MJ interviews Kay Koplovitz, Forbes Top 250 Innovator, CEO of the first satellite cable network, venture investor, and founder of nonprofit Springboard Enterprises. Springboard accelerates women-led startups, over 950 to date creating $76 billion in value!

Kay: Overcoming challenges together has a lasting positive effect on our value. How we value ourselves. And I’m not talking about dollars.

(0:21) [Intro music plays: “Where, oh where are you tonight? Why did you leave me unread on my phone? I searched the world over and thought I found true love. You met an AI and poof, you was gone.”]

MJ: To our listeners who can’t see, we were all bobbing our heads and dancing to the music. It’s a great way to get in the mood a little bit. But I’ll go ahead and introduce our guest today. Kay Koplovitz, who is a businesswoman, entrepreneur, and author who has spent her career looking to the future.

She was the first woman to head a television network when she founded USA Network in 1977. And she was a visionary, helping sports television reach cable by negotiating contracts for the MLB, NBA, NHL, among others. She launched the Sci-Fi Channel, chaired the bipartisan National Women’s Business Council, and used her platform to launch Springboard Enterprises, which is a global network of entrepreneurs, investors, and advisors accelerating the success of women entrepreneurs in technology and life sciences.

She’s a champion for female entrepreneurs and an inspiration to young women everywhere, and an inspiration to me. Kay Koplovitz, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kay: Oh, what a great pleasure to be joining you for your podcast today. I’m really looking forward to our discussion.

MJ: Yeah! Well, so you’ve spent your career sort of looking to the future, innovating. I know that you started the Sci-Fi Channel partly because you thought that it was what we were all headed towards, right? And now we’re kind of at the forefront of that sci-fi reality.

Kay: Hal is beckoning at our door right now. People here listening know who Hal is from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kay: He’s still around.

MJ: Yeah, I think that a lot of our listeners are friends of mine and people my age. And I know that when you were in school, you did your Master’s thesis on satellite programming and how it could sort of impact the social order by spreading information.

And AI is kind of another way that we are spreading information. I wondered if we could just start there with your experience working in media for so long. How you think that the spread of information is changing now, and for people my age, what feels different now than it did when you were an expert in your field with cable? What feels the same? Is this a familiar beast, or is this a whole new ball game?

Kay: Well, technology always changes everything. I’ve been present for the change at various times. Way back, I wrote a Master’s thesis in 1968 on satellite technology and how it could change communications around the globe. It was something that we didn’t have access to.

And for people that are listening, historically, we were in a Cold War with Russia and China. We didn’t know what was behind the Berlin Wall or the Great Wall of China. Today, both of them—one’s gone completely, the other one, the Great Wall of China, is a tourist attraction today—but we didn’t know what was there.

And I thought geosynchronous orbiting satellites, high-altitude satellites, only needed three to communicate all around the earth. It was a real breakthrough in technology and potentially a big breakthrough in people’s ability to communicate with one another.

So you have to start there with the satellites and what they did to change communication around the globe. So things advanced, computers came along for personal use, the internet sprung up, people started communicating through the internet. And eventually, we launched cable networks, USA Network in my case, Sci-Fi.

And Sci-Fi, I was not a kid who read sci-fi comic books and things like that. But I grew up in the age of Sputnik, President Kennedy challenging us to put a man on the moon. You have to have vision. Students today, if you want to innovate and be an entrepreneur, for example, you need to have a core position that you really, truly believe in and want to really reach for if there is no solution yet.

And one way to learn about that is to actually jump in and work for a company that’s a young startup company. You can learn a lot of things working for big corporations, but you won’t learn those skills because they’re not the same skills.

And I always say to students, if you really want to learn, “Well, am I really an entrepreneur? Can I really do this?”, the best way to do it is to start at a very young company and see how it operates and see what the challenges are and learn from those experiences. When you’re young, it’s the time to do it. It’s the time to try different things. You are free to try.

