Funding and Competing | Wikimedia COO, Janeen Uzzell (Podcast 130)

My staff has. They labeled me the Chief Extrovert Officer because clearly I'm not shy. I am a leader that is committed to leading from the heart. People are really important to me, making sure that my team feels valued and seen and accepted and appreciated and empowered. I want them to feel, you know, confident about the work that they're doing. And we were already a pretty remote culture even before our current circumstance with COVID and the Pandemic. Even harder to make sure that I did that for groups of people that didn't get to see me in person that often. So those things are important.

Jeanine Uzell is the Chief Operating Officer of the Wikimedia foundation, the global nonprofit that supports Wikipedia. She's dedicated her career to exploring how technology can drive equality and representation globally. In her current role, she oversees operational efficiency and scale during the period of Fastest Growth Foundation's history. In addition to being second in command at Wikimedia, Janine is committed to driving equality and the representation of diverse communities on the platform and is passionate about access to information. She's on a mission to expand the free knowledge movement and welcomes new voices that are more representative of the world around us. Prior to joining the foundation, Jeanine was the head of Women in Technology at General Electric, where she worked with the company's global CEOs to cultivate a culture across their workforce of 300,000 employees, which. Which accelerated the number of women in technological roles. Prior to that, she was the company's Global Director of External affairs and Technology Programs. And before that, she spent five years as the Director of Healthcare Programs for GE Africa, based in Accra, Ghana. Janine, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.

Thank you. It's so great to be here. Appreciate it and look forward to the time we get to talk.

I just kind of laughed as I read GE having 300,000 employees. I'm like, that's three times more than the city that I grew up. It's like, you know that GE's big, but holy moly, it was just big.

Yeah. You know my favorite question, Cameron, is, oh, you work for ge? Do you know so and so? I'm like, sure, there's 300,000 people there. Of course I know them.

Is Ghana west coast Africa.

West coast it is, right? You know, you've got Senegal, Cote d', Ivoire, Senegal, Nigeria, and then you come Benin and Ghana is down in there. Yeah, along the eastern coast.

So did you live over there?

Did I wasn't my first experience in Africa. I had been to Kenya on doing some Missionary work, other times. But Ghana is where I landed and was like, I could be here.

Wow.

And it was a game changer for me in my career, in my personal life. Just a wonderful, wonderful experience. It's still like a second home to me today.

That's super cool. Yeah. It's a new part of the region or world I've never really spent much time in. I've done Egypt, I've done Morocco, but never gotten really into the heart of Africa at all. How did you get involved in General Electric so?

Well, I spent almost two decades at GE. 16 years. I kind of. I'm using my air quotes, grew up at GE because it's where I really went through the leadership maturation cycle and became an executive and. But I landed there after business school and I was on an interview track when I finished business school. I think I graduated in May and started working at GE in August. I was working full time somewhere else and had an opportunity to go and work for what was then called GE Medical Systems, which is now known as GE Healthcare. And spent the bulk of my career at GE was always in healthcare, healthcare technologies, healthcare products. But I bounced from healthcare to corporate, to ggo, which is our international division, global growth and operations, to the research center, which is corporate again, and where every engineer, which I am, wants to work. So I bounced around a lot in my time there, but all within the GE family.

What an amazing organization. And it really is known for its leadership development program was Crotonville.

Is that it's Crotonville all day? Absolutely. I think that the work that we do at GE is great work. We get to work on tough problems, build great things. Right. We lead, we build, we solve. All of that. The leadership moxie, the chops that you build to me in that company set a great standard for me. Crotonville is our leadership institute. It's in Connecticut, and it's where folks from all over the world come. And when you work at ge, you have an opportunity to do residents work there and to spend time trained there.

I was always really enamored with Jack Welch, but also really with the whole leadership development program that GE was known for. I got to spend a few days at one of the facilities in. I think it was Louisville. So I did a leadership program there in the. In the. They were. We use washing machines as one of our case studies, but I was really fascinated. So it. Was it as good as kind of from the outside world looking in, Was it as good?

