Going from Unemployed to Founder, Tackling Imposter Syndrome & Building Community with Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: [00:00:00] I was so desperate and like probably at the lowest point in my life in January and could not find work. So I just got on TikTok and shared a video saying, like, 'I need an accountability buddy, basically. Does anybody wanna make a goal to get hired somewhere by April 1st?' So

Thought I would get 10 emails and I woke up with hundreds of emails in my inbox. And I was like, 'How do hundreds of people talk to each other? Well, I'll just put everyone in Slack.' I'm And then it just continued to grow. Now we're up to 3,000+ people in there networking and growing every day. ​

Hello, marginal listeners. I'm so excited to have you back with us today. We have a pretty special guest. This one has been on my podcasting Mount Rushmore for a while now, and I can't believe she agreed to speak with us given her massive TikTok following and the community she's built out of that.

The guest I'm talking about is Giovanna Ventola, who founded Rise, a free online community focused on the emotional wellbeing and professional development of today's workforce. So needed. Giovanna shares how she was laid off three [00:01:00] times in three years and how she of all places where audiences instantly connected with her candid expression and experiences of job loss.

We discuss how her social following gave way to rise and the feelings of insecurity she still faces shifting from unemployed to self employed. Giovanna also speaks to the impact of job loss on mental health, which is so, so important. The importance of community as well and how she's continually found herself building bridges throughout her work and her life.

so maybe this was all made to be, whether you're currently on the job market or just in a season of personal transition, like I know so many of us are, you're really not going to want to miss this episode. So with that, thank you so much, Giovanna again, and let's get into it.

Abby: I remember when I first reached out to you on TikTok and I was like, there is one in a million chance this woman responds to me and I actually didn't reach out hoping that you'd come on the podcast. I was just hoping maybe I would garner a response, but you've just been so, so generous, with what you've met me with so far. And I'm so thrilled that you're here [00:02:00] today,

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Oh, thank you. That's so nice. Of course, I would answer.

Abby: I've been following you for a while actually, because we have some parallels in our stories. Um,, I was laid off in 2022 from my job in big tech. And from that point on, I took to tick talk to kind of seek out people who could corroborate the experience I was having. And you were one of the very first people who came across my, my feed at the time.

So whether or not you know it, you've been with me for a couple of years now.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Oh, wow. I'm excited to hear that. Thank you for sharing that.

Abby: Yeah. Oh, cool.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: I'm like getting sweaty,

Abby: good. Good. That's exactly, I'm here to make you sweat. That's exactly what my intention is. Um, a little more background behind why I reached out particularly at this stage, you, again, you've been on TikTok for, for a number of years now, and you've been talking a lot about your kind of unemployment journey.

But you recently also made the decision to pivot and rather than look for other jobs, you decided to employ [00:03:00] yourself and actually turn what you've built on Tiktok in this big community of job seekers into your own full time role and basically build a company out of it called Rise. And you've recently been talking on Tiktok about how.

there's kind of a fear there, right? You got a platform under one premise and now you're into this new season of life and, and work. And you want to make sure you're still relatable to your audiences. And if that's the point at which I reached out, cause I was like, Hey, fellow formerly laid off person turned founder here for the record, your content could not be more relatable to people like me.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Yeah, I had started sharing my unemployment journey on TikTok in January and, um. I was overwhelmed with the feedback and to your point, how you said, you know, I came across your feed.

I don't scroll on tick tock. So I'm not like consuming content in the way that I'm putting it out, which is very interesting. but I do make it a point to answer comments and as much as I can. So I'm really glad that you commented when you did, because that was

Abby: [00:04:00] Yeah. And I think it's important that we kind of remind ourselves and remind each other that it's okay to. Change, right? And I think that's not to say that you're alienating an existing group of people. Like you might take for granted other people are also having these seasons of transition and of change.

So Because I've gone through that identity shift as well. I'm going from looking for jobs to deciding I'm going to work for myself.

Um, To that end, Giovanna, I would love for you for folks who aren't as familiar with your platform. I would love for you to get into how did you break into tick tock? And how did it [00:05:00] come to be this community now of thousands of job seekers? initially From a tick tock point of view.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Yeah, that's a good question. So I say this a lot. I'm not really a social media person. I don't really understand it much. but I was so desperate and like probably at the lowest point in my life in January and could not find work. And I had no friends, no family going through it. And my cousin, who's. Um, younger than me and cooler than me was like, you should share on TikTok and meet some new people that are going through it because my for you page has a lot of people that are similar in a similar situation to you. So I just got on TikTok and I shared a video about, an email networking template that I've been using forever. Like, somebody helps me. I'm a mentor of mine helped me put together this outreach template and it's worked. In terms of getting responses and reconnecting with my network. Um, so I shared that and woke up and the video had like 80, 000 views and people were emailing me or sorry, DMing me and asking me to email them that template. [00:06:00] So I just manually started emailing everyone my email template that I send out to people and I just kept going with the videos and updating people on my journey. about a month and a half in. And so like end of February, I. Shared a video saying, like, I need an accountability buddy. Basically, does anybody wanna make a goal to get hired somewhere by April 1st?

