Gen Z Leadership: Navigating AI and Communication in a Digital Age with CEO Ioanna Onasi

Lottie Bazley: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. I am your host, Lottie Bazley, and we have had the pleasure of speaking to some pretty impressive people on the podcast so far, including some really extraordinary women, and today is no exception to that. Today I am joined by CEO Ioanna Onasi. It is a joy to be here with you today, and I will waste no time handing the mic over to you to give us a little introduction to yourself and to your business.

Ioanna Onasi: Awesome. First of all, thank you so much for having me. Super excited for our discussion today. For context, I’m the co-founder and CEO Dextego, which is an AI sales coaching company. So think about like athletes prepare for their games. We help sales teams prepare for conversations they’re about to have with prospects. We help them basically develop their soft skills, and we’re based in New York, but if you can’t tell by my accent, I’m originally from Greece.

Lottie Bazley: Amazing. Thank you so much and welcome. So you do bill yourself as a Gen Z founder. So first things first, can you remind us what years Gen Z encompasses?

Ioanna Onasi: Oh. I don’t know if I know the exact answer to that, but I know I’m right by the cusp because I think if you’re like 27, you’re considered a millennial, I’m 26, but I’m not quite sure what age they start at.

Lottie Bazley: Well, this was it because I was having a little Google ahead of time, and it seems to be that there are some boundaries there, like horoscopes, depending on which sign you are.

Ioanna Onasi: Yeah, I know there’s also some debate around it, like some believe it’s a couple more years before or after. Anyway.

Lottie Bazley: Well, I fall firmly into the millennial category.

Ioanna Onasi: Okay.

Lottie Bazley: I’m safe in there. But it’d be great to hear a little bit about your career path in your own words, and then we’ll really get into what it means to be a Gen Z leader in the workplace.

Ioanna Onasi: Sure, yes. So if I take us back, I would say when I was in high school even, I had a big passion for sustainability. I actually was coming to the US every summer for summer programs in different universities doing sustainable business courses. And somehow that led me to sustainable fashion. I actually consider sustainability to be much more than just the environmental component and truly be about long-term and long-term impacts, whether that’s relationships, businesses, I tend to think like that.

So, taking my creative side, I got into fashion and was working at Marc Jacobs, then I realized, you know, it’s not the most sustainable company. And so then I went and worked as a COO for a sustainable fashion organization called Fashion Revolution where we built the first summer program in Greece. And we were basically the bridge between the US and Greece, helping professionals attend the summer program.

Fast forward when I did my Master’s at Pace University, I focused on strategic management and I was working for the chair of the management department whose expertise was in talent development and strategic HR. And I fell in love with developing talent because I had studied psychology for my bachelor’s, and I felt like it was really a combination of all of my interests, psychology, business, and it felt like a puzzle. Like: How can we develop high potential employees? How can we find them? What motivates them? All of that.

So that led me to take an internship in a startup in HR. And I was really in charge of hiring international talent from Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Portugal, and developing a strategy where I really, I think, challenged myself and learn a bunch of things, but also fell in love with startups because you always wear multiple hats, and you know, the pace is extremely fast.

So I quickly improved and actually became the VP of people and Chief of Staff. That company is called Aptivio. It’s also in the AI space. And again, fast forward to today, that led me to create my own startup in the AI sales coaching space because it truly shows the difficulties and the challenges that come with coaching and trying to develop Gen Z and young people that might not have access to executive coaches, might not really have that long experience that’s required to speak to C-suite people and have executive communication. So that’s very, you know, high level, my background. And on a fun fact note, I continue with my creative side by making art. So I do abstract art, and I just love painting.

Lottie Bazley: Cool. I love this, how kind of all of these different bits that you enjoyed doing, came together and you were like, “Actually, I’m gonna start a business now. I’m gonna take all of these things I enjoy, and I’m gonna make this a job.” I love that. And also, it sounds like you’re a super creative person with all of these ideas, but also doing some artwork too. I tend to dabble myself, but probably not anywhere near as good or creative as you seem to be.

