Ep. #37, Optimism with a Plan with Latrice Barnett and Kanika Chander

Rachel Chalmers: Today, I'm so happy to have Majority Collective on the call.

Majority Collective is a Generationship community partner. It was founded by Latrice Barnett and Kanika Chander.

Latrice is ex Salesforce, and a former chief of staff. She works with mostly small and midsize business CEOs and founders to strategize through various types of transformations, growth, early stage fundraising, and clarity of message, for example.

Kanika is a technology attorney by trade, strategist, confidant, and hype woman by nature. She works with companies of all sizes, but her sweet spot is early revenue businesses that are just starting to wrap process around chaos.

Together, they are the Majority Collective providing underrepresented and overlooked founders with access to world class professionals. Latrice, Kanika, it's so wonderful to have you on the show.

Latrice Barnett: Thank you for having us. It's great to be here.

Kanika Chander: Thank you. Yeah, we are stoked.

Rachel: Kanika, I'll start with you. What is the origin story for Majority Collective?

Kanika: Well, like any duo worth their salt, I'm going to start, but this is going to be come probably like a tag team effort.

It's like asking a couple how they met, where it's like we think we have the same story and we need to jump in.

So without making this my origin story, I was practicing law for probably 16, 17 years at the time. I had been in a number of kind of high-stress, high-growth tech company positions, and I think had reached a little bit of a boiling point.

Which I'm sure it's not unfamiliar to some of these listeners. And I think what we call them is, is we call them pivots.

So it was a pivot, although it was really more like a firestorm, where I ended up hanging up my own shingle and doing the work I love to do with clients, really, that I want to be working with.

Helping them through early stages and serving as a fractional outside general counsel to really wonderful companies, often women or minority led.

And my sweet, sweet big sister has known this lovely woman, Latrice Barnett for 20 plus years I feel like.

And Latrice can correct me. And I've known Latrice for that amount of time as well, socially.

And my sister said to me, "You're putting yourself out there, you're doing the fractional thing. You should really check in with Latrice. She lives in Seattle now," which is where I'm based. "And she is doing a similar thing with her specific expertise."

So we got together for lunch with a side of a glass of wine, and it was just like chemistry explosion.

It was like the best first date, maybe as friends, who suddenly had a common business kernel in common.

And so we were talking about how in our individual journeys, we are working with companies that are funded, they're able to pay the bills, which is great, because we need our bills paid, but, gosh, we'd really love to be able to do what we're doing in some sort of collective fashion, help band together other solo professional services providers or boutique providers who have really good big corporate experience, but for one reason or another have decided to kind of give it the finger and do their own thing.

And how can we, connect ourselves with the communities of entrepreneurs that I think have similar origin stories, similar value systems, and help them through their initial journeys.

And it's serving a different clientele both on the supply and the demand side than I think each of us was serving in our individual capacities.

And, wham, bam, boom, the Majority Collective was born. And now Latrice can tell me everything I forgot or misstated.

Latrice: I don't think you misstated anything. I think the only thing that I would add is that at the same time that we were having that initial fateful lunch, so much was being written, so many studies were coming out about where VC funding was going.

This is when a lot of these very well-intentioned Twitter profiles and LinkedIn banners started to shift. Right? And I think a lot of folks were saying, "Okay, well, there are people that still have ideas and there is a certain status quo of folks who are receiving a lot of funding"

Kanika: Spoiler, it ain't us. It ain't us, you all.

Latrice: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I'll be very frank that I'm pretty about that, right?

I mean, if we are such a huge and important part of the workforce and of the global population, period, I think what we're at 52% of a global population, and the actual percentage of funding that goes to women in particular is pretty darn small.

And so I think we wanted to make sure that we were offering services that are useful to communities like us, and also based in the experiences that we've had in these shoes.

So it's not just about giving money. We would love to give money at some point, but for the meantime, we have deep knowledge and a bench of experts to share.

