LOCATIONS: London, UK & New York City, USA
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: Russian, English and French
CURRENT ROLE: Founder and CEO, CreativeX
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLES: Founder and CEO, Hatch, Business development manager, Google
BOARDWAVE ROLES: Nextwaver, Mentor
Anastasia Leng explains that she loves a spreadsheet.In fact, this fundamental piece of business software has played a pivotal role in her journey to CEO of CreativeX, an AI-powered technology company that uses data to help brands make better creative decisions.
The Google alum’s journey started in 2012 with the launch of her first business Hatch, which was when she realised that funding is everything. Having faced multiple rejections, Leng decided to adopt a more analytical approach to secure funds. “We went to all these investor meetings, but we just couldn’t raise the money,” she says. Leng began to look more closely at her spreadsheets, analysing the data. “I started looking for patterns. How were investors introducedto me? What questions did they ask? How did I present myself?”
The information she’d documented on previous successes and failures to secure funding revealed some interesting insights. For example, the data suggested that those introduced to Leng through her professional network were more likely to convert into investorsthan people from a personal network. Leng noticed another pattern: the more masculine she appeared in investor meetings, the better her chances of securing funding. She realised that “If I made myself look more like the folks investors typically invested in, they seemed to react more favourably.”
Leng’s analytical thinking also helped her interpret business exchanges more accurately. For instance, when an investor asked, “What is the market size?” it often meant they didn’t believe in the size of the opportunity. “Fundamentally you need to find investors who really believe your market is there.”
Business instinct
This entrepreneurial spirit has been a part of Leng’s DNA from a young age. When her family moved to the US when Leng was a pre-teen, she started a babysitting business. “I put flyers up in our apartment building. The doorman saw them and introduced me to a family who I then babysat for. I got 20 bucks and I gave the doorman half of that money,” she says. “My mum likes to say that my business instinct was always there.”
Leng’s childhood was itinerant – she was born in Russia and moved to Vietnam when she was seven, then spent two years in Budapest, a few more in Bahrain before moving to the US when she was 12. She didn’t speak a word of English. “As a near teenager, it could have been a very traumatising experience,” she says. But what supported Leng through this time was her intelligence and determination and, crucially, her mother.
“I would come home from school and do hours of English instruction from her. We probably fought more during that period than any other time in our lives,” she says. Despite learning English quickly and excelling at school, Leng faced cultural differences that still resonate with her now.
“My parents wouldn’t let me wear jeans – it was during a Russian Cold War. So, there I was, rocking up to school in these flowery trousers. All the kids had cool Jansport backpacks but my parents said they weren’t good for your back, so I had this hardback backpack that had loads of reflectors on it. My friends called it the ‘School Bus’. I did not look like a kid who came from the US.”
Leading by example
Leng’s experiences of feeling like an outsider have instilleda drive in her to create a truly diverse workforce. “The great thing about having had a nomadic past is that you have to find a common language with a lot of different people,” she says. Leng has always had to adapt, from finding ways to play with the other kids in a French school in Vietnam, to integrating successfully into an American high school. “One of the things I appreciate most from my childhood was being consistently forced into situations where you had to find a common language – sometimes literal and sometimes figurative – with people who were very different.”
It is why she now asks one simple question when hiring managers: if you had to appoint a deputy, what skills would you be looking for? “A lot of people talk about work that they don’t want to do, that they would pass on to the deputy. Or they talk about their strengths and wanting to see them mirrored in the other person. But that is not the way to build a robust, resilient organisation.” A better answer, she says, would be: “I am not good at these things, which is why I need someone around me who can be the yin to my yang.”
Leng is also a great believer in what she calls “generous interpretations”. It is a phrase she often shares with her employees if they come to her with a problem. “When something doesn’t get done – or at least not in the way we want – we tend to assume mal-intent,” she says.“But what if you ask, ‘What is the most generous interpretation of this person’s behaviour, or of this situation?’ More often than not, this interpretation is closer to the truth and it enables you to get to a better outcome faster.”