But maybe we can come back to that shortly. So when it comes to Gen Z, they’re kind of known for being this digital first generation that are really deeply immersed in social media and online communication. So how has this kind of “digital first”-mindset shaped your leadership style?

Ioanna Onasi: Yeah. I really think that, what social media has done is, it makes people feel very connected to people they see on their feed, and they make them feel like they know them. Right? Which can be good and bad. I’m assuming for a famous person that can be a little bad too because there’s no privacy. But for not so famous people, I think it’s actually good because as a startup founder, it creates this bond, like you’re really trying to bring something to the world out of nowhere, and by trying to be more present on social media, I’ve gotten lots of positive feedback that people either want to work with me or they understand what I do, and they feel some sort of connection. So, definitely, that trend, if you will, has made me be more online, especially on LinkedIn, let in other platforms. But without that social media component, I think it’s also very hard to do market research nowadays. And, you know, people, especially startup founders don’t go to consulting firms and ask them for market research as they did 10 years ago.

It’s mostly going online, seeing who else does this and what do they stand for? What are their values? How they promote themselves. It’s all social media. So it has impacted the way I would say, we also market ourselves as a company. Me, personally, how I position myself as a thought leader out there and that also helped me create that community. Really, every single hire we’ve done or partner we’ve acquired is all through social media communications, less than — I think other companies that I know their leaders are maybe Gen X, that is more traditional, they still go and meet people in person. And that’s not to say that I don’t, but I think it’s much, of a stronger connection when they’ve been seeing you for a while online and then also meet them in person. And it creates that idea that, “Hey, I’ve been following your journey. I know what you’ve been doing.”

Lottie Bazley: Yeah. Such a good point. And like you say, you already start to build up that personal connection with a person and you don’t have to do heaps of work with that person yourself, right? They just see you, they form this connection with you, and then by the time they meet you in a room, they think like, “Oh, I’ve been friends with this person for ages” — a really interesting concept. So you talked a bit there about connection and community specifically on the LinkedIn platform. So what kind of things are you doing on LinkedIn there?

Ioanna Onasi: Yeah. I try to post a lot of short videos where I break out a topic. And usually, my whole idea is, as a Gen Z founder, I want to be able to accelerate other Gen Z founders’ journeys, but also other underrepresented founders’ journeys. And usually, the type of content you see out there for founders is founders that have really made it. Like: They’re huge, they’ve done exits, they’re billionaires, millionaires. And they tell you how it was, but there’s such a big disconnect from when they were actually doing it when they were in the hard parts of the startup world. And that’s why I think there’s value in sharing what I’m doing now in the zero to one stage rather than maybe five years from now.

And I just speak to my, maybe younger self, things I wish I knew or ideas that I think people can leverage even if they’ve done businesses for like 10, 20 years because it just brings a new perspective. And that’s really what I do. I share tips. I share how I see GenAI impacting a lot, the workforce, talent development, sales enablement.

And I also try a lot to hype up others. I think LinkedIn is a place, of course, for thought leadership, but also a place where you can truly build those relationships. I’ve made some great friends in the last two years from that. So I try to always comment and see others and say, “Hey, I see you. Congrats for this” or “You did good work.” Because that’s what keeps us going, right? The fact that we’re seen and we feel the energy that people are reciprocating what we’re putting out there in the world, I think, keeps people going.

Lottie Bazley: I love that. And I think it’s really — I have a question about transparency coming up, but I think it’s really nice to hear those like, hey, sometimes this is quite hard. Like it’s not plain sailing. You know, I founded a business and here I am as a billionaire but that in-between stage sounds like the bit that you are talking about, which I think is probably refreshing for people to hear.