Rachel: Yeah, I'm pissed as well. And Latrice and I go way back and we've talked about this a lot. It just frustrates the heck out of me.

Human society faces such wicked problems, and yet we're counting on this tiny non-representative group to use the resources wisely in a way to solve all of those problems.

Uh-uh, I don't think so. I don't think they know what to do with it.

Kanika: I think that's exactly right. And I think this is a phrase that when I used to use it, my husband would roll his eyes, but now he uses it as well.

And I think we talk about guidelines, not rules. And so, the Majority Collective, there's a couple of plays in our naming and when I think of this kind of "we" that we're building and referring to collectively, we are the majority, in fact. We are not minorities. Women certainly aren't. Even in any other calculation.

But when we think about the communities that we want to bring together to help provide our services or to receive our services, or just to be part of our network where we can really share information freely that tends to be otherwise kept behind lock and key, we're thinking about guidelines, not rules.

So it's not that you need to be a member of x, y, z community, or identify as a specific community member.

It's more that our guidelines and our values are built around, "Have you too been underestimated perhaps because of resources that were not handed to you on day zero or because of how someone may perceive you or where you're from, or how you look, or how you choose to live your life?"

And so that is, I think...

Our guiding principle is that those communities of which we in some ways are a part, and certainly there's somewhere we are just in strong alliance with, they're going to be our north star when we think about how we are doing our work and building out what we can do to help.

Rachel: And every company has to answer the question, who are we building this for?

It's not that the majority of existing companies designed for that non-representative minority don't do exactly the same thing. They just make different choices.

Latrice: Absolutely.

Rachel: For those who haven't yet encountered the term, what are fractional services?

Latrice: That's a really fun question. I feel like I get asked that several times a quarter.

The way that I think about it is, fractional services are basically when you divide your billable hours across multiple clients.

If we think about a 40-hour work week, you would provide some portion of that to each client that you have.

A part-time or a time-bound role, it can provide strategic guidance and support often to executives on an as needed basis. There's also sprint-based work.

And a lot of times, like some of the simple ways to do it is if you think about a certain percentage of your time being offered to a particular client ongoing, right?

So I'm going to allocate 25% of my week for six months to a particular client. And there's so many different ways of making it work.

I think that there are... I know folks who will give Mondays and Tuesdays to one client, and a couple of other days to other clients versus just a layer of time that you just track over the course of several days to a particular client.

So there's a number of different ways you can make it work, but just...

Kanika: Latrice, can you maybe speak to why some of the clients that we help currently or trying to connect with, what's in it for them to kind of use a fractional model?

Latrice: The reason I think it makes sense for so many of our customers is because a lot of times companies know they need a certain type of expertise, right? You start a company and you're like, "Okay, I need a CTO or a technical founder, and I need somebody to handle the marketing, I need sales."

But if you're scrappy, you don't have a lot of these financial resources that some people have on day zero, as Kanika mentioned, you have to be a little bit more thoughtful with the way that you spend your money.

And my thinking, our thinking is that oftentimes you don't need an entire staffed person to do these things. Number one, because you just need somebody who knows what they're doing, who can come in and be surgical.

Number two, because if you hire somebody, a lot of times, it's kind of like getting married, right? It's really easy to get married, very hard to get divorced, right?

And working is like that too. It's relatively easy to hire people and it's really hard in many states to release them when the role has shifted or the need has changed.

And so a lot of times folks will think, "Okay, maybe I can do contract," but even still a lot of folks will think about contract as full-time employment for a particular period of time.

So we offer expertise, you know, people, whether they're us or people in our network, to this fractional basis, because you don't need somebody full-time , and at such early stages of the company, these companies are often shifting and changing very quickly, very rapidly.

The same company will be a very different company in the space of three to six months.

And so we think about things in sprints similarly to focus on how do we get you to that next very quickly and then we can reassess and figure out what you need then.

Rachel: I want to dig in a little bit to that, because I remember when you first told me about sprints, I lit up because Heavybit has the same model.

