Today, at CEDIA Expo 2024, we celebrated the women of our industry at the Women in Consumer Technology Annual Luncheon. Not only was there good food and good conversation, we also were lucky enough to get to experience a talk from Sylvia Acevedo — an engineer and businesswoman who happens to also be the former CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA and chair of President Obama’s White House initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanics in early childhood leadership. Also she worked at NASA on the Voyager 2 team. Basically she’s a badass.

Her talk was all about her journey and career trajectory, which began when she was a young girl whose grandparents and mother were from Mexico and who didn’t have much money. She credited the Girl Scouts as being the first organization that pushed her to think outside the box, even about thinking entrepreneurially. She said her Girl Scout troop leader taught her a few lessons.

“The first was to never walk away from a sale until you hear no three times,” Acevedo said.

But with all the sales experience she was getting (cookies), she was also interested in science. I didn’t realize that people woke up one day and simply decided they were going to do rocket science, but that’s exactly what she did. And she went all the way to Stanford. In fact, she was one of the first Hispanic students at Stanford University to earn a M.S. in systems engineering.

“If you believe you can do it, no one can stop you,” she said.

This seemed to be the central theme of her talk. Believing in herself all the way from Stanford to NASA to Apple to Dell to Autodesk and eventually to the White House and back to Girl Scouts. Going back to that first lesson, she’s rarely taken no for an answer.

It hasn’t been without its challenges but with the right attitude, confidence and knowledge, you can do anything. You just have to find your niche and eventually your value-add.

Now, ladies, let’s go out and kick some ass.