#178 | Female Founders, Fear of Success, and the Leadership Leap Nobody Prepares You For w: Nita Laad (@ex-Cisco, @ex-HP, @Nexia AI)

Episode notes

▶︎ #178 | Female Founders, Fear of Success, and the Leadership Leap Nobody Prepares You For w/ Nita Laad (@ex-Cisco, @ex-HP, @Nexia AI) In this episode of the Leman Tech Leadership Podcast, Alex welcomes Nita Laad: Founder and CEO of Nexia AI, a Silicon Valley startup building an AI-native platform for product management teams. Nita brings a rare arc to this conversation - eight years writing code, then a full-stack leadership career spanning engineering, product, and go-to-market at Cisco and Hewlett Packard, and finally the leap into founding. She is also a 2025 Silicon Valley Business Journal Woman of Influence - and she is not here to make any of it sound easy. The heart of this conversation is the gap between leading in a corporation and leading as a founder - and it is wider than most people expect. Nita is specific: in corporate, the brand, the processes, the HR department, the training programs are all already there. You execute within a system. In a startup, you are the system. Every function lands on your shoulders before you have people to delegate it to, and the iteration cycles are not quarterly - they are sometimes hourly.

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