Nadia is Google’s Head of Industry in the USA, Lifestyle Coach, motivational event speaker, mentor, wife, mom of 2 and a real luxury leader. We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing her in New York City. Enjoy this article and Be inspired!
Who is Nadia Carta? Tell us where you were yesterday, today, and tomorrow in one sentence.
What a wonderful question. It’s also difficult. So who is Nadia? Let’s start from yesterday. I would say a girl. Full of ambition and full of dreams. And at the same time, full of grit and doubt. She was this girl who knew that she had many dreams and many things that she wanted to pursue. But at certain times, she doubted that she would make it. And today, Nadia is instead a woman that stepped into powerfully. And she now knows that. There’s no need to doubt herself anymore, and she knows that with patience, resilience, and faith, everything will land all the things she’s continuing to build and design. So that confidence is now part of life. I’m glad that people say, “Hey, you’re inspiring me”, for everyone going through similar journeys or even for people in general. They look for a catalyst or energy source to propel them to land what they want. So that’s my answer.
Yours is a story of a long and beautiful international career, when you started working at Google did you ever think you’d get here today?
God, this is such a wonderful question. My answer is No in the sense that when I started Google first and foremost in 2009, I would have never believed, not even in my wildest dream, that 14 years later, I would have been in New York with my family and I still remember my first day at Google very vividly. I was terrified; I was so scared. Everyone around me was such amazing people with MBAs and speaking; I don’t know many languages and people from America and worldwide because I started in a Global team. We were a group of 36 people and everyone was from anywhere. The Czech Republic, the UK, India, literally from everywhere in the world. And I realized that the only places I’ve been were Milan and Paris. I had never been anywhere else across the ocean and so I doubted myself a lot. I even said Why am I here? What is my purpose of me? I couldn’t understand Even people who talked to me during those training sessions and I would say What the heck is this?
How has Google changed from then to now?
When I started in Dublin, We wear a few thousand people. And I still remember, I’m going to tell you now, I was employee N°…… and today we’re like more than 200,000 And so, the company’s scale and size is entirely something. When I was part of a sub-Italian team in Milan, the office was less than a hundred people. And everyone knew each other and in Dublin, it’s almost like you’re going on an Erasmus. I was 26 and we were all very young, having a lot of fun, and leaving this experience. Very joyfully. We were all building something new and big, but we didn’t fully understand how big because we were so young.
Diana Da Ros: Yeah, but you were changing the world. Definitely
Nadia Carta: We were creating experiences and I still remember calling people in Italy. Because I was in a new business function, my job was to get new enterprises and agencies to buy our products and help more customers. And it was the very beginning of Google search and people. Sometimes I would call people that didn’t even know…what Google ads were, and I mean even me, when they interviewed me and asked me what search engine marketing is? What does search engine marketing look like? What is that keyword? So this was the very beginning of digital advertising and…We transformed a lot of the ways we perform. And what I always say to people that it’s fascinating to me is that Thanks to our job, we created so many businesses. If you are running a hotel business or…if you were running a small business somewhere through Google advertising, back in the day, you were able to lend customers that were transforming your enterprise. Even beyond the revenue, we were feeding jobs and services to thousands of people.
Some say that we don’t belong to the places where we were born but we can find our “home” in the place that best represents us. What is your “home” today?
