody that really enjoys it. I'm very about sustainability. So I didn't think starting another brand would be it for me, but I'm a community builder. So what can we do? And I want to elevate voices in women. So I was like, okay, this podcast is When you're getting dressed for work or for an event, like what are some of the things that you think about how you want to feel or what you want to put out there into the world that informs how you put yourself together?
Speaker: For me, it's color. I'm very colorful. I wear a lot of monochromatic outfits where it's one color, but just different shades of it. And in my closet is put together in a way where very easy for me to grab the colors. It's all like in color coordination. So that's the way I like to get dressed as I think about color.
Speaker: and how I feel. and also putting like, purple and yellow or the different colors that go together that way. I know some people start with shoes, some people start with something, but I think about color and like, what color am I feeling like today?
Speaker: Makes sense. You're wearing a beautiful cobalt blue shirt. just yeah I know, I was feeling blue today. I want to ask about your day. Maybe a week is a better way to frame it. do you block your time where you're like,
Speaker: Mondays and Tuesdays, I focus on this. Wednesdays, X. like How do you structure your time across these three big endeavors that you're juggling? So that's a great question. And I think because I have a lot of different workflows already flowing in my agency, the podcast I was able to squeeze into because we work on other podcasts for clients. And we have one for our AI Loves data as well. So I was able to put it into that production schedule.
Speaker: But as you can imagine, it's very structured. I have to do four hours of focused work per day. So that's my non-negotiable. And I usually do that probably earlier in the morning, but my kids wake up really early. So at six or 530, we're up and then we basically are just hanging out and making their lunches, doing laundry, getting everything ready.
Speaker: Then I drive them to school. And then when I get back, I usually have a trainer come twice a week. So that's what I usually do after that. Then I get ready. And then that's when I do my four hour block of work.
Speaker: And then after that, I usually have to go pick up the kids. And then usually in the evenings after I put them to sleep. We do dinner and stuff like that. Sometimes we'll go out, but then I'll do another two or three hour block.
Speaker: And then on Wednesdays, I have the nanny. So Wednesdays, that's when i schedule as much stuff as I can. So I can go back my day with meetings and dinners. And then usually they're with their dad on Sundays and Mondays. So that gives me Monday as well.
Speaker: to have more time to do more work and just to work on all these things. But I usually just don't have one day when I do just one thing. I try to do everything every day because that's how my mind works. I can't forget about something. I need to think about it every day.
Speaker: So I try to do an hour on this, an hour on this. That's how I do it. And then the meetings I do on Mondays and Wednesdays. And then I record the podcast usually once a month and I do five of them in a day.
Speaker: Wow. When you're doing your four-hour block, is that a mix of meetings, emails, deep work? Is it all deep work? It's mostly like deep work and meetings with my team.
Speaker: Okay. Like it's working on like all my work. When I had my startups, I used to work 15 hours a day. I'm not trying to do that anymore. like i will do that Like I don't think that's healthy. I think it's much healthier to do a very focused block versus to just continue to go on because you really can get burned out.
Speaker: Yeah. And I know people doing that still and I'm like, you guys should... Do something different. You're smiling because I feel like a lot of us have done like these really long hours like that. Like you in the past. Yes. In the past. like Exactly.
Speaker: Still, I'm like, I'll do coffee with email. So like from eight to nine, I'm just like seeing what happened, catching up. And then I have no meetings till noon. So I can do some deep work emails and then meetings for the PM. And that's it. I love the email thing. And I do that too.
Speaker: I don't open my email because I feel like you could literally just check your email all day. I will do that in the morning and when I'm done. I even talked to one of my women groups about this. I'm like, are you guys really checking email all day? And they're like, no, because they would get fired if they did that. I remember once there was a manager who was like new to the company and I was managing them. i was coaching them a little. And there are two things. Number one, they were obsessed with inbox zero. And I was like...
Speaker: That's insane. That puts you at the mercy of everyone else. And two, i was like, if you are just on email all day, that's your whole job really easily. You really need to be in command of your time more. I know some people, it's like a hard habit to break and they feel anxiety if they're not.
Speaker: certain yeah there's some inboxes that i have like thousands of emails makes me feel good because i feel like some people when i say i'm not in box zero i get a look from them where they're like wow you must be really disorganized or you must be like not on top of you no i felt that way like before multiple businesses and kids and now i'm like i think you literally cannot do everything you have to figure out what is the most important thing and bump that up right and then go down from there How would you describe your management style? I'm going to presume that you have systems, processes, and you delegate, and you have roles where there's really clear ownership over function. Is that correct?
Speaker: Yes, and definitely we use a lot of AI to keep everybody organized and on track because a lot of the time now, you don't really need as many people. But yes, I have people. we have a designer who works with a developer and we have the content team.
Speaker: So we still have people, but they're very encouraged to use all the tools that make their work a lot more efficient. than it used to be I know you said you were a content person and you still need a real person to write content. I feel like you cannot use AI for content. It just doesn't work that well.
Speaker: It will someday, but I'm a big believer. You still need to have that personal touch to all the content, especially technical content. Yeah. Especially if you don't understand what you're writing about and you have AI write about it, you could really go wrong there. And that's happened before.
Speaker: I appreciate what you said around AI. And when folks are really AI experts, I think I often presume that they're going to think AI is really good at content too. So I'm happy you said that because I think There's something as like an editor, though I've done so many things over the years, like still, I think at heart, sometimes I'm a bit of an editor. And like, there's feelings you get in your body when you're reviewing content. You're like, this line's not right. It's so intuitive and unconscious.
