We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Terrisa Duenas a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Terrisa, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

When I was very young I learned an important lesson about not being good enough. Since I was the fourth child of an immigrant family and only our Japanese mom raising us, we were going to have strict upbringings about education. It was an ideal situation for my mother and her first three kids. They were pretty much straight A students from kindergarten to high school graduation. I, on the other hand, was a below average little kid in grades. I remember my mom telling me that my kindergarten teacher said I was slow. I didn’t know why since I remember always being first or second in my times tables and then I realized she was referring to my reading speed. In junior high I remember taking a speed reading class and trying to read Watership Down. I recall the teacher picking the book up off my desk, sitting on the desk next to me, moving it back and forth between her hands, thumbing through it then saying, “You should be able to finish this in a few hours.” That’s not what happened. It took me days to get through half the book as I struggled to practice the speed reading skills of the day, then weeks to finish. “I’m so slow”, I thought to myself. But I enjoyed reading if I could do it slowly. I enjoyed many activities if I could savor the learning of them. I thought, “Isn’t it more important that I like what I’m doing?”  Or rather, “Isn’t it more important that I love what I’m doing?” That was the lesson—as long as I loved doing something, then I would be protected from feeling not good enough. How bad of a person could I be if I did something out of love? What I learned and what’s behind my company’s mission is how what you love and protect, and the disposition you have around loving it, that’s your superpower. That’s your defense against external messaging. Our mission is to empower girls to freely explore, multiple, and leverage their inherent interests as they realize their full potential. This is how we change the world.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

In a few words, I’m an idealistic, tenacious dreamer who executes. I love working with things and people. I got into entrepreneurship after a long journey learning to repeat the process of dreaming about what I could do, learning how to do it, doing it, and then getting it done with others. Through this process, I  learned that we’re not here for ourselves, and we’re our best selves when we focus on bringing out the best in others. The breakthrough was when I was challenged to define what nanotechnology was to a group of Los Angeles Unified K12 teacher scholars who wanted a way to explain it to their students. At the time I was deep in nanotechnology theory, leveraging artificial intelligence and developing machine models. How could I impart a technology definition bundled up with a lot of physics jargon so teachers and their students could not only understand it, but even use the definition for further exploration. The definitions of nanotechnology that were out there looked more like explanations that included the concept itself and so I had to go deeper and first explain the definition of “technology.” I couldn’t find actionable definitions of the word technology and kept seeing the word conflated with engineering and science–these three disciplines being very different for the experts who practice them. This is when I realized there was a framework already embedded in our thinking and when the concept of my startup, ESTE Leverage, got its beginnings. The framework materialized when I saw that these disciplines don’t exist in a vacuum and that while there’s always a practitioner, there’s always a receiver of what that practitioner has to offer. The realization was that these disciplines define relationships. What happened next was years of unpacking these connections and seeing how as soon as we start creating value for others is the moment we start thinking like an entrepreneur, scientist, technologist, and engineer. In the end I did get to use it to explain “nanotechnology” to the teachers and their students using the definition of technology in combination with science, engineering, and, finally, entrepreneurship. And that’s when something amazing happened which is the story of ESTE. The story about ESTE Leverage is in flipping the narrative on who gets to go in, stay in, and thrive in the STEM and Entrepreneurship pipelines. It’s not that you’re in or you’re out. As soon as you start creating value for others, you’re in. We are born to be entrepreneurs, scientists, technologists, and engineers because we are born to create value for others.

Any advice for managing a team?

The advice I have about managing teams and maintaining high morale is a framework and a philosophy. The framework is “R-MAP” and stands for Recognition, Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose. Is the team setup for everyone to follow/benefit from/ master/ these? My philosophy is based on the team’s morale and the belief that we’re here to reflect our best in each other. For morale I try to find out by asking and by intuiting what a person’s vision near, far, and for their lifetime are and how to constantly align the work they do with those visions. Bringing out visions helps individuals steer and also helps me strengthen their life message and theirs mine. The more we support individuals in their own life messages, the more powerful a company will be. And it goes beyond allowing fully remote, hybrid, or unlimited PTO. It’s about the dialogue you’re having with your team where you can trust a director with their own philosophy because you’re giving them that opportunity to grow and create their narrative, their success story, and list of accomplishments. I’m going to share a phrase I use to help explain why we’re here to reflect each other. I’m sure I wouldn’t have come to this phrase if I hadn’t spent so many years in deep-tech nanotechnology, defense, and aerospace, and the phrase is: if the universe didn’t need us to be here, we wouldn’t be.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

While getting to work at an aerospace company, inspired by so many colleagues who loved the prototypes they were building, I would have to bring all my resilience. My colleagues exhibited daily passion and deep understanding for why aircraft fly and I found out many of them had pilot certifications. I wanted to experience the joy and understanding they were feeling and went for my pilot’s license. I recognized right away that I would need to convince my instructors that I knew about planes, that I knew about mechanics (I had a PhD in mechanical engineering), and that I had the confidence to fly alone. I remember feeling held back with my check ride and instead of settling into that feeling I thought of all the ways I could present myself as a pilot ready to pass the ground and flight test with an FAA examiner. I started practicing as if I was actually going to Long Beach Airport for my check ride. “Good morning flight school, I’m going to Long Beach today, yes, because any day now I’m going to be advanced for my check ride.” “Good afternoon flight school, I’m going to Long Beach today, yes, again, because any day now I’m going to be advanced for my check ride. Yes, I know I have to wait out the weather and be approved in these conditions and I am eager to fly to Long Beach as soon as the weather clears.” Eventually, I was fortunate enough to get an FAA instructor of instructors and at the end, after I had passed, he said, “You were ready for your exam.” I wanted to hear it again and so as after pausing, perhaps staring at him while he was signing me off, I said, “Thanks for saying I was ready for my exam.” Then he replied, “Yes, you were ready. You were very ready. In fact, I’m going to write, ‘passed with flying colors’ and that’s what he did. And so the resilience came from having to keep believing in myself. I had to lean into the love of flying and I found myself thinking a lot about my pilot colleagues, how fun it would be to fly with them and how happy they would be for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.esteleverage.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/esteleverage/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/esteleverage
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/esteleverage/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@esteleverage