Roller Derby Skater & Tech CEO Taru Saxelin Crushes the Old Style of Leadership

Taru Saxelin is the CEO of the marketing technology company Tumplate. The company is rare in that most of the team are women and the companies are also women. Does gender matter in Taru's opinion? 

Interview with Taru Saxelin

Taru is an art director turned content marketing innovator in the multi-channel communications and B2B marketing industry. She is a world-known Roller Derby player and coach and professional athlete years have transformed her as a truly inclusive leader. 

Roller Derby is a full-contact sport where you can tackle harder than in hockey. The sport is tough, but the values ​​are soft: practicing the sport must be possible for everyone, and psychological safety and inclusion are key. What kind of leadership lessons has Taru picked up from the Roller Derby?

What is it like to be a female CEO in the technology industry, and does gender matter? 

Because the funny fact is that most of the marketing people are women, but when you look at this marketing technology industry, it is more male dominated. 

But what do you think? Does gender even matter?

Taru: I really wish that gender didn't matter, but unfortunately we still live in a society where gender is quite emphasized. 

Especially within the technology startups, there is a very small percentage of women in the technology field as investors, managing the investment funds, as board members, or as directors. Female leadership is rising, but it is just taking a really long time.

 Part of the reason why it takes a long time is that those work communities are not terribly inclusive or diverse yet. It is really difficult to for female leaders to rise up, who have the kind of experience that is needed.

I personally felt that when we were, for example, at the Arctic15 startup conference a while ago, it was not a terribly inclusive event. I don't blame that event, but the industry is just like that.

I myself never go into a conversation emphasizing that I am a woman, because I want the situation to be fundamentally equal immediately. 

In the startup world, when you meet a lot of other startup entrepreneurs and investors, fund managers, there are indeed a lot of men there and that is where we really do stand out.

You said that you are standing out, and I understood that you exceptionally have both women as investors and that your core team is also quite female-dominated. 

Could this kind of female-dominated core team actually be your competitive advantage in the tech industry?

Taru: Yes, I would see it that way, but it is not necessarily because we are in the technology industry, but because we are specifically in the marketing industry. 

More than half of us are women, which is really exceptional especially in the marketing technology field or in general in technology startups, as we just talked about.

Personally, I would rather see it in the way that the competitive advantage consists of the fact that, as you just stated, the people in the marketing field are mainly women. We have people with a marketing background, who are women who have marketing experience.

Our experience is based in marketing experience, so yes maybe being a woman also brings advantages for us, but it's more that we have experience in marketing field and doing marketing, instead of directly from being women.

Instead of talking about female founders or female leadership, do you think we should talk more about gender neutrality? 

But, when you look at studies, for example McKinsey has done a study that only 21% of leadership roles are held by women, and only 2% of early-stage investments go to female founder teams. 

How do you think we could move towards a more gender-neutral business world, taking these differences into account?

Taru: Personally, I would start from increasing diversity, and that gender neutrality, or equality between men and women.  

As you said just now that Poland is ahead of us, so we are still quite far from that equality.

I feel that such a low-hanging fruit in this situation would be increasing diversity at workplaces, that we start from that we have team members of all walks of the work community, creating an accepting open atmosphere for people of all ages and genders, and people are not judged by gender, then that helps us to balance out the equality between men and women.

That’s the way to bring the gender neutrality into the work culture. 

The fact that only 2% of the investments are for female founders is a completely insane, it seems completely irrational. 

Only 2% of women get investments, and part of the reason is that there are fewer female founders, but then there is also the fact that the investors are men and the industry is male-dominated.

The industry itself has already woken up to the fact that it is only the 2%, funds, boards, investors. They have realized that it can't be like this. 

And then if you think, for example, what if Elon Musk were a woman or a black man, how would that change the world? 

The industry itself has woken up to the fact that with these investment choices are changing the world and creating the future we want our children to have.

 And if they only invest in middle-aged men, then what does that future then look like?

Then it'll just be Elon Musks for the next two hundred years, instead of having real diversity and realizing that the startups and the ideas that change the world, they can come from anyone. 

We just have to create such a culture, work and business culture, that we can create more opportunities and that anyone dares to try. That it's not a limitation that only 2% of women get that funding.

It’s interesting that you said that we should create a business culture that enables or supports this. What should that culture be like in your opinion?

Taru: Diversity is the main theme here, it's the red thread. 

We shouldn’t create products without understanding the end-user. Our employees all have a marketing background and are women, because we want to create products for end users that we understand, we have the experience.

Our company culture must be inclusive and open and trusting in a way that people feel safe to be there, that they can be themselves. 

Think if, for example, you could to not reveal your sexual orientation at work. 