And today it’s free to access. When I started out, the television market was pretty closed. Cable television, people were like, “What’s that? Why do we need more than three networks?” They challenged everything that we wanted to do. And I said, “Well, there’s a lot more out here.” And to me, it was opening up the global communication sphere.

And that was using high-altitude satellites to communicate around the world, to communicate with people directly on phone services and things like this around the world. So it’s gone back to also low-orbiting satellites. You can launch thousands of them; there are millions of them out there.

And so we all know, for example, in the war-torn country of Ukraine, their communication is basically by Starlink and their field operations. But furthermore, for people with just communicating with each other, the streaming that has overlapped what the cable networks did, now the cable networks are being disrupted by the streaming networks.

And so communication has become literally among billions of people around the world. When we started off, it took a few years to get to like a million people, and then get to ten million people, and then get to twenty and thirty, fifty… it took time.

Today, you can instantly have the opportunity to communicate with billions of people around the world. Now, what does that mean? It’s hard to communicate with a billion people at a time, you know?

MJ: Right.

Kay: But also as a young person, your point about getting into entrepreneurship now, this being one of the best times to start, we have access to everybody across the globe and all of their information. It’s easier than ever to just get your feet wet, right?

Kay: It’s easier than ever, you’re absolutely right, but the challenge is to gather your own community. Because there’s so much competition out there. There’s so much opportunity out there.

And people say to me, “Oh, you know, the consolidation of the broadcast networks,” which is happening. The consolidation of the cable networks, which has been happening for the last couple decades and now really more so. Those are consolidating and coming together.

The big challenge is not “can you get in?” You can get in. Anyone can get in with a cell phone or a desktop or a laptop or anything, an iPad, whatever you have. But who are you going to reach? Are you going to reach your own community?

And that’s really where a lot of influencer marketing has come into play with a lot of celebrity stars from Hollywood, television stars, and people say there’s not enough creativity. There are so many companies that have launched on TikTok, that have launched on, certainly, YouTube. There are many, many different opportunities.

What is your goal? What is your business plan? How are you going to support this? This is, and advertising revenue, of course, has supported Meta, Facebook, and how are you going to create a business? First of all, establish yourself. What is your position? Is it clear? Can you attract your community? And then how do you want to monetize that community?

Is it a freemium model? Is it free at first and then we’ll charge you? I think we’re all familiar with that. Or is it just advertising-supported like FAST channels that are available through like Roku and all the manufacturers of sets of all kinds and computers of all kinds have advertising revenue?

It’s very hard in the vast community of billions of people to find your niche. But if you do have a strong following on your niche, you can create businesses that way. It’s not a matter of access, it’s a matter of performance in the end.

MJ: Right.

Jeff: Performance. A couple of things that stuck out to me from what you said, Kay. One: the phrase “gather your community.”

Kay: Let me give you an example. I’m a whitewater rafter. And the people who are in whitewater rafting who are the guides that I’ve been on Class V trips with, they show up in different parts of the world. It’s just this community of these nutcases who love to go whitewater rafting. We just loved it. I mean, it was just so exciting.

And then we’d go to South America, we’d go to Chile, and the next time we’d go over, we’d be in South Africa and the same guy—”Oh, hey! It’s so good to see you again!”

MJ: A community that you found of rafters!

Kay: That’s sort of fun. And then you can say to them, “Hey, have you done this river and what should I expect of it?” Give you an example of something that’s a small community that people are integrated together in and respond to each other quite quickly.

Jeff: You know, if you have access through all these different channels—streaming services like Twitch—if you have access, that is an incredible opportunity in that there’s no barrier anymore. But without a community, you don’t have a voice, right?

And a quote stuck with me from a student of mine: “Get over yourself and start the conversation you want to have.” Because another point you made in a couple different ways was you have to have a strong point of view and direction. And having the conversation that you want to have is crucial when there’s every opportunity to make more generic noise, content, whatever. But you’re not going to gather a community without that point of view.

