Interview: Kathleen Barrett, CEO of Backlight – Adam Mendler

I recently went one-on-one with Kathleen Barrett. Kathleen is the CEO of Backlight, the parent company of Iconik, Wildmoka, and ftrack. Adam: How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth? Kathleen: I got here in the most roundabout way possible. I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New York. My mom immigrated from Poland, so as a first-generation college student, there was a lot of pressure to do something safe. I went to NYU thinking I’d be a doctor, switched to economics because I was always a math person, then ended up at Goldman Sachs because people I met along the way coached me in that direction. I clearly had no idea what I wanted and wasn’t even fully aware of the options out there. Goldman was a genuinely great place to start. The organization really invests in young people, but I always knew I’d cap it at five years. I wanted to feel the impact of my work day-to-day, and corporate life wasn’t scratching that itch. So I left, took a year off, had a lot of coffee chats, and stayed curious. That space led me to
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