I was born in Kansas City, Kansas, not Missouri. Very important distinction if you’re from Kansas City! I grew up with a very Midwestern lifestyle. My dad is a biologist, my mom was a nurse and a social worker—both of them super idealistic. For most of my childhood I lived on this state park, and my dad was the caretaker but also helping raise the money to permanently save the land. It was this 300-­acre plot of original prairie. A lot of my early memories were of him running this summer camp and taking care of all kinds of wild animals and running around on the prairie. I went to college at University of Kansas, so I stayed fairly local. I had planned to go to law school and follow a more idealistic path, follow in their footsteps, but ended up in college falling into video games. And that was the inflection point that changed everything.

Yeah, so you accidentally became the world’s first professional female gamer.

Yes, very accidentally. I was at the University of Kansas living in a dorm on the Honors floor. I had been elected the president of all the dorms, so I was living in this apartment, not a normal dorm room. And I was hanging out with mostly all these guys. I had always had guy friends. They were telling me about this game they were playing and they started getting me playing Doom. I loved it, so I got into Doom with them. Then they started telling me about this other game that was coming out—a sequel called Quake. When Quake came out, we all played together and we formed a clan, which is like a Quake team. We formed one of the very first clans and it was me and seven guys. To me, this was totally normal. Our clan was actually pretty competitive, and we ended up winning the very first clan tournament ever. We eventually moved into a house (though I technically didn’t live there). The eight of us were in this house just playing Quake 24/7. And, we were hosting LAN parties and having all of these people come visit us from all over the country. Other Quake clans would drive from multiple states to come play with us in person. And, this is in the days of 21 inch CRTs that were so heavy, but we were carrying them around competing and playing. So we had this whole scene going on and we all got really good. I was competitive with those guys, with one exception. We had one player who was just phenomenal, one of the best in the world.

At that time we started getting to know some of the guys in Dallas around the shooter scene there, where some of the most noteworthy teams were making first person shooter games. We started getting to know them and that included the developers of Quake. We even drove down to Dallas to talk to them in person. On one of the trips down to Dallas, a friend had met John Romero, who was a designer of Quake. This friend knew I was really good at games, and on my behalf he threw down a challenge. He told Romero, “There is this girl… she could kick your ass, and she wants to play you.”

“There was a ton of harassment and hate and sexism and abuse. People would send me hate email all the time. The emails were not just things like ‘women shouldn’t be in games,’ but very intensely personal and insulting. Every inch of my body was criticized, every aspect of my personality.”

So without my blessing and on my behalf he had thrown the gauntlet down. I had no idea if I could beat the guy or not, but over a couple of weeks we coordinated the time and we ended up going down there for this match. By the time we arrived, a lot of people in the gaming community had heard about it and there was actually gaming press there. We played at his office in Dalla s­­he was like a legend at this point ­­he was kind of a celebrity in the video gaming world. We were playing best out of three death matches and he won the first of the three, and then in the second game we were playing to 25 and he was up like 19 to 3, and I remember at that point he said something sexist. I just remember thinking that I cannot let this happen. I can’t lose. I can’t stomach what’s to come if I lose this match and all of the taunting that will come with it. I can do better than this and I’ve got to turn this around. And just like that I went on a rampage. I ended up winning that match and the next one, so I beat him the best two out of three.

After I won, it turned into “a thing” and I got a lot of coverage in gaming magazines and he had to create an online shrine to me. It just all snowballed from there. I was in gaming magazines. I got an offer of sponsorship from a competitive league to be their first full time paid cyber athlete and help this organization recruit a team of other pro video gamers. I had sponsorships from joystick companies and I got the chance to travel around the world and play in video game tournaments. It was a blast. But, it was not planned. It was very much a surprise.

What were some of the best moments of that time for you. What were your favorite things about that experience?

The thing I remember most about that experience was that it opened up the world for me. I had never been out of the country. I grew up in Kansas City and had been there pretty much my whole life until this point. It opened up all these experiences and other cultures and things I never really even knew were accessible. I got to travel to other countries and people hosted me in their homes. It was a great education. And I had never really thought, “Oh, I’d love to leave the country but it’s not possible.” It’s almost like I didn’t realize it was out there to be experienced. So for me this was an awakening and the first time that I saw the rest of the world. It was also just a surreal experience being strangely internet famous. It came with lots of pros and cons, but it was also a very unique, singular experience that not a lot of people get to have. Thanks to my internet fame, I met a lot of friends and interesting people. It connected me to the world in a way that I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.

What were some of the tough parts and the tough lessons to learn?

The worst part was that even at that time ­ it was pre­-Facebook and pre-­Twitter and all of that ­even at that time I got a lot of harassment. There was a ton of harassment and hate and sexism and abuse. People would send me hate email all the time. The emails were not just things like “women shouldn’t be in games,” but very intensely personal and insulting. Every inch of my body was criticized, every aspect of my personality. People would dig up old pictures of me in high school and new pictures and write these elaborate multi-­page teardowns of every aspect of my being. At one point an ex-­boyfriend posted a lengthy insulting, derogatory post on one of the biggest gaming blogs at that time.

It was exhausting because it just felt like I couldn’t escape it ­even at home. I didn’t get much harassment that went beyond the digital at that point thank goodness, but I did get a few phone calls. It just started to feel like I had all of the downside of being famous without any of the upside—like money. I lost a lot of privacy. But I wasn’t really making much money. I didn’t have any of the upside or protection that comes with some types of fame. There was no real benefit to this. The benefit of connecting with people was so drowned out by how bad it felt to be in the spotlight. It really made me realize that I did not want to live like that. It was not an enjoyable way to be in the world, and it took its toll on my relationships. It just made­­ it made me view people as much more hostile than I had ever thought they might be.

“It just started to feel like I had all of the downside of being famous without any of the upside—like money. I lost a lot of privacy. But I wasn’t really making much money. I didn’t have any of the upside or protection that comes with some types of fame. There was no real benefit to this. The benefit of connecting with people was so drowned out by how bad it felt to be in the spotlight.”

Yeah, for sure. So how’d you get out?

Well, I kind of slowly backed away, you know? I quietly just backed my way out of the room. I was in a relationship—I had ended up dating that designer of Doom and Quake. We were in a relationship and we dated for five years, and it was pretty serious, but I ended up breaking up with him. And when that happened I moved to LA and away from Dallas. I took an initial job in games, but I made a conscious decision that I was going to start to look at other opportunities that would be adjacent but not directly in games. I consciously made an effort to step back from some of the press opportunities. I just slowly backed away from the attention.

It wasn’t an overnight decision. I didn’t do anything dramatic. I just felt like, “I have to get away from this, because it feels miserable and exhausting on a day-­to-­day basis.” At that time, I was working for Warner Brothers and I met this sales guy, Matt Golden, at a vendor who was selling technology to us. I was making games at WB, but Matt and I really hit it off. I thought he was great, and at one point he called me up and offered me an opportunity to take a junior sales role working for him. I’d never done sales before and I considered myself quite shy. He said, “I think I can teach you to sell, and you’ll be selling a little bit to game companies, but other companies as well.” So I jumped at that chance and that was a fork in the road for me. Ever since then, I’ve touched games, I’ve never completely left them, but I’ve never worked full-time in the industry since that point.

Was there any reaction from the community of, “Hey, where are you, we want to keep abusing you?” Or did they just move on to the next thing?

They just moved on to the next thing. I would occasionally get little pings, positive and negative. Even to this day­­ it’s hilarious to me, but even now I’ll occasionally walk into a meeting and somebody will say, “Hey, I know you. I remember who you are.” Occasionally, things will pop up online or somebody will post about me, and it’s fifty­-fifty. Sometimes it’s kind of positive and friendly and other times it’s negative and derogatory. But more than anything, the interest just faded away, and I was grateful for that. It is honestly what I was hoping would happen. It really was a gradual pulling away from the entire thing.

And now you’re an executive in technology. How did all of that experience, good and bad, inform your work now?