Kay: Yes, that is true. One of the things I would say—and I’m concerned about students today and trying to make choices among chaos—I have always believed that there is enormous opportunity in chaos. When everything is static, it’s very hard to get in.

There’s so much chaos right now that the other opposite side is true: there’s just so much chaos, where do I plant my flag? How do I…? People know when you’re authentic and when you’re not. The thing that I worry about is I think social media is dividing us. I think social media started off to connect people, connect families, “share my videos” and this and that… all these sorts of lofty ideas which were wonderful.

But today, a lot of the business models are based on hostility. More: the more people are angry and shouting from different sides at each other drives up the use, the attendance, the participation. And I worry about how that aspect of it—that business plan, and let’s be honest, the business plans of Meta and Google and companies like YouTube and companies like that—to some degree or lesser, they depend on that high friction.

And nothing has to be true. It’s what you say is true. It may have nothing to do with truth. People can project a lot of lies and just make up things and try to get people to believe them. And I think that’s really destroying our soul being in a lot of ways, and having people against each other, and then even family members against each other.

I don’t think that’s a good thing. And I’d like to go back to the idea that individual communities should be the challengers or the people who have the mission of that community and have their judgment as to what is the proper communication that they should be having. And if they don’t, they’ll kick them out.

And we had companies like that years ago, but today it’s… I think students know what is authentic, but they drift into things, too. It’s easy to be pulled into things by a friend or somebody that you know or somebody that you met and go down a path that is not…

Jeff: Or by an algorithm that’s tuned to deliver dopamine to you.

MJ: Yeah. We’re not just an AI podcast; we talk a lot about the influence of technology and social media. And because you have been in media since before social media, you sort of talked about how we went from like one or two cable news networks and now we have this influx of information across the board through social media and how it kind of divides us because fear sells, right?

You get more engagement if it’s more extreme, and maybe the companies that are giving us access to social media are less concerned about the integrity of the information and more about engagement. I wonder, are there any pros when it comes to media specifically, going from like one or two cable news networks to everything at your fingertips? I wonder if you’ve seen differences or if you think that there’s any benefit to that.

Kay: I always think it’s beneficial to hear different points of view. I don’t think it’s productive to have just groupthink. Whether you agree with “that’s your groupthink” or somebody else’s groupthink, I always listen to people that have different points of view than I have because I always learn something from them.

I don’t have to necessarily agree with them, but I learn something from them about why they think the way they do. So sometimes they change my mind because I say, “Now, that’s an interesting thought. They have a point there; maybe I should think a little bit more about that.”

So, I think it’s a benefit to have access. What I’m thinking about when I think about Artificial Intelligence and AGI: I think it would be great to be able to use technology to qualify for ourselves—as individuals—qualify what we’re reading and understanding through these different social media platforms, people, individuals.

And it’s kind of interesting because when you do research—and I use it for research just to look at things that bring things to my attention that I may not know exist because there are so many sources of information out there—I think it would just be great for us as individuals, or people in our group, to be able to get instantaneous analysis of what are facts or not facts that are listed here with what people are saying.

I think that’s the next best step that we can make because I don’t think we can really depend on regulation, like national, state regulation of any kind, self-regulation. Look, we had self-regulation in the cable industry for a long time. You know, and some of it was good and some of it wasn’t. And I think this is true today too, but I think we have the ability to at least instantly today check the viability or the truth of what are these stats, what is this information that we’re…

Here we are, we’re talking to each other. Now, if we want to go and find out, well, is Kay Koplovitz telling us the truth or not? You could find out like that, you know? “No, she’s just telling a story.”

So I think there are ways that we’re starting to understand, if we’re interested people and not just there to, let’s say, spread our—whatever we want—the message that we want, true or not true or whatever it is. This would be a great way to use the different platforms of technology that are coming into the core right now for us to be able to double-check ourselves.

We don’t have to have an outside source. We do have outside sources now checking on the veracity of a lot of statements that are being made, let’s say by politicians. Sure, there’s a lot of that going on out there, but wouldn’t it be great if just we as individuals could get the same just fact-check like that and say to ourselves, “Oh, I really thought I was believing this person, but actually what they’ve just said is not true. Here are the facts.”