So within the next, like, 30 something days, let's find a job thought I would get 10 emails and we'd , meet up and have little zoom meetings and hold each other accountable to apply for jobs. And I, again, woke up with hundreds of emails in my inbox. and I was like, how do hundreds of people talk to each other? And I had used Slack at a company that I worked for years ago. And I was like, well, I'll just put everyone in Slack. I'm pretty sure it's like free or they have a free platform, whatever, put everyone in Slack. And then it just continued to grow. So now we're up to 3000 people in there networking and growing every day. So it's a little weird.

Abby: That's [00:07:00] incredible. It's, it's funny because particularly if you put on like the founder hat for a second, what you're describing is product market fit, which is something that you don't really realize until you actually start to build something. And a lot of people, a lot of business owners have product market fit and you don't even realize it, but it's, you put something out there and.

It's inconceivable how quickly people respond to it and people find out about you without even realizing how they found out about you. Like there's almost like a built in virality to it. And it seems like you had that so, so early on because what you were putting out into the ether was just so deeply relatable to so many people, not everybody.

And I think that's something we learned to like. It needs to be a deeply specific relatable experience, but I think that's what I find about your videos is they're pointed, they're targeted, and when someone like me two years ago sees them, it feels like, oh, this person's almost inside my head speaking to my experiences, even though I've never met this person.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Yeah. That's [00:08:00] exactly what it was. Um, I've been in therapy for like 10 years now, so I'm really good at, putting words to my emotions and whether people want to admit it or not, the job search process is very emotional, even though we try to hide behind this like professional guise And I was able to express emotions in a way that made sense to other people that were going through it that maybe couldn't verbalize what they were feeling because nobody talks about it because your emotions aren't supposed to be connected to your job search experience.

So I found that when I started sharing, I would get a lot of comments, DMs, messages of like, you are explaining everything I'm feeling inside my head that I couldn't put words to, and you're doing it in a way that makes me feel seen and validated in my experience. So

Abby: and I think that's such an important point. We've talked about this before. This whole notion of work in life being separate and work not being laid in with emotion is almost a bit of a privilege. It's a bit of a privilege to say, Oh, I don't work [00:09:00] isn't emotional for me. I'm able to go to work, do my job, come home and not think about it.

And the second you get laid off. You realize how much life does intersect with work and when you're pining for work and you're looking for where your next dollar is going to come from, it is deeply emotional and work is much higher stakes for those people. So sometimes when I hear people say, it's just a job works just work. You need to compartmentalize. The reality is not everybody can, has the luxury of being able to parse work and emotion.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Yeah. And I think, you know, as it continued to happen to me, so it happened to me three times in three years. And that was sort of the thing that I was confused about. And I'm like, this can't be happening to everyone. It has to be a knee problem. I started sharing, the more I realized it was happening to other people at the same rate it was happening to me and one layoff.

Okay. Sure. Two layoffs. You're like COVID market three. You're Something's up, but it's hard to remove [00:10:00] your emotions and your feelings from it because you do feel like it's you or you do feel like you're making wrong decisions or, just constantly being knocked down and then having to restart again and then building that confidence.

And it's almost like, as soon as you rebuild that confidence. you get back into some sense of normalcy, it's taken away again. So it's just a lot of ups and downs.

Abby: Yeah. And I think it's so everybody's number one advice to job seekers is it's a numbers game. Again, don't take it personal, much like you shouldn't take the job that you have personally, but particularly when it's something that's happened to you three times over. I don't know. I feel like you'd need to be a machine to not have to have some type of creeping self doubt or insecurity born of those repeated experiences.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Support the making of more [00:11:00] such films. Become a Patron today.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: do it. You're not doing well enough. Like why was it me over somebody else?

And you don't get the answers because they don't tell you why. So you're just left hanging empty and you have to fill in blanks for yourself. that's really hard when you're trying to fill in blanks that someone else decided, but they won't tell you. And so it's really hard to then. Turn this experience into a constructive feedback situation, or into like, okay, this is what I can do better next time.

Because you truly don't know. and I think. I've learned was that, like, self validation is a lot of it and. asked to sort of. do this for yourself while you're also being knocked down. So it's like you need confidence for self validation, but you don't have it. So, no,

Abby: Yeah, it's so hard to build self worth when you don't have that signal coming in. Or even it's not even just not signal, but sometimes it's silence. It's crickets. [00:12:00] And sometimes that can be worse because like you said, as human beings, we like to make meaning of things in the absence of explanation. We come up with our own explanations and a lot of times we're not very generous to ourselves when we come up with those.

