Female Founders: Nasya Kamrat of Faculty On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Shut up and listen. Entrepreneurship is not new. Find the leaders who you admire most and take their advice, listen to their experiences, and formulate your own style based on the successes and failures of those who came before you. If you are too busy talking, you’ll most definitely miss something.
As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Nasya Kamrat.
Nasya Kamrat is the Co-founder and CEO of Faculty, a certified women-owned spatial storytelling agency that creates human-centric experiences for global brands. An award-winning creative strategist, her work spans traditional, interactive, experiential, and digital media. Nasya volunteers as a mentor for PDX Women in Tech and PIE Incubator Experiment, is a member of Chief, and a founding member of Komuna and the World Experience Organization.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Backstories are never linear. They’re full of twists and turns and surprises. And I think to find your way, you must be motivated and curious and elastic in equal measure.
I initially moved to NYC to work in theater. After a couple years I realized I needed health insurance and a real paycheck, so I got a job in advertising. And it was amazing! I somehow found this incredible family that seemed laser focused on my personal growth; Eventually, I was creating new job titles during my reviews because what I did best — part storyteller, part producer, part strategist — didn’t fit into a singular bucket. But after a few years, I started to realize that the things that I held true and close didn’t align with traditional agency models. I’d be sitting in meetings with brilliant men and women (but mostly men) where one moment it was all about making sure we billed enough hours and the next moment we’d be putting together creative briefs based on abstract personas instead of real people. Disciplines were siloed. Transparency was not even a consideration. So, eventually I left, hopping around a bit on both the brand and agency side, but no matter where I went it all felt similar. Sexism and ageism and racism — all the isms really — were rampant. And the thing that I loved and that did best — telling stories — became watered down deliverables. I just sort of knew that it could be different.
At one previous workplace, I met my future business partner and we decided to start our own agency, Faculty, after knowing each other for only a month or two. Our shared vision was to create an ecosystem where we could bring together the smartest, creative, most thoughtful people we know to offer brands a different approach to the traditional agency model. One that brought together the things we loved most — storytelling, technology, and strategy to our brand partners. It’s been almost 10 years since then!
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
The pandemic. 100%. So much of our business is in experiential and physical design and when the pandemic hit, nearly every single project was paused or cancelled, as I’m sure is relatable to most creatives and ad industry folks. The impact to the business was devastating, but the impact to the entire world was devastating. We had to figure out how to keep Faculty alive while also supporting all of the actual humans involved — employees, clients, all of their families. We ended up coming through the other side, positioned even stronger, but the collective journey (and my own perceived personal responsibility to keep everyone in my world OK) is hands down the craziest thing that’s happened since we started a decade ago.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
About 5 years in, I became pregnant with my son. I had a very challenging pregnancy and had to spend my third trimester on bed rest in the hospital. I irrationally thought that if I told any of my clients what was going on they’d lose confidence in our agency, so I kept it very much under wraps. This was doable, except for one particular client call; I was on a really big pitch via video chat and the woman in the room next to me went into labor. Alarms blaring, hospital machines beeping and people shouting and flashing lights and of course I couldn’t mute fast enough. Everyone on the call sort of stopped and looked at me. And I said, “oh, you know, the sounds of Brooklyn.” They all nodded like that was a totally acceptable answer and we went on with the meeting. New Yorkers are a different breed.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I grew up with two older brothers and always considered myself “one of the guys.” In my early career, I often surrounded myself with mentors who were men, especially in the theater world. But in my early agency days, I had this one executive creative director who took me under her wing and taught me about (and how to embrace) empathy and humor in leadership — seeing firsthand that you can be strong and powerful, but also lead with empathy, which was a game changer for me.
My early founder days felt incredibly lonely because I had this ridiculous notion that if I showed even the slightest crack I wouldn’t be seen as a credible leader. I know this is common for first-time founders, but it’s hard to explain to someone who is silently suffering and pushing through it alone. Fast forward to having my son four years ago and it became very apparent that I needed support to navigate foundership and parenthood at the same time. I started building this incredible network of women and the amount of support and guidance that network provided me was imperative to the growth of my business and my own personal growth. I have a few close friends and confidants who are my go-to support team when my world gets upended — for example, when covid hit and my business went to a complete halt for a few months, I had one friend (hi Ricki!) who picked up the phone every damn time I called her, often starting the call-in tears and ending it with side-splitting laughter.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. According to this EY report, only about 20 percent of funded companies have women founders. This reflects great historical progress, but it also shows that more work still has to be done to empower women to create companies. In your opinion and experience what is currently holding back women from founding companies?
I’ve talked about this quite a bit with other female founders and I think it’s a twofold issue.
The system is not built to support women’s careers. Our growth and financial trajectory simply aren’t the same as our male counterparts by design (and don’t get me started on BIPOC women) and it takes quite a bit of financial security and a certain level of bravado to be able to go at it on your own. From the minute women enter the workforce, we are at a disadvantage because, often, those in the position to hire and advance careers do so based on confidence (even when misplaced) rather than competence.
