In this episode of Let’s Talk Tri Delta, we sit down with 2026 Woman of Achievement Julie Kincaid Hill, California/Los Angeles. Julie is an entrepreneur, investor, board leader and philanthropist with a career spanning global real estate, finance and healthcare. Not only has she advised global organizations and broken new ground doing so, but she’s also a champion for the protection and empowerment of women and children. Beyond the accolades, Julie is known for something even greater—a heart of gold, a sharp sense of humor and a generous spirit.
Julie Kincaid Hill, California/Los Angeles, served in boardrooms and offices that had never before included a woman. She’s chaired major university boards, guided institutions through crises, invested in healthcare innovation and built development companies from the ground up. But what makes this Woman of Achievement so special isn’t just what she’s accomplished, but how she’s done it.
Julie shares the defining moments that shaped her, the best advice she’s received—say yes at the door—and some hilarious stories, including the moment she played golf to secure a seat on a mutual fund board! Most importantly, you’ll hear how Julie blends head and heart to get things done. Warm, funny, wise and deeply grounded, Julie offers practical advice for any woman navigating business and life. It’s no wonder she’s been so successful. When someone leads with both strength and kindness, people follow.
[Say Yes at the Door—Woman of Achievement Julie Kincaid Hill]
This transcript was created using automated technologies and may contain errors.
Hello and welcome to the next episode of Let's Let's Talk Tri Delta podcast. It's great to be back here on the podcast today. I'm Mindy Tucker, I'm Tri Delta's CEO. And each year Tri Delta recognizes a few extraordinary women who exemplify Tri Delta's values, who are paving the way for the next generation of women. Today's guest really shows us what it looks like to never slow down. So, excited to have Julie Kincaid Hill of our UCLA chapter with us. She is one of our 2026 Women of Achievement. Let me tell you a little bit about her. She is a powerhouse businesswoman, entrepreneur, board leader, philanthropist. Her work has shaped Fortune 50 companies, global development firms and countless lives, of course, through her commitment to women's rights and education and community. From leading major corporations to founding her own development company to championing shelters for women and children, she has built a life defined by purpose, courage, and service. How proud we can be that she is one of our sisters. Today, we get to know the woman behind all of those accomplishments, her drive, her values, her Tri Delta story, which I always love hearing. Julie, welcome to the podcast. We're so glad to have you. Thank you so much. It's lovely to be here. So, let's start early in life. Can you take us back to maybe some of the early experiences that shaped you? When I think about that relative to Tri Delta and I think about relative to going to college, my story is a little different because my mother literally died nine days before I was going to UCLA and she had been ill for some time. Her story is relevant and that she was one of nine children, I think it was, in a very large family and she was the only one who had gotten to college. Everyone else had to stay home and work to
support the family. They were Swedish immigrants, literally had come over from Sweden just before she was born and her biggest dream, she graduated from college when she was 15. She was valedictorian. She had a college scholarship. She went to Mills College and she was just there for one year. And then her father became ill. And she had to go home.
