The Salesforce CFO who left to save lives

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

AMY WEAVER: We got to the end of the call and I agreed I would at least think about it. So, the next week I’m thinking about it, and I came to the same conclusion. This is ridiculous. I am not going to do it.

JEFF BERMAN: Because you’re not–

WEAVER: Crazy.

BERMAN: Correct.

WEAVER: Yes. Exactly. It was absolutely unprecedented.

BERMAN: Amy Weaver had just been offered a new job, chief financial officer of Salesforce. It took her totally by surprise, but the opportunity was too intriguing to pass up. Amy had already spent enough time at the iconic software company to know it’d be hard work, but hard work worth doing.

WEAVER: How do we make it faster? How do we make it more efficient? How do we get rid of any of the bottlenecks? It’s very hard to scale if you have a rickety platform. You really have to invest in having the right systems, the right processes in place. If you’ve got those, you can scale very, very quickly.

[THEME MUSIC]

BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman, your host. This week on the show, we’re talking with Amy Weaver. As someone who’s had a pretty nonlinear career myself, after all, it is not every former public defender who goes on to work at places like MySpace and the NFL and lead companies and host a podcast like Masters of Scale, I’m always drawn to others who’ve charted unconventional paths, and Amy’s story is truly an extraordinary one. We reveal how Amy, a lawyer by training, zigzagged her way into the job of chief financial officer at Salesforce. We also dig into the latest challenge she’s taken on.

WEAVER: As I dove in and started learning more and more about Direct Relief, I realized that it’s probably the largest, most efficient, most effective, and most impactful global humanitarian group that you may never have heard of.

BERMAN: Amy is now the CEO of Direct Relief. You may not have heard of it, but you need to know what it is. It is an incredible humanitarian organization that distributes billions of dollars’ worth of medicine and supplies to people in need every single year. We’ll talk more about that later in our conversation. Amy, welcome to Masters of Scale.

WEAVER: Thank you, Jeff. I’m really excited to be here.

Copy LinkEmbracing career pivots and the importance of taking risks

BERMAN: I’m thrilled you’re here. We have so much to talk about. You come from a family of lawyers. Being a lawyer almost seemed preordained.

WEAVER: So, when you say “I come from a family of lawyers,” that’s not an overstatement. I think we stopped counting after we hit 12, 15 in the extended family. My grandfather served on the Washington State Supreme Court. He had four children. All four, including my father, became lawyers. I’m the oldest grandchild. It just felt very natural to become a lawyer.

BERMAN: Did you have a vision of what that would be for you?

WEAVER: Well, if you had asked me in sixth grade what I saw as my future, I thought I would practice law in Washington State and at some point, move into the public sector, and I was determined that I would eventually be the first female president of the United States. And I was so earnest as a 12-year-old that I remember I actually sat down and made a list of who my cabinet would be. And I remember very distinctly that one of my best friends at that time, I decided she just wasn’t there for vice president. And I gave her secretary of interior. I broke the news to her, and she went skipping off. And when she went skipping off, I thought, I knew she wasn’t vice presidential material. What I didn’t anticipate is that my career would take me to Salesforce, to being a CFO, and then now to being CEO of Direct Relief.

BERMAN: Amy’s first step away from the traditional law career she’d always imagined happened because of her love of travel.

WEAVER: I got a call from Expedia, and they were looking for a securities lawyer. Expedia operated all over the world. It was a product that is simply my favorite thing in the world, which is travel. So, I jumped over. It was a wonderful jump, but it was very hard. I remember I told my father on Father’s Day, and the entire day he looked like all he wanted for Father’s Day was for me to say I was joking about going inhouse.

BERMAN: And why? I mean, it’s not like you are leaving the law to go do– 

WEAVER: Be a CFO or a CEO.

BERMAN: Or frankly, to go do some 12-person bootstrap start-up where you’re just like, “I’m throwing away one career, and I’m going to take a big shot.” What was it where your dad wasn’t like, “This is awesome. Good for you.”?

