How Aspiring to be an Astronaut Led to a Career of Breaking Barriers and Becoming a Female Tech Startup Founder

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March 2, 2023 • 48 mins

Sonya Sepahban is - a minority of minorities - in today's startup world. She is one of the few women in executive boardrooms and startup CEOs that get funded. Despite the fact that she was often the only woman in the room, she was able to navigate these situations due to the help and mentors she received from the men in power.

Sonya rejected limits and focused on what she could do to make her voice heard. She believes that everyone has something to offer and that it is important to ask for what you need. This attitude allowed her to rise to the top and be successful in her career.

Sonya is a talented leader in the tech and startup space. She has had a varied and successful career, starting out as a junior NASA engineer and progressing to executive roles with thousands of employees as well as public company boardrooms.

Currently, she works with a small, talented team at a tech startup. In this conversation, Sonya and Dr. Jim discussed how purpose-driven living is the key to long-term success, why ignoring limits is the key to successful career navigation, and what role reinvention plays in life and career.

Sonya is the founder and CEO of a company focused on helping organizations of any size create inclusive workplaces. She has a background as a developer and senior female leader in Fortune 500 companies, which has shaped her work in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Sonya began her career in NASA, and she explains that looking back she can connect the dots in her career to the work she is doing now. She emphasizes that being purposeful is an important part of her work, and she believes that her own experiences have helped to shape her current role. Her goal is to help companies foster productivity and belonging for all individuals within their organization.

Sonya has been focused on purposeful work throughout her career, from joining NASA to now working in the corporate boardroom. She joined NASA with the hope of exploring space to better understand humanity and progress, then shifted to aerospace and defense to protect security, freedom, and the way of life.

In her current role, she is focused on making the workplace a place where everyone feels they belong and can be productive. She believes that regardless of the business, it is important to be focused on the end user, and that this is similar to what she did at NASA: making people feel safe. In her heavily male-dominated spaces, she is determined to make a difference.

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