She was the only one of the children who was not working and bringing money home. So, she was the one selected to come home and take care of her dad. And that was the end of her college career. She could have done anything. So, what she really wanted for me was to get to college and so my life was pretty much shaped for that. And even though she died nine days before I left from cancer that she'd had for some time, she knew I was going. But when I got to UCLA, it was a I was a pretty vulnerable person at that point, still trying to metabolize this. And I'd gone to high school in Covina, which is a suburb. And I thought those girls were so sophisticated and then I got to UCLA and realized these girls had been to Europe already. I mean, it was just it was it was. So, I was a little bit of it took me a while to come out of it. I didn't I didn't rush. My my family was not. organized to think about a sorority or anything, so I didn't rush. But I lived next door in the dorm to a wonderful woman somewhere out there named Claire Carlson, and she had pledged Tri Delta. And she said to me, why don't you do Spring Rush? And I said, gosh, I just don't know if I could. And she was terrific, just gives me a lump of my throat to think about it. Anyway, I did rush. I did pledge Tri Delta, and it changed everything for me. I had a sorry, I didn't realize I was going to get. Oh, I love that, though. It means so much to you. As Barbara Streisand would say, verklempt. Right. It was just, it was wonderful. It was like going home again. It was a beautiful house. I lived in the pledge porch with nine sisters. I realized I wasn't the only person who was intimidated by being at UCLA and it made the world of difference for me. I, you know, it's interesting. So many of the stories I hear from women, they talk about that one person who sort of saw something in them or encouraged them to do something that changed their trajectory and you've just told us one of those stories that Claire seeing you and saying, hey, I think you belong here and I'd love to bring you in. And yeah, and you're doing that and it changing so much. Well. I love hearing that story. From there, from UCLA, you have done a lot. There was a lot for me to run through in your bio when I kicked this off. How did your career begin? What did it look like at the beginning? Well, it was interesting because at the time when I was leaving for UCLA, I think there were 500 kids in my senior class and college counselors at that point were. You know, not something that was affordable. So, I went into my guidance counselor at my high school and I said, I know that I want to be in business so I could use a little bit of advice for what should I study? What should I take? And basically, what he said, you have to keep in mind, I'm old. And this was this was in the 60s. And what he said to me was, no, no, no. Pretty direct quote, pretty little girls who go into business become bitches on wheels. And he just shut down completely. So, I thought about, you know, what was I good at in high school? And I was, my favorite class was English. So, I became an English major. And it wasn't until I went back and I, by my senior year, I'd figured things out and I started taking business classes at UCLA in the, in the business school. But that piece of advice really kind of derailed me. It took a while and then even then when I got out, I worked for an ad agency and realized that I really had to have deeper skills. So, I went back and got an MBA. But I, you know, nothing against English majors. And I think that probably was enriching. And that was, you know, a more balancing thing. But we just didn't get good advice, good advice at that time. And it probably set me back a bit. And it also didn't do much for my confidence. Yeah, well, of course not to be told that in that way. is demeaning. It makes you feel small and it shrinks your dreams. But I do have to tell you a funny story. So, I live in Newport Beach and there are a lot of venture capitalists and people who work here. And there was somebody that I knew through the UCI Board of Trustees. And we had lunch one day and we were talking about this and he has certainly been very successful in his career. And I said, where'd you go to high school? And he said, I went to Covina High and I said, oh, really? And he's younger than I. And he said, boy, do you remember that guidance counselor? And I said, you, you have the same guidance counselor I did. He said, yeah, he told me that I could be a chauffeur because I liked cars and that that was my highest and best use that I could be. I could be a show. Oh my gosh. It's almost criminal. Anyway, I think of overcoming adversity. It's, it's grist for the mill. It's, you know, when you do find your, your direction, it it's clear and it's better, but that, if you want to talk about early days, those, those were my business, but they do shape you. I think that's, you know, you learn from that and they shape you. Bring me along to becoming the CEO of the U.S. division of Costain. Is it Costain or Costain? I don't know how to say that. It's Costain. So that's a lot of years. That's a lot of years. It took me a while to get there. This whole thing about keeping saying yes at the door, if you're asked if you could do something. I think I was mentioning that that was some of the best advice I ever got. It was a woman