WEAVER: I think what was hard is we have so many lawyers in my family, and they’re all doing different things, but they’re all very strictly within the law. And I remember my father kept asking me, “But will you still be a lawyer?” They really view law in the most lofty terms. There’s something beautiful about it and about the profession. And I think he wanted to make sure I was still going to be part of that. And I’ll tell you many years later, I still feel like I’m part of that. I don’t think I’ll ever not identify as a lawyer.

BERMAN: Yeah. I very much understand that feeling. So, you were at Expedia for how long?

WEAVER: Five and a half years. Worked for a terrific general counsel, but I recognized I’d gotten very comfortable in that second seat. And I really realized I needed to push myself and find that number one chair and see if I could do that.

BERMAN: Where did you find that number one chair

Copy LinkLessons from 2 AM doubts

WEAVER: It was a company called Univar. It was a 100-year-old northwest company, and I was very committed to being in Washington State. So, I jumped and went over, loved being in the number one seat, but within one year, the CEO who had recruited me left, and the new CEO decided to move the company to Illinois.

BERMAN: Wow.

WEAVER: It was one of those times in my life, I remember waking up at 2:00 AM quite a bit and just feeling like I’ve really done the research. I thought about this. I thought I was doing everything right. And suddenly I felt like my career was just kidding and did not know what to do.

BERMAN: Can we just pause for a second because I think this is an experience that so many of us feel. We have these moments where we’re waking up at 2:00 in the morning and going, “I made a wrong turn. I just know it. I feel it in my body on a personal level.” How did you deal with that?

WEAVER: Glad we paused on this because I don’t think people talk about this enough.

BERMAN: Certainly not enough.

WEAVER: There were a few things I learned. One is that 2:15 is never a good time to contemplate your life. No one has ever woken up at 2:15 and felt really great about their decisions. So, I’ve gotten much better at not contemplating life at that time, but the other is you’ve got to take charge of your life. And I did. I decided to leave, and I did it without lining up any other jobs, and it was terrifying, but it was much better than languishing in a role where I knew I was not going to move forward.

BERMAN: What gave you the clarity to say, “I have to leave to be able to get to whatever’s next?”

WEAVER: One of the things that really comes to mind is a favorite quote of mine, and it’s from William Sloane Coffin. He was actually a chaplain at Yale University back in the 1950s, and he was talking about leaps of faith. He was talking about it in religion, but I think it transfers. And he said, “I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.” And I said that to myself probably a million times when I was trying to make that decision. And then again, later in my career with big decisions. Sometimes you’re going to have to take that leap and have the confidence that the wings are going to grow.

BERMAN: I love that for so many reasons, not least of which because Reid Hoffman talks all the time about how entrepreneurship is jumping off of a cliff and building the airplane on the way down.

WEAVER: Yes.

BERMAN: How long did it take to grow the next set of wings?

Copy LinkJoining Salesforce

WEAVER: Not long because Salesforce came calling very quickly, and I got a call two months later asking me to consider being a general counsel.

BERMAN: How did they identify you as their next general counsel?

WEAVER: So, actually they had the chief legal officer. So, the general council was one step below, and it was a man named Burke Norton, and I’d worked for him at Expedia. And he called, asked me to consider the role, and I was not interested. I just left Univar partially because I wanted to stay in the Pacific Northwest, and this was going to require a move to the Bay Area. Also, my kids had just started school literally that week. It just wasn’t going to happen. And Salesforce was persistent.

So, a couple of weeks later, I finally agreed I would fly down. My husband and I flew down and said, “I’ll spend a day there.” Came back to the hotel that night and Jeff asked me, “How was it?” And I said, “Horrible.” And he said, “Why?” And I said, “I think we’re going to have to move.” And I had just gone there, and I had never seen a company with the potential that I saw at Salesforce.

And they also had this incredible thing called the 1-1-1 Program. And this was this new basis at Salesforce where they put aside 1% of their pre-IPO equity, 1% of employee time, 1% of their product all for good causes. And over the time I was there, almost everyone I knew who joined Salesforce, that played a role in why they joined. And within a couple of months, we had packed up, done a mid-school year move and come down to California.

