About this week’s episode: Our hustle may change due to circumstances (like a global pandemic), but it never slows down. By honoring your skills, interests, and what drives you – you can find a career that strikes the perfect balance between fulfillment and impact. Yana Welinder shares her story of how her passion for technology and policy has taken her down a remarkable path with the common thread of improving experiences for users all over the world. #iHustleForIt
About our guest: Yana is CEO and Co-Founder of Kraftful. Backed by Y Combinator and Google Assistant Investments, Kraftful provides mobile and voice interfaces to make smart home products usable by everyone. Yana writes about entrepreneurship and IoT in Forbes and ReadWrite, frequently gives talks about product management, and has been interviewed in podcasts like Masters of Product Management, Stacey on IoT, and Digitale Optimisten.
Before taking the leap with her own company, Yana headed up the Product Management team at IFTTT and built products at the intersection of design and science at Carbon. She’s an advocate for getting more women into top product leadership roles and co-leads Women in Product San Francisco, an organization with over 19,000 female product managers worldwide.
Yana started her tech career in law and policy, with degrees from Harvard, USC, and London School of Economics. She led legal, policy, and strategy teams at Wikimedia (the company behind Wikipedia) and was an academic affiliate with Stanford and Harvard. She’s published pieces about AI and biometrics in the New York Times and the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology and a chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy. As a tech policy thought leader, she’s been invited to speak at the White House (under the Obama administration) and Yale, Stanford, NYU, and other universities.
Yana grew up in Sweden after immigrating there as a child. She’s since lived and worked in five countries and now runs a start-up while being a toddler mom. In other words, she knows how to hustle 🙂
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Website: www.kraftful.com
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Twitter: @Kraftful_Inc
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Medium: https://medium.com/kraftful
Resource mentioned in this episode:
Listen to Yana’s episode here or on your favorite podcast app.
Hustle Over Entitlement™ 