I grew up in San Jose, California. My family was middle-class. My father was a software engineer, my mother taught school. It was a very conservative household, or at least California conservative. That really textured my world view.

People ask me now, how that affected me being trans, and it’s… well, the thing that you are is such an anathema to the culture you’re brought up in. It’s problematic. I think the biggest impact was that I lacked any real sense of self. I was just trying to be what everybody around me wanted.

Teachers loved me, because I was always doing what they wanted, and I was way more concerned with the adults in my life than my peers. I always did what my parents, particularly my mom, expected. I was always filling particular roles. That really drove a lot of my life in terms of what I did. It wasn’t until decades later, post-transition, where I start to develop a real sense of self. And then I’m think, “Oh, that’s weird—how did I live so much of my life having no real sense of who I was, just trying to be what everybody around me wanted?”

Were you exposed to creativity or technology, or any of those concepts early on?

That’s an awesome thing about the household I grew up in. My dad worked in the software industry. We had computers and game systems in the house my entire life. That was always something we had. We had a Commodore 128. It has the basic interpreter on there. You could write little go-to loop-type things. Actually it was my friend’s dad who had the first computer I ever saw. I was—I want to say—three and a half, maybe four years old, and I’m over at my friend’s house and he’s got this Apple II. It has this green screen. My friend’s dad shows us this vector drawing of a frying pan. You can’t even see it on one screen all at once. You have to scroll or zoom out. I see this and then he shows this little game he wrote of where these little horses race across the screen. Seeing that was the moment where I was thought, “This is the most amazing things I’ve ever seen.” That moment still stands out in my head when people ask me, “How did you get into technology?” That moment was really defining.

Walk me from that moment to working in tech. How did you get into it? What has your career experience been like?

When I first started college I wanted to do something a bit different. I wanted do music for video games. I was strongly pushed by my mother to go into computer science. “You can make all this money doing software.” And so I went into it. It was an interesting thing—I was good at it and I did enjoy it. I think I still regret not following my heart at the time. I pursued a computer science degree, and then started working in the software industry. That’s all I’ve done since. It’s an interesting field. There are times when I love it, and there are times when I hate it.

“I was presenting very gender-queer in interviews. And not getting any offers. Finally, one day, I gave up. I went to an interview without nail polish, no lip gloss. I presented as male as possible. Lo and behold: I got an offer. The thing of it is every time I’ve been brought in for an on site interview, where I was presenting male, I received an offer.”

What are some of the highlights, and proudest moments, and things that have excited you the most about your time in tech?

That’s a great question. I was really proud of my work at One Medical. Before I left there, I took a few minutes and ran a query on the git repository. I wondered, “How much of this code base did I write?” It turned out to be around 40%. During the time I was there, the software team was on average of about five people. Sometimes less, sometimes a little bit more but I was the first developer they hired. Writing that much code could potentially be embarrassing, except that I’m very particular about not writing verbose or excessive code. I write what I need.

I’m really proud of what I did there. I’m proud of the type of work that we did and the direction we were going. That was a really neat part of my career.

Your work has certainly impacted me as a One Medical member.

I look at it, and it’s this was a really big thing that I poured a huge part of my life into, and I look at a lot of other things I’m really proud of, and I feel like none of them quite stand on that same tier. I think I wrote some beautiful code when I was doing device drivers, some really elegant things. I solved some really hard problems, but they just don’t stand up in terms of the long term term impact that they have. One thing exciting about my current role is that it has the same potential for long term impact. We are building tools to fight harassment. To me, that is just as big as doing medical software.

Tell me more about that.

Being harassed online sucks. And I’m working for the biggest player in open source community platforms: Github. They made a decision at a very high level to put money and people behind actually making Github a platform that is safe and inclusive. I’m building up a team; we’ve got a really good foundation in the works. It’s going to be a while until we have real tangible results, and it’s not an easy area. There are a lot of really tricky aspects to it. But those are challenges that I’m excited to rise to. I want to build the online space that I want to have for myself. I want to build an online space that sets the tone for the future. I don’t want just to make this platform good. I want to make it the best of show: a place where voices are not suppressed and that people feel safe.

“I want to build the online space that I want to have for myself. A place where voices are not suppressed and that people feel safe.”

On the flipside, what have some of your biggest struggles been in your career?

The biggest struggle was post-transition, or probably mid-transition, when I was trying to figure things out and just living in a sort of gender-queer life, and I needed to find a different job. I was determined that I didn’t want to work any place that won’t accept me as I am. So I was presenting very gender-queer in interviews. And not getting any offers. Finally, one day, I gave up. I went to an interview without nail polish, no lip gloss. I presented as male as possible. Lo and behold: I got an offer. The thing of it is every time I’ve been brought in for an on site interview, where I was presenting male, I received an offer.

So I got that job. I worked there for a couple of years, and then there were some really negative situations there, however I did manage to transition during that time. That company ended up being a mixed bag. I had some solid support from my peers, but I could’ve had a lot better support from management. I realized, at some point, that the professional relationship had become fairly dysfunctional.

I needed to move on. I started interviewing for other positions. At this point, I was presenting female. It’s a lot different interviewing for a tech job when presenting female.

The bad interviews were not a big deal. If my skill set and approach don’t line up with a company, I expect them to pass. But the good ones… the good ones kept resulting in rejection. When a company decides to keep moving forward, especially when it’s been multiple rounds, it’s clear that they think you are suited for the job. They are spending time and money to pursue you. These companies would get to the end of all of this and then decline me on the grounds of something we discussed as a non-issue in the very early rounds of screening. For example, “We think we want somebody with more such and such experience.” and you’re like, “Wait, we talked about that exact thing during the first phone screen!” Why would you put hours of your employees’ time and mine into this interview process if that thing was an issue?

It’s clear there is a bias at work. A lot of men don’t want to work for or with a woman. On top of that, I never know who might have read me as trans and had their own transphobia come into play. But it’s pretty easy to sabotage somebody in the interview process if you want to. And I’m sure anyone with a non-privileged background faces these exact same type of things where all it takes is, “I don’t think they’re a good fit,” or, “Nah, they made me kind of uncomfortable,” or, “I really didn’t like the way they answered this one thing.” It’s much easier to sabotage somebody than it is to champion for them.

“It’s pretty easy to sabotage somebody in the interview process if you want to. And I’m sure anyone with a non-privileged background faces these exact same type of things where all it takes is, ‘I don’t think they’re a good fit,’ or, ‘Nah, they made me kind of uncomfortable,’ or, ‘I really didn’t like the way they answered this one thing.’ It’s much easier to sabotage somebody than it is to champion for them.”

Let’s dig deeper into that because I’m sure you have a lot to say. You worked in tech for 15 years before you transitioned. So you have tons of experience in the industry. How is life before and after?

I have a much different understanding of privilege. There’s a difference between knowledge and understanding. And to fully grasp the level of privilege I was afforded, it took this very painful experience of having to job search for over a year, and a lot of great interviews that my previous experience said, oh yeah, you have an interview like that you’re going to get a nice offer, you’re going to have multiple offers coming in. You’ll be in this great competitive situation!

Instead I would find that even when things went really well, when I was expecting to receive an offer. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work at some of these places. I would have been the first woman engineer. Do I really want to be that person? I’ve got a thick skin. I can handle it. I’ll do it.

But then they make the decision for me. They decide I am not up to the challenge of being the first woman. They can’t legally turn you away for that. But they can always come up with some other reason.

These situations brought me to very deep understanding of privilege. It is a much more nuanced and deep and personal thing than I understood before that.

“I’ve had to learn a lot about this privilege thing, and how much I had, and how much I’ve lost.”

There is a huge difference between the male friend who knows, “Oh, it’s not safe for you to walk down this street at night,” They will walk you to your car, all that stuff. They know about that and they do the right thing. But it’s a very different experience when you feel mortal terror. When you have to that walk by yourself, and you have some guy on a bicycle circling up, and coming up towards you, and approaching you, and– There’s a very different feeling and if you don’t have that experience, you’ll never fully understand. You will know. But you won’t understand.

That’s a much scarier place than just not being able to get a job. I’ve had to learn a lot about this privilege thing, and how much I had, and how much I’ve lost.

All of this has impacted me in a professional capacity. I am a huge champion of mitigating and eliminating bias in hiring. We have to really work hard to do this. Fortunately, we have good economic data on why you should do this. Ultimately companies should do this because it’s ethical, but sometimes you can’t always win over a board with the ethical argument. But you can at least win them over with the profit argument.

My experiences have made me a big advocate and champion for how to we empirically cut biases out of these processes, how do we give more opportunities to people from underprivileged backgrounds, how do we make tech a more equitable place? It already has huge economic barriers to entry, for instance, if you can’t afford to have a computer in your house. If I hadn’t grown up in an upper middle class family, would I be in tech right now? Probably not. I might have eventually had access to a computer at school and maybe that would’ve been enough, but it’s very different having had access to a lot of really interesting pieces of technology very young and very early and being able to just play with these things and grow to love them.

Where do you find your support networks?

Professionally or personally?

Both.

Personally, I’ve been very fortunate in terms of the circles of friends that were around me through my transition. The nature of all those relationships changed more than I thought it would. But in pretty much all cases, it was positive – even when that meant the distance in some of those relationships increased. I had a good group of friends to begin with, and that group turned into what I needed it to be. The nature of that circle of friends has changed and who I’m close to and who I’m not, but I have some absolutely amazing people in my life that are there when I need them, and people that I can count on when I feel like I can count on no one else.

“My experiences have made me a big advocate and champion for how to we empirically cut biases out of these processes, how do we give more opportunities to people from underprivileged backgrounds, how do we make tech a more equitable place? It already has huge economic barriers to entry, for instance, if you can’t afford to have a computer in your house. If I hadn’t grown up in an upper middle class family, would I be in tech right now? Probably not. I might have eventually had access to a computer at school and maybe that would’ve been enough, but it’s very different having had access to a lot of really interesting pieces of technology very young and very early and being able to just play with these things and grow to love them.”

Professionally, I feel like I’m only just dabbing my feet in. I’ve only been functioning in the professional world in a gender-variant way and then trans way for like the last four years. I don’t think I really gained much during the genderqueer portion of that, but once I transitioned and was presenting fully female, I have been able to establish some really good professional contacts. I was able to get more involved in organizations like Lesbians Who Tech and connect with other ladies in tech. That’s been very helpful.

It was a huge thing walking into GitHub and finding that there was a built-in support network of ladies there, who are in technology. And having lady managers as peers was actually a big thing. My previous company was too small for me to have any peers, let alone peers of the same gender as mine. That’s been huge. And that’s very recent, but there’s a couple of those people I know that long after I leave this place, they will still support me. I know who to go talk to. There’s experience and depth there.

How do you feel like your life experience has shaped the way that you approach your work?

It definitely shapes how I view the projects I’m working on. I am fortunate to get to take on a project that is directly related to being part of an underprivileged group. I have friends who’ve been deeply harassed for being trans online. Being able to directly work to change that is an incredible professional opportunity.

I have a fairly quiet online profile right now. Because of that, I haven’t faced a lot of direct harassment myself. But I’ve watched this play out in some friends’ lives. It’s personal. It is a very real thing, and being able to do something very real about it is very meaningful.

Earlier we were talking a little bit about really grasping the level of privilege that exists if you are a perceived straight, white, cis male. I’m not white, but I’m “white enough,” at least in the Bay Area. That’s definitely something I’ve started to understand better recently. Maybe some place else, I wouldn’t be white enough.

“We want the a diverse spectrum of candidates. We want to ask all of them questions about diversity, inclusion, and social impact. Those answers matter just as much as the technical questions. It has an amazing way of normalizing a lot of things. On top of that, you’ve now selected for people that are going to be looking for those qualities in others around them. You can leverage the effect people intrinsically wanting to hire others like themselves in a positive way, instead of the typical homogeneous, limiting way.”

These thing impact how I think about hiring and building teams. It changes the types of questions that types of questions you use.

We want the a diverse spectrum of candidates. We want to ask all of them questions about diversity, inclusion, and social impact. Those answers matter just as much as the technical questions. It has an amazing way of normalizing a lot of things. On top of that, you’ve now selected for people that are going to be looking for those qualities in others around them. You can leverage the effect people intrinsically wanting to hire others like themselves in a positive way, instead of the typical homogeneous, limiting way. That way tends to result in teams entirely of people from privileged white male backgrounds. I want other people to care about diversity inclusion. I want other people that are different than me.

I also want other people who might be like me. If you’re the only lady on a team, you desperately want to add another lady to that team. If you find someone who is qualified, you’re going to fight for them. Similarly, like if you’re a person of color, or if you’re a trans. Occasionally will have an interview where the video chat will come up, and I will suspect that the candidate is trans. I will want to give her extra privilege. And I have to actually fight a different type of bias there.  I still have to evaluate her on the same criteria I would any other candidate. Even though personally, I’m like, “I’d love to hire you just because you’re like me.” It’s the same thing. It’s an odd sensation.

Totally.

It ties in a little bit to my experiences, being functionally the same candidate presenting male and presenting female. It’s not that I answered questions differently, or did less well on the technical portions. It was like, yeah I’ve dealt with a lot of identity stuff, but that didn’t change in how smart I was. That didn’t change in how well I do in technical interviews. None of that changed, and yet the responses to me changed dramatically.

Did you experience similar biases when you were employed as well?

Oh,  I can talk about that little bit. In my previous position, it was a place where they all knew me through my transition (which was gradual). Having folks who are not close to you on a personal level see you in both genders is a little odd. I definitely saw ways where I was treated differently after transitioning. In the 15 years of my career prior to transitioning I was never, ever labeled as “aggressive.” Sometimes “assertive,” even “overly energetic,” “frenetic.” All sorts of labels would be applied to me, but never “aggressive.” Post-transition I got that feedback constantly. Especially when I was seeking any form of promotion – where that very behavior that almost guarantees reward of promotion in a male – it was used as criteria to claim that I was unsuited for a particular promotion.

“In the 15 years of my career prior to transitioning I was never, ever labeled as ‘aggressive.’ Sometimes ‘assertive,’ even ‘overly energetic,’ ‘frenetic.’ All sorts of labels would be applied to me, but never ‘aggressive.’ Post-transition I got that feedback constantly. Especially when I was seeking any form of promotion – where that very behavior that almost guarantees reward of promotion in a male – it was used as criteria to claim that I was unsuited for a particular promotion.”

If you get things done as a lady, you’re too aggressive.

Have you had mentors or people that you’ve looked up to along the way?

I have had people who have been mentors in very specific technical areas. I learned a lot about what good code looks like. When I was writing device drivers, I worked for this guy who was a terrible people manager, but a marvelous coder. He wrote beautiful code. That was when I really developed a sense of what beautiful code is. He was the type of person who wrote such beautiful code that almost anything you presented to him, he would not be super happy with. The highest praise was if you put something in front of him and he’d just scowl at it, but he’d have nothing to say. He would be essentially unhappy with it because it wasn’t something that he wrote, but he couldn’t actually come up with any criticism. I learned a lot from that.

I feel like I learned a lot about software management from watching a lot of people do it poorly. It’s an area where I can’t actually talk about a good mentor I have had because it’s a case where I, for the most part, just watched people fumble. I’ve also watched people who fumbled in many areas and then did one or two things right. I’ve tried to glean all these little bits. My strength as a manager is in aggregating all these lessons I’ve learned over years of watching people do things, both good and bad.

There was also a time when I had someone further up in the organization, two levels above me, at the start of my career, who saw potential in me as a leader. She started working with me to develop leadership traits and took time to meet with me one-on-one. That was actually really powerful now that I think back on it.

This was pre-transition for me. I never realized at the time what it must have taken for her to reach that level in that company as a woman. Now I can only imagine the battles she had to fight and what she had to do to get there. What an honor it was that she took time to mentor me.

More recently, I’ve been at a lot of startups and smaller firms. You often have a lot less opportunities for mentorship in those cases. You have a lot of opportunities for growth, but essentially if you’re at too small of a company, you have to look for external mentorship. This goes back to the identity thing I was talking about. If you don’t have a strong sense of self it’s hard to have really solid goals about what you wanna do with your career. Without clear goals it is easy to neglect mentorship and other career development.

It fascinates me that the shift into my actual gender was accompanied by a much clearer set of career and personal goals. Without low level psychological needs being met you can be blind to the higher level stuff. And it’s weird that you can be unaware that those needs are not being met.

How do you feel the state of tech in 2016? You’ve been here for a long time. What excites you, what frustrates you?

The thing that excites me the most, is that the conversation around diversity in tech feels like it is taking on a very vibrant life and it is very real. It’s both data-driven and personal, and we’re seeing that conversation play out, and we’re seeing the beginnings of real change. On the flipside, we’re seeing some really nasty counter-arguments, and we’re seeing a lot of people basically defend this concept of, “No. It’s a meritocracy. If you’re having issues, it’s because you are not good enough,” yet the data says that’s wrong.

“The conversation around diversity in tech feels like it is taking on a very vibrant life and it is very real. It’s both data-driven and personal, and we’re seeing that conversation play out, and we’re seeing the beginnings of real change. On the flipside, we’re seeing some really nasty counter-arguments, and we’re seeing a lot of people basically defend this concept of, “No. It’s a meritocracy. If you’re having issues, it’s because you are not good enough,” yet the data says that’s wrong.”

We’re seeing some companies are stepping up and doing things about it. And my hope is that those companies that are doing something about it don’t just play lip service to diversity and inclusion, but actually really step into that role and say, “We are going to do this really well,” and especially if they then see the rewards and they see economic benefits. That will really help as time moves forward, we’ll see a lot. We’ll see big shifts. If you look at other industries that had deal more direct with affirmative action in the 70s and 80s, you’ll see this indeed happened. Even some industries that are still known for being incredibly sexist. Take Law, which is known for having some really nasty misogyny baked into the system and yet we’re also still seeing that female lawyers are pretty big percentage.

