35 Under 35: Natalie Kaminski, Chief Executive Officer of FinCode Solutions

kaminskiNBy Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Russian-born, Israeli-bred Natalie Kaminski has moxie. The chief executive and founder of FinCode Solutions came by herself to the United States at the tender age of eighteen, with only a high school diploma under her belt and a desire to build a career; in what, though, she wasn’t sure.

As a kid, Kaminski had her sights set on a variety of professions. “My preferences went from wanting to be a lawyer (because it was cool) to wanting to be a model to wanting to be a psychiatrist. I had no interest in either technology or finance. To be honest, I don’t know how I ended up in those. I didn’t even have a computer. I heard about the internet but didn’t even use it.”

Yet, she said, “when [the internship at a technology school in Minneapolis] came along, I just took it.”

After a few months the technology school hosted a job fair to introduce the interns to local businesses. “I came very prepared and handed out my resume to everyone. But, when two weeks later, I still hadn’t heard from anyone, I just picked up the phone and starting calling all of the people I’d met.” One of those conversations was with Steve Timmerman, the founder and CTO of SWAT Solutions. Kaminski recounted, “I said to him, ‘hire me for free, give me experience that I can put on my résumé so I can go on to find a paying job.’ And he said, ‘Just because you are being so bold, I’m going to hire you AND pay you.’”

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Voice of Experience: Julie Monaco, North America Regional Head of Global Transaction Services, Citi

MonacoBy Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

In April 2007, about to embark on a business trip, Julie Monaco, then managing director at JP Morgan Chase, was contacted about a position in financial giant Citi’s Global Transaction Services division. That’s when fate intervened and a routine trip turned into anything but.

While waiting in an airport security line for her connecting flight through Tokyo, Monaco struck up a conversation with a fellow business traveler. It just so happened to be the CEO of Citi’s Global Transaction Services.

“I stuck out my hand and introduced myself,” said Monaco. He laughingly responded, “You are about to have the longest job interview you ever had.”

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Voice of Experience: Sarah Lamar, Partner, Hunter, Maclean, Exley & Dunn, P.C. and President of legal network, ALFA International

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

“I decided to become a lawyer when I was ten. We went on a family trip to Washington, D.C. and visited the United States Supreme Court,” said Sarah Lamar, a partner at Hunter, Maclean, Exley & Dunn, P.C.. “The tour guide must have done a really good job,” Lamar joked, adding, “Although it was a simplistic idea, I just followed it.”

Lamar grew up in the suburbs of New Haven, Connecticut. After obtaining her Bachelors from Yale, Lamar says she was “done with New England weather” and headed south. She attended Emory University Law School in Georgia, and spent the summer between her second and third year of law school in the DC office of Morgan Lewis Bockius, a well-known labor and employment law firm.

That experience gave her “a really broad and interesting view on that area of the law” so when she was deciding what law path to take, she “checked off what things I did not like in the law: tax, corporate law, bankruptcy…employment law remained fascinating because it is the study of human relationships and how they can go right and wrong. Also,” Lamar said, “it is very people-oriented and I am a ‘people person.’ It gives me the chance to get to know the leadership in different industries and what makes people tick. I’ve always been interested in the social issues surrounding employment law like harassment and discrimination and civil rights.”

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Voice of Experience: Janet Lustgarten, CEO, Kx Systems

janetpaloalto[1]By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

From a childhood in Colombia, to a life in the States, Janet Lustgarten’s personal motto might as well be “no guts, no glory.”

Lustgarten’s father was a men’s suit manufacturer in Colombia when new political pressures brought change to business and the way factories were run. “It was a difficult time,” she recalled, “and my family thought we’d live a better life in the United States and moved to Florida. We were the classic family coming to America looking for security and opportunity”

Just seven years old when the family arrived in Miami, Lustgarten didn’t speak a word of English, but found herself already proficient in math. “Even in Columbia, I was already leaning towards being good with numbers but, when I didn’t have the mastery of the language, that became my academic strength,” said Lustgarten. She followed her love of math and logic to Mt. Holyoke, the all-women’s liberal arts college. Ever the groundbreaker, Lustgarten commuted to University of Massachusetts for the computer science classes she required and became the first person to declare a computer science major at Mt. Holyoke.