Explanations are we?

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: not at all. It's mostly self blame. And I think across the board, it's a lot of self blame, shame and guilt. And those are really difficult emotions psychologically across the board to overcome. And so when you have to overcome them in something that is. majority of your day. I mean, you spend more time working than you do at home.

You spend more time at the office or, you know, at your home office, whatever, then in your house. it's just. The majority of your day now is all about figuring out what you did wrong or how you can be better and It's a confusing cycle and not to mention, , when you do like, get let go a lot of times you don't necessarily keep in touch with former colleagues because they're still there or they don't let go after you or before you.

It's like, unless you're all let go and mass group. You don't [00:13:00] have much to relate to.

Abby: And we talked openly about this when we first connected, I was let go in a mass layoff and it was the first layoff that happened at Facebook in 2022. And none of us saw it coming. And for that reason, when we all got laid off me and everybody else, particularly in my org, well over half of it was let go.

And our VP was let the entire org was disbanded. So I had this whole court of people that I essentially trauma bonded with and we could jointly commiserates. We were all going through the same thing. Now. I will say there were some people still left at the organization and. Sometimes it's not, it wasn't the easiest to speak with them because from their point of view, they're living in the wake of all these people losing their jobs and then they have to pick up the work.

So they can't really empathize with our situation, but thank goodness I had all these other people to turn to who could empathize directly with my situation. I cannot [00:14:00] imagine What it would have been like if I were one of these, what you call trickle layoffs or targeted layoffs, where you're kind of being targeted one by one, because the companies don't want to have these public mass layoffs.

So they find other innocuous ways of letting people go. And then what that means is they might be the only person on their team let go. And then where's the community in that?

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: There isn't one. All three of my layoffs was, were trickle layoffs, I guess is what I called it. and it's very isolating because you aren't let go with a group. So you don't have that immediate, let's trauma bond, let's talk bad about it or let's like all be sad together. And you want to continue having a good relationship with your colleagues who are still there.

So there were times where I was like, they would complain to me. I'd be like, I know that's so crazy. Like, I'm so sorry. You're stuck with all that work. Meanwhile, I'd love to work. I didn't get severance or like

Abby: Um, [00:15:00] Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Um, Okay.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: animals are not meant to be alone.

travel for a reason. You find your tribe, you find your village, like, You're

and you're just existing.

It's a very. Empty feeling. And I had that three times and I was going crazy.

Abby: Oh, my goodness. Was there anything that you did before you took to tick tock for anybody else who's [00:16:00] listening? And of course, rise is there as a resource now and tick tock and you're on tick tock. That's great. But is there anything else you did before you took to that platform to try to, you know, Build community or regain some self worth before you took to social media and did any of that work or was it pretty difficult.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: yeah, I was networking a lot. I have, like I said, that networking email template and I was asking people to connect me with people and that was going really well. thing that I, I did was, sent an email to a group of women. So I have a bunch of friends from a bunch of different friend groups.

And. picked and choose friends of mine who had spoken to me in a bunch of different ways about their professional journey and what they wanted. You know, sometimes your friends that you talk about work with and sometimes you don't. So I picked, women, Sent them all an email. None of them knew each other.

So the idea was that they were all from different groups of friends and I invited them over for lunch and I like we're going to have a [00:17:00] purpose party and we're all going to talk about, , what we want for this year, what we want out of our careers and network with each other.

And. was the only unemployed one, but everyone else came from different backgrounds. So that was really cool because we had like a four hour lunch. We did like a vision board type of workshop. We wrote down our goals. Um, and then I sat everybody next to different people that I thought they would have a good conversation with.

so that's something different that I did with people I knew. And then we all kind of followed up with each other afterwards and to continue conversations. And I was trying everything. And it was actually right after that lunch, like probably the week after that I started sharing on TikTok.

Abby: You know what's so funny is with that purpose party, which sounds like a party I would love to be invited to, you were already kind of building bridges. It sounds like amongst people. You were connecting people. You were sitting people together who you thought would have some point of resonance. And.

That's what you do with rise to your, you're connecting people, you're building community, but you're connecting [00:18:00] people with opportunity. And so I'm, I'm also curious back when you were in corporate, I don't even know exactly what your roles were, but did you also find yourself in situations where you were bridge building and connecting people or people to opportunity?

Cause this seems like a pretty, maybe this is your purpose through and through. I don't know.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: , so it's funny that you bring that up because many of my friends and former colleagues have said, well, this makes so much sense because this is who you are. This is what you do. You bring people together. You always find the most interesting, fun, great people. You're able to like. Curate groups of people and I didn't know that about myself really until all of this.

But friends have always told me that I'm their go to person for like anything that they want to do. you know, they come to me advice, which I don't think I give good advice, but I think it's more the related relatability is like, I'll try to level with them and then they come to me, you know, for pretty much anything.