BERMAN: Just on the 1-1-1 Program, I love hearing that that was such a critical part of recruiting at Salesforce.

WEAVER: Yeah. But I think the other thing that’s really important about the 1-1-1 is starting small. So, Marc and Parker liked to joke that when they adopted it, the equity was worthless. They had four employees and they had no product. But if you look at where they are 26 years later, it’s hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone out, millions of employee hours and something like 70,000 nonprofits running on the Salesforce system. That’s what you do and that’s how you scale good works over time. You start small, but you keep at it.

BERMAN: Still ahead, more with Amy Weaver on why she left the corporate world to become CEO of a not-for-profit. 

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Copy LinkCorrecting gender-pay disparities at Salesforce

While you were there, Salesforce was really at the front of gender pay equity. Could you tell us a little bit about those very public efforts?

WEAVER: It was 2015, 2016. There were two women, Cindy Robbins and Leyla Seka. And they went to Marc and said, “Great company, great values, and we don’t know for sure, but we think anecdotally there may be a gender pay gap.” And I think Marc’s reaction was, “Of course we don’t have a problem. We’re great people. We do good things. We don’t pay women less.” Three weeks later, Marc went on an interview live and said, “We would be investigating whether we had a gender pay discrepancy. We would publish anything we found, and we would fix it.”

BERMAN: Wow.

WEAVER: And I’ll tell you, at that point, I was general counsel and half of me as a woman was so excited about what we were doing. As general counsel, I remember thinking, “I’m not so sure this is a good idea.” We had no idea what we were going to find, and we had no idea what the scale was going to be in terms of trying to fix it.

BERMAN: We’re trained as lawyers not to ask a question we don’t already know the answer to.

WEAVER: Exactly, exactly. I was like, “How about a little digging in behind the scenes before we jump in?” But it showed a few things. 

First, huge credit to Cindy and Leyla for raising this. But Marc really makes decisions on where to go on that. And once he makes a decision, we are lined up, and we’re going to make it happen. So, we did dive in. We did a very deep study, and we found out, no surprise really at the end, that there was a discrepancy, and we fixed it.

But one of the things we learned in that is that you can’t do that once. So, we ran the study again the next year, and sure enough, we also found a gap. So, we had to look at what was causing that, how was this repeating? And they’ve continued to do it every year. But I also think this really goes to something about gender paying your expectations at the workforce.

When people first started talking about the differences in gender pay, what I heard a lot was, “Look, it’s because women don’t ask for more pay.” I mean, Bobby’s in my office every week demanding more. And I always hated that argument. I mean, first, as a manager, the last thing I wanted was more, Bobby is coming into my office and demanding more pay. But second, you’re putting the pressure on the person who has the least amount of information.

So, if Julie on your team thinks she might be underpaid, she doesn’t know anyone else is being paid, and it’s her job to fix it; it’s just the wrong approach. What you need is that the company that has the information needs to be using their data, they need to see what’s going on, and they need to fix it. And I think you can use that analogy for so much about what is going on in the workplace.

BERMAN: Yeah. And that is both leading nationally, globally, as a company that has innovation as one of its core values and showing away. It’s also doing what’s right for your team. And frankly, to your point, for your leadership, for your managers who don’t want people in their office every which way.

WEAVER: Exactly, exactly.

BERMAN: You’re incentivizing the wrong behavior. 

Copy LinkFrom chief legal officer to CFO of Salesforce

So, let’s go back to your Salesforce journey because you’re now the top lawyer at one of the top companies in America. You could have a wonderful and linear path from there.

WEAVER: Definitely not done the linear path.

BERMAN: No. And it’s one thing for a general counselor, chief legal officer to jump to an operating role. It’s another thing to become CFO.

WEAVER: Yes.

BERMAN: How does that happen?

WEAVER: Very unusually. So, at Salesforce, I had been there about seven years. And my best point, I was the chief legal officer, and it was 2020. And we realized that our current CFO, Mark Hawkins, who’s just a wonderful person, had indicated that he was thinking about retiring. So, behind the scenes, I was working on a global search for a new CFO with Marc Benioff, our CEO and our audit chair.

