Sophia Matveeva: The Non-Techie Tech Founder

Sophia Matveeva is the CEO & founder of Tech for Non-Techies, an education company and consultancy helping corporates upskill their teams for digital transformation and teaching non-technical innovators how to bring their ideas to life. Sophia’s career has had twists and turns–from PR to private equity to entrepreneurship. We talk about finding the “connecting thread” across your career, why women so frequently ignore their greatest strengths, and what helps non-techies get into the Tech world.

Q&A

Welcome, Sophia! You’ve had a dynamic career with a lot of changes–different industries, functions, Founder vs. employee. How have you navigated all those changes and pivots?

I think there is actually a connecting thread that we all have. That thread of interest or that thread of talent – and hopefully our intelligence and interests coincide at least a little bit – that's actually the thing that puts it together. What I'm really interested in is communication and getting people to understand each other. So for example, I speak three languages and I'm hoping to speak more. I practice a new language whenever I go to a country. I try to take a short course to understand a little bit of the language, at least so I can order a coffee or something. 

And the reason is that I think there is so much in this idea of what one person says, then what the other person hears, and the gap in between. I remember so much drama happening in that gap in between. That can happen in a corporate environment. It definitely happens when you're switching careers. Because you might have one skill set and you know how to talk about that skill set using a particular set of language. In another industry that skill set is actually very useful, but you have to talk about it differently. And that communication gap is the reason for most arguments, I think. In romantic relationships or just in any relationship. I said this…but I heard this…and then all hell breaks loose. 

So I said this. But, what do people hear? How do I say it better? That's always been the thing that has interested me. I don't think I'm ever going to solve that problem. It's kind of the human condition. But there's a lot of work to do on it.

I love that idea of the connecting thread in your career. I feel like I recently discovered the thread in my career. But it took me a long time to identify it. Did you always know that communication was your thing? Or if not, what was your moment of realizing?

This is going to sound so ridiculous, but I've always known. But until recently, I was ashamed of it. And actually, I actively tried to fight it for a certain period of time. I think women do this. When we're good at something or something comes naturally to us, then we think well, that's just a stupid thing. This other thing must be the thing that's important. Internalized patriarchy! 

I studied political science in my first degree. I was really interested in how politicians use the media, and especially propaganda and dictatorships, like how you can essentially shape the opinions of nations and then use those opinions to get people to do really horrible things or to stay in the regime. I then went to work for a financial PR company, which meant we weren't representing dictators, but we were representing private equity overlords and Fortune 100 companies. That was really interesting because I always got to see what was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times the day before it came out. It was fascinating. 

But I kind of had this insecurity that, oh this is kind of this fluffy thing. This isn't the real thing. I must go and do this other serious thing because this is not serious enough. So I jumped to private equity because I thought, “this is what serious people do.” And I was bored out of my mind, honestly. Because it's actually quite boring. When you're an analyst in private equity, you're essentially just in a spreadsheet. But I thought that this is what serious and important people do. I then thought, well, I'm gonna go to the most serious MBA. So I did my MBA at Chicago Booth. And you know that it’s Chicago Booth and MIT that are usually the two that are most in love with a good spreadsheet.

Yes, I thought the same thing!

Yes. So then I got there and I just thought, we're here. I will learn things and then I will become a real adult when I get this degree. I learned a lot of stuff. And actually, to be honest, I didn't find it that hard. Some of it was boring, like financial accounting. I think it's really boring but, to be honest, I run a business now and I couldn't live without it. 

So it was just one of those things where I got into the place where I thought it was the most difficult thing. I got there, and then yet another myth was busted. I was like, oh, it's actually not that hard. I can totally do it. But now that I can do it, I have not actually changed my real life. I still have the same ups and downs. But I was still thinking it was these skills that are the most important and really dismissing that, actually, I had a talent and a way of looking at things that I was completely ignoring.

Then I started a tech company. And again, I remember thinking, well, crap, I'm from a non technical background. So what I need to do is I need to learn how to code. I was thinking I've learned how to do all the statistics stuff so I can learn how to code. I was totally dismissing the fact that what I’m actually really good at is attracting very good people. One of the things I am good at is getting really good people to work with me and great advisors. And I think the way you work with people is you set them up with a problem to solve and then you let them get on with it. That is fantastic because if you're a non technical founder, you don't know how to solve the problem. 

But again, I completely ignored that thread of talent because I thought that a serious, grown up person is going to learn to code everything and build everything on their own. Which I think is this very male attitude – I'm a lone wolf in a garage building my thing. Whereas I think women are much more capable of saying, “Well, I don't know how to do this, but you know how to do this really well. Would you mind looking at my work?” But I worked in a male dominated environment. I was at a business school where it's like 80% men. Things that come more naturally to us as women – and I don’t know where that comes from, whether that’s socialization or genetics, but I think the result is kind of hard to dispute – I was actively trying to rip those talents out. To kind of be less of a woman. I was thinking I needed to do all the things at my kitchen table with my bare hands by myself. 

And it was literally just finally capitulating, understanding that it is impossible. And then that made me come back to the thing that I like doing, that I'm interested in. It came full circle, but it was probably a decade long detour into misery.

