Heather Newman
Hello everyone, here we are again for another episode of The Mavens Do It Better podcast where we interview extraordinary experts that bring a light to our world. And the light in front of me today is Annie Parker. Hello.
Annie Parker
Hello. It's so good to be here.
Heather Newman
It's so good to have you here. And we are talking from sort of opposite sides of the world a little bit or
Annie Parker
Kind of,
Heather Newman
Yeah. Where are you coming to us from today?
Annie Parker
Well, I'm actually waving at you from the future. So, I'm over in Sydney, Australia. So that means technically I think I'm somewhere between 12 and 15 hours ahead of you. So, I can see that the sun is shining, and it's a beautiful day.
Heather Newman
Hey, fantastic! I can't wait to get there. That's good. And I'm coming to you folks from Marina Del Rey here at Creative Maven HQ. So, so excited to have you on and this was folks, this was one of those where we've been sort of watching each other and interacting with each other on Twitter, of all places. bringing a little positivity to sometimes a little bit of a negative place. So, I think we were just talking about how good stuff to be able to meet and say hello and connect.
Annie Parker
And every social media channel out there has its problems. And, of course, Twitter, as we well know, isn't always the most positive and safe place. But there are absolutely wonderful friendships that I've created through Twitter. And I'm, I'm still just on that knife edge of saying I still love the place.
Heather Newman
Yeah. That's perfect. Well, yeah, we'll make sure to put Annie's information in the show notes, of course. But you know, one of the things we're definitely connected in is through Microsoft. I'm a Microsoft MVP, and you work at Microsoft. Will you tell everybody a little bit about your role there? Because I think it's super, super cool.
Annie Parker
Cool. Yeah, of course. So, I've been at Microsoft for about two years now. I work in the Microsoft for Startups team. So basically, this is a team of, you know, a small handful of people around the world where we basically try and encourage founders to build on our cloud, use some of our tools and services, help them go through that scaling and build phase. And ultimately, what we're trying to do is to help startups sell through our channels. Now, what's in it for them? Well, there's lots of help there's free Cloud Credits to build on Azure. There's access to people who can help on your tech stack and any problems that you might have on the build side, as well as on the go to market side. So, we work with people's sales teams and business development to help them get ready to sell into an enterprise channel, which, for those of you who haven't sold an enterprise before, it's kind of like a Pandora's box of what the hell. They're tools and processes and extra things. Everything takes much longer than you would think. Cause you know business is big business. So, we help founders to try and kind of unlock a little bit of that, that black box, if you like, of how to sell. And then ideally if they're selling through into our sales channels to our customers and partners, everybody gets to win. partners and customers get access to innovative product and service startups are getting repeatable revenue streams, which trust me, lots of founders will talk to you about raising funding and how hard that is. But if you can actually get repeatable revenue and fund your own growth, that is the sort of the billion-dollar answer to your problems. And, and then, of course, what's in it for Microsoft. If they're building on our cloud and growing with us, then we get to win too. So, it's a beautiful scenario where everybody gets to win.
Heather Newman
Yeah, that sounds like a very cool job. I love it. That's great. So, you've been at Microsoft two years. Let's go. Let's go. backwards in time, what how'd you get started working in tech?