Ioanna Onasi: I think most of the times it’s hard. And honestly, I always talk about the ups and downs, and the people we had to go through because it’s just the reality. And I truly think before starting a business, I wasn’t aware of how hard it would be. And no one is as aware. If they were, they wouldn’t jump into it for sure. But the funniest part is meeting people that are now starting and they have this excitement. It’s like a freshman at college, you know. You don’t know what you’re about to experience, so you’re super excited and it’s like, you need both. You need to have these people in your life and the people that have been there, done that. So if there is a problem they can hold you grounded.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah. Love that. I really like that. So you did talk there about short videos that you are creating on LinkedIn. And something that I think about quite regularly as an internal communicator is this difference between how people are digesting information outside of work. So things like TikToks, Instagram, WhatsApp voice notes even, versus how we communicate with our employees in business.I think it’s still often a lot of written communication. Maybe some companies are venturing to videos. But how do you think, or what do you think the style of communication that we’re seeing on social media, how should that influence how we communicate with our people internally? I think it’s a fantastic question, and the most important thing to recognize is that people learn in different ways.

Ioanna Onasi: So always having a variety of styles of communications is important. However, what usually takes place is you go with the preferred version of that leader, right? So if I like written communication, now everybody has to do it, and that might not be the way, they would prefer it and as a result, it will impact their productivity. So acknowledging and understanding how people like to communicate is important. But also think about the opportunities we have now of accessing YouTube GenAI. What I mean is you can take that written format and turn it into a podcast and turn it to a short audio clip. It’s so easy.

Or changing the style, like bullet point versus paragraph in seconds leveraging ChatGPT Perplexity, whatever. So there’s no excuse, what I’m trying to say, to not be flexible, but in my opinion, depending on what’s the demographic we’re looking at, if it is Gen Z, definitely short-form videos. And communication styles that referred to current, culture-related things. I always see — it is so clear.

Going back to LinkedIn, I can see what companies put out there and sometimes there are companies that love to send GIFs. Or like a post, you know, these fun 30-second animated posts based on a movie character or I don’t know, something happening. And it’s like, okay, you can tell this is their culture versus someone that’s more traditional and they write more professionally.

Because it’s like when you read the post, you kind of hear a voice in your head, right? You read it with a persona. So what feedback I’ve gotten is that as a company: You need to choose what your persona is and stick with it. And then the rest will kind of either assimilate it or reject it.

But you can’t do everything. So choose two to three means of communication that make sense, based on your team. In my opinion, as I said, if you have Gen Z, definitely videos, but also podcasts are really a big hit nowadays. So maybe you try a small pilot and see if it goes well. Also to your point, internal communication might be very different from external communication. And that’s also okay.

In our case, we do a lot written when it comes to internal communication, but externally we try to do it more video-based.

Lottie Bazley: Nice. And I think that really resonates in terms of doing what is authentic to you, right? And, you know, we’re talking about audiences and what the audience wants, but your point about understanding the leader’s preference as well because, you know, if you get someone who’s really uncomfortable in front of the camera to do this video just because we want a video, it’s not gonna be as, A, authentic or, B, work as well.So I really like that point there. And, I touched on the fact that I had a question about transparency, and I think it fits in nicely with this authenticity stream that we’re talking about now. So something that I feel very strongly about as a communicator is transparency. And I will often advocate for transparency over other things, especially when it comes to reasonings, communicating reasoning behind tricky decisions.

I think it helps to increase trust. It avoids rumors, it demonstrates accountability, and heaps of other things. And I believe that Gen Z tends to prioritize transparency, but sometimes leaders may feel like it could lead to potential backlash or panic people, or even would just leave the leader themselves vulnerable to any criticism about that decision. So how do you personally strike that balance of knowing when to say something versus when not to say something?

Ioanna Onasi: Yeah. You bring up such a good point where I’ve actually lived it through many times, and I’ve seen reactions both positive and negative. And sometimes, you know, ignorance is bliss. But I also fully understand the need and the urgency to be transparent sometimes. But I also think there’s categories of situations. If something for instance is happening in the business that doesn’t impact employees, and it’s more “nice to know,” you know, you don’t need to tell them everything because it could be a distraction.

