Gemma Allen: “No matter how much you love New York, it’s never going to love you back the same.”

A month before Gemma Allen was born in Cork in 1984, her father lost his job at Ford, and her older siblings spent years joking that she was the curse that brought the house down. Four decades on, the Blackrock native co-hosts and produces "NYSE Wired" from inside the New York Stock Exchange, where she sits down with founders and executives raising billions to build what comes next.

A month before Gemma Allen was born in Cork in 1984, her father, Martin Cummins, lost his job at Ford. There were already four children at home, and she would spend years hearing about her unfortunate timing.

“My older siblings would always joke that I was some sort of curse,” she laughs. “Once I came into the house, it seemed like everything went rapidly downhill.”

Today, Allen works inside the New York Stock Exchange as co-host and producer of "NYSE Wired", a technology program from theCUBE. She interviews founders and executives, produces the show, and oversees its content and studio operations. After an early career at Microsoft and almost nine years with IDA Ireland, she is accustomed to asking how businesses work, where they might grow, and what makes them worth backing.

The program connects Silicon Valley with Wall Street, examining emerging technologies alongside the business models behind them. Guests have included Michael Dell and Jensen Huang, and the schedule can run to around 30 interviews a week.

Gemma Allen (right), co-host and producer of "NYSE Wired".

“We interview some of the real big names and big bets in tech, folks that are raising billions of dollars or building the next frontier,” Allen says.

Her interest extends beyond the invention itself. A product might be technically impressive, but explaining how it will find customers, generate revenue, and operate at scale is another matter. She wants viewers to understand that, including those with little familiarity with the technology being discussed.

The volume suits her. “I’m not someone who ever gets jaded by talking to strangers,” she says. “I get energy from it. I’m a hardcore extrovert.”

A Cork childhood

Allen grew up in Blackrock, Cork City, in a large extended family. Her father was one of 15 siblings; her mother, Marion, came from Barrack Street. Money was limited, but she remembers a happy childhood and parents who were determined that their children would stay in education.

Both had left school at 12. Marion worked in a dry cleaner's, while Martin eventually went to Ford. Leaving school early was not an option they wanted for their children, whatever the financial pressures at home.

Allen began earning money young, babysitting and tidying gardens before taking jobs at McDonald’s in Douglas and a tile shop as a teenager. “I’ve always been pretty self-sufficient,” she says. “I worked the whole weekend before my Leaving Cert.”

Gemma Allen and her family, in Cork, in 1984.

She entered the University of Limerick through its Access program, but her father’s death at the start of university left her wondering whether she should be there at all. She missed the opening weeks and worried about leaving her mother at home.

“I thought, I can’t go to college now. I can’t leave my mom.”

The Access team helped her stay, supporting her as she struggled to settle in and complete her work. By graduation, however, she had achieved a 4.0 and the highest grade in her class, received a Dean’s letter, and been offered a fully funded PhD.

She declined it. “At that point, I wanted to just earn money,” she says. Throughout university, she had traveled home on weekends to work and helped her mother with bills, leaving little money for going out or traveling. Instead, she borrowed €12,000 and enrolled in a master’s in business at UCD Smurfit School.

It led to Microsoft’s graduate program and a job working with international clients, with trips to Brazil, Greece, and Moscow.

“The opportunities I got with Microsoft made me realize there’s an entire world out here for the taking, and I’m forever grateful for all of the opportunities I got.”

A move to New York

New York, however, was where she wanted to live. Two of her father’s sisters had emigrated there in the late 1950s. One, Joan, brought Allen to visit when she was 16, on her first flight. Allen later named a daughter after her aunt.

“I had a longing to live here,” she recalls. “And I could never shake it off, honestly.”

When a move through Microsoft failed to materialize, she applied for a New York position with IDA Ireland. The job came with a visa. Between applying and receiving the offer, she married Leo, from Limerick, who needed some persuading about the move.

Gemma Allen on Wall Street.

“He was really reluctant,” she laughs. “He was so not on the same page at the beginning.”