Annie Parker
Gosh. So as with most people, particularly people like me who are coming up to 20 years of, you know, sort of their career pathway. It was complete dumb luck. I originally started and I actually don't usually talk about this one too much because it was so far back in the past, and it was quite, I didn't enjoy it. So, I sort of locked it away in my metaphorical cupboard in my mind, but I started out as a programmer. So back in the day I worked for what was then Anderson consulting, so I'm that old. We pre-Accenture brand, right. Seriously, I worked for them for about a year and a half before the rebranding happened. So there you go I've worked in Anderson consulting and back then they used to take on hordes of grads, teach them the basics of C Programming and then throw them out into the big bad world and just basically, you know, start installing SAP and Oracle instances. And, and honestly, it was the first two years of my career and I basically saw the inside of a server room. Because this is even back when people had servers, yes, and hot lights, hot room, lots of fans, dos prompts, all that kind of stuff. So that's actually how I started I was purely technical in my first role. But one of the things that I realized quite quickly was being by myself and in a locked in locked into a server room wasn't really the most sort of positive environment for me, I didn't enjoy it. So, I moved on from there and then went to go and work in telco for quite a few years. And the beautiful thing about working in the mobile phone or cell phone industry back then was it was just as mobile telephony was really taking off in terms of things like having 3g so that you could actually get access to internet whilst you were, you know, sort of wandering around and not just voice calls and texting. I remember launching blackberry as a device into the UK. We, we were one of the first mobile phone companies over, so it was Vodafone in the UK, we did the first video calls and just all of this mobile telephony moving into having effectively a computer in your hand. And I did that for about sort of eight, eight or so years. And, and just I love that that pace of technological change and how much it opens up in terms of empowering people and companies and startups eventually, to just go and build stuff and to do it cheap. So, it was about 10 years ago now and I was still in the telco sector, but I realized I kind of hit a bit of a brick wall. By the way, when I say I hit a brick wall, I am not the nicest person to be around when I'm not happy in my job. I turned into a bit of a terrorist. So, you know, those people who are in meetings going, that will never work. That's a stupid idea. We tried that before, don't you remember, and it was a complete disaster. I was that negative ninny in the corner, just basically shutting everybody's ideas down. And that's not actually me. I'm, I'm the kind of person I like, I'm super positive, and I want to see things work. So, I kind of took myself out of the room and kind of stopped that it's not very helpful, wagged my own finger at myself in the mirror, and realized that I just wasn't happy in the job. So, I needed to do something about it. Nobody else is going to do that for me. I need to be in charge of my own personal development, all of those irritatingly obvious statements that sometimes are really hard to see and you only really see them when it gets quite bad. So, I didn't know what else I was going to go do. And what I did in the meantime, whilst I was trying to figure that out, I decided to go and climb Mount Kilimanjaro with my dad, my brother and five friends.
Heather Newman
Wow.
Annie Parker
And what I realized through that process was I need to be all in. I need to be fully committed to a project or a program or work for me to feel like everything is firing on all cylinders. What happened is I got to the top of the mountain, and right at the top, it's quite a gentle incline for the last sort of 200 meters or so you can see the sign when you're from quite far away, and I saw the sign and I thought I would get hit with this rush of adrenaline and I would sprint to the finish, sort of celebrate and all that sort of stuff. And I didn't I just got hit with this other wave of emotion of, Shit, that's over. it's done. what am I going back to, so I sat down and had a little sob. And it was one of those moments where something that I was so emotionally invested in, was no longer there. And I had nothing to replace it other than going home to a job that I didn't want to be in anymore. And it was soul destroying. And so, I did what most sensible people do not. I picked up my phone cause there is there was at the time and I'm pretty certain they probably installed Wi Fi kind of hotspots up there now, but you could actually get cell phone coverage at the top of the mountain., I picked up my phone, turned it on, texted my boss and quit.
Heather Newman
Wow.