If it’s something that does impact the business and their security, of course, I think you also have a responsibility, not just “it would be nice”, you have to be transparent. And then there are some super important things where you need to be transparent to employees and to all stakeholders at the same time. So you need to know the topic you’re thinking of. Where does it fit in, in these categories? And have an action plan. Overall, I also see that Gen Z sometimes wants to be considered equals within a business because if you want transparency, that means you should be in a position to do something with the news you will hear.

However, sometimes they want that, but they don’t act on it. And that’s where I think the difficulty comes in, where leaders sometimes push back and say, “No, I don’t want to be in a position that I always have to over-communicate because I don’t feel like there is a benefit for the business.” It’s also a distraction for that leader sometimes to spend all their time communicating with every individual across the ladder, right?

So I think there’s sometimes conflict of interest between leadership and the rest of employees. And I can definitely see both sides. That’s why I say the easiest way to go about it is just understand what type of communication this is. Is it necessary to say? Yes or no? And Gen Z, they — what’s that phrase?

Lottie Bazley: They want the whole cake and eat it. Yeah.

Ioanna Onasi: Yeah. Okay if you want me to treat you like an equal, put in more effort, talk to me, communicate back. Don’t just think that it will be one way. So it’s a collaborative effort, and to improve communication, a company, for sure, has to come from the top-down, but it’s also: What pressure do you create? As an employee, do you tell your manager straight up, “Hey, I wish you communicate better,” or is it something you just say to your colleague, “Hey, I wish my manager would communicate better.”

So how are you making clear that this is your expectation in the way you want to work so that you feel safe, and you feel productive. Because sometimes the leader might not see that. They might have no clue that the team wants more because nobody told them.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah. I love that. And it’s really about — the thing I’ve taken from that is: It’s about setting boundaries just as you would with a relationship outside of work, right? It’s about figuring out what it is that you want, what it is that you need, and the benefit that you feel from that, and explaining that clearly.But again, I loved what you said about the two-way relationship thing. If the leadership is giving you the respect to tell you about these decisions that they’re making, then they also expect that respect back, because we’re treating each other as equals, right?

Ioanna Onasi: 100%. And I think the best place to bring this up is during the interview, like, ask the company, “Hey, what’s your communication style? How frequent is your communication? And are you transparent about difficult situations? Or will I know about them after the fact?” And then hold them accountable. If a month in, there’s no communication and they promised you that, just say it. “Hey, that’s not what I expected.”

Lottie Bazley: Yeah, absolutely. Set those boundaries from even day minus whatever, right? 

Ioanna Onasi: Yeah.

Lottie Bazley: So, we’ve talked a bit about Gen Z, obviously, but as a Gen Z leader, you are working with multi-generational teams, right? So, how do you navigate that different communication preferences that we have between Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, or boomers to make sure that you don’t lose that alignment or collaboration?

Ioanna Onasi: Yeah. It’s not the easiest thing. I think, of course, you have a component that’s very personal. Just because you’re part of a generation doesn’t mean you will always have a preferred way. You might, for instance, be very casual in your— in the way you speak, and you might be a Gen X versus you can be Gen Z and try to be super serious.

So there’s all sorts of things out there. And always, my first reaction when I meet someone is just to observe, let them lead to see their preferred style, and then try to match that energy. If it matches mine, right? Sometimes it’s a choice. You can go out of your comfort zone and try to please someone else.

But sometimes that might not be worth it because you don’t find an alignment. For example, I believe I can easily do a lecture and go to university and present in a serious mode, and I can also be in a room with three people and be very, very casual, and still get the work done.

So, it depends on your adaptability as a person. In my case, because indeed I work with all sorts of people, what I’ve seen is that the older someone is, usually, the less okay they are with being vague. So they need a structure. So what I do is, I send an agenda before the call.