I see tech in a position to actually do better. I want to see tech sidestep the “lean in” approach. Can tech avoid teaching everyone from diverse background to simply behave like the status quo? Can we instead bring a diversity of approaches and personalities into the workplace? The status quo is to expect underprivileged people to to go and behave like the white men in the industry. The more you can behave like these men, the better you will do.

We’re seeing in tech companies that are willing to actually move women into leadership. We do even better when we don’t just look for the women that emulate men but we look for women and people of diverse backgrounds that just are themselves. They bring a slightly different tone and perspective on things, as opposed to just the very stereotypical driven Type A masculine. Type A females are great but they are very different than their male counterparts in terms of their approach and what their goals are. And we’re seeing this type of shift, very slowly. I feel like we’re just at the beginning of this, which is a little painful, but we’re seeing that these shifts are happening and that there are more opportunities.

“The status quo is to expect underprivileged people to to go and behave like the white men in the industry. The more you can behave like these men, the better you will do.”

And we’re definitely seeing a lot more companies trying to just fix their diversity from this big number-game side of it and be like, “Well, we need to hire more women, we need to hire more people of color.” And that by itself is not good enough, because we’ll continue to maintain the reality, most women and people of color leave tech after less than 10 years. If we just hire diversity and we don’t build support networks, these people will be bullied out.

At my current company, I am part of several internal support networks. We are building sub-communities around being Latina or being a woman, etc. We are building these support networks internally in parallel with our recruiting efforts, and that’s a huge deal. And I’m seeing a couple other companies that are doing a pretty good job of that too. They understand that they can’t just hire people from diverse background, because they’ll end up leaving. You have to actually put a support system in for them. And as we see that, we’re seeing this growth and this vibrancy, and you see these just amazing things.

“Most women and people of color leave tech after less than 10 years. If we just hire diversity and we don’t build support networks, these people will be bullied out.”

What are you working on right now, either work-wise or personally, in 2016?

Professionally, I’m really working to build a solid team, to accomplish these goals that I have in terms of fighting harassment and abuse on the GitHub platform. That’s just an exciting thing to be working on, and I’m really excited to be recruiting and hiring for that, and trying to put in really solid processes around how we’re going about building the software we need. That’s exciting.

On a pseudo-professional note, I’m trying to do a lot more speaking and writing about these topics. There’s a reason I’m openly trans on the internet. I made a very conscious decision about that a year ago. I could very well be stealth on the internet. I can mostly be stealth in person, but I made a conscious decision that I have this privilege and if I’m stealth, I give up my voice. And it’s really hard to drive changes solely from the perspective of outsiders who are allies without the voice of those who are actually affected.

One of my big things for 2016 is doing a lot more speaking, and writing about this very topic, and sharing my stories. I’m an empiricist, so I want data on all this stuff. And I get frustrated. There’s not a lot of good data on many aspects of this. In some areas there’s great data. Like we know a lot about gender bias in terms of how it affects interviews. But there’s a lot less about how transphobia, or homophobia, etc come into play. So often the best we have is our stories and our anecdotes. And especially since they’re very real. We may not be able to statistically prove that this is happening, but we can appeal to people’s life experiences and hope they say, “Oh, yeah. That happened. I could totally see that happening more, and that shouldn’t be happening. What can I do about it?” I definitely am trying to use my voice to make the world a better place for anybody from a non-privileged background.

I would love to hear you speak. You’re so eloquent in everything you’ve said here.

Thank you.

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

Probably. I could see using some of my work, in terms of the trust and safety, could move me someplace different. But, if I do that it would still be someplace clearly related to these very issues of making sure that people have safe and inclusive spaces and that we’re building these types of places both in real life and on the internet. If I stay in tech I definitely hope to tackle some level of upper executive-style work within the tech industry. I think I have a lot to draw on in terms of that, and that’s a direction I would like to see my career go long-term.

What advice would you give to folks going through similar struggles or coming from similar backgrounds to you in tech?

That’s a hard one, because there’s a degree where I want to say,”Don’t give up.” And there’s another part of me that feels like that’s the most flippant advice in the world.

It was incredibly emotionally destructive for me to deal with the rejections of interviews I knew went well. I expected to be rejected for something that didn’t go very well, or I could tell we were just on different pages regarding management style. But the interviews where it was clear that we synced and it was clear that there was a good match and a good fit…. To get turned down for those was just unbearable. And no, not just once or twice — the first couple times you dismiss it. By the third and fourth time, it was really so incredibly emotionally destructive.

It’s hard for me in good faith to say, “Just stick it out, it’ll be fine.” We need diverse people in tech. I don’t know what the answer is there. It makes me sad that that’s the case.

“I’m an empiricist, so I want data on all this stuff. And I get frustrated. There’s not a lot of good data on many aspects of this. In some areas there’s great data. Like we know a lot about gender bias in terms of how it affects interviews. But there’s a lot less about how transphobia, or homophobia, etc come into play. So often the best we have is our stories and our anecdotes.”

We need to keep fighting to eliminate these biases and make sure people really do have a fair chance. Yet I know that not every company is trying to do that, and so I don’t know what the answer is. There’s a school of thought out there advocating that underprivileged folks should just be the entrepreneur and go that route. But then you have the problem of, yeah, you can do that, but the bias is then going to happen to you at the funding level.

The best I can do is try to leverage the privilege in my life to improve these situations. I have this privilege, I have a job, I have a position, I have authority. I can use that to try to fix these problems from that side. What do I tell someone who is young and up-and-coming? I can say, don’t even apply at the places that are shitty?

[laughter]

I don’t know how you make it. We’ve built a system that is so just difficult and ultimately cruel. I’m really hoping to see some of the very big players build out better programs for early engineers, early career engineers. I’m also hoping to see them build out better support systems for people in their mid-to-late career so that they can bring in women and people of color that have managed to survive and make it a good place to be. We have to see some big changes, both from start-ups and also from the big players, the big employers, the ones that employ tens of thousands and not just a few hundred here and there.

I grew up in the Bay Area. Both my parents were computer science PhDs and software engineers. As a kid I practically grew up in my parents’ office, surrounded by computers. It might seem like I was always destined to be in Silicon Valley and to be a software engineer. But actually, back then, tech wasn’t glamourous. And I didn’t actually know what my parents were up to. I didn’t think of tech as a dream career; I just knew it was one thing that I could do because both of my parents did it. Even though I eventually ended up in tech, it wasn’t because I had set my sights on it and headed directly there.

So you didn’t always know you would be an engineer. When was kind of the moment that you first became interested in a real way?

I can’t pinpoint a specific moment.

It was always a possibility because both my parents had been engineers, but even all through college I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I started thinking I might want to do linguistics. I also considered bioengineering, because biotech seemed like it might be hot. But I took a class or two in each of those fields and decided they weren’t for me. I ended up doing an electrical engineering major, mostly because of continuous iterations of sunk cost fallacy after I took a circuits class with some frosh dorm-mates. A year into that I decided I didn’t like EE, either. I finally landed in the master’s program for computer science, but still more to prove that I could do a master’s in something technical than anything else. A friend had dared me to do it. As I went through my degree programs, I started to become more okay with the idea of doing something on the engineering side. And so when I was graduating, I looked at data science or data analyst type roles—getting closer to engineering, but still not quite there; and somewhat reluctantly I also interviewed for software engineering roles, because every company was hiring engineers and there were more opportunities there.

In the end, I was convinced to join Quora as a software engineer. At that time, the company was only four people and they really just needed engineers to help build out the product. As for my inclinations towards data science or data analysis, there just wasn’t any data yet. Adam told me to try out the engineering side and we could re-adjust later if it wasn’t working. I figured I would give it a shot. So that’s when I actually started doing software engineering. That’s also when I actually started realizing how cool software was. Of course I’d taken computer science classes, I’d done internships, etc. but it wasn’t until I was on the ground floor of a really early stage startup that I understood that we were building a product from scratch and that I realized how powerful it was to be bringing things into existence. Somehow before that I didn’t get that engineering is about building things; a bit ironic, given that I already had two degrees in engineering by that point. But finally at Quora, I got it.  

What are some of the things that you are proud of over the course of your career so far?

As an engineer, I’ve found the most exciting and rewarding experiences to be in the early stages of building products and getting them off the ground. I was at Quora early, as #5. I signed on with Pinterest when there were only 8 people on the team. With both companies, I joined before it was clear at all that the products would become big, whether anyone would be interested in using them, and it’s been amazing to be a part of both those early teams building out and scaling consumer web-scale products.

Aside from that, I’ve done some work supporting and advocating for diversity in tech and though I’m just a small part of the movement, I’m proud that the last few years have seen dramatic change in the industry’s awareness of the issues and commitment to fixing them. When I first started working, I felt overwhelmingly alone and frustrated, and I didn’t know whether it was just me, if I had anyone to turn to, and just generally what was even going on. We’re far from having fixed any of our diversity issues, but they’re at least out in the open and people are starting to talk about them now.

You are known as a major catalyst in getting tech companies in Silicon Valley to acknowledge their diversity issues. When were the seeds for that planted?

Early on, when I was at Quora, I was very plugged into the startup community and in the course of being on the site itself, going to events, all of that, I got to know people at lots of different companies. Not deliberately, but just offhand, I also came to know how many female engineers were at each of these companies. I had a rough mental catalog. Not perfect, but I had some sense of what companies were up to, and it was more than anyone else had, I think.

Then there was a specific moment, when I was at the Grace Hopper conference in 2013, at a group breakfast with Sheryl Sandberg, where she made a comment to the effect of how the numbers of women in tech were dropping precipitously and we needed to take action, that I had the gut response: “How do you know what the numbers are? How does anyone know what the numbers are?” And then I was struck by the irony that in an industry that was so data-driven, where we had metrics and dashboards for everything, where we studied conversion funnels from landing page to signup to activation so fastidiously, where we ran A/B tests for every new color and UI element much less new features; we had no data on diversity.

“I was at the Grace Hopper conference in 2013, at a group breakfast with Sheryl Sandberg, where she made a comment to the effect of how the numbers of women in tech were dropping precipitously and we needed to take action, that I had the gut response: ‘How do you know what the numbers are? How does anyone know what the numbers are?’ And then I was struck by the irony that in an industry that was so data-driven, where we had metrics and dashboards for everything, where we studied conversion funnels from landing page to signup to activation so fastidiously, where we ran A/B tests for every new color and UI element much less new features; we had no data on diversity.”

When I got home to San Francisco after the conference, with all these thoughts still swirling around in my head, I sat down and wrote a Medium post. It was framed as a call to action but in truth I didn’t expect anyone to take it on. I definitely wasn’t the first person to ask for numbers. Even in the process of writing my post, I went googling and found a CNN report from a few years prior that said that investigators had reached out to a bunch of tech companies to ask their numbers and all the companies said, “No. No thank you.”

I didn’t expect anything to change after I wrote my post. It was a big (and pleasant!) surprise to me when people started sharing their numbers with me over Twitter. But then I realized that my @mentions were not a good place for this data to live, and so I set up a GitHub repository to track it. Why GitHub? It was something that a lot of engineers are used to using. And it supported tracking the metadata: who was submitting the data, what their source was, the date of submission, any other relevant context, and also the history of updates. The project was meant to be crowdsourced, so it was important that we had that metadata.

I’m up to about 250 companies now that have submitted their data. It’s mostly the smaller companies, but that’s fine, actually. What’s more important is that there was an upswell in attention on the subject and the larger companies realized too that it was important to publish their data. In May of 2014, a few months after I wrote my Medium post and started my GitHub repository, Google was the first big tech company to release a holistic diversity data report. The story I’ve heard through back channels, though I haven’t been able to validate it, is that people in Google HR got wind of what I was doing, discussed, the question made its way all the way up to Larry, and he made the call to release their data despite objections from legal. And their report was more than just women in engineering; it also had race breakdowns, and it covered tech, business, leadership, etc. After Google, most of the other major tech companies followed suit. It’s become an industry-wide movement.

I’ve been hearing women recently who work at well-known companies here and talk about wanting to leave those companies for Pinterest, because they want to work with badass ladies and that’s like becoming more and more of a priority for more and more talented people that just want to be surrounded by with other really talented people.

Yes, I’ve heard that a lot amongst my friends too. They’ll say things like, “I don’t have to put up with BS anymore.” And I’ve felt similarly myself. Even within Pinterest, where I’ve changed teams a few times, when I’ve looked around, one of my top criteria has been whether there are women that I’d want to work with. Not to say that I’d necessarily rule out opportunities on teams that didn’t have women, but at this point I really prioritize being able to work with other talented women. I’ve worked on a few teams now that had 50/50 gender balance, and I can say that the dynamic is different, and so much better, when that’s the case. That’s not to fault men on more male-dominated teams, but the dynamic really is very different.

Absolutely. How have you seen tech’s attitude towards women changed since you’ve started in the industry?

There is substantially more awareness now of unconscious bias and the ways in which women (and underrepresented minorities) can be disadvantaged, even if unintentionally. I’ve also seen a lot more allies become a part of the conversation and the solution. But it’s a slow shift. We’re trying to engineer a really big cultural change, and that takes time.

And people have lived their whole lives under certain conceptions of how things work, their certain beliefs about the world. And it’s hard to dispel those in just a short period of time.

I get surprised that these people still exist, but explain to those who are in doubt about this why having a team with diverse perspectives is beneficial to a product.

First, there’s the research that shows that diversity makes teams more creative, more diligent and thoughtful. Intuitively that makes sense. People from different backgrounds and perspectives engage in different ways, and in more diverse team settings people are forced to confront the reality that other people may perceive and think about things differently, and therefore end up working a little bit harder to justify their thoughts, their opinions, whatever they’re proposing. And the research also shows that diversity drives better business outcomes. It’s smart business.

“People would make comments about Pinterest like, “Oh, that seems like a niche market.” They thought it was niche only because they weren’t women.”

As for the tech industry specifically, we’re building products and services for everyone. The quality, relevance, and impact of these products and services can only be improved by having the people who are building them be demographically representative of the people who are using them. Here’s an example of a very obvious oversight from lack of gender diversity: Apple launched HealthKit in iOS 8 as a comprehensive health and fitness portal app to track nearly everything you could think of tracking, things like blood alcohol content, inhaler usage, sodium intake , but somehow they missed period tracking. This is the one thing that almost all women track and have tracked probably for the entirety of human history, even in the absence of any fancy quantified self devices or apps. But you know, women’s health, no big deal. To be fair, I don’t know if there were women on the HealthKit team, and maybe there were and something just went awry, but it feels like if there had been more gender balance on that team they wouldn’t have missed something so obvious.

I remember when Pinterest first launched and there was so much hoopla over how this company catered to a population outside of Silicon Valley and grew so huge and it blew people’s minds. They couldn’t believe that by catering to the world outside of Silicon Valley that they had tapped into something lucrative.

People would make comments about Pinterest like, “Oh, that seems like a niche market.” They thought it was niche only because they weren’t women.

An interesting comparison point is other major Internet properties that skew male. They’re considered neutral. Think Wikipedia. Something like 90% of their top editors are male, but the Wikipedia is regarded as very neutral source of truth. Nobody ever talks about how masculine Wikipedia is, because in our society male is the default. Only when a site has a demographic that skews female does it have to be called out as “so feminine, so female”.

Personally, how do you think your background and life experiences have affected the way that you approach your work and your perspectives around the things that you build?

To be very honest, I’ve grown up very privileged and a lot of my life experience matches that of many other people in tech. Somehow the most unusual part of my background is that I’m a woman, which doesn’t seem like it should be that unusual.

One more thing to mention, maybe: I’m very American, but I’m also the child of immigrant parents. I still have a bit of the immigrant mentality. There are a lot of things that you don’t take for granted when you are not from the country you live in—you don’t have your support systems here, you’re much more focused on survival, as opposed to assuming that things will always be fine and there’ll be people to support you. There’s a certain risk aversion that comes from that, an unwillingness to “rock the boat,” so to speak.

“There are so many other people that have worked on diversity in tech, too. There are so many people that have been a part of this crowd agitating for change. It feels unfair to me that I get the attention that I do. But if I have the stage, I’m going to try to use it.”

There’s also that feeling of being an other. I grew up never seeing any images in media of people who looked like me, whether in entertainment, politics, business… I was just talking to some friends the other day about Disney movies and which ones we like the most. My favorite has always been Mulan, but it’s hard for me to know if I like Mulan the best because she’s the only one who looks anything like me, or if I would have liked it the same with a blonde blue-eyed princess.

On that dimension of being race and being Asian, though, one interesting thing about tech is that Asians are so overrepresented. Asians aren’t a minority in tech. When people talk about people of color in tech, they don’t include Asians even though Asians are people of color.

So obviously your diversity work has kind of thrust you into the public, and you’ve become a very public face of diversity. How has that affected your life? I’m sure it’s been positive and a little scary.

It’s been surprisingly positive.

That’s good.

I do find the attention a little strange because I don’t think my story is that special or that I’ve done that much. There are so many other people that have worked on diversity in tech, too. There are so many people that have been a part of this crowd agitating for change. It feels unfair to me that I get the attention that I do. But if I have the stage, I’m going to try to use it.

On the negative side—I’ve been pretty lucky to not have had any serious incidents of stalking or harassment, only a couple of cases. I don’t think they’re that bad, although I’ve had people tell me, “It’s not normal to have stalkers at all. The fact that you’ve had to go to the police before is not normal.” But it hasn’t been that bad.

Wow. It’s funny that we feel that it’s totally normal, because we have perspective from these other women in the industry who have gone through things a thousand times worse.

Oh, yeah. It’s like, “Oh, I’ve only had, like, two stalkers.”

Oh, man. Back to what you were just talking about earlier—you’ve written about being Asian in tech, and how sometimes the Asian population can be put in a bit of an awkward place in discussions around racism and discrimination. I’d love to hear more on that.