Wouldn’t that be sort of cool? That then each of us could have that responsibility. Some people are trying to deceive you. There’s all kinds of people like that out there.

MJ: It’s almost like both the problem and the solution is the fact that we have access to all of the information, right? It just takes a little bit more…

Kay: It’s overload! Our brains can’t consume it all at one time.

MJ: But it takes some more personal responsibility, right? To care about whether or not the facts you’re consuming are true.

Kay: Now, on the other hand, someone can use it for evil. They can use the same technology to, let’s say, bring in people who they’re spinning a yarn to and get them to believe it.

MJ: It’s a double-edged sword.

Kay: Because they’ve said it so many times and people start becoming believers, and we do see that a lot today, let’s say our political environment, we do see that.

Jeff: I wonder if you think that—I’m sure you’ve had it, the experience of catching a bot, whether it be Google’s or Claude—catching a bot in an inaccuracy is actually a good thing because it teaches you to be skeptical, to ask follow-up questions, those sorts of things.

Kay: I don’t know if I’ve really had the… I don’t think about it as catching a bot. They make mistakes too. We make mistakes. Like I use it for research. It could be a contract. I could say, “I want analysis of the contract if I’ve forgotten something or need something out of my head.” And boom, you get an answer. Well, okay, well that’s… I better check that out. At least I find it very, very good.

Jeff: So I think we all can feel that there’s a lot of chaos swirling around us right now. And Kay, you brought up that chaos can be an opportunity. MJ, your perspective is that there’s a lot of chaos right now, but in that, there is opportunity.

Just coming back to that point you made, Kay, about for young people, a great way to learn a lot quickly is to work in a small company, a startup, a growth company, maybe not. How does that relate to this concept of there being opportunity in chaos?

MJ: I think that my entire generation feels like anything we do post-grad is kind of taking advantage of a chaotic moment, and that can feel pretty crippling. I think that there’s a lot of uncertainty about what the workforce looks like moving forward, how different technologies impact the way that we experience the world, the way that we contribute to the world.

But I also think that if you can get over the lead in your stomach from that crazy uncertainty about what even the makeup of the workforce looks like, there is a lot of opportunity to be the people that are coming up with ideas of what it could look like—envisioning that future.

And that means that even if you’re in an entry-level role right now, you have to be inventing what an entry-level employee does now because AI can sort of automate the basics of that role. So we have to be a lot more proactive about proving our value early.

As scary as it is and as much as it feels like it’s setting us back, I really think that it’s something that’s going to push my generation forward because we have to much younger decide what our point of view is, decide what we want to say, decide how we can demonstrate our value to people that might employ us. Because generating sort of mediocre content is something that AI can do now, right?

They can summarize an email and make a PowerPoint. And so something that I’ve grappled with as I’m looking at the beginning of my career is: what do I care about? What can I do that is interesting? What are the questions that I can ask? And also I think it’s sort of a lot of my life experience, including the pandemic and then AI, has sort of forced me to reckon with the fact that humans and human connection is something that is so important to me and something that is how the world is going to move forward, right?

Post-pandemic, I was so grateful to be able to be in person with the people I love. And I think that that gratitude is getting even bigger as I realize that interpersonal connection and human-first companies are the future because AI kind of automates all of the tech babble. And it comes down to who are you? How do you connect with the people around you in a meaningful way that only humans can do? And what do you have to offer, and what are the questions you want to ask, and how are you going to solve those questions? Those are my thoughts.

Kay: Yeah, well, I think you’re hitting on something that’s extremely important, and that is relationships—human, face-to-face relationships. And if someone your age is to say to themselves, “Well, I want to go into the art world and I want to deal with art,” then maybe they want to go work for an art company.

Maybe they want to work for Sotheby’s or maybe they want to work for an art studio. Even technology is changing how people access that, but being able to be there in the environment with the people that you admire and want to learn from is extremely important.