And so, you

Abby: So, [00:19:00] uh, I have a question. Um, Um, Uh,

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: about that question, but as I'm processing it, I think I was sort of a bridge , I worked in. Commercial real estate development, most of my times in corporate, or I was the only woman in the room and. I had to be that person that connected the conversation with more of a, , step back approach. Like, I remember being in the room for, like, big meetings with all men, older men, men with money, finance, , real estate, all this stuff, and I would just sit there quietly. And I'd wait for the right moment and say something that I picked up on and I could get two people to maybe agree or I [00:20:00] could get two people to see something differently. I have a very vivid picture in my head of a, of a situation actually. So it's kind of funny that you asked that question, but I guess, yeah, I guess this is something that's, I just do.

Abby: It's funny when a lot of times I speak to founders a lot and they say when they're kind of mentoring other founders about what businesses to build, the question they always pose is what would you do if it were free slash what have you been doing your entire life for free when nobody's watching?

And oftentimes that is your, that is the thing that you should be building because it is just innate in you and. You love it. And When you love something, you tend to be really good at it. So good at it that people can't ignore it. And I can just see you being in that room contributing in ways and kind of connecting people in really unanticipated ways where you really stood out.

And. Yeah, and I also I had [00:21:00] no idea you had experiences being the only woman in a room because that basically characterizes my entire career.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Yeah. it was, very interesting and cool learning experience. I was young too. I was probably 26 when it, when 25, 26, 26, when that all started. So I was pretty young I came from a arts background. So I was a professional contemporary ballet dancer. And then one day I was in commercial real estate and it's like, What is she? Why is she here? So I feel like I had to constantly overcome that. , and so a lot of overcoming that was listening. So I didn't know the business. So the only way I was going to learn it is if I listened to the experts. And so in listening to them, I was also able to understand to work with people.

And, um, oftentimes I say it was a lot of personality management. That's really a lot of what it is. I could tell you, like who would get mad, who would raise their voice, who would do whatever. And I knew how to navigate those situations accordingly and appropriately,

Abby: [00:22:00] what a superpower.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: I guess.

Abby: that high emotional intelligence for sure. I guess quick question here. do you. Miss corporate, because I know that you've since taken a turn and now you've decided to work for yourself. But I know for me in retrospect, now that I am out of corporate, I can openly kind of disparage some of the things I didn't like about corporate and hindsight's 2020, but there were certain things about corporate for me that were incredibly demoralizing and de energizing.

I think because a lot of times I was the only female in the room and I didn't have that sense of community, which is why I created this podcast, because. Nobody in my corporate office could relate to what I was going through. My friends couldn't relate to what I was going through. So I looked to podcasts and nobody was talking about being a solo female in a tech startup.

So ergo here comes marginal. But what about you? Did it ever, is there anything about it that you were kind of happy to say goodbye to inadvertently or not?

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: So I missed it at [00:23:00] first because I, being an You know, a performing artist, there was no, I guess in my mind, security safety, any of that, because it was a lot of contract work, everything's up in the air, I was working 24 seven at multiple jobs just to get by. So when I went to corporate, I felt safe. I felt like I get a salary and benefits and like days off and I can travel when I want, and I don't have to worry about losing pay for a day. and I think unfortunately for me, I was at

Abby: Um, Um, Uh, Um, Uh, Um, Um, Um, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a. so much for [00:24:00] us and next time. Bye bye.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: and then

Abby: Location. So let's start out with the uh, uh, uh, uh, we're gonna go into the, the, uh, the uh, the, the, the, uh, uh, uh, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: saw and it took me until honestly, I don't even know. I'm just figuring out what the growth potential is here and what I've done. It's really hard to look. look at what I've done up to this point and be like, wow, I'm doing this, this and this because. It's moving so fast, but, I missed it and now I don't. And now I'm actually really happy to be doing what I'm doing. And it's funny because growing up, my dad would always be like, you're going to have your own business someday. And I was like, please never say that again. All I want is [00:25:00] security and stability. And now , he's like, you. And I'm like, okay, well, dads are always right. Right. So,

Abby: Yeah, exactly. Sure. If dad's listening, then that's completely right. Um, the irony though of us thinking, you know what, corporate, that is stability, that is security. And then I think now we're in a situation where we both feel like self employment is, you know, betting on yourself might be the most difficult thing to do.

risk averse thing you can do. . So how long were you looking for a job? You would hope to get a job by April of that year when you kind of started talking openly in January, creating these accountability groups.

