Interview with Sarah Bond

Sarah Bond was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in October 1978.  She is one of seven siblings. Her father was a CEO in the telco industry and her mother worked in technology at AT&T before Sarah was born and then returned to work in philanthropy. Sarah says of them: “They are extremely hard-working people, who always instilled a sense in me that I should do the same.”

One of Sarah’s influences stems from a conversation with her father, she explains: “I turned to him and I said, ‘Dad, I just want to let you know that you are never going to have to worry about me, because I’m going to grow up and be a nurse, and I’m going to marry a doctor, and I’m going to be just fine.’  He said, ‘No, that’s not right.  You can do whatever you want, not because of who you marry, but because you do it.  If you want those things, you can be the doctor.  Don’t feel like you have to marry a doctor to achieve those things.’  It really stuck with me, this idea that, my gender, my race, was not a limiter, and that I could achieve anything I wanted, even though all of the imagery and everything that I saw as a young girl was that the way to succeed was in who you married.”

Sarah also tells the story of how her maternal grandmother stood up to the Ku Klux Klan which has given her the understanding that she can do anything, she says: “I’m proud to be the granddaughter of a woman with that type of grit and when I encounter something that I think is impossible, I just remember that she stared down the Ku Klux Klan.”

In 1989, when her parents divorced, Sarah moved to the UK with her father who came to run a part of British Telecom. She went to Moira House school in Eastbourne where she sat her GCSEs and moved to James Allen’s Girl’s School where she gained A levels in economics, maths and history.

She says: “In general, the more mathematical a subject, the more I liked it and the better I was at it.  I love the logic of math.  It’s somewhat beautiful.”

Having completed her A levels, Sarah applied to universities in both the UK and the US as she was not sure where she wanted to continue with her studies. She eventually opted for the US and attended Princeton. However, after two years, Sarah decided to take a year out and work and apply for a transfer to Yale where she could be in the centre of a city. She says: “I worked a year.  My first year of official working was at a company called Kenan Systems, that actually got acquired by Lucent Technologies during that year.  I worked in the marketing department. I applied to go to other universities, and I got accepted to Yale, and I got super excited about Yale which is where I finished university.”

In 2001, Sarah interviewed and received offers for roles at both Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. She decided to accept the role at McKinsey in their San Francisco office. She explains: “In the end, I decided to take the offer with McKinsey, because, while I loved the idea of working at Goldman, I was convinced that McKinsey would give me an opportunity to actually work more with people, and different types of problems, versus the same type of problem over and over again. I liked the thought that I could travel the world, I could work with all sorts of different companies, and I could have that exposure. … I had a great time at McKinsey.  I worked in San Francisco.  I did six months in Korea which was a fantastic experience at a young age and then I did a whole year in Spain, because I wanted to become fluent in Spanish, and I wanted exposure to Spanish culture.”

Having always wanted to go to business school, Sarah applied for, and was accepted, to Harvard in 2004. She says: “I had always planned to go to business school and round out my education.”

One of the unexpected learnings for Sarah was an understanding that everybody is just human, she explains: “You realise that, for all of people’s successes, that everybody is just human; everybody has something that they’re not so proud of, or something that they struggle with.  Therefore, what you really need to focus on is the humanity in people. I didn’t expect to learn that from going to business school.  But, that’s actually the thing I’ve always kept with me.”

After Harvard, Sarah returned to McKinsey to their Seattle office where she became a manager, progressed to senior manager and then associate partner. One of her clients was T-Mobile and when informing the CEO that she was pregnant with her first child; she was asked if she would join T-Mobile as the Chief of Staff. She says: “I was kind of surprised.  I couldn’t believe it. I went home and I thought about it. They had offered me a couple of roles there over the years, because I had done a lot of consulting work in costs and operations, marketing, strategy and pricing.  I thought, that’s a pretty amazing opportunity in my early thirties be the chief of staff to a CEO of a Fortune 100 company and to get to see an entire management team, and everything that it took to actually run a whole company.”

In 2011, Sarah joined T-Mobile and during her first week in the role, it was announced that AT&T was intending to acquire the company. After nine months, the deal was not approved and T-Mobile was left needing to turn the company around. During her two and a half years as Chief of Staff, Sarah worked with three CEOs including John Legere, the current CEO. She says of the work: “That was just a great ride. T-Mobile acquired MetroPCS, which was another wireless company; and the company went public (“IPO’d”).  We completely turned around the company with a strategy that was launched called the ‘Un-carrier’ strategy and I got to be part of the leadership team that made all those decisions to actually completely turn around the company.  T-Mobile went from losing a half a million subscribers every quarter to gaining a million subscribers every quarter in a flat market.  It was incredible.”