Yeah, I promise you, like. And it's not, you know, People are like, oh, you work at GE that long, you're just kind of a part of the DNA. Sure, it was a huge part of my life. But I absolutely believe that our leadership programs are, hands down, some of the best. The case studies and the problems that, that we get to solve. When you're in these training sessions, you're taking leaders from all over, different parts of the company, different businesses, different areas of expertise, different parts of the world. And you all are in a room and you're solving like a real problem and you're thinking about shareholders and the board and employees and staff and marketing and, you know, I'm an engineer and I learned what it meant to do to be an engineer, but to consider marketing, to be an engineer, but to consider sales, to be an engineer, but to consider, you know, all communication, communications and these different models. And that's kind of the result of what happens when you. When you go through program at ge, which I did, and then when you have an opportunity to be a part of the leadership development, I.

Is problem solving, is that kind of one of the core skills then like that you talk about the GE workout process. Is that one of the. Or what would the top two or three skills that you would say are more transferable or that have been the most useful for you?

I think one, it's your approach to leadership. There's a maturity and a standard of leadership when you are GE trained that includes, you know, as all leadership models do, integrity and all. But there's a resiliency, a leadership expectation that you take on. So that's the first one. The second one is definitely. And these aren't in any specific order, problem solving, for sure. The way that we approach a problem, the way that we consider a problem, in the way that we operate across various disciplines, to think about how to solve a problem is. Is really important and a strong suit. And I'm going to lean on the global perspective within GE as the third one, because we were a multinational and, you know, on any given day we were working across so many different cultures and the diversity of thought. And while maybe other colleagues might not think that other former GCOMs may not have them in that order, those were definitely the three that are, you know, if I have to list three that are standing out for me.

Well, it's interesting you said the global perspective because GE was really global and built its chops around being global when global wasn't easy. You know, now we've got the Internet and accessibility, but back then it would have been way tougher to be that global organization and think globally than it is today.

Agreed. Listen, I'll tell you, even the work that I was doing in Africa, as far as what 20, 16, 17, 18, even then when we were more developed, when we went to Africa, we worked for then the CEO of GE Africa, his name was Jay Ireland. I worked for Jay and just a great leader, great person to work for. We were still over there building these flag companies or organizations across the continent. So we, we had a large office in Egypt and an office in South Africa, but we didn't have offices in, in Ghana, in Nigeria and Cote d', Ivoire, in Senegal and Kennegal and Tanzania and Mozambique. We didn't have those offices there. Those were offices that they brought us there to stand up, to learn how to do business there, to hire locally. And this is what I mean about this resiliency because we had to get there. And I mean the first one I got there, we were working in like a Holiday Inn, right? You know, just trying to chomp on their wifi, running around town trying to figure out where we could send a fax to work on deals with the U.S. i mean this, we were GE, but this is what it took to solve problems in that region. When we first before we actually built our office space there at our headquarters in Kenya, we were hoofing it like.

Entrepreneurial bootstrapping in a 300,000 person company. It's crazy. So why would you leave there and did you go right from GE to Wikimedia?

I did accept, I did take a sabbatical, a break in between. And mostly that was because of some personal things. During my time as an expat and time away my family went through of losses that were really tough. One being my father and his brothers. And I was away for much of that and I came back to the States and I went to the research center and was working and had an opportunity to take some time off. I actually was thinking that I was going to go back to GE and during that time that I was spending with my family in New Jersey, I went to stay with my family for a bit. I really had an opportunity to think about what wanted to do next. And I thought it was, you know, to be at GE where I had a great experience. But the company had changed a lot. Jeff had left, I had repatriated and you know all of those things that I told you about what it meant to be like doing startup work in Africa for ge, those opportunities weren't really present as present for me when I came back to the Americas. It was an opportunity for me to consider something different. And right in the. Probably like two months into my sabbatical, I got a phone call to consider the Wikimedia Foundation. And yeah, I just kind of started the dialogue.

Most people have heard of Wikipedia, but what's Wikimedia as kind of the overall. Is it like the parent organization for. Can you walk us through what that is?