They've broken down some of what they used to teach in their accelerator into an ICP sprint for finding your ideal customer profile and a launch sprint, and things like that.

Can you tell us about some of your sprints and what it's like for founders to come through them?

Latrice: Absolutely. We have a number of different sprints. They're growing all the time based on what our clientele need or ask from us.

One of the things that we've done is align on strategy and vision, right? A lot of folks will think, "Oh, this is really fluffy stuff. I have a product. That's my strategy and my vision."

And it's a little bit more than that, right? I mean, the companies that actually stay together are the ones who really put some thought into, where are we going, right?

If you decided one day to walk out of your house and go to France or to Paris, but you didn't have a map, like it would be a little bit tricky to get there. And your strategy is the same way, the way that I look at it.

So from there, we work with companies to help them to define the highest value priorities that they have in the short term and the long term so that they can say, "Okay, when you start a company, there are so many different pieces, so many different threads to pull on, and it's easy to become overwhelmed."

And so we want to make sure that folks understand, "Okay, this is what has to happen in the short term. This you can put off until the midterm, and this you can have further down the line," as in terms of the way that you're stacking your priorities.

Rachel: Yeah, I hear what you're saying, Latrice, but I've built this really, really good product technically.

Latrice: Yeah.

Rachel: And I know that now that I've built it, Paris will come to me, right?

Latrice: Mm-hmm, sure it will. Yeah. Right. We've seen that happen.

I mean, I think we get a lot of that, folks who are just like, "Yeah, well, I don't need that."

And we say, "That's great. If you know a better way to do it, rock on. And if you don't, come back."

Rachel: Ah, well, that's a perfect segue to my next question. How are founder journeys changing in the age of AI? Are people getting ChatGPT to write their strategy documents for them?

Latrice: Oh, god.

Kanika: Oh, pick me, pick me.

Like we can have this conversation really candidly, because we are also founders ourselves. I certainly don't have a rich dead uncle somewhere who's funding my business.

And so I'm leveraging AI for sure. And I think the way that I am seeing this play out in founder journeys is kind of twofold. One is thinking about the founder as a business builder, and one is thinking about the founder as an individual within that business.

And so thinking about the first component, when I think about founders in really building a business, I'm seeing an explosion of innovation, right?

Because now the delta between conception of an idea, and even just initial prototyping, beta execution, is just shorter. And it adds accessibility to folks that maybe don't have the skillset to fully put together or materialize their ideas.

So, there's generative AI tools that are providing access to really creative founders to develop products or solutions that are like net new, things we haven't seen before.

Or we're giving people access to kind of low code, no code, ways to kind of demonstrate interoperability that they weren't able to do previously without spending money and finding the right person.

I'm not going to say, vibe coding, I will not do it. You know, just having access to resources to get your concept a little further along to be able to work on that product market fit, work on that buy-in.

And I think because of that there's a lot more blue ocean maybe than 10 years ago. Like I feel like the businesses I'm seeing, it's not people developing a better CRM or a better project management tool. It's not, Asana 2.0.

Now it's like we're coming up with things that don't even have an analog or a comparison, which I think is fantastic.

The downside, or maybe the risk that comes with that is now it's so much more challenging to explain what it is you're doing to your market because, "We're not building a better X, we're building Y and you've never heard of this before."

And I have to explain to you what it is, why you need it. I wonder if you're going to get budget to buy it.

And so there is I think a real communication skillset that needs to be built around bringing these new products to market in a way that is well received.

And then if I can... Thinking about founder as individual, this is going to Rachel's point, which is why I was laughing, is, I think AI at its best can make good founders a lot better and can make them savvier consumers of professional services, which selfishly is what we do.

On the legal side, I have found clients leveraging AI to sometimes become better clients because they do a little bit of initial research first.

And they come to me and they say, "Hey, I think that this could be an issue. Can you help check me on this? Or is this something I should be thinking about?"

At its worst, it can take people's existing blind spots and make them gigantic.

