Tech is still dominated by white men. Lola Han’s company is growing, but the road to success has never been easy. Han said she’s faced many challenges in growing her business, but they mostly have more to do with her gender than her ethnicity.

In 2017, Han founded CultivatePeople, a consulting firm that helps startups and emerging tech companies develop better pay structures. The company’s core mission is to make compensation painless for companies while helping to solve pay gaps for high-growth companies by using machine learning to match employee jobs with reliable, global market data. CultivatePeople’s software went public in July 2020, but despite all its success, Han still has to deal with people who doubt her.

"About a year ago, I was at a happy hour and a guy asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was the CEO and founder of a tech startup that makes sure workers are paid fairly," Han said in an email interview. "Later that night, he came back to me and said, 'You know, when you told me earlier that you were a CEO, I thought you meant CEO of a handbag company or something.'"

Situations like this, which have happened more than once, have motivated Han to prove people wrong about her ability to run a company. When it comes to scaling from a startup founder to a CEO, she values mentoring and educational opportunities the most.