How awful it would be if you could never discuss about your family with anyone. 

That whole part of you would stay hidden, and it can be something that stresses you out throughout the entire day.

You won't be able to talk about anything regarding your family at the workplace when others are having a normal water cooler conversations. 

Then you can not have genuine encounters at the workplace. Genuine encounters create creative moments, which also move the business forward. 

The best company culture is when people are having fun and the business is moving forward at the same time. 

Discussions with genuine encounters build small victories, and such creative discussion really move things forward. 

If you are not able to participate in those discussions as your authentic self, then moving business and small wins will not happen. 

You are into Roller Derby and have competed and coached players around the world. 

This sport is considered a pioneer if viewed through the lens of inclusiveness and diversity. 

First of all, tell me a little bit about roller derby, what it is in general, and above all, why is it important that there are such sports?

Taru:   Roller Derby is a women's full-contact sport played on roller skates. 

It has five players on the field per team, one of which is the scorer. 

Four defend and attack simultaneously. It is an incredibly challenging sport strategically and it is the only full-contact sport where you can hit hard. 

Even in women's ice hockey you are not allowed to hit as hard, and this has the same contact rules as in men's ice hockey.

It is completely self-financed sport, meaning that everyone who plays roller derby, they train, finance and do everything themselves. 

There would be no sport without players. The core idea of Roller Derby is that it is an inclusive sport, it is a diverse sport where everyone is welcome to play and do.

I was involved in Roller Derby for 10 years, and my Roller Derby career ended when my diaphragm broke and I broke my leg, and it ended for me.

But how do I see it? 

I think it is important that there are such inclusive sports like Roller Derby. For example, it taught me a lot of leadership skills.

It was like my first sandbox where I could learn about leadership, because we did everything ourselves. It was the first time I coached and led a team, organized events. 

I also sold my own coaching services in Europe and the USA. For the first time I realized that I can be a leader in this situation.

All of these people are following me, and I can help them by selling and marketing my own services that are valuable for them. 

I also got feedback directly and immediately if something didn't go well. Before that, I had never thought that I could become a leader. But in Roller Derby I rose to that position and found that this suits me really well and, moreover, it felt natural to me.

I was also able to constantly move forward in different roles throughout my roller derby career. 

If we don't have inclusive sports for everyone, these kinds of experiences will be missing. Leadership is often learned in sports.

And if opportunities are only offered to a certain part of people, then other will be lacking of those experiences.

Then we don't get those diverse top leaders who have learned about leadership in these kind of sandboxes, and received direct feedback and seen what happens when they succeed as a leader, and what happens when you can motivate people to give their best in those situations.

Roller Derby already had an inclusive culture, but I didn't know it beforehand. 

However, I noticed that there is also an awful lot that could be improved, but in roller derby the culture of diversity was already there in the core, and everyone has the right to exercise and everyone has the right to play sports, and we create the opportunities and frameworks for everyone to play sports and they can find the joy of team sports. 

When the culture was already present there, it also had to be taken into account in everything, for example in coaching. I learned about inclusive leadership there, and those attitudes and learnings also carry over into business.

Was this the kind of experience you have been able to get learnings from for your current role as CEO?

Taru: Absolutely yes. We have such cool people in the current company that it makes it easier when you have a background in managing a diverse group.

I learned from team sports that if you start doing it seriously, you will learn, for example, pricing, project planning, leading a team, managing a larger organization, all these things.

Team sports can be great place to learn skills that you can use in the future. 

But if there are no values of diversity in team sports, then how can you understand what that diversity means in business? If the place where you learned about leadership didn't have it?

Finally, I would like to ask you that if there was something or a myth that you would like to crush, what would it be?

Taru: Let's start here and see where it takes us. 

Because I would like to say that leadership and motherhood go hand in hand. 

People who think that motherhood is a not so favorable for a leader or being motherly is a disadvantage. 

If you are a mother, or a step-mother like I am, I feel that motherhood is really important to me, it  teaches you so much amount emotial intelligence. 

I use those same emotional skills a lot when I lead a team. Incidentally, this has also come up in investor discussions. I know that you shouldn't talk about it and you shouldn't ask about the children. But the issue has naturally come up in investor discussions and there have been comments from investors about how great emotional skills mothers have. I think it's an incredibly great feature that this has been noticed and that the emotional skills of young startup entrepreneurs who are mothers have been noticed when they lead others.

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Crush Movement was founded by Anna Pyykkö and Katja Presnal. Crush Movement brings thought-leaders together to redefine what success means today. Together we crush the patriarchic norms, and build a better future by empowering feminine energy and soft values. Together, we will change the world through female entrepreneurship.

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