Annie Parker
And it was the most liberating moment ever. It was fantastic. I got down the mountain and I got this text back from my boss at the time saying you may just be a tiny bit tired and emotional. So, let's just talk when you get home. Nope, I'm done. Done my mind is made up you cannot change it. And I got back from that and about sort of two or three months after the I'd quit; they finally accepted my resignation. Thanks, I thought that was mine to give not yours, but never mind. but thankfully and I say thankfully because sometimes you just need to put it out into the universe that you're not happy and that you need something else. So, I by saying I have resigned I don't want this role anymore. What was really interesting was a whole ton of other opportunities started coming my way. A lot of them I said no to so it's another kind of sales role or another marketing role. I'm going no, it's not enough. I need something where I can feel like I'm genuinely wired in at a purpose and values level not just that's a nice sounding job. And, and it was New Year's Eve 2011. My phone rang and it was one of the colleagues from my team back in the UK saying, Would you like to come and work for me and I spell this guy worked in the small medium business marketing team at the time, I used to work in consumer marketing and I'm going, not sure that's enough of a change. He went, no, no, no, I've got this new gig. It's awesome. We're going to work with founders, we're going to help them figure out whether or not their prototype or minimum viable product MVP is good enough to perhaps kind of be a business in the future. And they're going to get investment from us it's basically a corporate accelerator program. But back then, I hadn't even heard of one of these things. That sounds fascinating. Working with early stage founders. I am in, by the way, you do know that I've never done that before. And I've got no earthly idea what you're talking about. And this guy's called Simon Devonshire he's still a very good friend. He's going, one thing I've learned about working with anybody in business is good people don't stop being good. So, I don't see this as a risk. come work for me for six weeks. If you're not happy and it doesn't work out, no harm, no foul. Two years later, the clock rolls forward. And I was head of operations for this accelerator program across the whole of Europe. We had seven different cities where we were running these startup, founder driven investment vehicles with a with a six-month kind of incubation process to help them build businesses. And it was the best job until
Heather Newman
dot dot dot
Annie Parker
Wasn't even looking. One of the one of the mentors that we sort of encouraged to get involved in the program in London had a buddy visiting from overseas and he said, do you mind if I bring him in and we do a tour? And I said, No, of course not. So, I did the tour. I introduced this guy to a couple of startups, and I said, by the way, who are you and what do you do? So, I'm based over in Sydney in Australia and I actually worked for Telstra. Basically, Australia's largest telco, and we're looking at building something similar. Do you know anyone that would be interested? Now, winding the clock back again, just very quickly. I've been, I've been and travelled around Australia, something like five times. I love the place. I came over here as a backpacker straight after finishing University fell in love with Sydney, pretty much immediately and had always wanted to come back and live here. And that was seven years, coming up to seven years ago now. So, I worked for Telstra and basically helped them set up their accelerator program for a little while. And that's where the connection to Microsoft comes in because my former boss moved back to Seattle. And she joined as a as a CVP in the cloud and AI part of the organization looking after all things to do with ecosystems and communities. And she kind of tapped me on the shoulder a couple years ago and said, want to come and play with startups again but this time at Microsoft? You don't say no to that?
Heather Newman
No, you do not. Wow. Wow, that's so cool
Annie Parker
That whole story rests on the power of your personal network and people who know you. And I remember that call from Simon on New Year's Eve 2011. And the fact that he believed in me, was more important than the job if that makes sense. I'd have looked at the job description, I'm sure I would have been interested and I might have thrown my hat in the ring. But the fact that he knew me already knew that I could grow into that and develop into that role. It was his belief in me that made it possible. And yeah, all of those different opportunities where I've moved halfway around the world or quit a job at the top of a mountain or whatever it might be. Sometimes you need to be brave enough to have that belief in yourself as well.
Heather Newman
Absolutely. and pass it along like he did you, you know, and I bet you do that, you know,
Annie Parker
Huge proponent of the principle of paying it forward. And I've made a ton of mistakes in my life, a ton, whether it's in personal life or in my business world. And, and I don't want anybody else to go make them again. You want advice? But the key there is that you again, you need to be brave enough to ask for the help. 99.9% of the time, when somebody asks me for help, I give it. it's not because, you know, I'm trying I don't want to hide anything away or anything like that. It's just sometimes I actually don't have the answer. But the amount of times that I've given that help versus I have proactively run the person or emailed the person who I think might need it. I don't know what people need at whatever time they need it. I'm I can't read mind's eye can sometimes be close enough to a person because they're my friend and figure out what then what perhaps they might need. But otherwise, you need to be brave enough to go and ask for the help. And trust me 99% of the time, you will get it back, whatever you need.
Heather Newman
I agree with you. 100%. Yeah, and it's something that we aren't accustomed to doing, you know, we just don't we, it's not even suffering in silence, you know?