At what point did you decide to. Move on from the job search and take this community you are building as a full time thing. [00:26:00] Hello, Hi, everyone.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: I applied to bridge jobs, like coffee shops, grocery stores, all of that couldn't get anything. it was bizarre. I have a little freelance work that I'm doing. which was so by chance, it was a friend introduced me to a friend who needed, Some help and that's great, but it's not paying the bills, you know, So yeah, from November, let's see. So December to August, call it like eight months. I was looking full time, nonstop applying, interviewing, doing all of the things you're supposed to do. and kind of realized what rise could be, I'll say in July, I started thinking like, [00:27:00] okay, it was, it took a lot of pushing from my leadership team. So the two people that, Volunteered and working on this with me. really, we're like, this is a big deal. I was like, all right, let's do it.

And so August I stopped looking for work, which was weird and scary. And you know, you don't want to announce that publicly. Not that I have like a huge public platform or following, but when you're somebody's unemployed, best friend, and you're doing it together. You kind of got to tell them like, I'm not doing this anymore.

I don't know. The 30, 000 people is a lot of people to tell that to. can either watch me succeed or fail. And some are there probably to watch me fail. Let's be honest. And so know, it's a little scary, but whatever. We're how many months in now? Almost three months in and I'm still alive. So that's good.

Abby: so you, that's amazing too, that you have a leadership team of volunteers. I think that's other great signal. Other people believe in this so much that they're willing to dedicate their [00:28:00] time uncompensated to help you grow it. I think, uh, Uh, I'm gonna have to I, I'm gonna have to ask again today.

If you are in a group of people watching right now, So, um. this is, this is, uh, this so we we are now. The, the, the we are now. Uh, so, um,

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Armando does all the communications PR, and he helped me sort of figure out the story that we were going to tell, and hone in on that because I can be very wordy. But in September, we did what we call the rise September volunteer search, a lot of people were reaching out to me asking how they could help and sharing stories with me about what they've gotten out of the community. That's. Beyond professional development. And people are sharing very open, vulnerable stories with me.

And they're like, I want to give back thing. That's given so much to me in the worst time of my life or whatever. And I was hesitant at first, because I feel like it's rude to ask someone to work for you for free. But someone was [00:29:00] like, okay, but we all volunteer for organizations all the time. And that's very true.

I volunteer. And they're like, if we want to give back time to something that gave us something, let us do it. So we out job descriptions, basically, for projects that we knew we were going to need help with and. We now have 31 volunteers who are all working on different projects. We have an org chart that outlines our social analytics team, our TikTok content team, our, PR and partnerships team, our communications team, we have a graphic design team and member experience team.

And so there's 31 people that want to make

Abby: Uh, What I'm going to do is I'm going to take the, uh, the, the, the transcript that we [00:30:00] That we just included, Um,

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: cool little community within the community. I, Seriously think about them all the time and how grateful I am that they're willing to help so been a lot of fun

Abby: Yeah, okay. Two things. One, what a beautiful value exchange. It is so nicely kind of reciprocal, right? Because they help you because you've given them so much value, but. By them helping you and volunteering in these capacities because they are job seekers, it also helps them build their portfolios. So even though you're not paying them, you are giving them so much currency in other ways as job seekers.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Yeah, I didn't realize how valuable that was And just being able to show their work that they've done in this downtime, like someone was explaining to me how different this actually is than taking a LinkedIn course or, example, the graphic designers, they're designing these beautiful [00:31:00] things and they get to put that in their portfolio. Some of them said when they left their last companies, they weren't able to take their work with them. don't have work to show when they're asked to show a portfolio. And now they're going to have a work that they're proud of. They said they're like, it's so much better than just spending eight hours a day on job applications.

Abby: Totally. That was my situation too. And when I was let go from Facebook, it's not like you have the time, the, the, the runway to download everything before you find out that you're going to get locked out of your computer. So yeah, things that I had spent years working on. I didn't have any ownership over it, so I wasn't able to speak to any of that work after I left the second thing I wanted to say, and I know this is a theme more broadly.

You and I have been talking about Giovanna is you didn't feel comfortable having people work for you for free, even though they wanted to. And it gets into this whole idea of imposter syndrome. Like, who am I to have 31 people volunteering for me?

Who am I to call [00:32:00] myself a founder, to appoint myself the title of founder? Warrant doing this full time. Can you speak a little bit more to this notion of imposter syndrome and how you're kind of reckoning with it right now?

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: I'm learning how to reckon with it. Let's put it that way. , I am very uncomfortable with the fact that I gave myself a title and I don't know if they're, if you watch Curb, do you watch Curb Your Enthusiasm?

Abby: No, I was, I thought you were going to talk about summer house and I got really excited because I do watch summer.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: we will talk about summer house because that whole founder thing is,

Abby: I know.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: we'll get there. But I was watching curb the other night and the doc, there was like a doctor, I think it was Jeff's doctor and he had business cards and he gave himself a nickname and his name was Andrew, but he wanted to be called rusty like later in life.

And Larry was like, What is this? Who started calling you Rusty? And he's like, Oh, I just thought I'd give myself a nickname. And Larry was like, you don't give yourself a nickname. People give you a nickname. And that's kind of how I feel [00:33:00] about a title. I've never given myself a title. , it's always been I've been hired for a job.

