Drumroll for greatness – Lexi Reese joins the pod this week! Lexi is the co-founder and CEO of Lanai, an AI Empowerment Platform that helps enterprises transform AI experiments into systematic success. Before Lanai, she led the Global Programmatic Ad Business at Google and then jumped to be the COO of Gusto (a unicorn, but don’t call it a unicorn as you’ll hear Lexi explain in our interview). Always one to look for ways to do more to help others thrive, after Gusto and before Lanai, she launched a campaign for California's U.S. Senate seat.

We’re tired just thinking about all of this because in addition to occupying big seats at big tables (and beautifully trying to make more seats for others) – Lexi is the mother of two girls. And for her, motherhood has been a superpower. Helping her become an even better leader (and she’s already one of the best!). As she says in this interview: “I think of motherhood as a leadership laboratory because a great leader makes people better first in their presence, but then it lasts in their absence. It stays with you. And that is what motherhood is.”

In our convo we discuss:

- Going from film-making and finance to the tech c-suite + a run at politics

- Motherhood as a leadership laboratory

- Why America sees Mothers as a bug in the system

- How kids clarified her mission to leave the world better than she found it

- How to operate at 75% when your norm is 125%

- The role her mother and her immigrant background played in shaping how she wanted to operate in the world

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The Mothers is a production of Backline Media.

**Friends of the Pod Week! This week, we're excited to swap episodes with The Mothers, an amazing podcast about being a mother, to introduce our communities to each other's work - because there's room for all of us moms here! If you enjoy this conversation, be sure to check out more episodes from The Mothers wherever you listen to podcasts and join Sara on Instagram @themotherspod