Welcome to Women Disrupting Tech.
My name is dear Kanupkas, and on this podcast, I give the women
who work in tech the platform they need to inspire and empower
each other. Join me on a journey into the
world of entrepreneurship, funding biases, and role models
to discover the strategies for success in the tech industry.
In other words, how women can disrupt tech.
Are you ready to listen? Hey, welcome back to Women
Disrupting Tech and thank you for tuning in to this special
episode 125 S This episode starts about a year ago when I
visited A diverse Leaders in Tech event at the Muse office in
Amsterdam. Muse is a company that builds
the future of hospitality management for hotels and it's
one of the few Dutch start-ups valued at more than €1 billion.
Among the speakers were Mathais Vella, the CEO and Magali Elash.
After sharing her story of coming to Muse, Magali mentioned
that within weeks of joining Muse, she felt safe enough to
come out. And that was my prompt to Start
learning how Muse build a culture where people can truly
be their best selves. Because make no mistake, Muse is
a Unicorn for a reason. And that is that everyone works
extremely hard to meet customer and investor expectations.
But still, the team is very diverse and that's also for a
reason. The company believes that
diversity in backgrounds and experiences contributes to
better results. And now you're wondering how?
Well, that's what this episode is about.
Magali Mathes and I talk about their journeys from traditional
hospitality to modern hotel tech, the power of storytelling
in building an inclusive culture, and how we can deploy
AI both for personal development and organizational growth.
Plus, you'll discover why embracing your fears as a
founder, investor, or even as an ordinary human being allows you
to lead from the frontline. Shout out to Meerte Bishou for
connecting me with Magali, and of course, to Magali and
Matthais for their time. I'm absolutely convinced that
you'll enjoy every single minute of this episode.
With that, when you're ready to listen and learn how Muse builds
inclusive cultures in hospitality, please welcome to
women disrupting tech, Magali Elhash and Matthais Vella.
Magali Elharsh and Matthais Vella from Muse.
Welcome to women disrupting tech.
Good to have you both. Question I always ask at the
start is how you got into your current position and also
Magali. I was wondering how and why you
decided to join Muse? Hello there again.
Thank you so much for having me on this podcast.
I decided to join Muse about six years ago.
I was working in the hospitality industry in Paris, and I had
reached a point in my career where I could not find myself in
the industry anymore. So a little bit of history.
I come from Beirut, from Lebanon, and I had a dream to
work in tourism and hospitality. So I left my country at age 20.
I came to Paris and I wanted to conquer the world of
hospitality. I've had about 10 years in in
this career that I I love doing and I did it with passion, but
very quickly and I, I felt that I could not be myself.
I felt that I could not thrive and, and break my ceiling and be
the leader that I wanted. So I started feeling insecure.
I started feeling not well. And someone from news contacted
me for a position and I took a leap of faith.
I went to their website. It looked very nice.
It looked like people felt like me, looked like me.
They were happy and the mission resonated with what I wanted to
do to to change the hospitality industry.
I took a leap of faith. That was six years ago.
I decided to join Muse for the mission, the vision, but also
the people. And I made the right choice six
years ago. Yeah.
Can I just double click on one thing?
You said. You said I could not be myself.
Can you elaborate a bit on that what that means?
Yes, when you I worked in the hospitality industry in Paris,
it's a lovely industry, but it's also a very traditional one.
Traditional by nature because it is culturally embedded in the
French hospitality to be traditional.
But it was also an industry lacking diversity, lacking
inclusivity. You have, I found a lot of
aggressions, microaggressions, bullying, harassing.
But when you did not fit into the traditional background, I
was a bit different. I I was a woman in a leadership
position with a strong voice, with a strong opinion.
That was not always welcome in a room full of men or it was not
always welcome when our investors wanted a specific
picture of what their property would look like.
So I struggled, I struggled to, to have a place where I, I felt
respected and I felt that I could definitely be myself with
my vision of hospitality, with my eccentricity and, and very
soon it became toxic for me to be in that environment.
This is when I knew that I had to leave because I was not doing
this job out of passion anymore and it was becoming harmful,
harmful for me to stay. Yeah.
So it was sort of killing you from the inside it.
Was killing me from the inside, it was killing my passion for
the industry and it was also killing my performance.
I was, I was no longer someone that could be at top performance
always. I could not be someone who came
to work happy, motivated and wanted to to give out the best
in me. And when you work in
hospitality, it's tough because you you're here to inspire
people. You're here to create a magical
experience for your customers. And if you don't have it, it's
pointless to work in the industry.
Yeah, that that energy is contaminating.
Exactly, yes. Yeah, So, Mathias, you joined
Muse as ACEO. You're not.
The founder, right? Yeah, I joined about a year
after Richard had founded the company.
By the time I joined there was 2 developers and a graphic
designer so it really still was like a bunch of lads in the
basement underneath the old Times Square in Prague.
Oh, OK. What?
How did you find yourself in the basement in Prague?
And on the back of that I was wondering what were you going to
build? What was the plan initially?
I always knew I was going to be a hotelier.
And we have a lot of hoteliers who are disenfranchised.
We're like, you know, they, they thought they were going to be a
great hotelier. And then you end up doing a job
that you're like, this is not exciting.
This is not the job that I aspired to be.
And I'm one of those people. I, I worked for one of the big
large global chains, Hilton, for about a decade and it was
fantastic. Like I learned so much.
And at some point of that career, if you're very
ambitious, you do get stuck. You are often the smartest
person in the room. You're the hardest working
person in the room. You have opinions about
everything. And that is sometimes not
appreciated if you have an opinion about another team in
another department. And I found that I was just
stuck. Like they were so good.
They promoted me every single year, but I just, I wasn't
learning at the speed that I need to learn.
So I ran into Richard said, why don't you just quit and just
join me? And I was like, I, I do
everything by the book. Like I literally have a plan for
my whole life planned out. But I was 30, no mortgage.
I thought I can take one risk in my life.
Like only one thing. Let me just take one risk.
And I jumped and took that risk and I joined the basements with
the developers and Richard. And you know, the first few
months you have a lot of doubts. You're like, Oh my God, what
have I done? Like this is going nowhere.
But The thing is, at some point you realize the freedom you get
by by being in your own business and making all the decisions.
And yes, cash flow is awful. And you know, how do we pay
salaries again this month? But it's the freedom and the
creativity and the learnings that I have every for 12 years
that I've been in this business. There hasn't been one day that I
haven't learned something new, and I think that that thing is
the thing that drives me. I'm so ambitious as a person and
in an entrepreneur, like a tech business, you can just keep
thriving and keep growing, and that's the thing that just
really motivates me. Yeah.
