As an entrepreneur, Tiffany Pham knows how to hustle. Before and after launching Mogul, a media platform that empowers women to voice their ideas and exchange online resources, she was a one-woman show. Bootstrapping and running the platform on her own, she quickly learned the importance of building a reliable and supportive team.
“For the first year and a half, the internal infrastructure was a challenge,” says Pham, who founded Mogul in 2014. “We had to retroactively build the infrastructure because I was a one-person team for a couple of months. I had to support a million users on my own within the first week of the launch. Over time, I was able to onboard the rest of the team.”
Pham, a Harvard Business School graduate, was coding, designing, advertising, bringing users to her platform, and generating content. She was effectively her own engineering, design, brand, content, and finance team.
Pham started the company with the mindset that it’s important to create a culture of transparency and collaboration for all women—young or old, entrepreneur or hobbyist. She believes that culture transcends the digital space, but it has to start from the inside out. Internally, she shapes the culture of her company through feedback, leadership, and a calm demeanor. She works with her team to get them to a place where they can thrive.
“People tell me I’m the chillest hardworking person they know, and that arises from two aspects of life,” Pham says. “One, I’m highly overprepared for any given moment, so I know I’ll overdeliver, and two, I grew up listening to Dale Carnegie tapes when I first learned English. Through these lessons, I came to understand that stress wasn’t necessary.”
Her calm persona as a CEO is almost unheard of given her busy day-to-day schedule. When I spoke to her earlier this week, she told me she had a two-hour negotiation with a finance company, a call with a designer for the beta version of the Mogul website, and a product call. And after our interview, she said she had a speaking engagement and a teammate’s birthday celebration. If that wasn’t enough, she also had to make an offer to a new intern and fly out to San Francisco to present Mogul in front of the board of directors of the National Committee for United Nations Women.
But it’s all in a day’s work to her. The biggest deadline she’s up against is the website re- launch, scheduled for January 13. And through the redesign, she hopes it’ll become even easier to connect with and share resources among the 18.6 million visitors to the platform each week. Mogul has been making big impressions on social media feeds—they get 650,000 social shares for every 1 million visits.
Some Fortune 500 companies are closely following her and reaching out to help generate web traffic to their digital storefronts. WeWork also plans to partner with her to bring Mogul’s business courses to its members.
“Right now, we’re trying to fulfill the mission of becoming a digital hub for women around the world,” Pham says.
As she grows her business, she says one of the most important things she’s learning about is hiring the right talent. She’s retained young hires who show “potential to help Mogul get to the next phase” and is “flexible in terms of growth.” Pham is happy to share that three of her interns are graduating college a year earlier to join the team next year.
Pham’s biggest inspiration to start her business was her grandmother and her best friend. She says her grandmother ran newspapers across Asia to help women. When her grandma passed, Pham vowed to follow in her footsteps by using media as a platform to reach out and connect with women. As for her best friend, they go way back to middle school.
“I sat next to this girl in math class who would always get 100s on her paper, and I would either get a 92 or 93,” Pham says. “I had this serendipitous moment where I thought to myself, if I was going do anything and be good at it, I’ve got to give it my 100 percent.”
Photo credit: Mogul