I play back the agenda during the call. I make sure we leave with next steps. If you do that to a Gen Z, maybe that is extra stress. Maybe that’s too much. So you need to be a little more unstructured, yet make sure that there is some sort of next step. You can’t leave it In the air, or else they won’t do what you’re asking for.

So, you know, there is a range. And I’m trying to find where this person is but I also try to make clear what my expectations are. So when I hire, for example, and that has actually happened to me twice, where I hired two Gen Z, and I set my expectations in front of anything else. And I said, “Hey, I totally understand you might not have the time, for example, to do X, Y, Z. Just tell me before it becomes an issue. I’m not gonna be mad if you tell me, I’ll be mad if you don’t.” And then present the problems. Because I want to have the time to react. And unfortunately, many times when someone is used to a specific way of working, and it might be that they don’t communicate and they just deliver, they’re not able to adapt to my communication style which is, “Hey, I want those frequent check-ins” Or else it makes me want to micromanage. And that’s not what I would rather do. I would rather spend my time elsewhere. But yeah, sometimes we don’t find a middle path, and then I’m like, “Hey, I told you from the beginning what my expectation was and you agreed.” So

I think it’s that simple. You just have to be straight up about what you expect and as much as you can, try to be adaptable. But outside of that, — it is really hard to be able to work with multiple people, all the time. And so it’s okay, if the person listening is in that spot where they feel like they can’t do it a 100% and show up as their best selves. Because we are really asked in this current workplace to work with so many diverse people. Which, on the one hand, is phenomenal because of the ideas and the passion and the perspectives. But on the other hand, it is really hard. And that’s okay. We’re all trying to navigate it and always say, enjoy being in the middle part of the complex situation. Because if everything was perfect, it would be boring, too, right?

Lottie Bazley: Absolutely. Yeah. And that kind of boundary setting is something that really resonates a lot with me because when I think about my role as an internal communicator, and we talk about communication, again, we talk about it differently inside of work and outside of work, right? Like, it’s perfectly normal to set boundaries with friends, partners, family members in terms of your communication styles outside of work.

But that’s not really something that we see in the workplace, right? So I really, really like this fresh take that you have on setting those boundaries from the start. And then, if they’re not being met, it’s easier to have that conversation, right?

Ioanna Onasi: Yes. And you don’t feel bad because you talk from the beginning versus if you didn’t, then you’re just trying to figure it out as you go. That would make the conversation harder.

Lottie Bazley: For sure. So we talked a little bit about bridging the gap between the different generations, but I hope you don’t mind having a bit more of a personal question now. Something that I have experience with myself is age discrimination. A while ago, I had a manager who was a bit older than me who had heaps of industry experience, but seemed a little bit stuck in their ways.

It was very, “We’re gonna do it this way because this is the way that we’ve always done it.” And when I tried to challenge that, I was often met with things like, “Well, you’ve not been doing this as long as me,” or, “Do your time and then give me the advice.” So I wanted to ask you, as a very impressive but also younger leader, is that something that you’ve ever experienced? And how would you deal with that?

Ioanna Onasi: Yes. Great question. And I actually want to combine it with being a woman, too. And I’ll first tell you something I’ve heard from Leila Hormozi, who is a female founder of a million-dollar company, CEO of Acquisition.com. Because a lot of women and a lot of younger women come to me and say the same, “Hey, they don’t listen to me because I’m young,” or “Hey, I spoke to that investor, and they didn’t even think I can do it.”

All of that. And I’ve also said this to myself many times, especially when I started Dextego. And I also realized that it’s kind of our default excuse to ourselves, when something goes wrong. But what might simply be happening behind the scenes is just a skills gap. And it is, again, a characteristic of Gen Z. We want everything, and we want it now, and there’s no patience. And we don’t want to be like our parents, like 10 years waiting for promotion, and a ladder, a lateral path.