It informs my work in so many ways. I have been quite lucky, because that experience in gaming opened a lot of doors. It is still a great conversation starter, or sometimes it’s the reason somebody knows my name and makes a connection. So I took that baseline and went down a different path and found some great mentors. These folks taught me new skills that could build on top of my knowledge of gaming.

One of the biggest things I took away from my experience in gaming is that it was (and still is) a male-­dominated culture and industry. But I thrived in that environment and I made some great friends and connections. There were many great things about that experience, and I feel like I learned how to relate and thrive in that very male culture.

Silicon Valley (where I work now) is actually not much different. A lot of my time since those days has been in sales and business development. It is still an extremely male culture. It’s also a culture filled with highly intelligent people. Similarly, gaming culture was filled with extremely bright and passionate people. I see a lot of the similarities between those gamers that I used to socialize with and the people I sell technology to now, even if they’re not gamers. The personality types are similar, the interests are similar, and the way that I’ve been able to relate to them and gain credibility is similar.

In the end, building on that experience has been quite helpful, and it makes me feel comfortable and at ease because this is my spot. Even though I’m still often the only woman in the room, I feel like this is my place, this is what I’ve always been a part of. That comfort level was gained through my experience in gaming.

“I was going into the office everyday and like, ‘Yep, everything’s amazing and this is great and I’m here to crush it,’ and just executing on my job and nobody knew. Nobody knew that at home I had this young daughter who was crying for her dad who no longer was willing to see her, and that I was about to be evicted.”

Throughout this whole time or most of this time, you’ve been a single mom. How is that?

Being a full custody single parent is difficult, regardless of the circumstances. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done. Trying to combine being that with being a tech executive has been incredibly challenging. All along I knew what I wanted for my daughter: I wanted to build a career that would inspire her. I also knew that I didn’t want to give myself up. I didn’t want to follow the motto of parenting that says, you dedicate all your time to your child, and you minimize time away. I wanted to have a life, too, because I wasn’t done living. My philosophy on parenting is that you build a life that shows your child how rich life can be, and how great and rewarding a career can be, and how great your friendships and relationships can be. So, I had this idea in my head of building an amazing life so she could see that and have that model. I feel like I’ve mostly done that, but it has been exceedingly hard because I feel like I have lived on a treadmill for the last decade of my life. From the second I wake up in the morning, I have a job. I have a job at home, and I’m a mom and I’m doing that and I go to work and it’s extremely intense and focused. And then I get home and I value that time at home with her so highly and I want that to be quality time. I try to give her that at the level of quality, the level of engagement that she deserves. It’s hard to succeed at that when I am so exhausted from working so hard all day at a challenging job. It’s tough, and trying to keep up the facade at work that I’m fine and I’m not exhausted and I’m not just completely run ragged is not easy.

For the first five years of single parenting, I was also extremely broke. Right after I moved to San Francisco as a newly single mom, I was about 12 hours away from being evicted from my apartment here. And it was absolutely terrifying. And yet, I was going into the office everyday and like, “Yep, everything’s amazing and this is great and I’m here to crush it,” and just executing on my job and nobody knew. Nobody knew that at home I had this young daughter who was crying for her dad who no longer was willing to see her, and that I was about to be evicted. Trying to keep up that dual existence was just incredibly hard, and I am grateful it’s easier now. But I am also acutely aware of the fight that single parents must fight. It’s not easy.

Balancing work and single parenting, I’ve often got this insanely ridiculous challenge going on at home, and yet the second I show up to work, I need to execute at a high level as if I’m just one of the other guys who’s 25 and single. Trying to maintain that level of energy, the enthusiasm, that facade that everything is fine­­ that has been the hardest part.

Where do you find you support networks? 

I am extremely independent. I’m not good at asking for help and for the first six or seven years of being a single mom, I really did not ask for help unless it was truly an emergency. I kept to myself and I did not let people help me or even know I might need help. Over the last few years, I made a conscious decision that I need to let more people in, and I have formed this amazing network of really wonderful, supportive friends. I’m working on learning to be more vulnerable and tell them when I need help. They are amazing and always show up for me. The biggest change on this front was actually just a couple of months ago. I moved my mom, who is retired, out from Kansas City and into my house. Now she’s living with us, and we have a three generation female family going on right now [chuckles]

“I am extremely independent. I’m not good at asking for help and for the first six or seven years of being a single mom, I really did not ask for help unless it was truly an emergency. I kept to myself and I did not let people help me or even know I might need help.”

Amazing. I want to go backward a little bit. Just even out of my own selfish curiosity. I deal with a tiny bit of hate that slowly increases every time I do better at something, but I’m learning to not give a shit, and I feel so much better about it since starting to learn that process and apply it. Like the fact that you have had every inch of your body criticized and yet you were able to pose for Playboy—how are you able to go from experiencing what no human really should experience in terms of humanity and then just et it roll off your back? Or does it never roll off your back?

Honestly, it never rolls off my back. As much as I wish I could tell you that I don’t give a shit, I do ­ even when I don’t want to. And it’s really hard. It still bothers me, always. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that sort of harassment or abuse to just roll off. It’s an inhumane task, and I think it puts undue pressure on the receiver of that abuse. What I’ve gotten better at is shortening the amount of time that things bother me. I give myself permission to be upset and be offended and be hurt because I deserve that. I should be offended, and it’s not OK to be treated like that. But then I make a conscious decision that continuing that letting myself feel bad any longer is actually hurting me. So there’s an end to it. I make a conscious decision to move on. I’ve accepted that this stuff is always going to bother me. I’m always going to care. I do make different decisions now, because I know the weight of online abuse. But I’m also extremely competitive, and I firmly believe that the best form of revenge or payback is simply to win. Any time I get upset, any time I’m hurt, I just let it flow through. And then I double back down and I tell myself that I’ve just got to fight through it. And there may not be an immediate victory, there may not be that sweet feeling of revenge right away or a sense that I’ve avenged a wrong. But I know that in the fullness of time, I will succeed and that that will be the proof that the critics were wrong.

“Honestly, it never rolls off my back. As much as I wish I could tell you that I don’t give a shit, I do ­ even when I don’t want to. And it’s really hard. It still bothers me, always. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that sort of harassment or abuse to just roll off.”

What would you say are your biggest motivators?

My number one motivator in life is providing a great life for my daughter. I am a big believer that providing a great life for my daughter includes living a great life myself. That central desire to show her what a great life looks like guides a lot of my decisions. It guides me to take risks and to push myself to go out and even have fun when I might be more inclined to isolate and stay at home. I don’t want her to see me as this person who just isolates and sits on the couch. That idea drives me to push myself in all areas. Beyond that, I am compelled by learning and challenging myself. I love to be challenged and to feel like I’m always growing. I know that when I feel that little hint of discomfort, that I’m probably doing the right thing. I know I’m challenging myself just a little bit in a way that I’m not comfortable with, and I like that feeling because that’s how I know I’m on to something.

How has having a kid­­ and really all of your experiences affected your priorities? Particularly in terms of what you look for in a job and future jobs?

Having a daughter has made me look at opportunities differently than I would have expected. I think I would have expected that it would make me more cautious, but having her actually has made me a little bit more of a risk taker in some ways. I feel a little more compelled to take a shot at things that might seem unattainable. There’s always this balance in my head of risk versus playing the role of the caregiver and sole breadwinner in my family, and needing to ensure our financial security. So there’s always the pull of needing to play it safe with really swinging for the fences for my daughter to watch. And usually that “swing for the fences” desire wins out. I try to push myself in that direction. I’ve never been very good about middle ground. I don’t do well in the gray area. I’m in or I’m out. I don’t like to just hang out and chill. In every role I’m in, if I’m not 100% invested and I am not in it to win it, then I might as well not be there. I’m not really capable of doing the normal 9 to 5 thing. I suppose that having my daughter has intensified both the desire for security and the desire to take risks. But that desire to take risks is the one that usually wins.

What do you love about working in tech after all these years?

I love working in tech because it forces me to be creative on a number of different planes. You have to synthesize so much information, whether it’s about technology or solutions or people. There are so many aspects to consider in a situation, and you’re often solving new problems. There’s no clean template to work from. That multifaceted challenge is what I enjoy. Most of my time in tech has been in some kind of a sales role, and usually I’m doing highly technical sales.