And if I hear you correctly, you define growth also as learning.
It what? How else would I run it?
OK. Yeah, I think, I think.
There's I see growth or learning also as a way to as deep way to
grow. Yeah, like I just crave it.
If so, learning how AI works, it is so exciting and it freaked me
out initially. But I'm like, well, I need to
figure it out because the whole world's moving there.
Let me just go and figure it out.
I'll build a bot and, and and then I have to push everyone
else in the company to do the same thing.
But if I don't do that, then the fear will be crippling.
The fear of I'm uncomfortable with this new change in the
world and I every time I realized that something is is
crippling me with fear or anxiety, I jump into it to learn
more about it because that's the only way to get comfortable with
something. If you learn and you embrace it
and then you get comfortable and then you can lead from the
frontline again. Yeah.
OK. So that, that was another way
for me to, to define growth is that you embrace things that are
outside of your comfort zone to yeah, basically get new
experiences and to, to find out if it's for you, yes or no.
Yeah, exactly. So what what was the purpose of
building meals? So building something that
because you talked about having a lot of disenfranchised
hoteliers on staff, what are you going to do?
Did you want to do different from, let's say a?
Traditional industry. So if you think about a
traditional hotel, a lot of things are done by hand, right?
You woke up and then there's a receptionist who's typing all
your personal data into a system.
And in the back office, it is pieces of paper with credit card
numbers on it, staples to other things.
Like it is so incredibly manual. And I ran at some point of that
career at Hilton, I ran a front desk for 800 rooms and it was so
painfully manual. And every time you want to run a
report to say what's the busiest day of the week in terms of
check insurance, there is no report that exists.
Umm, and you just always get stuck.
And, and this was the thing I was, you know, envisioning with
Muse. We should solve, we should the,
the core system had to be replaced.
It can't just be like lipstick on a pig.
We had to replace the pig to something more modern.
And that's really what we let's build the really, really hard
thing, which is the infrastructure kind of system of
a hotel. And then once you've got that,
you can do really exciting things like build an online
check in so guests can check themselves.
And no one enjoys queuing at a reception desk, giving their
passport, giving their credit cards, filling in registration
cards. Nobody in the world wants to do
that. So like, let's just build that.
And that vision that from 12 years ago has actually not
changed that much. The ambition has just got bigger
over time. Yeah.
So how did you get your first customer?
Yeah, that's really like, it's really hard.
What's that, Hilton? And you just went straight back
like, hey guys, I've got something to solve all your
problems or all the problems I ran into.
There you go. From the bottom up.
So initially we had built it for the hotel that Richard's family
runs in Prague, but that's your own hotel, so that's easy.
Then finding your first customer and every we just walked into
hotel lobbies with our laptop and said, Hey, can we show you
our new system? And everyone's like no scram,
get out. Like I've we've got a great
system. It's the industry leading
solution. And it really was very painful.
Like you get a lot of rejections in the beginning.
Luckily we found some hotelier friends of mine that were
willing to take a risk on us at some point.
And the first ten were connections or friends from the
industry that were taking a risk.
And then it starts to move. But it's it's very, very
difficult. And just just to make sure it's
clear what a muse does, you make software to help hotels
basically run a lot smoother. We basically take over the
entire tech stack for our hotel from the the most visible is the
reception desk, but it's other restaurants.
The way that orders are taken in the restaurant, housekeepers are
on smartphones inspecting rooms. It's literally every person in
the hotel that works with our system.
So I want to move to to the the main part of of the conversation
because the reason you I invited you on, I've also hinted on that
in the in the intro is that you're an incredibly fast
growing or I don't even call it a startup.
It's it's a scale up. It's Unicorn, I think even and
what really struck me when I first ran into Muse was that
it's so incredibly inclusive, but it's inclusive by design
almost because what I see is the inclusion and and belonging is
mostly as a sort of add on. How did you build inclusion into
your way of doing business, into your way of running the company
from the start of that? So it wasn't intentional, right?
You start, you're just fighting for survival, but a gay man,
naturally, you're hyper aware of things around you because you've
always had to think, right? Am I going to be my true self or
am I going to be the straight version of me just because
that's what's expected. So that hyper awareness of your
own minority, minority status even as a white man, right?
So like I have an easier life because I'm a white male, but I
am gay at the same time. And sometimes you have to hide
that depending on what the situation is, especially if
you're living in Eastern Europe, it is quite a different place.
So that hyper awareness naturally built in a safety
because people know if I'm struggling with something, I can
turn to map because he understands what I stand for.
I often recognize minorities. I will randomly call them, like
reach out to them saying, hey, how can I help you?
How can I support you in your journey?
And I try and push people a little bit out of their comfort
zone. And I remember a conversation
that Magalie and I had a couple of years ago where I said, I
think you should lean into it rather than step away from,
from, you know, not talking about it.
You should especially you should talk about it because you have a
triple kind of minority status. And I'm like, that's, that's a
really powerful thing for others to hear because you are thriving
in your environment. So for me, it's just naturally
baked in. But also because we were in
Czech Republic, a country where everyone speaks Czech at the
workplace, I didn't speak it. So it was almost my laziness to
not learn the language that forced us.
I had the conversations like, I'm really sorry, but all
written conversations have to be in English.
So naturally the culture starts to build from the first four in
English, and then as you start hiring people, you bring a much
more international crowd in, and then that builds and that builds
over time. So it was some unintentioned
like it wasn't as a strategy once we started because we were
just fighting for survival, but there was a few seeds that we
planted very early on. OK, Marley, I think Mathiasia
said something really powerful. He told you to lean into your
identity. How did that make you feel?
I remember that conversation with Matt.
We were having lunch and, and I, I always speak very
transparently to Matt and I told him like, I need a role model.
I need a coach, a mentor that looks like me, that, that, that,
that is also from a diverse background.
And then Matt looked at me and said, you're it, you're that
person. You were that inspiration for
your other colleagues. You are a woman in the
leadership position. You're a member of the LGBTQ
plus community. You're also a mob.
Share your experience, share your struggles, be vulnerable,
open up with people. And, and I did, at first, I, I
did not feel comfortable. I called a friend.
I was like, this is what my CEO recommends.
What do you think I should do? I, I had a lot of thought about
it. And then I spoke at a company
all hands in front of more than 400 people.
I shared my experience, I shared my thoughts.
And so many people reached out to me that day by saying, like,
your testimony is having an impact on me.
It's helping me be better at what I do.
It's helping me come out. And it was so, so powerful to
hear all those messages that I'm happy that I did.
I'm happy that Matt pushed me. And I'm happy to speak also
sometimes on behalf of my community because we are in a
situation where every voice counts and, and we need to unite
and we need to ally. So we can definitely convey
those messages no matter how early your startup ages or your
scale up or you are Unicorn or even a big tech, those voices
matter and it's important that someone represents them and not
just the CEO. Yeah.
So. So is is that also a culture you
want to build so that it sort of trickles down so that all the
people inside a company have a role model like Magali or like
yourself? Like the.
I think so because like, like I only represent the white male
gay community in some sense, right?
So, and people don't want me to mansplain how it works for
women. They want to see someone just
like them that that says the right things.
And so I always look for examples when I hear someone who
is very open, I will reach out to them one-on-one and say, Hey,
I, how comfortable are you to speak about that publicly?
And I find always the conversation around diversity,
equity and inclusion is really hard because, you know, probably
the listeners to this, they are the converted.
They do not need to be convinced that this is the right way to
go. But how do we reach the ones
that actually need to hear this? They're not going to tune into
this podcast, but I can reach them through, for example, in
all hands, if I, you know, just have a 5 minute segment in an
all hands once every so often. They don't know it's coming, but
it's a really personal story of someone who's experienced
something and they just talk about it very humanly.
This is a person that they deal with all day, every day that
they now learn something new about.
Like neurodiversity was one of those topics that, you know,
it's invisible and when you suddenly give it a face, then
they start to talk about that. And that really excites me.
But I couldn't have done that. Like I couldn't have talked
about minor diversity status because I don't have it.
I don't understand it. So I have to find a role model
for it. Is it about giving it a face?
Is it? I think, I think it's the
storytelling is really critical before often, you know, it
doesn't land because the moment you say diversity, equity and
inclusion, you've just tuned out an entire audience.
Like they're like, right. I that's, that's from the left
wing. I don't want to hear about it.
That is not for me. But if I talk about Magali and,
and her specific situation and I tell the story of Magali and the
hardship that she's gone through in her life to get to where she
is, people don't think that that's the EI because they don't
know what the EI is. It's just a swear word from the
left, but if you tell the story of a person and you don't say
the word DEI, suddenly they'll listen.
OK, So if I want to broaden the scope of my audience, you don't
you recommend that I don't talk about DEI, but just talk about
people, which is actually what I'm trying to do because it's.
About I think I agree that it's issue.
Yeah, that that I fully agree with.
And it it doesn't. The thing is, it wasn't like
this a year ago longer, but it still had some impact, but it's
just become so toxic now that the people like you've got the,
the people that are converted, you've got the people who are
like don't want to hear a thing about it, but you've got the
middle, the, the, the group of people that are just like, I'm
open to it. I, I'm not probably going to sit
it through an entire podcast, but I'm open to, you hear an
example once every so often. So it opens my mind and it's
those people that we want to reach.
But because of the extremity of what the media is portraying
now, they've moved away. They're like, oh, OK, OK.
It's clearly toxic. I I just don't want to be
associated with it, but that they're still the most important
people that we have to convince. Yeah.
How do you do that in the in the inside a company and also
towards investors? How do you persuade them that
the the way you're running the company, not necessarily as a as
a diverse or as an inclusive company, but more your way of
doing things? How do you persuade them, hey,
this is the right thing you said stand still about telling, hey,
I'm just earning you both loads of money.
Have you ever had any criticism? On this, it's really hard
because I leave with my mouth and like I don't really have a
filter. So I do sometimes get in trouble
because I say things in the wrong forum or something.
But generally I lead with ask for what you can say, like you
don't ask for permission, but you ask you apologize
afterwards. And then strategy that I follow.
I have to say the thing that's on my mind and most of the time
it, it leads to the right outcome.
And then whenever I get wrong, I just apologize really nicely.
And you get away with that. And I think it's important, like
it's the right thing to do. And most people recognize it
when you explain it in the right words.
And, and somehow I've I've been able to get away with most of
it. But I've also always been this
person. It's not a person I've become
because we've got a chief people officer who tells me to be that
person. I've always been this person.
So if you're doing business with us like and you see me on
LinkedIn, this is what you get. This is this is who I am.
Yeah. And that sort of also filters
away their own crowd in terms of investors, I would think.
Exactly. So how does it help you have a
mission to to simplify hospitality?
How does that help to build get the right people on board and
also to get a bit of an international crowd on?
Like if you think about hospitality, everyone, everyone
in the world stays in hotels. So you have to figure out a way
to connect with everyone and solve everyone's needs.
And I think that's why we lean into diversity so much because
we're like, how do you build a product with just a group of
white men that serves everyone, that understands everyone?
And it's the simple things like neuroversity or color blindness
or female travelers. And if you bring those people
inside our company, then we build products that are more
inclusive that people love because the the buyers of the
products are much more diverse, the stakeholders that are
evaluating us. And if they recognize that
they're being recognized, they will be more likely to buy a
product like Muse. And that's some of the success
we're seeing because we really do look at all aspects of the
diversity spectrum and we try and figure out how do we support
those, those parts of it. It does require you to then
bring in that diversity and, and very early on, we up until the
15th employee, I think we were all men because, you know, you
start with lots of developers and in the Western world,
they're mostly men. And when the first women came
in, and I remember the first two women that we hired, I was, I
was concerned because I was like, God, these women are going
to come into this male culture. And I really had to ask them
saying, are you comfortable with it?
How can I support you in this? Because I realized you're about
to walk into this, this male man cave and it isn't, you know, we
have, we're not used to having women around, but we, I just
asked them and I started that conversation like, I want you to
be comfortable, like, how can I support you in this environment?
I'm just very directly asking people and I recognize that
diversity and I'll just lean into it.
If I'm, if I'm uncomfortable, I'll be the first saying, I'm
really sorry, I'm going to ask you a really stupid question,
but can I just, you know, what do you think about this topic?
And if you start like that versus, you know, directly just
ignoring that diversity status, it's very, very different.
And and I get away because I smile nicely and I'll ask a dumb
question then forgive me for saying stupid things out loud.
And I think. That that is the best way to
sometimes lead. Yeah.
How did you prep the the men? Because you were in a in a man
cave. How did you how did you prepare
the men to OK to be welcoming to those women?
Did you? I didn't actually, no, I didn't
really. And I was probably should have
in hindsight, like right now I would.
But at that time, I was so junior, so I was just 30.
I'd, you know, sure, I'd done some management jobs, but I
hadn't purposely thought about it.
In hindsight, I possibly should have said, you know, hey, we're
starting to diversify this group of people.
Are we? Do you, would you feel
comfortable if you're a woman walking into this office?
And I think in hindsight, I probably should have done that,
Yeah. Did you make any small changes
like to the toilets or to the to cleaning up the the sink?
Yes, yes, I'd like to say yes, but like, honestly, we had no
money for cleaners and things. So it was it was always a mess
until we started to professionalize the business.
It's I think the men in the office naturally started doing
that because there were women around.
So previously, you know, we were, we were living off
Ubereats. Some desks were stacked with old
foods, cartoons and stuff. But suddenly when there's women
in the room or, you know, a diversity, like people feel a
little bit uncomfortable and they then become aware of some
of these behaviors that they have and they naturally started
cleaning up after themselves. Oh, that's it.
It's an inter. I do recognize it, but it's.
Yeah, it's interesting that once a woman enters the room, the
whole. The dynamic shifts.
Yeah, yeah. So Maggie, I was wondering, from
what I hear, Muse is a really safe place to work.
What does a safe place look like to you?
At Muse, what I like is a bit what Matt mentioned about the
open communication and the vulnerability.
Feeling safe means that I can discuss any topic with the
leadership, with the Our People team, or with almost everyone at
Muse. I, if I have struggles, if I
have challenges, I, I feel comfortable and I feel safe
bringing them up because if I'm feeling something, probably
other people in the company are feeling the same, but I'm not
scared of speaking up. And as Matt mentioned, he's also
very direct when he had a question, when he has an
opinion, he voices it. And it's not just because he is
the CEO of the company. He encourages this type of
behaviour in everyone else in the company.
And it's been since they won, since I joined Muse, and now,
six years later, it is the same culture that is allowing us to
speak up, to disagree sometimes, to move on and commit to
something even if you disagree. But this open communication and
this forum of transparency is what helps me feel safe.
But it's also in creating environments where you, we are
intentionally talking about those topics like diversity,
like neurodiversity, like being queer at work, like being a
parent at work. It is it is building the
intention and to turning our company into a space
environment. And even if my side, like
probably in the beginning, it was not intentional.
It was just a wish or a desire from his side or and from the
founders side. And that in that wish became
something that was built into Muse DNA.
And today I feel that we're in a situation that if Matt were to
leave Muse or if our Chief People officer were to leave
Muse, we're in a very good place because the foundations of this
safety is built and it's very strong.
And this is what is allowing us to scale is that because we were
able to create a safe space for everyone to thrive in and to be
able to share their experience, their expertise, their concerns
that we are in a better place now to to build something even
stronger on those foundations. And it's it's a translation of
what Matt's been trying to build, but also what everyone in
the company are building as well.
It's not just a one person job, but it's everyone that is part
of building that culture. Today we have ERG groups.
Every RG group has a different topic, but we have the women at
News that are building a strong future for women in tech, but
also for women at News. And those are very strong
programs where we ask ourselves the question, what would make it
a better place for us at News or in the word of tech.
So those programs are sponsored by our leadership.
They're sponsored by the company and they're allowing us to be
creative to to be innovative and to think about what the future
would look like for us. And, and I feel that this is
incredible and this is how Safety at Work translates today.
Yeah, so also that you can speak your mind, you can be yourself,
which going back all the way to beginning was what you were
looking for in a job. So and it's, and what struck me
in your answer is that it's a sort of, it's not just at the
top, someone shouting from the top, hey, we thou shall or be be
yourself. But it's also facilitated
through Ergs through and also through the people inside the
company. Yes, exactly it is.
It is becoming part of our DNA and it's everyone's
responsibility, but it's also evolving because you cannot
build everything from the start. You build, you iterate, you
build, you grow, you make it better.
And I remember when I became a mom at Muse, I, I, I came back
from my, my 6 month maternity leave and I was completely lost.
And I, I did not know if I was going to have the same job.
I did not know. It was the first time for me
being a mom. And during my maternity leave,
people reached out to me, my former manager reached out to me
and he's like, we're, we're, we're waiting for you.
You're going to, you're going to be a mom, you're going to be a
mom leader. You're always going to have a
job at news, even if you're on a six month maternity break.
And only those words felt reassuring, but it also meant
that we did not have a program around it because I was not the
only parent, right? You had a lot of parents coming
back to work. And that sparked like a light
bulb on in our people team and in the leadership team saying,
OK, like this is the time where we we have to start building for
the future because more and more of our team members will go on
parental leave and come back. How do we build a program where
they feel safe coming back to work, where they feel that they
have the support of our company when they come back to work
after such a such a long break? And this is what I mean by
building as you grow is that you cannot build everything from
scratch. When you're a start up, you have
a million other priorities, but it's adding small pieces to the
puzzle every time you're faced with a new situation.
It is allowing us to grow. Yeah.
And also taking things as they just come naturally.
So over time you will run into people becoming a parent and
then, oh, now we have to do something.
So it's yeah. Yeah.
Like and like that's where as we started growing and and our
entire population of muses got older.
So once they start hitting their 30s and mid 30s, suddenly
children started appearing. Yeah.
But then we've got to be deliberate about it because
we're now operating, operating in 20 more countries where we
have employees and not everyone is getting equal parental cover.
And we said we have to have a policy that is inclusive
because, you know, in some US you get what, 3 days something I
don't even know whether it's so ridiculously bad.
And then you get some countries where it's incredibly long.
And we said we have to have a minimum baseline because we
think it's important that, you know, women should or sorry that
the primary care caregiver, it's important that we call it the,
the correct wording. The primary caregiver gets six
months and the secondary caregiver gets two months and
that allows that's much more inclusive in language to work,
you know, moving on from women to just any gender because you
know, God knows what a couple looks like.
And that also is saying to the people like we value you, we
value that, you know, you need to spend time with your family,
but hopefully you will come back because we make an investment in
you. And then when you come back,
hopefully you will have several years that you're going to stick
with us and return on that investment.
But young parents should spend time with their families because
if you take that away from them, you know, that is not going to
help their, you know, workplace happiness.
And it's hard because, yes, a person will leave for six
months, and there's work that needs to be done that somehow
sits in that void, but that we figure out.
And I think it's more important ethically to make sure that
people get to spend time at home with their families because then
they'll come back more loyal afterwards.
And hopefully it deals with some of the gender pay gap that we
see. We definitely have a gender pay
gap at news that I am very unhappy about.
But it is a long term commitment to solve for that.
And this is one of those things that we've done to help fix
that. What, what, what is out of
curiosity on the on the pay gap, what makes it difficult to solve
that sort of in one goal? Because it's, it's not equal pay
for equal jobs, right? So if you are a director of
deployments and you're a woman, you'll get the same salary if
and then if you were a man. It is about their progression
inside the company. Women just don't progress as
fast across the company. So if you take all the salaries
and you, you, you divide them into quartiles in terms of pay
equity, women just don't progress in their careers as
fast as men do, and that's creating the gender pay gap.
We publicly talk about this once a year.
We publish our results, which we don't yet legally have to.
But I can't wait for that moment that all companies have to do
this and it creates this responsibility to management to
lean into it saying, well, why do we have a pay gap and where
is it coming from? And what can we do better to
make women thrive in the workplace?
Or we look at the hiring, like for some roles, you just are
given male candidates and we we just have to ask her at the top
of the funnel. I want a more diverse top of
funnel. And yes, the best person for the
job might be a male candidate, but I still want to see women
that are qualified for it to make sure that we've we've gone
through that process. Yeah, that we actually did
select the best person for the job.
Exactly. And that we can prove that it's
the best person for that job. And then looking at how, you
know, how do you interview because people with biases will
lean into certain types of questions to, you know, I will
identify much more easily with a white homosexual than I do with
a white male just naturally, because that's where my
inclination is. But I need to remove those
biases in the interview process. So we're trying to really work
with scorecards and standardize questions that we're asking.
We use Metaview to record all of our interviews and it gives us
suggestions and coaching and your your talk to listen ratio.
And it's really helpful because AI is really good at filtering
out whether you have unconscious biases that you need to address
through training in some way. Is is that something that you've
built yourself, this software? No, we, we, we buy it and we've
changed many times because AI is moving at such such a speed.
But we always want to be at the forefront of buying the best
innovative technology. So your standard scorecards you
have to develop, but you need a software that supports it.
And there's some really good solutions out there now.
OK. Oh, that's that.
Well, that's cool to hear that at least that the entry side of
things, it's taken care of. So I want to circle back a bit
to the to the gender pay gap in terms of career progression.
How do you solve for that within Muse and how does it influence
culture? So we always, we look at the
gender pay gap we have and then we break it down by department,
by region to understand where it comes from.
And we have, we have like management development tracks.
So we have an internal learning and development team that has
manager tracks. We've got an employee resource
group that focuses on women and, and, and other diversities.
So you really start to just lean into saying, OK, if women need a
role model, where would they turn to?
They turn to the employee resource group to find people
like them that are open in this group, this really safe
environment. They're not going to naturally
find and now a person that it has a neurodiversity difficulty,
but they might find them in the ERG for neurodiversity.
And it's really finding role models that then become become a
mentor that can say, you know, why are you stuck in your
career? What can I help do to help you
progress in your career? So we really think about the
entire employee life cycle. So we mapped out and we're in
this process of remapping it now of when an employee enters to
when they leave and, and what are all the moments of contact
and career progression moments and performance reviews.
And then we look at it, well, how do we go about performance
reviews and, and salary reviews and, and, and high performers
versus low performers and how do we deal with that?
And every touchpoint is one of those points where we should
have someone asked a question saying is there any bias in this
process? How are we addressing that in
the right way? And it isn't clear cuts but.
Also, what I'm hearing you say that when it comes to the ER GS,
it actually in a positive way uses those biases.
To help people thrive. I honestly never thought so.
With the first time I've heard about Ergs, I was like, oh,
that's just some corporate mumbo jumbo.
I was like, this is just a thing we have to do because that's
what the corporates expect. And now we're a big old grown up
company. But actually we did one thing
differently because often Ergs are like a passion project and
you do it on the side besides your very, very busy job and you
don't get paid for it. And it's like, that's just wrong
because these people are doing something really important.
They're building culture and they're diversifying our, our
customer, our employee ways. So we started paying them an
equity. So you get equity shares, long
term output from building culture.
So that was one of the things we dramatically shifted.
But also, once I started seeing the output of the Ergs, it's
really powerful when, you know, we had the pride all hands two
weeks ago. There's so many stories that you
just don't know about that they're doing in the background.
And and yes, it is still very corporate mumbo jumbo, but it
actually works. And that's why it's worth
investing into it because it is a place of safety that people
with a diversity background can turn to, to find role models, to
learn how to deal with specific situations.
And it genuinely works. Yeah.
So Magali, the safe space that Muse is, how can you share a bit
of how it has helped you performance wise and career
wise? Definitely because I've, as I
mentioned before, I came from environments where I did not
feel safe. And what does that look like?
First of all, you see the impact on your mental health.
Your anxiety kicks in you you come into work every day with a
will to escape the fastest possible way.
You're scared of making a move. You've, you've put your energy
and you focus on the things that don't really matter, on how you
look and how you speak, on how you act and how you interact.
That means that you don't have energy left to actually perform
and to produce anything. And I felt this when I was in
unsafe environments. I felt that I was blocked and I
was just not delivering the quality and the the the work
that looks like me and. How did how did you feel that?
You're just, you don't have energy left.
You don't have energy left. I was working in a hotel.
I did not have energy left to go meet my customers.
I did not want to because I had spent an hour and a half of my
morning making sure that I looked like something
appropriate for my peers, that I could hide myself and I could I
that I needed to remember everything that I had said
during our last interactions because it was probably
something that was going to come up in the Monday morning
discussion. So, for example, I would get a
question like, what did you do this weekend?
And I wanted to hide that I was back then dating a woman.
So I would just come up with different things to divert the
attention. But then on Monday morning, I
put all my energy into this, this interaction with my
colleagues and with my peers. What am I going to tell them?
What did I actually do this weekend?
How did I feel? So it was just creating
something fake at the end of the day, instead of focusing on who
are my customers, what kind of service, where I was I going to
give them. And it was probably me that
needed to do this work on myself.
But it was all that I could think about.
And at the end, it just diverted the attention from what what I
was supposed to deliver to something else.
And at first I was not very conscious about it, but at, at
some points I would go into meetings and get out of meetings
by saying I did not contribute once.
I did not. I did not say one thing.
I was a member of the executive committee of this, this hotel or
of this group. And I, I did not want to share
my opinions anymore because I was most of the time I was
interrupted. I was dismissed.
My opinion was like OK, thank you very much.
You said something in a 2 hour meeting and I was shut down.
I was not listened to and at the end it meant that I didn't know.
I no longer wanted to share anything.
I was just demotivated. I was scared and I felt that it
was just a vicious circle of me not contributing, them having a
bad impression of me. And then it was just a toxic
circle. I had to get out of it.
And I saw the difference when I joined Muse.
And from the first two weeks at Muse, I felt that it was OK,
that they couldn't care less who I was dating, who I was, what
kind of. Fashion.
Stand to be fair, we had the new hire orientation and Matt
specifically meets everyone that the new hire orientation and he
always starts with an intro of this is me.
This is the picture of back then his boyfriend and this is a
picture of my dog Beyoncé. And I was sitting in that room.
I was like, OK, I'm here. They have rainbow flags on their
website, but it's not marketing, it's not fake.
You have your CEO standing up in front of a room of 25 people and
saying, hi, this is Matt and this is my boyfriend.
And the fact that he like his opening sentence is, is this, it
sets the tone right? And then we jump into business.
But I, I learned that OK, I was in a safe environment.
If my CEO is OK, then I'm OK. If you can make it to sea level
being who you are, it means that I, my career is not stuck
because of who I am. And it was not just Matt, it was
everyone. It was the first interaction
where everyone feels OK to share in 2 words who they are.
I'm a family person, I have two kids, I have a dog, I like
hiking. And it's that introduction
around who you are, then what you do that is creating the
foundation of a safe space. And I felt it immediately
because it took me two weeks to come out at Muse.
And then this opened the door for me to to other things, to my
family, to to some member of my extended circle.
They had no idea. And this is what it meant for
me, that one, from a career point of view, I was safe.
It meant that I had no limits, I had no boundaries anymore and
that I could come out and you have this feeling of of safety
six years later when the company is bigger, when new hire
orientation is something more structured than before.
But everyone that joins muse today has the same feeling is
that start with who you are. If you want to, this is a safe
space. And then let's dive into
business once we have removed all those invisible blockers
that are not allowing you to perform.
And this has helped me immensely because my first two weeks when
I started working, I felt something different in, in me
and how I was attending meetings, how I was talking, how
I was speaking. And I, I, I found my old self by
knowing I, I am a competent person.
I, I know what I do. I am an expert in my field, but
I was no longer in a position where I had to hide it, where I
had to shush it. On the contrary, it's like you,
you, you just turn on the engine.
And then I was flying And that, that helped me and it, it
continuously helps me every time I pause and I assess the
situation because sometimes, let's face it, not everything is
great, even at Muse. And sometimes I am in situations
where like, OK, I get out of this meeting, I don't feel it.
What, what, what went, what went wrong?
Why did I not voice my opinion? Why didn't I raise my hand and
say I disagree? And it's allowing me just to
take a step back and reflect who was in the room with me?
Why did I felt intimidated? What could I have done better?
And I know that I have the ability now to talk about it.
I can just pick up the phone and call that person and say, hey,
listen, during the meeting, the 1st 10 minutes, you kept
interrupting me. I don't really perform well in
this type of situation. Can we please be cautious of
next times? And I learned this.
I just, I now I stand in front of my mirror and I, I, I
question it. What happens if I get
interrupted in a meeting? I usually, I'm usually
frustrated and I get annoyed and I can be very, I can show that
I'm frustrated, but I learned also to take a step back and
say, OK, let's just talk to that person.
Maybe it was not intentional. Maybe that person was not aware
that they were interrupting me. And it's the ability of just
opening up the conversation and and just talking that is
allowing us to improve, not just myself, but all the stakeholders
as well. So it's.
There's two sides to the diversity thing that you talked
about. There's the you're not
comfortable to share personal parts of your life, so you hide
them. And then you have to remember
what you said. And then all you do is think
about how, how am I dealing with that situation?
And you're not focused on the work.
But then there's the people that are there to judge you and to
promote you who are like, she's she's hiding something, like
there's something wrong with this person.
I don't want to hang out with them.
They're hiding something. And when a promotion comes up,
they will go with the, the, the, the person that's most natural,
that they trust. And, and there's two sides to
that. And that's part of the reason
why it's so hard to solve this, because unless you create an
environment where people can speak up and open up, you will
never get to know all of the people.
And you know, the, the, the, the other sex will, will thrive in
that environment. So there's so many layers to
this challenge. But I, I recognize what Magadie
is saying. I recognize that in some
situations, like I'll get into an Uber here in Amsterdam
sometimes and I'm like, right, he's he was like, oh, your wife
this and that. And do I correct him or do I
just go with it because it's the safest thing?
I'm in a car with a stranger in the middle of nowhere.
I'm probably just going to go with it because I don't know
what he thinks. And you're always making these
decisions, but every time you do it, you're unnatural in your
communication. And that somehow it is seen by
people. Yeah, people sense that.
Yeah, yeah. And and I actually that's
powerful that you share this last bit Matthais, that actually
those people share it. It also again, if you can't be
yourself, if you can't be your true self, if you hide, have to
hide things and have to make sure to your point, Magali, that
you have to remember, Oh, I said this and this there and there.
So I have to keep things straight and then I can't take
off, go off the line. It's sort of becomes a sort of
rehearsed pitch rather than true story.
Exactly. And you cannot perform.
You cannot perform well. Your energy is focused on
something else. I'd rather focus my energy on my
performance on, on doing my job correctly.
And, and you see when that weight is off your shoulders
that you can focus on the things that matter, my productivity, my
efficiency, my, my job as a leader.
This is what's important. And at the end, I'm here to
build a high performing team and Muse is also building a high
performing team. I just want to make sure that
my, I am comfortable and then my team is comfortable at work so
they can perform, so they can outperform themselves and
continue breaking their ceiling and, and pushing for more
innovation, more creativity. And you can only do this when
you're, when you're in a good place, when you're in a safe
place. I want to double click on
something you said about rehearsing in front of the
mirror because you, you're, you're asking yourself these
questions. What happened?
How can I, what can I do better? Or maybe what should I tell the
other person how it made me feel when we spoke before you told me
that you had built some sort of coach for people inside Muse
that they can actually see how they performed in meetings and
where they sort of can do the same.
Tell us a bit more about that because it's, it's got me my
mind racing, I can tell you. Yes, it's it's been racing my
mind for almost 2 weeks, even 3. But a while ago, Matt was
sharing his story of how he was able to build a bot in less than
3 hours. It was a very inspiring talk on
LinkedIn, but also within the company where he's like, listen,
I've built this. It took me half a day, but I'm
happy that I built a coach. And I encourage you all, sorry
your boss and I encourage you all to look into AI because this
is what's going on in the industry.
And I, I, I was staring at a blank page.
I did not know what I wanted to build.
So I started a blank page for about a week and then and I had
a reflection what would help me, what would help me get better at
my job. And I love receiving feedback
because I feel that this is the only way that I can grow.
So I built an AI coach that reads my meeting transcripts and
that gives me recommendation. And first of all, the the first
recommendation were were very tough to read, but then I made
it around my my interaction specifically as a woman when I
was either leading a meeting or attending a meeting.
And that coach today analysis what I say, how I say it, how I
handle objections, how I handle microaggressions, how I handle
interruptions. Am I conveying the right
opinion? Am I making a point and it
analysis based on the seniority levels of attendees in my
meetings. So if I am facing AVP position
or AC level or if I am leading my team, how how are my
interactions changing? And it's also giving me
recommendation on what are the things that I should avoid doing
and the things that I could start practicing.
And the first, the first transcripts were not easy, but I
had noticed a lot of things that I'm very apologetic in meetings.
And I knew that I was doing this.
But once I took every transcript of meeting and I saw that every
single meeting, I was apologizing about something,
either my bad Internet or the fact that I could not see the
screen or the fact that I did not have an answer to a
question. And that came out several times
or the fact that I had a strong opinion, but whenever someone
had an objection, I tended to dismiss my opinion and to let
other participants argument their own opinion.
And at the end, you're like, OK, whatever you do, whatever you
want. And those things I, I knew about
them, but when I read about them and when you have a coach that
says you had a strong opinion in the beginning of the meeting,
what happened to it? Why didn't you stick to it?
It was eye opening and it was great for me, but I also wanted
to share it with, with peers. So I, I, I gave it to a few
members of the women at Muse ERG.
So we tested it. We were about 40 women to test
it. And everyone had the same
feedback by saying, OK, it's incredible that it's about it's,
it's pinpointing exactly what's what in my communication.
I could enhance, it's making me better, but it's also giving me
recommendation of sentences that I could use instead of saying,
sorry, I can't see the screen, I suggest that you rephrase by
saying, can you make the screen a bit bigger?
It is very slight recommendation, but so far the
tool is working. A lot of women are using it.
And I've made it public to everyone at Muse a few days ago.
So I'm, I'm really hoping that we'll start using it in our
meetings and then it will also help coach other women in the
company because I really found it very beneficial.
Yeah. Do you think it also would
benefit men to get a reflection on how they're interacting in
meetings and how they can perform?
Maybe not perform better in terms of the meeting structure,
but more in terms of how they can make meetings more
inclusive. I definitely think it could
benefit men. We have a a Muse constitution,
the constitution of Muse that is made of several articles and
what Muse expects of you in terms of performance,
innovation, etcetera. But there's a whole piece about
interactions, respects human interactions, being aware of
other people's diversity, being inclusive in your meetings.
I think I could definitely incorporate that element of this
constitution and give recommendation on how to become
a great ally to your, to your team and how to become a more
inclusive manager if you're, if you're a male at Muse and I, I
think it would definitely be a good tool for everyone, not just
for women. Yes.
OK, I see Matt Nott. I hate it.
It's terrible idea. OK.
I was wondering Mathias bit going back to to a question I
asked earlier. Let me proceed this question
because you asked everyone to play around with AI.
At the beginning, you said something that struck me in the
sense that you were a bit scared of AI.
What was that and what changed it?
Yeah, When AI came out in, what is it, November 2022, I think
the first time you saw it, you're like, wow, this could,
this could destroy our business. Like the first thought as a tech
entrepreneur is like, this could destroy everything that we've
built overnight if I don't figure this out because you
didn't know how fast it was going to develop and how good it
was going to be. And luckily it's not as extreme
in that sense. But in the moment, you don't
know. So there's just this fear of I
don't understand it. I don't know how fast it can go
and what it can do to our business.
And in that fear, you can either say, well, let's just see what
happens, or you can figure out what happens yourself.
And you want to be at the forefront of the, the innovative
side of it and just figure it out.
And, and that's really what like initially I asked a marketing
team to put me on a stage, get me a keynote to talk about AI
and hospitality. I said, just find me a stage
because that's the forcing function for me to actually have
a story. And it led to us really talking
about, well, what are we going to actually do with AI inside
our products? So the forcing function is the
fear. Then put me on a stage, I'll
learn it, and then it becomes part of the strategy.
And earlier this year, I felt. Did you think it's food like
that? No, but it's a behavior that
I've taught myself generally. Like every time I feel nervous
about something, I need to lean into it.
Like because I just don't want to ever feel nervous because I
will ask the dumb questions out loud, but only if I recognize
that I'm actually interested in learning a new skill.
It's just recognized fear. That's the most powerful thing
that I can tell anyone to do. And then just lean into it.
Just go and figure it out. And most things you can solve, I
find. So, you know, there's some
projects at Muse that are not particularly going well and
like. OK.
How do I deal with that? Like I don't have time for it
but I realized that these are massive cross functional
projects that are failing and I should be there.
I need to figure out what's going wrong.
And it's this, this ability to be like AT shaped engineer,
you've got that notion of, you know, being a specialist, but
also having enough information about the rest of the
organization to kind of contextualize everything.
And, and I want to be this T shape.
I can dive into a very specific topic, get to the detail, make a
decision, pull back out and get back up to the surface level.
And I think that's one of those really important skills that
I've just learned through the years to hone hone.
And initially, in the old times, we would call that
micromanagement. Today, I think it's a really
important leadership skill. This is brilliant.
We used to call it micromanagement.
Yeah, we rebranded it. This I got to keep for the
quotes, but going back to the to the AI, why did you ask other
people also to to start building their own AI?
There's two stages to learning something and there's the the
keratin stick, right? So initially it was a carrot,
like let's make people comfortable with it.
We had to talk a lot about AI. Let's make sure that all the
tools are available across Muse. And it was a very friendly
stage. And that stage took about a
year, 2 years. And at some point, I was like, I
actually feel that it's time for the stick to come out, which is
a very aggressive way to say it. But I was like, why are people
not doing more with AI and we're not getting the efficiency
gains? And the only way for me to force
that culture was by me to build a bot myself, record myself in
the process of doing that, edit that video myself, drop it on
the Internet and then go back to our leadership team.
And I went, we had an offsite last week in Prague.
And two months ago, I dropped that video.
And then I went to that group of 70 people that were coming to
the offsite. And I said you only get to come
if you share your bots with us. If you do not share your bots in
advance, you don't get to come to the off site.
So 70 people build a bot, shared it publicly and some not so
great, but they had a lesson. Some the the winners were the
salespeople. There was three people from the
go to market team that actually ended up winning the award from
70 people. It wasn't the developers, it
wasn't the product leaders. It was the people that were
brand new to it who felt the deep pain of their job and they
built some of the most innovative bots.
But it was the forcing function of the stick basically saying,
sorry, no, you only get to come to this really important offsite
if you build it and you show it to us.
And people afterwards told me, I really did not like that you
made me do that task until I did it and until I struggled for
five hours. And the lessons I've learned
through those five hours were more than I've ever learned in
the last year. Because it's so powerful.
When you start to talk to AI and all the wires start to connect
in your head, it's like, oh, this is how it all works and
this is how it comes together. And the 1st AI bot is the
dumbest one. But then you've got the baseline
and then you can build on that and you can make it better and
better iteratively. We're living in one of the most
exciting times in technology right now.
I think that was not my opinion three years ago, but that is
what it's had has become over time.
And I've got to like prophet, prophesize that to the world
now. Yeah.
Do you have a programming background by the way?
No, I'm a hotelier. I know nothing about coding.
So you had to teach yourself coding and you don't build.
You don't honestly, if you can talk like a normal human being,
you can build an AI bot today. If you've got a problem to
solve, you can build an AI bot by just talking to it and and
just using, you know, every time you get stuck, you just say, my
bot did this thing. What did I get wrong?
How do I fix it? And honestly it would just give
you the answer and it will say you know, I build a chat bot and
I got stuck because he wasn't answering the question.
I said why is it not answering the question?
And I realized I hadn't connect the the the database of answers
to the questions and I hadn't saved it in a database and
connected the dots. These are stupid but you, you
learn so fast and AI is really good so you do not need to learn
to code. But that's cool, and that also
opens it up to indeed people who don't have the the coding
background. Every single person can build
with AI today. That's, that's good to hear and
encouraging to hear also that there are forward-looking CE OS
who just forced that. It's scary, yeah.
No, no, no. But let let let me put it this
way that let's employees face their fears in a positive way.
And then maybe Phil. But hey, yeah, at least you
tried. Yeah, exactly.
OK, so Mattache, what if you could give other founders who
want to build, looking back also on your journey with Muse, if
other founders would like to build a company that is as high
performing and as inclusive as Muse, what would you recommend
they do? What would be the first step and
something that they definitely should not?
Forget, I don't know where the saying is, like because I lived
in so many countries that I don't know the sayings, but
there's a saying called the fish stinks from the head.
And I think it's a Czech saying. But basically it means that if I
don't lead it at the top of the organization, it won't be the
culture and a lot of people will be like, right, it's AHR
function. HR has to make diversity work,
but it doesn't if like it's my telling, I want to make sure the
diversity works. And yes, HR is there to enable
that conversation, but I have to lead it.
And I think often this is what founders get wrong.
They default this as AHR function, but this is a founder
thing. If you look around your company
today and you don't see diversity, there probably isn't
diversity and recognize that there's a problem and then lead
from the front line by just talking about just saying it.
Like I look around the room, this seems not a very diverse
room. Should we talk about that?
That's a great starter. Sounds sounds great.
If there was, looking back, something you would do different
from how you've done it, what would that be and why?
Like I would love to say that I'd like to be more deliberate
early on, but I also know that when you fight for survival,
it's the last thing you think about.
But I would love to have had a strategy and I would have loved
to have access to AI at the time because then, you know, you can
very quickly build out like a policy or a directive towards
it. Whereas back in the day you just
have to Google your way to like. It was never as good as AI.
It's much weaker. It's much quicker to kind of
give it shape in because you can ask AI saying, hey, this is my
situation. We've got 20 employees at this
company. We're all white male.
How do I diversify it? And AI starts to give you
suggestions. And we were never that
strategic, but it just wasn't available.
But you know, you, you can't start with diversity soon enough
because if you build that in too late in the journey, it will
never feel authentic. Because when you basically grow
a company with all the same people who hire the same people
because they're all hiring their friends and then the
homogenization sets in, you'll never be able to fix it.
Or you can, but it's going to be a really heavy lift and it will
feel unnatural. So I'd say start from day one,
thinking about it at least and and dealing with your own
unconscious biases. Thank you, Margarelli.
Closing question for you, How can allies contribute to a more
inclusive tech ecosystem? I would say communication is
key. Ask the question.
Start by asking the question, how can I help?
How can I make my meeting or my team a better place for all of
us? Attend those ERG groups
meetings, even if you're not part of them, out of curiosity,
but also maybe you can contribute by giving suggestion,
your opinion or even maybe you can grow yourself, your skill
set, your behaviour. I think assessing yourself is
also important. How do you behave, how do you
perform when you are leading a meeting, attending a meeting or
when you're just communicating with others?
And it's the self reflection part that is important.
And I think if we make it intentional by saying how am I
performing as an ally? If everyone takes a minute to
self reflect, they could definitely contribute to making
the culture a bit more inclusive.
It's as I said before, it's everyone's role.
It's everyone's responsibility to make a company an inclusive
space. And I think the word ally, it's
not a noun, it's a verb. And that's a really important
distinction because you can't say, yes, I'm open minded,
everything is great. No, no, it's a doing you, what
are you doing to lean into that conversation?
You know, should I as a man join women at Muse?
Yes, absolutely. You should be part of that erg
since you can overhear what they're talking.
What are the challenges? Allyship is a doing word.
It's not a sitting back and saying yes, I am very accepting
of all the things you're doing. Like no, no, what are you doing
to change it? OK, SO11 challenge to that
because I I love what you say. How do you do that without
disturbing sort of the safe space that an erg is supposed to
be? Because I think just keeping
this to myself, one of the reasons I doubted really long
before starting the podcast and before started starting to
attend women's events and events about diversity was that I
thought, well, yeah, actually I need to be there.
But on the other hand, then I'm disturbing something and I, I, I
don't want to be the person that sort of kills the initiative.
But that's the difference. You're not here to mansplain the
situation to us. You are here to ask really
thoughtful questions and then listen and curate and and lift
us up through your platform. Yes, you can go into the women
at News ERG and let me just let me explain to you how we're
going to run the show. Or there is the let me sit back
for a couple sessions just just for my opinion and listen really
deeply and then ask a few really good open questions.
And I think that's the difference.
Thank you, because that's exactly the answer I was looking
for. Good.
So Magalia Large, Mathias fella, thank you very much for an
amazing interview. Really enjoyed this.
If people want to learn more about you and about Muse, where
would you like to send them? LinkedIn is the place for us.
Cool. And probably there's muse.com.
Like honestly once you follow us you will regret it.
We are everywhere. OK, cool.
And we'll include those links in the show notes.
Again, thank you very much for the interview and listeners.
Thank you very much for listening and until the next
episode, keep being awesome. Well, that's it for episode 125
of Women this voting tech with Mabili Elash and Matais Vela,
titled How Muse Builds Inclusive Cultures in hospitality.
Magali, Matthais. And I hope that you found our
conversation as inclusive and transformative as we intended it
to be. And if you have any questions
for Magali or Matthais, please share them in the comments on
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answer. When you want to connect with
Magali and Matthais or learn more about Muse, please check
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