- Welcome back y'all I'm hanging out with Cassandra Freeman.
Give it up.
(audience cheering)
Who's jamming with the band.
Earlier this spring, the Forbes 30/50 Summit convened
in Abu Dhabi.
The event featured some of the most powerful
and innovative women in the world.
Attendees included Hillary Clinton,
Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai,
Misty Copeland, and Gloria Steinem,
it's an incredible amount of people, just to name a few.
And the whole thing was chaired by journalist
and Know Your Value founder Mika Brzezinski.
Just before the summit here on the show,
Mika surprised two female entrepreneurs
with tickets to a once in a lifetime event,
y'all gotta check this out.
- I would love to invite you both,
I will give you tickets to be my guest at the 30/50 Summit
in Abu Dhabi, share ideas and to help lift women up
from around the world.
Will you come with me? (audience applauds)
- Its so cool.
- Thank you Mika.
- That's so cool. - Thank you.
- Thank you.
- I am so stoked to find out how it went,
so dialed in from New York, please welcome
the co-host of Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski,
as well as the founders of Vontelle Eyewear,
Tracy and Nancy here in the studio.
Give it up!
(audience applauding and cheering)
(upbeat music)
Oh my gosh, so first of all,
Mika, Cassandra, everybody, hey!
(Kelly laughing)
And Mika I'm gonna start with you.
You were host to the most powerful women on the planet,
have you recovered?
Was alcohol involved?
I feel very nervous about that.
- Afterwards, no, it was incredible.
It surpassed all expectations.
It was inspirational, aspirational,
and every woman who attended knew that growing their value,
they left there knowing it was possible
and with things to do for themselves.
We had over 50 different countries represented, 500 women.
And my gosh, this setting was like the Louvre, the palace.
We had a party in the desert, and you had Catherine O'Hara,
and Ayesha Curry and Jessica Alba,
and then this incredible, Misty Copeland,
this incredible panel with Billy Jean King,
Gloria Steinem, Olena Zelenska,
and then my co-host
was Hillary Rodham Clinton. (audience applauds)
So, it was unbelievable.
And as you can see in some of the photos,
we had an award ceremony at the Louvre on that stage.
Tracy and Nancy and I got on the stage
after the award ceremony in the moonlight
and we had our selfie moment (laughs)
to really connect and we just hugged and we were jumping
up and down and going around in circles
'cause we were so excited
about how this event had turned out.
It was remarkable.
- I can't even imagine the energy of just,
you just mentioned so many powerful people,
like powerful women,
like the energy in that room must have been,
I mean you could have got drunk off that alone,
you know, it's just such a powerful thing to be a part of.
Tracy and Nancy remind everybody the challenges
that your business is facing.
- Well we're both from Corporate America,
and we had no experience in the eyewear business
when we launched our company.
And now we have, our sales are growing,
we have a great partnership with Nickelodeon,
but we still need investment dollars to scale our business
in order to get it to the next level.
- Absolutely. - Yeah,
and the whole thing we were excited
and thrilled to be invited to the event,
and our goal was to meet women who could help us
scale and get to the next level of our business.
- Wow, what a room to network in. (laughs)
That's crazy.
So Tracy and Nancy were kind enough
to document their entire journey to Abu Dhabi.
So let's check out what their experience was like.
(gentle music)
- Pack in the car heading to Abu Dhabi.
We are going to rub shoulders with Hillary Clinton,
Misty Copeland, Jessica Alba, Ayesha Curry.
Looking forward to meeting all of the fabulous women.
- What's up!
- Thank you to the Kelly Clarkson Show
for hooking us up with the Forbes 30/50 Summit
hosted by Mika Brzezinski.
We made it.
Welcome to Abu Dhabi.
- Just landed, it's 2:30 New York time,
but it's like 10:45 in the morning here.
Are you excited?
- Super excited and super exhausted.
- She's loud for early in the morning.
(upbeat music)
We have arrived.
Oh my goodness, look at this room, it's beautiful.
(water whooshing)
It's beautiful.
The sun is going down.
- Today is the official day.
- I can't contain my excitement.
- We are trying.
- Hello to everybody from everyone here
at the 30/50 Summit in Abu Dhabi.
(audience cheering and applauding)
We're having a great time.
- I'm so thankful for this conference.
- The more powerful you are,
the faster you can make things happen.
- We're making slow but steady progress
on a range of issues that affect women and girls.
- What really inspires me is that previously
it was thought that first ladies are just soft power,
but we have showed that it is not just a formality,
we're not just a soft force, we are a force.
(audience applauding)
- I was very excited, you know, that I would be here.
I saw you on the Kelly Clarkson Show and I was like,
"Oh my God!"
The rest of the day is gonna be amazing.
The gala tonight is gonna be great
and it's just so great to see you all in person.
(camera clicking)
- I'm so proud you guys came.
- All because of you,
all because you. - Oh, we love you,
you're amazing. - So fun.
- Thank you for having us.
- Thank you for coming.
- Thank you for doing this for us,
you dunno how much we've been networking.
- Good, look at this room, turn it around.
Look at this, ooh.
- Mika Brzezinski, you don't know what you've done for us.
This is an honor,
all these beautiful, smart intelligent women.
- All in one room.
It's amazing, it's just amazing.