My job often feels like piecing together a puzzle. I love figuring out how to motivate another company with very, very intelligent employees to work with your company and use your technology. It takes more than people skills and it takes more than technical skills. The blend of those two things is really compelling for me. I feel like I’m always having to find a new strategy, and really deeply listen to people to understand how to be successful.

“I love working in tech because it forces me to be creative on a number of different planes. You have to synthesize so much information, whether it’s about technology or solutions or people. There are so many aspects to consider in a situation, and you’re often solving new problems. There’s no clean template to work from.”

Yeah. Let’s go macro for a second. How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What is exciting to you, what’s frustrating to you, what would you like to see change?

I think the state of tech is pretty frustrating. I don’t feel like the situation for women has improved in any meaningful way over the last few years. I see a lot of talk about it, so many tweets and posts and meetups. But my own experience has not improved in that time, and in talking to my peers and my mentors their experiences aren’t improving either. I find that really disheartening.

The reality still is that there are pockets of more diverse teams and there are pockets where there are more women. But I’m not encountering those pockets very often. It’s still a very isolating experience to be a woman in tech for me. There are some brilliant, badass women out there, but in my day-­to-­day it is rare for me to interact with women.

“It’s still a very isolating experience to be a woman in tech for me. There are some brilliant, badass women out there, but in my day-­to-­day it is rare for me to interact with women.”

I’m excited about so many of the new technologies that are being built that are going to fundamentally transform the way people live. I want to be a part of transforming peoples’ lives and making them better and easier. That’s exciting to me. What is concerning to me is the dearth of women on the teams building those technologies. Women’s needs and the way we live our lives are not necessarily taken into account in the same way when this new tech gets built. Some of that is intentional, but I think more of that exclusion is simply out of ignorance.

When people design products, they are limited by their own life experience, needs, and perceptions. It’s only natural that men would design experiences for their needs more effectively than they might design for women. I worry that as they become so much more prevalent and so much more mainstream that the divide between men’s and women’s experiences of the world is only going to get bigger.

I appreciate all of the work being done on the “pipeline problem” of bringing more women into the tech workforce. That is important work. However, I strongly believe that the pipeline is not the core problem at this point. There are some deep cultural issues we need to face as an industry to reduce churn before filling the pipe can ever be really effective.

“When people design products, they are limited by their own life experience, needs, and perceptions. It’s only natural that men would design experiences for their needs more effectively than they might design for women. I worry that as they become so much more prevalent and so much more mainstream that the divide between men’s and women’s experiences of the world is only going to get bigger.”

Where do you see yourself in five or ten years? Do you think you’ll still be here?

I do not think I will live in the Bay Area. I am really fortunate to own a home here, but even being in the top 1% of income earners, I struggle to maintain the type of life I want for my daughter here. It’s exceedingly hard to raise a family here. We’re failing the kids in our public schools here while rich kids just go to private school. Living in the Bay Area and working in tech feels like a treadmill that I can’t quite get off. I’m having fun; I’m still running and I’m smiling, but I’m 39 years old this year and I’m starting to think about how sustainable this is. Can I continue? Absolutely. Do I want to continue to run at this pace with so little gain? I don’t think so. I want to keep building businesses and I want to participate in this, but I also want to change the game for myself. I would love to see myself in five to ten years owning my own company, but not necessarily a venture backed company. I would love to start more of a lifestyle business that I can feel good about and believe in, but is also compatible with having a family, and having a great home life, and enjoying life. Life is short, and I want to enjoy that time and not lose my entire life to this work.

What advice would you give to young women hoping to get into tech? 

The number one piece of advice I would give to women in our position would be to be aggressive even if it is not your nature. Get out there and advocate for yourself. You don’t have to change your personality. But you do have to fight for yourself and for your outcomes. There is such a level of reward for aggressiveness and the “cult of the hustle” is so celebrated in the valley. There are some good reasons for that, because hustle is great and it gets things done and it gets you out there and gets your product out there. Relentless hustle is often required to build a successful business. And what I find is that other styles aren’t necessarily as celebrated or appreciated today in this world. Right or wrong, if you want that opportunity you have to adapt and be aggressive and hustle and put yourself out there without apologies. Don’t feel bad about it, don’t be ashamed of it. Ask yourself, “Why not me?” When you look around at different opportunities, whatever they may be, look at the people there and say, “Why not me? Why couldn’t I do that? Is there a real reason that I can’t? Is there something special about them that I don’t have?” And the truth is that almost always there’s not. There’s no reason why you can’t get there. I remind myself of that when I start feeling a little “less than.” I’m every bit as capable and intelligent as my competitors. The other thing that I try to remember is that everybody feels that level of insecurity. That is not abnormal.

“The number one piece of advice I would give to women in our position would be to be aggressive even if it is not your nature. Get out there and advocate for yourself. You don’t have to change your personality. But you do have to fight for yourself and for your outcomes.”

The truth is that we are the adults that we’ve all been waiting for. Everybody feels like they are waiting for the adults to show up, for somebody more competent or knowledgeable, but the truth is, we’re those people. You’re that person. So own it and don’t ever believe you are less than that.

I grew up in the Midwest first in Pennsylvania until I was 9 – and then Ohio, and I started programming in high school. During Sophomore year I decided to be lazy and take an extra study hall, but the computer science teacher, Mrs. Petite, hunted me down, along with all the other advanced math students, and said “You should take my class,” and I’m so glad she did.  I took two and a half years of computer science in high school and just absolutely loved it. My first class was in Visual Basic, and I made the video game Frogger as my final project.

At the end of my sophomore year I was very nervous, I knew that my school had AP computer science courses but I wasn’t sure if I would be good at it.  I asked my teacher Mrs. Petite who said, “Of course you would be. Sign up.” So I did. I took AP computer science A junior year in C++ and AP computer science B senior year in Java.  I fell in love with programming in high school, I loved how quickly I could bring my ideas to life, and so I went into college knowing I wanted to major in computer science.

“I fell in love with programming in high school, I loved how quickly I could bring my ideas to life, and so I went into college knowing I wanted to major in computer science.”

How was college for you?

College was great! I always knew from a young age that I wanted to do engineering or math or science based things. I just liked them in addition to a healthy appreciation of the art.  I spent a lot of time writing, reading literature and dabbling painting and pottery. But I had a penchant for the sciences, so when I applied to colleges I focused on schools with computer science departments.

I eventually chose Cornell University in Ithaca, New York which has a really excellent computer science program.  It is a super tough program but it was really fun. I have some best friends from that program that I still very close with even though we live in different cities.

In college I also TA’d a class that was the Intro to Data Structures course in Java.  I also became interested in game design and built a couple video games, via an elective program.  I was also incredibly interested in computer graphics because I liked the idea that I could visualize or see what I was making and create art. I also came to realize that I was really bad at linear algebra, or not really bad but I was never going to be great at it, so then I thought maybe I should pick a different area to focus on.  

During college I interned at bunch at different places including Stanford’s Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Microsoft.

At SLAC I had my first introduction to large scale computing.  They had, at the time, one of the larger academic computing clusters that the scientists working at the accelerator could use to analyze and compute all the data they were collecting.  In order to do this they needed massive compute, and I worked on the team there that provided it.

I also did a more traditional internship after my junior year at Microsoft, in Seattle.  I worked on Windows Live Experiences which was how I got involved with networking and found a passion for building things that socially connect people.  

When choosing a full time job after college I really wanted to work in Video Games.  I wasn’t exactly sure what area of computer science I wanted to focus in so I figured I might as well just build something that I think is fun.  I ended up landing at Microsoft in Microsoft Studios because I got an offer to work on the Gears of War Series, an Xbox Game.    

“When choosing a full time job after college I really wanted to work in Video Games.  I wasn’t exactly sure what area of computer science I wanted to focus in so I figured I might as well just build something that I think is fun.”

So let’s dig into those first experiences. How was working Seattle? How was working in games?