Secondly, women are generally the primary when it comes to family and parenting. Even when we have supportive partners (and my partner is incredibly involved and supportive) so much of building and supporting a family falls on the shoulders of women. This intrinsically creates gaps in our careers which make making the jump to founding and running a business incredibly challenging.
Can you help articulate a few things that can be done as individuals, as a society, or by the government, to help overcome those obstacles?
On an individual level, women need to start supporting other women’s growth as leaders. Open up your network, help those around you, and bring together all the badass women you know so they can lift each other up. Lifting each other up is paramount to success as a group, and we don’t do it often enough. That said, I am incredibly hopeful that the next generation of leaders will be well-equipped to change the statistics in favor of workplace equity, but it won’t happen unless there are incredible women sponsors to help them navigate the arduous reality of life as a woman leader.
On the other hand, men simply need to MAKE ROOM for more women. Room for our ideas, our voices, and our way of doing business and community building. As much as women need to lift each other up, men need to stop viewing/treating the success of women in the workplace as a threat, but rather as a benefit, especially in the development of new ideas and workplace structures. Upholding systems of oppression are as impeding as those who create them.
I think the government can also make a huge impact here — if we had more supportive parental leave on the government level, it would allow for both women and men to co-parent more effectively. Many countries offer both maternal and paternal leave. The US could do, if only we weren’t systemically afraid of the (positive) changes that would have on our work culture overall.
This might be intuitive to you as a woman founder, but I think it will be helpful to spell this out. Can you share a few reasons why more women should become founders?
In the US, women make up 51% of the population, 41% of MBAs are acquired by women, and in a 2019 HBR study, women were rated more effective in 84% of the competencies that are most frequently measured. While those numbers are promising for women who are considering becoming founders, it is still a daunting leap.
But the best leaders are empathetic, are effective during a crisis, can inspire others, and are able to multitask — all areas in which women excel and all areas that are instrumental to being a founder.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a founder? Can you explain what you mean?
Ping pong tables and beer on tap do not make a company great. The best founders don’t hide behind faux benefits — they listen, they build, and they learn from every one of their failures (which will be many). They’re open to making the changes necessary to support their employees, their clients/customers, and their business.
Is everyone cut out to be a founder? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful founder and what type of person should perhaps seek a “regular job” as an employee? Can you explain what you mean?
I don’t think everyone is cut out to be a founder. An incredible idea doesn’t make an incredible founder, it’s knowing how to realize that idea in a sustainable way while inspiring others to become part of the journey that makes a successful founder. And sadly, founders often don’t get to do the fun stuff — if you are a designer or an engineer or someone who likes to get into the work and get their hands dirty, being a founder can be super depressing and creatively stifling because you rarely get to do the things you love to do as founders are often too busy looking and spreadsheets and contracts.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
- You are not alone. The humans you surround yourself with — your partners, employees, clients, mentors — they want you to succeed. Let them help you.
- Messing up is the best way to grow — if you use your mistakes to evolve and transform, they’re not setbacks. Nobody is tracking all your little missteps except for you, just learn, adapt, and move on.
- Showing your humanity is a strength, not a weakness.
- Shut up and listen. Entrepreneurship is not new. Find the leaders who you admire most and take their advice, listen to their experiences, and formulate your own style based on the successes and failures of those who came before you. If you are too busy talking, you’ll most definitely miss something.
- Stay curious. The minute you stop learning is the minute your business will fail.
How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I am a community builder at heart, and the thing that I’ve focused on over the last few years is how to bring communities together and champion one another. From hosting dinner series’, to mentoring next gen women in business, to donating my time as a board member for an organization that supports women entrepreneurs, I believe that community building is essential to growing both personally and professionally.
As part of my initiatives towards community building, I recently launched Komuna, a co-op network of women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ independent specialty agencies that work together to support brands and be an alternative to the holding company model.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I believe that we need to move away from thinking DEI is a box to tick. If all the underrepresented founders — women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ etc. — create a community in which we are supporting one another and not staying in the silos/boxes that are forced upon us, we will no longer be the minority. Together, our voices can be louder than our individual “subsets” that the hashtag culture and misdirected DEI initiatives are imposing on us. Together we can make a difference that is unachievable when we’re in constant direct competition with each other. The voices of underrepresented founders deserve to be heard, not just because different perspectives allow us to approach problem-solving in different ways, but because we, all of us, deserve a more equitable workplace.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.
Rose Marcario without a doubt. The things she did while she was CEO of Patagonia were game changing — from how she supported working mothers to her commitment to climate change to redefining what sustainability can be in retail. Hearing firsthand about her experience leading one of the most progressive and iconic brands of our time would be amazing.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Female Founders: Nasya Kamrat of Faculty On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.