AUDIO NOTES
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Any time that somebody tells me I can't do something, that's the moment I take it as a challenge and dig in, learn whatever it is I need to learn and become an expert, and do it even better than I thought I could.
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I’m Victoria Bailey, I’m a managing director at Morgan Stanley, and I’m in our Menlo Park, California office.
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I grew up in a small town in New Jersey with a single mom and a sister who I absolutely adored from the moment I was born. My mom is an incredibly strong person, and I think being a single mother, working three jobs to put me through school, it was incredibly impactful to see somebody work that hard, but also still be incredibly dedicated to her family.
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We had a very, very modest upbringing. And so it was really, really important for me to make sure that I helped her in any way I could. I made a promise that I would pay for myself to go to college.
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Miss America is the largest scholarship organization in the world. And when I first became involved, I didn't really understand how the pageant world worked, but I knew that it was a way that I could actually earn scholarship money. I ultimately ended up winning Miss New Jersey and going to the Miss America pageant when I was 19 years old and that afforded me the ability to pay for my way through college.
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Early in my career I had a lot of people telling me that I needed to act a certain way or be a certain way in order to be successful. I was a young working mom, I remembered how hard it was to balance having a career and having young kids at home and so every single day I felt like I was coming in and judging my job and feeling like it was incredibly frustrating.
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And it wasn't until I actually fully embraced all of the things that make me who I am, and brought them to the table every single day, that I became successful.
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My kids inspire me. Every single day they are trying new things and I think that motivates me to get outside my comfort zone and try new things as well. Both my husband and I work incredibly demanding jobs, and I think my kids have learned to appreciate that.
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They actually see the benefit of having both of us working incredibly powerful jobs and that they see that hard work every day translating into success in our careers.
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When I started in this business, our senior manager wanted us to cover venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. And nobody else on the team wanted to do it because venture capitalists at that time weren't making a lot of money. So as the junior person on the team, I ended up being the one it fell to, but I decided to embrace it and really just understand everything that venture capitalists needed as it related to private wealth management.
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I think specialization is incredibly important. I built a network of venture capitalists who then introduced me to all the entrepreneurs that they invested in. And that's how I’ve built my business.
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I believe that advocating for others is incredibly important. I was incredibly lucky early in my career to have fabulous mentors who advocated for me, so I viewed it as my responsibility to pass that along and advocate for others to help everyone continue to grow.
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CRC 5484401 03/2023
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