Unfortunately social media has not helped because we see the sudden successes from even artists, you know, and it really is distorting the reality because you need a lot of years of experience to be an expert with something. You do need to go through difficult situations to get to the success.

And so sometimes us saying, “Hey, they didn’t respect me because of this and that.” Do you really know that for a fact? Like have they told you, “Hey, I don’t respect you because you’re a young person.” If not, then it’s just an assumption. And that assumption can literally just be a projection of what you’re thinking in your head as your personal insecurity that you’re young in a room of older people that are much more experienced and they’re showing up, or have just a stronger personality, they’re more extroverted than you. So I’m not disregarding the fact that it can clearly just be age discrimination, but also know that sometimes we make it bigger in our heads than it is and it could simply be that we haven’t won their respect because we don’t have enough to show. Because we have our ideas and what’s happening in our head might be awesome, but if you don’t have the proof, unfortunately, today proof is everything. And that proof comes either from social proof, like you get others to talk to them about how great you are, or you have a resume, or skills that have gotten you somewhere and they can see that you did this before, so you can do it again with them.

And so, my experience has told me that it is 10 times harder, when you’re younger and a female, to get that respect, but it’s not impossible. And you win it, by showing up, by taking the step, and by, again, being transparent as you said, that, “Hey, I might have not done this before, but for this and that reason, I believe I can do it, and that’s what I’ve done so far.”

So: Do you want to be part of this? Do you want to help? Do you want to be a mentor? Do you want to be a partner? But don’t show up as, “Hey, I know everything and I’m better than you, so you better respect me even if I’m young.” Right? It’s, I think, the way we portray it, — and again, just checking in with ourselves that, “Hey, do we know for a fact that this is happening?” If it is, then, absolutely, I think you should speak up whether it’s your boss, or your colleague, or straight up to the person who did that discrimination and tell them, “Hey, that’s not okay.”

Lottie Bazley: Yeah. I think that’s a really refreshing way of thinking about it because you’re right, clearly discrimination exists out there, we’re not denying that, but what I’m hearing from what you’re saying is that also it’s that imposter syndrome that’s coming in, right? But making sure that you’re finding that balance between the confidence, like, “Hey, I’m here because I have great ideas,” or, you know, “I’m really creative,” and understanding what your strengths are.

Ioanna Onasi: It might not be your experience, but you have strengths in other areas that you can kind of push forwards to those people to help get that respect from them.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah. For sure. So talking about creating authentic relationships potentially with investors, but also teams and clients, and you work, of course, in the industry of AI. So a lot of the stuff that we’re hearing is that AI can make things impersonal or feel a bit false, and you don’t know whether you’re getting an AI version of a message that someone sent or that authentic person. How do you try and cultivate, maintain really authentic relationships in this AI age?

Ioanna Onasi: Yeah. Great question. I think, something I’ve been vouching for, the last years, and specifically when I speak to founders, is that we have a responsibility, whoever is making AI-based tools, to make them for the better of society. In our case, we’re truly trying to empower sales teams to get a better name for themselves. To be able to improve their interpersonal skills, build trust with clients, improve their active listening skills.

So we use AI for truly empowering humans, which is a little ironic. But we don’t want to replace anyone. There are companies out there that are actively working on automating and developing AI tools to replace employees. So on the first level, I think there is a founder responsibility, and it’s also a call to action for anyone developing such tools to do it not to replace, but to do it to help us, to help society.

There is another component when it comes to more internal communication, to your point, which starts again from the top. If that leader uses ChatGPT and all of their posts are kind of impersonal, the rest will do the same. There’s also a lot of people I know that use ChatGPT to write all of their content, social media, et cetera. It’s one thing to say I use it to format my text, or to ensure that I don’t have spelling mistakes, and another to say I use it to write everything. Because then you’re portraying a fake version of yourself, right?

So keeping it authentic, authentic is the way you present to your team, you present to the world, you present on social media, it’s very important. And there is another thing that I believe is very interesting here: Are we as a society preferring to speak to a flawed human or are we creating an expectation that we prefer AI because it’s perfect?