And it's like, if I tell my, if I say I'm the founder, , Is it really? You know what I mean? , so it's been an interesting transition, I guess. , but I've been, me and Armando and Andrea talk about it a lot. They're like, you got to get over that. So we're working on it. Maybe I'll go back to hypnotherapy and see if my hypnotist can fix, fix something within me.

But, uh, yeah, we can talk about summer house.

Abby: Yeah, to bring up that example, because I feel like it is such a well, there's a couple founders on summer house, right? And. Yeah. Um, I don't think maybe necessarily they are the best representations of being a founder and CEO, but something you said to me earlier about one of the castmates really resonated.

So if you could clue our audiences in, even those who are not Bravo watchers, I think it's a really good story for them to be clued into as well.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: there's a few founders on summer house, right? I think they're great. They're doing great things with their whatever they're doing. I'm so great. But, Danielle, [00:34:00] who I've watched through many seasons is the founder and CEO of a company. And, , she was in an argument with somebody and the way she was speaking, she said, , as founder and CEO, I know how to read people or whatever she was saying.

And I was just cringing and kind of like, Oh girl, like. This is not the time to just be like, I'm a founder, I'm a CEO. And so after seeing that was around the time where I became a founder. I'm all for women supporting women. And there's a lot of women founders. But in my mind, I'm like, that is not in my head.

What I would be doing as a founder, just. I'm a founder and CEO. I can tell you exactly how to behave when you're drinking on a Saturday night, whatever, whatever she was talking about. I don't even remember. And so also I said this the other day, I was texting a friend and I was like, every dude that goes on the bachelorette, their title is founder or entrepreneur.

Abby: Oh, yeah.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: And I'm like, it's me [00:35:00] now.

Abby: Well, every content, yeah, every content creator and it's so hard, right? Cause it's like in some respect they are, there are some content creators that are founders and entrepreneurs, but when you kind of open it up to that breadth of experience, I don't know. It means that founder and entrepreneurship can take multiple forms and some people can exploit that position of leadership and business ownership.

And yeah. Especially if you're someone who's had a corporate background characterized by people giving you titles,

really, first of all, it feels weird to give your yourself your own. And I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but I've worked at companies before where men have given themselves their own titles.

And.

looked at the men performing those quote unquote job descriptions or job titles and it was, there was such dissonance between what they said their job was and what they actually did. And so for me, it was like, okay, if I appoint myself a title, will [00:36:00] people not truly think that I'm, I'm doing this job, I'm performing this job.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Yeah. And I used to believe, and I'm having sort of like a, is it an existential crisis? I'm not sure, but, um,

Abby: I have it once a week. Yep.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: I grew up thinking you work hard at something you do well at it. You sharpen your skills. You do all the things you get better, you grow and you will be rewarded with the appropriate. Reward title, whatever that is.

Right. And as I've gotten older and more mature and been through some things in life, you kind of look around and you're like, that's not true. And there was no rhyme or reason for why people are getting things. And I'm not, or I am, and people aren't, and it goes both ways. Right. And, I've sort of. I don't think I buy into corporate ladders, corporate structures, any of that as much as I used to anymore.

because of what you just said, and the first time I had an experience with that was I [00:37:00] was working for the company I worked for for a while. And one of my old colleagues left and he went to a smaller company

Abby: Okay.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: And it kind of, I don't know. It just opened my eyes a little bit to, to what is work and what does it mean? And, the importance of confidence within yourself and self validation is more important than external sources, giving you that validation and that feedback, which is very difficult when, I mean, we're talking about imposter syndrome.

, I went from being a ballerina to, like, a court, you know, in commercial real estate development to now, , whatever I'm doing now, it's very, it's this identity shift and It doesn't feel real. So like, I do feel like an imposter.

Abby: Yeah, to some degree, a lot of us do, and I'm not going to lie. It takes me, I mean, I needed my co [00:38:00] founder to tell me, I mean, he and I just talked about titles again, because we're going through a huge product pivot. By the time this episode comes out, it'll be public that we basically launched a new company.

And for that new company, I have a new title. And I'm now coming out openly saying I'm a co founder in this company, which isn't something I really claimed before in RevScience, and I think this is where the importance of allyship comes in.

I know one of your volunteers is a male. Um, my co founder is a male. And as much as it stinks that I need a male to validate my position and my contributions, I do think that let's be honest with ourselves. We all do live in the patriarchy, like these systems of power and influence do matter.

And that's when it's really great to have really powerful, strong male allies. My co founder is a very huge supporter of me And a huge acknowledger of my contribution. Sometimes he calls out things I do that I don't even realize that I do much like Armando does for you . And so those people in your [00:39:00] life are such amazing pillars to have. And I don't doubt that you are that for other people too, but it's nice to find those folks in your life. And it makes me want to be that for more people in my life because You can build as much self worth as you want, but we are social creatures.