So, I think about like, as with any other powerful sword, it's a tool, but it's not a proxy, and I don't think it's ever going to be a substitute for true human expertise, nuance, or empathy.

The skills that we're all building, I don't think our professions are going to go away.

I think it's just... You look at the folks that were already a little skeptical of bringing in the strategy person, the vision person, the legal person, the financial modeling person, and those folks are going to rely on these things as proxies versus tools. And I think it's going to be to their detriment.

Rachel: That's a really good distinction. People who value the skills that other people bring to the table versus people who just see other people as a cost center.

I think it ties back to your first point. It's hard to explain why people need to care about your product if you don't know how to tell stories to other humans, if you don't know how to interpret the needs and wants of other people.

So I think you're right, it will be to those founders' detriment. You can't automate loading soft skills because the core soft skill of building value is creating something that another person could use to lighten their workload.

Latrice: I would also, just to kind of touch back on your original question, which I realize was in jest.

But for anybody who wanted to write their vision and their strategy with AI, or simply outsource it to AI, I would ask why.

This is the moment that you have to shape something that is meaningful to you in a way that resonates with your inner core, because that's what's going to be the heartbeat of your entire... The skeleton of your entire organization.

And if you outsource... People certainly could outsource it to AI, but then when somebody asks you, "Why are you doing this? What does this company mean to you?" Will you have the right answer? Right?

Rachel: Yeah. It's been a big conversation in the creative communities I'm in as well. Like, you can certainly get ChatGPT to write a sonnet for you.

It really underscores what we've been saying all along, that it's the process, not the outcome. The pleasure of writing a sonnet is in writing the sonnet.

Latrice: Bingo.

Rachel: The pleasure of creating a vision statement and a strategy statement is sitting with yourself and gaining that level of self knowledge to identify the thing that you have to offer that is your unique strength.

Latrice: Yeah. Why would you want to give that away?

Kanika: Yeah. And I think, Rachel, like as someone who's profession is often identified as cost center, so I feel that deeply.

I'd like to think that those of us who are worth our salt in these professional services can make the distinction of when AI has been helpful in a process that might otherwise be inefficient for our client.

I have clients that come to me with things that have been generated through AI and I have full documented records of it takes maybe just as long to unfuck the thing as it would take me to do it from step one.

And I've explained that to folks and they've received it decently. But there's also times when I've been brought something that's been put together with the support of AI where I was like, "Thank you, now I don't have to fucking do that tediously myself."

And I can look at it, I can sign off on it, but I'm all for democratizing information and things that don't need a juicy creative or juicy legal brain, "Great, like, move it along," because I don't get that joy, right?

Like my sonnet, none of this stuff is sonnets, but like my sonnet is not taking a form and filling in the blanks, right?

Rachel: Right, right.

Kanika: So, my sonnet is taking something that seems complicated and fucked, and getting it to a point of agreement and understanding in documentation.

And so there's a pleasure in doing some of these things creatively and then there's a pleasure in knowing that there's easier ways to get the unpleasant things done more quickly.

Rachel: Yeah. I mean, my analogy would be just looking at hundreds and hundreds of pitch decks as an investor. And yeah, you can get AI to generate a pitch deck for you.

And I can tell straight away 'cause the thing I'm looking for is what's different about you, what's unique and original about you.

And I can guarantee you that hyper-powered predictive text is not going to get you to interesting weirdness.

Latrice: Absolutely not. That's only going to generate... At this point in time, all it really does is kind of give you the general mass of everything that's kind of in your general space.

And I think that's what people really struggle with. Folks struggle with identifying those differentiators and that's what you have to do.

Rachel: Yeah. That's the real work. Latrice, I'll throw this one at you. How do you think founders can prepare themselves for the software markets of the future?

Latrice: This is a two-parter for me. I think, number one, automate would make sense to automate. And that I think is a pretty... That can be a personal decision, that can also be an informed decision.