I loved working in games. I’m really glad I did it in my early 20s. I’m also really glad I’m done, or am on a break from the industry at least for awhile, because it is pretty exhausting. The crazy hours you hear about are 100% true, but I learned so much in those first six/seven years I spent in games because you just work all the time. I loved it and I was having a blast so I don’t regret any of it, just sometimes your priorities change away from just work as you get older.

“I loved working in games. I’m really glad I did it in my early 20s. I’m also really glad I’m done, or am on a break from the industry at least for awhile, because it is pretty exhausting.”

So I worked on Gears of War 2 which was a phenomenal opportunity straight out of college that doesn’t happen in the games industry that often. So I got very lucky and I worked my ass off. We were working 60+ hours a week as soon as I started, and I remember sleeping on the floor to finish builds and taking naps as things were compiling. Game builds actually take a really long time because you have to compile the assets down and then package it into something the Xbox knows how to run. There’s this xkcd comic of, “Oh, it’s compiling” and that’s a real joke in the game industry.

I then continued to work in the Gears of War franchise on Gears of War 3.  As we were working on that—an internal studio instead of Microsoft—343 Industries was created to take over the Halo franchise from Bungie, the studio that created Halo.

“We were working 60+ hours a week as soon as I started, and I remember sleeping on the floor to finish builds and taking naps as things were compiling.”

In 2009, I was loaned out to 343 to work on one of the first title applications on the Xbox360, Halo Waypoint.  Originally on the Xbox360, you had this standard dashboard and all you could really do on the console was play games, I don’t know if people remember that, this was a while ago. And then they added the applications like Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, etc…. Halo Waypoint was also one of the first of what we call title applications, that came out.  It was very new, and I jumped on it because I thought that was really exciting.

At the end of the Halo Waypoint project, I learned that 343 Industries had positions open, so I moved over to that studio full time when it was about 40 or 50 people. I was Web Service Developer number 2 that they hired, so that was pretty cool because we got to take over this whole charter of the Halo universe. I was really young, only 23, so this was an amazing opportunity, so I just ran with it.

Halo was really fun, it was this crazy wonderful experience. It was very career-defining for me. It’s definitely the biggest thing I’ve done at this point. We re-wrote all of the Halo services in Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud compute. We also built a lot of it on top of this Microsoft Research technology called Orleans. The Orleans team was amazing we approached them and said, “Hey, we like your stuff. We would like to build all of the Halo services. Will you work with us?” and they were crazy enough to say, “Yes.”  Then we were crazy enough to think we could do this so we did it and it was amazing. It really led me to love, not only games and creating the social aspects of it, but also introduced me to Distributed Systems.  

What was it like to be a woman in the Game Industry?

There’s obviously a lot of controversy going on about the games industry now. Everyone knows about all the harassment, especially a lot of women are facing in that industry, especially online, and all the horror stories that are coming out. I actually had a very positive experience, at least with my studio. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that Bonnie Ross is the studio General Manager, and she runs all of Halo at Microsoft. And then the executive producer of Halo 4 was Kiki Wolfkill, another really fantastic woman. And so, when I joined the studio, I was literally joining a studio run by women, and it was fantastic. I think it just set the tone. Even on little things like t-shirt orders always included female-sizes even when we were only ordering like 30 shirts, things like that. The studio always felt very inclusive.

Trade shows were a little different. People would come up to me and say, “Oh, you’re not in marketing?” And I’m like, “No dude, I make the game.” And that was always surprising to people.  I used to count the number of times a person said “Really?” I got up to five once.

“I actually had a very positive experience, at least with my studio. I attribute a lot of that to the fact that Bonnie Ross is the studio General Manager, and she runs all of Halo at Microsoft. And then the executive producer of Halo 4 was Kiki Wolfkill, another really fantastic woman. And so, when I joined the studio, I was literally joining a studio run by women, and it was fantastic. I think it just set the tone. Even on little things like t-shirt orders always included female-sizes even when we were only ordering like 30 shirts, things like that. The studio always felt very inclusive. Trade shows were a little different. People would come up to me and say, ‘Oh, you’re not in marketing?’ And I’m like, ‘No dude, I make the game.'”

So you left 343 Industries? What was the impetus?

Some of it was just—I’d been at Microsoft for five, six years, something like that. Problems start looking more of the same and there was just some things I wanted to go explore outside in other parts of the industry. I was also very burnt out. To be perfectly honest, I was working really long hours even after we shipped Halo 4.

Shipping Halo 4 was one of the most magical, sleep-deprived, wonderful experiences of my life.  I loved every minute of it and leaving Halo in 2015 was really hard, but sometimes you get to a point where you want to do or explore other things.

I then did a year at HBO, which started up a studio in Seattle.  Essentially I was working on what became HBO Now.  I stayed there for only a year.  It wasn’t the best culture fit for me.  

So then I made the decision to move to San Francisco.  I knew a lot of people in San Francisco. I was super excited by the tech scene, just because a lot of stuff is happening and it’s interesting. So I started looking around and interviewed with literally everyone [chuckles]. I had a bunch of job offers from some really amazing places but ended up deciding on taking a job at Twitter, and so that’s where I am now.

What excites you in your work now? Is there a thread across all your work, from games to Twitter?  

I really love Distributed Systems.  The space is developing really quickly as applications have to scale to handle larger amounts of data that’s globally distributed.  In addition we now expect services to be always on.  Down time isn’t acceptable.  So there are a lot of really hard problems in this space, and a lot of overlap between research and industry that really excites me.

I also love Twitter as a platform.  Just like games, I’m helping to build social connected experiences that bring people together. I’ve learned a lot on Twitter, and made some really close friends who I first connected with via Twitter.  I also think Twitter does a lot of good in the world, giving people a voice.

“I really love Distributed Systems.  The space is developing really quickly as applications have to scale to handle larger amounts of data that’s globally distributed.  In addition we now expect services to be always on.  Down time isn’t acceptable.  So there are a lot of really hard problems in this space, and a lot of overlap between research and industry that really excites me.”

How did you get into speaking and writing?  How has that experience been for you?

So I kind of got pushed into speaking actually.  I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have a bunch of people who have sponsored me.  So at Microsoft, Clemens Vasters and Scott Hanselman sought me out and encouraged me to come talk on their podcasts.  I also have a friend Kate Matusdaria who made the intro that led to my first conference talk at Surge 2014.  

I also got invited to speak at Ordev 2014 basically because I got into a heated argument on Twitter with Kelly Sommers and some folks from the Node.js community about Orleans.  Afterwards one of the conference organizers reached out to me saying, “We are really interested in learning more about Orleans and saw the conversation on Twitter, would you like to come talk about it.”  So I responded “I guess, sure. That sounds great.”

My first conference talks went over very well, from those came more talk invitations and most recently an article on The Verification of a Distributed System that was published in the Communications of the ACM.  

What’s it been like being a senior-level woman in Tech in Silicon Valley?

It’s definitely hard, and it gets harder as you get more senior I think.  But I’m in tech because all the toys I want to play with are here, and I love the work I do, so I’m here for the long haul.  

Most days it is fine but every now and then there are things that grate on you.  There’s a lot of little things, like getting offered “uni-sex” aka men’s sized shirts.  Or people being surprised when you say I’m a Tech Lead.  Then there are some people who want to see your credentials.  At this point I’m just like, “Do you need a moment to Google me, hold on I’ll wait.”  Honestly the reason I’ve been hustling so hard the past few years, all the talks and articles outside of my day to day job, helps with my visibility/credibility in the industry.  It makes it easier to show up, because some people already know your name.  

“Most days it is fine but every now and then there are things that grate on you.  There’s a lot of little things, like getting offered ‘uni-sex’ aka men’s sized shirts.  Or people being surprised when you say I’m a Tech Lead.  Then there are some people who want to see your credentials.  At this point I’m just like, ‘Do you need a moment to Google me, hold on I’ll wait.'”

Where have you traditionally found your support networks, and where do you find them now?