“Computer science was a field that was up and coming,” said Lustgarten. “And I had a very clear objective to be financially independent. I wanted to develop a career path that would allow me to live comfortably in New York City. I was confident that I could graduate from college with a degree in computer science and secure myself a well paid position.”

After moving to New York City, Lustgarten interviewed with IBM for a sales support job but didn’t get the job because she “didn’t fit the mold.” Not stopped by this disappointment, Lustgarten began to look around for other opportunities. She was “just curious about personal computers, PCs, and went into Computerland, the only retail computer store  in New York City, a couple of times. When she observed that most of the sales people barely knew how to turn on the machines, she saw an opportunity. She met with the owner of that store and proposed that she build a technical support department within the sales department of the store so that customers would have successful preliminary experiences with computers instead of frustration. The owner gave her a chance—and a salary. Through that job, she developed a consulting business, helping computer customers with the installation of memory chips and other technical issues after purchase.

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Voice of Experience: Renee Pendleton, CPA, Partner, Cherry, Bekaert & Holland

ReneePendletonBy Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Renee Pendleton had a steady babysitting job in college. That wouldn’t necessarily distinguish her from many others her age. But how many babysitters parlay advice from their employer into a successful career path?

“I had wanted to be a controller in a small company but, he convinced me to try public accounting first because, if I didn’t like it, I could always go to a private company. But it would be difficult to go into public accounting if I did it the other way.” She followed the advice with the intention to “get in, stay for two years and get out,” but decided to stay at the end of that period to learn a bit more. “Now, here I am 22 years later, still in public accounting,” she said, laughing, “And I blame that guy to this day.”

Raised in Portsmouth, Virginia, Pendleton started off majoring in psychology at Old Dominion University. She intended to learn to help people with their problems; however, after one semester of psychology, “I thought, these people are out of their minds. I just don’t get it!”

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Elizabeth Schneider, Managing Director, Citisoft

Elizabeth Schneider_CitisoftBy Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

“Education is continuous. The day I stop learning is the day I’ll die,” said Elizabeth Schneider, the managing director at Citisoft.

She credits her mother for instilling this value in her. “My mother was the oldest of nine children in a very poor family. My mother, who barely spoke English at the time, took on the role of trying to educate herself and raise her brothers and sisters in a very tough time right during the Depression. She realized that if you look at education as a lifestyle and more than academic you will grow and learn things that will propel you forward much more quickly than just classroom learning. From an early age, my siblings and I were involved in learning in all forms: drama, dance, community service, sports, and travel.”

After graduating from McGill University with a Bachelor of Science, Schneider entered into the evening MBA program at Babson College. And shortly thereafter, she got her first break at Fidelity Investments in entry level fund accounting. “[The man] who hired me took a chance and hired me [even though I had no experience working with securities].” Schneider continued, “Unlike today, there wasn’t anywhere in the academic world that focused on trading operations. At the time, the only way you learned this was through experience. [My boss] gave me the opportunity to get in there and learn.”

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35 Under 35: Laura Bissell, Managing Director, Okapi Partners

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)LABFullPhoto[1]

“You have to set goals—even if they are little goals—to achieve something. Every day set a goal,” said Laura Bissell, Managing Director of Okapi Partners. She spent her childhood watching her mother, a well-known interior designer in Boston, do just that, growing her fledgling business into a booming one. “My mother started it out of her home and built it into a thriving company. It took her a lot of hard work and blood, sweat and tears but she knew what she wanted and worked for what she wanted. That is where a lot of my ambition comes from.”

Bissell started her career with Globix, an internet service provider, in the “heyday of the technology sector.” There she underwent four months of intensive training in many different technologies, a background she would have the opportunity to use later in her career.