The work mattered as much as the location. During the interview process, Allen explained that her father’s unemployment had shaped her family’s circumstances and her siblings’ lives. Attracting multinational investment and securing Irish jobs had a significance she understood personally.

“I knew what it felt like to have a parent on the dole,” she says. “I knew what that does to families.”

She spent almost nine years with IDA, describing the chance to represent Ireland and compete for investment as an opportunity to “wear the green jersey.” That connection remains strong, even after 12 years in New York.

She and Leo now live in Williamsburg with their two daughters. She loves the city, but is candid about the expense and the difficulty of raising children without family nearby. Health care, housing, and education all complicate the question of whether they will stay permanently.

“New York is kind of a city that no matter how much you love it, it’s never going to love you back the same,” she says. “You really work for your money here. You carry the cost of it in so many ways.”

Writing and speaking up

Alongside her full-time work on "NYSE Wired", Allen writes for Forbes Women, often in the evenings or on weekends after her children are in bed. Writing became a more serious pursuit after her mother’s death, when it helped her cope with grief. It now gives her a platform to profile women across industries and examine the obstacles they face.

“I believe fundamentally in the potential of women, and I don’t think many women have been given a fair chance,” she says.

Gemma Allen with Katie Perry.

“I want to help women who deserve to have their stories told.”

Asked what she would recommend to a young woman entering corporate America, Allen offers two practical suggestions: take improv classes and learn poker. Improv teaches people to adapt, she says, through skills more structured and deliberate than an audience might realize. Poker offers practice in negotiation, assessing risk, and knowing when to bluff.

“All good negotiators are good bluffers,” she says.

She also advises women to focus on work whose results they can demonstrate. “Don’t just work hard, work smart.” Being busy or doing extra work to impress a manager is not necessarily the same as making an impact.

Speaking plainly has sometimes cost her. She has never found it easy to change her manner depending on who is in front of her, or to master the corporate performance that can come with managing upwards.

“I was never really good at managing up in the ways that others were,” she says, “because I’ve always been very true to what I think.”

Much of that self-belief came from Marion, who was determined that her children would think well of themselves, whatever their circumstances. Allen remembers her grandmother joking that Marion “never had any ducks, only swans”; such was her conviction about her own children.

That confidence had little to do with money or appearances. Allen rarely had the fanciest clothes, but her mother placed far more emphasis on how she carried herself and spoke to people. She credits Marion with giving her the confidence to speak for herself, although she acknowledges she hasn’t always found it easy.

“She used to say to me, and I always say this to my own kids, you should be able to talk to a king or a jester and no one should know which you are.”

“I have understood from a very young age that you have to make your own way and self-advocate,” she says.

Ireland and opportunity

Allen remains equally conscious of the opportunities Ireland gave her. She has little patience for emigrants who dismiss the country, particularly when she considers the education and support that made her own career possible.

“Nothing annoys me more than ex-pats in New York constantly criticizing Ireland. It’s one of my pet peeves. Because God help me if I was born to an unemployed father with five other children to feed in 1984 in the Bronx.”

She entered UL through Access, received support when she considered dropping out, and graduated with opportunities neither of her parents had enjoyed.

“Ireland has a very fair approach to education, and that is so key,” she says. “I got so many chances, and I’m forever grateful.”

That gratitude also shapes how she treats other Irish people in New York.

“I would help any Irish person I could help,” she says, “because I think it’s so important we do that for each other and pay it forward.”

She is unequivocal about what those chances meant.

“I would never have been at the New York Stock Exchange or on a billboard in Times Square if I had been raised in the circumstances I was raised in, in New York.”

Her father’s redundancy shaped the circumstances of her childhood, but Martin and Marion insisted that education should give their children choices they themselves had never had. Allen went from the Access program at UL to Microsoft, from representing Ireland in New York to interviewing some of the most influential people in global technology.

For all the distance traveled, Allen's measure of how to carry herself has remained remarkably close to home. A king or a jester, her mother told her. Talk to them exactly the same.