that I studied. with later on who said you know why you're successful and I said well I've worked my butt off and she said no you've always said yes at the door the synchronicities that come up the things that are laid in your lap sometimes women edit themselves and we don't say yes apparently I have always said yes part of it was a challenge part of it was you can't tell me I can't so that led to a number of different a number of different jobs and um at one point I was recruited by, I was working in LA and I'm working for a large development company and working on the Irvine Ranch, which is a multi-master plan community where a lot of research has been done about home building and mobile oil was starting their master plan communities. And so, I was kind of a, I was in the right place, and I got recruited by a headhunter
to move back to Atlanta to run their land development division. And that. That was I didn't realize quite at the time how much that was going to mean in my career. The fact that a Fortune 10 company would recruit me to run a division of theirs and, you know, they bought me a house and all that. So, that that made me start thinking, obviously, I'm on the right track. Obviously, the preparation I've had is terrific. And then after that, when I came back to California, I took over costing the U.S. development, construction, home building business. And at the time, I was, again, the only woman. It's kind of been the story of my life, partially because the career that I picked was very traditionally male. But that has really fueled me to help open doors for other women. What advice do you have for women in those particular situations where it is male dominated? Well, one of the things that has worked for me, I think a sense of humor really helps because it cuts through. It makes people feel comfortable. It tells you the situation isn't so serious. So, after I'd been CEO for a while, because I was a sitting female CEO in a non-traditional business, I was getting phone calls from headhunters to go to interview for public company boards and one of them that I interviewed for was a mutual fund business in New York and my son was at school in the East Coast. And I thought this will be very convenient. But I didn't really know anything about the finance industry, so I studied tremendously. Anyway, I went back to the interview. It was in New York. It was at the Lynx Club, which is an in-town golf club. I expected to be quizzed by, why, given that you were in this career, do you think you could switch to this career in finance? So, I'd studied everything that I could. I was asked one question. One. And the question, it's a cliche, the question was, you do play golf, don't you? And it ticked me off so badly that I lied and I said, I do, which I don't. And so, I suppose a piece of advice is if the question doesn't pertain, if the question is specious, if the question is singling out a skill that's inappropriate, take some liberty. You know, be a little bold. But I called my husband on the way home. He said, how did the interview go? And I said, well, I think they like me. I think, you know, probably come on the board. I said, but I have a small problem. And I don't. And he said, well, how long do you have? And I said, well, it's interesting because they say they want me to go with them because they play at Augusta. every year. He said, how long do you have to learn to play golf at Augusta? And I said, six months. And basically he said, you're screwed. But I took lessons like crazy. Like we do as women, we prepare and we prepare. And I figured out I could drive the ball. I had no, no short game. I had, but the sense of humor came in a lot at Augusta. And it, if you know this hierarchy, I mean, The way Augusta works, not only get too far into the arcane rules of Augusta, but I think it's illustrative. You have to have a member, a coat who invites other members. And we had nine people on our boards. We had three coats and they invited the nine of us. Well, my guys are kind of genuflecting up to these because these are the captains of industry. They're all CEOs of big companies and they want to be good golfers and they want to be one of the guys. So, I read everything I could about Bobby Jones and how, Augusta was developed I read everything about Martha Burke who picketed them because they had no women but I went and I thought I'm a guest here and I'm not going to make a stand or say anything but I knew I could trip over some wires just without knowing anyway I wound up doing that went into the on the first day went into an area that was a private dining room and I was asked to leave and one of our guys had to escort me out well just as we got to the door one of the members came over and said, it's okay, Mrs. Hill can stay. And I thought, okay, interesting learning. Some members are more equal than others. This guy can grant dispensation. And then it turned out that he changed the order of play. He put me in his cart. He turned out to be such a fun, nice guy. We giggled all the way through. He helped me. And just being able to tell jokes about that and be light and easy with it. was great. One of the jokes was apparently he was quite the drinker. And when they golf, when the refreshment cart came around, he said, I'll have my usual. And they said, he was, I guess I can say this. I don't think he's still alive. His