That’s why I think, in many ways, return to the office is beneficial. I think it’s been harder for people starting out only on screens looking at each other. You’ve got a connection to the people, but it’s not the same as having that really personal relationship and understanding the other person.

And so you go into a company—let’s say you’re not really thinking about being an entrepreneur, you want to go into a company—even if that’s a bank, you want to go into banking or something like that. I mean, it’s hard to establish those key people that you want to follow when you never get to see them personally.

You don’t get to sit around a room and have a cup of coffee with them. You’re just a face on a screen. And I think that there’s a good thing about being able to communicate with people around the world in all kinds of different media that we have available to us today, but I think you’re focusing on something that’s really, really important to the future of humanity. And that is personal, personal relationships with people. There’s nothing that can substitute sitting around the table or working in an environment where you can go down the hall or around the various cubicles that people are in and talk to someone.

MJ: Yeah.

Kay: To bring it back to a startup, I think that there’s something valuable about the foundation of a small company that is mission-driven and you’re working in the chaos and it becomes so much about how each individual person in that company contributes to the mission, what they can bring to the table in terms of problem-solving.

Specifically in life sciences and tech startups where maybe you’re trying to solve a healthcare issue. It’s about the people that you’re trying to help. There’s a human-centric mission. And when you’re in a small company, every person’s voice matters, everybody is all hands on deck, and you have to bring value to the table in terms of your ability to jump in and work with each other.

Your experience working with small companies, with startups—how do you feel it kind of ties into the human connection piece? But the chaos, and it actually is an opportunity maybe for individuals to really shine and showcase their talents and figure out what they care about. What are your thoughts on that?

Kay: Yeah, well Springboard Enterprises, which is the non-profit accelerator that was launched 26 years ago now, the mission was to find women in science and technology who are starting companies and connect them with potential investors and advisors that they needed.

It’s a perfect example of mission-driven entrepreneurship because it didn’t exist. People said, “Oh, you know, women don’t do that kind of thing.” And I said, “Oh yeah? I think they do.” And they said, “We never hear from the venture capitalists; no one ever comes to pitch us, no women ever.”

They didn’t know each other. So we had to go out and find the original companies that we brought in. And we were stunned when there was no internet for us; we didn’t have an internet connection, we didn’t have a website or anything like that. Six of us went out and just sent out to groups that business organizations, colleges we went to, we just tried.

And to our surprise, 300—over 300 applications showed up on paper. Whoa, what are we going to do with this? And we were very fortunate to have Stanford and Berkeley MBA students help us sift through them all and we came up with 26 companies. We said, “These companies can grow big, we think.”

We’re going to have to see what we can do with them and help them establish. So that’s how we established our first initiative in bringing women to the marketplace. And when we actually had a Demo Day in January of 2000, some 300-some people came to listen to them. And they were like, “Where did you find these companies?”

You know, we found them by going out to look for them. We didn’t just sit in a room and wait for them to show up. And I think this is like a mission-driven thing now because these women over time have raised over $14 billion, have created over $76 billion in value for their investors, 28 IPOs, 240 M&A events… I mean, they are really kicking ass out there.

And I really, I’m very proud of the work. And talk about something that’s mission-driven, this is a community of people who are there to see them succeed. Not punish them, not interrogate them, but to give them tough love. I mean, tell them the real truth about what they’re doing and how they have to change and what they can do to help them through the gates. And this is a community, what you’re talking about in many ways. Mission-driven community make a difference.

MJ: A community that you found, yeah!

Jeff: I’ll reflect: MJ and I were fortunate enough to attend the 25th anniversary gala for Springboard Enterprises last October. We got to see Kay there in her element, in her community. And I will say that afterward MJ said something to me that was really important. She said, “Dad, I’ve never been in a room with 250 women and I didn’t hear anybody say ‘I’m sorry.'”

Because every woman in that room, every person in that room, had a strong point of view, was probably looking for chaos to take advantage of.