So much of your story resonates with me. I was attracted to an MBA from Sloan for the same reason – I thought it would be perceived as a rigorous, hard-core MBA. That attraction was based on a sense of weakness. Quantitative rigor was not my superpower, and I felt so desperate to fill that weakness and not be found out as an imposter in a very business oriented and male-oriented world. Today I actively rely more on my superpowers: writing, connecting with people 1 on 1. How can we get more women to learn this message sooner and not go through a decade of craziness to figure it out? Is that possible? 

Well I have friends who haven't. So I know that it's possible. This thing that you said about you chose MIT because of a perceived weakness that you had – it was the same thing with me. I thought well, I'm really good at communicating and understanding and connecting with people – but that’s rubbish. To be a real professional, I need to really get deep into statistics. And so it was looking at the weakness and then I tried to fix that. 

But a friend of mine said to me, “Well, actually, my career strategy is looking at my strengths and investing in my strengths. I just figured out what I'm really good at.” You know, there is talent and we all have talent, but you don't become a prima donna opera singer by just having talent. You also train. You learn what you need to eat, to drink, to do to protect your voice. So what she said is that she literally breaks it down into training. She thinks, what courses can I take, what books can I read? What can I do to become super excellent in the thing that I'm naturally gifted at? 

I remember when she was telling me this. I was thinking, God, this is kind of heresy. You’re not thinking about all of the things that are wrong with you and trying to fix them? When I think about this deeper, women in our society are brought up to constantly look for what's wrong with us. Even things like the beauty industry – and I'm wearing lipstick, I love the beauty industry – but also the message it sends us is “Look at your face. Oh my god, that is a terrible face. Buy all of these things to hide your face.” Whereas men don't get that message. If a woman is going to speak at a conference, she is expected to wear makeup. Whereas if a man – a cis, heteronormative man –  turned up to speak at a conference wearing a lot of makeup, it would be weird. So I think women are trained to try to look for what's wrong, and then to invest our money and our time and our effort into fixing it. 

I started understanding and spotting these elements of patriarchy recently. And I do think we have to internally have this battle with ourselves to say, yes, there is a thing I'm not particularly good at. There's a thing I don't particularly like doing. And I am okay with it. Instead, I'm going to invest my time and my money into the thing that I'm really good at. But that's a lot of work for women given the messages that we as women get from society.

What you’re describing seems simple on the one hand, but it is a tectonic shift for women. We see this “fix women” culture in companies too. Even companies that want to promote gender equity still have the mentality that it’s about fixing individual women, rather than changing the system. We constantly turn towards women and ask them to change, shape shift, fit into the system. As opposed to changing what’s around them.

Exactly. I wrote an opinion in the Financial Times about this. There was a piece that had come out by a bunch of bankers and politicians about why female founders get so little funding. None of them had ever founded a company. I think they just wanted to make a press release. Anyway, their proposal was to have more training to make women more confident. When I read that, I was thinking, I'm a female founder. I had raised money. It was not fun. It was not easy. In the US less than 3% of all VC funding goes to women. In the UK, less than 2%. When all these very wealthy, very powerful people got together and came up with…a bunch of training on making women more confident? I was like, I want to hunt you down! 

So I wrote an OpEd in the Financial Times and said that there is this serious problem, which has an impact on business and on the economy. And your special solution is telling women that they're not confident? I said to them, I am confident. I don’t need training. I speak three languages. I went to Chicago Booth. I worked in private equity. My company exists. Actually, what I need is for you to take me seriously. 

I think that a lot of the training programs you see in corporates to help women with things like impostor syndrome, I think they actually backfire. I was having dinner with a couple of girlfriends who are successful in very large companies. They don't have a confidence problem. They will say, I’m confident. I know I'm good at my job. I just want to get paid more. I just want to get more opportunities. If you don’t have the same money in your pocket, it's not because you're not confident enough. It’s because somebody has decided not to give you an equal bonus. 

Absolutely. I think when we introduce simple confidence training as a grand solution, we are not shining the spotlight on the big problems to be solved. You mentioned your experience as a female founder. Did that experience inspire or motivate your work now, building Tech for Non Techies? 

It probably did in a way. It was actually something that I heard from Buddhist teacher, Tara Brach. I was having a really bad day. You know, when you just need some self help and to listen to a nice voice on a podcast. She was saying that with our emphasis on technology, what has happened is that half of the population is now feeling stupid. The emphasis on STEM skills means that anybody with an arts degree or anybody with a social science degree, or somebody who, god forbid, doesn’t have a degree at all – basically just decided, well, life didn’t work out for me. 

I was also kind of feeling like this, despite being in private equity and having an MBA. And that’s when I was thinking, how can I explore how to be non technical in tech? And how much of my feeling is because of being female? Because when you walk into a room of mostly people who are coders or data scientists, they're mostly going to be men and mostly white men. And they’re mostly going to be men from white, wealthy families. So basically, they are the male children of rich white families. I went to private school, so I have one of those attributes. But still, I don't have the others. I'm not technical, and I'm female. So that's still quite exclusive. 