My family has always been a huge support.  In the tech community I’ve met a lot of friends via IRC and Twitter, I know that sounds super nerdy.  One of my best friends, Ines Sombra, I knew because of Twitter and we met for coffee when I was in the process of moving down to San Francisco.  There is also a group of people I know from IRC channels, where we talked about distributed systems, and since have become friends.  I’m really grateful for all of them because I have a really strong network of women and men who are very supportive, who get it, who have my back, and I think that is really important for staying in the tech industry.  I do not know how I would do it otherwise.  

How do you think your background and family and support networks and life experiences impact the way that you approach your work?

My mother has always had a career, a very strong one, she’s currently a Director at the US Department of Transportation right now, and has been CFO at companies.  She’s always been managing teams and directors of them, and implementing these big projects. You know, just seeing her out there doing that makes me believe I can.  So her career definitely influenced me early on to also want that for myself.   

Have you had other specific role-models in your life? People that have inspired you?

I feel like I owe quite a bit to my high school Computer Science teacher, Caroline Petite.  If she hadn’t encouraged me to take her class, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today.  Her passion for programming and teaching really inspired me.  I still stay in touch with her via Twitter it’s great, she’s fantastic.

Of course Barbara Liskov, one of the greats of distributed systems, and one of only two women to win the Turing Award.  Also Nancy Lynch, she wrote one of the canocical distributed algorithms books, and has done foundational research in the space.  Just seeing them out there excelling in the space is inspiring to me.  I hope I get to meet them one day.

“I owe quite a bit to my high school Computer Science teacher, Caroline Petite.  If she hadn’t encouraged me to take her class, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today.”

Then there are the women I know more personally who inspire me; Camille Fournier, Ines Sombra, Jessie Frazelle, Charity Majors, Jill Wetzler, Elaine Greenberg, all these women in tech inspire in different ways, and I’m lucky to count them as friends.  

What really excites you about tech right now?

So I get really excited about academia and industry partnerships.  I think we are in a very fortunate time where these key partnerships are starting to happen, because I think we’ve hit the sweet spot where the industry actually faces some of the problems that academia is trying to solve in distributed systems.  In the 70s and 80s when some of the canonical distributed systems papers were written people were still running things on one machine, so it wasn’t as applicable to industry at that point.

I have been fortunate in my career to work with some wonderful researchers like The Orleans Team at Microsoft Research.  I also am lucky to get to chat with academics like Peter Bailis and Peter Alvaro and pick their brains, and hopefully partner with them sometime in the future.

“So I get really excited about academia and industry partnerships.  I think we are in a very fortunate time where these key partnerships are starting to happen, because I think we’ve hit the sweet spot where the industry actually faces some of the problems that academia is trying to solve in distributed systems.”

What would you like to see change in Silicon Valley?

I think Hero Culture is really harmful.  The idea of this one awesome developer who jumps in and saves the day, or founded the entire company, or wrote an open source library all on their own.  I get that it’s a good story, but I’m always skeptical when I hear them, because I’m like did they really or is this just the myth we are telling?

I also think Hero Culture can be really toxic to teams.  It doesn’t foster a collaborative environment.  It’s not helping other engineers on your team grow, especially the junior engineers.  It also creates single points of failures and bottle-necks in your organizations.

But hey, it’s a good narrative.  Who doesn’t like a good story where the hero comes in and saves the day. It’s a much easier story to package and sell versus the team of complicated individuals that had to band together to do something.  

“I think Hero Culture is really harmful.  The idea of this one awesome developer who jumps in and saves the day, or founded the entire company, or wrote an open source library all on their own.  I get that it’s a good story, but I’m always skeptical when I hear them, because I’m like did they really or is this just the myth we are telling?”

Where do you see yourself in five or ten years? You’ve mentioned you’ll stay in tech, but what do you think you’ll be up to?

I’m really indecisive right now about what I want to do next.  Part of me wants to go and travel and work for a while.  In tech we are really lucky that you can find a job that will let you do this and work from wherever you want, and I think that would be an amazing experience.

Long term, I would like to work on more teams where industry and academia are working together.  I think I’m particularly strong in that area, I learn very quickly and understand how much tech we need to solve a business problem.  I hope to keep doing hardcore distributed systems.  I find this area really fascinating, and I don’t think it is going to run out of problems to solve any time soon.  

Honestly the answer to this question changes constantly.  I guess I just hope I’m always learning and expanding my knowledge. I want to keep sharing what I know, having fun doing it, and feel like I’m working on worthwhile projects that make some positive impact on society whether it’s entertaining people or helping facilitate communication.  

Lastly, what advice would you have for women in tech who are hoping to follow in the same kind of path?

You just have to be stubborn right now.  You have to realize that it’s not really fair, and it’s going to be hard.  I know you aren’t supposed to say that but it’s the reality of the situation.  If you consistently show up, do good work, and find a supportive group of people, you can do well.  It may take switching jobs a couple of times, and that’s ok, you don’t owe anyone anything, find a place that’s right for you.

There’s this great interview with Mindy Kaling where she talks about confidence.  She says “Confidence is just entitlement,” and that you earn it by you showing up, working hard, and earning your entitlement.  

Taylor Swift also summed this up well in her acceptance speech at the 2016 Grammys saying, “but if you just focus on the work and you don’t let those people sidetrack you, someday when you get where you’re going, you’ll look around and you’ll know it was you and the people who love you who put you there and that will be the greatest feeling in the world.”

So I think that’s the advice, you just have to show up, do really good work, find the people who love and support you, recognize it is probably not fair, and be a little stubborn.  

“You just have to be stubborn right now.  You have to realize that it’s not really fair, and it’s going to be hard.  I know you aren’t supposed to say that but it’s the reality of the situation.  If you consistently show up, do good work, and find a supportive group of people, you can do well.  It may take switching jobs a couple of times, and that’s ok, you don’t owe anyone anything, find a place that’s right for you.”

I grew up in Southern California. I have always been very logic oriented, and more than a little bit stubborn. I really don’t like doing what I’m told just because I was told to. I grew up doing martial arts and one of the big sayings we had is that when logic and tradition conflict, it’s time to make a new tradition. It has kind of stuck with me my whole life, and sometimes in the past caused problems with authority figures [laughter].

They are just words I live by. Growing up I was always told that I should pursue a career in law– encouraged by my teachers and even to a certain extent my family. We had lawyers in the family, everyone knew what that was. Computers weren’t really a thing or a career at the time, and certainly not prestigious yet. My dad worked in IT and that was like a big cutting edge scary technology thing for a lot of people. It never occurred to me to do anything other than something along the lines of chemistry being a lawyer because those were the things that people really encouraged in me. And so I got into Cornell’s engineering school as an undecided engineering major, and had a vague idea of maybe going to law school later, but really had no clue what to do.

I took a computer science class, and it was awesome, and I liked it. So I stuck with it for a while. Still didn’t know what I wanted to do because nobody had given me the idea that I should, “go be a software engineer for a living.” That never really happened. And then around my first semester of my sophomore year, I found out there was a games class and I took that, and then more games classes, and at that point I was hooked, and was like, “Oh my God, why would you do anything else with any of these skill sets?”

I was lucky. I went to a an incredible school that had a games program when there weren’t a lot of games programs, and it fed directly into EA‘s internship program, which was also really nice.

When was the first moment that you knew you were into tech and/or gaming?

I don’t know. I grew up playing video games and I always thought that was just the coolest thing. Then being able to actually make them seemed just all kinds of crazy and fun, and I wanted to do something that I would have fun doing. Of course I had no idea when everyone was like, “you need to really, really love it to do that,” because they really had no idea. These are dudes talking, and they really have no clue how hard it is to do what we do.

So walk me through that. What was it like first getting into the professional world? And then walk me through your whole trajectory through today.

I had a really great female mentor in college, who spent time with me and worked with me on some of my issues and skills with academics, because I was doing really poorly in school. Like not feeling like I fit in. I felt like I was learning, but I didn’t feel like I was good at school, or doing well. And we had a lot of long conversations about what my hangups were, and she took me to a women in computing celebration, the Grace Hopper Conference, around our junior or senior year of college. And it was just totally this life-changing experience where everyone was just a little bit more like me.