MJ: Yeah, I think that what I meant by that—that’s “sorry” is kind of a running thing in our family where my dad noticed that my sister and I apologize constantly for things that we have nothing to be sorry for. And I think that it’s sort of an ingrained female thing to be a little sheepish.

And so when we were younger, he would always say, “Take your sorry back. What do you have to apologize for?” And I think that I used that as an example because I was in a room full of women who held eye contact, had something to say. There was none of the sort of socially ingrained spatial apology where women feel the need to make themselves small, right?

These are all women who have voices, are confident, who know what they want to say, and when you have conversations with them, they are unapologetic in taking up that space. And it was honestly one of the most incredible professional experiences I’ve had. It’s the beginning of my career, so it’s a short list, but I’ve never been in a room full of women who were all so inspirational. And it was a really profound experience for me. So thank you for that.

Kay: Well, I’m glad it was a good experience for you and there are legions of us. And I was at the Femmys Awards this week here in New York, all women in Fintech. Men and women in Fintech supporting women in Fintech. And Fintech is chaotic. There are massive changes in the financial market going on, whether you think it’s crypto or you think it’s blockchain or you think it’s stablecoin… I mean, all this stuff that’s going on in finance.

This is the time for people to really come out in front, you know? Because it’s very chaotic and it’s also very exciting. And you know what? Entrepreneurship is exciting and frightening at the same time, which is probably why it attracted me, because it’s… it’s frightening.

But it’s also exciting. And some days you get up and the problems are so heavy, you’re just saying, “How am I going to get through this day? Or how am I going to pay my employees?” And then you say to yourself, “I can do it. I can get this done. How am I going to get it done?” And then I go, “Okay, I’m going to do this first, then I’m going to do that, and I’m going to get it done.” And that’s how people, you know, you move forward one foot at a time.

Jeff: You do it together. My experience in startups was one where—you think about a startup as maybe the stereotypical male startup of the “sainted soul,” you know, Steve Jobs or whoever. Zuckerberg. But my experience in startups is that it is way, way more of a collective endeavor.

And startups by their very nature are going to be smaller than enormous multinationals, and so you can be more collective. There are fewer layers of middle management and command and control because it’s a smaller group of people so you don’t need those things in order to be productive.

And when you wake up and you don’t know how you’re going to make payroll, it’s much more likely that you’re going to have a conversation with somebody in person across the way who might offer a perspective that gets the whole organization to a solution a lot faster. And that kind of shared sharing in the experience of overcoming adversity is a critical element of being human and of humanity in the sort of best and most positive sense.

I clearly have an agenda here which is to encourage any of our younger listeners to consider working in a small company.

Kay: You’re absolutely right. It’s a small group of people, you’ve got a mission, you’ve got a business that you’re trying to get into the marketplace, and you come to the table and each person—it might be three people, it might be five people—but you’re there together. And overcoming challenges together has a lasting positive effect on our value. How we are as people.

In fact today, I have another of my group from USA Network. We’ve been out of USA for 26 years, 27 years maybe. We are still together. Every other month, we get in a different locations. Some of us are in New York, some are in LA, some are in other places that they are, in Europe or whatever. We still get together because we had that amazing experience of building something from an idea to a powerhouse together and we had to bridge a lot of challenges.

And there isn’t anything that can substitute it, really, in a lot of ways. And it’s not about money. It’s about our value together and what we did together. And I think to me that’s one of the most exciting things. Now sometimes people get that from being in larger corporations and people, but if you join a bigger company, it often depends on who’s leader of the team that you’re on and what is their success.

It may have nothing to do with you in terms of success or failure because if that person falls out of place, all of a sudden you’re lost. Your team has to go over to this team and then this team may not want you on their team and people navigate their way successfully to the top of corporations. I’m not saying they don’t, but it’s a different experience than being an entrepreneur.