For somebody who doesn't have any of those three attributes, it must be very very difficult. So I started reaching out to people who don't have technical backgrounds to learn what they had to learn about technology in order to succeed. I was writing for Forbes at the time. So I interviewed a bunch of successful non technical founders and investors who invest in non technical founders. These were people who are at the top of tech companies, but who don't have the Mark Zuckerberg background. And a lot of them happened to be women. 

I remember, I spoke to Robyn Exton, who is a female founder of a company called Her, a social network and dating app for queer women. She's a non technical founder, but she went through Y Combinator and today her app has scaled globally. I was really interested in exploring what non technical people need to do to survive and to thrive in tech. Inevitably, a lot of those conversations happened to be with women. Those conversations inspired Tech for Techies, which helps smart non technical professionals learn enough about technology to build tech businesses, to lead companies going through tech transformation, or to invest in tech as non technical innovators. 

My talent of communication and translation and languages and seeing how people speak to each other – that really came to the forefront. Because what all these people were saying is that, what you need to do as a non technical person is you need to be able to collaborate successfully with your technical colleagues. But that doesn't mean that you have to do what they're doing yourself. But you do need to be able to speak to the scientist, because a data scientist knows how to look for patterns and data but it is usually the business person that has the right question and will help us drill for oil in the right place, or sell the right shade of lipstick for your area, or set the right price or whatever it is. 

As a business person, you need to understand enough about data science to know the question in the first place. But you also need to have the confidence to stop your learning at some point. At some point, you just need to say, “Okay, actually I know enough to be dangerous and I'm just gonna leave it there.” Because people have a to-do list as long as their arm. The idea of taking a six month long Python course at General Assembly is just not something that’s possible for adults who have responsibilities, especially for mothers. 

I’m curious what you said about technical knowledge versus the mindset. When I started interviewing women career changers, I expected women would need practical support on how to execute a career change. But what I found is that women are incredibly good at execution and in fact need more support on the emotional side–how to overcome fear, or guilt, or concerns about making a change. What do people need the most when it comes to getting into Tech?

My mission is to give people knowledge and confidence. If you have lots of knowledge, but you don't have the confidence to speak up about your knowledge, then you're basically sitting there just being smart by yourself. Which is not that fun. Not very useful. So the way I approach it is that yes, I teach them the concepts. I teach them the concept of how to speak tech, like what's an API? What do you need to know about servers in order for you to actually have a conversation with an engineer? So I do teach these concepts. But what I also do is I show examples of non technical professionals who have succeeded. Because I find that once people see examples, they can see that, “Oh, this person is kind of like me, and this person did it.” That I find is the best thing. 

On the Tech for Non-Techies podcast there are many episodes that are lessons by me. Today was a lesson on how to find user experience designers if you don’t have a technical and design background. So that is a tactical thing. But last week I spoke to the former CFO of Netflix. Obviously a company as big as Netflix is going to need a CFO. That person is extremely important. The CFO of Netflix is basically the number two to the CEO. So really important. A CFO at a big tech company needs to understand some aspects of technology because that’s their lifeblood. But obviously a CFO does not need to be a developer or a data scientist. So I show those stories of what a non technical person is doing at a tech company and how they got there. 

That way anybody who is working in a consultancy or working in the Big Four and is desperately trying to leave, they can see that actually there is an opportunity for me. I can see myself doing that. And that's the way, you need to show people like them. And I find, especially with women, I have to constantly say, “Don't just sit there expecting that you have to learn everything.” The whole point is to accept that non techies, I dare say, are non technical. We don’t say, “Let us get you a PhD in computer science first, and then you will be ready for your career pivot.” No. It’s about learning enough. When you're not technical, people don't expect you to understand everything. You need to ask questions. You need to have the confidence in yourself that I'm a smart, successful person. But I can't know everything because nobody knows everything. 

I also believe in the incredible power of stories.  They plant a seed in people’s minds and they realize, when they see others do it, that they don’t need to be superhuman or special to achieve it. Who is someone else’s story, a podcast, or a resource that you recommend to women and all people considering getting into Tech? 

Obviously I recommend the Tech for Non Techies podcast. Not surprisingly! 

But I'm just looking at my bookshelf in terms of what I’ve found to be useful. There is a book called Swipe to Unlock, it's actually self published, written by three recent graduates who basically wanted to get jobs in product management. To get noticed they wrote a totally non technical person's introduction to engineering concepts. It's really, really simple. And they got those jobs! But it's really really simple and one of these things that you can keep on referencing. You will be able to understand it, but you have to want to understand it I'd say. 

The Tech for Non Techies podcast is an easier entrance – you can walk around and you can listen to that anytime. I’ve also written a guide to the top 10 tech terms non-technical professionals need to know, based on the classes I’ve taught at Techstars and Oxford university.  How To Speak Tech is available on the Tech for Non-Techies website, and it’s free! 

Where can we find the Tech for Non-Techies podcast and your other work?

Everywhere! The podcast is on all the podcast apps, including Apple, Spotify, and your browser. 

I also post useful learning content for non-techies on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

Thank you, Sophia, for chatting and sharing your story! You can learn more about Sophia here and check out Tech for Non Techies.

This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.