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Bozoma Saint John

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104
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2017-12-27
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2017-12-27
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1
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  1. “Man, there were many factors. One, I didn't know when the hell I was doing. Let's just start there. I can admit that now, you know. No, but it was as I bit off too much. You know, I just now looking back, I'm like, what the hell was I thinking? You know, it was like, I bit off more than I could chew. It was both the fact that, or those are a few reasons. One, it was a pretty big team and I'd never run a team that size before. And leadership is something that you grow into. You know, you're not, you don't just run in and do it. It's like you've got to build it. You got to understand people. You have to understand what your management style is like. That's as important as the people you're managing, how to manage different types of people and different types of person.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Tan clothes and black and grays. And I'd gained some weight with the pregnancy of my pregnancy. And I just felt like I wanted to change the way that women were portrayed, or at least plus-sized women were portrayed. And it felt like the right thing to do. So without any experience at all, I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to go do that. Plus, it was a team. And it was the first time I would be the head of anything, you know. So I was like, oh, I want experience as a leader to run my own team. I have this awesome marketing background and I'm super cute. Like, why can't I do it? I don't understand. Yeah, I went. And again, I failed in like a year. By a year, I was done. It was over.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I would walk into the office and be like, what she got on today, you know? And so people would say things like, why don't you know why you work here? He's just working at a fashion company. And mind you, I had no idea about the business of fashion at all. Zero idea. But I knew I had obviously the gold standard in marketing at the time, which was this Pepsi, you know, pedigree in marketing. And the small companies I mentioned, Ashley Stewart, which was based in Caucus, New Jersey was looking for the head of marketing because they were trying to turn around the brand. I'd also just had my daughter, and the brand was really targeted towards plus-sized women of color, you know, to like, you know, fashion was zebra print and gold and like LeMay and things like that. It wasn't the competitor who was like.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “That I really didn't want to look like my colleagues. And I knew that I didn't have to. And so I'd already started to experiment and people would make comments all the time, you know, like about whatever I was wearing, literally every day. I felt like I was like walking a runway every day.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “I quit because God man, I'm telling you, like I quit for the most ridiculous reason sometimes. I quit because I was a brand manager. And, you know, there was a very specific way that Pepsi organized its marketing team, right? It was like you had a class, everybody was promoted, you know, or not. You had just a particular set of responsibilities. You couldn't really stretch outside of those. And it just wasn't, I was just like, oh my God, if I stay here, I'm just going to be some, you know, like middle management person with nothing, you know, no excitement. I just didn't feel like that was a thing for me. And enough that there's anything wrong with that. It just wasn't for me. I wanted to do more. And also I had already begun to what I would call experiment with my look.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “It's like when I at one point after I left Spike's agency, I went to Pepsi and after a few years there, I quit and took a job at a fashion company called Ashley Stewart.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Which, by the way, also led me to understand that, of course, I'm capable. You know, of course, it's like if I didn't push myself that way, I wouldn't have then made the next jump, right? Knowing that, okay, I'm smart enough to do this, but this is not what I want to do. I want to get back to the things I do know how to do and make them better. And to me, those are some of the more critical moments whereas it feels like failure, but it's actually helping you turn around, helping you to put a finer point on what you actually know how to do or what you should be doing. And there's been, you know, several times like that where I've felt like Maybe stretching with something that I wasn't quite sure I could reach that bar, but I was going to fake it anyway.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yeah, I mean, I think so. I really love that quote that you just said because it is true. You know, it's like at one point I was doing really well with Spike. You know, I gotten promoted a few times and I was looking around thinking because what he was really doing was now what we call like the pop culture marketing, right? Or consumer engagement. But at the time, it wasn't called that. And what I felt was like, oh, this is easy to me. You know, I can do this. I need something that will make people pay attention to me and know that I'm smart. So I was like, oh, let me go sign up for some pharmaceutical advertising, like a pharmaceutical advertising job, you know, because that's hard, you know, and it's really, really difficult to execute. And I've lasted like three months there.