Jeff: I’m going to plug two books today. Yours in just a moment, but also Julie Wainwright wrote a book called Time to Get Real about her experience building The RealReal. And she’s got a great section—I actually taught it in my class in January—she’s got a great section on that corporate environment and how it works, and she’s being sort of empirical and objective, and how you’re going to have a different experience there than you are in a smaller company where you do have more of a natural environment for pulling together.

Can I read you a couple of quotes from your book? It’s called Bold Women, Big Ideas. You may not have the whole book memorized after 25 years because you published this in ’01 or ’02.

Kay: Remind me what I said!

Jeff: I read it over January into February. I found it to be incredibly relevant to today’s moment because you were chronicling the peak of the dot-com capital craze, the peak of the dot-com facilitated rapid change in business and society because of new technologies, not just internet but also biotech as well.

And a lot of the dynamics that you describe are what we’re experiencing today with the latest emergence of a new disruptive technology that we’re all having to adapt to. Bear with me, but I’m going to ask you a question at the end of a few quotes. So, the first is not a quote of yours, it’s from a mentor of yours, Reuben Mark, who was CEO of Colgate.

And he said to you, “Kay, it isn’t enough for you to be a role model as CEO. Just because you’re the CEO doesn’t necessarily get others to realize that women minorities are worthy of it. You’ve got to be proactive. You’ve got to inspire others to think and act the way you do. If you really believe in helping others, that’s your obligation.”

Take that as the backdrop to start. Then you say, “There’s something seductive for me in traveling into the unknown. The journey itself thrills me and I don’t think I’d ever feel altogether happy if I didn’t know there was risk involved. Surely the risk of the unknown that takes me down Class V whitewater rivers and to the top of peaks, and it’s not so different in the business world.”

And then you say, “The simple truth is that once I get a big potent idea, it moves me to distraction. I feel compelled to try to move others with me. At the risk of repeating myself, I’m very motivated by the power of ideas.”

One of the ways that you inspire me is that you have built a career both in service to a community and in the business and material success of that community and of your own. So you didn’t sort of go off sit in the nonprofit world at a key juncture in your career and you didn’t go off and just slay dragons as an investor at that key moment in your career. You’ve found a way to balance both service and success in the business world.

And you’ve done that for 25 years and that room at the Springboard gala was full of just a small number of the people who’ve been inspired and empowered by this duality. My question is: how does that continue to sustain you? And a two-part question: how does that continue to sustain you, and what’s the big idea that you’re most—that you’re locked in on right now? I could imagine there is one.

Kay: Let me go back to Reuben Marks for a moment. Because what Reuben was saying to me is it’s not enough for you to be the leader of the change of what a leader looks like. At that point in time, studios had bought in. One of them was Universal and Paramount, the other was Time Inc.

And Sid Sheinberg, the head of the president of Universal, every time I walked into his office to see him if I was in LA and stopped by to see him, he’d say, “Here comes the CEO. You don’t look like a CEO,” he’d say to me every time. And I said, “Get used to it, baby. This is what a CEO looks like.”

So we would get—we had this little thing that we’d do all the time, you know? But I was trying to say to him, “I don’t have to look like you.” Reuben Mark said to me something else that was important. He said if you really believe in diversity as a key element of your success in your business, then you have to motivate people internally and you have to adjust their bonuses to actually perform and have diversity in…

So the head of sales and the head of distribution and the head of advertising and the head of the… within a corporation, part of their bonus had to focus on the fact that you wanted to have diversity within the company. You wanted to have different—I didn’t want everybody in my legal department to be Jewish. I didn’t want everybody in my sales department to be Italian. I didn’t want everybody in my… it was sort of a little bit like that. And I said, “You know what? Reuben’s right. I’ve got to do that.” I had to change the motivation for people within my own company even though I was a leader of them all.

That sort of thing I thought was really kind of important for people to understand. Why do I, after 25 years of, you know—when I started the whole thing was Springboard, it wasn’t like I had this idea that I was going to do this for the rest of my life. I just wanted to get it off the launch pad.