The topic has been wearing on me a bit as I’ve heard so much talk about issues of race and racial diversity in tech, people insisting that we need more people of color in tech—but Asians are so conveniently left out. There are plenty of Asians in tech, and we are people of color. Somehow in the tech context, though, we don’t count. It’s only Blacks or Latin@s. That’s such a strange oversight to me. Sure, Asians are overrepresented in tech, and yes, we complicate the conversation. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be a part of the conversation.

“I’ve been pretty lucky to not have had any serious incidents of stalking or harassment, only a couple of cases. I don’t think they’re that bad, although I’ve had people tell me, ‘It’s not normal to have stalkers at all. The fact that you’ve had to go to the police before is not normal.'”

If we back out to a larger conversation of Asians in America, perhaps the first thing to talk about is the model minority myth. We’re expected to be hardworking and good at science and nerdy things. In theory this sets us up for success in tech. But this model minority myth is dangerous. It was originally constructed as a tool of anti-Black racism in response to the civil rights movements of the 60s, setting apart Asians as a community of color that has succeeded due to our work ethic and good character (and thus implicating Blacks as responsible for their own inability to pull themselves out of poverty and crime). It cleaves apart communities of color in a way that props up white dominance and supremacy. And it’s also not actually that great for Asians. Part of the stereotype of Asians is that we’re good rank-and-file employees but not good leaders, and that’s borne out in the numbers. We’re overrepresented in the lower ranks and underrepresented in executive roles; there’s definitely a bamboo ceiling. And if we go back to intersectionality, the expectations on Asian women are even more constraining than those on Asian men.

As you can tell, I’m kind of all over the place on this subject as I’m still trying to feel out the relevant themes in the conversation.

I think that most people don’t even know the complexities whatsoever. I didn’t know the term “bamboo ceiling” until I did this project and saw the term in my submissions.

It’s also really important that Asians get involved in the conversations around having more Black and Latin@ people in tech instead of being complicit in racism against them.

Kind of in the same realm, do people make assumptions about you based on what you look like—being race, gender, fashion, demeanor?

Yeah. It was much more so the case earlier in my career. Maybe partly because I was younger and not as far along in my career and fewer people knew who I was.

I had the experience once of going to a conference (PyCon) and people not taking me seriously when I was wearing a dress and looked feminine—they assumed I worked in recruiting—but then engaging me in technical conversation when I showed up the next day in a t-shirt and jeans. Another time I went to a woman’s meetup and when I mentioned to someone I had worked at Quora and was then at Pinterest, her first response to that bit of information was to ask, “Are you the community manager?” Not to say that there’s anything wrong with recruiting or community management, but it’s frustrating for those of us in engineering to be always assumed to not be in engineering.

Each of these experiences isn’t so significant in of itself, but repeated over and over it’s that feeling of death by a thousand papercuts.

Yeah, I get it. Even in photography, I have people assume that I’m not the photographer.

That’s so frustrating.

Have you had mentors or people that you’ve looked up to for inspiration?

I don’t have mentors in the classical sense of the word, although there are people that I’ve found resonance with, in specific aspects of their identity and success. The closest I’ve had to a mentor is probably my mom: She was a software engineer, and so she just was an example of what I could become. And that was very powerful.

A few years ago people used to ask me this question a lot. “Do you have any mentors?” And it was usually a binary choice. “Sheryl or Marissa?” I never really identified with either of them very much. Sheryl’s not technical. Marissa was technical but never worked as an engineer either. And she has made statements to the effect of, “I don’t think that I would consider myself a feminist,” and denied the role of gender in the modern world, which is very baffling to me.

One person that I really admire is Megan Smith. Not a mentor, but definitely someone I look to for inspiration. She’s a badass MIT-trained engineer and has held a number of important leadership roles; she’s very motivated by impact and has done a lot of great work with Google and now in the government. And she’s very compelling in calling people to action in a way that conveys urgency but not shame.

What are your biggest motivators?

My biggest motivation is a sense of moral responsibility in taking advantage of all the privilege and advantages I’ve had to make the world a better place. I know that’s very vague and not prescriptive at all, but I’m trying to turn that motivation into something real.

I was lucky to be born in America and to grow up here in the Bay Area, in a middle class family, with parents that valued education and let me focus on my education and not worry about anything else. I was lucky again in being able to attend Stanford and to have all the compounding privileges from that. Good internships, good career opportunities, the right networks. I didn’t deserve all of what I’ve been given but it’s not like I can give it back. All I can do is try to pay it forward.

Similarly, I feel like you do a lot to give back to the community, and when did that become particularly important to you?

It became most important to me after I’d had a series of not-great experiences, felt very alone and unsupported, and didn’t know where to turn. I was seriously considering quitting tech. And that’s despite the fact that I love software engineering. I love coding. I love building things. The job is a great match for my skill set, and there’s a lot of market demand for software engineers. Even so, I was really close to leaving. And I imagine there are a lot of others—actually, I know that there are a lot of others—who’ve had the same sort of frustrating experiences that I had. I just want to help make it so fewer people have to go through that.

How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016?

In terms of diversity in tech, we still have a long way to go. We’re trying to make that difficult transition from awareness of issues to commitment to action. Commitment is more than a blog post saying, “We care about diversity and here are our numbers.” But it’s hard to make diversity a priority because it’s a long-term strategy. It’s not something the companies see the benefits of immediately. Teams don’t suddenly more innovative as soon as a woman or black person is added to the mix. So in the face of short-term prioritization, companies are often unwilling to commit to diversity.

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

I hope so! I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing, but I hope that I’ll be using the power of software to help alleviate issues of social injustice. Again, very non-prescriptive. But I think there’s a lot of opportunity to apply tech to these problems that haven’t traditionally been the focus of the tech industry.

There’s that criticism of Silicon Valley startups, that they’re focused solving one problem: “What is my mother no longer doing for me?” And they’re getting so much funding and attention! Some of the criticism is fair, I think.

Yeah. There are many many many people in the industry—a lot of which I’m interviewing for this—that know the potential that tech can make on real, significant problems outside of Silicon Valley.

We definitely are starting to see more of those companies. They’re not as flashy, not as sexy, but so important. Just for a few examples: There’s Honor, which is helping to provide elder care. And I was just talking to someone last weekend whose company is using data science to map out gas leaks from pipelines and to provide that information back to drilling companies. They’re addressing the problem of climate change through data science.

“Commitment is more than a blog post saying, ‘We care about diversity and here are our numbers.’ But it’s hard to make diversity a priority because it’s a long-term strategy. It’s not something the companies see the benefits of immediately. Teams don’t suddenly more innovative as soon as a woman or black person is added to the mix. So in the face of short-term prioritization, companies are often unwilling to commit to diversity.”

I feel like, keeping talent in tech is just as hard as recruiting it in the first place. So what do you think tech can do currently to prevent folks from leaving?

This is a hard problem since it’s not that there’s just one thing that’s wrong. It’s a whole culture that’s broken, we have to change the culture, and culture change is hard. Recently I’ve been trying to read up on different social movements, like the civil rights movement, to understand how those have played out and where they’ve seen success and failure. But even for the Black community, after decades of civil rights activism, there’s so much left to do. Just take a look at our system of mass incarceration that is essentially systemic racism.

But to get back to the specific question of tech, what companies can do to start addressing retention issues—going back to the metrics—is to measure everything and to understand where the problems lie. Google, for example, measures everything and they have a whole people analytics team that’s looking at this kind of data. They saw that there was an attrition problem with new moms and introduced a more generous maternity leave policy. When they did that, attrition dropped by 50 percent. The data is clearly going to be very useful in informing policy decisions within companies.

And lastly, what advice would you give to folks who may be able to relate to you in some ways that are hoping to get into tech?

The tech industry may be simultaneously easier and harder than you might expect to get into. On the one hand, something like software engineering is really just a trade skill, something you can pick up if you are interested and put in the time. On the other hand, the culture and values and processes that define the industry right now aren’t always very conducive to inclusivity and it can be difficult to navigate. But being in tech is about building the future of the world we live in, and it’s worth it.

I was born in Thailand in 1980 in a refugee camp near the border of Thailand and Cambodia. It was the aftermath of the Killing Fields where a million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge’s communist regime. My parents never talked much about that time, since it was so traumatic for them. And I don’t remember anything because I was so young. I do know that both of my parents lost their first spouses during that time.

“I was the poorest person in class, and one of the only Cambodians. At the time, I didn’t realize everyone else was actually pretty poor. But there was still a hierarchy even amongst the poorest of the poor. Like it was hard getting teased for wearing the wrong type of shoes or the same shirt several days in a row.”

My mom did tell me about how I had gotten pneumonia as a baby and almost died. She still has the X-rays. It was very, very hard for her, but she loves telling me that the early sickness boosted my immune system because I rarely got sick after that as a child. Too bad it didn’t last into my 30s. I get colds all the time now.

In 1984, we immigrated to the US as refugees as war. Our airfare was sponsored by a Mormon family, whom I don’t remember ever meeting, but it’s why we converted to Mormonism. We landed in Oakland and I’ve been in the Bay Area ever since.

You may not have super early memories but I’m curious to know what it was like arriving at the States for your family and what adjusting to life in Oakland was like?

My earliest memory is us living in cramped apartments around the Lake Merritt area with my grandmother and cousins. I went to a year-round school called Franklin Elementary, which was predominantly Asian. After the first grade, we moved to West Oakland, and I attended Hoover Elementary which was mostly African-American.

“It  felt completely normal to live together with eight or nine people in a tiny one bedroom apartment. It was really communal, and we survived on very little—24k a year of government assistance, which my mom miraculously made work somehow.”

In both settings, I felt like an outsider. I was the poorest person in class, and one of the only Cambodians. At the time, I didn’t realize everyone else was actually pretty poor. But there was still a hierarchy even amongst the poorest of the poor. Like it was hard getting teased for wearing the wrong type of shoes or the same shirt several days in a row.

My parents also didn’t speak English, so it was a constant struggle to switch between different cultures between home and school.

What did your family expect of you? What kind of pressure did they put on you to excel or be something when you grew up or that sort of thing?

My mom was particularly emphatic about education, and doing well in school. That was the top-most priority. She would always say, “You don’t need friends. They’ll just bring you down. Just focus on school.” I just assumed it was an Asian mom thing. But later, I learned she had an uncle who paid for her to attend school back in Cambodia. That experience must have made her acutely value education, because it’s not free in many countries.

“Food is interesting. People I meet love to say, “wow, you must have had delicious food growing up”, as if every meal was a dish from their favorite Thai restaurant. It’s always weird to be exoticized. What was normal for us was actually an extremely basic diet of rice with a small side of protein. McDonald’s and Chinese take-out was like the “fancy” treat for special occasions.”

With my dad, he was hands-off about education, but he cared a lot about appearances. He learned to be a barber in the refugee camps and was very meticulous about it. He cut my hair growing up until his hands failed him. He was also very particular with the shoes and clothes he bought for me, even when they came from The Goodwill. I have a fond memory of him saving up money so that he could get pants made by a tailor in Chinatown. It was really fun to see him pick fabrics. I definitely got my eye for design from him.

What aspects of growing up to you obviously felt normal at the time? Now that you’re in Silicon Valley you’re like, “Man. My upbringing was different than a lot of people’s here.”? What memories stick out to you?

I have a lot of siblings, six younger than me and one older half-sister. It  felt completely normal to live together with eight or nine people in a tiny one bedroom apartment. It was really communal, and we survived on very little—24k a year of government assistance, which my mom miraculously made work somehow.

Nowadays, I hear complaints about how small the apartments are in SF and how making 175k/year isn’t enough. I totally get that in this market, but everything is much more luxurious than what I grew up with.

Food is interesting. People I meet love to say, “wow, you must have had delicious food growing up”, as if every meal was a dish from their favorite Thai restaurant. It’s always weird to be exoticized. What was normal for us was actually an extremely basic diet of rice with a small side of protein. McDonald’s and Chinese take-out was like the “fancy” treat for special occasions.

I remember one of my first “American” meals. A woman from our church invited me to her brother’s family for dinner. Everything was so plentiful, and I remember this giant salad bowl, and I immediately asked. “Oh, there’s no rice?” That became a running joke every time I ate dinner there. I also remembering getting to high school and eating a bagel for the first time. I was like, “Whoa, delicious!”

It’s amazing to think back, because I’m such a foodie now and really enjoy the spectrum of food available in San Francisco. I hate bagels now, though.

Oh man. What were school years like for you? Did you have any technical inclinations or creative inclinations? When was that first developing for you?

In first grade, we had a computer lab, which I took to very naturally. Creatively, I was obsessed with origami and could make very intricate pieces. My mom thought it was an incredible waste of paper, so I would rip out endsheets in books and use that for folding.

In middle school, I took both art and computer classes. What was really cool, was that my art teacher was married to my computer teacher. Later when my art teacher, Ms. James, found out that I’d become a designer, she was thrilled.

Walk me through those later years of school and then eventually getting into college.

High school was awesome. Many people talk about their high school years as the most horrible time in their lives, and I actually had a really wonderful time. I went to Oakland Technical High School—which I had to work really hard to enroll in, because it wasn’t my assigned school.

I had a great education because I was equally exposed to the sciences, liberal arts, and creative arts. I was in a Magnet program called the Health & Biosciences Academy, as well as a humanities program called Paideia, which was taught using the Socratic method. Both of those programs really taught me to think critically and very deeply about the world.

“I started studying for the SAT’s when I was in the seventh grade because I was just like, ‘If I don’t go to college, then I’m never leaving the ghetto.’ I had this great fear of being in a cycle of poverty that I saw my peers get trapped in.”

At the same time, I was also really involved in the journalism program. I was co-Editor-in-Chief of the school newspaper, which is where a lot of my inspiration to become a designer came from. We were designing the newspaper by hand, actually cutting out printed columns and doing paste-ups for the printers. I also worked on our high school’s first video yearbook, which introduced me to Adobe products for the first time.

Was college something you thought that was possible for you financially? Or like as a kid, did you think it was basically possible?

I always believed it was possible. I had both incredible faith and anxiety around it. I started studying for the SAT’s when I was in the seventh grade because I was just like, “If I don’t go to college, then I’m never leaving the ghetto.” I had this great fear of being in a cycle of poverty that I saw my peers get trapped in.

I didn’t worry too much about the financial aspect of it, because I was pretty aware of loans, scholarships, and grants. If I had worried too much about the finances, I think I would have been paralyzed to act.

In the last couple of years of high school, my grades ended up being really shitty, so I didn’t apply to the Ivies or UC’s like most of my Paideia classmates. I had been too focused on everything else that interested me non-academically: helping to run the school newspaper, starting a gay-straight alliance, leading our high school’s Sierra Club program, learning radio journalism at Youth Radio, and performing in plays and dances. And, at the same time, I was trying to come to terms with being both gay and Mormon. It was a lot, and my grades got pretty shot. In the end, I knew I wanted to do design and applied to just one school, the California College of Arts and Crafts. It’s now just called California College of the Arts. I was relieved when I was accepted, and I remember telling my best friend, Ben, “My future’s going to be okay now.”

At that point, did you have any idea that you’d end up working in Silicon Valley. Was that on your radar?

I don’t think so actually. The dotcom boom was still nascent when I entered college, and I was very interested in motion graphics because of the work I did on my high school’s video yearbook. Of course, the dotcom boom reached its peak quickly after I started school. CCA was mostly print-based, but a professor named David Karam started a program called New Media, which I quickly enrolled in. It was a mix of motion graphics, information design, programming, and interaction design. I fell in love with the classes and knew I wanted to work on very technical, internet-related projects.

What was going to art school like after coming from a big high school in Oakland?

I’d been exposed to so many different cultures and types of people early on in life—Asians around Lake Merritt, African Americans in West Oakland, and wealthy white Mormons in the Oakland hills and beyond—that adapting to art school was relatively fluid. You just learned to weave in and out of different groups.

On the other hand, I felt a lot of otherness. I met so many kids that came from an enormous amount of wealth and privilege, who weren’t serious at all. They didn’t know what they wanted to do and had parents who funded their experiment with art school. The majority of students truly wanted to be artists or designers and they were very serious about it, but others were just there to play.

Walk me through your tech career. What happened from there?

In college, I got a really awesome internship at a company called Move Design. It was started by two former IDEO designers, Peter Spreenberg and Samuel Lising. My friends, Dain and Kim, were also working there, so we just did a range of fun, interactive projects. I learned ActionScript, Lingo, JavaScript, PHP, and Perl during that time. That’s what really got me super excited about the internet, programming, and interaction design.

When the boom went bust, I went to work for Youth Radio in Berkeley as a teacher and designer.

After that, I was hired as an intern by Conor Mangat at MetaDesign, which is one of the top branding agencies in the world. The San Francisco office had been started by a favorite professor of mine, Terry Irwin, along with Erik Spiekermann and Bill Hill. I was lucky to get that job because it was the nadir of the dotcom bust. The San Francisco office had just downsized from over 100 people to less than 10, so I’m very grateful to Conor for believing in me early on.

“I joined the Gmail team. When I started, there was only one other full-time designer on Gmail. The way we ended up splitting it, was that my colleague, Jason Cornwell, worked on desktop, and I worked on mobile. It was just really cool to have that much responsibility and impact. Mobile Gmail was supposed to be my 20% project, but that quickly became my 120% project.”

My work at MetaDesign was mostly visual design for brands and websites, but eventually, I wanted to branch out into UX. I was really inspired by Hugh Dubberly, a former design manager at Apple who’s ridiculously smart and knowledgeable about design history and theory. He eventually became my mentor and hired me at his studio, Dubberly Design Office. I was super happy working there and stayed for 5 years.

One day a sourcer from Google emailed me out of the blue. I remembered when I was at MetaDesign, a recruiter from Apple had contacted me. I blew it off and later regretted it. So this time around, I decided to follow up on the email, even though I was very happy at Dubberly.

I had a few phone conversations with Google, then went down for a day of interviews. I was so impressed with everyone I talked to, and the opportunity for learning was so huge, that I decided join. It was an amazing experience, though when I first joined, I felt like I didn’t really belong there.

