Exploring Life & Business with Leela Srinivasan of Parity

Today we’d like to introduce you to Leela Srinivasan

Leela, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’m a first-time CEO with a career that’s a hodgepodge of tech marketing, management consulting and sales. I was born in Scotland but was always fascinated by America and moved to the States soon after college, first to Florida then up to Boston. At that time I was working in sales but wanted to broaden my skill set, which led me to get my MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

After graduating business school I moved to San Francisco and switched to management consulting at Bain and Company. Out west I married my husband Joel, who is a Raleigh native and diehard Tar Heel. After our first daughter, Carly came long in 2009 I realized I needed to find a path that would be more consistently fulfilling than consulting if I was going to feel it was ‘worth it’ to leave my child at home with a stranger. So I transitioned careers again, this time into tech marketing, where I spent the following 13 years, at companies ranging from early stage startups (recruiting software company Lever) through mid-stage startups (digital payments platform Checkout.com) to pre-IPO and post-IPO companies (LinkedIn, OpenTable and SurveyMonkey). My last three roles at Lever, SurveyMonkey and Checkout.com were in the position of Chief Marketing Officer.

After three successive CMO roles, I was burning out and decided I was ready for a different sort of challenge, which was the precise moment that I was introduced to Parity. Once I learned more about the inequity that exists between men’s and women’s sports, I couldn’t unsee the problems, and decided I wanted to focus on helping find solutions. I am almost two years into my journey to close the gender income and opportunity gap in professional sports – and I couldn’t be happier about the decision.

Locationwise, between 2010 and 2021 we moved from San Francisco to Chapel Hill, back to the San Francisco Bay Area, then back east to North Raleigh in 2021. Our three daughters are wrapping middle school and in high school now, so we’ll be calling Raleigh home for the foreseeable future. I’ve grown to really like it here – it’s the perfect place to raise a family, and most folks you meet are down to earth. The higher education scene is strong and the restaurant scene is vibrant. Given how much I travel, RDU is also a dreamy airport compared to past options I’ve had to deal with. I know it’s getting busier, but I can still leave my house and be at the gate 30 minutes later.

Aside from my work at Parity, these days I also sit on a couple of boards. I’m an independent director at Nasdaq-traded Upwork, the world’s work marketplace, and I’m on the board of a nonprofit named Empowered by Light, which deploys renewable energy projects to support communities all over the world impacted by climate change. I’ve also stayed close to Tuck Business School and am a member of their Board of Advisors.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Is any road smooth?! That said, I’m a glass-half-full person so I tend to think of ‘struggles’ as ‘problems to be solved’.

The biggest struggles have been in figuring out how to balance work and life outside of work as a driven person climbing the ranks. Living in the Bay Area, I often had terrible commutes which were not super-compatible with a young family. I’ve also worked (and continued to work) in jobs that required travel. There’s an ever-present tension between family and business. My path wouldn’t have been possible (or nearly as fun) without my husband Joel. Over the years we’ve both figured things out together and made sacrifices at different turns.

On occasion, company culture has also been a source of struggle. I’m proud of the companies I’ve worked for, and I try not to regret any career decision (since each one has been a learning experience). That said, I once worked at a company where the culture (not as written, but as practiced) and my own personal values were misaligned. That is probably the toughest situation I’ve found myself in, one in which I was losing sleep over the situation. Ultimately, the right decision all around was for me to leave.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Parity is a sports sponsorship platform that focuses solely on professional women athletes. Our mission is to close the gender income and opportunity gap in pro sports, which we do. by pairing professional women athletes with the right brands for innovative partnerships. We’re proud to have worked with a wide range of companies, from larger companies like AdventHealth, Morgan Stanley and LinkedIn to fast-growing consumer brands like Nulo Pet Food, Zbiotics and IPSY., and to support over 1100 athletes across 85 sports, all 50 states and 30 countries.

To be honest, I’d never heard of Parity when they approached me about becoming CEO. But they could see that I had built the skills (across a career in marketing, management consulting and sales) and experiences (including time working in marketplace businesses) that they thought would be relevant for the role. What they didn’t know is that I’m a sports nut. I grew up playing field hockey and. tennis, and watching every sport under the sun. That said, I’d never really stopped to think about the economics of sport for women athletes, and once I learned from Parity about the status quo, I knew it was a problem I wanted to spend time working on.

You’re probably aware that women’s sports has been on a tremendous upswing over the past several years, with women’s sports fans growing in droves and women athletes gaining in influence. We’ve run the numbers to show that women’s sports fans are 2.8 times more likely to buy a product or service promoted by a professional woman athlete than by any other kind of influencer!

Despite all of that, the vast majority of women athletes don’t make enough money through sport which makes them extra-dependent on earning income off the court or field. In a research study we conducted among 500 elite women athletes last year, 74% said they work another job outside of sports and 1 in 4 works full-time year-round while training 25-30+ hours per week. 93% are stressed about their finances, and 64% say they have considered giving up their sport because of the financial implications. Which is pretty shocking for athletes who are competing nationally and internationally at the top of their game.

Parity goes out every day to talk to brands of all types, to open their eyes to the opportunity to get involved as a partner or sponsor in women’s sports. We then learn everything we can about the brand objectives and compare those against what we know about the 1,100+ pro women athletes in the Parity community before circling back to the brand with ideas to help them forge partnerships with exactly the right athletes from our community.

What sets us apart is our ability to find the perfect match. When athletes come onboard with us, they answer dozens of questions to help us understand who they are, what they care about, and what issues or products and services might be the ones they can speak to with maximum authenticity.

In my almost two years as CEO, my favorite moments have included meeting athletes from our network who are so grateful that we’re out there trying to support them. They’re often overlooked by agents as not being ‘worth it’ because they don’t command millions, or hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands for their time. But I firmly believe there are brands for every athlete and athletes for every brand – large or small.

Any big plans?
We’re continuing to bring on board new brand partners – this week we announced LinkedIn for example (see this link for details: https://impact.paritynow.co/parity-and-linkedin-empower-professional-women-athletes-through-career-development-and-sponsorship-initiatives) – and we’re already starting to talk to brands about their strategies for the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics and Paralympics in 2026.

We’re also in beta launch of an app that our athletes can use to compare notes and network with one another as well as communicate with us. We’re excited to provide a safe space for athletes to be themselves without being trolled online, and to get more value from Parity as a partner.

Lastly, like so many others right now, we’re thinking through ways to leverage AI and other technological advances to scale our business. Stay tuned for more on that.

Pricing:

• Athletes available for internal and external speaking engagements starting at $5,000
• Campaigns featuring one or more athletes are custom-built – we’re happy to put together ideas for any brand

Contact Info:

• Website: https://paritynow.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paritynow/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leelasrinivasan