And one day I remember Marc FaceTimed me out of the blue. And I remember it very clearly because he was in Hawaii. It was his birthday. He had the Hawaiian shirt on. And he said he wanted to talk to me about the CFO search. I said, “Great. I’ll pull up my list of people.” And he said, “I have a new name.” I said, “Who?” And he said, “Amy Weaver.” And this was so far off my radar screen, so incomprehensible that I just remember looking down at the list and saying, “She’s not on my list.” And I barely remember the rest of this conversation other than just thinking, “There is no way I am going to do this.” But Marc is quite persuasive and it got to the end of the call, and I agreed I would at least think about it. So, the next week I’m thinking about it, I came to the same conclusion, “This is ridiculous. I am not going to do it.”

BERMAN: Because you’re not–

WEAVER: Crazy. Yes. Exactly. It was absolutely unprecedented. As far as I know, this is the only time in the Fortune 500 that anyone has gone directly from the chief legal officer role to the chief financial officer role. It was going to be hard. It was going to be very public. I mean, when you’re CLO, you make mistakes, they’re embarrassing, you get through them. Your CFO, the stock dips, you’re on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

But there were a few things that changed my mind. The first was a conversation with Bret Taylor. So, Bret is now founder of Sierra. He’s the chair of the board of OpenAI. And at that point, he was COO of Salesforce and was about to become co-CEO and a very, very good friend. And I sat down with him, and I said, “Bret, I am not qualified to be CFO.” And he said, “You’re right, you’re not,” which is actually not quite what I was fishing for in this conversation, but he said, “You’re not qualified to be the traditional CPA CFO.” He said, “But that’s not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a partner to help lead the company and set the financial strategy.” He said, “I want you to take the job and make it yours, apply your skills, your experiences, bring that to the job.”

And his comments were such a gift because it immediately took away all of the comparison I was doing in my head between myself and every other Fortune 500 CFO. And it let me start thinking about what were the skills I did have and how could I recreate the role of CFO? The other thing is I started thinking about all of the times I have spoken to other people, whether it’s mentoring or new people coming into the workforce or just general advice. And I would always tell them the same thing. It’s, “Look, you got to lean in. You’ve got to take risks. Don’t be afraid. Just go for it.”

And I realized it was really easy to say to other people and really hard to apply to myself. And I started imagining myself trying to speak to groups of people again, or maybe even going back to Wellesley College, my alma mater, and talking to young women. And maybe they wouldn’t know, but I would know that when I was offered to that point, the biggest opportunity in my career, I turned it down because I was afraid. And so, I jumped in.

BERMAN: First of all, incredible. And to live the advice you’re giving other people, “Take that risk.” What did you do substantively to prepare for the role? Because even if you’re making the role yours, to your point.

WEAVER: You have to have the basics. So, there were a couple of things, and I got some incredible advice. So, the day after I was announced and something had been in the Wall Street Journal, I got a series of texts that evening from Julie Sweet, and Julie’s the CEO of Accenture. And Julie’s another former lawyer. We practiced together at Cravath, and then she had become general counsel of Accenture, moved to become CEO of North America, and then global CEO.

And she started texting me quite insistent that I call her that night. And I remember thinking it was almost midnight on the East Coast, but I did it anyhow. And what she wanted to tell me about was how she moved from general counsel to North American CEO. And she said at Accenture, they knew she was hardworking. They knew she was bright. They knew that she knew Accenture inside out, but she said, “At Accenture, what gets you the credibility is, can you sell?”

So, she said she took the first six months and focused on showing everyone she could sell. And her advice to me was, “Find what is going to give you the most credibility on the job and focus on that.” So, for me, I decided it was Wall Street. It was the relationships with the shareholders and our analyst community. So, immediately started listening to her with our shareholders. We were still coming out of the pandemic, so I was able to do this very quickly on Zoom.