I met a woman from EA before they were hiring interns and talked to her and got my first in with the games industry. Ever since then, I’ve been really focused on staying in games. I had a great time at EA. I loved it there. I worked at Zynga later, and was super into it in the very beginning. I joined there in 2009 and it was right after FarmVille launched, so they were just looking for people to help keep the games going, build more games, and keep the servers from catching on fire. I had some amazing mentors there that really helped me grow and develop myself as an engineer and build a little bit of confidence.

There were also people that smashed it down and it was kind of cyclical there. I would have a really, really good couple of months and then a really, really bad couple of months. Sometimes I’d leave work crying, sometimes I’d leave work super happy and really feeling like I got to actually connect with people and do things that made a difference.

One of my first projects there was doing a charity feature in FarmVille where you got to buy a special seed to plant and it was for Haiti. We donated over half a million dollars to Haiti and at the time I felt like I was this nothing engineer, who got to be a part of this really cool thing that not only did something great for our players, but helped change the world. It’s pretty badass.

Then, there have also been not great moments where I’ve wanted to leave and quit and not do games anymore, maybe not do tech anymore [laughter]. Lots of situations and lots of decisions that kind of led to where I’ve been the past couple of years at GSN, where I feel like we’ve got a much more stable grasp on development than some of the other mobile/web games places. Even though I’m not working directly on the games themselves anymore, it’s still nice to be a part of game creation. But just being a part of the gaming experience has still been pretty important for me for some reason. Maybe it’s because I don’t like feeling like I shouldn’t be there [chuckles]. I don’t know.

When did your attention shift from game making to game culture? What was that impetuous?

I think it was relatively recently. I went to Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing again this year, and for a while I’ve been doing women in tech talks at universities and we’ve been hosting meetups and for women. I think I’ve been engaging over the past year. I had this wonderful manager who was encouraging me to talk and encouraging me to get involved in things. Before that I was just coasting and still stuck in this mindset of trying to figure out where I fit in or how to maximize my ability to coast. He really helped me carve a niche out for myself and find something that I care about again, which made a huge difference for me because it not only reminded me that I do have a voice, but that I’m not the only person who will benefit from using it. I just haven’t had that same passion for games that I did in the beginning for a long time. Being able to recapture a similar feeling has been really good for me.

I can relate, having to sometimes look in new places to find that feeling. What was your experience like, or what is it like, being a girl in gaming and a girl in tech?

Honestly, it’s about equal parts lonely and empowering. It sucks when you’re giving a presentation to 18 dudes, 16 of whom are white, wondering why you’re the only girl in the room or whether you’re being held accountable for your gender. Not held accountable but “why am I representing all female engineers?” “Because I am the only female in the room and there are 20 men here?” It’s tough. It’s tricky.

I feel like on the more balanced teams that I’ve been part of, there’s been so much more collaboration. Whereas when I’m the only woman in the room, I tend to collaborate less and talk less because I’m interrupted more or I don’t feel like it’s worth it to say the same thing that’s been said over and over again in a different way. Sometimes it’s scary to say the thing that you don’t feel like people really want to hear. And I feel like, especially after my time at other places, you’ve been conditioned to expect to be reprimanded, glossed over, or even laughed at for speaking your mind. To be overlooked, labeled as overly emotional, or too invested. It’s still scary to speak up, even now, even though you’re very well-respected and your abilities are very much considered top-notch, but it’s really hard to internalize anything that’s not constructive. And usually the only things that are worded constructively are negative.

Being isolated in many ways– where do you go? What are your support groups? Where did you find them at first, and where do you find them now?

At first I didn’t really have them in the workplace at all. I had people that I could maybe play board games with after work, or socialize with a little bit In a non-frat, “non-brogrammer” way and kind of built on that a little bit. Just finding people I worked with that fit my definition of culture. And I got really lucky. The place I’m at now has a ton of people that aren’t super hardcore into drinking and partying and stuff, which makes me feel a lot more comfortable around my coworkers. Past environments were particularly bad at that, because the way I found support would be to drink a lot with people and go out. That’s what you would do and that’s how you lived that life. It was just a part of that bubble for a long time. It’s one of those uniquely tech-y startup-y San Francisco expectations, and I went along with it for a long time trying to fit in and be well liked, and because that’s just what people who worked there did. Eventually, the culture really started shifting as the startup vibes went away and the teams got too big to handle.

It was very much like this frat that you were either a part of, or you’re even looked down on as somebody who went home and had kids. It still blows my mind that that was the cultural norm and people talked about it like that. It’s just this skewed thing that isn’t real life, but because I was young and desperate to fit in with the Silicon Valley brogrammers, that was my world view for longer than I’m proud of [chuckles].

Wow. How did that culture affect your female colleagues with kids? Did they stay? How did that affect retention?

It was a lot of long hours, a lot of attrition. The company skewed very young. So I think for the people who had already started their families and knew how they wanted to live their lives, they had a much easier time drawing the boundaries. A lot of the younger women got sucked into the whole, “this is how it has to be because this is what 90% of the people are doing and if you want to be cool, you have to be a part of the 90%”. You want people to like you, right?”

It was actually really eye-opening for me because after a few years, I was able to develop friendships and camaraderie with people a little bit outside of that bubble and take a second look at myself and realize, “this is how much alcohol I’m consuming…this is how much self-destructive behavior I’m engaging in”. I even had really good friends that were in the thick of it with me that kept trying to warn me, and I just couldn’t see it until it was far too late and I’ve had a few friendships destroyed because of my drinking.

I remember that scene in general. You may or may not relate if you want to build a brand. In tech, it’s kind of…you want to build your personal brand, and so you feel like there is a social path that you must take. It’s almost like the social path is more important than the work path.

I feel like if I had known that that’s what I was doing… I didn’t understand that I was building a brand. I was just really trying hard to fit in and be respected by my peers. I was hearing these things about people that left at 5:30pm everyday and I did not want them saying those things about me. I wanted to be well liked and well respected, for people to want to work with me. For a while I felt like I really was, until I actually looked in at myself from the outside and was like, “No. This is not what I want to be. I am so much smarter than this.” It’s hard to become your own person when you don’t know what you’re doing, and you’re just doing it because everyone is [laughter].

Totally.

After awhile of that, then leaving and getting out of the bubble and really focusing on becoming a healthy, whole person, I feel like it wasn’t until I was asked to actually say something that I was even comfortable doing that. From there, it just grew. After going to Grace Hopper again this year and getting energized by people who are actually doing some good in the world, a couple of other women at the company were interested in actually forming a professional bond. It’s a cool experience and really motivating for me to reach out internally and involve the men and the women at the company in the diversity issue. I feel like since then, we’ve had—maybe not quite as much momentum as we’d like—enough momentum to get people talking and having conversations and wanting to take a second look at job descriptions to make sure that they’re gender inclusive and little things I’m hoping will add up.

Tell me more about the diversity issues that you have experienced or seen in gaming specifically. I’m curious to see the similarities and differences in that specific area versus the rest of tech.

Yeah. It’s a little awkward at first because you hear the way that your co-workers talk about your players and sometimes, there’s a lack of respect for the players. Especially at some of the younger-skewing companies where you have people talking about the players. I guess it depends on your school of thought, but I always feel like you should have the utmost respect for the people that are paying your salary, but sometimes they can be—and it’s not generally —insulting. Sometimes it can be a little bit irreverent, but some of the memes that you see posted at some games companies, where it’s like, “would grandma understand it?” it’s not really necessary. In gaming specifically, I feel like there’s a lot I had to deal with when I was interviewing as far as culture fit. That specific thing, that term drives me crazy. I can’t believe that’s still okay to say.

I feel like that really caused a lot of problems for me early in my career. I honestly thought that I wasn’t marketable or hire-worthy for a long time, because of just not feeling like I fit in, even though I could answer the technical questions. For a long time it made me question whether I actually should have a seat at the table, because I don’t fit in. It’s evolved a little bit, because now the way that I talk about interviewing, and think about interviewing, shows a much firmer grasp of the process. I’m much more willing to walk away from a bad interviewer, and I can understand what that says about the company.