If we go towards the second route, what happens is we get very disappointed because, to your point, AI is not perfect. So we are creating a black or white scenario, which I think is flawed as a society. Instead of saying, we prefer humans that just become better with the use of AI. It’s not either or. It’s not either we keep things as they are or we go straight up to AI and we’re aiming for that perfection, because, again, it will take time to become perfect. It’s not perfect whatsoever. A lot of companies still maintain the human in the loop to get to that perfection. And that’s okay. So, yeah, I think the world, keeps giving us these scenarios of where AI is taking us either in the catastrophe or in that abundance.

And there is really a world in between, and it’s the world we’re living currently in the present, where there is a lot of uncertainty. And communication, — imagine like only AI-based communication, right? Like, imagine ChatGPTs talking to each other and making decisions for us. Is that the world we really want to live in where AI lawyers and AI colleagues are taking over, you know, society? I don’t know, I don’t think so. I think, being in a position where, for instance, doctors leverage AI to do their research faster and get to creations like drugs and new innovations overall faster is an amazing situation to be in. But leaving it all to AI is a scary world and I don’t know that we are ready for it.

Lottie Bazley: No, I totally agree. And it’s really one of those things about finding that balance, right? We’re not — well, as you say, some people are looking for AI to replace those certain things, but I think there’s a lot of companies now or a lot of people certainly even that are just seeing AI to help advance certain skills, or like fill those gaps where they might be great at this one thing, but not so great at this one. Rather than try and use AI to help elevate that, that it’s like, actually let me even the playing field with my skills using the help of AI right.

Ioanna Onasi: Absolutely.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah. Fabulous. Well, we are running out of time unfortunately, but I just wanted to say thank you so much for joining us today, and I have really enjoyed this conversation and definitely have some personal things to take away. But just to pick up on something you said earlier about wishing that you had someone like yourself when you were starting out to help you with that kind of business advice, before I let you go, one final question for you. For those listening that might just be starting out in their careers or considering a change, do you have one piece of advice that you wish that you’d gotten yourself when you were starting out?

Ioanna Onasi: Well, definitely to not take things personally. I think it’s very hard when you put yourself out there and you’re vulnerable to feedback. You might get a lot of rejection or many nos. The things I’ve heard in my career have sometimes been really tough. For example: “Hey, you should hire a male CEO to get funding,” or “You can’t do this.” Comments like that can be pretty hurtful. But I’ve learned that not every piece of feedback is meant for me to act on or change. Sometimes, it’s just feedback, and that’s okay. Don’t take it personally. Just keep going, trust your gut, and be open to learning from others and pivoting when necessary.

The reason I created my blog—it’s a Gen Z founder blog on Substack—is really to provide actionable advice and a fresh perspective for people in similar positions. And I keep coming back to what I said earlier about supporting others. I think it’s incredibly important to put out into the world what you hope to receive.

So, if you want to connect with other Gen Z founders, go create a Gen Z founder community. If you’re looking for more positive people, reach out and connect with positive people. So much of it is actually in our own hands. It’s all about perspective. If you focus on the negative and what’s working against you, you may never get started. So try to train your mind to look at what’s going well and focus on the positive.

Lottie Bazley: Absolutely. And I couldn’t agree more about the idea of lifting each other up. I think, wherever possible, when you’re in a position to help people who aren’t in the room, we should take that opportunity—especially when it comes to supporting young founders and female founders.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Ioanna. It’s been an incredibly interesting conversation, and I’m personally taking away so many insights. To all our listeners, thank you for tuning in! If today’s conversation inspired you, you can connect with Ioanna on LinkedIn or check out the Dextego website, which we’ll link in the show notes. Thanks again for joining us, Ioanna, and enjoy the rest of your afternoon.

Ioanna Onasi: Thank you so much. You too.

Lottie Bazley: Thank you! Bye.