Annie Parker
Admitting that we're deficient in something, whether it's, I just don't know how to do this, or I don't have the connection to x, y, Zed person, or I, I feel a little bit lost. And maybe it's more on the sort of self-care angle. All of these things. I had a business coach way, way, way back in the day. And it was actually in that process, where I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do post the telco career and then startups that whole I don't know who I am, and I don't know what's up. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up thing and one of the things best pieces of advice I got from this business coach was vulnerability is not a weakness. And I keep saying that now even you know, 10 years later in startup land, and I think we do need to actually get rid of some of the bravado kind of white tech bro schtick of we're unbeatable and we're bulletproof. Because no is and the truth is our industry will be much better off if we all admitted that.
Heather Newman
Yeah, I agree with you 100%. And that kind of maybe leads into you know, I know you. You just had Microsoft Ignite the Tour in Sydney, which is awesome. And I had the pleasure of working with lots of folks on the some of the diversity and inclusion programs over the last couple of years and I know that's something that you care about as well and have and know a lot about. Can you talk a little bit about the kind of cool things happened at the tour, stories you want to share and also sort of the Global Diversity programs there that you're involved with?
Annie Parker
Yeah, definitely. So, I'll start with the second question first. So, within the Microsoft for startups program, we've been deliberately over indexing our time with partners who we know are doing great work in the diversity and inclusion space. So, a couple of good examples. And we've been working with Backstage Capital. And so, if you if you, if anybody is listening and doesn't know of them, please go Google, or Bing or any search engine of your choice. A lady called Arlan Hamilton, who's the CEO of that group, and it's a VC fund initially, and but they've now branched out into running their own accelerator programs as well. And they only invest in founders who are diverse, so you can't get money from them, unless you have a diverse founder on your team. And I think that's just we need to be, you know, re-weighting the fairness balance. Because if you're a diverse founder, whether it's a person of color, a veteran, a person who's older than your average bear or somebody with a disability, you are statistically way, way, way, way, way less likely to even get the meeting. Let alone get the investment. And even if you just look at it down the lens of gender, globally, only 2% of the venture capital funding goes into female founders. So clearly, the game is not fair. And I'm now a huge proponent of stacking the deck hugely in favor of people who have not had the ability to get that that influence, their network, the door opening call it what you will, and a for a friend of mine used to use a phrase which is "Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not". We're trying to make sure that the best talent around the world that hasn't yet had that opportunity is given it. So, whether it's working through partners like Backstage Capital, we've partnered with the Grace Hopper foundation. We do work with a group here in Australia called Remarkable, which is funded by the Cerebral Palsy Alliance. And they work with founders and startups who have solutions that actually help people with disability. And we're partnering through all a lot of the AI for good programs that Microsoft sponsors at sort of a corporate global level. So those they're giving grants out to groups or startups that have technology that either supports improving the planet, improving conditions for displaced people around the world, and also for accessibility, and they actually just released recently launched another one which is super interesting, which is about culture. So, here's an alarming statistic for you 80% of the most vulnerable ecosystems. So the parts of our planet that are the most beautiful, whether it be the Great Barrier Reef, the Everglades, all of these, the Arctic Circle, all of these places where we have truly unique surroundings and ecosystems 80% of those ecosystems are owned, run and cared for by indigenous people. Have a think. Have a think about how much technology we have designed that might actually support indigenous people and cultures. It's, I'm going to give you a clue. It's not very much, teeny tiny and if you think about it and Australia is a really good example. The dating of how old indigenous culture has been literally the most, So Australia has the longest continuing indigenous culture on the planet. A couple of years ago, they dated that at 60,000 years, it's now looking like it might be closer to 80,000 years. These are the original entrepreneurs. They built tools they built entire ways of working with the communities and the ecosystems of animals and plants around them. They then there's a whole ton of research now that's proving that they knew how to manage and farm the land, that they knew how to irrigate and fish and manage not necessarily crops but