“It’s a big psychological shift to be a founder. Our employees depend on us to feed their families and themselves. They depend on us for helping them grow professionally and personally. I take it much more seriously because of that responsibility. It’s not a hobby. It’s a real business where the success or failure of the company has huge impacts on everyone.”

Expand on that.

I just felt like everyone was so much smarter or so much more accomplished. During orientation, they were like, “Oh, here’s some amazing people that work here.” They profile all these ridiculously-accomplished people. I’m like, “Uhh. What? Why am I even here?” Eventually you get over that a little bit, partly because you talk to other people who say, “Oh yeah, I felt the same way.” Later on, I read about impostor syndrome which describes this phenomenon.

What did you work on while at Google?

I joined the Gmail team. When I started, there was only one other full-time designer on Gmail. The way we ended up splitting it, was that my colleague, Jason Cornwell, worked on desktop, and I worked on mobile. It was just really cool to have that much responsibility and impact. Mobile Gmail was supposed to be my 20% project, but that quickly became my 120% project. Now the Gmail team is huge and it’s really awesome.

So crazy. What has it been like transitioning from a tech employee to tech-founder?

It’s definitely very different. There’s a lot more responsibility because of who is dependent on you. At Google, I was an individual contributor, and even though I had a lot of impact, no one was dependent on me for their own livelihood. It’s a big psychological shift to be a founder. Our employees depend on us to feed their families and themselves. They depend on us for helping them grow professionally and personally. I take it much more seriously because of that responsibility. It’s not a hobby. It’s a real business where the success or failure of the company has huge impacts on everyone.

What are some of the struggles and roadblocks that you’ve had to overcome both as employee and entrepreneur?

My biggest struggle is social anxiety, which progressively got worse as I got older. There were times when I would have panic attacks in public streets or just walking into a room. It was a huge barrier to becoming a leader. That probably held me back a little bit, actually probably a lot, at Google. I overcame it when I stumbled on a research program at Stanford that was comparing methodologies for treating social anxiety. I was accepted into the study, and went through 12 weeks of treatment and cognitive behavioral therapy. It worked, and it’s much less of a problem now, even though it’s always there.

“My biggest struggle is social anxiety, which progressively got worse as I got older. There were times when I would have panic attacks in public streets or just walking into a room. It was a huge barrier to becoming a leader.”

Awhile back, I read about how Nightmare on Elm Street was inspired by Cambodian trauma survivors who died in their sleep from nightmares. And I later read about how trauma, especially amongst survivors of genocide like Cambodians, can be passed down biologically to their children. It really helped explain why depression, stress, and anxiety is so prominent in my family, so it’s something I continuously watch out for in myself and my family.

What has working in tech been like knowing that you don’t have any financial network or safety net?

It’s hard and it’s fragile. I talk to a lot of other entrepreneurs who have families they can fall back on if they fail. And if their families aren’t wealthy by income, they own property and have accumulated value, so they still have another plan B. Many other entrepreneurs also have fewer financial obligations, meaning they don’t have to support their siblings, parents, or extended family. I get that everyone struggles. But clearly, some struggle more than others. A lot of people take for granted the network and privilege they have, and they don’t realize how incredibly lucky they are. For me, it’s always precarious. I’m on a founder’s salary, which is less than half of what I was making at Google, and I still need to support family members as well as myself. It’s very tough when you don’t have much of a plan B, but it makes me more driven to make the business succeed.

“I talk to a lot of other entrepreneurs who have families they can fall back on if they fail. And if their families aren’t wealthy by income, they own property and have accumulated value, so they still have another plan B. Many other entrepreneurs also have fewer financial obligations, meaning they don’t have to support their siblings, parents, or extended family. I get that everyone struggles. But clearly, some struggle more than others. A lot of people take for granted the network and privilege they have, and they don’t realize how incredibly lucky they are.”

Yeah. I feel you. Do you ever feel isolation in the industry? For me personally, when I worked in tech, I felt a sense of otherness and isolation a lot. Not from being a white chick, there are plenty of white chicks—but socioeconomically. I came from a small town, went to public state school, moved here with no money, also did not have a financial support network. I just never met anyone that I could really relate to. I’m curious if you ended up feeling those senses of isolation during your career? Just based on being different?

Yes absolutely.

At Google, I remember sitting at work and overhearing a conversation where someone said, “Oh yeah, I have a couple of houses and my partner has a house too, but it’s just too hard to manage.” She was literally complaining about having multiple houses, and I was just like, “Wow, what world is this?” It was definitely not a world I came from.

When you come from poverty and you’re also gay, Cambodian, Mormon, and a refugee of war, there’s always an inherent isolation. Of not fitting in anywhere. Of not knowing anyone else like you. Until my 20s, I was even stateless, and couldn’t get a passport from any country. So I felt a very deep sense of isolation. You have to cherish your own uniqueness, but you also have to learn how to adapt in order to survive. It’s exhausting.

Let’s get more into identity. What is your experience been as a gay man on top of everything else? I’m especially curious about being gay in the context of being Mormon.

That was really tough for me, because I was very religious in high school and earlier. I was a Boy Scout, I went to Mormon summer camps in Utah, and I planned to go on a mission. I tried very hard to be the perfect Mormon boy. And it took me a really, really long time to reconcile that. When you have this belief system that doesn’t include you, you have to figure out how you fit in or not. Eventually, I realized I didn’t fit in, and I became a much healthier person afterwards because I didn’t hate myself. In San Francisco, we still have some diversity left, so I don’t really feel too separate in terms of the gay facet of my identity. I feel lucky about that.

“When you come from poverty and you’re also gay, Cambodian, Mormon, and a refugee of war, there’s always an inherent isolation. Of not fitting in anywhere. Of not knowing anyone else like you. Until my 20s, I was even stateless, and couldn’t get a passport from any country. So I felt a very deep sense of isolation. You have to cherish your own uniqueness, but you also have to learn how to adapt in order to survive. It’s exhausting.”

On the flip side, I don’t know how active you are socially in the gay community, but what is it like being a techie in the gay community? Total other side of the coin.

Ah, this is an interesting topic. What’s sad is the mainstreaming of gay culture. I talked about this recently with my partner, Harold. When I was growing up, being gay was synonymous with being rebellious and iconoclastic. You were expected to be different. It was still taboo, but it afforded you a great amount of freedom and space to express yourself.

The world has made a lot of progress in acceptance of gay people, but a side effect is that assimilation has happened. Gay folks are in the mainstream, but they fit into what is acceptable. In media, they’re usually normalized into caricatures of what’s expected: wealthy white men who fun, attractive, and inoffensive. Yet there’s a full spectrum of people who still aren’t represented—there’s poor gay people, there’s gay people of color, there’s lesbians, there’s trans, there’s gender non-conformists, there’s gay people who are angry, and there’s people who have sex with the same gender but aren’t “gay.” So I’m saddened by the mainstreaming of gay culture, because I wish we had a greater representation of difference and all of the in-between states.

Most sad of all, is how mainstream San Francisco has become. One of my best friends, Sean, moved to the East Bay recently, and he was like, “Yeah, I wondered where all the people with the weird haircuts went. They’re all here in the East Bay!”

My next question, which we’re already touching on—what’s it like being both a techie and local?

In some ways, it’s really fun because I feel like I’m getting to do what I love in the place I grew up in. But, San Francisco has changed a lot. Oakland is changing even more. Many things have been lost because of how much tech has transformed the area. I miss that.

I’m in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco, and I can’t actually afford to move back to Oakland. It’s just really crazy because I spent all this time trying to escape Oakland, and then I can’t actually afford to go back. It’s very ironic. I touched on it a little bit when my friend made the comment about haircuts in the East Bay—San Francisco just isn’t as diverse as it once was. It’s very homogenous, and that’s increasingly getting harder for me to accept. It’s heartbreaking.

“I’m in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco, and I can’t actually afford to move back to Oakland. It’s just really crazy because I spent all this time trying to escape Oakland, and then I can’t actually afford to go back. It’s very ironic.”

I used to think I’d live in San Francisco for the rest of my life because it’s just so open, diverse, and you can live how you want to live. But when toast is $5 dollars, it’s kinda crazy. I actually love the $5 toast, but when that’s the norm, and there is not much deviation, it’s obscene.

Can you expand on what’s been lost?

My partner is much more conscious about social justice, diversity, and oppression. He’s definitely made me more attuned to those issues. For example, the queer arts in San Francisco is dying because it’s getting pushed out by rising rent prices, evictions, and a lack of studio spaces.

My techie side says, “Oh, well. It just means, as an artist, you have to adapt, and try to figure out who the audience is and cater to your audience”. The other side of me is like, “Wow. That’s a really shitty thing to say. These are people that have a particular point of view and a particular statement they want to make, and you’re telling them they need to suppress that?”

The fact is, their way of expression is being taken away from them. I have to constantly ask myself, “Am I part of the problem or am I not?” It’s very, very complicated and I’m not sure what the answer is.

How do your friends and family from growing up feel about how you turned out?

I think they’re all super excited for me. My mom still doesn’t really know what I do. She doesn’t have an understanding of technology but my siblings do. And I feel good in that I can set an example. I wish I could write an autobiography that was like, “I grew up poor, then bootstrapped myself, and did it all by myself,” but the reality is that I had a lot of help and people who believed in me. I had mentors, I had family that watched out for me, I had amazing teachers. I feel like it was definitely like a group effort, and so, I hope I continue being a good example for others. More importantly, I strive to help others in the same way others have supported me.

What would you say are your biggest motivators? What drives you?

Well, I had this experience growing up where I had to do a lot of translation and filling out of forms for my mother who didn’t speak English. That made me aware of things that may be invisible to others, like the design of forms, for example. So there’s a notion of service design that I get really interested in. How do you help others accomplish what they need to get done to survive or excel? Answering that question is a huge motivation for me. It’s partly why I started Mixmax with my friends, Olof and Brad. I wanted to make something that would actually help people do their own work better in order to succeed.

My life with my family and partner is also a major motivator for me. I’m driven to help support them. I believe when you succeed in your personal life, you also succeed in your professional life. It’s not about “balancing” work and life, but about creating flexibility in each so that both areas can succeed.

Let’s go macro for a second. How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What excites you, what frustrates you?

I’m extremely excited about software for professionals. It’s so cool to see how people use existing pro tools for their work. The current tools are really, really awful. It’s just amazing to me how much we focus on consumer products, but there’s this world of professional software that needs great design. So it’s very exciting to think about those possibilities.

What’s frustrating? Everyone is so entitled. It’s definitely a bubble in the Bay Area where people feel like they deserve the world, because they happen to be an in-demand tech person living here. Super, super frustrating. It’s refreshing to talk to people outside Silicon Valley, who are also hungry to learn and grow, but have a lot less entitlement.

“Always ask yourself, ‘How can I exceed expectations?’ Set explicit goals and push yourself to achieve more than what was previously asked of you.”

Lastly, what advice would you give to folks from similar backgrounds to you who are really interested in tech but just not quite sure how to get into it and succeed?

Gosh, let’s see. Well, one tip is to don’t be afraid to approach the people you admire and recruit them as mentors. You might be hesitant to reach out to people, because you think they’ll flat out reject you. For the most part, I have found that many people are willing to help and are awesome about it.

Another tip: always ask yourself, “How can I exceed expectations?” Set explicit goals and push yourself to achieve more than what was previously asked of you. I learned this from Google and from my time at Dubberly. Hugh phrased it as “pulling a rabbit out of a hat.” Overachievement increases the chances for success and learning.

My last advice is to foster a wide variety of interests that make you happy. Tech might not be what fulfills you in the end, so consider other things that could also make you happy, and at the same time, viable as a living. Even within tech, there are many hats to wear, many subjects to explore, and many products to design. It’s super open.

I was born in Hayward, California. I have been an East Bay resident for most of my life. I grew up between Hayward and Oakland, sort of bounced around a lot as a kid. From there, I was actually the first kid in my family—and I don’t know where I got the idea—that I wanted to go to college, but I just thought that that was what I was supposed to do.

“I come from a pretty low socioeconomic background, a pretty poor community, and one that is pretty wrought with a lot of gang violence, a lot of drug abuse and in my home, specifically my sister, was a drug dealer for most of my life. I grew up in this really chaotic home and for me—I had a lot of examples of what I didn’t want to be, what I didn’t want out of life.”

So, unlike most of the people that I grew up around, I just felt like, “I need to go to college.” I eventually got into some schools  and somehow found some money to go.

I come from a pretty low socioeconomic background, a pretty poor community, and one that is pretty wrought with a lot of gang violence, a lot of drug abuse and in my home, specifically my sister, was a drug dealer for most of my life. I grew up in this really chaotic home and for me—I had a lot of examples of what I didn’t want to be, what I didn’t want out of life.

I would see these depictions of women on TV who were educated and independent, and they weren’t exposed to sexual assault, and abuse, and they weren’t exposed to drug abuse or trauma, or violence and I mean—maybe they were, actually—but on TV they looked so—happy. And I was like, “I’d like a calm life. I think that’s something that I’d like. I’d like to be successful.”

I don’t know where my ambition actually came from, but at some point I was like, “I’m going to go to college.” I worked my ass off in high school and tried to take advantage of what little resources I had to make it work. I eventually got one of my mom’s old friends to co-sign on some student loans to cover what my scholarships didn’t cover. And I went to college. The first person in my family to do it.

I attended a few different colleges and eventually wound up in San Francisco at USF. They gave me some money to go to school there and I actually, by total accidental, wound up in the technology industry during my time at USF.

“I would see these depictions of women on TV who were educated and independent, and they weren’t exposed to sexual assault, and abuse, and they weren’t exposed to drug abuse or trauma, or violence and I mean—maybe they were, actually—but on TV they looked so—happy. And I was like, ‘I’d like a calm life. I think that’s something that I’d like. I’d like to be successful.'”

What was the impetus that got you interested in tech?

Here’s the official story of how I got into tech: My best friend at the time, who’s actually still my best friend today, Kacie, was working at our Career Services Center and I needed a job pretty badly. I was very poor. At the time, I wasn’t speaking to my family at all. My parents have no money. They have horrible credit. They could never really help themselves and so they could definitely never help me. I remember at the time I was stealing tampons from my campus bathroom because I just didn’t have the $5 to spend on tampons. And just looking back—still, looking back on that past still affects me in so many ways.

“I remember at the time I was stealing tampons from my campus bathroom because I just didn’t have the $5 to spend on tampons.”

But yeah—back to the story of getting into tech. So, I was really poor and I was like, “Okay. I have my student loans and my scholarships paying for my housing and my tuition.” But I didn’t really any have money to eat or for any basic shit like paying for household items, groceries, or whatever. So Kacie, who was also my roommate at the time, comes from really a similar background as me. We both had to work really hard and live really simply. We grew up living paycheck to paycheck. Neither of us had any sort of safety net and we always just had to make it work. So, when she was working at the Career Services Center, she would bring me home job ads.

One of them was from a startup in Soma and I was like, computers, hmmm I can computer. I can figure it out. I always had this blind faith in myself. I don’t know if it’s arrogance, I don’t know what it is or where it came from. I don’t know why me. Why I always figured I could make it work. I knew that I knew how to learn. I knew how to teach myself things. So I figured, if I put myself in this atmosphere, maybe I can learn a few things.

So I would apply to all of these job ads that Kacie would bring home. And one of these ads was from a startup named Yammer. At the time, they were a really small tech company who has just moved up from LA. They had placed an ad for a really lowly data entry position. It was a temp job for sure, but I was like, “no I think I’ll stay.” I was a very stubborn person. I’m sure the reality of me finding a job at Yammer has something to do with my white-passing privilege, I’m sure. But I kind of just threw my hand up for all the odd jobs around the office.

“I always had this blind faith in myself. I don’t know if it’s arrogance, I don’t know what it is or where it came from. I don’t know why me. Why I always figured I could make it work. I knew that I knew how to learn. I knew how to teach myself things. So I figured, if I put myself in this atmosphere, maybe I can learn a few things.”

Someone would be like “We need someone to stack the fridge. I’d be like, ‘Me!’” “We need someone to write a blurb for our blog,” ‘Me!’” “We need someone to replace all of the hyperlinks links in our blog templates” and I was like “Me!”

All these menial tasks sort of allowed me to build a skill set around being a creative technologist. I mean I had some background. I wrote and I read so much when I was younger because I experienced so much trauma as a kid, and reading and writing and escaping my world and being in this other like fiction-y world, really provided a safe space for me.

When it came to reading, specifically, I think it kind of saved my life. It got me through some really hard times and provided a kind of shelter for me through much of my adolescence. I think I feel really similarly about the internet, actually. On the Internet, I can be a person who isn’t wounded by my past—although now, I guess, I might seen as wounded online, heh.

But the Internet has always felt like magic to me. It’s this thing that anyone—even people like us that come from a pretty low socio-economic background—can access these tools to teach ourselves things, and to interact on the same playing field. I can meet or talk to someone from anywhere in the world, and I can connect with someone and find those people who are like me, and have experienced similar things to me, I guess. There’s something really magical about it all.

“But the Internet has always felt like magic to me. It’s this thing that anyone—even people like us that come from a pretty low socio-economic background—can access these tools to teach ourselves things, and to interact on the same playing field. I can meet or talk to someone from anywhere in the world, and I can connect with someone and find those people who are like me, and have experienced similar things to me, I guess. There’s something really magical about it all.”

So, anyway, I decided to stick around in tech. To do Internet things.

I taught myself to code long before I think I would have considered myself a designer, but I eventually realized that I find a lot more satisfaction in design work, and in bringing a vision, a product, to life. And now I get to do this type of work on a daily basis. That’s how I came into this crazy world that is tech.

What your first impressions were of Silicon Valley, whenever you happened to discover it?

I was just really attracted to the edginess of it. I was really attracted to this faux ideology of “meritocracy.”