Sure. And I'll tell you, when I received this phone call, it's like the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm like, it kind of makes sense what that might be, but what might that be? And so the Wikimedia foundation, we are the organization that hosts Wikipedia and a series of other wiki products. But the most external facing that the audience would know would be Wikipedia, which of course is the online encyclopedia, one of the top 10 websites in the world. And it's so unique in tons of ways, but the most being that we are an organization of a little less than 500 right now. We're going to grow to a little over that this year, but we currently, not including our contractors, have, you know, not quite about 417 people. The community that builds Wikipedia are hundreds and thousands of volunteers that write the content for the platform. They are the heroes and the sheroes and wonderful folks that do this work that allows 1.5 billion unique devices to touch the Wikipedia platform every single month. And one of the ways I love to put that in context for those of us that are social media fans is like, I'm a big Instagram user. So Instagram has about 1 billion users a month. So kind of like you need devices, Wikipedia, 1.5 people that count on us to be a premier source of information. So what I like to say is if it happens in the world, you know, it happens on Wikipedia. And I think we'll get into that a little more.

It's super interesting to think just how Wikipedia and the wiki organization can stay on top of the content so well when we can't seem to get in this era of fake news, we can't seem to discern what's true and what's not true even in the real news. And you guys have done an extraordinary job of being able to. I don't want to use the term police, but to edit or I would.

Say it's the accuracy in the editing. Cameron and the talk pages are the things that a reader wouldn't digest if they were logging in. Whether they go to wikipedia.comorg or they access it on their, their phone, as an app. When you Google, you know you're pulling Wikipedia content, but the talk pages is kind of like the behind the scenes chatter. And you know, we always, it's editors assume good faith. You assume that everyone means the best in the way that they write. The articles are supported by citations. And so when the media reports on information, we're able sometimes to be in front of it as particularly with all of our different time zones and where we work and then we support and add weight to the content through the citations that are written. So that's a great thing. Also, there are gaps because there's certainly going to be a gap in perspective sometimes when, when we don't have a diverse community of editors always. So for every great thing, we also have a challenge. And you know, I could kind of go on about some of the diversity of Wikipedia, but yes, the editing community does a great job working to ensure a safe space, a thriving movement and an opportunity for the Open Knowledge platform to be successful.

You're right. I'd never really thought about the diversity of the community that's contributing. But yeah, that's got to be a huge issue because it certainly leans towards the nonprofit contributor. I don't know. That's a really interesting not dilemma, but problem. Well, that's why you got GE behind you, because you can figure that stuff out.

I am trying to help figure that out. And what happens is, as with any product or any experience, Cameron, the outcome is always going to be based on what's put into it. So it's as biased or not as the community or the technologists or the folks that actually build it. And so because Wikipedia editors are mostly male, mostly white, mostly American, mostly European, that's a small percentage of the world, right? It's technically about 1% of the world that is telling the world's stories. Which is why in terms of all of our, at least in English Wikipedia, I think we have about just 18% of the stories or the articles on English Wikipedia are about women. So I mean, that's not a fair representation, right about in terms of what the makeup of women are in the world. So these are the kinds of things that we have to continue to go after and to continue to work on and improve. And I'm excited that I get to use my operational skills on something that has such a great impact on the world.

How's the organization funded? You mentioned that you're a nonprofit. How, how do you raise your money?

Super cool way. The majority of our funding is from all of the readers of Wikipedia that donate approximately $15. Can you imagine? So we are over $100 million in terms of annual givings.

Where do we donate? I've never, I've been to Wiki pages. Oh man, I should be getting pop ups or something asking me.

Don't worry, you'll get it. I'll make sure that we get it to you specifically.

I'll be on your list.

There is a campaign season, particularly when you use the site during certain times of year. We're actually in English campaign season now, so you will see that request to give and yeah, average donor about $15. Then we have some larger campaigns. We're very fortunate to have an endowment that is fed annually. So it's really a gift and an opportunity to focus on the work of free knowledge and supporting this gift to the world.

Do you attend the TED conference or TED Women at all?

I have not attended. I am a TED fan. When I was at ge, one of the officers that I worked for spoke at TedMed and so I had a chance to participate in that. We have some upcoming opportunities and I hope TED is one of them and I'd like to wait until it's back in person again.