But I also started making sure I could speak the language of Wall Street. And I remember our investor relations team and our PR team really putting me through the paces, just throwing question after question. These days were just brutal as I was trying to memorize a million numbers, trying to learn the approach to this.

I remember one day, Evan Goldstein, who was then leading in IR for us, throwing out a question. It was a pretty technical question financially. And I answered it and I knew it and I was so proud of myself. I looked at Evan and said, “Evan, I got it right.” And he said, “Yes, you got it right technically, but you didn’t sound like a CFO. You didn’t use the words a CFO would use. You didn’t organize it. Do it again.”

And we would do it over and over until I had that comfort level, and I knew I could go head to head with our analyst community. And not only was Julie’s advice just game-changing for me in terms of credibility, but investor relations and working with the analysts and working with our shareholders actually turned out to be one of my favorite things about the job.

BERMAN: It’s a great reminder that getting the substance right is only part of it and having truth tellers on your team, because I’m guessing Evan was reporting to you.

WEAVER: He was, and he did not shy away from giving me that feedback. I really appreciate it.

BERMAN: Which is a big deal because you could imagine a lot of people would be like, “New boss, not sure I want to say this.” So, remarkable. 

Copy LinkLeaping into humanitarian aid

Okay. Amy, you’ve got this stunning run at Salesforce, one of America’s best run companies, certainly shortlist for any number of extraordinary roles. You made another leap in this next phase of your career. So, tell us about going to Direct Relief.

WEAVER: I had an incredible experience at Salesforce and never really considered going to another company. It would be very hard to beat the experiences I had there, just the faith that Marc put into me and the opportunities he put in front of me. But particularly when I took the CFO role, I knew it was going to be an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to see more about how to run a company, but I really wanted to take those experiences and use them in a different way.

So, I announced last August that I would step down from the CFO role and help search for my replacement. And really thinking I would take some time away and then look for either public sector or nonprofit work. So, within a couple of months, an email came in through LinkedIn, cold call, about a global CEO role at an organization I had never heard of, and I came this close to deleting the email.

And I’m so glad I didn’t because as I dove in and started learning more and more about Direct Relief, I realized that it’s probably the largest, most efficient, most effective, and most impactful global humanitarian group that you may never have heard of. And the mission of Direct Relief is to provide medical aid to people who are impacted by poverty, by disasters, by civil conflict around the world, anyone who’s in need.

And that is in 92 countries last year, all 50 states, four territories, we provided nearly $2 billion of medical aid. And when I really think about what Direct Relief does and what our mission is, it comes back to something I heard John Green say on Masters of Scale. So, John, of course, is a young adult fiction author known for things like “The Fault in Our Stars”, but he became really, I think he’d be okay with the word “obsessed” with tuberculosis and wrote the book, “Everything is Tuberculosis.”

And you asked him, “How is it possible that a disease that was generally curable in the 1950s is still ravaging parts of this world?” And John said very simply, “It’s because the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.” And at Direct Relief, our mission is to get the cure to the disease.

BERMAN: Profound. It’s one thing to say, I want to be part of it at the phase of career where you are, you could join the board, you could help them raise money, you could become a global ambassador for them. There are all sorts of things. Becoming CEO is another thing. What did you see as the opportunity to take the experience that you’ve had and apply it and 2, 5, 10x the impact around the world?

WEAVER: So, the move to Direct Relief from being a corporate CFO can look very sudden. It looks like a very sudden and sharp left turn, but it felt actually like a very natural progression. Throughout my career, throughout my life, I have been very involved in volunteering and working with ways to structure and strengthen nonprofits. For the last five and a half years, I served on the board of Habitat for Humanity international, traveling to Poland, to Kenya, to Puerto Rico, around the country really to support their efforts and their mission.

So, the opportunity to get to Direct Relief actually felt very natural. It felt like the chance to take everything I learned in the past and apply it in a new way and to give all of my best efforts, all of the things I had learned and to focus it on one organization. And Direct Relief is absolutely that organization.

