Meet Victoria Yampolsky

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Victoria Yampolsky a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Victoria, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I am a big proponent of mind training as a key tool to build confidence and resilience. I believe everyone can train their mind to build those skills.

I train my mind 1..5-2.5 hours every day – this includes meditation, exercise, morning walks, visualization exercises as well as working on rewiring suboptimal thought patters developed as a result of my upbringing.

I learn to be more resilient and not react too harshly to setbacks, rejection and failure by training my mind to be focused on my purpose, accepting things that I cannot control, recognizing and ignoring the inner critic, and treating every outcome, positive or negative, as information I can use to move forward. By staying true to my commitments and doing things I promised I would do even when I don’t want to and/or don’t feel comfortable, I build my confidence.

I am committed to my continuous personal growth. I know it is up to me to create the life that I want.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I am a serial entrepreneur and strategic CFO advisor specializing in financial modeling and valuation for early-stage startups and small businesses. I am a passionate advocate for female founders and a champion for fair access to capital. The topics I really care about are finance, mindset, and entrepreneurship and how they are all interlinked.

We are doing an exciting event on Oct 22-23, called Breaking Barriers: Female Founders and The Emotional Side of Venture Investing. With this event, we want to change the conversation from things we cannot control (how hard it is to raise funding), to what we can (what we can do to become one of those founders who raised despite all the challenges). We will use this event to launch several new Female Founder Mindset Gyms, our program for early-stage female founders focused on building a resilient mindset and financial confidence.

My bio if that is relevant:
As President and Founder of The Startup Station, a CFO advisory firm and financial education platform, Victoria has worked with over 150 founders across 15 industries, helping them raise more than $50M in venture capital. Her courses on accounting, financial modeling, valuation and startup finance have reached hundreds of entrepreneurs worldwide.
Victoria also founded PowerUp Globally, a global initiative aimed at bridging the gender funding gap. Its flagship program for early-stage female founders, Female Founder Mindset Gym, uniquely combines mindset training, business training focused on finance, and mentorship.
Before her entrepreneurial career, Victoria spent nearly a decade on Wall Street with Deutsche Bank and CapGemini. She holds a Cum Laude Bachelor’s in Computer Science with a Mathematics minor from Cornell University and an honors MBA from Columbia Business School.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

There are three things that help me in my journey:
1) Algorithmic thinking – I am fortunate to have computer science training and it helps me every day in how I run my business. I plan my day like an algorithm to improve productivity, I think through a strategic roadmap looking for bottlenecks and finding the shortest route to the goal, like an algorithm. I even build my financial models as business algorithms. By linking strategic decisions to financial results, I develop models with much higher predictive power and flexibility that empower business owners to make more informed decisions.
2) Creativity and curiosity – I am a poet and have many cultural interests outside of my work which is fairly technical. This allows me to expand my mind and creativity and think outside the box. I also love traveling and this serves a similar effect as being immersed in art, music, theater, or poetry.
3) Mindset training – this is something I embarked on only 4 years ago and it has changed my life. It taught me limitless thinking, it allowed me to identify and work on my limiting beliefs and connect with my true purpose. I am finally doing what I truly want and am surrounded with many people who support me.

I would highly recommend reading the book “Mindset” by Carol Dweck and, if you are a female, “You’re a Bad Ass” by Jen Sincero, I would then determine on what kind of mind training works for you and begin step by step. I wish someone had explained it to me – that I should question the way I make decisions, That it may not be optimal. That I may be self-sabotaging myself and not even be aware of it.

Understanding who you truly are and then developing resilience, kindness, and humility to pursue it are key to a happy and fulfilling life. And also be curious – just like you were when you were a child! The world is an amazing place with so much to discover.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

My mission is to cultivate a generation of female entrepreneurs who feel limitless. To empower every female founder out there to go after her dreams. I am looking for people who want to join me on this mission: corporate organizations, founder communities, accelerators, innovation labs, entrepreneurs, investors, business leaders, philanthropists. Only together can we change the world.

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