There really is this “Oh, you dropped out of high school. You can be a CTO,” sort of thing. To me, that was really attractive, the mobility. Here I thought, “I’m going to be working as an admin, or a secretary my whole life,” because that’s what women who come from my community wind up doing. Or maybe I would have ended up in a warehouse. There’s not a lot of mobility in these types of jobs. Whereas at these startups, I was seeing these men who’d dropped out of high school running companies. And so I was like—again, this stubbornness comes up for me, I was like, “If they can do it, I can do it.” Well, I don’t know that I ever really believed that. I think that for me, I felt like I had to do it. I felt like if I didn’t do it, I would die. I don’t how to describe it—

I literally can relate.

Like, you feel like you don’t have the option to fail. There’s no choice. And so you better make it, and then you better turn around and give back to whoever it is around you that you can, because—I don’t know. Like thinking that you did it all on your own is sort of a privilege in it’s own right—I don’t know. Sorry [laughter]. It’s  really hard for me to talk about sometimes. But, yeah, it just really felt like I had to make it and so, I guess, by any objective standard in our industry I feel like I’ve succeeded, which is awesome.

I’m still sort of learning—I’m still sort of career building and I have so much growing to do, but I think that I’ve sort of gotten past the whole “I don’t belong here” thing because not even the people who think they belong here belong here, you know?

Like I feel like the Internet belongs to all of us even though businesses don’t operate that way. I don’t know, I just feel more empowered these days than I did when I first joined tech.

So on the one hand, I was really attracted to the mobility in tech, when I joined, and the opportunity and the access. But what I was really taken back by was the wealth and how wasteful people are with it—specifically in Silicon Valley.

I remember the first time I started dating someone in tech and I was still in college and poor as fuck at this point. He was like “I’ll take you to your favorite sushi place, your choice!” So I had this place that I always went to in college and I loved it. It was super cheap (by SF standards) and super delicious and I was all about that fucking place. I thought it was like top notch because to me those things matter, a lot. If I have a good time there with my friends, then that’s the top notch place.

So this guy, we go on a date at this sushi place and he starts the conversation by doing this thing that really bothers me. Salaries came up or money or something. I don’t remember exactly how the subject of money came up, but it did. And he was like, “Oh. I can’t possibly tell you how much I make.” I was like, “Yeah, you can.” I was like, “It’s fine.” But he did that fake embarrassed thing—like, he wasn’t really embarrassed. He’s really proud and he wants to talk about it. There’s this great SNL skit that’s like, “Don’t make me dance.” It’s when someone who really, actually, does want to talk about it, trying to get you to probe them, I guess, for more information and to me, that was really off-putting. So that was annoying. I’m a real ass bitch. I always speak my mind and I don’t feign embarrassment or shyness and I guess I wasn’t used to being who did.

But then, the absolute worst part of this date happened. When the bill came, he laughed at it. He audibly laughed at the check and just—I think my head just went to the side like, “Wowwww.”

I had never been in an environment like that. I was coming from a totally different world. I never thought that I would make more than my mother made. My mom worked for the court system in Alameda County for 35 years and her ending salary, after 35 years of service to the county, was $50K. This guy—who eventually told me his salary—shocking, I know. He was getting paid $125K, which now I make much more than. But I don’t act like that, I would never act like that. it’s insane to me. It’s insane how much wealth there is here but also how quickly it can go away.

What else is insane to me is how wide of a gap there is between the salaries  a “junior” or a “non-technical” employee and those of engineers and designers. It’s pretty astounding. And so to see someone act that way—in a restaurant—I was embarrassed and angry.

I was embarrassed because of what I come from and—I don’t know. Like—I don’t know. It’s just like, I assumed “Oh, it’s just this person. This person is just this way.” But then I started realizing that this is a really common attitude and set of behaviors.

Once when I was out for a dinner with coworkers, no special occasion, and I watched my founder get wasted at Alexander Steak House and tip 50% on top of the included gratuity on a bill for like 14 people’s dinners. Great for the waitress. I’m like, “Oh, my god, that’s amazing.” Like, “You’re going to have a great night and a great month probably.” But just how nominal it was to them. Like to do that. Like how easy it was, and how much it didn’t affect them. I was like, “I could feed my family for like how long on that tip, not even the bill.” So it was just kind of insane to watch. That was like a $20,000 dinner or something crazy like that.

“I’ve always felt like I have to hide the person I am from everyone. I am always worried that someone’s going to “find me out,” and that I will be no longer welcomed, or I will be no longer valued as a person here, and I’m still working through that.”

I remember seeing people throw money around like that in my early years in tech and just thinking, “God, if they only knew how much $500 would change my life.”

Right?

And you feel this shame for even thinking this. It’s hard to ask for help. It’s super hard, and you don’t want to be—because I know how rich people see poor people—as needy, and that we’re always asking for handouts.

This is actually a conversation that came up in a college course when I was at USF, where there’s a ton of wealthy students. We were discussing the history of San Francisco and speculating  about why specific immigrant populations settled in different neighborhoods of the city and the conversation very quickly devolved into students railing against poor and ethnic people. The line, “Well, white people are richer because they work harder,” was actually said. In a college class. And then—What was the other one? “White people don’t want to live next to ethnic people, because ethnic people are always asking white people for money.” I was horrified.

Holy shit. On what planet?

On theirs, apparently. That was a really big “Holy shit, these people are not like me” moment and I had to settle into that feeling because that attitude was pretty well represented the people I was meeting in tech.

It’s always been really disheartening for me and I’ve always felt like I have to hide the person I am from everyone. I am always worried that someone’s going to “find me out,” and that I will be no longer welcomed, or I will be no longer valued as a person here, and I’m still working through that.

“I have a lot of survivor guilt about my family and friends being left behind. All my friends who I think are just as creative and just as smart as any of these tech people and they just don’t have the same access to the tools and the resources as them. I don’t know. It’s sad. It’s sad and it’s hard to reconcile.”

I go to therapy twice a week for this [chuckles], but it’s just survivor guilt that I have from making it out of the hood, and making it in a really white, male-dominated industry. I have a lot of survivor guilt about my family and friends being left behind. All my friends who I think are just as creative and just as smart as any of these tech people and they just don’t have the same access to the tools and the resources as them. I don’t know. It’s sad. It’s sad and it’s hard to reconcile.

It certainly doesn’t make me want to participate in a lot of tech-focused things, because my mind and my heart will always be with my friends and family whose lives are more complicated and who have been through it with me. I don’t know. It’s hard not to be resentful to some extent as well. It’s hard to make peace with the disparity, I guess. It’s always on my mind.

Okay, so before I go deeper into the dark shit, tell me in terms of your work, just overall, what have been some of the most exciting things about your work? What parts of your work really activate you?

Oh, my god, so many parts. All the parts. No, I’m kidding. I have one story that I like to tell, because it just totally simplifies why I am still here—I had been doing these odd jobs, just trying to infiltrate this boys’ club, and say, “No, I can be technical, too. I can understand technology, and I can be an expert.” I was actually on the marketing team at Yammer when the perfect opportunity to level-up presented itself.

We had our own visual design team in the marketing group and we really wanted to build a static page that acted as a feature overview for a new product launch we were doing at the time.

None of the product engineers wanted to build it, because they were like, “No, we came here to work on the product, not marketing.” Marketing doesn’t get a ton of cred with engineers. If they’re smart, they realize the value that marketing can have, but unfortunately the reality within most tech startups is that marketing is just fluff.

Yeah, I remember.

Right. It’s like, “Come on. We’re all here to run a business, guys.” But, yeah, so I was in this meeting when we were like, “Wow, it would be really nice if we had this webpage.” So, once again, I threw my hand up and said “I’ll do it.'” And I thought, “I can figure it out. I’ve written some HTML before. It can’t be that hard, right?” I had no idea what I was getting myself into, honestly.

I pulled some pretty late nights, but with the luck of a lot of Googling around I was able to pull together what our design team wanted, and we wound up launching this page at TechCrunch Disrupt. Which, in turn, meant we got a ton of traffic to this page that I’d built.

After we launched, one of our engineers pulled me over and he was looking at this data visualization tool that was showing all of the visitors and http requests we were getting to this page and how we were distributing the traffic and requests across load balancers. There were these little circles—and I’ll never fucking forget these little circles because they’re what really attracted me to information design.

These salaries that we get paid, not only are they great for our bank accounts—but for some of us, the kind of money one can earn in tech can really transform your life. You can lift your whole family out of poverty one day with the type of salaries we earn. It’s tremendously powerful for someone like me. I just think it’s—being able to do that, have this amazing power to improve your own life, and your own situation, and your own health, and eat good food.

They were flowing onto the screen and into a funnel, and like—It’s almost like a Rube Goldberg machine—they were being diverted into different paths. It was so fucking cool. I remember seeing that and thinking “All these little bubbles are people and they’re looking at this thing that I made,” and there’s just something so powerful in that for me. Being a maker is so powerful. It’s this—It’s a freedom, and something that I could take pride in, and something that I can point to and say, “I did that,” or “Me and my team did that.”. Being a part of that launch meant so much to me. I think that’s where I get a lot of my self-esteem and a lot of my self-worth—putting out things that people use and that people love, and that people talk about.

That’s the coolest part. I remember we went on Twitter—and this is really early Twitter days —for me at least—and we could see what people were saying about the site.  They really liked the page and I was like, “Wow, I wrote that.” It was just really, really awesome and—I don’t know. I’ll just never forget that.

I think this was the first time that I was like, “I’m going to do this as a job,” and I can make money doing it, and really improve my own circumstances—People don’t realize that. These salaries that we get paid, not only are they great for our bank accounts—but for some of us, the kind of money one can earn in tech can really transform your life. You can lift your whole family out of poverty one day with the type of salaries we earn. It’s tremendously powerful for someone like me. I just think it’s—being able to do that, have this amazing power to improve your own life, and your own situation, and your own health, and eat good food.

“People don’t realize that when someone threatens your ability to work—and you’re someone like me—that’s your everything. That’s your livelihood.”

The thing that makes me feel like I have really made it, really is a fridge full of groceries, good groceries. And I’m eating well, not like a glutton or anything., But I can afford to eat well now. Healthily. And I can cook good meals and really take care of my body. Like, I’m on probiotics now. I wouldn’t know what a probiotic was five years ago.

It’s really life-changing. And I don’t think a lot of people realize the stability and the quality of life we’re keeping away from those who really need these things by building an industry with a high barrier to entry, and one that isn’t inclusive. This seems so wrong to me. Why wouldn’t we try our best to open up the industry to more people? I don’t know.

Did you, at any point, ever expect to be a face of gender rights and advocacy in tech?

Am I? That’s weird. It’s so weird still, because I don’t feel that way. My friends just treat me so normally and I feel so normal.

It’s so surreal to me, honestly. Back when I went public with my experiences at GitHub I just felt like I had to do it. It was one of those moments where I was like, “I have no other choice. I am backed into a corner.” And you probably notice as well, your flight or fight is triggered in that moment and you have to decide. And, trust me, I think that I might have looked, in that moment, strong and eloquent on Twitter, but one of my best friends had to come and pick me up off of a hotel room floor because I was crying hysterically and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was like, “There’s no point in living anymore.”

“I couldn’t imagine wanting to hurt someone, actually. So the fact that people really wanted to hurt me, not just professionally, but also physically, and emotionally they wanted to end me. I don’t know. It was so devastating. It was so devastating. I think people in tech like to try to distance themselves from what happens on the internet and be think, “Tech workers are normals. It’s just people on the internet who are crazy, just these randos who live in basements and wherever.” It’s like, no. These people work side-by-side with us in these offices. They’re not randos. They’re people who we come in contact with everyday.”

People don’t realize that when someone threatens your ability to work—and you’re someone like me—that’s your everything. That’s your livelihood. It was just heartbreaking because I know I’m not a perfect person, and I could have been better to some people in my past, but I would just never intentionally try to hurt someone, ever.

I couldn’t imagine wanting to hurt someone, actually. So the fact that people really wanted to hurt me, not just professionally, but also physically, and emotionally they wanted to end me. I don’t know. It was so devastating. It was so devastating. I think people in tech like to try to distance themselves from what happens on the internet and be think, “Tech workers are normals. It’s just people on the internet who are crazy, just these randos who live in basements and wherever.” It’s like, no. These people work side-by-side with us in these offices. They’re not randos. They’re people who we come in contact with everyday. I don’t know. The whole experience was incredibly traumatizing. But hey, I’m still here.

I never imagined I would be the face of anything, nor have I ever wanted to be. I’m naturally very protective of people who can’t for whatever reason, protect themselves. Having grown up in a really abusive and violent home, I always wished that I had someone to protect me. As an adult, I’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of, sometimes to my own detriment, setting myself on fire to keep other people warm. I don’t think it’s always the most intelligent thing to do, but for at least my early twenties, I really felt like it was my responsibility. I really felt like, “Hey, I have access to these things, and all these girls, all these women of color who are at home or from Hayward, I want to show them that they can be here, and they deserve to be here, and they have every right to be here, just as much as anyone else does.

They have everything they need, inside of them. They have all the parts. They just need access. I guess I just always really felt really, deeply responsible for—I don’t know. To create something. To create an industry that is better than the one we came into.

Man. There’s so much more context and depth to the risk you took now that I know more about your upbringing. I was such a minimizer the whole time I was in tech because if you don’t have a safety net and you do anything to lose the job, that’s it.

Yeah. And it doesn’t go away, honestly. And I understand that not every woman has the opportunity to do what I did. They don’t. I already had a pretty good network. I knew that I could find a job and that I would hustle and find a new job. I don’t think everyone has that. I know that there are people, especially women, and even more so, women of color, who have suffered much greater mistreatment than I have but who are much less protected than I am. So for them, ”speaking out” would be even more costly.

“It’s hard when you see all these companies pouring money into diversity efforts, but you still hear all these stories of these women who are being seriously mistreated, sexually assaulted, just brutalized at the hands of incompetent management in tech and having their hope stripped away.”

Thinking about the barriers that we all face, I want to know more about that. I would venture to guess that a lot of women reached out to you after the fact with stories, and you don’t have to get super specific, but I’m just curious what you learned through other women about the greater woman-in-tech experience after that incident?

Honestly, it was really hard for me to hear a lot of stories. In one sense, I was very happy to be a person that someone felt safe enough to talk to and to reach out to, and I felt so much love and warmth from that. I feel like a lot of those stories gave me strength, and I built a sisterhood with a lot of these women. And at the same time, for my own mental health, it was devastating. It’s hard when you see all these companies pouring money into diversity efforts, but you still hear all these stories of these women who are being seriously mistreated, sexually assaulted, just brutalized at the hands of incompetent management in tech and having their hope stripped away. Because what this does, it’s generational. When women have had to put up with this for generations and then the new generation of women come in  and they don’t get treated the way that the first generation did. I almost feel like there’s some resentment there, where it’s like, “Everyone should have to go through what I went through,” which I am like, “Hell no, protect other women. At. All. Costs.”

“What’s really cool for me is to watch other women stand up for themselves and to tell me that I inspired that—their strength. And I am not worthy of that. But that’s worth it to me. Oh, my god, like I would go through it—maybe not a million times—I’d go through it at least two more times if I could know that people could look at me and see that I’m okay and know that they’re going to be okay, too. It’s really important for me to stick around for this reason, and to not let other people silence me because when I get silenced so does a whole generation of women who come after me.”

Well, actually, I don’t even think the kids will need our protection. What’s really cool for me is to watch other women stand up for themselves and to tell me that I inspired that—their strength. And I am not worthy of that. But that’s worth it to me. Oh, my god, like I would go through it—maybe not a million times—I’d go through it at least two more times if I could know that people could look at me and see that I’m okay and know that they’re going to be okay, too. It’s really important for me to stick around for this reason, and to not let other people silence me because when I get silenced so does a whole generation of women who come after me.

Yeah, it is all very intense.

Did you have a moment where you were able to stop internalizing harassment and process it in a different way or is it still just as horrible?

I think as women it’s so ingrained in us to internalize any abuse that we receive and to process it as if, “We must have done something to deserve this.” I think that I am still very much in this phase of, not necessarily making peace with harassment because I don’t know that that’s the right next step for me, but in knowing that it’s wrong and that no one deserves to be treated that way. I’m still having to remind myself that this isn’t natural. No one should ever tweet your home address, tell you that they’re going to rape you and your whole family. That’s not normal, and I think that our culture is normalizing that behavior and writing it off as though, “That person’s crazy, but whatever.” But it’s not normal and it doesn’t make it okay, regardless of whoever the person on the other end is. It’s not okay. And It’s not our fault.

“I think as women it’s so ingrained in us to internalize any abuse that we receive and to process it as if, ‘We must have done something to deserve this.'”

So I’m still sort of in this—I wouldn’t call it healing, because I hate when people tell me I need to heal. As important as healing is, I think that everyone should kind of heal on their own terms, and not be told to heal by other people. It’s sort of passive-aggressive in a way [chuckles]. But I’m still in the stage of convincing myself on a daily basis that I did not deserve this. And it’s hard, it’s really hard. I think that might be easier for someone who didn’t come from the background I come from. But I’ve internalized abuse my entire life. So this is a long journey for me, and I think I’m at the point where I’ve accepted that it might take my whole life to learn how to cope. But I’m making peace with that, the fact that I came from this background. It was out of my control as a child. It was somewhat at least power-dynamic-wise, out of my control at GitHub and in tech, when I was not in a position of power.

I’m just still very much in the process of learning how to take care of myself. I’m trying to not set myself on fire to keep other people warm, anymore. It’s not my job. That’s something that all women need to hear at some point. They need to hear that self care is important, and self worth is important, and working on themselves, and spending time with themselves, and celebrating themselves is important. All those things are just so fundamental, at least for me, in finding happiness and stability. As someone who comes from a very unstable background, my goal has always been stability. That’s where I’m at.

My next question touches a little bit on what you were just saying. What do you think your motivators are?  What do you think drives you and has that changed from a few years ago?