Copy LinkWhat Direct Relief does

BERMAN: I can only imagine the scale of operation required for this. Help us understand what you do and how you do it.

WEAVER: Sure. So, we work mostly with pharmaceutical and biotech companies where we either procure the medications or they are donated to us. And then we handle all of the logistics through a network of partners that we have all over the world and in the United States. So, we are that middle process, the supply chain between those.

And they’re really different programs. First, we have some structured programs where we work with organizations. For example, Eli Lilly has a wonderful program called Life for a Child. And they are providing insulin, working with us in countries around the world serving 60,000 children with juvenile diabetes and with plans to scale that to 150,000 by 2030.

Another great project is Global HOPE out of Texas Children’s Hospital that brings together Direct Relief and Teva Pharmaceuticals to fight childhood cancer in Africa. So, very structured programs. We also take excess inventory. So, in situations where a pharmaceutical company may have overproduced or for some other reason have medicine that would otherwise not be used, they will donate it to us. We will find the right place in the world to get that to as quickly as possible.

We also respond to emergencies. So, whether that is a tornado or a war. In fact, Ukraine has been a huge focus for the last three years and we just passed $1.8 billion in medical aid over the last three years to Ukraine. And then we also do something called kitting. That’s putting together kits that can be used ahead of time. So, what that would mean for disasters is we have hurricane preparedness kits.

So, we preposition these June 1st of every year in 70 locations throughout the US and Caribbean, looking at where we think hurricanes are most likely to hit. And the kits have about three days of medical supplies, hypertension medications, insulin, anything you may need during that time period. And the three days is important because that’s about how long it may take FEMA to get there or for us to get there, the American Red Cross to get there. And then if those kits aren’t used, if the hurricane does not hit, on November 1st, the clinic can open them up and use them for community purposes.

Copy LinkApplying Salesforce lessons at Direct Relief

BERMAN: How do you take what you learned about scaling, particularly at Salesforce and apply it to what you’re doing now?

WEAVER: I think there’s a couple of things. First, it’s very hard to scale if you have a rickety platform. You really have to invest in having the right systems, the right processes in place. If you’ve got those, you can scale very, very quickly. So, coming in, as you can imagine, very interested in the technology, what we are doing for data, what we could do with artificial intelligence, but also just the end-to-end processes.

From the first call from a pharmaceutical company to the time something arrives on the ground in Uganda, how do we look at that process? How do we make it faster? How do we make it more efficient? How do we get rid of any of the bottlenecks? So, I think having strong platforms and optimizing for speed are two of the most important areas.

BERMAN: Amy, what about change management? Because you’re coming in, not just as a lawyer and a CFO, but with Salesforce DNA.

WEAVER: Yes.

BERMAN: I mean, this is a hard charging, fast-moving, innovative company. How are you managing the scaling, the growth, the change that you want to bring to Direct Relief and bringing your team along, bringing in new people?

WEAVER: So, it’s all of those things you said. And then I’m also following a CEO who was there for 24 years. Thomas Tighe, also another former lawyer who worked for the Peace Corps and has an incredible legacy with Direct Relief. But needing to come in, really make this my own and gain that trust, looking to a number of things I’ve learned in the past.

One, I went back to Julie’s words about what gains credibility. And I realized it was going to be very different joining Direct Relief. If it wasn’t going to be dazzling them with my knowledge of GAP, it was going to be listening because I’m working with a group of people who are there every day because they care so much about the mission. And doing anything that might change that mission or change the focus on the people we serve is really scary.

So, I came in determined to listen and then meeting with almost every single employee at the organization, meeting with our board of directors, each one individually, and then getting out into the field to meet our partners. So, traveling down to the Santa Barbara Neighborhood Clinic to see what the needs were locally. Traveling to Uganda and Ghana and being on the ground. All of that has been incredibly important in terms of gaining, I think, the trust and the credibility with the team.