I know, my God, it’s fascinating because I went to an astrology session on Tuesday. So we can talk. I’m all into stars and planets and spirituality and these astrologers explained that So we are born under a certain sky and that’s what our natal charts are. When we are born, each of us, the planets, is in a unique and specific position. That is unique to that person because they only last a few seconds. And then explained that you’re not when you move to another place. That chart flips. So if you’re moving west of, you’re driving east, you need to be a chart and this, for me, was very insightful because he said, if you’re moving to a place, That is home to you, you will feel so good and so complete and fulfilled. But you will always be unhappy if you move to a place you don’t like and it’s not your home. And I’m like, Gosh, this explains so many things that I took an action item to go and see an astrologer now to analyze what happened to me moving and this is a long way to answer you after 38 years. I finally found my home, which is here in New York in Manhattan for now. We’ll see if we buy upstate and I believe everything happens for a reason. I was born and raised in Sardinia in a town called Siniscola which has a few thousand habitants and I remember when I was a teenager, I always wanted to escape. How was it like Moana? That is looking at the ocean and I want to go and it’s interesting because Sardinian people are either people that want to stay there and don’t want to go anywhere or people that want to go. After all, the island is too small. And even when I was in college, I remember I was sharing a room at one point with another Sardinian girl. And even if she was in Milan, she always wanted to go back. She was like, ” I want to go back”. Whereas, for me going back was never an option. And when I moved to Milan and I was 18, I didn’t know anyone. Not a single person and some people will be, my God, but that’s so scary. You went to Milan and all of that. But I was never scared. For me, everything was such a huge adventure. I travel everywhere in Europe. I visited every city in Europe. While travelling for work, I spent a few days exploring every city to see if any of these cities could have been my home right? Madrid, Istanbul, London, Munich, Hamburg. And I remember that whenever I asked myself, I would see myself leaving here because I was always searching, even when my husband Fabio lived in Montpelier, Madrid. And after living in Milan, I then moved also to Paris. And even when I lived in Paris, I lived in Paris for two years. I said to myself, What I live here and even when we went to Sydney, and I don’t know. That was what I meant. When your soul is always searching? And even when we went back to Milan and we had our daughters, and we bought places For me, I experienced the impatience of searching. Then when we arrived in New York, I don’t know what happened, it was a kind of magic, but it was very quick. It was love at first sight. I travelled to New York many times in my career. And somehow. Like I never said, I never said… We were going to move to New York, but when I got the opportunity, we arrived here. I looked at Fabio and said, We’ve done searching. And I met someone yesterday, another person like me, all into it, etc. And she explained that Manhattan is built on a giant crystal. And I’m going to search for this…because I don’t know anything about it, but I want to conduct a little apparently because of the subway systems, the trains, and all of it. and how they shake this crystal. We are in a very, very peculiar energy vortex. That creates This thing. And there are two categories of people. Either the people that are getting so scared by this and they handle the people that like me cannot get enough.
Tell us a little about your work… How do you help grow companies, leaders, entrepreneurs and professionals?
So as Google at work, I help companies and corporations digitally grasp the next generation of technologies they need to serve their businesses. I lead a team in charge of digital transformation, so we sell platforms and solutions that are based in the cloud that my clients then use to support other clients and so those are products that we sell at scale. To give you some examples to make it practical, we know that the industry is going from a privacy perspective with all the companies trying to be privacy respectful and to manage their data. And so the solution that my team uses is Google Analytics to help our clients analyze, segment, and activate their data so that they can be privacy safe. So it’s a significant work stream that we’re all working on and then another solution and by media, it’s scale. We’re now in the transformation for connected TVs and buying advertising videos, advertising its scale, like reaching more customers according to the data that those marketers own. That’s part of my Google job. And of course, we do all that by following our values and always focusing. Inclusivity ensures that we offer spaces for diverse people to show up and be themselves and reach their audiences.
Since 2023 there is also a New Nadia with beautiful Coaching, Lifestyle, Leadership, Motivation and Personal development projects. How are you developing your business today? Which target customers are you targeting?
I have a big passion for everything that is leadership and management and building leaders of the future. And so, 18 months ago, together with a friend, I founded a company called 99 humans, and we were podcast hosts 99 humans is a platform that humanizes this leadership because we realized that, We always speak about leaders almost like they’re perfect people. They got it all together; they’re always in this Forbes magazine. Very And One ever says, What is the messiness of the goofiness or the travel and the challenges you face as a leader? And this week, with what happened at Google, with the layoffs and in the tech industry, we got a sense like whoever isn’t in a manager position. Had a very tough week. Yesterday night I said, my God, I’m exhausted because I was showing up for all the people supporting and helping them. So 99 humans is a platform aimed at humanizing leadership and diffusing, This constant vulnerability in the world. So if you are looking for a new podcast, you can find us in all the podcast channels, and it’s called 99 humans. And then the third thing that I do as Nadia is I’m on a mission to transform people’s lives and create a corporation to spark people’s lives. The desire for them to thrive and what I call their zeal, and the reason why is that so I’ve been a lifestyle coach for the past three years. I coached more than 500 people across the globe and saw a pattern, And the design is always that people are leaving their lives on autopilot. They have this thing that they leave, they go, but they don’t pause to ask themselves. What am I building? And I’m on a mission for people to realize that they need to step up and be the CEO of their lives. And take charge of what they are. Measure their metrics for their lives. Keep themselves accountable. And thrive. I’m not saying that I’m always this energetic. I have some moments, too. I have moments; I don’t like, like yesterday night, I feel like life energy was out of me. But because I own myself to measure my metrics, I analyzed myself and asked, What do I need? I was like, and I need a long night of sleep. I need a bit of joy. I need to do things that make me happy. So this third mission that I have is to spark people’s zeal for life. My website is going to launch next month. And I’m on the right track to continue transforming these people. I met yesterday with two people; I held the space for them, and they were crying. They often are with me. They said, Wow, Nadia, It transformed me in only 30 minutes. And say, yeah. So here this year, I want to change 50,000 lives!