I think I used to be really ambitious. I used to be like, “I’m going to be a CEO,” or “I’m going to start a company,” and I think that my motivation has changed. Now I just want to be okay, and to be healthy, and to be stable, and I know that life is chaos. I’ve kind of accepted that, but I think now—I think I’m less ambitious in the traditional sense, and more ambitious in being at peace with my past, where I come from, and this survivor’s guilt thing that I experience a lot.

“I’m just still very much in the process of learning how to take care of myself. I’m trying to not set myself on fire to keep other people warm, anymore. It’s not my job. That’s something that all women need to hear at some point. They need to hear that self care is important, and self worth is important, and working on themselves, and spending time with themselves, and celebrating themselves is important.”

I’m working a lot on my mental health these days, which I think is incredibly important for me. I’m doing a lot of unpacking because I think as a means of survival, you are taught to suppress all of your bad experiences, and just say to yourself, “It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine.” I’m minimizing, as you called it earlier, which I think is a really good way to put it. You have to do that to survive sometimes. And I think now, for the first time in my life, I’m surrounded by positive people. I have built this amazing team of friends and family members around me. I have an awesome therapist. I am sort of spending some time unpacking why I am the way I am. Why I react to things in certain ways. Why I’m triggered by certain behaviors in others, etc. And I’m just kind of focusing on myself, which is why I’m not doing any speaking or writing right now—like, I’m not doing any interviews; I’m not reading a single blog post this year. I’m not doing anything I don’t want to do, basically. I barely even drink anymore. I’m just trying to do things that make me feel good, and I’m trying to take care of myself because I think for a long time a part of why I was so ambitious was because so long as I was focused so much on my work and my advocacy, I didn’t have to deal with my past. I thought that if I just focused on work, and I became—I think in some ways that benefited me, because I obviously became well known in my craft and respected and valued as an employee, or as a producer, whatever it is. A producer of value—a worker. But I think that there’s just so much more to me and my life  and I’m just starting to try to embrace some more of those things recently.

What do you look for in a job now versus when you started?

Yeah, well, mobility used to be a really big thing for me and so I would pretty much go anywhere—I mean, I think that there is this thing where you’re young you want to work for like the hot, flashy start up, right? You want your personal brand associated with this really hot, edgy—I don’t know—brand of this larger entity or whatever. I don’t go for that anymore. I want to do really great collaborative work. I think also I used to be very much like—because you go into so many tight companies and you think fighting is normal and we should always fight about the things and argue and be really like—I love the passion that comes out in that in some like technical—arguments—But I’m not in it to be the winner.

“I’m in it to do work that I’m really proud of, because those are the times I look back at my career and think, “Damn, that was great.” The times that I felt most proud of the work I was doing was when it was on a team that was super collaborative and one where everyone was contributing. I don’t get there when I’m working alone.”

I’m not in it to win an argument, I’m not in it to “win” a company, I’m not in it to win a stock option that’s not worth anything [chuckles]. I’m in it to do work that I’m really proud of, because those are the times I look back at my career and think, “Damn, that was great.” The times that I felt most proud of the work I was doing was when it was on a team that was super collaborative and one where everyone was contributing. I don’t get there when I’m working alone. I’m never really happy working alone, it’s isolating.

I really do like empowering people, enabling other people on my teams. Being a great collaborator really helps you grow into a great manager. And I may want to do that someday, eventually. But right now I’m really enjoying being an individual contributor.

“When I look for a team to join, I try to see how people interact with one another. I like being on a team where people feel heard, and obviously, diversity is a really big deal to me. It’s nice to be able to relate to someone on your team. It’s nice to make jokes and have people get them. It’s nice to be on a team where other people know what it’s like to be constantly discriminated against, and judged for who they are in this industry, or what they represent, or where they come from. I like being on a team with other people who know what it’s like to have to leave so much of themselves at home everyday and come into a job because they have to protect their own stability.”

When I look for a team to join, I try to see how people interact with one another. I like being on a team where people feel heard, and obviously, diversity is a really big deal to me. It’s nice to be able to relate to someone on your team. It’s nice to make jokes and have people get them. It’s nice to be on a team where other people know what it’s like to be constantly discriminated against, and judged for who they are in this industry, or what they represent, or where they come from. I like being on a team with other people who know what it’s like to have to leave so much of themselves at home everyday and come into a job because they have to protect their own stability. So yeah, I don’t know. I think I look for teams that are really collaborative and I look for good management.

A good manager—an experience with a good manager versus a bad one is night and day. You could work for the best company in the world, but if you have a bad manager I just feel like your experience at that company is not going to be one that’s positive; it’s not going to be one that helps you grow as an individual contributor or a manager. Again, I grew up having enough bad examples of what not to do in my life and so these days I’m sort of looking for more good examples and for what I want to do with my career. I’m finally at a company where I can have a long career. I could realistically stay at my company until I retire and that’s a really exciting thing to me. It gives me so much motivation to want to work on my relationships with people and build with them. Those relationships don’t feel contentious like so many really high pressure start-up roles feel. I don’t feel like I’m competing with anyone on my team.

I’m reading this awesome comic book series right now called Saga and I’m obsessed with it and there are so many really good quotes in it—but there’s one in particular really resonates with me and that’s, “life is mostly about learning how to lose”.

Life isn’t so much about our winning moments but it really is about how we handle losing. What’s our next move? How do we keep going?  People like us, we’ve been losing forever, right? So this isn’t anything new. For some more privileged people I think it’s a lot harder to lose, especially later in life because they’ve never done it before.

How do your friends and family from home feel about how far you’ve come?

My best friend Kacie is an elementary school teacher and she actually uses me as her example of how to “make it.” She works at a public elementary school in Oakland and her school has one of the highest rates of children who have experienced trauma. I was one of those kids. They’re me. I go to her school and I see these kids and I’m like, “I remember running on the playground with all of you”. It’s really a cool experience for me. But they’re going through a lot as kids and it’s cool because I’ll come around and she’s using me in her lesson plans to teach her students that just because you might not come from the most fortunate situation, you don’t have to accept that that’s all you deserve out of life.

I think every kid deserves a childhood. I think every kid deserves to eat and be loved and to really just be a kid, you know?

“Things that I thought were weaknesses in my early twenties I’m now starting to see as strengths. Being a sensitive person allows you to be really empathetic. And I can read emotions really well. I can empathize with people and do my job better because of it. Sensitivity is, actually, generally something that is framed as something that’s weak. But I’ve found that it’s actually more like a superpower.”

It’s been really cool to watch her use me as an example in her classes. It feels so sincere and just real. There’s all these tech publications or whatever and they’ll email me and be like, “you’re so great, you’re so magnificent” and I’m like it doesn’t mean anything coming from a lot of those people because they’re not my people. I don’t know if they are; maybe they are in some way or shape or form but it matters so much more coming from my friends and family here at home.

I have an eight year old niece and—oh, she’s nine now, holy shit—she’s nine and I helped raise her for her first three years of life and it is—I never had an auntie like me. I never had that good example—And I mean, I’m not perfect—Oh my God, I’m like deeply flawed like any human, but it’s really cool because even though she is going to have to go through a lot of the stuff that I went through as a kid, she will always be able to look at me and say, “I can have that” which is just the most important thing to me.

How do you think the combination of your background, how you grew up, and the life experiences that you’ve had impact the way that you approach your work and career?

Oh, man. Well, one: I’m hyper vigilant. I have PTSD. It’s something I’ve had my whole life and because of it I am very much always kind of on-guard.

It’s very hard for me to relax in certain environments. I think in one way it’s made me an incredibly sensitive human being. It’s funny because things that I thought were weaknesses in my early twenties I’m now starting to see as strengths. Being a sensitive person allows you to be really empathetic. And I can read emotions really well. I can empathize with people and do my job better because of it. Sensitivity is, actually, generally something that is framed as something that’s weak. But I’ve found that it’s actually more like a superpower.

And I don’t think I would have that superpower  if I hadn’t gone through what I’ve gone through, as sad as that is. I don’t think I would have had the courage—any of the courage. At the time, again, it didn’t feel like a choice going public with my story but never in a million years can I imagine that I would have had that courage or gotten to that point where I would say that I’d had enough. If I didn’t have my background, I probably would have just swept all that emotion and pain under the rug and kept going, you know, as so many women have to do. I think my past has influenced almost everything about me. Almost everything. Yeah. And I think, again, even though I’m trying really hard to focus on myself, I still think deep down that I am fairly protective of other people and their right to live and be who they are and bring who they are to work, and I just think I do it in a very different way than I did in the beginning of my career.

Yeah. Shall we go macro for a second?

Yeah.

How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What excites you, what frustrates you?

Women are in such a difficult position when they join a tech company, and I’m not speaking for myself personally. I’ve been in this position at many companies. I feel like tech companies expect women to be their voices of “diversity.” And I feel like there’s a ton of pressure put on women to recruit other women to their tech firms. But then if something bad happens you’re almost made to feel like a hypocrite. Being in this position really makes you question yourself and if you’re merely a part of the machine, instead of someone who is creating real change.

What I’m excited about is just the rise of all these just incredible voices of women in tech. I have a mentee who is a CS student at Berkeley. She comes from Hayward. I coached her in cross country when she was 14 years old at my high school. I coached my own cross country team for a summer in college and it is so fucking cool to see her bring her Hayward swag to such a white, cultureless industry. It’s just so rad because I never had the balls. I never had the balls to be 100% who I am inside of these establishments and I feel her bringing it. And I feel like I helped a little bit which is really gratifying.

“I see this mosaic sort of taking shape in tech now, and I’m seeing all these different voices emerge and there no longer being one woman as an authority over the voice of women in tech. And I love that. I am obsessed with that. I am so excited. I get to take a step back and really just admire it and help sort of signal boost. Like, there’s just so many amazing women doing very cool things in our industry right now—it’s very cool.”

It’s all about creating space. There’s more space in tech in 2016  for her to be herself, then there was for me when I joined the industry. Just seeing her be like, “I’m here and I’m just as good,” seeing her have the attitude of, “I deserve to be here and I’m just as good as any of you,” is such a powerful thing for me and I really hadn’t seen that in at least my first four or five years in tech. That’s something I’m super excited about. There’s way more vocal women now so it’s no longer like the one Julie or the one Shanley, you know what I mean? It’s not like there’s one radical feminist, no. They’re everywhere and there’s all these voices. For me, and I’ve said this in the past and no one’s ever written about it which makes me always like—you know when you say something in an interview and then they never write about it and you’re like, “That was the gold. That’s what I want people to cover.”

I got you girl. Don’t worry.

I’ve always felt like there’s no one woman in tech, like it’s not Julie. I’m only one person. I’m only one woman in tech. I’ve always felt like the Women in Tech movement should be represented by this mosaic essentially of all these different voices and all these different experiences

It should be representative of different ethnicities and cultures and I want the world that I know to be represented here, and the world I come from is really diverse. Where I come from everyone respects each other’s cultures and everyone respects the strength of women. It’s not devoid of its own brands of misogyny and prejudice. But it’s more representative of what the world is actually like.

Anyways, I see this mosaic sort of taking shape in tech now, and I’m seeing all these different voices emerge and there no longer being one woman as an authority over the voice of women in tech. And I love that. I am obsessed with that. I am so excited. I get to take a step back and really just admire it and help sort of signal boost. Like, there’s just so many amazing women doing very cool things in our industry right now—it’s very cool.

And the idea that I may have helped create some of this newfound space for women to shine is really cool too. It really is.

I don’t think there’s any “may” about it.

I am still not quite at the point of acceptance. My boyfriend tells me all the time, but I am just not quite there. I’m working on it, though, with my therapist—don’t worry [laughter].

I’m getting there. For a long time after my (very public) GitHub exit, I really felt like I had been abandoned. I felt like I had been kicked out of tech, and that I was like this taboo, like the black mark essentially—from Harry Potter. I now think a lot of that was internalized and it was just sort of in my own head.

But it’s just really good not to feel like the enemy anymore, and to feel like there’s more of us than there are of the bad guys, maybe. I don’t know. Good and bad is like a weird binary for that, but there’s more introspection; there’s more conversation; there’s more dialogue. And I feel like those are the things that have to happen. Like, we all have to have hard conversations; we all have to check our privilege. Like, I accept that the way that I was treated by the press and by the media—those are the same thing, I guess, right—was probably way more kind than a woman who is visibly of color would have been treated, and I accept that there’s some privilege there, and so I think it’s important for all of us to sort of accept what privilege we have both in society and in the industry.

The introspection that I am starting to see is really promising. There’s all these amazing women writers writing great pieces, and I just feel like I can retire. I’m like, “This is fantastic.” I just try to support them now and reach out when I feel like someone’s not in a good place and just let them know, “Hey, I’m here. You want to come and hang out with me and my dog? I’m around.” I try to do that as much as possible when I see someone on the receiving end of any abuse that I’ve experienced. It’s a messed up little sorority we’ve got going but [chuckles] I’m definitely feeling a little more solidarity and I’m feeling more—It’s just a feel. It’s so weird because you can point people to all these articles about women in tech in the past decade or so, but it’s really hard to capture how being in tech has felt over that time. There’s no exact timeline, really. But I’m definitely feeling way more positive about it now than I ever have.

Amazing. I hate that you went through all that but I’m also so, so happy to see it all turning into such a positive thing.

It’s really cool. I don’t know. I just hope someday my kids will—Actually, there’s is a great story I’ll tell you—My grandma, my abuela, on my dad’s side, she was this total badass and she died a year after I was born and so I’ve only heard stories about her. But she was such a badass. One of the stories my tia told me was that when my abuela was young and in high school,  she had these red pumps, red high heels. She went to a Catholic school, an all-girls Catholic school, and they had to wear a uniform and she was like, “Nope.” She would hide these red Kat Von D-style pumps outside her house and she would leave dressed in her uniform every day. And then pull her pumps out of the bushes and dress herself up on the way to school and then get in trouble for it. I hear these little stories about her every once in a while and I really wish I had gotten to know her. But I still feel this deep connection to her, because of these stories. People say we look alike and we sing alike. There’s all these similarities and I just hope that someday my kids and my grandkids can read about me on the internet and be like, “Holy shit. Our abuela did cool shit.” I want to inspire them to open the door for more people like them. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, was open a door.

My favorite coping mechanism that I’ve had since I was like 18 is “it’s good for the memoir.”

That’s it.That’s a good one. That’s really good. I’m going to write that down.

Like when the shittiest stuff happens I’m just like, “Noted, noted. This will fit in. This is pretty good. Yep. Here’s another chapter. Okay.” I would recommend. A very good coping mechanism.

That’s definitely going in the toolbox, for sure.

Last question for you would be what advice would you have, just based on the lessons you’ve learned, for young girls who are either getting their start in tech or are hoping to get into it?

Find your own way. That would probably be my advice. Find your own way and you don’t have to go to an Ivy League. You don’t have to rub shoulders with whoever, rub elbows, I don’t know the saying. Find your own way if you can. I would say be 100% yourself because that is who you have to go home and live with. That’s who you have wake up with and look at in the mirror every day.

“Be 100% yourself because that is who you have to go home and live with. That’s who you have wake up with and look at in the mirror every day.”

A lot of people will ask me, “Are you mad that GitHub didn’t fire so and so and that they’re not suffering or whatever?” I’m just like, ” No, because they have to go to bed with who they are every night, and I get to go to bed knowing that my conscience is clear, and that I did everything that I could for myself and for other people in this situation. And that I did it with a pure heart.”  I don’t know. I did it with the best intentions, and I fought. I’ve had some really dark moments since then and dealing with the trauma from the experience has been challenging.  I ended up in a hospital once, and it is the biggest success to me that I survived, and that I’m a survivor. This stuff never going to go away for me. It’s going to be my whole life. It’s going to be a part of my story. A part of my memoir [chuckles]. I’m making peace with it, but also, I’m just making decisions and making choices that I can live with. That’s what I would recommend to young people is to make decisions and choices that’ll make you proud. Make yourself proud.

I’m originally from San Francisco.  Actually I technically grew up in Millbrae, but I went to K-12 in the Sunset district of San Francisco. Most of my family is based here. I’m back in San Francisco after being gone for about ten years for college, grad school, and working as well. I’ve been back since late 2011.

How did you first get interested in tech?

I used to be a civil engineer – I worked in that industry for about four years and started to get really bored. I was doing a lot of repetitive work, and projects would last for years. I didn’t get to see the fruits of my labor as soon as I wanted, so I wanted to be in a space that used more innovative technology where I could see results faster. Based on what I was hearing it sounded like the tech industry was super fast-paced and that’s what I decided to transition into. I started to look for all types of jobs in tech and at the time, I thought I only qualified for customer support positions. I started working in customer support to get my foot in the door. It was really funny when I was applying because the company said, “A civil engineer with a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering is applying to work in customer support: we think she might be overqualified.”

Walk me through that transition, once you were in tech, working customer support, and teaching yourself how to code.

I worked in customer support at two companies, as a Community Manager and Customer Engagement Manager for about a year-and-a-half to two years. At one of those companies, I thought I wanted to do usability, but that didn’t end up panning out for me. I thought I wanted to continue working with people.

“’A civil engineer with a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering is applying to work in customer support: we think she might be overqualified.'”

Then I started to become interested in HTML and CSS because a friend of mine talked about building her own site and a site in Flash for a client as a side project. I decided to take a HTML and CSS workshop, which was about 12 hours in total. Eventually, I moved back to San Francisco without a job. During that time in addition to job searching, I started building a portfolio of art projects in HTML/CSS and posted that online. That was exciting and I thought it was super cool.

That’s when I took the Customer Engagement Manager role, which was more technical than the previous one. Customer Engagement Managers there had read access to a database, and I provided support regarding our HTML/CSS Craigslist templates and API. Our manager taught us how to write SQL queries so we could kind of view data, which really helped in customer support. I’d tried to learn Python and then I also tried to learn PHP because that company’s stack included PHP, but I didn’t take to either of those languages.

