Fortune Most Powerful Women

Appreciated the chance to connect with two powerful execs for #MPWDaily this week: 💰 Goldman Sachs' Asahi Pompey, who just added oversight of Goldman's $3 billion Urban Investment Group to her remit 💻 Colleen Aubrey, an Amazon advertising vet who has a new role as SVP for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solutions, aiming to build Amazon's first true enterprise applications business. Asahi shared how to overcome challenges over the course of a career; she didn't make partner the first time she went up for it at Goldman and almost left—but decided to stay. She made partner two years later, then was asked by David Solomon to join the management committee. Colleen, a member of Amazon's S-team, shared the secret to success at Amazon: always growing and taking on new challenges near-constantly. ✉️ subscribe to the newsletter for more (link in comments)! and catch up below https://lnkd.in/gbC5Hkby https://lnkd.in/gEi2GpUJ Fortune Most Powerful Women Fortune

When Colleen Aubrey joined Amazon in the U.K. almost 20 years ago, she worked with sellers of used books, DVDs, and video games. https://lnkd.in/gPKyf_xU As she helped grow the U.K. market’s share of units available on Amazon from the single digits to about 30%, she got a piece of advice from Eric Broussard, a longtime Amazon exec who was around for the company’s earliest days. “If I focused on developing a reputation for being able to deliver great results, then many opportunities would come my way at Amazon,” Aubrey remembers Broussard telling her. “You just want to be the first person people thought of for a new problem to solve or a new mountain to climb. And I think he was right.” In the years that followed, Aubrey moved to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and rose in the ranks of its ads business, culminating in a role as SVP of advertising products and tech. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gPKyf_xU

In 2016, Asahi Pompey was preparing to reach a career milestone: becoming a partner at Goldman Sachs. https://lnkd.in/eWYgRvqU The firm’s then-chief compliance officer had been working toward this moment since joining Goldman a decade earlier. And Pompey had set her sights on Goldman at 25, when as a junior attorney at Cleary Gottlieb she helped advise the bank on its 1999 IPO. “Partner at Goldman Sachs is the crown jewel,” she says. But that year, she found out, she didn’t make it. “It was a low point in my career, and I considered leaving the firm,” she says. Two years later, in 2018, Pompey made partner. And two years after that, she got a call from Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon inviting her to join the firm’s management committee, where she is now the only Black person among its two-dozen members. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eWYgRvqU

Female athletes’ salaries are a hot topic—look no further than the WNBA, where debate raged this year about superstar Caitlin Clark’s $76,000 rookie salary—less than her $84,000 autograph card sold for at auction. https://lnkd.in/enT8i4YT Some argue that those salaries, while meager in comparison to male athletes’ earnings, aren’t so bad in context—after all, the WNBA season is four months, not year round, and players have other financial opportunities too. But less talked about is the expense that goes into being an elite athlete and maintaining a spot in a competitive league. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/enT8i4YT

So much of the AI boom is male-dominated, from the $19 billion raised last quarter alone to a gender gap in who has free time to fiddle with new technologies. https://lnkd.in/etJt4zJm So it’s novel to see a startup doing something unique in the AI space—that is not just woman-led, but unabashedly using a stereotypically female category as a launching pad for new technology. Mariam Naficy cofounded Arcade AI, which bills itself as the “first-ever AI product creation platform.” Right now, that means you can use AI to make jewelry. Naficy is best known as the founder of Minted, the stationery and art printing platform. She says that over her career she’s “focused entirely on the ‘extras’”—or aesthetic categories like jewelry and art, rather than staples—and saw jewelry as a way to show the power of what an AI product creation platform could do. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/etJt4zJm

Add best-selling author to Taylor Swift’s seemingly ever-expanding list of accolades. https://lnkd.in/gWcb9kNj The performer’s self-published The Eras Tour Book has chalked up one of the best-selling debuts on record for a nonfiction work, selling 814,000 print copies in the week ending Nov. 30. The only book that has done better, according to Circana BookScan, was Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, which sold 816,300 copies. Swift, though, would easily have bested that number had she chosen a more traditional publishing route. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gWcb9kNj

Rent the Runway hit 15 years old last month. At the helm of the business still is CEO Jenn Hyman, who cofounded the clothing rental service when she was a 27-year-old business school student. https://lnkd.in/e9craCzR Hyman has seen Rent the Runway through its highs—like the late 2010s, when its unlimited subscription service had started to become ubiquitous in certain markets—and its lows, like the cratering of its business during COVID shortly thereafter. In the years since, Rent the Runway has struggled, and a true attempt at a turnaround is still in its early days. Through it all, Hyman has asked herself two questions to determine if she should remain at the helm of the business: Is she tired? And, more importantly, “Do I still believe?” Read more here: https://lnkd.in/e9craCzR

“The chief merchant leads the personal shoppers of America.” Latriece Watkins, is the chief merchant at Walmart U.S., the company’s biggest division at 69% of its $650 billion in sales; Megan Crozier, is the chief merchant at Sam’s Club; and Andrea Albright, whose responsibilities include serving as executive vice president for sourcing at Walmart. While a successful holiday season takes a village—including COOs to make sure items move through a retailer’s system efficiently, CFOs to manage money in a healthy way, and CTOs to ensure the IT systems sing together—the chief merchant’s role is particularly important. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/e_HnkHhN

The L’Oréal family’s heiress, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, closed 2023 on a high note as the first woman whose fortune notched $100 billion. https://lnkd.in/dcQDGf_G But the tables have turned in 2024 as Bettencourt Meyers becomes among the billionaires to lose the most wealth this year—second only to fellow French magnate Bernard Arnault. The 71-year-old vice chair of L’Oréal’s board has seen her wealth nosedive by $26 billion to about $74 billion since the start of the year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dcQDGf_G

Great article in Fortune that features three of our leaders – our Chief Merchant for Walmart U.S., Latriece Watkins, our Chief Merchant for Sam's Club, Megan Crozier, and Andrea Albright, our EVP of Sourcing. Together, with their teams, they are contributing this holiday season in ensuring we have great items across our stores and online, allowing us to deliver on our purpose of saving people money so they can live better. We are fortunate to be an academy of incredible leadership talent. #TeamWalmart #Leadership   https://lnkd.in/gvFW6SWe