Like you said, we live in community, we live relative to other people. So if we can curate a group of people who reflect back on us, all the incredible work we're doing, what a gift.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: I will cheer other people on till I'm blue in the face. I cannot find it within myself to tell myself I'm doing something. Well, which is weird. I'm working on it. I think the biggest thing that has opened my eyes to what I'm actually doing is. Is the people in the community and the volunteers and the feedback I'm getting not necessarily about myself, but about how they're feeling.

They're explaining to me, or I'm hearing, or I'm seeing in the channels, or I'm getting messages or emails or feedback surveys. [00:40:00] about life changing moments and these people's, whatever they're going through right now. And then I go, Oh, I brought these people together because I was able to use my voice.

And so I'm giving myself that credit. Um, but it takes a lot and it's interesting because, it's me, Andrea and Armando and Andrea are very like. we overthink everything and we're like, okay, this and this and what do we do? And is this good? And he's like, yeah, no, this is perfect. This is what we're going to do. This is what you're saying is perfect. And I'm like, how do you just have that in you to say? And so I'm working on it. getting better at it. I will say, I have to remind myself a lot, but, getting better at being able to admit what this is and talk about what this is, which is great. I have a lot of people that are in my corner too, which. helps,

Abby: Yeah, I would give yourself some grace too, because I think it truly, and you're doing the work and I know you talk so openly about therapy. Thank you for that. I think every founder, I mean, I think every person should be in therapy, [00:41:00] but particularly founders. I mean, this is. Yeah. I don't know the people who do it alone.

I don't know how solo founders do it. but, and that'll get to the point of founder communities as well. We'll talk a little bit more about community and what's on the horizon for yours, but yeah, just having, having these support systems, having co founders, having partners, having therapists, they are a lifeline if you're going to take this path.

so that's one thing, but also I would, acknowledge that. As a woman, I do feel like a lot of us have this proclivity to second guess ourselves, right? Particularly in certain facets of business. I mean, this just hasn't been modeled to us. Let's be honest. A lot of the tech billionaires in the world, a lot of the venture capital dollars, they're not going to women.

2 percent last decade or so. It's not budge. So this is of course why we feel we are not worthy of leading these companies and taking money from people, we have been conditioned to think this way. And so we internalize a lot of that social [00:42:00] conditioning and then we feel like, Oh, it's our fault that we don't feel worthy, but make no mistake.

We've been being told our entire lives that we're kind of not worthy in certain spaces.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: you're a hundred percent right about that. I'm very lucky. I grew up in a house with a dad who was very supportive and a mom who was very supportive, but even with all of that support, it doesn't matter. You go out into the world. I mean, I was a ballet dancer, right? That's a very woman dominated.

All the directors of companies were men. It's all women. Why is there a man directing the company in a 90 percent or whatever it is women field? Why are the men getting the leads? It's just even in, even in industries where it is very women focused, it's, you're still not really the biggest deal in the room or whatever.

Um, so it is very interesting and I think, there is also a lot of like women that don't support women. And so you're getting it from both angles, which is also very interesting. And, Yeah, I would get a therapist.

I'm very lucky. I have a really good one [00:43:00] and she's a woman and she has her own practice. So she inspires me in a way so,

Abby: that's again. And I mean, it's the reality of the situation. Like some women don't support women and it's sometimes that happens because we're all operating from a place of scarcity. So I've talked openly in the past about how when two women are working in an organization and they're both operating from a place of scarcity, say they're the only two women in that organization, the likelihood that one is going to stick her neck out for another one is so much less.

Because it makes her more vulnerable to her all male executive leadership. It makes her more vulnerable to get pushback to lose her job by going out on a limb for her female direct report. I, I'm talking about this very hypothetically, but this is what happened to me. I'm speaking to my own personal experience of having a female manager, and I.

I don't blame her because I don't know at that time what I would have done in that situation to preserve my own job security when we were so few and far between in that all male office.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: I think what you said, [00:44:00] I don't blame her. I think that is, that's a big part of it, right? I understand why. Some, a woman, any, anybody really, who's not in that sort of position of innate power would protect themselves. Why wouldn't you? So you know, it's survival of the fittest always, I think it's, I'm hoping, I'm hopeful that it gets better.

I'm, blown away by the people in rise. I think I'm learning so much by the members. I'm blown away that there's so many men in there. I just, I find it interesting that, you know, men are in there willing to speak about how they're feeling. And we have a few men in there who are making the conversation open to other men and they want to make it a place where it's normal to talk about this stuff.

Um, so I think it's, I'm hopeful that it's changing and growing and, and, and, The world has been so weird these last couple of years, but I think we're all kind of being forced to evolve in a way, even if we don't want to. And [00:45:00] it's very uncomfortable, but I think everybody in some way, shape or form is forced to make some changes right now, which is kind of cool.