But the other part goes back to values. So, I pulled together the top 12 executives at Direct Relief. We went offsite for a day. And I said, “I want to talk about where we’re going. What is the next version of Direct Relief? What’s the evolution? But before we do any of that, I want to talk about what our values are.” And we were offsite for five hours, and we spent the majority of that just trying to hammer out, what do we believe our core values are? And I think if you tell people that you’re starting with your values, any change that comes from that, they can trust that you’re doing it for the right reasons and going forward.

BERMAN: I mean, I have to ask. I understand you don’t rely on government dollars.

WEAVER: We have never taken a dime of government funding.

Copy LinkNavigating the politicization of aid work

BERMAN: But we’re in a moment where healthcare is politicized. Science is under attack, not just in the U.S., but this is happening globally. As you focus relentlessly on this profound mission and you are serving people all over the world and all over the U.S., how are you navigating this? And I asked that question both as a leader of an organization with this profound mission, but also as a leader of humans who wake up and seemingly almost daily, there’s something else to read about the attack on the values of the work that they’re doing at Direct Relief. And I’m not asking you to be political here. I’m trying to understand as a leader how you managed through this.

WEAVER: So, the week I received my offer from Direct Relief was the week that USAID was defunded. And in a time period from that moment to the time I started the job, we watched budget cuts coming up at that point still being discussed to Medicaid. We saw PEPFAR cuts, and they were definitely times when I asked myself and certainly a lot of other people asking me, “Why would you move into humanitarian aid at this time?” This is going to be the most difficult time.

And I really thought about that. I also think this is the most important time to be doing it and the opportunity to have the most impact. Direct Relief is incredibly well positioned. We don’t take any government funding, so we’re very, very solid. We have wonderful relationships with both the biotech and pharmaceutical companies, as well as organizations on the ground throughout the world. That gives us the opportunity to step up.

And I think right now, it’s all about meeting the moment. I talk to people every day who just don’t know what to do, or they talk about things like, “You know what? They’re going to volunteer after they retire.” Or maybe they’ll save up and give their money to a good cause at some point. Now is the moment. This is the time. It’s the time for people to use their money for good causes, their time, their energy.

And for Direct Relief, that means stepping up to where we see the need. And I’m seeing it both in the U.S. and abroad. We’ve got the ability to do more. And I firmly believe that if you have the ability to do more, you have a moral imperative to do more. And that’s what gets me out of bed every day, and that’s what’s helping me navigate these times.

BERMAN: When you look back on your zigzag, how would you describe what you’re great at that you’re now applying at Direct Relief?

WEAVER: I think part of it is building teams. Part of it is learning how to scale, but part of it is also a commitment to showing people that you can do that in a way that is still kind. And I think that there has been a real change in the last 20, 30 years, certainly over the course of my career in who is coming into the workplace. Certainly, many more women are coming in, many more people whose backgrounds wouldn’t necessarily bring them into corporate America, but we haven’t made as much change in terms of showing people that you can succeed as a leader, unless you fall into the same model of every leader that is coming before you.

So, it’s an opportunity where we say “you’re welcome in the workplace, but to move up, you need to act like everyone else who was here before.” I think we still think of leaders as the loudest, the tallest, probably the deepest voice, all things I will never, ever be. I’ve really been determined throughout my career to show people that you can be the most effective and that you can lead and you can do it with kindness and you can do it without necessarily having to fit into that model of everyone who’s come before you.

BERMAN: I wish people could be in the room with us as you give this answer because the entire energy in here shifted as you gave it. You absolutely light up with that response. And I think it’s a really important note for everyone who’s watching and listening. What a wonderful place to bring it to a close. Thank you for being on Masters of Scale.

WEAVER: Thank you, Jeff. Thank you for having me here.

BERMAN: Thanks again to Amy Weaver for joining us. As this episode drops, I am on my way to Santa Barbara to tour the Direct Relief facilities and spend more time with Amy because honestly, after listening to this, if you don’t want to spend more time with Amy Weaver, I think there might be something wrong with you. Seeing how Amy is translating all the scale lessons she’s learned in her career to supercharge Direct Relief’s humanitarian work is deeply inspiring. To learn more about Direct Relief, check out the link in the show notes. I’m Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.