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Shalini Sardana (She/Her)
Co-Founder & Co-CEO | Startup Mentor | Helping Female Founders Build Successful Businesses and Secure Funding | Fast Company's Honorary List for World Changing Ideas 2022 | Founder Institute Graduate
Shalini Sardana: Elevating Women in Leadership and Entrepreneurship
Shalini Sardana is a remarkable designer, leadership ambassador, angel investor, and founder dedicated to amplifying women's impact as leaders and entrepreneurs. With a commitment to social change and a passion for human-centered design, Shalini has built a distinguished career over 25 years, using her talents to address complex social challenges, particularly around gender equality. Her diverse education and professional experiences blend seamlessly to create a unique perspective that drives meaningful impact.
Professional Background
Shalini is a hybrid designer, bringing together her extensive background in design, social entrepreneurship, and innovative thinking to shape her professional journey. Her experience spans various sectors, incorporating design thinking principles to tackle social issues and promote women's leadership. As a former Co-Founder and Co-CEO of She Raises Capital, she has played a pivotal role in connecting women entrepreneurs to investment opportunities, demonstrating her dedication to creating equitable access to resources for women in business.
Beyond her entrepreneurial ventures, Shalini has made significant contributions as an angel investor, having supported several startups focused on social impact. Her capacity as a Venture Partner at Republic and her role as an Angel Investor with Pipeline Angels showcase her strong investment acumen and desire to support underrepresented founders. This commitment to social change extends to her mentorship activities; she has served as a Startup Mentor at Techstars and as a Design Lead at Social Impact Designs where her guidance and expertise have empowered many budding entrepreneurs.
Shalini's design career includes impactful positions as a Designer and Researcher at both Stanford University and The Clayman Institute for Gender Research, where she used her design skills to promote gender equality and research-driven solutions. Her unique ability to blend design and social science has enabled her to ask critical questions that inspire authentic exploration and discovery.
Education and Achievements
Shalini’s educational journey is as impressive as her professional one. She earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Interaction Design from the California College of the Arts. Her academic background is complemented by a Certification in Graphic and Interactive Design from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master’s degree in Fashion Technology from the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Delhi. Additionally, she holds a Bachelor's (Hons) in Psychology from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, which informs her understanding of human behavior and empathy in design.
Her commitment to lifelong learning is evidenced by her pursuit of training in Authentic Leadership from the Seat of the Soul Institute. This educational foundation equips her with the skills to lead with purpose and to guide aspiring women leaders effectively.
In her tenure, Shalini has also contributed as a lecturer in Design Thinking at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business, sharing her passion for design with the next generation of innovators. She has held positions as an Adjunct Professor and has been instrumental in teaching principles of human-centered design and its application in diverse fields.
Notable Achievements
Shalini's career reflects a series of notable achievements that underscore her commitment to women's leadership and social entrepreneurship. She has successfully founded and led several initiatives to foster a supportive ecosystem for women entrepreneurs. Through her work as the founder of Impact by Women, she has held space for discussions on women's empowerment in business and sought to create platforms that celebrate and elevate women's voices.
Her involvement with organizations like SheEO™ as an Activator reflects her dedication to transforming how we think about entrepreneurship. Shalini’s work with the advisory board of Women Living a Richer Life at Brighton Jones has paved the way for enhancing the lives of women through financial literacy and empowerment.
Shalini’s expertise in design has been recognized throughout her career, as demonstrated by her participation in various prestigious positions. For instance, as a certified leadership ambassador with Take The Lead Women, she has utilized her insights to lead workshops that cultivate leadership qualities among women.
Moreover, her creative contributions as a designer and researcher have helped create tools and frameworks that promote gender equity in design and business. Shalini’s focus on human-centered approaches has proven effective in various social impact efforts and continues to inspire her peers and mentees alike.
Personal Philosophy
At her core, Shalini believes in the profound potential of design to enact change. She recognizes that human-centered design is not just about creating aesthetically pleasing products but about understanding and addressing the needs of the people who will use them. This philosophy underpins her approach to social entrepreneurship and leadership, shaping how she navigates challenges in her career.
Her journey embodies a commitment to asking the “right” questions, driving her to discover innovative solutions that speak directly to the heart of social issues. The alchemy of her upbringing in India, combined with her academic background, has instilled in her a deep sensitivity towards gender dynamics and an eagerness to foster inclusive environments.
Conclusion
Shalini Sardana stands out as a leader, designer, and advocate for women entrepreneurs, whose journey serves as an inspiration to many. Her rich experiences in design and social entrepreneurship, knowledge of human behavior, and unwavering commitment to promoting gender equality underscore her valuable contributions to society. As she continues to drive impact, Shalini remains a key voice in the discourse surrounding women's empowerment, innovation, and design thinking. Her story is one of resilience, creativity, and an enduring belief in the power of design to transform lives and create a more equitable world.
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Clay is a relationship management platform that serves as a personal CRM, helping you organize and deepen both personal and professional relationships. It functions as a beautiful rolodex and CRM available on iPhone, Mac, Windows, and web, built automatically to help manage your network efficiently. Unlike traditional address books, Clay centralizes all your contacts in one place while enriching them with additional context and features to help you stay thoughtful and connected.
Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Clay takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Clay encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Clay work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Clay is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Clay's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Clay makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Clay's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Clay isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Clay instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Clay is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Clay can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Clay's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Clay has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Clay a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Clay's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Clay as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Clay eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.