Then one of my coworkers recommended I learn Javascript. You can run it in your browser and you can view your changes quickly. So I took another 12 hour workshop over a weekend with Girl Develop It and learned Javascript. I started building all types of things and going to hack-a-thons, going to hack-nights, hanging out with more experienced programmers, and asking them a zillion questions. Eventually I transitioned from Customer Engagement Manager to Web Developer. I started working on HTML emails, which are a horror, but a good place to start.

“I started building all types of things and going to hack-a-thons, going to hack-nights, hanging out with more experienced programmers, and asking them a zillion questions. Eventually I transitioned from Customer Engagement Manager to Web Developer.”

How do you feel like your background in multiple disciplines affects how you work as a dev?

I definitely wouldn’t say I’m an expert. I like to say I’m a Jane of all trades, master of none. [laughter] Certainly customer support affects the way that I work as a developer. Working mostly on the front end, I do think about our customers. I try to think of all types of people who might be using the platform instead of just thinking about people like me. That helps me as a developer – having empathy for people who might not be the most technically savvy or people who have qualities that might limit their interactions with websites.

Working in civil engineering helped with developing a technical mind and thinking about things in a formulaic way. That really helps in programming in general. Also in all engineering disciplines, essentially create building blocks, which are more digestible and used to build larger blocks. Software Engineers called it abstraction, but Civil Engineers don’t have a term for it. Abstraction of formulas and calculations exists in civil engineering. That’s definitely translated over to the way that things work in Software Engineering realm.

“Customer support affects the way that I work as a developer. Working mostly on the front end, I do think about our customers. I try to think of all types of people who might be using the platform instead of just thinking about people like me. That helps me as a developer – having empathy for people who might not be the most technically savvy or people who have qualities that might limit their interactions with websites.Working in civil engineering helped with developing a technical mind and thinking about things in a formulaic way.”

One other thing that overlaps is the relationship between civil engineers and architects is very similar to the relationship between programmers and designers. It’s funny: architects will create designs and then they pass that on to civil engineers who actually vet those designs with calculations. Designers create visual mocks and pass those onto developers, who build out the code. Equally true is the overlap within the industries themselves: architects and designers are often very technical, either knowing structures or writing code themselves; and civil engineers and developers often have an eye for design, throwing together what might be a great looking window or website.

What about working in tech and in Silicon Valley has been really awesome for you? What are things you’re proud of?

Being able to create my own projects out of thin air. The innovation and speed of innovation have definitely met my expectations for the industry. You can build a website overnight and I love that aspect of Tech. I guess that’s more personal. That what I do professionally, I can also use to produce personal projects is awesome – I have a lot of fun doing that.

I’m also so proud that one of my projects, (Human) Wasteland, became a political talking piece around homelessness in SF. I used programming skills I developed put the site up in just a week. The fact that a small, week old project could raise awareness about the lack of resources for those experiencing homelessness in San Francisco is so amazing! I still can’t believe that happened.

What have been some of your biggest struggles or roadblocks?

Coming from a non-traditional Computer Science background and being an “older” Chinese American woman in Tech has been interesting. There’s definitely unspoken bias. Since I’ve started working in tech, I’ve been the oldest person on all but two teams, the only woman on all but one team, and the only Asian woman on all of the teams. Some of those teams became more diverse and some became less diverse over time.

“Coming from a non-traditional Computer Science background and being an ‘older’ Chinese American woman in Tech has been interesting. There’s definitely unspoken bias.”

But… you’re not old at all.

I know. I’m in my early thirties, so it’s kind of shocking, but really interesting. I think you kind of have to take it with a grain of salt.

But I’m also frustrated when I think about what is being innovated in Silicon Valley. Most of the innovation is going towards things that are built for the types of people who already work in the industry. And I feel like having a more diverse team – or a more diverse workforce in the industry in general – would really help broaden the horizons of what the industry can actually do and what we could bring to the world outside of tech. But right now there are so many apps that are just replicas of existing apps.

The other day I conversed with coworkers about learning to cook and they said, “Oh there’s an app for that.” Then they listed a number of apps that do exactly that or a slight spin on it, e.g., “Oh, do the chefs come to your place or do you go to the chef’s house?” That sort of thing. I find that extremely frustrating in tech.

“Most of the innovation is going towards things that are built for the types of people who already work in the industry. The other day I conversed with coworkers about learning to cook and they said, ‘Oh there’s an app for that.'”

I have a lot of internal conflict: I want to do social good and use my skills to bring about change, but I still work in an industry where the majority of people don’t feel the same way. So that’s been a strange experience and personally hard to juggle or manage.

You mentioned bias and microagressions in your pre-interview and I’m curious what that’s been like for you.

It’s interesting because I think I’ve experienced racism and microaggression all of my life, but now that I’m older I notice it more. When you’re younger and it hasn’t happened as often, it’s easier to just brush off and not think about it. But as you become older and the more you experience it, the less tolerant of those issues you become.

It’s happened with strangers and it’s happened with friends. Usually, I don’t think people intentionally try to hurt you. That almost makes it worse in a way, because they don’t even need to think about what they’re doing to you. People can just say things about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, or age without having to stop and think about it.

Microaggression definitely affects the way you work: how you interact with coworkers or people in the industry and how you network. It can even affect your career. If you can’t work with those people who are saying racist or sexist things towards you or if you are not comfortable at work, then how do you further your career? How do you move up within a company? Or how do you move up within an industry if you’re being looked down upon? People don’t see you for your skills or your ability. They just see your race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, or age.

“I think I’ve experienced racism and microaggression all of my life, but now that I’m older I notice it more. It’s happened with strangers and it’s happened with friends. Usually, I don’t think people intentionally try to hurt you. That almost makes it worse in a way, because they don’t even need to think about what they’re doing to you. People can just say things about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, or age without having to stop and think about it.”

I think this industry isn’t alone in its discrimination– it happens in so many industries. Civil engineering is somewhat similar, except most civil engineers are closer to the tech investor profile or archetype. In general, mostly older white males dominated civil engineering. So I think discrimination and microaggression happens everywhere– it’s just now that I’m in tech, I definitely notice those problems more that before.

You mentioned being the oldest person on your teams—do you experience ageism at 32?

[chuckles] I don’t think so, not super directly. I wouldn’t say ageism outright, but I think people in tech typically don’t consider people who are older or caretakers, or have families and obligations outside of work and partying. A lot of team bonding involves drinking or happens after work when people may need to go home and care for their children, parents, grandparents, etc. I’m at an age where I think, “Yeah, I don’t really want to drink every night.” So I think it’s more of a microaggression rather than actual, direct ageism.

You also mentioned sexual harassment being an issue.

Yeah, sexual harassment has definitely occurred at multiple companies where I worked, but not always directly to me.

The first time it happened to me, I wrote a long article about it. I’m still surprised that it was allowed to happen. I don’t know if sexual harassment is worse in tech, but I feel like when you have an industry that is predominantly young, male, focused on partying, and being the “fun” industry, all of those factors combine to create an atmosphere that almost encourages sexual harassment. At least in instances I’ve witnessed or personally experienced, alcohol was definitely involved. And those incidents occurred in the office, so I’m of the opinion that company culture and values make a huge difference.

I also noticed that the people I know who have sexually harassed others have done it multiple times: repeat offenders. I don’t know if there’s any way to fix this, but I wish there was some way to pass that information on because even if they’re punished, these people are just rehired because there’s such high demand for people in tech. Unfortunately, I think companies that once employed them are protecting themselves by not defaming those people when they get fired for sexual harassment.

In this industry with the emphasis on partying and a “fun” atmosphere, people become friends. Everyone becomes super friendly. But when you lack a more professional atmosphere, people don’t want to call out, reprimand, or punish coworkers for sexual harassment.

“I feel like when you have an industry that is predominantly young, male, focused on partying, and being the “fun” industry, all of those factors combine to create an atmosphere that almost encourages sexual harassment. At least in instances I’ve witnessed or personally experienced, alcohol was definitely involved. And those incidents occurred in the office, so I’m of the opinion that company culture and values make a huge difference.”

In my case of being sexually sexually harassed, I reported it.  I think I was one of the first employees to officially report it, but eventually found out that many of my coworkers knew about that dude’s history of sexual harassment and/or had been sexually harassed by him. Not only that, but when he was sexually harassing me and other women at the company, he was dating another coworker and lying about it. And the guy just got a slap on the wrist. He wasn’t fired, he was barely scolded.

It’s a super long story, but basically he went on to date one of the people whom he managed and used company resources to take her along to a conference, i.e., a company paid vacation. So it was just a super strange situation overall that was allowed to continue– nothing was ever done about it. He eventually quit of his own accord.

Wow.

Yeah. People liked him and so they don’t want to fire him.

That is nuts.

Yeah [chuckles].

“In my case of being sexually sexually harassed, I reported it.  I think I was one of the first employees to officially report it, but eventually found out that many of my coworkers knew about that dude’s history of sexual harassment and/or had been sexually harassed by him. Not only that, but when he was sexually harassing me and other women at the company, he was dating another coworker and lying about it. And the guy just got a slap on the wrist. He wasn’t fired, he was barely scolded.”

On a more positive note, have you had mentors or people that have inspired you in your career?

Yeah, I’ve had a lot of engineering mentors, people who guided me along the way and gave me advice on what I should be learning.

When I moved back to San Francisco, the manager I ended up working for was running a very technical customer support team. He was a great manager and helped push me towards software engineering without him even knowing it. He allowed me to handle all the technical support for our API and HTML and CSS Craigslist templates. That really really helped me in my development and towards my trajectory of becoming a software engineer. He could really pinpoint people’s skills and push them in that direction, and cleared roadblocks to help that happen.

It’s funny: people have told me what he said about me as an employee and I heard that he said something along the lines of, “yeah, Jenn was kind of a pain in the ass.” Because I asked him for a lot– I was demanding as an employee but he was a great manager.

“Many communities in Tech support people who are starting out and also people who are experienced. I learned JavaScript through Girl Develop It. Initially, that network was helpful for meeting other women, learning javascript, and staying involved. But there are tons of these networks: Girl Geek Dinners, Women Who Code, RailsBridge, PyLadies—you can really have your pick, and all these women have been extremely supportive.”

And at the very beginning of transitioning into Web Development, there were so many friends and coworkers who were extremely helpful by just answering questions, steering me towards the right technologies, attending hack nights and hackathons with me, and encouraging me.

Many communities in Tech support people who are starting out and also people who are experienced. I learned JavaScript through Girl Develop It. Initially, that network was helpful for meeting other women, learning javascript, and staying involved. But there are tons of these networks: Girl Geek Dinners, Women Who Code, RailsBridge, PyLadies—you can really have your pick, and all these women have been extremely supportive. It’s also a great way to track what’s going on in the industry particularly with women.

I was also a member of a feminist hackerspace, Double Union. I found out about it via AdaCamp which was run by The Ada Initiative, which is sadly defunct. But AdaCamp was awesome– it really opened my eyes towards women in tech, acknowledging the issues that we face, and discovering that I’m not the only person deals with those problems. That was a really amazing experience. So joining Double Union was really great for me. Lots of wonderful, supportive, accomplished women are members that organization.

In the last year or so, I spoke at a bunch of conferences and it’s been pretty crazy the last few years for me, being really immersed in tech.

How does it feel being a San Francisco native who works in tech?

It’s a huge catch-22 [chuckles]. I love my job– I love being a software engineer. I really enjoy the work that I’m doing and learning new things every day. I also so lucky that the best place for me to find a job in my industry is in my hometown where all my family live. That’s also amazing.

At the same time, the change that tech has brought in San Francisco makes me really sad. I recently talked with my boyfriend about how the archetype of San Francisco completely changed from when I grew up here.

I feel like I’m part of the problem and also part of the solution. I wish that more people in tech cared more about people in the city outside of tech. I wish that they were more involved in community and building community, but I don’t feel that. Not in this industry. I feel like they only want to build community within tech or predominantly tech neighborhoods. It’s strange. After coming back here, the change was palpable and it’s only getting worse.

I feel like I’ve been personally trying to get more involved in local community to be part of the solution. I pretty focused on homelessness currently, but also generally on politics. I’m a member of League of Women Voters and trying to be more involved.  I also try to inform people about the connection between tech and politics. For example, wealthy tech investors are often heavily involved in San Francisco and California politics and that’s typically bad for people in San Francisco.

Also I’m involved in St. Francis Homelessness Challenge, run by former mayoral candidate Amy Farah Weiss. It’s basically a year-long challenge trying to provide resources and solutions for people who are experiencing homelessness. I’ve been trying to be more involved by volunteering for the Challenge.

“The change that tech has brought in San Francisco makes me really sad. I feel like I’m part of the problem and also part of the solution. I wish that more people in tech cared more about people in the city outside of tech. I wish that they were more involved in community and building community, but I don’t feel that. Not in this industry. I feel like they only want to build community within tech or predominantly tech neighborhoods. It’s strange. After coming back here, the change was palpable and it’s only getting worse.”

What you think that tech companies could do to be more involved in the city that they’re in?

The first thing is reducing greed. I assume that’s difficult because most startups here run on borrowed money. They’re all running on money given to them by investors, so I suppose they kind of need to be greedy in order to become profitable. I don’t know the best thing to do in order to avoid that.

Certainly, giving back helps. I know many companies offer time off to employees so they can volunteer, but I know people in tech who leave and volunteer outside of San Francisco. So they’ve taken time off to volunteer in a community where they don’t live. Or they’ve gone to volunteer with the ASPCA, so they’re walking dogs.

My high school in San Francisco required two types of volunteer work in order to graduate. 50 normal and 50 core hours. Core hours required you to be out in the community interacting with people in a very real and palpable way. For my core hours, I worked a weekend at St. Anthony’s, an organization that provides essential support to San Franciscans living in poverty. I served food to people, talked with them, and cleaned up afterwards. I also volunteered for Via Services, formerly Crippled Children’s Services. I worked at an overnight camp for people with disabilities and special needs. I helped organize activities and games, helped with cleaning, and general care giving and participation during my time there.

If the tech companies provide time-off to their employees, they should mandate that the time is spent on San Francisco’s people and communities, in other words, things that really matter and actually helped enrich the city.

Another thing companies can do is educate their employees about what’s going on in San Francisco. I doubt something like that would happen though. There’s a crazy story by Pando Daily (https://pando.com/2015/10/26/conway/) that revealed Ron Conway emailed CEOs of companies he had invested in, telling them how to vote in the San Francisco November elections. Of course, you know he was saying, “Vote against Proposition F, the Airbnb law, and vote against Proposition I, the moratorium on housing in the Mission district,”. This is crazy and disturbing, but many people in tech who don’t even know about these things or how the companies they work for are funded by super corrupt people like that. I really do think education, knowledge, and awareness would be helpful in making a better city.

Where do you see yourself here in 5 or 10 years. Are you still going to be working in tech? I’m assuming you’ll still be living here.

Yeah, I think I’ll still be in San Francisco. Practically all of my family is here, so it’s really hard to leave. I have over 50 family members within the Bay Area.

While applying to work for Eventbrite, I applied to work for 18F, which is basically a consultancy that lives inside the federal government. Their funding comes from the United States General Services Administration. 18F basically is contracted out by different agencies in the federal government to work on different websites and improve project management practices. So they’re all across the tech stack, helping the federal government function more efficiently and help citizens gain faster access to services.

“I’m super interested in that: working in civil service and politics. Just doing software engineering for social good or working towards social good. That’s my ultimate goal.”

Unfortunately, the timing of things didn’t quite work out for me because I’m relatively new to software engineering. I was looking for more face-to-face, in-person interaction and mentorship. And most 18F teams are distributed, so many employees work remotely. Sadly, I turned down the offer. But I think that could be in the future for me, assuming 18F is still around after this upcoming election– they better be! I’m super interested in that: working in civil service and politics. Just doing software engineering for social good or working towards social good. That’s my ultimate goal.

What kind of potential do you see in that space? Like what about that potentially is really exciting to you?  What would you like to see tech doing in that space?

There’s so much potential for improvement. There are agencies where many things are not even digitized yet. For example, when I hear about and see photos of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, I’m just so shocked and saddened by the state of things there. Knowing that soldiers are not receiving the benefits they need after training and fighting for this country, giving up years of their lives to do that work: I look at that and I think, “Wow, there’s so much that we could do. There’s so much that ordinary citizens can do to help all these other [chuckles] ordinary citizens all around us.” That’s really exciting to me because you/we have so much power to affect so many people in a more positive way.

“Tech right now is so focused on money, investments paying off, and profitability. And I’m not interested in that. Getting paid well is awesome, but the fact that you could help people obtain health care, soldiers paid for the time they’ve put in for the country, helping immigrants settle and get legal help: that’s so much more exciting to me.”

Tech right now is so focused on money, investments paying off, and profitability. And I’m not interested in that. Getting paid well is awesome, but the fact that you could help people obtain health care, soldiers paid for the time they’ve put in for the country, helping immigrants settle and get legal help: that’s so much more exciting to me. And there’s so much work that could be done to help so many people in the country.

What advice would you give to folks who are either feeling stuck in tech or trying to transition into tech?

My number one piece of advice is staying really open to whatever path may lead you to tech.

I started out in tech as a customer support agent, and I feel like that’s one of the least glamorous ways: answering phone calls and emails from people asking how to change their password. But, if I hadn’t been open to that, I probably wouldn’t be in the tech industry now.

What you say yes to in order to transition into tech will often surprise you too! Working customer support really helped me empathize with customers and that makes me a much better engineer now. Be open to different possibilities or different paths. You don’t have to pay for a boot camp to learn software engineering, and you don’t have to be a software engineer in order to be in tech. Be open, be willing to do your research, and find other ways to get in the door. Especially for people who can’t afford to pay for boot camp or to take three unpaid months off.

For people who are feeling stuck in tech: many skillsets in tech cross over to lots of different industries. What my friend does as a business analyst is similar to what analysts do in tech. Be a business analyst in tech or be a business analyst in a ton of other industries. Design work also crosses over to a lot of different industries. Even engineering! My boyfriend’s mother actually started out in banking, then ended up running the computers there. She’s now a software engineer for another bank. But she could always go back to banking.