After two and half years, Sarah moved to lead the strategy and business development group within T-Mobile.  She adds: “That was a strategy group for a private company, that had become a public company, so I had to completely build that function to be a public company strategy group to handle what we do at board meetings, to be able to do assessments on M&A, and all of those other things.  It was an awesome ride.”

Following her success in the business development group, Sarah was promoted to Senior Vice-President of Emerging Businesses with a view to extending the T-Mobile brand into video, banking, and data monetisation services. During this time Sarah had her second child; a son. She says: “I nursed both of my kids to twelve months, which is one of my greatest achievements, being able to nurse two kids to twelve months while working full-time.”

The product that Sarah is most proud to have led the creation on is called ‘Binge On’ a product innovation that enabled people to truly have unlimited data and continues to this day.  With video quality increasing, T-Mobile found that people were consuming huge amounts of data. Sarah says: “We were having congestion problems; the network was really under a lot of stress. So, we sat there, and we said, ‘Wait a second.  This is video that somebody’s watching on their phone; a tiny little screen where you can’t tell the difference between 1080p and 480p.  So, we created a product by which people would opt in to having their video at 480p, and in exchange they could keep unlimited.”

It was a risk. “I remember really clearly, I was driving into the office on a weekend to sit down with the team to go through all of our calculations and how we had laid everything out and I was on the phone with my boss, and he goes, ‘Sarah, you are gambling with the entire business right now.  I think I’m going to come in and look at it with you.’ The day we switched it on, we predicted it (network load) would go down by 9.8 per cent, and it actually went down by 10.3. Today, having your video over mobile phones at 480p is pretty much the industry standard, and it’s because of what we created there.”

Having spent six years at T-Mobile Sarah decided she wanted to move on and continue to grow and develop. She says: “I had a great run; I’ve had two babies, I’ve been promoted, I’ve had different jobs, I was able to launch a product. This was an incredible experience, but I thought about the next six years, and I just couldn’t imagine having that much growth again at T-Mobile and I wanted to keep growing.  I wanted to keep doing more and learning new things.  I decided I wanted to work at a core technology company.  Wireless is tech, but you’re transferring someone’s bits.  I wanted to go work in a company that made the bits.  I wanted to work for a global company.  And, and I wanted to learn new leadership styles.”

In 2017, Sarah was approached by Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President of Business Development at Microsoft, and invited her to interview for a role they wanted to create for her as General Manager of Business Development for Disruptive Technologies. The role would see her focusing on things like quantum computing, block chain, the intersection between biology and computing.  She adds: “All these new technologies that we know are going to be really big but were quite nascent.  I was thrilled to go and take that role.”

While working in this role, Sarah was invited to interview for a role leading business development and partnerships for the Microsoft Gaming Division as they were looking for someone who had knowledge of consumer business and wireless. Sarah adds: “I ultimately decided that I really wanted to do it because everything I had done in my career before then had always been about the intersection between consumer and tech. As much as I was loving what I was doing in disruptive technologies, it felt like it was a job that was calling to me.”

Sarah says one of her proudest achievements at Microsoft has been presenting at the company’s E3 game conference; watched by 100 million people every year.  She explains: “For E3 2019 I was asked to go out on stage and be part of the show.   Just that in itself was an honour.  I was asked to announce a new product that my team helped create called PC Game Pass, which was also amazing, but what was really special about the entire experience was that they had never before had an African American Microsoft executive present, let alone an African American woman present.”

Sarah recently wrote, ‘In the tech industry, I am not only viewed as different because I’m a woman, but because I’m African American.  That means fewer than one in 30 people in my industry are like me.’  She says that her father taught her to turn the negative perceptions of other people on their head. He would say: ‘If people are staring at you, they’re staring at you because you’re so great.’  Sarah continues: “He didn’t want me to feel self-conscious.  He didn’t want me to feel less because of other people’s perception of me and so he always said, ‘Turn it on its head.  It’s because you’re so beautiful, it’s because you’re so brilliant.  Don’t feel self-conscious about that.  Feel proud of it, that you are unique.’ I think I learnt to use it as a mental trick, like it’s an experience to be unique, but if you view it positively, you can view it as an opportunity to do something for others, and to carve a path for others who will come after you, and to make it easier for them to get to that same place, which is really why I work.  I look at my children’s faces and I realise I could make a decision to stay at home, I could not be getting on a plane to Japan or China or London, or Kenya. But I get on that plane because if I don’t get on that plane then that’s a missed opportunity for me to shape the world and make the world a more inclusive world for the people who will come after me.”