Speaker: And I feel like when you read AI, I've noticed my body does not respond at all. No, it's dry. It doesn't have that hook. Even if you tell it like you need an emotional hook. Yeah. That's what that is.
Speaker: And that resonance is so important to performance, especially on like social or the work that we do at Midbury. What are some of the tools though that you are loving or how are you using some tools to really support the work that you all are doing operationally?
Speaker: Well, as you can imagine, running an agency is a lot of operations. So that's what really we've been able to utilize the tools for. We use agents, for a lot of scheduling because we run a lot of virtual events for clients and we have like hundreds of speakers to schedule. So we use AI for that. And that's very helpful. And also to organize everybody's schedules, making sure to send everybody reminders, summarizing all the meetings. We use Gemini.
Speaker: We use chat TPT. We use perplexity. We use a few different tools. As a nonprofit, you could get some of them for free, which is cool. But we use Canva. That's very collaborative, which I love because before I feel like designers were like in a vacuum or something. And now if we lose a designer, everything is there.
Speaker: yeah And then some stuff we built, like, i don't know if you've heard of clay. That's a tool. So we love that tool. We've had some custom things built for us throughout the years as well, just to make all the things stick together. We use HubSpot, which makes things much easier as well, because it ties everything together and they have their own AI in there. Again, if anything comes out and for video editing as well, we're always looking for new stuff for that, because that makes the social content much easier to create, especially technical content. You don't need like real people in it.
Speaker: Yeah. So I feel like those tools make things much simpler. For social content for us, for technical, I'm not saying you should do B2C content with AI. I think it's not there yet, but I do think for B2B, that deep stuff, it's much easier to create content now, like visual content. That's what I'm talking. about We have a client who just launched a new weekly podcast and it's all AI.
Speaker: The host is AI host. It's AI generated script. Their creative director reviews it and gives notes and stuff overhand, but it's pretty interesting. Yeah, no, you can literally do that too. But I'm a creator myself and I've been for almost 25 years now and I just don't want to do that. I want to create.
Speaker: I want to use AI to create the scripts. I'm like very old school. ah just like doing it because I feel like it's creative and I'm a creative person. I think AI can really help after like summarizing it, clipping, all of that stuff. But I'm a big believer, like making the creative thing yourself.
Speaker: But again, I know that's going to change too. Do you have any predictions around AI over the next two to three years based on how deep in everything you are? I think there's going to be a lot of jobs that are lost and are replaced. A lot of the time kids or younger people come to me and they're like, what should we do? And that's very hard to say, but I'm telling them it should either have your parents buy you like a plumbing company, electrical company that you can run or something like that, or become an electrician, a plumber, or...
Speaker: GC, those professions are not going anywhere for a while. But everything else, like real estate is going to be gone. There's going to be a lot less lawyers out there. Doctors are safe for a little while, but there is a lot of tools that are being built now to even do surgeries and everything. It's very hard to predict exactly what's going to happen, but that's where we're going towards that automation, like complete automation of everything.
Speaker: I appreciate you saying that because I feel like there's a trend where people who are really involved in AI say things like, It's going to be a shift, but like being someone who knows how to use AI is great job security, all these things. And it's like, I don't think so. It's not. I think a lot of jobs that are here today, they were not here 18 months ago.
Speaker: Like in the industry, there was not a head of AI. Yeah, that's true. It's all new. So I feel like a lot of that stuff is going to change. And it's very hard to say for those people, but I'm like an outsider working in the industry and I could see how...
Speaker: things are shifting on who's losing the jobs and who's not going to lose them, right? Because you still need a human in the loop. You're still going to need one. So being an expert in your field doesn't mean you need to be good at AI. You just need to know deeply what you're doing in your field and then you should be okay.
Speaker: It's funny. I was going to say, what advice would you give to a young person today? i feel like you gave some good career advice already here. I'm curious. i always like to ask, is there any bit of advice that you would give to your younger self now as you look at your career today?
Speaker: I guess I was always very impatient when I was younger and I was very lucky to have a lot of opportunities. But I would jump on the first one, right? I wouldn't wait for something and there would be another thing that would pass me.
Speaker: But I think everything also happens for a reason. So I wouldn't be here if I didn't take the opportunities I did. But I think patience is what I tell all the young people is you just have to be patient because room was not built overnight. And that's what I would.
Speaker: tell my younger self, even though as a young person, it's very hard to be patient. I know I'm a type A person, but you still need to take one thing at a time because you can't do everything great because you can really mess things up if you tried too many things.
Speaker: It's hard. I think people get really mired in self-doubt in the process. And it's hard to trust that it'll happen as opposed to trusting that you need to be patient. But I think that's great advice. For anyone who's listening who wants to follow you, listen to your podcast, check out your work, where can we send them? And we will put everything in the show notes so that if you're listening, you can just scroll down and click. Mostly I am on Instagram and i am I Want Her Shoes. And the podcast is I Want Her Shoes Podcast.
Speaker: And if you go to my profile, you'll see all the things on there. And I'm also on LinkedIn, which is Anna Aniston and AIlovesdata.com. And Iwanthershoes.com. And you can get the podcast on your favorite platform from there or on YouTube as well.
Speaker: And I want to give a shout out. You're a top voice on LinkedIn. Do I have that right? Yes, I am. Well done. It's been, again, many years of building LinkedIn. and putting out a lot of content. That's what that requires. But you're an expert at this.
Speaker: here We are. I appreciate your time so much. i think the work you're doing is really cool. And I really appreciate everything that you shared with us today. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me on.