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “And I was like, I was like, one of those moments where you're just like, oh, oh my God. Does that not want me to do? I'm sorry. Did I do something wrong? I don't know what I did wrong. And he just shook his head and just walked off. And I thought for sure I was fired. That he came back out. I'm sitting there literally shaking. I think I really need to pee as like my armpits are itching. I'm like, oh my God, I can't even. And he left me like that for like an hour and a half and he comes out. He's like, you made some good notes. I was like, oh, okay, okay. And it was literally that moment where he was like, you know what, you should stick around. He was like, I think we could find a job for you here. And literally, that's how I got my permanent job there. So out of that crazy moment. I believe he realized my potential.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Is a very judgmental pen, you know? And I read it and made notes and corrections. And I don't know, just made, yeah, lots of markups in his manuscript. And then he came back like, you know, it wasn't the next day, but it was like maybe three days later, which, by the way, was quite a feat because bamboozled is a hard script to read. I don't know if you've seen the film, but it's very heavy. And he came back and he was like, what'd you think? And I handed him to him. And he opened, like he looked kind of confused. He opens it up. He's like flipping through the page. He's like, you marked up my script?”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “And by thoughts, I thought he meant like mark it up. Took my nice one. And why I had a red pen, I will never know. Like, I cursed myself to this day. Like, why did you pick up a red pen of all things? Like, why not a blue pen or a black pen? Why a red pen?”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Exactly. Because I was answering phones. Let's remember I was answering phones. I was doing nothing else by answering phones. Actually, that's a lot. I was getting coffee. I was cleaning up dirt. Like I was doing whatever needed to be done, right? And yeah, he had just finished writing bamboozled. He was about to start casting and principal of photography. And he, yeah, he was walking by my little reception desk and he dropped and he was like, hey, read this because actually he knew when I'd gone in a few times that he'd made small talk with me. He knew that I love to read and that I wanted to write were two things that I thought I wanted to do at the time. And so I think for him it was just a, you know, like I just wrote something here. You read it, you know. But what I heard. was you should give your thoughts on this.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “You know, it's like today's day is it. But also just, you know, things like she's just smile at people, be smiling all the time, you know, just stuff like that where, you know, I feel like any sort of older mom or grandma type of character would tell you, you know, that like smile at people, be friendly, you know, today is the day. Make it happen today, you know, that kind of thing. She was just more of an encourager than anything.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “You know, it wasn't so much even about her advice, but the fact that she was so encouraging. Know like I would go in there every morning and she would just have the big smile on her face and just say, so today's the day, you know, today's the day. Like that, that kind of advice, you know, where like every day, even if it didn't happen yesterday, she'd be like, today's it, like it's it. You know, you're gonna get it today. And she didn't even know when the hell I was trying to do.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Color brains are so good. They're hard to make, but once you know how to do it, they're so delicious. And collards can sit, you know, for some time. So you don't make them every day, you know?”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yeah, there's some my go to meals now. Always like some sort of starch, right? So either pasta or rice where my two that I like or potatoes every once in a potatoes myself. So that a meat, you know, so I'd like stews and soups, so chicken or beef or fish in like a tomato based soup or tomato based stew and then a green that was usually some variation of that every day.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I'm just paying me in rolls. Like, I'm cool, you know? But she, you know, gave me the number of the temp agency and literally changed my life, you know, because I called the temp agency. They started sending me out on jobs. I started making some money. I was able to feed myself. And then one day the magic call came, which was that Spike Lee had fired his assistant and they needed me to go answer the phones at his new advertising agency that he had just created on Madison Avenue 49th Street in Manhattan. And I went.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And so I went in every day and she knew that I was coming in every day, but she knew I didn't have a job. We just started making conversation. And very much, I mean, it's very much in my personality to talk to strangers. I'm very curious about people. And so I asked her a ton of questions, you know, and then she started asking me questions. And I don't know, we just struck up a friendship. And eventually I confessed to her that I didn't know what I was doing. You know, I was just here trying to figure it out. I was sleeping on my friend's couch and she had a lot of really great advice. And one of the practical ones, she had lots of good life advice. But one practical one was that her niece had signed up at a TED agency and they would call her in the morning and tell her where to go. And she was making good money doing that, right? Because, hell, for me, it was like, I'm making no money. So any money was...”