You give a lot at work and in your private life; how do you recharge your energies?
It’s a very good question because it’s my most important thing. I learned it late in life; if we can say late, I used to live a life I was always gogo. And I mean, you are a mom like me and many moms will certainly read this. And sometimes, we tend to be always on and during the pandemic. I had rough moments. I don’t speak about this with many people, but I was a little depressed and even had some suicidal thoughts at one point. So it was tough, and I was talking to my therapist on Monday. I was like, gosh, when I looked at that moment, it was such a dark place. I was always angry with my family and it was tough, but It was a wake-up call to pause. What needs to happen, Nadia, in your life to reset? And to go into a place where you need to recharge your energies, you cannot always be giving. You need to pause. So today, after all these self Healing journeys, The introspection and analysis and all of that. For me, there are four non-negotiable things that it’s my mantra. And it’s Number one. It’s a Hashtag s, and SJ. So, the first s is for sleep. I understood that. I need seven-eight hours of sleep. And then, if I don’t sleep, I cannot function. And if I don’t sleep, I cannot operate. And I know that some people don’t need all these hours of sleep. For me, It was a tough call. I used to sleep five hours per night. And I was always jittery; I was electrical. It took me a while to understand that the problem was in sleep. So now I have very, very prescriptive sleep hygiene. That means that sometimes I need to decline a dinner. That means that I need to reorganize my schedule to go to sleep. What do I mean? I need to be very intentional, so that’s what I do in all my rituals, essential oils and books. It’s a thing. And we can talk about it one more time. The second thing is I need to move my body. I need to take a long walk every day. I do 12,000 steps. I need to go to my Pilates. I need to go to my yoga. I need to work out,…so for me, it’s non-negotiable. It’s almost like taking a pill. The doctor prescribes it because if I don’t do that, then I tend to spiral and when I go into depression mode, the third thing is Solo self-care. So what does it mean? It means I need it every day for everyone our two that I’m by myself. Either I’m meditating, I’m journaling. I know I love my washi tapes. I sit there. I read my cards. There has to be something where I’m by myself. What does it mean to plan my calendar to ensure I have that time, even during the weekend, with my daughters and my husband? No. Very important for all the moms who will read this to watch out. And then the last thing is Joy, which I know you’ll appreciate this much. I need to have sources. In the week of my day of things, they will generally make me happy. Laughing with a friend, reading a book that I’m passionate about, or going to dinner, like having sources of things that will generally make me happy. That means that I need to know what makes me happy. So I need to spend time on what makes me happy.
Diana Da Ros: This is a big problem. Many people do not know what makes them happy.
So for me, I understood late in life, for example, that I love beautiful things. And so, when I go to a jewellery store or museum or look at a beautiful building, that makes me happy. So every day, I need to have my little dose of joyful happiness, so that’s how I recharge my energies.
Thank you for sharing this because this will be very helpful for many people. And next question, we are going back to the pandemic. What have you learned from these years of the pandemic? Because you changed your life a lot during the pandemic, of course.
The pandemic for me was both terrifying and Healing. Why terrifying? Because I’m an extroverted introvert. So that means that I need to stay with people. To get energy, be happy and move. and I’m going to be very honest when they closed all the restaurants. And I know it sounds silly, but not being able to go out for dinner with my husband and not being out to have that moment or going to a museum or going to a place or going to the office for me. It was like a giant when they told me I was not going to the office anymore. I remember I was coming back from maternity leave. So, I was already home for six months and I was like, I’m not going to be going to the office. I’m terrified and so sad. And then, we moved here to New York and thankfully, in New York, the rules and regulations could have been better.
Diana Da Ros: A little bit different.
Very different, but, That was a big challenge for me. And so what I learned and again, I had all my mental struggle and Fabi and I were here by ourselves and the child care. And I said Healing because It was so dark that I was confronted with, you need to solve it. Now, I’m a person who, under crisis, really operates very, very well. Concern for me, I don’t immobilize and move through the crisis.
Diana Da Ros: It’s an opportunity, of course.