When it was time to move on, she “fell into” the little-known industry in which she would ultimately make her name: the proxy solicitation industry. “I wanted to be in the financial realm because I’ve always been mathematically-minded. I was networking through people I knew from both Colgate University and [her high school] Andover and found Georgeson Shareholder, a well-known name in the proxy solicitation business. I started there from the bottom up,first working as a project manger in the mutual funds area doing the day-to-day grunt work of proxy solicitation business, like talking to the vendors and really just doing the math.”

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Voice of Experience: Dr. Sherry Cooper, Executive Vice-President and Global Economic Strategist of BMO Financial Group and Chief Economist of BMO Capital Markets

CooperBy Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Dr. Sherry Cooper, Executive Vice-President and Global Economic Strategist of BMO Financial Group, was destined for the world of finance. An entrepreneur from an early age, Dr. Cooper said, “When I was 12, I spent the summer babysitting. But I didn’t just watch one child. I would gather all the children from up and down the street and take them into my backyard and watch them. At $50 per child, I made quite a bit of money that summer.” One of her role models was her great aunt, who was a “hotshot in mortgage finance” long before it was even a possibility for most women.

But despite the early attraction to finance, it took some time before she embraced it as a career path. Dr. Cooper marveled, “I always assumed that I would just get married and be a homemaker. Until I got to Goucher College, it never occurred to me that I would have a career for the rest of my life.”

She graduated first in her class with a dual degree in economics and math, and then continued on to the University of Pittsburgh for a Ph.D. in economics. Although Dr. Cooper wasn’t interested in academia, she still didn’t see any future in a financial institution. “I grew up in a time when there were very few women in banking or finance so it never occurred to me as a possibility.”

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Sharing Inspiration for Success: NAFE’s 2009 Women of Excellence

iStock_000009937357XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

On Friday, December 4, the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE) honored its 2009 Women of Excellence. NAFE is the largest professional association of women. The awards celebrated successful female business leaders dedicated to making a difference in their workplace, the larger community, and the world.

Keynote speakers and Pulitzer-prize-winning writers Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn opened the event with a call to make a difference in women’s lives around the globe, as detailed in their book Half the Sky.

They stressed the importance of addressing women’s issues around the world, not only because it’s simply the right thing to do, but because meeting women’s economic needs can help overcome poverty and violence. As Kristoff explained, “the paramount moral challenge of the 21st century is the brutality inflicted on women and girls around the globe.”

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Voice of Experience: Wendy Cai- Lee, Director, Chinese Services Group, Deloitte

By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

Wendy Cai-Lee is quick to point out that much of her success is attributable to the sacrifices her parents made for her and her sister. When the director of Deloitte’s Chinese Services Group was just twelve, her father—a former diplomat from China’s State Department—gave up his career and his country and moved his family to the States. “We moved mostly for money and my sister’s and my education,” said Cai-Lee. “My father was concerned that if we waited any longer, I wouldn’t be able to learn English and speak it without too much of an accent.” She continued, “My parents were hardworking people who put their careers on hold and put all their hopes and dreams on their children. There was a lot of emphasis on education.”

The family ultimately settled in New Jersey. “It was a huge adjustment. But kudos to my parents: they made the move when I was young enough so that the impact was not as traumatic as it would have been if was older. I was very lucky that my parents not only moved me here when I was very young but also with a sold background of Chinese—I speak 5 Chinese dialects—and moved us to a town with an excellent school system.”

Cai-Lee was a good student and a quick learner, although there were some challenges: “In New Jersey, I grew up in an Italian and German town…my sister and I were the only Asian Americans in our school system.” Still, Cai-Lee said, “I learned English within a year. And, by the time I went to junior high, I already joined the junior debate team. I don’t think I’m that much smarter…it’s just that my father was already teaching me geometry in 5th grade. I just simply I learned all that stuff early on so it was easy to excel.”

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