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Yeah, I would go in and at first it started in the morning because honestly, I really didn't have any money. And so I wanted my money to last. So I would go in the morning and they were selling like fresh rolls for 10 cents. And so I would buy the fresh roll, eat that. I had coffee back at the house or tea. And so I would go back to the apartment. And that would be literally like sometimes my meal for the day.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “So that was sort of the trade off. And they agreed. So, yeah, I went to New York with no plan. Like I really didn't know what I was going to do, but I didn't have any money because my parents were definitely not going to finance this year. Streets in New York, you're going to have to figure it out. And there was this little Dominican spot on the corner of 125th Street near Columbia where it was called Florida, where there was a very kind older lady who kind of took me under her wing. You know, she'd feed me. Man, let me tell you, she'd feed me for free. Yeah, she gave me like a meal a day”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “I had no idea what I was doing. You know what's funny is back to your question about being or think we started about being scared, I was scared. I was really scared. I didn't know what I was going to do. But the thing is that I knew I was really smart and I knew I could like. Hustle. And so with those two things, armed with smarts and hustle, I had one friend who was living in New York and I always wanted to live in New York. And she was getting her master's in film from Columbia. And so she had a like a graduate apartment with a roommate, but they had a couch. And so basically I told her and her roommate that if they would allow me to stay on their couch for three months while I figured out how to get a job and my own place that I would cook dinner like every night.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Of course, they chose a lot because, of course, they were like, go, go, yeah, yeah, go get all that out of your system and then go to school and be serious. And yeah, that was definitely a mistake for them.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Yeah, go pull in a more balanced way. I'm just kidding. Yeah, of course they chose the previous one. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go like, you know, or I'm sorry.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Struggle, right? Because I'd be looking for other things to satisfy me and I'd probably fail, or I could take a year, get all of this wildness out of me.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “I just had no idea. I was like, no, I like these arts, but I don't know what career that is. And so I have nothing to tell my parents that I'm not going to be a doctor, but I'm going to do this instead. There was just nothing. And so the conversation was, I want to make sure that I'm going to go to school, be committed to it, and graduate in the amount of time that will be acceptable to you. I can't do that unless I've taken time to really figure this out. And that was really my pitch. So the end result was, you know, or the picture I was painting was that I could go now and”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “You might be right You might be right. You might be right. Oh, I got. I've never thought of it that way. God, that makes me laugh. But my parents were so proud, you know, of the fact that I was going to be a doctor because for them, you know, not only like politics and academics were really important, but becoming a doctor, an engineer, or a lawyer were the three professions that they felt would be acceptable for their daughters. And so becoming a doctor was what needed to happen. And so, yeah, I graduated pre-med. But I knew in my heart that I just knew I didn't want to do that forever or be a doctor forever. And I just didn't know how else to push that back until I could figure out what I actually wanted to do. Because it wasn't like, I was like, oh, I want to go be a dancer. You know, I feel like that would have been easier if I knew what I wanted to do.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “There was some benefit. And the same thing with my parents, my dad was very much. So when I was a kid, I was really good in sciences and math and coming from Colorado, there were not a lot of black girls or young women who were science and math nerds who also were on the cheerleading team going to college. There just weren't a lot of numbers of us. And so I found myself in a probably the enviable position of having my choice of places to go and getting into programs that were looking obviously for diversity, but also somebody like me who just didn't appear to be the normal stereotypical Probably pre med student”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “My gosh. Well, you know what's funny? I think the art of the pitch is always about enthusiasm. Know it's like it doesn't really matter what you say as long as you're really excited about what you're saying, that people often then will give you the benefit of the doubt. They really will. It's like they, and along with the Jay-Z conversation, I don't remember exactly what I said, but I know I was enthusiastic about it. And I made the outcome sound probably really good.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “You know what? I think at the time, we thought it was a big gap because he was well known in New York or in the tri-state area. And we wanted a name that people would recognize. So it wasn't like he was unknown, but he wasn't the international superstar that obviously that he is now. And so to us, we were really excited. We knew who he was, and we were excited to have him. But Wesleyan is not a diverse college either. So it wasn't then anyway. And so that's just called the target audience was not big enough to fill the cafeteria that we had planned.