It’s an opportunity, I see, and so, for me, it was healing because I was confronted with my biggest nightmares. And so I was like, I’ve got to do something. I need to find a solution and I don’t want to be in this state anymore. So I started the therapy during the pandemic. I made peace with everything in my life that was hunting me down. I understood I care about the pandemic. It was that moment when I said, my being is non-negotiable, and I’m going to ruthlessly prioritize what I need to be well Because when I’m OK, all the rest of my world and my family will be OK. That is the biggest lesson that I got from the pandemic. I learned that you need to be ready to reassess. And that it could be better. I used to be that person in my life, that person it’ll be like, I have a plan and I’m going to follow the procedure and go with the project whereas My learning was. I have a plan. The project will work for a while; I need to revise the plan. And now, I don’t think in plans anymore, but I believe in principles. I say because remember, during the pandemic, you would wake up one morning and it would be like, we’re not going out anymore and then you would have ten things that you had planned and you couldn’t like that shock of uncertainty. You’re like, God, what do I do now? So that learning of saying you have a plan and you will readjust the plan. So, be ready for things to get changed and the uncertainty. It truly helped me in not being incurred anymore on something. Always be prepared to adjust. We have a plan. Our flights will get cancelled. OK, how can we vote, like having the mental elasticity I’ve been practising through meditation, to be in the present moment and always readjust? All right. OK, the things around me will change. How am I going to anchor myself? With a life balance.
What do you think the international luxury market is asking for today?
I have a group of friends that were very into this topic. I have a friend in the diamond industry and another friend in fashion. So we speak a lot about this topic. When you have endless access to financial resources,…Everything is almost a commodity. If you are in a situation where you can go to any restaurant at any moment, you can go on any vacation or hotel. You can buy any bag you want etc., and at one point, everything looks the same, right? However, to truly make a difference. It’s about an experience customized to your needs and flawlessly executed to what you are In. That moment I give an example when I go to a Chanel shop because they have in, they have incredibly accurate data about me. They know I bought a bag in kind last year, another one in New York, and I live in America, so they may say you have some tax advantages. If you believe in Paris, I have that experience fully customized to who I am. That is number one, and a company can achieve that through careful data management. The business, I mean at Google, is about how you will use your customer data to customize their experience. So, number two is about really having in mind that your customer at that moment’s dream is for you to tend to their needs. I love the American way, for example, of doing this because when I go to a restaurant here, Everyone is focused on giving me the best experience to me. And so what I want is to be cuddled; I want to because if I take two hours to go to a spout to go into a cafe and all of those chances, I’m coming from Stress and another world. And so I want someone to say, Hey, you need matters, let us take care of you… let us look after you. Then look at number three, which you do very well, Diana. Is this concept of Taking away the Stress from the customer when you say I got No worries. We will find a solution, the luxury market as That opportunity. We got this. I know. And our readers might be thinking about when we go on vacation when with the side to go to certain places because we know that that place will have a certain standard and that they’re going to look after my family and me. In a given way. If you book the Ritz Carlton or a mastery and Puglia, which I know, or you want to ensure that That experience will be flawless. You want to avoid taking the risk. You’re going to be upset, or you’re going to be cranky because you have that every day at work or in other. And so if you are engaging with a luxury provider, You want to be flawless, that experience to be perfect. It’s all about customer experience.
What are your recommendations for companies that want to grow?
I’m a fan of the number three, so again, I’m going to lie down in three. So, number one customer experience. No matter your size. You need to take care of your customers and you do it very well, you always send a card. I got your card right away… Even if you are a small business, taking care of your customer base is one number; to do that, you need to have a data management system. And an organization around you to make sure that you take care of your customer. So let’s go to Number two to get new business and customers and master this new communication method. Interactions on social media are now everywhere and you know where your customers are. If your customer is on LinkedIn or if your customer is on Instagram, you have to be there. You have to be there; you cannot afford to say, yeah, I’m going to be someone you need to know. If your customers are on YouTube, you have to be on YouTube, so know where your customer is. And then the third and last is a map; what are your needs? Don’t try to do social marketing. Optimize your expenses if you need to learn how to do social marketing. If you know that all of your customers are on social media, then find a way to optimize your expenses to be on social media, cut somewhere else, be creative, and try to expand. So please don’t focus on doing the things as you’ve always done them, but pause and Think. There are a lot of ways to do that. There are retreats nowadays, but as an entrepreneur, founder or CEO, you need to inspire your people to be creative and take the next level, which means that you need to take care of yourself to do that. And so those are the three recommendations because these can make a difference.
This is Nadia. Be inspired!
Nadia will be the Official Speaker at the World Global Women in Leadership Summit in Boston, USA 24-25 May 2023
Sparkle Your Zeal! To connect with Nadia:
IG: instagram.com/nadiacarta
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/nadiacarta
Photo by Pasquale Cuorvo Photography
Article edited by Diana Da Ros