How Diane Bryant went from homeless teen to CEO of a multimillion-dollar start-up
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Diane Bryant was like many other 18-year olds. She didn’t have a clue about her future plans. Bryant was not aware of the potential for engineering until one her classmates complimented her on her numbers-crunching abilities.
I was in Calculus II during my freshman year at college, and the man next to was talking with me. He asked what my major was. He replied, “Well, I didn’t have a major yet. It’s evident you’re a math whiz.
Bryant was also impressed when he told Bryant that engineers have one of the highest starting wages for bachelor’s degree holders. She says, “I had grown tired of living in poverty and knew that I wasn’t going to be living in poverty.” Following class, she immediately went to her counselor. There, she declared that her major was in hardware engineering.
Bryant’s impulsive choice set her on an exciting career path, taking her from Google and Intel to NovaSignal in Los Angeles. She is the CEO of NovaSignal.
Bryant, who experienced homelessness as a high school student and confronted sexism at the office, had to persevere. CNBC Make ItBryant is now sixty-two and we spoke to her about her career path and how she got from Sacramento couch-surfering to Sacramento’s C-suite.
The 18-year-old homeless
Bryant received a letter from her father telling her to leave home four months prior to graduating high school. She and her younger sister were to be independent from him once she turned 18 years old.
She recalls that all of her belongings were left on her front yard. “I packed everything I owned into my Volkswagen Beetle before we set out on the road.”
The rest of her senior years she spent bouncing around between her sister’s house, her friends’ homes and sleeping on her backseat. She enrolled in American River College after high school and was able to find an apartment near campus.
Bryant describes the disruption as “incredibly disruptive”, but she was determined to make it through. She had no relatives to rely on for financial support – just her own grit and determination.
She made her first major career move
Bryant sees in retrospect that there were people who supported her at every stage of her journey and invested in her success.
While in college, Bryant held three different jobs: a waitress at 2 restaurants, and as a hostess for another. One of the restaurants was home to the same couple every Sunday, after they had finished church. Bryant was the waitress they requested repeatedly. They would sometimes have to wait up to 20 minutes before a table cleared in Bryant’s section. Bryant impressed them with her kindness and professionalism.
Bill Baker was her husband and he learned she was studying to become an engineer. He offered to sponsor her for an internship at Aerojet. Aerojet, which is rocket and missile propulsion manufacturing company, is one of Sacramento’s biggest employers.
The recruiter called me back and stated that Bill Baker was advocating for me. “That job helped me become a more competitive applicant for Intel – it was at that moment I realized the true power of what an advocate can do for you, when someone is willing to use their reputation and position to help someone less fortunate.”
You either adapt, or you die.
When Bryant first joined Intel in 1985, Silicon Valley was in the thick of its “rough and tumble era,” she says – a time when women also made up a mere 5.8% U.S. engineers
Bryant often found herself the sole woman in the room. She quickly learned that she needed to be “one of them guys” to make her feel at home. During her second week on the job, she was in a meeting with all men when one of them cursed – then turned to Bryant and immediately apologized for using foul language in front of a woman.
She recalls that “all of the attention was on me and I turned bright red.” “So I said, ‘No f—ing problem, and everyone looked so at ease, like, ‘Phew, we don’t have to change our behavior because there’s a woman here.”
Bryant realized that Bryant was the only one who could get them to work with me, and make this team successful, if she made these men feel more at ease by adopting their aggressive, direct style. I thought: “You adapt or die.”
That meant swearing more, ordering scotch at outings with her co-workers and buying a BMW with manual transmission (“engineers would never drive an automatic”).
Bryant was a product manager before she left Intel in 2017. She also served as the president of Intel’s Data Center Group.
She would have the same argument with her self every day as she drove home from work: Should I stay? She loved her job but felt her progress often stalled because of managers who she thought gave her fewer opportunities – and smaller raises – than her male colleagues.
CNBC Make It reached out to Intel but they did not return a request for comment.
However, she was the sole breadwinner for her two young children. Once again, Bryant dug into her grit – and when she was miserable in one of her roles, a mentor identified a different job within the company for her, put her in the job and “off my career went again,” she says.
Success is all about her.
Bryant, who left Intel in 2016, was the Google Cloud chief operations officer for a year. Bryant also served as an adviser and board member to several start-ups. Bryant then joined NovaSignal in 2020 as its CEO and chairman.
She was driven by restlessness, a little existential crisis over her legacy and switched from Fortune 500 to lead a startup. “I don’t get any younger so I was looking to make a huge, final impact in the world,” she said. “I was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a job that you’re not only driving the top line and bottom line but also has strong social impact?”
Andy Bryant (the former Chairman of Intel) was one of Bryant’s mentors. He advised Bryant that she do something new: Help a start up succeed.
NovaSignal employs artificial intelligence (AI), ultrasonics, and robotics in order to determine blood flow to the brain. This can be used to detect blood clots as well as other neurological abnormalities such strokes and dementia. According to CrunchbaseNovaSignal raised over $120 Million in funding.
Bryant said, “I cannot imagine a better job.” We must empathize and understand the needs of the customers we serve, the physicians we work with, as well as the standard of their care.
Her emphasis is on being a compassionate leader to ensure employee retention. She says, “I know each one of our 125 employees and can identify what drives them.” “When you have a startup, we usually only have one or two people in each job title – so if we lose one person, we’ve lost an entire organizational function.”
But the most critical skill she’s brought from her past experiences to the C-suite is confidence – even when she has to fake it some days. She admits that she lacked confidence in her early career. She says, “But, you must pull yourself together, regardless of any self-doubt, and say, “I’m going win, I will be successful.”
She continues: “It goes back to grit – no matter how many roadblocks are in your way, nobody wants to work for the person who says, ‘I’m doomed’ … you need to be the one to say, ‘I can do it.'”
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