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “We made a pitch, yeah, and he came to campus. He came to campus. And we were in the cafeteria. That's where we set up Charts like $2 at the door because you know, it's like when you give a free concert, usually I learned that actually then, that when you do things for free, people don't show up. If you make a little bit of value, they will show up. So it was $2 at the door. It was not very packed in there, which is so unfortunate. Jay was not happy with that. But we threw it. We threw it. And now I can say I did it.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “It was something like that, where you could get like 12 CDs for a dollar or whatever Was definitely some sort of scheme, and he had like hundreds of these things. And we're, you know, he was showing me his favorites. And Jay-Z was one of, and I wasn't really familiar with Jay-Z because even though, like I said, I went to high school in Colorado, I definitely swung more West Coast like gangster rap than I did the East Coast hip-hop. And so I wasn't as familiar with Jay, but I was determined that if these set of people wanted to see East Coast rapper, then Jay-Z was going to be the best. And so we were going to go get him. So literally was like phone calls. We like called the management team. I don't even know how we got the phone number, to be honest with you.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Very, I mean, it's very professional. And so, yeah. And so we had a campus radio station. I didn't have a show, but I had all my, you know, all the friends who were doing the radio stations and who had or who had the radio programs, radio shows, and had the opportunity to bring other people, you know, bring people as guests to campus. And one of those guys knew Jay-Z's people. And so we were throwing, you know, like, I think it had to be like the fall dance or something like that. And just talk to him about all the different options. And I remember that he had this collection of CDs. You know, it was like they called back then. It was like you could order them for like 99 cents. Do you remember?”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “And I, although I was good in the sciences and math, the things that really made me, you know, like live or excited, you know, the things were exciting to me were the arts, music and dance and art and all and writing and that kind of thing. And so my outlets were to join all of the like social clubs that would allow me to express myself in that way. And so for me, one of those places was like the student, the committee for like African American development, I think it was what it was called, or the Black Student Alliance, I think in other places it's called. And one of the things we always did was fundraisers, right? Because you needed the money to put on the show, to do. And I joined the committee for like musical engagement. I don't even know what that means.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Dude, it was college at Wesley University. That was Wesley. Yeah. I think it was like, it had to be 1996 probably. How does that happen? Maybe not 95 because it was really early. So yeah, so I got to college. I was pre-med.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Oh, my mom is definitely more nurturing. You know, she's the one who's like, oh, well, maybe, you know, we should figure out a new campaign, or maybe we should make something. You know, like she's always very solution-oriented as well, but in a softer way. And so she was, you know, she allowed me to sulk and feel sorry for myself, you know, and then, you know, make you feel, give you the pep talk, you know, to make you go back out, but also very solution oriented to say, okay, we're going to do this again. We're just going to try some new things.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “To leave school, like that was the only solution. You know, he would have made me run until there was no one left to vote, you know? Made me do it again and again and again.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Yeah, oh he always, that's the funny thing is that I literally had to graduate from high school before he stopped harassing me about running for student counsel. You know, it's like...”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “You should do it next year. Build up your audience and do it next year. You know, it was always that way. It was like there was no time for tears. Just like, okay, fine. Just do it next year. You know, it's like, I don't even know why, like, this is not a question. This is a demand.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “And so I come home and he's like, how do you go? I'm going to do the accent because, you know, how do you go? I was like, yeah, so I didn't get it. He's like, didn't get what? Not one position. You didn't get president. You didn't get vice president. You didn't get assemblyman. You didn't get councilman. You didn't get anything. Nothing at all. You know, and I'm like, no, like no position at all. He's like.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “It's the same thing that they say to me after anything that I consider a failure. First of all, again, both of them very direct in a, ooh, how do I describe it? They're like stereotypically African. My dad is very harsh in the way that he speaks, you know? Like he's like, so for instance, when I lost, I came home. He's like, and obviously he'd been in politics, right? So he feels like, oh, you should naturally, you should win, you know, run a campaign, you win.