Trailblazing Women: Julie Pham

My mother, Hang Nga Pham, co-founded the first privately owned Vietnamese-language newspaper, Nguoi Viet Tây Bac , in the Pacific Northwest in 1986 with my father, Kim Van Pham. They saw our Vietnamese refugee community growing and recognized a need to connect people and services. My earliest impressions of women in business were of those who own beauty salons, restaurants, delis, law firms, insurance offices. An all-women-of-color team like mine is not unusual in Seattle.

After deciding to leave my career as an academic in 2008, I returned to Seattle to help my family run the newspaper. I got my real-life MBA trying to find ways to survive the Great Recession. I brought together different ethnic media, and I chaired the MLK Business Association to facilitate collaboration among small businesses in South Seattle.

Over the years, I’ve determined there are three types of people who can help businesses: advisers, those who give advice; connectors, those who spend their social capital to make relevant introductions and referrals; and consumers, those who spend money, either as a client, lender, or investor. Advisers can help businesses start, connectors help them move, and consumers ensure they can grow. Vietnamese businesses grew because so many within our community spent social capital and money on each other.

My Vietnamese community modeled how having a strong informal network of connectors and consumers makes it possible to bypass formal institutions of power. In the middle of the pandemic I started my own company, CuriosityBased , to serve employers who invest in building relationships and practicing curiosity at work. I wouldn’t have survived those first years without friends who believed in me and became connectors and consumers.

Instead of pursuing the traditional publishing route, I decided to self-publish and self-fund my book, 7 Forms of Respect . To my great surprise, I hit my crowdfunding goal in 18 hours. When my campaign ended, I had more than 300 consumers, many of whom pledged just $5. While it doesn’t take much to be a consumer, it requires more than just giving advice. In Seattle, our greatest strength is also our greatest challenge. While we have many people who have social capital and money to spend, not enough of them are willing to do so. There are a lot of risk-averse advisers who won’t take the next step, sometimes because they think their words are just enough. To succeed, I’ve learned to differentiate between connectors who say, “Yes, I’ll introduce you to that person” from advisers who say, “You should talk to that person.” This is especially evident in the tech industry, where I worked for nine years. So many talented and traction-rich female tech entrepreneurs struggle to get investment needed to participate in high-scale growth, yet they receive advice freely.

Trailblazers take risks. Imagine what would be possible if we had more individuals willing to take the risks necessary to help more trailblazers thrive.

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