But I feel like, until you’ve really been in the industry for a while and get to know how the game companies interview, you can’t tell the difference between a diversity friendly game company and one that isn’t, because these are things that you just are told are a part of the industry. There’s this attitude of you’ve got to really love working games and you’ve got to fit a certain profile because this is how the industry is and I feel that’s why so many people have been going indie over the past several years. Nobody wants to work in an industry like that. Especially when it’s one that claims you need the passion to work there and then exploits that passion and you don’t even actually get that much influence at a larger company over the things that you care about. Why would you do it?

How do you feel all these experiences have changed your priorities and what you want out of a job now?

Right now I’m really focused on two things. I work at a games company that has very reasonable balance in hours and generally cares about its people. We’re not the best, we’re not the worse, but we’re stable. We like each other and we’re good people. To me that’s a good enough starting point. We can take what makes us good people that care and do good things together, and foster a more collaborative culture where people like me can speak up. People like our CTO are willing to listen and talk about things like the fact that we only have four female engineers in our US offices, and our C-Staff is empowering us to ask “what can we do about it?”. Those are the types of people that I want to work with and that I want to help me.

We’re focusing more on doing things like meetups where we can actually create that community that we’re missing. And learning how to function on a level playing field. Things like learning how to negotiate. A bunch of members of our women’s group in Boston went to a negotiation workshop put on by the city of Boston (because we are a bi-coastal company). And they got a report back to us on all the things that they learned about negotiating. Even just today, there was an intern who got an offer somewhere else and we were telling her, “this is how you go about negotiating, this is what your tone should be,” just generally helping each other. That’s the kind of thing that really sparked something in me at Grace Hopper, because people generally want to lift each other up.

There’s none of all the fakeness you hear about in female-dominated industries versus all of the cut-throatness in male-dominated industries. We’ve generally seen both sides of the coin as women in tech and we’re not interested in that, and I think that’s a really cool thing. Everyone from every company I’ve been working with has been nothing but supportive and encouraging and wanting to find ways to work together to help. I’ve been talking with companies like Twitter who want to do networking events and breakfasts and talking and going to meetups at places like change.org where they discuss using data mining for good. It’s just incredible how supportive people can be if you let them.

But it’s just so hard to find those willing to put themselves out there and speak up. I think one of the things that made it take so long for me was that I feel like, for engineers especially, there’s this concept of, “you don’t belong in this engineering culture”, and for gamers especially, there’s this “girls don’t belong here” culture. And when you have the two overlapping, it’s really hard to reach out to either community because there are no engineers or very few engineers in the games advocacy groups, and they’re talking about a lot of issues that maybe apply less to engineers. Pay equality is a little bit better for engineers, you’ve got more stable career trajectories, things like that, your work is a little less subjective. It’s not quite the same.

And you get that same sense of maybe not quite belonging from the tech side too. For example, a woman at Grace Hopper told me, “I wouldn’t work in games no matter if it paid better than software because not only is there this gamergate media presentation, but there’s also this, ‘I want to do some good in the world’ attitude that I feel like a lot of women in tech have.”They’re here to really make a difference and help, and that’s kind of what helps keep them going. I kind of feel the same way, but the fact is that games are capable of being this vehicle for change and this binding force for people and culture in so many ways.

I keep thinking about my first project at Farmville where we made half a million dollars to build a school in Haiti in a matter of 24 hours. Had it been this gamer-bro dominated attitude leadership of the team, that whole concept and feature never would have happened. There are so many reasons like this that we need more women and minorities in different kinds of games. Because of this attitude and because of the negative media presentation, I feel like it’s just moving so slowly .

So you’ve started speaking and I’m sure you’re becoming more public every year. It’s great that it’s the new way you’re building your personal brand, but I’m curious…I feel like I would be scared shitless as a woman in gaming building her brand, especially working on culture. How do you feel about that? Do you feel almost disincentivized to do well at this?

Yeah– even if there’s a carrot there, there’s going to be a stick there. It’s scary and it’s not something that I feel like I should want to do or maybe I should do. But part of where I’m coming from is that as an engineer, nobody can take away the fact that I’m a badass engineer. No matter how many 12-year-olds sit behind their computers and try and tear me down, the fact that I write the code I write and that I’m capable of solving the problems that I’m capable of solving, and the fact that my track record does speak for itself in many ways, even if it sucked getting to that point and I have a hard time internalizing it sometimes.

Like—I won the CTO award at Zynga for technical innovation and I don’t know if it’s changed since then, but at the time I believe I was the only female engineer to get one, and the award itself was a pretty big deal, company-wide a lot of consideration went into a bunch of different projects every quarter. So the fact that I can think about problems differently and do these things and have this merit as an engineer, I feel like gives me a unique perspective to reflect on when I feel like I want to question why I’m qualified to speak up. No matter what you say, my credibility isn’t something that can be taken away by anyone but me, and I’m trying so hard to own that and not let myself take it away, which is something that I’ve struggled with a lot over the years. At least from an engineering perspective, I do have the chops to be here. So from that perspective, I think it’s a little bit safer for me to speak about why I should also feel like I belong here than a lot of my peers for art or for design, especially. I don’t know how those women do it because I would not be able to deal with not belonging if my credibility and intelligence were called into question or debated frequently.

Even if I lose my job for something I say, I will find somewhere that will want me to be an engineer for them, and I have options. Even when I wrote my first piece that I published, it was like, “This is only on LinkedIn and I’m only going to write on LinkedIn because I only want people to tie their professional network to the things they say.” And a lot of my coworkers said that that was probably the smartest thing I could have done at that point, and I agree. That’s why I did it. I won’t write anywhere that I will get anonymous comments if I can help it. I don’t have a Twitter, I don’t have a lot of the tools that I think people use in the industry to get jobs and make connections. I feel insecure enough that I think that it’s for the best.

You’ve touched on this in many ways, but what are the biggest motivators behind your work? What drives you?

I don’t know. I want to help the future me’s not have what happened to me happen to them. I want corporate game development to become something thing that you can feel safe doing no matter who you are. We have our most diverse developers and most innovative games being developed as indie games. While I think it’s great that that’s an option for people who have the drive and passion and all the things that it takes, it shouldn’t be your only option if you want to feel safe or create games that reflect on who you are. I feel like given how important games are as a medium, as something that so many people touch every day, the fact that the industry is still so skewed really sucks for both developers and players in the long run.

In terms of the future, I know you still have a lot enthusiasm for games and you were able to execute on some of that. What are you excited to see in the future? What is the positive potential that you’d like to see in games?

I’d love to see games go full circle and start influencing our culture rather than reflect the worse parts of it. Everyone’s losing their shit over Star Wars right now because, “Oh, they finally released a blockbuster movie with a female lead and there’s a female Jedi, and it’s just such a huge deal”. I would love to see games make it the norm such that it’s not a big deal. I would love for women and minorities to be relatable characters because then we’ll be relatable people. Especially growing up, I actively didn’t really play a lot of the games where you had to play an over-sexualized woman. I never really got into the shooting games. Had they been less geared towards men and marketed towards men, maybe that genre might have held more appeal for me. Maybe it still wouldn’t, I don’t know.

I’m just personally curious what your favorite games were growing up.

I am and always was super into RPGs. I loved the 7th Saga, I loved Super Mario RPG, I loved Illusion of Gaia, those kinds of games. I also really love– I’m kind of an achievement whore and I’m a collector, so I love doing lots of side quests. Collecting things like Pokemon was the perfect game for me because it’s literally about catching them all. I love games as a storytelling mechanism for escape, as well as the social component that they bring through local competition or cooperation. I didn’t really have the best network or childhood, or a lot of friends growing up, but I felt like I was really able to not only escape that but really engage with stories and maybe become a better reader and a better narrative teller because of gaming. I was able to bond with people playing Mario Kart or Wave Racers as a kid and have something I could get excited about and make a connection over.