certainly how to make sure that they lived off the land but also gave back to the land as well and do it in an in a friendly way. And it's just fascinating to me that we haven't spent any time at all working with indigenous cultures around the world going so you know, those things that you've been doing for hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Can we perhaps maybe just learn from you a little bit? Just it's, it's fascinating and also it makes my heart break, because just think of all of that untapped knowledge going to waste. And so going back to the now the question of Ignite the Tour, and Ignite just for those of you listening who don't or haven't heard of it before, Ignite is a conference system that we sponsor around the world from Microsoft, where we invite people from our customers, partners and suppliers, bring in your IT pros, your tech folk who want to learn more about what's happening and what's coming out the next. We've then put in over the last couple of years we've put in a specific track around supporting what we call the humans of it, which is just to remind ourselves that we may be here to do a job and to, you know, code our little hearts out but at the end of the day, we're also human beings and also the technology has enormous potential to do good in the world. So, the Ignite the Tour in Sydney last week, I hosted a couple of panels. One was just to support and host people who have stories of the difficulties of navigating a career in technology. So, what happens when the 10-ton truck hits you of that just went horribly wrong? And so, in one case, it was a young lady who was talking about how the nonprofit that she works at very nearly went under because the funding ran out. How do we how do we navigate those moments and she ended up having to go through a process of figuring out the business because the general manager left, and she was the only one really who understood the operation. She had to unfortunately fire a few people and figure out how to try and turn this bad situation around. Very happy to say that the nonprofit is still going and she's doing well. What she learned through that process wasn't the tech wasn't the how to make the technology of the business work. It was how to just run an operation and step up and be a leader. And then the other lady on the panel recently came out as a trans woman, 18 months ago, and prior to that she would have been classed as a white guy. And what happened on the you know almost right down to the day, the week, the month that she came out as trans, job opportunities dried up. And, you know, it just keeps showing us that whilst I hope that the businesses that I work in and the startups that I work with, think about how they show up and how they resonate with audiences, like people from the LGBTIQ, veterans, people with disability. Are we really truly being inclusive? Are we being as welcoming as we possibly can? And are we making sure that when we're going through interview loops and recruitment processes that we do have a diverse set of candidates. And the sad fact is that, sadly, we're not there yet as an industry, and there's a lot of work to do there. And there's lots of ways that we can do more on that space. And I would encourage anybody who's listening to go look at Project Include, go read up on some really awesome people who do a great kind of work in this space. So, a good friend of mine she is called Aubrey Blanche. Used to run all things diversity and inclusion for Atlassian. She's recently moved on to another role, but still in the diversity and inclusion space. So, Aubrey is just a phenomenal person to follow, whether it's on Twitter or go read her medium blogs, super helpful for any founder out there wanting to learn. And going on to the second panel, we took a little bit of a switch and looked and one of the things that I'm pretty passionate about at the moment and it will be no surprise to I think anyone listening, Australia's really struggled over the last few months with bushfires, floods, droughts. I think we're missing a locust invasion and the four horses of the Apocalypse but otherwise, we've had everything else and for anybody that is still wondering whether or not this is a blip or just seasonality, it's really not, it is climate change, the science is out there, please go read up about it. but at a practical level, I wanted to host a panel which talked about the impact that the bushfires have had on communities and individuals, and then also to talk about how technology can make a difference and perhaps be part of the solution. So, we've had analysts sharing, you know, one lady was sharing how her family home that had been in the family for generations has gone. 12,000 acres of land just incinerated. Another founder was on the panel with us who's an indigenous, indigenous entrepreneur. And she was sharing it's not just about houses and property that's been decimated and destroyed. But indigenous land, rock out, that's, you know, like I say 60,000 years old, gone. And impossible to replace that. So, the loss and the sort of whether it's loss of life, loss of homes, loss of habitats, loss of animals, we've lost 1.2 billion animals in the bushfires in the last three months.
Heather Newman
Wow. She said billion.
