It’s been quite a decade for Clara Shih.

In that time, the CEO and founder of Hearsay Social, a startup that uses predictive analytics to help salespeople reach clients at the right time with the right message, has worked at Microsoft, Google and Salesforce. She created an app that went viral. She wrote a best-seller, “The Facebook Era.” She made friends with Sheryl Sandberg, who then helped her get a seat on the board of Starbucks. And then Shih launched her own company, which has raised $51 million to date.

Given all that, the organizers of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which has drawn some 12,000 female technologists to Houston this week, asked her to speak about how she has learned to navigate and, more importantly, work toward changing the largely white- and male-dominated world of technology.

Shih offered a lesson that has been key to her personal development and to the growth of her company.

Understand the power of listening.

“All those classic stories of males talking over me, of cutting me off, of repeating my ideas their own, have happened to me,” Shih said. “But I’ve learned I can most confidently speak up when I listen first.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy to do. Shih told the crowd at Grace Hopper about her first 360 performance review and how hard it was to hear that her team, the people she cared about, thought she was a micromanager.

To read the rest of this story, please click here