Totally. Side note: do you remember the Pokemon photography game that came out for N64?

Pokemon Snap [laughter]? Yes!

How indicative that that was one of my favorite games [laughter] ever. I played that.

I was actually just talking about that this weekend. It was so good!

I know.

It was so good.

I would love to see more photography games.

I thought it was just amazing. I mean look at how popular Snapchat and Instagram are. Photography games would…

That’s so true. And there’s not been any – I mean, I don’t know. I don’t follow anymore, but I’m assuming there have been none.

Nothing really good since Pokemon Snap.

How do you think your background and life experiences, everything in-between, impacts the way that you’ve approached your work?

For a long time I’d like to really pretend that I didn’t notice, but later I recognized that my approach to things is a little bit unique. Take my first ever engineering internship in games. I wasn’t doing very well halfway through. I was trying really hard to figure out what people wanted. I was having a hard time not doing what was expected so much as just what I felt like I should be doing. I was just taking a lot longer to figure out how everything worked together, and I got some feedback halfway through that reflected that, which I found fair. None of the critical things on that feedback really bothered me other than being referred to as a slow learner, because that’s one thing that I’m really really not. Maybe I do have this tendency to be over-prepared as a result of wanting to get everything right the first time, but I would not consider myself a slow learner and never have, so I spent the rest of my time proving that one little tidbit wrong, and everything else just kind of fell into place.

I think that from then on it was about like not only proving that I’m not a slow learner, but I’m taking a little bit longer to get all the facts straight, communicating that that’s what I’m doing and not that I’m not understanding and just trying to present competence. It’s hard to do that when you’re not very confident of what you’re doing because you feel like you have to prove that you’re confident. Over the years, it’s kind of been stacking a little bit because you have to spend so much energy proving your competence the further you move.

To have to still prove everything from the ground-up is overwhelming at times and it’s something I’ve always struggled with. I’ve developed this terrible case of imposter syndrome where I have to reason through and prove everything and then I get feedback that I’m providing way too much context. Figuring out what’s important to communicate is still a struggle that I think comes from a lot of those experiences. Similarly, being able to take a compliment on my work and take pride in my work is something that has been really hard to develop because of those experiences and because of the lack of constructive, positive feedback.

One thing I used to do in high school is when I got a really good grade on an essay or something and I didn’t understand why I did well, I would go after class and ask, ” Why is this good? What did I do well here and how do I do more of it?” Because sometimes it’s really easy to get it right, and be happy about getting it right, and not really focus on the why. That’s something that I’ve been trying to take forward and take advantage of a little bit, because that’s, I think, a part of what makes me so good at what I do. I’m very capable and focusing in on why it’s right as much as why it’s wrong gives me the ability to replicate good results more frequently, and I think that that’s true of a lot of women.

I feel like women– because we tend to get that a high level of scrutiny and feel the need to justify it, we tend to focus a lot more on why things are right as well as why things are wrong. A lot of the female engineers that I’ve worked with have been especially good at explaining not just their code, but other people’s code or why certain principles are better to follow, or why things were done a certain way. There are a lot of men and women who I’ve admired greatly in many different teams that really focus on why things are good or not so good.

I agree.

It’s not to say that men don’t do that, but there have been a much higher percentage of women that I’ve worked with who have done that than men.

How do your lady friends in gaming feel about their long-term careers? Are they going to stay?

That’s a tough one. I’m not sure. I know that a lot of women have felt pushed out and given up. I have this incredible friend who had just such a rough time at Zynga. She wasn’t an engineer, she was a product manager, but she’s such an amazing, powerful, strong woman who no longer cares about games and isn’t going to do it anymore. And I think that’s really common, especially in games, especially in light of everything. I can’t proudly say I work in games the way I used to be able to. I used to be so excited to tell people that I worked on Farmville or that I was working at EA and got to work on a Sims game or whatever. That was a really exciting moment for me, and that joy and that pride in my industry isn’t there anymore. It’s hard to stay passionate and exciting after these big and small experiences add up and you see your female colleagues, friends, and peers go through things that make you want to cry or throw something or just walk away.

Yea, if you don’t love the games anymore, then why stay?

That’s exactly what it is. I fully recognize that I am far more stubborn than most people should be, and I think the only reason I’m still here is because I’m stubborn, and that’s one character flaw that I will own all the way through, it’s both good and bad.

I feel like I have hope for the positive impact you can have while you’re there. I’m sure you’ve had a moment where just meeting another woman in games is enough to make you feel like you can be in it, you know?

Yeah.

And so just your presence is probably more valuable than you realize.

Yeah, like I’ve almost cried when somebody who I’ve met who’s a minority or female or trans just shows that passion and still has it. That makes me cry with happiness.

Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?

That’s a tough one. I’m still kind of in this phase where I’m trying to figure it out. To figure out whether my personal brand and goals are tech related, games related, or diversity related. But I don’t see leaving tech and still feel a strong draw towards games. I like programming too much to leave. I really love the personal satisfaction I derive from creating good software. I love solving hard problems, and that investigative technical super sleuthing makes me so happy that I don’t really see leaving tech, but I don’t know. I’m not sure caring this much about games is good for me, but it is the whole reason I developed these programming chops and passion. In a way, it’s still core to who I am.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I feel like the balance is not always good and while I really believe in the positive cultural impact that games have, I wonder whether…if the industry doesn’t start making the strides that Tech is making…I mean Tech is so much more grown-up about everything then Games is. And if we’re not able to be grown-ups and talk about things like adults, then what can we do? I want to have adult conversations and I don’t want to fight. I want to cooperate and collaborate and I would love to be running an engineering team that really reflects those values. I would love to run a collaborative team where people are supporting each other and solving problems and building things that are exciting to build and working together to do it as opposed to working against each other.

I hate the concept of staff rankings. I hate the concept of… just because somebody’s not doing well in an environment, it’s their fault. There are so few environments setting people up to succeed that I see and really mentoring and working with people. I would love to be part of a female mentorship for games, or for tech. Because when I look above me in the org chart there are no women where I am… none. There is nobody in my work that I can connect with and even just have a conversation and say “what made you the person you are that got you here?”

It’s very hard to find that, especially in games coming from someone who is there. You really have to look to tech to find those high achieving female mentors that you can really look at to see…what did you do right? What did you do wrong? What do you wish you had done differently, and did it make you happy? I used to get asked all the time growing up whenever I would find a loophole to something, whether I would rather be right or happy. That was always such a bullshit question to me because obviously being right makes me happy. The joy comes from finding new ways to be right.  I guess it’s not a hard line always, but I feel like in tech and in games it seems like a choice still. Maybe in tech it doesn’t really seem like much of a choice.

What advice would you give to an earlier version of yourself? Like girls who are super in love with games and super passionate about it and hoping to get into gaming professionally?

Honestly, I feel like I would tell myself that it’s okay to focus on being safe, happy, and being unique. It sounds so cheesy, but being your own person and really owning what makes you different as opposed to trying to fit in would’ve taken me a lot further. I don’t think I would’ve been that person putting myself in unsafe or unhealthy situations and not setting myself to succeed and not really understanding why nobody else was setting me up to succeed either.

I would watch male colleges get praised for doing less and being given every chance or opportunity, and being set up for success and I assumed that it was me that wasn’t worthy of being set up. Or that I was being set up to succeed and just doing it wrong.

A lot of feedback I would get on my communication style was that it was very erratic or incompatible with the existing organization. If I could tell myself the science of why it was happening, and help to call out that bullshit as opposed to internalize it, I don’t know I’d be the same person, but I would absolutely give that advice.

There’s no reason to hand over your self-worth to a manager who may or may not be fair, objective, or know what he (or she) is doing. And if you doubt your abilities, take a test somewhere. Do a project. Find a more objective way of figuring out if you stack up. And if you don’t, go back to the basics. There’s no shame in that. But don’t hand your self-worth to somebody else because they typically don’t do good things with it [laughter].

And it’s okay to feel like you’re doing awesome and not get recognized for it. And it’s okay to feel like you don’t fit in because that might mean you’re doing something right.