name was Max Taylor. It was Taylor made golf club. So, he was definitely a golfer. And he said, I have my usual. He puts this drink, he called it a lemonade. And it was, it reeked of vodka and it clearly was not a lemonade. So anyway, I said, I'll have what he's having. And that made it a whole lot more fun. And then it turns out one of my proudest accomplishments was he didn't show up for dinner, but I did. Anyway, I think the theme of this, to sum all that up, is say yes at the door. You'll figure it out. It's probably not rocket science. If you can have a light spirit and tease them a bit along the way. There's other stories I could tell you about. Sometimes just saying the outrageous thing can bring people together. It makes us feel like human beings. It makes us feel like we can relate on a one-on-one basis. And I've tried to use that in tough situations many times. It's a connector. It's a way of finding common cause, I guess. Yeah. No, I love a good sense of humor. I think it's really critical. That story, there's so many layers to that story. We could probably talk, we could probably do a whole podcast just on that story if we wanted to, because there's so much in there. And what it must have been like to be in that place where, you know, the whole apparatus is not really designed for you or welcoming of you, but you stepped into it openly and made it work. I think that says a lot about you. It's just what a story. So, it was fun, too. Yeah. Yeah. Do you still play golf? I am a crap golfer. I think at the end of the day, there aren't many of us who are anything else. There are a few people who play well and they're on the tour and the rest of us are just, you know, amateurs having fun, right? One of the instructors I had said, you know, it's meant to be a fun game. Just, you know, figure out how to make it fun for you. And that is kind of a metaphor for a lot of things I've done. It was a really good. piece of advice. Just don't take it so seriously. Yeah, that is good advice. So, tell us what your professional life looks like now. Well, it's interesting, because I'm going to be 80 in July, and I'm going to have a big birthday. And it's like, people say, when are you going to retire? to my brother who literally was a rocket scientist who retired a very traditional engineer's career at 65 and he says well when are you going to retire and I say hey this is me retired this is what I'm going to do so what's wonderful is I've gone into working uh with private equity uh tpg is a private equity firm it happens to be in San Francisco that's where my kids live it works great to go to meetings and go visit the kids and the grandkids I'm on a couple of other boards I’ve gotten very I went to UCLA but that's up the 405 freeway, an hour through traffic. And so, I've gotten very involved with University of California at Irvine and chaired the board of trustees. That has probably been 25 years now. That campus has enriched my life in so many ways. It's like an intellectual candy store. I've chaired boards, you know, in almost all of the schools, just really been. blessed with having this in my backyard and being able to get to know all the deans and to go and take classes if I want to. So, a lot of what I do right now is around that. I've also been involved for many, many years with the domestic violence shelter. My company built the shelter here in Orange County and then financed the research on why women stay and then founded a domestic violence research center at the law school at UCN. And those issues matter to me. I'm involved with with Girls Inc. I'm involved with a lot of I do a lot of informal mentoring, just talking to people about my career. And, you know, people have said, how did you plan your career? And I said, let me give you the best analogy I have for that. And that is that if you're a skier, you go to the top of a run and, you know, you want to go to the bottom, but you don't know which way you're going to go. And you haven't. you may look this way or that way, but as you get into it, you realize you want to go over there because the snow's softer and the sun's out, or you want to go over here to avoid a mogul, or you want to try to find a mogul, or you want to miss some people. When you get to the bottom, it looks like all your turns are linked, but they're not. You do what you're supposed to do as you wind your way down. And then you look back and you think, that's a story. You can see it in its completion. But at the time, that's where you say yes at the door comes in. It's that if you don't say yes, you don't know where that turn would take you. And if you, you know, so I put it, it's an adventure. You're moving fast. You don't know from the top what it's going to look like. You don't have that all figured out. You have no idea. It's at the bottom when it starts to make some sense. And I just, I want to mention something that's really been big in my life. And that was when I started to understand Jung's concept of synchronicity. And that is, it happens to everybody. And that's when coincidences that are beyond statistical probability happen to you. And they can happen in little ways. Like you think about somebody, the phone rings and it's them, or it can happen in big ways where an opportunity opened up. And simply by saying, yeah, I'll step through that door, the coincidences started to