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I think you should put TED and TED Women. Both of those you'd be a perfect fit to be at. So tell me about the organization, Wikimedia. I mean, when we got on the call, I saw a little bit of your sense of leadership because you were like super gregarious and really outgoing and one of your team was going to be on the call with us as well. And I saw the energy with them. Walk us through what kind of a leader you are and what you believe you know, a leader should be.

First of all, my staff has they labeled me the chief extrovert Officer because clearly I'm not shy. I am a leader that is committed to leading from the heart. People are really important to me. There's a few things that are really important to me. Making sure that my team feels valued and seen and accepted and appreciated and empowered. I want them to feel, you know, confident about the work that they're doing. And even when we have to have the tough conversations and oh boy, do we have to have them because we're doing a lot of culture shift and change management at Wiki and some of my conversations are long and hard, they're required. So it's really important for me that in the engagement they have a different experience with me. We were already a pretty remote culture even before Our current circumstance with COVID and the pandemic, even harder to make sure that I did that for groups of people that didn't get to see me in person that often. So those things are important. One of the things that I do specifically, I'm really committed to building diverse teams. As a woman of color, that's really important to me. I've had great success with the diversity of teams in that the thoughts and the way that we solve have always been rewarding. And I love hiring people that can grow into their roles, that are great at what they do, and I love to let them go for it. But hiring them to grow up into a role gives me a chance to shape some of the skills and the challenges. So I really love that I'm a leader of people. As I was mentioning to you, we're 19 years old now in the movement and will be 20 years old in January. We have within the foundation, obviously much smaller than my 300,000 colleagues at GE. We have 417 staff members, not including our contractor base will be a little more than 500 by the end of planning year ends in June. So June of 2021. We are currently in 37 countries. About 32% of our staff is global. In that number, 46% of our senior staff, not including the CTIM executives, are located outside of the United States. So really diverse and widespread. We are a tech company. You know, the majority of the staff that work at Wikipedia are techies. We're software engineers, we're programmers, we're data specialists. We're a tech organization that happens to be funded like a foundation.

And then has your style changed from GE to Wikimedia?

It's changed in that the open culture at Wiki allows for just some different practices. GE is more like the way that I was raised. My dad's in the military and I come from a regimented family. You know, we have rules and we do our homework and we eat dinner at 5 o' clock and all these kinds of things. And Wiki just has a very, a much more relaxed culture, a much stronger freedom of conversation. We work a lot in the spirit of consensus. And then there was a lot that still had to be developed at Wiki, so operational procedures, even just quarterly report outs and metrics and things like that. And so there was some shaping that had to happen, which meant I had to still bring the rigor and the strictness of what I've learned at ge, because there are some things that we needed to do to do better. But it was really like a seeking to understand and not just be understood or else there was a fine line between considered a bit of control, command and control kind of a thing. So trying to find a way to make it fun, make it palatable. But I will say some of it was met with some difficulty. You know, it's like, oh, don't corporatize us, don't turn us around. We're not, we're not that. But you know, it was really helping our staff see that process and operations, this, these things are necessary in order for us to ensure that we are doing our best work and the right work and that we are able to sustain the long haul. We're not just here for today and tomorrow and 10 years from now, but even longer than that. And my experience can help us ensure that we do that. Well changed in that, you know, maybe I can dance on, on stage at our all hands and I might not do that with Jeff and Mel, but then again, you know, knowing me, you never know.

I've seen Steve Ballmer dance on stage. So Steve can do it at Microsoft, you can do it at Wikimedia.

Like I said, I'm not shy.

You're right. How do you identify whether people are growth people? You said that you like to hire growth people or people that will grow. How do you identify that they are that? What do you look for?

So I'm looking for not just a hunger or a passion for the specific work that they do. So their skill set, the thing they've been educated in, the job that they've been hired or interviewed to do, I'm looking for and not even just the passion or the mission or the organization. I'm looking for a breadth of interests, even if they don't have expertise in it, how they speak about leadership, if they're simply focused on being the best program or the best coder as opposed to using those ideas to solve cross departmental problems. And so I'm looking for those kinds of things. How they talk about problems or issues, are they very tell me what to do and I'll fix it or are they willing to engage in a little contrast debate, pushback? I'm fine with all of those things. You know, on any given day my team and I don't agree and it's we agree to disagree, we make decisions and we move on. So I'm looking for people that are interested in that. And then usually when we're having a conversation, whether it's in the interview or in some teams that I've been able to Inherit it's really their coachability and how I feel they respond to some of the feedback or the discussions we have. You can really tell if a person is shut down, checked out, settled in, single, focused.

You mentioned a little bit as well that you've always been a remote team or largely remote. What percent of your company is is remote and what percent are in offices?

Pre Covid, about 70 plus percent of us were remote. I am an office junkie. My cfo, our CEO, some of us love it. We're there every day and I am struggling to not be there now. Miss it terribly. Our main office is in San Francisco and then I'm based in Washington D.C. i also was living in San Francisco for a while, but I'm based in Washington D.C. so we have a smaller office here which are closed with the COVID restrictions. And we've committed to keeping the curve as flat as we can by keeping our offices closed through June of next year.

Wow.

But we were 70% remote already. And even then, because we were such a big travel team, working remote wasn't something we had to learn how to do. So when the world went remote, we didn't have to switch on any special light and say, oh, how are we going to do this? In fact, we used to our knowledge as a way to give back and help other people figure out how to do this quickly. The most we had to do was get me and the execs monitors and things at home because we didn't have them because we didn't work at home.

How did you lean out so far to June of 2021 and say we'll stay remote until then?

Honestly, because our main office is in San Francisco, we've been really working to align with what some of the other tech companies in Silicon Valley have done. And so you've got Salesforce and Google and other companies that have offices right in downtown SF where we are, we're right down the street from Salesforce and others.

Is Salesforce remote?

We're all remote right now. SF is still a remote. Now maybe there are some folks that may be going in depending on essential.

Wow. Crazy. It's like, will the last person to leave the Bay Area please turn out the lights?

Exactly right. You know, it's ea, the gaming company. I have friends that work there. My friends at Google are still all remote. My friends at Facebook, everybody is still remote. And so we've been, you know, in thinking about that, it was like, okay, let's reevaluate this. By the end, you're thinking into Next year.

I know that we're all conjecturing, but it's kind of fun. Like, where do you think the future of work is going? Is it like, are we ever going to go back to these big offices?

My opinion is that I don't know about never, but it will be a very long time before we're back in the sense that we experience now where you've got tons of people in small spaces. Our office in San Francisco, like most spaces, is an open work area. We're just all over the place. We couldn't bring ourselves back into that and we don't have dividers and separators and we just, we're all laying on couches and sitting in chairs and huddled in corners getting it done. Whether it's some sort of process where we have A days and B days and teams go in at different times so that we have less people in the space that might, that might be what we go back to, I don't know.

Yeah, it's amazing to try to think about. I had a client in Columbia who had 800 employees and he said March 15th, if you said that any of his employees would ever be remote, he'd said over my dead body. In March 21, he said the entire 800 person company, 700 were remote. They had to buy, get wi fi access set up for the other hundred that didn't even have it at their homes yet. But he said within two weeks all 800 employees were remote.

Like I said, for us it's been just getting many of the execs and a few folks set up at home, making sure we have the right chair. So I'm not doing work on my couch all day and things like that. But you know, the future of work is going to be us trying to find ways to host these virtual sessions and stay engaged in multiple time zones. And right now we're doing even just the simple things of rotating our staff meetings in various time zones. Like we have a monthly all staff meeting this month is the late shift. So our staff meeting starts at 9 o' clock at night if you're on Eastern time. So I'll be on with our staff from 9 till about 10:30, 11 o'. Clock. This is what we have to do so that we create some equity and inclusiveness for everyone.

What are you doing to create the kind of community and to the connection while we're all offline? I had a bunch of the members from the COO alliance recently. We did it an online trivia and music bingo, which I thought was gonna be the stupidest thing ever. And I was laughing for 90 minutes, laughing my ass off like, I don't laugh out loud like you do all the time. And I was 90 for 90 minutes. I was literally laughing. And one of my team's like, dude, you're the happiest I've seen you in years. I'm like, I don't know, it was just silly. It was just fun.

I love it. And you know, I love to laugh. I've got quite a hearty laugh. And so you can hear me coming. But I'll tell you a couple things. Our team, the head of our talent and culture department, Robin's done something so great the past few months in our staff meeting where she's been inviting local artists to perform. For the first 10 minutes of our staff meeting, we've listened to some great music. I love horses. My department staff meeting, the ops team, they reached out to a farm and invited a horse in our zoom chat. So all of a sudden, and we use okrs, outcomes and key results as our, our practice. And so all of a sudden in our team meeting, I see something pop up and it says okr, the stallion. And I'm like, what does that mean? And here comes this horse. And, you know, it was just the funniest. They did it as a surprise to me and I. And I loved it. We've been doing some things where it's just, it's on our staff calendar at different times, it's optional, it's the water cooler and staff members are just dialing in and we're talking about, you know, some folks are just talking about what they're working on. Kids at home, some folks are just on there with their headphones on, just listening to chatter as background noise as something to work with. And in true Wikimedia and Wikipedia fashion, the funniest thing, someone on our staff made a link on one of our internal office wiki pages that literally just has a clicking sound to a keyboard and different office voices. All the things that get on your nerves when you're working with people. Toby's laugh or so and so's nails clicking. And those, those sounds are like meant for you to listen to and when you, when you just want to be annoyed or laugh. So I think those are funny and creative things. We have a Slack channel called distancing socially and, you know, folks are putting pictures of their dogs and things in there. We have a push up Slack channel where you type the word go and everyone's supposed to drop and do 10 push ups. And it, it solicits a lot of really interesting commentary. Let's just say that when people don't want to do the push ups, and I think that those things are fun and entertaining. And then we've also just done our best to care for our staff, Cameron, in some different ways. And that's shifting to a reduced work week as needed. And those expectations are that staff and contractors can work like 20 hours a week if necessary.

Is it more the results only work environment that you're moving towards versus definitely checking hours, right?

Yeah. And it's just really keeping folks aware of where you are and how you're getting your work done so that you can, so that you can, you can feel free to check in and care for your families. You know, we offered, presented a stipend to our staff just if for folks that needed to maybe do some upgrades to their home office or wi fi speed with the way the world is working now.

Things like, I'm lucky my kids are 17 and 19, so I'm like, I just. They know the rules, they do their own thing, they make their own food, and life's pretty simple. But I can't imagine having a three and a five year old running around. I'd be losing my mind.

Yeah. And they come to our meetings and we let them. You know, it's like when we have special workers visiting us, we just want to make sure that everyone feels comfortable because we still got to keep wiki running.

You know, you talked about the long, hard conversations that you sometimes have with teams. What is your model that you use for these long, hard conversations?

You, you know, the model is typically, say something good, tell them the bad stuff. Say something good afterwards. That really good sandwich, I hate that sandwich. But because you know it's coming. But because you know the sandwich is coming, I just start out really upfront, like, hey, we're gonna have what might be a little bit of a tough conversation. I'm gonna try and make it, you know, as palatable as possible. And let's just, let's just work through it together. So let's just put that out for now. Let's start with the sandwich. I think you're, you know, and I'm not even being sarcastic. I mean, it's like this one, this could be a tough conversation. Maybe not, but I want to set the expectation. And, and then I just want you to know that I've got the time blocked. We've got 30 minutes, but I've already blocked an additional 15 afterwards or so. So that you don't feel rushed or we have an hour, whatever the case may be. Putting my phone down, my camera's on. I see you, I'm with you. Let's have this conversation.

I like that you just kind of call it out right away because they know it's coming. So you just kind of throw it out there. And then even say, I'm even going to use the shit sandwich. And like, here it comes too. If you have a conflict issue that you have to address with somebody or a hard discussion you have to have from the instant that you know you need to have it and you're boiling, do you give yourself an hour cooldown? Do you count to 100? Do you have anything to breathe into it before you go at it full force?

I'm not going to claim to be the expert because, woof, it takes a lot to get me heated. But when I'm there, you're there. When I'm there, I'm there. But it's. You really took me there, if that's where we're headed, as opposed to just the general frustration of we're going back and forth. And what I try to say at that point is I need you to know that you're being heard. I hear you. I also need you to know we don't agree on this. So I'm going to call it right. And here's the decision that we have to make. But I hear you. I got your points. I got your idea. If I'm pretty hot, if we're in a dialogue, I may say, let's take two. Let's just catch our breath. That's something that was. I honestly don't know that I did that super well at GE or if we just didn't have enough of those. If I didn't have many of those, I don't know. But I definitely will take a moment. If the conversation is something that I've become aware of, I am learning to do better at taking that into the whole. Spending time with it, putting more thought around it, even getting some coaching on it maybe, and then coming back to it.

I think it's some of the wisdom that we gain as a leader. Right. Over time. We've had enough of the hard discussions and we've seen. Oops. Kind of screwed that one up. Oh, that one went better. Like we kind of learn our own. Our own model or methodology with it too.

And perspective too. Right. Because I have to keep everything in perspective. And I'm trying to remember what might they be going through right now. What might they be considering? And that's just something that I'm really trying to stay conscious of.

That's a huge one that we just talked about at one of our COO alliance events last year, one of our in person events, I had everyone write down one thing they were struggling with on a post it note. And then we passed out the post it notes and then shuffled them all up and I read them all. And the stuff that people were struggling with, like one guy, one. One person. We don't know if it's a woman or a guy. I have a brain tumor. Another one was, you know, I'm splitting up for my spouse, my mom's in hospital and I shouldn't be here. And you just realize like everybody is struggling with something when they miss on that deadline or they're short in a meeting or they're scattered. Sometimes it's just life. People don't want to show up and mess up. Sometimes it's. I think, I think your perspective on that is really pretty intuitive. On the technology side, when you're in the Bay Area and you're competing for this war on talent, especially as you mentioned, you're kind of an engineering techie company. How do you compete against these companies that are funded, you know, like the Facebooks and the Googles where they can just. It used to be called predatory pricing. Now it's like predatory hiring. Like they just overpay to hire people.

We have a, you know, our compensation fleet philosophy is just not that it's. Listen, we were a nonprofit and while we do have competitive pay because we're a tech nonprofit and this is my first nonprofit, Cameron. So the foundation is a competitive pay structure. But one of the things, particularly with our tech folks, and I'm a tech folk myself, is that, listen, you're not going to get the Google bonus and the Google stock and that's just not what you're getting here. You are a part of this mission and this passion and this calling if this is where you want to serve. So one, you work at Wiki because we do offer competitive pay as a foundation, but you're working here because you want to be a part of the free knowledge movement. So that's for sure. Where we may not be able to offer something that competitive on that tier in pay. We have an incredible set of policies around holidays and benefits and our flexibility and work from home before, before COVID our travel. You know, there's so many really great things that we offer to be a Wikimedian and you can lean into that as well.

Well, it sounds like you've got your base. If we think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you've got that base pay. It's solid enough that the rest of the stuff matters. But if you were. If you were way too low on the base pay, none of the other stuff matters.

Yeah. To me it's a safe balance. Now, look, everyone's going to say, how much do you want? The answer is more.

All right, Jeanine, if we were to go back to the 22 year old self, you know, you're getting ready to embark on your career and you were going to go and give yourself some advice, what advice would you give yourself?

This question, Cameron. It's tough for me, and not in answering it, but just in answering it. And it's that I would tell myself at 22 to bet on myself sooner. I was just that girl that didn't believe, you know, she hadn't. She was bringing enough to the table, you know, over studied, over compensated, over. And some of that is, you know, just what society and life feeds you, particularly when you're a black woman in tech. But I should have. You know, I wish that I had betted on myself more sooner.

Yeah, I think it's a great bet. Yeah, you're. You are solid. Really solid.

Thank you.

Janine Uzell, the chief operating officer from Wikimedia. I really, really appreciate the time and you're sharing with us today. It was amazing.

Be a much, much better listener, much more adaptable, much more flexible. Get to a point where you can lead, but lead in a way where you're listening and you're adapting and you're taking into account everybody around you. It takes a lot more than smarts to get ahead in the world. A big part of that is listening, being considerate and respectful of people.