Abby: I love what you said about having men in the community because there's a lot of research out there. We know men are the patriarchy hurts. Everybody men are struggling right now. Women are struggling right now, but particularly a lot of men feel that they can't speak openly about their emotions.

They're not graduating college at the same rates of women. A lot of them are remaining single. And, um, they're also impacted by these mass layoffs as well. And, um, they're Men in particular, they have also been socially conditioned to look at work as identity. They were supposed to be the breadwinners. And so when they are without jobs, it's probably in a lot of ways, even more catastrophic.

and so I love that you have a place where men can kind of speak in process openly about this too, because men are in a mental health crisis, particularly in this job climate. Silence.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: off and their [00:46:00] microphones off and just listen. And that's fine. Right. We have these networking calls on a daily basis and there are people that sit and listen. And then, you know, a few of them started turning their microphones on and asking questions and a few of them would put their cameras on.

And now I have some of them volunteering because they're so like, Over the past three months, you know, I've learned how to open up after hearing you speak or hearing somebody else speak or seeing this person, what they said and just realizing they weren't alone and they don't have to pretend. So I think it's so nice.

I just, I'm, I'm all for anyone that wants to grow and also share. I just think it makes, that's what this is all about. Right. I just,

Abby: And what is business if not people to like, we're all people at the end of the day. And the more we try to embrace that and stop pretending like it's not the case, the more I think we're all going to be a lot more authentic in the work we do and the better we're going to be at the work we're [00:47:00] doing.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: I agree with that. I always, I say this all the time. People are people. I don't know what that means, but to me, that means people are people, they do people things and good or bad, whatever it is, it's like, we are all people. We can't be expected to be perfect all the time. And, there's so much, like, social learning and interaction going on in this in this group.

It's proving that people need to be around people. We can't keep learning just from computers or just from AI or from being isolated in a room. and I think that's the cool thing with all of this. So.

Abby: So speaking of people, bringing people together to be their authentic selves, tell our audiences a little bit more about what is the latest and greatest with rise. If folks want to get involved, how can they sign up and what is on the horizon for the community?

[00:48:00] Um,

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: R. I. F. C. It's a rhizome was the inspiration. That's a story for another day. yeah, you get in the Slack community. We're building out a member dashboard so that all of the resources we have will live behind like, uh, it's not a paywall, but it's just like, once you're a member, you'll have access to all this stuff.

Everything will be free. We are working on with, hopefully, some talent acquisition firms. I mean, we have this huge talent pool and I know a lot of the statistics about the talent pool. So I would like to get people jobs. we have a bunch of professional development workshops where. Bringing in some groups that we're going to partner with long term, which will be really cool. and in 2025, we're going to start doing in person events in different markets. Um, so that's something to come down the road because it's really cool that everyone's networking virtually, but people are meeting up in person. learning about this and we're seeing where they're meeting up. And so there's going to be a lot of, real meetups

Abby: [00:49:00] Silence. Silence. Silence.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: the amount of volunteers. Movement you can make with 31 people versus three people. Just, it's going to be, it's going to move faster than I think. So, um, I don't really sleep much, but it's going to be cool. so yeah, a lot to come. I'm excited.

Abby: I'm excited. Wow. Yeah. I mean, we can't even envision what it's going to be. I mean, I'm thinking it's going to far exceed our expectations, but the mass, talent you have backing you.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Yeah, it's cool. I'm very proud of, you know, everybody and all the work they do because that's what gets me up in the morning. I think about this all the time.

Abby: Very cool. Well, Giovanna, if there is anything else you'd like listeners to walk away with having listened to this [00:50:00] conversation, anything else you want to leave them with today,

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Yeah. I think the. biggest piece of advice I can give to anyone going through any challenge, whether it's employment, personal, family, friend, whatever it is, is find a community of people that can validate your experience. And if you don't have that in the group of people you have, like for example, I didn't have friends or family to talk to about something I was struggling with. I have a loud voice. I looked for it. I would say with Rhize there's so many people in there that from across the board going through things like any sort of thing you want to talk to someone about, you can get in there. but it's just find your community is the biggest thing that I can say, whether it's, Rhize or not just find a group. There's no need to do this, anything in life alone. So Yeah.

Abby: Yeah, couldn't agree more. Well, thank you so much, Giovanna. We'll include information about Rise and how folks can get in touch in the episode's show notes. And until then, thank you so much coming on, being your authentic self as always [00:51:00] and building community with our listeners. I'm sure some of them will be seeking you out and will be joining Rise in due time.

Truly.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: you. I'm happy to have everybody. Everybody's welcome.

Abby: Okay. Thanks so much, Giovanna.

Giovanna Ventola, Founder of Rhize: Thank you.

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