Annie Parker
Yeah, a B not an M, a B. And it's, number one, it is heartbreaking. Number two, how do you come back from that? And maybe we don't, maybe It's what we used to have is never going to grow back. So, we have to care for what we have left. The good news was we did share an awful lot of thoughts and ideas how we could, you know, for when a crisis does hit again, how might we manage that better through using technology through using AI and you know, drones perhaps to be putting fires out rather than putting people in front of fires. you know, when you've got a raging inferno and 60-meter-high blazing fire, we shouldn't be putting humans in harm's way of that and fascinatingly, as well, and this was fascinating for me, because I didn't know this until I got to Australia. Quite a lot of those firefighters are volunteers. They're not, the people who live in you know, rural areas of Australia and they're the first people who get to go and fight these fires. It's volunteers. There's so much opportunity, I think for technology, whether it's in the artificial intelligence space or drones or even prediction. How do we predict where these fires might be before the terrible conditions flare up again? So yeah, those are, those are some of the panels we hosted. And hopefully, folks listening can kind of get the gist of I, my role at Microsoft and Microsoft for Startups team, we care about that blend between. It's not just tech for technology's sake. We really want to encourage people to understand that the technology can have a huge amount of purpose and to solve genuine problems.
Heather Newman
Yeah, absolutely. Every piece of technology, everything that we get our hands on these phones and these surfaces and all this other stuff, you know, it's the other thing is that they all started from an idea of somebody's dream of a way to help somebody else right? So, I think, you know, that's that storytelling piece that sometimes we miss, right of connecting it back to humans.
Annie Parker
And I think, you know, if all, we used to have this phrase back in the program in London that I mentioned, I first started out on 10 years ago, we often saw founders coming in pitching an idea. And we would go, that is a great piece of technology, looking for a problem to solve. And I think anybody out there who's got a really cool idea, ask yourself this, is it solving a problem? Is it solving a problem that lots of people have? If the answer to those two questions is yes, then you might have a business. The third question, and this is the hardest one is will people pay money for it? Now if you get a triple score on that go right ahead. Go build it make the world a better place.
Heather Newman
Yes, trifecta. Place your bet. Yeah, for sure. Oh, my goodness. Where are you from originally?
Annie Parker
I'm originally from the West Midlands in the sort of the middle part of England. I grew up in Yorkshire and Scotland. So, my dad used to work for one of the supermarket chains in the UK. And he was kind of like one of their managers who is a problem solver. So, they would send him round into lots of different cities and places in the UK to go and we lived in I've lived in so many different places growing up, I think it was something like nine. And I think that's one of the things that sort of threaded through my career and my personal life as well over the years. I love traveling. I'm not very good at sitting still for very long, you know, and I have just bought a house here in Sydney though I'm staying.
Heather Newman
Rad! Yay!
Annie Parker
But I do love traveling. So, the whole learning about the world and really wanting to sort of travel to as many places as possible. That got sort of instilled in me as a kid when we moved around so much.
Heather Newman
Sure. That's so funny, you know when, as you and I've been getting to know each other on Twitter and talking back and forth and stuff, and it's funny, my father worked for JC Penney's department store. And he was a fixer too, like he would make stores better and so I moved around a bunch when I was kid as well. There is something about that, that that gives you I think the travel bug. It can also maybe help you with sort of that, you know, razzle dazzle I'm coming into town. I need friends. Like me, don't you like me? Yeah.
Annie Parker
I think it taught me resilience as well. It's okay to feel a little bit awkward or out of your depth or anxious because you don't know anyone yet. But don't just remind yourself this too shall pass, right that being the new girl in class or the new boy at school, just need to throw yourself in there and go and chat to a few people. And then literally days and weeks and months later, you will very quickly forget that you used to be the anxious kid in the room. I do find it fascinating how travel also keeps you quite grounded. So, I've been the last couple of years, I have a travel buddy back from England who we pick a random country to go meet in every year. So, I think so far, we've done Nepal, Vietnam, Argentina, and Sri Lanka. We're just about to book our next one. In fact, we were just talking about it this morning going to Nicaragua.
Heather Newman
Oh, okay. Good for you.
Annie Parker
The country number 63.
Heather Newman
Wow, that's good. That's so good. I was just you know, Joel Olson here. Yeah, we he was just on the podcast and we talked a lot about travel and countries and stuff too. So yeah. So, I, if you if you weren't connected with him to talk about travel and some of the things he does.
Annie Parker
I do follow Joe on Twitter.
Heather Newman
Yeah, he's a travel blog, which I didn't even realize.