But at the same time, the other piece is talk to your freaking customers. Like they're going to be the ones that tell you what they're going to buy, right? And they're going to be the ones that buy it.

And I think that that is something that I'm seeing so much of people are just terrified of talking to their customers when that is the simplest way to figure out what they need.

So I think that that's a scary thing and people need to just like dig into that and face that fear because it's going through that, that helps you understand where the future of software is going. And any product for that matter.

Rachel: Kanika, this one's for you. What risks, legal, technical, and social, do you see in the widespread adoption of AI?

Kanika: Well, Rachel, with great power comes great responsibility.

Rachel: Thank you, Uncle Ben.

Kanika: As with everything, power related or that's capable of being monetized, there is such a risk of not only an abuse of that power, but a concentration of resources in the places that have resources to begin with.

And so, obviously, my brain is scrambled with kind of the world that we live in at the moment where I think everyone is so focused on the zero-sum concept that I think is just inaccurate.

And I think there's widespread adoption, but I don't think it's democratic yet.

And so the folks that have access, that are able to use AI tools to better their own personal, social, professional business lives, like we need to share that wealth and apply it to all the places that maybe don't have it at their fingertips, and it will reach a greater good sort of outcome.

I'm convinced of that. And so I think the risk is in hoarding-- Hoarding the benefits that can be achieved from the use of these tools. That's the biggest... That's what I worry about the most.

And certainly I worry about all the things that we've already sort of talked about, which is the death of the creative soul and also the death of our planet.

We don't need to to ChatGPT every fucking thing because you can't remember the name of that song, maybe just think about it for a minute before you blow up a data center somewhere just to figure it out.

Latrice: I'm going to add onto that by saying, while there's a truth in, we're not going to make much progress if everybody's hoarding that information or that access to the data and the tools that are shaping our futures, I'm also a little bit cynical.

Like, I'm not asking anybody to share, we need to just get up in there, Right?

We need to actually just kind of like stick our foot in the door and just be like, "Oh, no, no, no, no, I've got it."

Because nobody's holding that door open for us. No one.

Rachel: Yeah. We spent a generation asking for permission... Now, let's ask for forgiveness.

Latrice: Yeah, I don't even want to ask for that 'cause I don't need it.

Kanika: Right. What is it? Don't ask for permission for something that's already yours.

Rachel: Right.

Latrice: And I think this is critical for us, right? We've already seen what happens when... I mean, just look at healthcare, right?

Everything, for years and years and years, centuries, has been based, predicated, off of the male form, right?

And we had to kind of jump in there and be like, "We are not actually like misbegotten copies of men, right? Like we are our own distinct form and we work wonderfully as is, right? And you get to study those. And we're not like, kind of broken versions of men that they have to just kind of deal with."

And I think our data and all of our information is kind of in the same boat, right?

If we're leaving ourselves out of the equation of folks who have access to that data, access to how it's used, and access to how it's processed, we are literally leaving ourselves to being left out completely or just undermining our own futures.

Rachel: Yeah. So how might we mitigate some of these risks?

Latrice: Like I said, get up in there, like more people. More people like us, more women, more people of color, more everybody just kind of not being so darned afraid of data.

It's not an impossible thing. Maybe it's not the sexiest thing that you can think of, but it is really sexy when you think about how it's going to affect your life personally.

Kanika: Yeah. A good corollary to that right, is kind of an empathy-first mindset, which like, maybe we've gotten to a... I don't think that you can overuse that term, but I think like, if we think about getting the right people in the right conversations, I think, what you end up being better able to do is putting yourself in the position of the underserved.

And if we're using AI, let's keep asking ourselves, "How can we leverage that to help overcome the inequities that might have been created by it in the first place?"

And I was at an event recently where I saw kind of glaring example of like, maybe from my perspective, good and bad approaches to mitigating some of the risks around inequities, where there was an attorney who was talking, I thought really beautifully about how AI can really help pro bono legal services.