A different world
This desire to see a situation from another angle is perhaps the gold standard of management – and it is one that Leng applies in practical ways too. While she is a goal-driven person like many CEOs, she thinks that we sometimes need to step back from that. “I once hired a senior executive who told me that he measures his worth in the number of meetings he has, which I thought was terrifying. I think we see busyness as a kind of mantle that we need to hold up, but I actually think it can be dangerous because if you do not actively step away, reflect and think, you are stuck on this treadmill of doing the things that you’ve always done.”
This is why at CreativeX Fridays are different from the rest of the week. “If you are on track with your goals, you can do whatever you want. You can go golfing, you can watch Netflix, you can meet other senior leaders to get inspired by them. You can work on projects, if you’re not on track with your goals, you have Friday to catch up.” On Fridays, only urgent emails are sent and no meetings are scheduled.
Another personality trait that Leng shares with a lot of CEOs and entrepreneurs is that she is a natural risk-taker. She took university courses while at school just to see if she could cope and would travel abroad by herself as a teenager. “I really liked being thrown into a new situation, thinking about how to survive. I got a lot of energy from it.”
This also resulted in itchy feet. After graduating from Pennsylvania University with a triple major in psychology, sociology and French, she landed what to many would be a dream job. “Google was brilliant at hiring under-confident over- achievers, and that was me,” she says. “I was eager to please, I was highly accountable, and I had a very strong work ethic. If you have those characteristics and you are relatively socially adept, you will do very well.”
Leng had a range of jobs at Google, from product marketing and management to working on the company’s new bets on early-stage products that the search giant thought might be big. But, when Leng reached her fifth work anniversary, she left. “I felt bored. I was too young to be bored.”
Leng joined a friend who was launching an e-commerce firm, Hatch, which taught her the basics of the start-up world. But she realised that the company wasn’t working so she pivoted again and went back to her spreadsheets. “The visuals we were using seemed to make a really big difference to the conversion behaviour of consumers, but we couldn’t understand why some visuals performed better than others. We needed a creative spreadsheet. We tried to dissect them. Did they have people in them? Was the product featured? We were trying to understand the relationship between the way we were communicating and how our consumers responded.”
Business picked up once they started acting on the findings but, when it came to the next round of fundraising, Leng found herself facing rejection after rejection again.
Her epiphany came on a flight to San Francisco where she was due to have two final investor meetings. “I realised thatit was insanity to be gearing up to do the same things I had done 100 times before and expect a different result. I went into those meetings and said, ‘I know we are supposed to be talking about Hatch, but I want to talk to you about how we turned the business around.’ I didn’t have a company name or a PowerPoint deck. I just talked to them, and I showed them the spreadsheet.” And so CreativeX was born.
As well as running her business, Leng has two young daughters. And, while she doesn’t have a spreadsheet for her work-life balance yet, she has applied long-term strategic thinking. “What my husband and I hope is that we will achieve balance over the course of our life, but we no longer aspire to achieve it in the course of a day,” she says.
To ensure she stays on track, Leng goes to therapy. But, as you might expect, it is not the usual kind. “Once a month, I meet with a group of founders and CEOs for two hours and we have a completely off-the-record structured conversation, which is very open about all aspects of our lives, professional and personal.” This concept of personal board meetings is something she is considering introducing at CreativeX. Whether she does or not, it will undoubtedly be preceded by a spreadsheet.
Tips From The Top
What are your tips for a successful business?
1. Listen more than you talk.
2. Actively seek out people who disagree with you and give them air.
3. Reinvent or refocus yourself every 12 to 18 months.
What is the best advice you’ve been given?
Assume generous interpretations. Distinguish between things you’re able to change and those you aren’t, and apply your energy proportionately.
Can you tell us something surprising about yourself?
I learned to speak English when I was 13.
If you hadn’t become an entrepreneur, what career would you have pursued?
I’d be a journalist or a writer.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?
I can be without most tech. However, my lifeand career would be very different without tech that enabled mass information access – search, internet, ChatGPT and spreadsheets.
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