Annie Parker
No, I keep thinking I should write one of those one day. I was in Ignite the Tour in Joburg two weeks ago. I got to go back to a hotel. I stayed at 11 years ago with my best friend when we did a six-month world trip. It was cool to just go back to somewhere that you've been to a decade later.
Heather Newman
Oh, yeah. Completely. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah, I got to go to South Africa and hang out with Tracy and Alistair and all of those lovelies last year myself. So, for the first time. Yeah. Ha. Similar, similar things here. I was like, that doesn't surprise me so much at all. So that's very cool. Well, I'm going to bring in the last question because I've had you on for a bit. Yeah, but I could keep talking to you for like two hours. I'm like, I'm like, I have so many other things I want to ask you, but um you know what, before I do that, I you work for Microsoft, you, you were doing all these different things. What's your way to unplug? What makes you happy to, you know, relax and all of that kind of stuff?
Annie Parker
I'm a simple child. Very simple. I go for a walk with my dog.
Heather Newman
Ah, yes, yes.
Annie Parker
And I've noticed as well that when I am on a longer trip, you know sort of anything more than about seven days. I literally start hanging out in parks and accosting people saying, Can I just can I just cuddle your dog for a second? We were in New York a couple. I think it would have been in about late January, early February this year. So, It's cold out, right? It's New York. I made sure that the hotel we were staying at was the closest I could get to Central Park. Just so I could go for a walk every morning or evening and just go and say hi to some dogs.
Heather Newman
Yeah.
Annie Parker
I don't know what it is. But my I know that if I haven't spent time and it can, other animals are also acceptable, right? So, horses, just being with other sentient beings, I just think calms me down and it chills me out. Gives me that moment of peace, because you don't need to talk. You don't have to show off your presentation skills you just need to be.
Heather Newman
Right? Yeah,
Annie Parker
One thing that was amazing if you're not seen it. if you're ever next in Seattle, there's a sort of wildlife kind of sanctuary. It's about an hour and a half north of the city. And they have a pack of wolves there. And you can literally go and hug a wolf. I will send you a photograph of it in a second. One of the very truly beautiful things I've ever done. It's this animal that, you know, could, you know, kind of rip your throat out if it wanted to, but they choose not to. They're in harmony with us. And we're in harmony with them. And just this whole, it was it was genuinely beautiful. So, I actually did do that because it was it was a long trip I'd been away for, I knew I was going to be away for two weeks. And we've also just done a big partner conference in Vegas. Probably within the first three or four months of me joining Microsoft and I booked this in deliberately in the middle of the trip, so that I could just do something that would help me tap out. The other thing is hiking. So, Mount Kilimanjaro and I always do a hike about around Mount Rainier when I'm over in Seattle I took my dad on holiday in April last year and we went hiking in the Himalayas for two weeks. I don't know there's something really Zen about the clear skies, the fresh air, the cold evenings and just I don't know, being at one with the universe. I know it sounds very Zen, but it just helps me chill.
Heather Newman
Absolutely. No, it's super awesome. And another podcast guest. Nicole Butler who is a speech therapist. She actually climbed Mount Kilimanjaro as well, but she ended up getting the sickness she didn't make. Yeah, she didn't make it to the top had to be taken down.
Annie Parker
Yeah, my dad got the sickness too. but this I'm also you know, when people say are you more like your mom or your dad. And I like to think that I have the best parts of both, but certainly one of the things I took from my dad is just sheer bloody mindedness. I cannot finish something. If I set my mind on something, I'm going to do it. My dad has this too. So, he claimed we originally climbed in the September and dad didn't make it. And it was bugging him that much that he went back the following January and did it again, practically sprinted up.
Heather Newman
That's fantastic. I love it. Good for him. Good on you dad. Cool. Well, this is a question we ask everybody. I'm really interested in moments and sparks in our life and so curious if you'd share with our listeners a spark a moment person place, a thing that really seats you in who you are today?
Annie Parker
Hmm, I think the Kilimanjaro moment where I ended up falling on the floor and bursting into tears, the thing that I was doing had gone. Was one of them but one of the other ones actually had happened probably about six months prior. And it was interesting to me actually how that chunk of time where I knew I was going to leave the job I didn't like anymore, but I didn't know what I was going to go do next. They that sort of six or nine months of my life was deeply frustrating and irritating. But so, so needed. And oftentimes when I see other people going through a career, kind of, refocus, or call it what you will, the one thing I always sort of advice is hold the tension. It might feel really awkward and frustrating, but it's awkward and frustrating for a reason because you need to learn something until you've learnt whatever the thing is, you need to keep going. So, at the beginning of that process for me, I was lucky enough to go on a training course that my company paid for which was fabulous. And it was all it was all around learning how to be a leader. But instead of it being the company kind of rah-rah thing of here's how we want you to lead it was you're going to go on a course to figure out how you are, what sort of leader you are. And then when you get back you can apply it into the business. And, and it was fascinating. So, it's called self-leadership. Leading Self that was it. It was run by a company called the Oxford Leadership Academy who I will quite happily recommend to anybody. And the first thing we did, or first sort of group activity that we did or as individuals was to map out a lifeline. So, you start with a blank sheet of paper, horizontal axis time, vertical axis happiness, and the sort of the course moderator just said to us all look, this is something that's going to take you a couple hours. So, go find a quiet corner, map everything out in your life from about age 10, 11, 12 onwards from the moments where you actually really remember something, not secondhand remembrances from your parents telling stories or that kind of thing. And it was, it was a really, really useful exercise on a number of different levels. But the thing that came across to me was everything in my career at that time, where I was being recognized for it, whether it was you know, achieving sales targets or hitting budget numbers or customer satisfaction, all the other business metrics, even though we were smashing those targets out of the park. The happiness that I derived from it was negligible. And the moments where I felt happy, weren't actually my job. So, you know, helping others do well passing on my knowledge to other people making sure, one thing that was my job, which was of my own team, I loved it when I saw one of my team doing really, really well and developing and all of those sorts of different things. And the next part of the process was that we had to read our lifeline or timeline out to our buddy. And my buddy, was a beautiful human being called Pete Williams. We're still friends. And this was 10 years ago now. And I read out my lifeline timeline to him. And we were challenged to just what's the first sentence that pops into your head? And his first sentence, it was just it floored me. He went, I have absolutely no idea why you work for this business. And it was the first time anybody had really put it that bluntly back to me that I was quite obviously in a job that I didn't derive any kind of truer, higher purpose from or it was really transactional. He's going I don't know why you work for this company.
Heather Newman
Yeah. Wow!
Annie Parker
Thanks for that.
Heather Newman
Yeah.
Annie Parker
I see it now. Now you've put it that bluntly. But it was it was a seminal moment for me of realizing that if I carried on doing what I was doing that trying to find my true purpose of what I really wanted to do in life was never going to happen.
Heather Newman
Yeah, sometimes it's one sentence, isn't it? One word, one. Something one person, you know,
Annie Parker
Sometimes it takes a complete stranger to help you see it as well.
Heather Newman
Yeah, even close friends. Sometimes they're like, really? and you're like, defiant or whatever. And yeah, sometimes it does take that. What a cool moment. Thank you for sharing that with everybody. Everybody I'm going to definitely put any had a lot of wonderful links and folks that she mentioned. So, we'll make sure to put those in the show notes for you as well. I again, I'm so pleased to finally get some of this time with you and love what you're doing in the world. So, thank you for helping startups. Thank you for helping everybody.
Annie Parker
I get so much joy out of it. It's almost doesn't feel like a job. So, I'm very lucky.
Heather Newman
That's what it's supposed to be right? Yeah. Well, cool. And hopefully I'll see you in Australia. Sometime later this year for sure.
Annie Parker
Absolutely, and I will show you around, show you some other awesome people when you get here too.
Heather Newman
I love it. Thank you so much for being on the show. All right, everybody. That was another episode of The Mavens Do It Better podcast. Here's to another big beautiful day on this blue spinning sphere. Thanks, everybody. Take care.