And I would say that can expand beyond legal, right, where there's communities that need support and services, and often they're packaged up by folks that maybe are willing to give time and effort, but don't necessarily have that built up skillset.

And now you can leverage a much more accessible knowledge base to provide services to folks.

Because if you have the desire and the time, you might be able to school up a little bit on some of the things they need help with.

And, someone sitting about 10 feet away from that person kind of also posited the idea of, when we use AI technology to better the greater good, we can provide, AI Ray-Bans to folks who can't see.

And I was like, I think it's this crass example of like providing the solution first without thinking about what the problem is. And I don't think the underserved communities maybe need a better CRM tool, but they might.

Rachel: Yes.

Kanika: Or AI-powered glasses just yet. I think it's more reminding ourselves to ask. What Latrice said, always what Latrice said: Talk to your fricking customer, talk to the person who is in the underserved position, understand what the needs are and build for that.

Rachel: Amen. This one's for both of you. What are some of your favorite sources for learning about AI?

Latrice: I'm happy to go first on this one. I am a huge fan of... There's a gentleman named Rajat Paharia and he designs his own apps.

He's just a really interesting and creative developer and very much of a listener to his audience and his customer base.

But he's often posting tips on LinkedIn that I find super accessible and interesting.

Kanika: Cool. I mean, my first answer, is you Rachel?

Rachel: Oh no--haha!

Kanika: Yeah, I sit at my desk and I wait for Rachel to throw me crumbs over Slack and I gobble them up hungrily.

So, I mean, but truly, truly, I think Rachel, your experience and insight in this area, I think is absolutely very genuinely on my list.

I don't know if these are exactly AI related, but I'm Lina Khan fan and so, I think about things that probably have a bit of an intersection with the legal area.

I think Amba Kak is really cool. I hope I'm not mispronouncing her name.

And then there's a blog that I found recently that I think was maybe just for like appropriate for maybe my level, but I think Ethan Mollick has some really cool things to say about AI in how can you use it well and how can you use it poorly, and even in day-to-day life, which I think has been really cool.

And I'm always on the lookout for, especially women in AI. Your blogs and your Substacks recommendations, send them. Send them, send them.

Rachel: Oh, I think you would both really love the "Atlas of AI"by Kate Crawford, an old buddy of mine from Australia. It talks about the physical underpinnings of data centers and planetary computing.

And I think she's amazing. She works at Microsoft Research and I should get her on the show. But I think you'd both really like that one.

For our listeners, we will publish all of those links in the show notes.

Now, to my favorite two questions. The reason the podcast is called "Generationship."

I have made you two co-emperors of the solar system. Everything for the next five years is going to go exactly the way that you think it should go.

What does the world look like in five years time?

Latrice: I think for me it's more variety in the types of people using AI and more empathy in it to ensure that people are not using that data in harmful ways.

I see the democratizing potential for AI and by definition that means everybody, all walks of life, are authoring and managing their changes and outcomes. We have to be the ones that are going to come and save us. And I think we will.

Kanika: My future of the world is kinder. That's my full stop.

Latrice: I like that.

Rachel: You got my vote.

And finally, you can each have your own starship if you'd like, or you can have a collective starship.

But you have a ship that's going to sail to stars so far away that it takes more than one human generation to get there.

That's a Generationship. What are you going to name her?

Latrice: I think I'll name mine The Optimist. I believe in hope, but always with a plan.

Rachel: Mm-hmm.

Kanika: I love this question. I'm a space camp kid.

I asked my son this question, he's three. So he just said his own name, which is Rami. But Rami does mean a little wish. Or it actually also translates to marksman, but there's a component of it that means wish.

And I like the idea of launching a wish out into space and hoping it lands well.

Rachel: Yeah, and the marksman angle means that you'll actually get to the star you're aiming for, which is very cool as well.

Kanika: Yeah, we hope so. So we'll name it Rami so that he's happy with me once I get our starship.

Rachel: Latrice, Kanika, it's always a joy to spend time with you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Kanika: Thank you, Rachel.