Stop Settling for the Number Two Seat: What an AI Founder Wants Women to Know (with Rebecca Liao)
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You have watched it happen. A group of co-founders forms, the talent is spread across the whole team, and when it comes time to name a CEO, the woman in the room reaches for a different title. President. COO. "Number two co-founder." She is more than qualified to lead. She takes the operator seat anyway.
Rebecca Liao has seen it enough times to name it plainly.
"It is still, I think, way, way, way too rare for a group of co-founders, men and women, for the women to put their hand up and say, I'm the CEO, or I deserve to lead this, or I think I'm ready to lead this," she says. "Usually they are more than happy being number two. So being the really smart operator to a male visionary. That is a very common trope and archetype. Women are good at it, honestly. We're very good at being great operators."
Rebecca would know. She is the co-founder and CEO of Saga AI Labs, and this is her second AI startup. Before Saga she was a COO in blockchain infrastructure, an early growth leader at a company SoftBank scaled to unicorn status in eighteen months, and an advisor to U.S. presidential campaigns. She has spent her career inside rooms that were overwhelmingly male, and she did not just survive them. She founded companies in them.
So when she talks about the number two seat, she is not describing a lack of ability. She is describing a decision.
The problem is not confidence. It's the story we've accepted about who leads.
Ask most people why women take the operator seat and they will reach for imposter syndrome. Rebecca pushes back on that framing for herself right away.
"I've never had imposter syndrome," she says. "I know what it is. But I think that's just personality work of mine, that I've just never had imposter syndrome."
The harder thing, she argues, is more universal than gender. It is the experience of being the outsider.
"It's not necessarily about being the only woman in a room full of men," she says. "The same could be true of someone from one particular ethnicity when everyone else is another ethnicity." Her own example: as a ballet dancer, she'd be the outsider in a room full of hip-hop dancers just as surely. "Everybody recognizes commonality with one another. And then you show up and they're like, okay, looks nothing like us, talks nothing like us, probably has a different background."
Her answer to that is not to lean harder. She is direct that the "just assert yourself" advice does not hold up. "It's not a question of Sheryl Sandberg's lean in," she says. "Not many people, honestly, not just women, but not many people have the luxury to just put themselves in a position where they're able to lean in all the time."
What works instead is two things. First, decide you belong there, which is the opposite of imposter syndrome. Second, play the long game on relationships.
You don't need everyone in the room. You need a few allies.
The mistake, Rebecca says, is walking into a male-dominated space and reading it as "those are the bros and I'm out here by myself." That framing leaves you isolated before you have even started.
"You do have allies. You can definitely find your friends. And you don't need everyone to be your biggest fan in order to start building," she says. "There are good men who will be your ally and who will support you. It's not going to be everyone at the beginning. You have to be okay with that. But you can find your group, and then you can build from there."
That is the practical version of belonging. Not a solo act of willpower, but a base of support you assemble on purpose, over time.
The real danger in AI is groupthink
Here is where the leadership question stops being personal and becomes an industry problem. Rebecca started the conversation by naming what she sees as the biggest piece of BS in AI right now: the loudest safety alarms.
Her read is that a lot of the scariest messaging serves a purpose that has little to do with safety. "The more scared they can make people feel, the more powerful they can make the technology seem, the closer they can get to that outsized valuation," she says. And she draws a sharp line on what danger actually looks like: "AI is dangerous because it is imperfect, not because it has a mind of its own."
Follow that thread and you land on the deeper risk. When a small, similar group of people writes the story of a technology, you get groupthink. And groupthink has costs.
"It's a dynamic that leads to erosion of critical thinking, honestly," Rebecca says. "And that ultimately is going to lead to worse products, lower progress in the technology, maybe building the wrong things, and also getting valuations and capital allocation to a place where it's really not healthy."
The fix is not fewer voices. It's more different ones. Which is exactly why the number two seat matters beyond any single woman's career. If the people most likely to bring a different angle keep defaulting to the operator role, the room stays an echo chamber, and the products get worse for everyone.
What this means for you
You do not have to found an AI company to take Rebecca's point personally. Her closing challenge applies to anyone who has been made to feel like tech is not for them.
Women, she says, tend to assume they don't have the tech vision, the risk appetite, or the adaptability to be a visionary as well as a good operator. She does not buy it. "There are a lot of people who can do it. And so it's a question of whether you want it. And I would encourage women to consider seriously whether they do ultimately want it."
That is the whole episode in one line. Not "are you capable." You are. The question is whether you want the seat, and whether you are willing to say so out loud.
If you have been running AI quietly in your business and telling no one because the pushback is exhausting, consider this your permission slip. Somebody two steps behind you needs to hear how you did it.
Want your brand clear enough that AI can actually sound like you? Start with the Brand-to-Bot Blueprint at aiqueens.com/brand-to-bot-blueprint.