But then the dot-com bust. And I knew that women felt they were going to get shoved out and I said, “I can’t leave them out here. We’re not leaving them, we’re going to go on.” And we went on, we went on to Washington D.C. that year, we went on to Boston that year in the year 2000, and we made it very clear: we’re going on. You’re going with us.

I didn’t want them to feel that they were being abandoned because everybody was being pushed out, but it felt very bad for women who had just started to get in. Actually out of that first year, we had five IPOs eventually. So it was, you know, they were companies that were actually well on their way when we found them.

So I think that what motivates me is learning. I am a constant aggressive learner. And these people teach me every single day. It’s like I am going to university every single day. They know more than I do. I’m pretty good at some things, but they—people in biotech, I was in biology as a minor, I liked operating on my rat. I would carry my rat around in my… and the history of science was my favorite course in college, in my undergraduate for… I didn’t know that was going to be my favorite course!

I just love learning things. And I think some of the biggest wins going forward from today are going to be in biological sciences, in the administration of our healthcare in this country and around the world, that people are going to have better access to their own—it’s going to be much more individual.

I believe very strongly that people, once the individual understands what their condition is, they will make choices based on cost and outcome. And this is—you’re seeing this already. When you saw a year and a half ago actually now, when Eli Lilly took their GPL-1 treatment direct to consumer. Well they were trying to stem actually Ro and Hims & Hers and other people that were generic producers of it, but that has now becoming a more viable way for people to access those types of drugs for diabetes and weight loss.

You’re going to see more movement into the market. And in this country, in the United States, we need improvement. Our healthcare system is very difficult to navigate. Most people don’t have a concierge. Many people still don’t have a viable healthcare plan. And currently many are being pushed out.

You say “what are you excited about?” There are so many things. I’m still in space; I’ve still got stuff going on in space. But if you ask me what I think is going to be the best improvement for us going forward in the next several years, I would look in this space. There is so much that has to be improved, should be improved, and we can improve.

And we can take better care of ourselves knowing more about ourselves individually because we have the tools to be able to measure ourselves today in a variety of different ways. I’m very excited about that. And I learn from the entrepreneurs every single day the pathway. So you ask me what’s exciting to me? That’s exciting.

Jeff: Balancing service and success through a love of learning for the 25 years that you’ve been an investor and have, you know, been whether you planned it or not, you know, been one of the many amazing people but one of the key person driving Springboard. And I’m with you on the health thing. It’s a really exciting time. And talk about chaos, I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet in the most positive sense when it comes to individual health.

Kay: Well Jeff, you know a lot more about it than I do, you know, so I’m going to learn from you as well. And MJ is going to teach me what the younger people are, because you know, we all live in our time. So we have to adjust to our time, whatever that is. And I have a lot of—as I said—grandnieces and nephews who are the same age you are, and you know, I watch how they’re making decisions about what they’re going to do.

I have a PhD in chemistry, on the other hand I’ve got a welder. And he actually creates bronze artwork. And welders aren’t going away.

MJ: Yeah! Well Kay, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a really incredible discussion. You are such an inspiration. Thank you for taking the time to give some advice to the people my generation. Hopefully we can seize the moment and embrace the chaos and follow your advice.

Kay: Thank you very much for inviting me in. Thank you so much, it’s been a pleasure! I’ll keep learning from you.

Jeff: Thank you, Kay. Take care!

Kay: Okay, bye-bye.

MJ: Bye-bye.

(28:22) [Outro music plays: “Ones and zeros, vectors and scalars. What do you see in that machine? I gave you my heart, my warmth and Snapchat. You chose a robot, now I’m alone.”]

Jeff: You Teach the Machines is hosted and produced by me, Jeff Pennington, and co-hosted by my daughter, MJ. Please take a minute to review and subscribe to You Teach the Machines wherever fine podcasts are downloaded. Copyright 2026. Any and all use of the audio recording of You Teach the Machines for training or other contribution to artificial intelligence models or their application is expressly forbidden without the permission of the creator. And we’d love to give you permission, so long as you come on the show!