accumulate in a good way. And I can get way off into the spirituality of that or whatever, but it's just, it's a philosophy that says, we don't know everything while we're here. And why don't we just go out and try stuff? And if the stuff works out, great. If it doesn't, we will have learned something. Oh my gosh, there's so much I want to still unpack. How did the work in the nonprofit space around domestic violence, how did that come about? Where do you think your inspiration for that came from? Boy, I'm getting chills because there's a synchronicity right there that you asked. Wow. I didn't have that in my life. That was not, I didn't have any relationship issues with that. My mother didn't experience that. It wasn't until after I'd gotten involved, gone on that board. Part of it is just the sense that it's domestic tyranny and it's a violation of human rights. And to abort a woman's capacity to grow and change just struck me as just a fundamental. You know, somebody asked me one time what the definition of a lie was. And it's Scott Peck's definition of lie is absence of truth. Well, doing this to a woman is absence of truth. And it's some people think it's a definition of evil. So, it just fundamentally got to me and then volunteered to build a shelter and then raise money and then, you know, raise money for research. It wasn't until I was at my grandmother's funeral and someone said that my grandmother had been abused. Wow. Because nobody talked about it. But there was something in this, you know, the fellowship of womanhood, the sense of just knowing that that wasn't right. That got me into it. Yeah. I can tell you have a heart for it. And sometimes you don't know about those connections until you find out later something that's been really powerful for you actually has some deeper connection in your life or in your family. You know what's interesting is the FBI statistics will tell you that one in three or one in four women have had some involvement in it so when I've given speeches and I've been asked you know many times to give speeches I always mention this and i always say in this room we know we don't talk about it but there are both abusers and abused and if you are one or the other i want to tell you about this agency is called human options and then just go on because we don't talk about it and it's hidden yeah um I'm going to shift gears a little bit here. When you found out that you were going to be a 2026 Woman of Achievement for Tri Delta, what did that mean to you? First of all, it was a huge surprise. It was a huge honor. One of the women who's been the most important, and I hope she'll, her name is Linda Healy, and I hope she'll watch this, has been a dear dear friend of mine um was a roommate my senior year in the sorority I lived in um after freshman year I lived in for the three years she was a roommate she's remained a good friend we talk still all the time um I went back to the Tri Delta house at UCI and got my circle pin at at 50 years it's it's very interesting to me when I'm asked to make a recommendation um how many of my friends want their daughters to think about Tri Delta. The hardest part, as you know, is that the Theta Pi house at UCLA left. It's going to come back. I know it's going to come back. It is. We're working so hard. I know. And anything I can do to help with that, I'm more than happy to. But there has always been a network. There's a very strong alum group here. Most of them could be my daughters. And so, I don't go and socialize, but I'm here and available if they need me. It's just that the fundamental basis of women's friendships has been one of the most important things to me in my life. It is very, very special. Yeah, we certainly do that well in Tri Delta, I think. Yes, absolutely. One thing, I have a, I don't know if you can see this here, but I have a crescent moon on my little chain. And I have a six-year-old granddaughter. And crescent moons are something that she and I have shared. And the other night, we had big storms here. The other night when it cleared, there was a crescent moon. I should send this to you. On a great big moon with a star right next to it. Oh, right next to it. And I took a picture and I sent it. to her and I said tell your mom and dad to tell you all about Tri Delta and how this relates to mommy or grandma's um sorority oh it was very it was very real Well, you are certainly a star in our crescent. You are so sweet. I mean, we are just thrilled to recognize you and get to hear your story and celebrate you this year. So, thanks for the time today. Thanks for sharing a little bit about your Tri Delta journey and your career journey and your heart. And we're just thrilled to recognize you as one of our Women of Achievement. Thank you so much, Mindy. And it's so nice to know you. And it's so nice to be reconnected in this way. It's lovely. Well, we're thrilled to have you. I hope everybody else out there enjoyed this interview. Some great stories from Julie. I hope you will join us this summer at our convention. We're going to be celebrating our Women of Achievement at convention this summer. So, if you haven't signed up to come yet, go to TriDelta.org. We hope you'll like, subscribe, and rate this podcast. We have three stars in our crescent, but we love those five-star ratings. Thanks for joining us today. And until next time, Delta Love.