With the gaming industry having a reputation as being white male dominated, Sarah talks about how to change the image.  She says: “I think that there is a lot that we can do, that we are doing, to change that.  The first is to ensure that the community around gaming is a place where everybody can play and have fun.  Where, toxicity is managed, where you can have control over the experience that you have. That there are parental controls, that if someone says something to you that makes you feel uncomfortable, you can do a setting so that you don’t need to hear that anymore and so that it can be a place where everybody could show off and be themselves as they want to.  We do a lot of investment in that area, for that specific reason.”

She also believes that having a diversity of creators is also important to ensure diversity of content. She adds: One of the things we invest a lot in in my team, because my team is responsible for curating the content that you see on Xbox today, is ensuring that we create space for new types of games for diversity of creativity to flourish on the platform.  We specifically try and seek out stories and creators that are unique. We have a role to play as a platform on creating room for those creators to flourish and have success, for people to play those games, and for anybody to feel that they can be on our platform and enjoy what they are doing.”

Sarah was part of the delegation to open Microsoft’s first development centre on the continent of Africa in Nairobi, Kenya where she met with the President of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta.  The centre has provided 500 jobs within the development center, and it is estimated that every job will create a further five jobs in the region. The jobs are high paid and skilled roles in tech which are normally not available in the area meaning that Africans normally have to leave their homeland and families to be able to work in the sector.

Sarah says: “This opened up so much opportunity.  People dreamed of working at Microsoft, at Google, at Facebook, but they have to sacrifice being with their family and in their own culture. We were offering this opportunity to people right there.  We opened a development centre in Kenya, and one in Nigeria, and we travelled across both.  So just the experience of bringing that to the country was incredible for me, which is part of why I went with the delegation.  In terms of meeting the President, I have to say, he’s a really nice guy.  He’s really friendly.  He was quite informal. We shared with him our vision.  He was thrilled to support it and it was just this incredible experience to see his enthusiasm for what we’re doing, and what we were bringing to his country. I was amazed at just how lovely and friendly he was.”

“I would say generally the thing I’ve learnt that you should follow your intuition.  That, sometimes you have a feeling deep in the base of your spine.  Every time I’ve had that feeling, I’ve been right.  But sometimes, you’re like, oh, I’m just imagining that.  There’s no data to back that up.  I’m telling you, if the feeling doesn’t go away, you’re not imagining it.  You should follow and seek out environments where you feel comfortable, where you feel supported, and where you can do your best work. So, every time I made a decision where I’ve leaned into that sense, in the long run it’s been positive.”

On the subject of what she would do differently, Sarah says: “I would be more forgiving of myself and others.  I held myself to such a high bar.  I’ve held many of the people around me to such a high bar. Now, as a mother, as someone who’s seen so many experiences around the world, I realise that it’s OK to not be perfect or have the right answer.  It’s OK to falter a little bit.  It’s actually good.  If you are always getting it perfectly right, you weren’t putting yourself out there enough. So, I think if I would do it anything differently, I would have taken more risks, I would have been OK with falling down a little more.”

Sarah has  a few points of advice to anyone thinking about a career in technology today, she says: “First, it’s a great industry, you should totally go into this industry.  It’s fast-paced.  Your ability to have impact on the planet is unparalleled.  This is the only industry you could change a line of code and at the speed of light your decision can go around the entire globe, and it can impact billions of people on the planet. Secondly, don’t be scared of coding. It’s just another language.  It’s a useful tool.  I think it’s been kind of propped up as something that’s so impossibly hard that people think they can’t do it.  But you can do anything that you put your mind to. Thirdly, find the part of the industry that speaks to your heart.  It’s not just about dollars and cents, it’s not just about leadership, it’s not just about managing people.  It’s about you having clarity of the mark that you want to leave on the world, and how you’re going to do it because then you’re actually going to have real sustainable happiness.”

“You know, there’s a lot of barriers associated with being a woman in the world today.  I’d love to be able to sit here and say my advice is for everyone and that I have no special advice for women because it is not necessary, but we are not there yet. The thing is that the world is not like that; not yet.  So, my advice to women is to never let somebody tell you what you cannot do, do not listen to those voices.  Turn up as your best self and find others who support you in that, and don’t be surprised when not everybody does, but find the group and the pod that will let you just do your best work.

My advice to men is, to watch out for those moments where you see women treated differently and to be a good ally and to give a helping hand, because that will make everybody’s world better; women and men.”

Sarah Bond YouTube Video

Interviewed By: Elisabetta Mori in London on the 13th November 2019

Transcribed By: Susan Hutton

Abstracted BY: Lynda Feeley