(audience applauds and cheers) - Oh my gosh.
Wow!
That's some serious female power.
I wanna go to that event.
- That is the proof.
But it just proves like...
It has to happen in collaboration,
you have to be put in the room
for those collaborations to happen.
So it's remarkable, remarkable.
- So Tracy and Nancy, were either of you
intimidated at first?
'Cause it's a very powerful room,
but they also seem like people that are very warm
and kind of welcoming and friendly.
So was it good?
- Yeah, not intimidated, but very excited to be
at this most lavish conference in the whole wide world.
I mean women from every country, from every background.
And everyone was just so nice to us.
You know, we were like excited, like we snuck into a party,
but after a while people were like,
"we know you, you're the glasses ladies,
you were on the Kelly Clarkson Show."
- [Kelly] Oh, that's awesome.
- And that made us feel just amazing,
and we realized that everyone
just had a great story to tell.
And everyone wanted to help us and talk to us.
- Where do you find these glasses from?
Like where do you get them?
Like where do I buy it? - We create them,
we create them. - This is us.
- But like, where do I go buy this?
- Vontelle.com.
- There you go, vontelle.com.
(audience applauds)
What about you?
Like how was your experience?
- So as Tracy said, not intimidating,
but we got to meet women from every walk of life.
And we found that we all had common ground,
we all had a mission, for us, it was the eyeglasses.
So we created Vontelle, but we met women who were
software engineers, bankers, attorneys,
mortgage brokers who decided that they were going
to start over and create their own business.
They created their own lane.
So, that just goes to show you that,
you know, you think that you're different,
you come from all different walks of life.
We're talking about women who came from 50 countries
around the world,
but we all had that common ground
that we saw a need and we decided to fill it,
if not us, then who?
- Yeah, so Mika, a big part of the summit was mentorship.
So tell us about that.
- Well that's what it's all about.
And my gosh, I couldn't have put it better
than Tracy and Nancy in terms of the experience in itself,
but we have an app, we had networking sessions,
mentoring sessions, and you know,
it sounds kind of like networking, kind of like,
"oh, I gotta network today" is sort of how
some younger women feel like.
It's just kind of challenging and scary.
We pulled it off, not only do we know how to party,
we know how to network and connect.
And you really came away with a lot of key messages.
Number 1, it's about the money and that is okay,
number 2, how to know your value, what is that about?
How to communicate it effectively?
And lastly, no matter what,
you have a much longer runway
than you ever imagined in your life,
so you have time to slow down, do it right,
fall down, get up, start over again.
You got lots of time.
- [Kelly] Absolutely.
(audience applauding)
So Sandra, like mentorship is a huge thing.
It's a huge thing in your life too, right?
Mentorship? - No, for sure.
First of all, Mika, you can have a church
of just the amen of like what it means
to bring people together.
I so believe in all of that,
and you know, I was a professor for 12 years
in New York City at Fordham University,
Pace University, and other universities.
So I've always had to mentor people,
but even through creativity,
we have a whole lane just for emerging artists.
And what's interesting is that
people who are at the top of their career,
they long to actually mentor people
to bring them in as well.
And especially when you think about like
my show, the creator of our show is a guy from Kansas City.
He had nothing to do with California.
So, thankfully someone like Will Smith was like,
"yes, we love this idea, come to LA, let's do it."
We need more mentorship to happen.
- Cassandra, I'm curious what are you doing
on International Women's Day next year?
This is an annual event, we would love to honor you there.
And Kelly,
hello?
- Oh, what? - Can you?
- Cassandra and I will show up. (laughs)
(audience cheering and applauding)
- Okay, that's all you have to say,
where you having it next year honey?
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- We'll go wherever you tell us.
- I was like, first of all, I've never been to Abu Dhabi.
Yeah, I was gonna make that joke
but I was like, "be serious,"
but I'm gonna make the joke now.
I mean, seriously, you picked such a stinker of a place
to throw a party. (laughs)
I was like, that place looks gorgeous.
Like it just sets up the environment.
- They might have seen me dancing in the desert
very late at night with a hundred women,
but maybe not, but probably.
- But I like the idea of that though too,
of like the 30/50 thing, I love how people are talking
from different generations and learning,
because you can learn both ways, like from either person.
So, Tracy and Nancy, so here's a big question,
did you meet anyone that you feel like
can help you achieve what you wanted?
Oh, look at the smiles. (laughs)
You did meet somebody.
- I wanna thank Mika again and Kelly and the show
because yes, we met a lot of people there.
- [Kelly] Yeah. - And people were impressed
by us and very understanding that,
you know, glasses don't fit everyone's face,
everyone's features, and that we created something
that's really good.
And we met some investors,
we can't say names yet but they're working with us.
They're taking us under their wing.
- [Kelly] Oh wow. - They're, you know,
training us and we're going through the process.
So, it's amazing.
- Mika, you won honey. - [Kelly] I love that.
- You did it. - [Kelly] I love it.
(audience applauding)
- This is the coolest thing.
- Unless things like this happen.
So that tells you that this event was perfect,
'cause you're meant to go in and hopefully find a match.
It's like the best matchmaking date that you hope for.
That's what networking's for.
- [Kelly] Yeah. - Well Mika, good job.
And yes, we will be there next year.
Okay Kelly? - [Kelly] Yes.