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “Oh, I was a sprinter, so the hundred, the 200, the four by one, and the hundred hurdles were my. Where my race is that I loved running”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Yeah, I think in the genes, you know, both my parents are very bold people. Like I told you, my dad, he ran for political office. He had no problem like moving his family around the world. My mom has always been very bold, you know, in the way that she, in her fashion, in the way that she raised us, in her speech, in her directness, that those are all things that I just grew up hearing and knowing, that there was never any fear that I wasn't going to be able to do something. And my parents never, they would never allow me, you know, to feel like I was able to do something. And so that fearlessness or boldness or going for the big thing has been taught as well as it's my nature, you know, because those are the Of people I come from.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Yeah, it's a dialect in Ghana. Anyway, it's just, you know, she just has been instrumental in my, you know, sort of acceptance of even myself, that there was the things that I learned from that moment were that, you know, it's really okay to be different and be vastly different and to celebrate those things, you know, not to be ashamed of it, not to hide it, not to try and be something else because it's not the norm. And that's okay. Even just that simple, what seems like a simple thing has been so instrumental in my life. And even as I sit here today, you know, that I am never afraid of being the odd man out, you know, because I feel very comfortable in that space.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “She refused to buy pizza. You know, yeah, she would say, listen, like you go to their house, they feed you their food, they come to our house, we feed them our food. It was just, there was no argument, you know, but also was like things like speaking our native tongue in the house, you know. It was like she had no problem, again, like, you know, having my little teenage friends over and speaking to me in our native tongue, oftentimes addressing them in our native tongue, even though she speaks three languages, you know, including English very well.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “And there was some appreciation for difference, and I didn't find that at first when I got to Colorado Springs, you know, that there was not an appreciation of anything that was different from. People who grew up in Colorado. And that was difficult, you know, because I wanted to fit in, obviously. I was 12. I wanted to make friends. I wanted to feel quote-unquote normal. And now, of course, I can look back at it and be very thankful that my mom refuses actually a good word because you haven't met my mother. There are no choices. She's refusing”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Yeah, you know, it's so interesting because I have, because I moved around so much as a kid, the moving to Colorado wasn't really that traumatic. You know, I think that you would think about it in people, you know, like sort of clutch their pearls and like, oh my God, you were this dark-skinned African girl who moved to very white Colorado. That must have been awful, you know? And the truth about it is that I had moved around a lot. I was a new kid all the time. And so that didn't bother me that much. However, I think culturally it was difficult for me because in the moving around, we'd always been in what I feel like were very international cities, you know, places where there was a community of like, let's call them expats. And so the feeling was always very cosmopolitan, you know, that people moved around, they had at least some idea of where you came from, you know.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “We'll be in America, they'll get a great education, and we'll just build our life here. I don't think he really was thinking about the whole diversity thing, though, when we moved there.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Why Colorado? There's a number of things first, he really did like Colorado. He really loved, you know, the open spaces and the mountains and neither my parents were afraid of cold, which I think is a stereotype about Africans or something that like, you know, you must not go to some place cold or something. But neither of them were afraid of it. But my dad also wanted to help out international students who were studying in the US because he had been one. And there was a company organization out there called International Students Association or International Students Association. Yeah, that's right. And they were charged with basically helping to support international students, the U.S., who are studying to get their graduate degrees. And they were based in Colorado. And so he was like, oh, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Let's just go there. I'll do that. These girls will grow up in this, you know, beautiful location.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Him there, and then he made the brilliant decision that we should move to Colorado Springs, Colorado, because what more diverse place to move your four African daughters and your wife than there How”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Well, so I was born in Connecticut. My dad was getting his PhD, or two PhDs in Ethnomusicology and Anthropology. He'd come from Ghana as a Fulbright scholar. And I was born six months before he received his degrees. So right after he received them, we went back to Ghana, which then, you know, he got into politics and we had to leave when I was five. We were in the US for about a year or so before both my parents wanted to move back to Africa, but we couldn't go to Ghana. So we moved to Nairobi, Kenya, and we were in Nairobi, Kenya for about two years. And then, of course, because Ghana was calling him so much, my dad decided that we should move back to Ghana. We were there for another two and a half years or so before realizing that things weren't really going to work out there. Politics wasn't working out for.”

    2017-12-27 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #288: Lessons from Bozoma Saint John -- From Spike Lee to Uber, From Ghana to Silicon Valley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT