[00:00:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host, Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, business leaders, talk about bold decisions, pivotal moments, and innovative ideas that shaped their journeys.

This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real world industry problems. If you wanna learn more about it, head over to technologyrivers.com and tell us more about your project. So today we have an amazing guest, Ana Chaud. 

Ana, I’ll let you introduce yourself, tell us where you grew up, just your only career, and then we’ll go from there.

[00:00:57] Ana Chaud: Okay, great. Thank you. Hi. It’s nice to be here. Thank you. So I’m Ana Chaud, I’m based in Miami, Florida right now, but originally born and raised in Brazil. I moved to the United States when I was 21.

I went to San Francisco to get a graduate degree and went to school there. At the end of my program, I ended up getting married and creating a family in California where I spent 20 years of my life and where I started my career and what prompted me to what I’m doing today.

And then at about, I don’t know, 20 years later, I moved to the Pacific Northwest where I spent another 15 years and eventually moved east where I am today and yeah, so that’s where my journey was or has been. 

[00:02:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So you’ve been working with founders and executives for decades now. What first drew you into working so closely with leaders and how it has shaped your own entrepreneurial journey?

[00:02:16] Ana Chaud: Yeah, so that journey started in San Francisco. I think what most people don’t know is that very early on in my career, I was a project manager, and if you’ve been a project manager, you probably know that you hold all the responsibility, but none of the power to actually make things happen. You just have to make it happen by other people being able to do what you’re supposed to do.

You follow up on them. So during that time, I started to get really curious and what we would do to motivate people to get their jobs done in a way that was effective that one in a way that was productive for everybody and I started to watch how leaders were working with their teams and I started getting interested in that quite a bit on how leadership was impacting the performance and the results of their companies.

So later on as my career evolved. I became a consultant for operations and financial management, and I started working very closely with founders and with executive teams of small and medium sized companies and during that 12 year period, which was the length that I had my business before I moved away from California, I was able to really take stock on which leaders were doing what and how they actually managed their businesses, who were successful, who weren’t and I was started like this little book of do’s and don’ts and I always said to myself that I was the best founder until I became one, because I thought I knew everything from that experience of what I needed to do to become the best founder.

So, I worked for over 250 leaders at the time that were clients of mine during that period where I really was able to identify qualities that I thought were really great when they were managing and leading their firms or not, and I took all that to heart. When I started my own journey as a founder, so that’s sort of how it shaped my entrepreneurial journey.

When I started Garden Bar, which was after I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I really experienced, you know, walking the shoes of my clients, understanding what they were coming from, understanding the challenges, and then working really hard to apply everything I had learned in the leadership world and how I wanted to actually take my company and work with my team and set a strategy, et cetera.

So that’s sort of how that previous experience shaped the entrepreneurial journey.

[00:05:18] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. 

[00:05:20] Ana Chaud: Of course. 

[00:05:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So, you started Garden Bar and can you talk more about it? What inspired you to start this? the retail, I would say, or restaurant and then did you raise capital or how did you structure it? What worked? What didn’t work?

[00:05:40] Ana Chaud: Yeah. You know I think there’s a saying that says, I think necessity is the father of invention or something in those lines and I always, 

[00:05:50] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Necessity is a mother of invention.

[00:05:51] Ana Chaud: That’s correct. The mother or the father, or could be one of the parents of invention. I think that’s what happened to me. So I moved to the Pacific Northwest and I had a personal change in my life, it was a divorce and that which really changed the trajectory of what I had to do. That divorce put me in a situation where I had to go back into the workforce in a different manner. I had left San Francisco, I didn’t have my client base, and during that time, which was a very convoluted time in my life, I had this job, which I’m sure everybody can relate, one of those jobs that you absolutely don’t like, but I had to do it, so I was doing it and every day.

I would look forward to my lunch hour and this is a true story and I wanted to go and I only had half an hour for lunch, which sounds crazy, but it’s true. So I needed something really fast and I wanted something healthy and I couldn’t find it was important at the time. I, you know, my options for fasts were always a burrito or pizza or a sandwich, and I just wanted to get a salad and I thought, I just need a salad. I didn’t want anything, you know, too heavy whatever it was anyways I found myself going to Chipotle every day and getting their salad and after, I don’t know, two months eating Chipotle salads every day, which I loved. I thought it would be really nice to get more than six ingredients in my salad because I’m just getting bored with this.

So the idea of having a solid bar that I could come in and out and then really get my lunch and feel good about my lunch came to me and I thought, I’m gonna start looking for a place like this, there was not any at the time I thought, this is so fascinating because in the East coast in particular New York, the concept had been developed pretty well.

I mean, they had sweet green, they had chopped, they had different concepts in the solid world, but nothing in the northwest. So I started digging a little deeper and they dare came to me at that same time my ex-husband and I had finalized the divorce and he bought my house, my share of my house, and I had this little bit of money and he said, are you gonna buy a new house?

And I said, no, I’m gonna start a business and he said, what do you mean? And I thought, I need to start a salad restaurant and of course everybody thinks I’m crazy and I thought, I said, no, I don’t think I’m crazy. I think that this is the need in this town and I’m gonna do it. I connected with my business partner, then my co-founder.

He was a restaurateur in Portland at the time. He knew that what I was trying to do, we aligned on the vision. He brought the restaurant experience. I brought business experience, and then we co-founded our first location in Portland and that was the first garden bar that we had, and we grew from one to 10, well, nine, and then one was building, so we had 10 leases under the umbrella in about three years. 

So it was a little fast and in five years we were acquired by our competitors from Seattle. So it was a fast and furious journey. I don’t recommend that to anybody. But to answer your question, did we raise capital? Yes, we self-funded the first location and then all the subsequent locations, I raised three rounds of funding.

One round was an equity round, the other two were convertible note rounds and then three years, three and a half years in, I found my suitors, the people that are gonna buy me and then I coordinated and I really just orchestrated that exit and worked with them to get an acquisition done. So yeah, that’s the journey. It was fast.

[00:10:03] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool and growing multiple locations, that hard, obviously, that brings different challenges. 

[00:10:11] Ana Chaud: Yes, it does. 

[00:10:12] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So is there any lesson that you learned the hard way while growing multiple locations?

[00:10:19] Ana Chaud: Oh, so many lessons. There’ll be so many lessons. I think first of all, we did grow. We grew too fast. What happened was, that was one of the biggest, I think if you were to ask me what was one of the most pivotal leaps in this founder’s journey was when I decided to scale it to multiple locations. Right? So we started the first location and it was this huge success. 

The city really wanted it. It was like this unbelievable embracing of the concept and the idea. So we immediately opened a second one and then. I realized that what we had in our hands was something called a convenience model and not a destination model. So I realized that people wanted to go to a garden bar that was no more than two to three blocks from them ’cause we were downtown in a high dance area. 

This is when Portland had a downtown. Now they don’t anymore, unfortunately. But at the time it was a vibrant downtown and people were walking to lunch and all that. So the scaling became a little too quick. If I were to look back and redo that, I think what happened was I did not understand the multi-unit model well enough to understand what the maturity time it is for one of the locations.

How do you actually allocate costs and funding? So I learned on the go at the end. I knew exactly how to actually manage the locations in the vi, you know, think about how they are each, the unit economics and what I needed to hit, but as I was learning as I was going, so it was very stressful and I also did not understand the economics of a food and beverage service, you know, which is not very amazing. Like it’s not like you know most things. So you have to really understand the model and those are things that I didn’t know. So those are lessons of understanding how a multi-unit model works and also understanding the difference between having a corporate owned. You know, multi-unit versus a franchise model.

It’s a completely different business and so we did not franchise. It was not something that we wanted to do. But as I was growing the brand, then I started to learn would it be an option for me in the future or not? Would it be something that I’d like to do? So I guess in short, I had a lot of things that I learned as I was going, I didn’t know beforehand but it was a good journey in the end for sure.

[00:13:10] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So looking back, it’s been six years now and you said you were dabbling franchise or not. I mean, looking back, do you think if you do, if you had a chance again, would you franchise it or was that a better route? Versus what you did was the better route again, there are pros and cons of each thing.

[00:13:36] Ana Chaud: Yes, there are pros and cons. I think it depends on what your goal is, right? For me, the integrity of the food was very important and the impact I had on my customers was very important. It would’ve been really difficult to get that same level of quality service and customer experience.

If I were franchising I had a much when you don’t franchise, you have a lot more control over the culture you have with your team. You have a lot more control of the operations and how you run the stores. All the protocols that you set up. So the challenge is of course, you know, if you have one standard operating procedure, for example, and you’re gonna implement in one store, you have to implement the same 10 times or whatever that is, right?

So it becomes a little harder. You have to have layers of control, but you do have a much better . I guess you have much better results and the outcome is a little bit more controllable in the sense that you can control the quality, you can control the user experience, the franchising, you are a lot more hands off because you have each location being operated by someone else.

And so the work is how do you provide your operators with all the information they need, with all the resources, the tools that they need in order to be able to. Come up with something that’s quality, same user experience, et cetera. So does that make sense, that differentiation?

[00:15:23] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yep

[00:15:23] Ana Chaud: Okay.Yeah.

[00:15:24] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So with 50 pages, that’s one of the businesses that you’re running now. You help the leader design their, what’s next? What inspires you to create a structured process for something so personal?

[00:15:40] Ana Chaud: Yeah, so, well, there’s three parts to it. There is my experience before Garden Bar, right, Which I have, I worked so close to leaders and I was able to notice how much achievement becomes the architecture of their identity. So it’s basically this idea that whatever I, at this goal, or I get to this position, my company does that. This is where when I’m gonna do X, Y, and Z. I had noticed that, but it never really clicked for me.

Then I went through the Garden Bar. Once I got acquired. I went back to working with leaders and just in a different capacity, where before I was working with them on streamlining operations and financial management. After Garden Bar, I was more focused on strategy and execution of a strategy, fundraising strategy, fundraising, acquisition.

So I was working more on the bigger picture with these leaders and what I noticed was that the same issue was happening. These leaders were hitting every single box in their business, but they were not personally happy and even though I’ve noticed that before, this time, it hit me harder because I realized that I too was getting into it stage in my life where you keep searching and going and hitting the next step, and you check the next box, the next box, and then all the things that you keep saying you’re gonna do personally just don’t happen.

So that’s really made me sad to see so many of my clients unhappy, you know, losing their marriages, health issues, getting to a position where they could get out of their businesses, but they wouldn’t because of the fear of who they would become without that business.

And that’s what I mean, that achievement becomes the architecture of their identity. It’s, they, all of a sudden they think they are what they’re achieving. I started to flip the model. I started to look at them and say, okay, you know what? We’re gonna do strategy and before we do that, can you please tell me what you want personally?

And then based on that, let’s think about a strategy in your business that actually supports that personal life that you’re seeking and what I noticed was that the majority of them did not know what they wanted personally. They didn’t even think about, they wouldn’t even give any time to design or plan or figure out what they wanted personally.

They thought, okay, when I hit this financial goal, the idea is my personal life. I’m gonna click whatever that is, but they don’t know what that is. I’ll travel someday, I’ll play the piano, I’ll learn French, whatever it is that they were thinking, but never really putting it as a plan. So when I realized that they did not know what they wanted

I was a little bit at a loss thinking, okay, how do I help them figure out what they want? And I started like just doing, you know, one-on-one conversation. Tell me what you want. I was like writing, you know, figuring, I’m not a mind you, I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know how to do this. I, you know, but coincidentally, during that time.

I was talking to Elliot Weal. He’s my business partner now, also my life partner. We were not life partners then, but he is my business partner and he tells me he was in the same space and he was having the same issue and he said, you know, I designed a program for them. You are more than welcome to try it and I did. I tried it and I thought, wow, this is a structured way for me to think about what I want for myself and I thought, can I try it with my clients? 

And he said, yes and that was the birth of 50 pages, which is basically a structure framework. It’s a process that we take leaders through that helps them figure out what they want for themselves.

A lot of times our clients are in the position in their lives where they are ready for what’s next. You know, they’re either ready for an exit or they wanna do something else and they don’t know how to execute. So we help them get clear on what they want for them personally, and then based on that, we help them create a plan and execute the business is one dimension that they have for themselves.

But we work on every dimension of their lives. Not only the business, but you know, their health and their mental health, their spiritual health, their financial health. We try to bring it all together and then help them create a picture of what they want for themselves.

[00:20:55] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Oh, cool. No thanks for the explanation. Of course it is really important to have that clarity, and you’re right, most business people they know more about the business and they’re ignoring their personal, so bridging that gap and bringing them clarity. Is really obviously putting them into the right path, improving their life, for sure.

[00:21:25] Ana Chaud: Yes It’s true

[00:21:25] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And so then you have another company, Sankalpa Life 

[00:21:35] Ana Chaud: Sankalpa 

[00:21:36] Ghazenfer Mansoor:Yeah. So we’re, this is where you focus on women navigating midlife transitions. So what patterns or teams do you see most often? When women are redefining their next chapter.

[00:21:48] Ana Chaud: Yeah. So it’s funny, this started as a passion project, but now it’s sort of taking front and center because I feel like there’s such a need out there, midlife in, let’s just start by the fact that midlife is a natural inflection point more so for women because of menopause, right, And a lot of people talk about that these days, and that’s a time in the woman’s life where the biology shifts, but it’s not just the biology of hormones and changes, it’s really the physiology of the brain of a woman shifts a lot during menopause and what that does, it brings her all these questions about authenticity.

About am I being who I want to be? Am I on a path that I wanna go? Do you know? Do I wanna stay here, don’t I? But when women feel though, which I don’t think we talk about, women feel a lot more guilt asking themselves this question in particular when they are very successful in high achieving.

So for a woman to hit high levels of success. We cannot deny or disagree that she has to work harder than men. We all know that. So when a woman hits that path, she feels guilty, even questioning, why am I feeling this way? Look at me, look what I am, look what I’ve done and so that feeling of guilt and shame will keep them sometimes living a life that’s not what they, that’s not meant for them.

So I decided to start this community for women who are in midlife, usually 50 plus, who are going through the same challenges, who know how hard it is, in particular corporate women who get started to get pushed out of corporate America. Do we know that? Like you hit 50, just know that they’re gonna get rid of you somehow, unless you’re, you know.

Someone else like in the famous, but if you are a regular 50 plus woman, it gets really hard for them and then it gets really hard for them to find other jobs. So it is a tough time doing a woman’s life. So because of that too, a lot of women feel really nervous about even trying to question or see what’s next for them or even choose or make different choices.

So what Sankalpa Life does, it’s we bring together these women, we connect them, we have them talk to each other, we have them understand that they are not alone. But most importantly, what we do is we give this woman the opportunity to live. I think what happens is that most of us postpone living. We don’t wanna go on trips, we don’t wanna, you know, do things that are fun.

We maybe feel like, oh, who am I to go surfing? You know, I putting a group together to go surfing. We’re all 55 year olds. We’re gonna surf for the first time. You know, and these are the things that I think women need. We need the opportunity to bond and do things together that are fun, that makes us feel like we’re alive.

And I don’t think there’s something out there for women of our group, and that’s what we’re doing. So that’s what Sankalpa Life is about and then I run those two in parallel because we sort of compliment each other. So I’m able to offer the program of 50 pages to a lot of women that are in the community of Sankalpa Life because they are women who maybe wanna leave the corporate world and don’t know how to.

So I help get them out of that and start something that makes them happy.

[00:25:38] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Well 50 is, I would say that that is the age. Good age. That’s when people start thinking about a lot of those things. Well, as you were talking earlier as well, the kids getting out of the home and now, stable.

I say, okay, what is the meaning of life? Why,I’m doing all of this? So started giving back time, going back to, I mean, obviously I say in a business term, going back to the whiteboard and figure out, okay, this is what I really want, or, and sometimes you just need them little guidance and then they also start to seeing it.

[00:26:17] Ana Chaud: Yeah, I agree and I think too, I think it’s important to remember that you need to give yourself permission to even want those things. I think the more success we had in life, in the business side. The more guilty and shame we feel to want something else because we realize how special it is to hit certain levels of success and we feel like, okay, why would I leave this?

But then what you do is you’re fighting internally that void or the lack of fulfillment, and you need to allow yourself to know that, you know what, maybe I did hit and now I wanna do something different. I’m the queen of reinvention. You probably know this. I’ve had like 10 different lives. I don’t mind doing that.

But what I try to do is inspire others that it is never too late to start over. It’s never too late to have a change of heart and you can always do something different, yeah, and I think that’s a lot of what. I really work hard to help the women in our community, so that’s what we’ll do.

[00:27:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Oh, cool. No, this is awesome. I think you’re doing a great work. 

[00:27:28] Ana Chaud:Thank you. 

[00:27:28] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Improving the lives of men and women. So you’re on both sides. 

[00:27:30] Ana Chaud: Yes,both sides for sure. 

[00:27:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So you have worked with many founders, 200 plus. What patterns do you see in how great leaders operate compared to struggling leaders?

[00:27:43] Ana Chaud: See, that’s an interesting question. I think that if I were to, there’s so many things, but if I were to nail one thing, I would say that the best leader that I have worked with are the ones who have the highest level of self-awareness of who they are, and they’re not the leaders who want to emulate someone else. So you do have leaders sometimes that they don’t know what kind of leaders they wanna be or who they are, what their strengths are.

And instead of really reading, learning that about themselves and leaning into their strengths. What they do best, what they do is they look at somebody they admire and they think, okay, this is how they do it. Then I’m gonna use that formula thinking it’s going to work for them. It usually doesn’t and I can say that, you know, it’s amazing obviously to, you know, we read leadership books and we learn from different leaders, what we need to do as leaders is, you know, it’s really collect all the things that we resonate with and then making, create our own recipe. So that’s the part that I think that makes for me,differentiated the leaders who knew who they were and how they wanted to lead.

They emanated a certain kind of charisma, energy magnetism that drew their teams to them because there was a level of authenticity that was there, and that was really impactful. The leaders who wanted to be someone else, because they just did not know who they were, the ones who had the biggest issues.

So that’s what I think that made a huge difference and then there’s, you know, skillset and team and this, and vision. Well, those things we can help with, right? Like I can help a leader with creating vision. I can help a leader create a strategy. I can help a leader hire a team. I cannot help a leader have self-awareness that it’s a hard one to have.

[00:29:56] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah and you worked with accelerators, startups, you worked in venture capital. How do you think the entrepreneurial ecosystem can better support leaders in aligning success with their personal fulfillment? Or can it

[00:30:18] Ana Chaud: Yeah, So I think it’s the problem, how can I wanna answer this in a way that’s not so convoluted.

Let me start by this. If, you know, if you’ve worked with a lot of leaders the way I have, I’ve always been curious what is it that propels them to start their own business? Right? And now I am talking not just the people I worked with. I have asked, I think a lot more than 200 people, what propelled them to start the business.

And it always comes down to four things, freedom, control, money or impact. So those are the four things that lead people to start their own business. They either want more control of what they, how they do things. They either want more freedom, they either want more impact, they wanna create something bigger or they wanna make more money.

But if you think about that journey. When you start your journey as a founder, you’ve got none of those, right? You are working like crazy. You don’t have three hours, you’re making no money, you’re barely talking, like you have no impact. You’re just, none of that is there. So there is this ecosystem though.

That is created within the entrepreneurship journey that is a reward of scaling and success like you have to keep reinforcing this because that’s what in our world, we think that we need to do. So like, I think it was the CEO of Palantir, I don’t remember that just came out a couple weeks ago and kept saying, well, if you think you can have a successful journey without killing yourself, think again.

I’m not saying that it’s not true. I think early on for sure, but if we start the journey with the understanding that the wellness of the leader is what determines the wellness of the organization. If I know that from the get go, I know that if I am a stressed out case, my entire team is gonna be stressed out as well.

If I am an untrustworthy leader, everybody in the team would be untrustworthy. They are a reflection of the leader. So yes, we are gonna have times off, you know, there is chaotic. There is absolutely no way to avoid that in the beginning. But there is a level of self-awareness to know when I am acting out of place, when I am acting, you know, too stressed out or micromanaging, whatever that is.

And that goes back to what I was mentioning earlier, where your level of self-awareness can really impact the way you scale your business. So in order to align that success with personal fulfillment is really being able to form to practice is the word practice self-care. Knowing that if I do that and I’m a better person by default, everybody else around me will be better.

If I can model being a healthy, fulfilled, joyful leader. Everybody else around me would like to be me because the truth is nobody wants your job if you’re stressed out, Kate and always unhappy. Like so if you are working for somebody that’s always having issues, stressed out, doesn’t have a life, why do I wanna be a leader?

I don’t and I think as a leader, I wanna inspire everybody to become one someday. So that is sort of like the paradigm that is missing. As far as entrepreneurship is concerned is that I see a lot of founders, entrepreneurs that feel like going crazy without nothing going on. That is just the way it is and that’s it, and I’m gonna resort to it.

That’s my life. I don’t think it has to be that way. I think there are ways to find your ground, find your center, find out who you are, and then come from a position of strength, from a position of control and not a position of reaction or reactivity.

Does that help you? Does that make any sense? Okay, great. Fantastic.

[00:34:42] Ghazenfer Mansoor: I’m gonna switch gear a little bit. So AI is everywhere nowadays. Yeah. There cannot be any conversation without AI. So how is AI or, is AI impacting your business and how do you see it changing operational efficiency for founders or for your clients? I mean, where do you see how AI is impacting. Anything around you? ,

[00:35:14] Ana Chaud: you’re talking Okay. So, it depends on what part of my work we’re talking about, right? Of course, so the piece that AI is really helpful, of course, is that it helps me in particular with my community of women to design better experiences to find better resources, to tap into all the, that’s there to help improve the experience for them and that’s all good. The part that I don’t love so much is that a lot of times, in particular for 50 pages, people are losing their authenticity, you know, and so what’s happening is no one is writing.

The communication is becoming robotized right now. You just plug something to chat GPT and everything comes. Everybody that I talk to has the same language. Everybody uses 13 M dashes. Everybody has contrasting, so what I think it’s happening is that it’s diminishing the authenticity of communication. 

And because I’m building a community. I have to find a way to keep people connected from their genuine self, and AI’s not helping with that. But AI does help a lot with things like creating, building, compiling, sharing, researching the resources that I need to provide my audience with an amazing experience.

So AI helps me with that. I don’t know if that helps, but I don’t have like, it’s not as for what I do. It’s not extremely disruptive as it would be for a lot of different businesses. AI for me, I’m, I still depend highly on connecting with my clients. Like I, we have to really, you know, connect and click for us to be able to work together.

So there is a personal piece that is replaceable for me also the way I communicate. Now, I actually love writing emails that have mistakes and all that because I need to see a person writing something and I need to see how people actually feel, and it comes through communication. So I, that AI is being a little problematic on the communication level. But other than that, I think it’s great. That’s all. It’s,great

[00:37:51] Ghazenfer Mansoor: yeah, AI is definitely empowering people, but at the same time, it’s important how do you use Ai 

[00:37:58] Ana Chaud: oh, there’s no question. 

[00:38:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor: A lot of people are using it just like a Google search and that’s where the mistakes are.

And then, I’ve seen many times a document where it’s so clear that it’s AI. In fact, it changes the contact like, Hey, the guy who’s talking. It’s different then because he didn’t realize he just had AI generated. Yeah. And then it’s talking a total different thing because the hallucination is a lot, so that’s right.

It requires more, it just requires, I would say, a different attention that Yeah. So rather, and also just fully relying on it.

[00:38:41] Ana Chaud: I also think that the output is highly dependent on input too, right? So if you know how to input things with quality and if you put quality material in there, if you have quality conversations with it, I think you can get a lot out of it.

It’s more about how you approach and how you use it. In a way that can help you. It’s not gonna solve, it’s just gonna help you solve. Yeah. So if we come from this particular piece, I think it can be extremely helpful.

[00:39:13] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yes. Yeah. Well, and we always say like. So AI is not gonna just give you magic, it’s gonna give you based on what data you have. Absolutely. In computer terms, we have this term called gigo: garbage in garbage out 

[00:39:35] Ana Chaud: 100%. 

[00:39:36] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So if your input is garbage and output, AI is not gonna do the magic, it will just help you improve. If I have my content, it can improve my English, it’ll figure out my mistakes, it can rewrite it, rephrase it. But it’s not gonna tell me still what I should.

In some cases it does, but then you still have to use, you have to be figured it out. I mean, so the way I’d say is like for me, AI helped me articulate well, but I still have to give it the context and get that articulation

[00:40:01] Ana Chaud: You got, I think you nailed it. Like it helps you articulate well, but you are inputting what you wanna articulate and you’re not asking it to articulate something that you don’t even know what.

And then I guess this goes in parallel, what I was talking about earlier, you know, you wanting, you know, a leader wanting to emulate somebody else. You are using somebody else’s choreography. It’s never your choreography, but if you know who you are and how you wanted to be and now you see how somebody else does it, you can then take that as a resource.

And I think AI is the same way. You know, it helps you articulate, but at least you have the material that you want it to help you articulate, as opposed to just having everything come out and you just repeat it. I think that’s the difference. Yeah.

[00:40:48] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Having led across so many roles, CEO, investor, advisor, what lessons have stayed constant no matter what the industry or stage 

[00:41:01] Ana Chaud: Well, what lessons have stayed constant, no matter the industry or stage CEO investors and advisors?

I think it’s this idea that, you know, no matter where I worked, if you don’t have a personal blueprint of what you’re trying to accomplish. What are you trying? What is your business helping you accomplish on a personal level? And he again, and it can be anything. It doesn’t have to be a career. Some people have a job which they love because they don’t wanna think about it when they leave.

If I go to a job where I stay there from nine to five, and all I need from that job is money to pay for my rent and my outings and whatever it’s okay, but at least I have clarity of what my personal blueprint is, and I know. What I want that job to support. So the constant lesson is that, if I think that achieving financial and professional success is going to give me clarity on my personal life. I’ve got to rethink that. It’s not true. I’ve seen that every single time. It’s important to know your personal blueprint and how your job is going to support it. How is your community gonna support it? 

How is your physical routines are gonna support it. You need to figure out what are the resources they’re gonna support. Your personal blueprint, and that’s what I think it’s missing quite a bit. Once we get into the entrepreneurship world, we get lost into this chaos that we think we’re supposed to, and then we have a hard time getting out of it because we all led to believe that debt’s what we should be feeling.

And don’t tell me otherwise, and that’s what I need to do. I was there, I remember thinking that unless I had a chaotic day, I didn’t have a good day and I’m thinking now I look back and go, no, it’s not true. But it takes a while for people to come to terms to that and a lot of times to is it takes them to hit the, you know, Brock bottom and I feel really sad when I see a lot of people who have to have health issues to get them out of the, you know, hamster wheel. 

And we don’t wanna have to go there. We don’t have to, we don’t need to, you know, lose the loved ones or, and I had a personal story with my own mother, which was a, something that reshaped my personality with my mom, who died young, and it was one of the most accomplished women I’ve ever met, except she never enjoyed one of her accomplishments ’cause she didn’t live long enough, but she was always postponing it and so every time I would say, Hey mom, do you wanna do this? Yeah, when I get this done, I would do it. So she was always thinking there would be a day where she would get all the things that she wanted and she was gonna enjoy it, and that they never came.

So by seeing, from seeing that on a personal level. We ended up enjoying everything she built, but she never did. So that’s something to think about.

[00:44:32] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So, I mean, I may have an answer for that, but I just have one question, like, so if you have to go back to your early career and give yourself, one piece of advice about leadership and balance, what would it be?

[00:44:48] Ana Chaud: It would be enjoy the plateaus. I think that would be the first one thing that I would tell myself. It’s like, okay, when you get to something you want, take some time to savor it. Take some time to enjoy it because I’m going to celebrate it. We. I’m not conditioned to do that. We are conditioned to keep going further, right?

We do that with sports, we do that with physical. Like if I have a physical goal and I need to hit a certain level of weightlifting, now I’m gonna go to the next, which is great because to try to build muscle, I understand. But when it comes to our personal achievements, we don’t take enough time to celebrate the wins.

We celebrate the win, and then we move on to the next goal and then we celebrate the win for a little bit and then we go to the next goal and that constant pursuit is what’s keeping me going. Now, there is a lot of brain scientists that are gonna go back and say that that pursuit is what gives you the domine fine.

I’ve heard a lot of that. I get it. I understand the addiction to pursuit. But if I were to go back to my younger self, I would say. When you hit something that you are really looking for, stop and celebrate. Live it. Enjoy it. See how it feels like knowing that you accomplished that, and then anchor that feeling because that’s what’s gonna keep you going to the next, is knowing that you can recreate that feeling.

But if I don’t even know what that feeling of accomplishment is, how do I know I got somewhere? So that’s the biggest lesson for me.

[00:46:37] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool Ana, what’s next for you? Both in your own journey and in the communities you’re building through 50 pages or, and San Kapa Life.

[00:46:47] Ana Chaud: Well, obviously 50 pages, it’s a big project for us right now. I think we have created something that is truly unique and remarkable for an audience that really needs it. So that’s been really exciting. We are doing our cohorts. 

We do retreats and then Sankalpa. Which I said I had earlier started as a passion project, but now really is taking a lot more form. I think what’s next is just really growing this community and really being able to give the women in the community these opportunities to find exciting, amazing things to do and enjoy and really make the next 50 years, the best years of their life.  

I don’t know if you know this, but we named the company 50 pages because it is, we found out it’s the minimum number of pages. For a book to be considered a book, and I thought that we thought that, okay, why not write your life story. Have something you can look back 50 years from now and be proud of and know that you actually did the best and you’re leaving something that makes you happy. So that is the idea before 50 Pages is really for you to take ownership. You have agency to write what’s next for you to really create the story that you would be proud of.

[00:48:17] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. Thank you Ana, for joining us on Lessons from the Leap. 

[00:48:21] Ana Chaud:Thank you 

[00:48:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: If our listeners would like to connect with you, do you wanna share any. How they can connect with you, your website, LinkedIn, anything you wanna share.

[00:48:35] Ana Chaud: Of course. So, we have our website is 50 pages is spelled out F-I-F-T-Y Pages Life. That’s our website. They can go on LinkedIn and find me on a shout. I’m there. I connect every day with people there  Sankalpa Life is also another website.

So all these different ways to find me if they need to connect and talk and here I am.

[00:49:04] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And thank you for sharing your journey, your leadership insights and wisdom you’ve brought from helping hundreds of founders grow with clarity and intention. 

So for the listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to subscribe and share the episode with someone who’s building, scaling, or taking a new leap in their journey.

This show is brought to you by technology rivers. We help companies grow faster by building AI and technology systems. That creates real operational leverage. You can learn more about us at technologyrivers.com. I hope today’s conversation inspires you to take the next step. Thank you for listening, and I’ll see you in the next episode. Thanks everyone.