If you’re feeling stuck in tech, you should definitely get out (GTFO). Don’t continue working in the industry if you don’t feel like it’s right for you. Anything’s possible. Of course, it really helps to have a safety net, so first make sure you have that safety net in place before you jump ship. But my overall advice is that you can absolutely use your skills towards other jobs in other industries. Tech is not the end all be all solution.

“My number one piece of advice is staying really open to whatever path may lead you to tech. I started out in tech as a customer support agent, and I feel like that’s one of the least glamorous ways: answering phone calls and emails from people asking how to change their password. But, if I hadn’t been open to that, I probably wouldn’t be in the tech industry now.”

Sure. My early years. I immigrated here when I was three. I don’t have any real memories of living in the Philippines, but that’s where I was born. I was largely raised in San Francisco, in a neighborhood called Bernal Heights. Back then, it was mostly just a blue-collar, lower-middle-class neighborhood. It wasn’t what it is today, which is starting to look a little chichi in some respects. Back then, security alarm systems for people were dogs in front of their houses that were loose and chasing you away.

I had to actually start going to school on my own at a pretty young age. I was walking by myself to school at the age of seven which can be a little scary in the city. Coming from an immigrant family, my parents were both working and they had asked my sisters for help with dropping me off at school, but they had their own world of stuff that they were dealing with. So, I ended up walking to school on my own. I was also a latchkey kid as early as five years old. It can be scary being at home alone, and so I had to learn to be independent and resourceful really early on. You have to be street smart and careful, so you in some ways you have to grow up too early.

“I was walking by myself to school at the age of seven which can be a little scary in the city. Coming from an immigrant family, my parents were both working and they had asked my sisters for help with dropping me off at school, but they had their own world of stuff that they were dealing with. So, I ended up walking to school on my own.”

You kind of lose that sense of innocence about things that kids should really enjoy. Like Santa and the tooth fairy. My parents, up front, when I was around five or six, told me there’s no such thing as Santa Claus and there’s no tooth fairy. I’ve been happy as a mother to see that innocence through the eyes of my children. I think that it’s wonderful to keep that in our young children for as long as possible, because the pragmatics of life will set in soon enough, and there’s no need to do that too early.

I started playing tennis when I was seven. My dad would play tennis on the weekend, from around six in the morning until noon, and so I’d hang out on the courts with him while he played with his friends. I would mostly go hit against a wall to practice playing tennis, and then he would spare half an hour or so to play with me at the end. As I got older, there was this national program during summer breaks that was cofounded by the legendary American tennis pro Arthur Ashe called National Junior Tennis League (NJTL). They were for inner-city kids to keep them out of trouble, because they knew that a lot of people couldn’t afford summer camps. I was one of those kids. I started playing more formal tennis and I was getting more actual lessons through that, which was a wonderful, wonderful program. That’s where I started really competing against boys in tennis, and really becoming a power hitter and really just enjoying that sport.

I really believe that, especially as a girl, playing sports helps with development in math and science and the confidence you need that lots of girls lose as they get into their teen years. I didn’t experience that lack of confidence and I attribute it to my participation in tennis. There have been some studies published about how girls (especially those participating in team sports) do much better in math and science. It’s actually the opposite effect for boys. It makes them much more aggressive. I’m grateful for the  experience of sports as a regular part of my life growing up. I’m also grateful for the fact that when I was 16, they (NJTL) gave me the opportunity to be one of their teachers.  At the time I was the youngest teacher they had ever hired and I taught both in Oakland as well as San Francisco. That helped me start exercising some leadership skills early in my life. I really appreciated that opportunity and that responsibility, and also being able to give back to kids in the neighborhood.

I started my interest in computers fairly early. This is way back when everything was command prompt driven. There was no user interface. There was no Windows. It was DOS-only green screen. Those were the early days of primitive spreadsheets and word processors. But it was interesting to use a computer back then – not everyone had one so it was novel. I grew up in those early days of using a computer when there was no Internet for the public. That didn’t happen for a while. In retrospect, it was a little less interesting too because it was more isolating since there was no social network to leverage. There weren’t any online resources to learn more about tech. The ability to learn from online communities and research was tough unless you were going to college and could get in those kinds of classes, which were also limited in those days.

“I started my interest in computers fairly early. This is way back when everything was command prompt driven. There was no user interface. There was no Windows. It was DOS-only green screen.”

My family situation was really difficult. We were an immigrant family and my parents had difficulty adjusting to the American culture. I was also the youngest of four girls but my sister who is closest in age—she’s about 2 years older than me—was born mentally retarded and her mental capacity is at the level of a three or four year old. Even though I’m technically the youngest, I’d end up spending a lot of time taking care of her. I would sit and do flashcards with her to try to teach her the alphabet and numbers. When I was a teenager I remember taking her to some of her doctor appointments and navigating the bus system with her to get there. It gave me a lot of responsibility really, really early on in life. I had my hopes of where I wanted to go and wishes for success. I did very well through most of my academic career, so I had these lofty goals to go to an Ivy League college at some point. I had made it to a top high school in San Francisco (Lowell High and they were rated really, really highly back then). I wished to go somewhere like Harvard for college but because my family life was really difficult, I had to make the decision to just compress my high school education as much as possible and I actually finished in three-and-a-half years. And when I was done and had finished all the credits to get my diploma, I left home when I was 17.

“My family situation was really difficult. We were an immigrant family and my parents had difficulty adjusting to the American culture. I was also the youngest of four girls but my sister who is closest in age—she’s about 2 years older than me—was born mentally retarded and her mental capacity is at the level of a three or four year old. Even though I’m technically the youngest, I’d end up spending a lot of time taking care of her. I would sit and do flashcards with her to try to teach her the alphabet and numbers.”

For some time, I was just trying to survive out in the world with no real support. I picked up my love for computers again when I was fortunate enough to land at a startup company in San Francisco that was building a network layer called TCP/IP for Windows. This was back when not all computers had networking capability. I landed an admin job (administrative assistant), which was not my dream job at that time, but was something I could easily get, and was good pay for a college student at that time. It re-exposed me to my love for tech, and my love for engineering, and it was good to see the work that they did.

I was also very lucky that there was an IT worker there (named Kate) who allowed me to spend some time with her, helping with her hardware, like swapping out motherboards, adding memory. I loved troubleshooting as well, so the QA team borrowed some of my time, and that was really great. That sort of really invigorated me to say, “Okay. I really need to get my act together and make sure I’m taking the right computer classes in college.” And so I continued down that route. I was in school part time and a lot of courses were very difficult to take at night. Generally, there were very limited classes in terms of the computer science program. Those programs were very, very new back then, so you were lucky if your school had a computer science program. I cobbled together my education as I went. We had a lay off at some point and I ended up in one more admin job. It was there that I was fortunate enough to make a connection with someone who recognized my troubleshooting and technical ability and after the startup was acquired, he recommended I apply for a support role at Lotus which was a subsidiary of IBM at that point. I interviewed and they hired me as a support person. I loved that they had given me that opportunity. It was such a great experience.

“I did very well through most of my academic career, so I had these lofty goals to go to an Ivy League college at some point. I had made it to a top high school in San Francisco (Lowell High and they were rated really, really highly back then). I wished to go somewhere like Harvard for college but because my family life was really difficult, I had to make the decision to just compress my high school education as much as possible and I actually finished in three-and-a-half years. And when I was done and had finished all the credits to get my diploma, I left home when I was 17.”

Pretty early on I ended up coming across this scripting language that was part of the extension framework for what was called LotusScript—it was in a desktop database called Lotus Approach which competed with Microsoft’s Access. No one knew how to use these API’s or the scripting language and I just sort of started playing around with it. I was able to use it to customize different interactions in the app. At some point there was an opportunity that came up for someone who needed to have some web skills and needed to know Lotus Script. The job was unfilled, so I kind of raised my hand and went, “Well, I can do this.” I applied. It was a little unusual for me to do it, because I was only three months in— three or four months into my support role, and for a good reason they want support people to stay in their roles for at least a year before moving on to something else.

They actually made an exception for me, which I was really grateful for, and allowed me to take on this role as an application engineer. That role ended up leading to other opportunities. It was still within the first few months of that role to take on a project to “webify” forms and reports in Approach. “Webifying” and creating dynamic pages was a thing back in the 90’s when most sites were still static. We were trying to take advantage of the new concepts of web forms to bring reports that people wanted to produce dynamically to the web. I worked with the DB2 group. DB2 was IBM’s database server solution. They had an internet connector that they had just built that could be used on the web and so I was able to connect the dots and build a wizard that took your Windows based forms and reports to the web and leveraged that dynamic connector. It was a lot of fun and a lot of hard work, and I did that in three months.

When I demoed it to a really senior engineer at Approach his reaction was, “How did you do that?” because it involved LotusScript, which no one knew; JavaScript, (which no one in our group knew and was an emerging language back then that no one was really an expert in at the time); HTML, which was also fairly new and the DB2 connector which had it’s own scripting, language, and integration. So I just connected those things, and back then there was no specific layout controls in HTML, so I had to build these crazy heuristics for trying to adapt them to the web because there was no X-Y coordinates that you could actually set your elements to. But I approximated it well enough that most forms and reports actually worked out pretty well. That was one of my first projects and I did that mostly solo, so it gave me the confidence that if I could do something like I could do almost anything. And I kept going. Not long after I transferred into main product engineering—doing C and C++ programming—one of my first projects was dealing with the Y2K problem. A lot of people back then started leaving for startups, because startups were the thing to do, so IBM was losing a lot of people in Silicon Valley. Eventually, they decided that they wanted to start doing some consolidation of our group in Lotus. They’d acquired Lotus the year before I’d started there and then they started to consolidate the group that I was in, and so I ended up in a group layoff that they did in order to consolidate things into IBM.  I went from there to a number of different startups where I continued to do development. Recently I went to look up the status of a couple of patent applications I had pending while I was there at IBM and realized that both were granted!

That was with the beginning of my career and I was grateful for the opportunity to continue working as an engineer for awhile. But from all my experiences with engineers, I was almost always the only woman in the group. There was one startup when there were two other women, but that was unusual. Most of the time in teams I was working on, I was the only woman in the group. To be really honest, it didn’t bother me. I didn’t really notice it in a bad way. We would go out for lunch, we would hang out, we would talk tech, etc.

I did a gig at Borland for two-and-a-half years— almost three years —as a pre-sales engineer. I was one of three for their worldwide organization, and I started noticing, “Okay. There are three of us women in sales engineering. That’s kind of interesting.” Again, it didn’t really bother me that much. The three of us still kind of keep in touch. We obviously bonded pretty easily, because we were the only women in any of our sales meetings. Once I earned a top SE award for my district. I was really proud of that because that was also the year I finally finished my college degree after more than 10 years. My sales rep at the time didn’t even know I was studying at night so she was impressed that I was able to kick butt at work and also finish my degree.

“Once I earned a top SE award for my district. I was really proud of that because that was also the year I finally finished my college degree after more than 10 years. My sales rep at the time didn’t even know I was studying at night so she was impressed that I was able to kick butt at work and also finish my degree.”

From Borland I landed at Microsoft, and it was one of those things where I thought, “Wow, an evangelist!” To be an evangelist, travel and speak at conferences, and present about the latest technologies was just an amazing opportunity. There also, for the first year and a half, I didn’t notice anything different. Again, I was one of the very few women in that evangelism organization. It’s probably a thousand people worldwide, at corporate it was about a hundred and fifty people, but only a few women. At the end of my first year, I married, became pregnant, was about to go on maternity leave. I had also moved back from Redmond down to Silicon Valley. They felt that I’d done well enough my very first year at Microsoft that they asked me to stay even though I was going to be remote. We actually had to get approval in order to keep me. It actually escalated all the way to the VP at the time, and he approved it, which was remarkable. Because Microsoft in those days wasn’t very pro remote-employee. I was very lucky that they allowed me to keep my job. Seven of the eight years that I was at Microsoft was remote. I used all the technologies that we had in order to make sure people knew that I was actively engaged, and still driving my initiatives, and I was still networking with the right groups, and getting a lot done in my particular area.

For the first year after I moved, quite a few coworkers had not realized I moved because I was able to create a strong virtual presence. I started noticing that I was being treated a little differently was when I came back from maternity leave. It wasn’t immediate. I had what I felt was a really weird experience of coworkers, partners I was working with, and customers saying, “Wow, you’re pregnant. Congratulations, that’s really great. You’re going to quit your job, right? And stay at home?” I had that over and over again. And I thought, “What? Really, you think I should? I never thought about just being a stay-at-home mom.”

“I started noticing that I was being treated a little differently was when I came back from maternity leave. It wasn’t immediate. I had what I felt was a really weird experience of coworkers, partners I was working with, and customers saying, ‘Wow, you’re pregnant. Congratulations, that’s really great. You’re going to quit your job, right? And stay at home?'”

I’ve had this long career, and suddenly people are saying, “You should stay home” I was getting a lot of peer pressure. I got some from some local moms that I started to meet as I was pregnant, and they were all saying, “Oh, you’re going to quit, right?” And I thought, “Oh…” I just wasn’t expecting that. It was strange to me, and foreign. Not one person ever asked my husband if he was taking time off for our first baby. I was planning on spending some maternity leave off with my young child. I was excited about having my first baby. And I took the 12 paid weeks off that Microsoft offered at that time. I could have taken more through vacation time or other means but I took the 12 weeks. With that first child it seemed to me that 12 weeks would be enough – that was more time than I had ever taken since I had started working when I was 17. In the end though, 12 weeks, for me, wasn’t enough, and I wish that I had taken a little bit longer. As I got back into my role and continuing to do my work, that this term of being “mommy tracked”, I started to feel like, “Wow, that’s actually real.” You’re not being given the opportunities to grow. You’re getting rated really highly for reviews and yet you see the remote colleagues getting the promotions that you’re also asking for. They happen to be male. And I don’t think any of that was intentionally malicious. I think people don’t understand what we know now as unconscious bias.

“As I got back into my role and continuing to do my work, that this term of being ‘mommy tracked,’ I started to feel like, ‘Wow, that’s actually real.’ You’re not being given the opportunities to grow. You’re getting rated really highly for reviews and yet you see the remote colleagues getting the promotions that you’re also asking for. They happen to be male. And I don’t think any of that was intentionally malicious. I think people don’t understand what we know now as unconscious bias.”

We’re doing a lot of training within Atlassian about this now—how to recognize it and what to do about that. That term didn’t exist back then. There was no way of knowing what was going on. I knew that my colleagues and my managers weren’t bad people, but I don’t think they recognized that. They were probably thinking, “She’s busy with her kids now. We can’t give her these responsibilities.” Every year I got great reviews and I was in the top quadrant of very promising and talented employees, yet my career really flatlined after I started having kids. To be clear though, I’m grateful for the time I had at Microsoft. I did get a variety of opportunities where I learned a lot, but I really wish that I could’ve taken my career a little bit farther while I was there.

The issues I experienced were not ones unique to Microsoft – these are issues that exist across our tech industry and we need to recognize it as a broad problem that we need to solve as a community. I did end up leaving Microsoft after eight years. I was ready at that point for bigger challenges. My younger child was in school. She had started kindergarten at that point. I really wanted the next big career opportunity. I went to Intuit for nine months. I was there for a short time in part because developer audience wasn’t a big focus for them at the time and I felt that was still  a big, big part of my career. I was recruited then by a fintech company called Yodlee. There I had the opportunity to exercise many different skills of mine from marketing to engineering, to planning and product management, as well as the evangelism piece.

And there was a really wonderful opportunity of just connecting the dots across many parts of the organization, and really focusing on evangelizing internally. The part of business that I was in wasn’t well understood, especially in our Bangalore office where all of our core engineering and product management was happening. So I spent some time in Bangalore. I actually did three trips in one year to Bangalore, just to really help educate them and to get the alignment that we really needed to be successful with that business. I’m really proud of that work.

I had a challenging project when I started. The developer portal they had wasn’t a true developer portal. You logged into a walled garden only to have three big PDFs to download as documentation that didn’t give enough guidance to get going on the APIs. It didn’t have online,, searchable documentation. It didn’t have a sandbox experience for you to try out the API, and I was able to get everyone rallied around it across all the different organizations, including the Security Office. So we were able to get a new portal out that actually did provide a sandbox environment, and that really shortened the duration of time for the sales reps to close deals with customers that were trying to evaluate their product. They were able to try it out and assess for themselves if the data they were getting was the kind of data that they needed for their solutions. I’m proud of the work that I did there.

I was recruited by Atlassian where I have been now for the last couple of years. Aside from the fact that I’ve built an evangelism team from the ground up, I think the thing that I’m most proud of is that I took some of the learnings that I had from my days at Microsoft. I was a chair for the Women at Microsoft Silicon Valley organization there – we grew an active community and had regular speakers and meetings. We also launched our first Silicon Valley Women at Microsoft conference at Microsoft while I was in that team. But, there was also this concept of mentoring rings that we ran in Silicon Valley. I thought that was unique to us. I didn’t really find any other information about mentoring rings outside of Microsoft. The idea is that it’s really difficult to find female leaders to be your mentor, because there are so few of them in tech. Yet all of us have something unique to contribute in terms of the skillsets, backgrounds, and the learnings we have through our work experiences.

The concept was born out of the idea that we can learn from each other, so let’s bootstrap ourselves together with these mentoring rings. I was part of the pilot group. Martha Galley, who’s now an exec over at Salesforce, was one of the driving forces behind that. So was Kris Olsen, who is a friend of ours who passed away too early. I think about her often when I’m doing my diversity work. I took that mentoring rings concept to Atlassian, and did the first pilot group over a year ago. Just this week the participants from that group (six of them) basically stepped up to run three new mentoring rings that they’re launching over the next few weeks. I’m so happy and proud that they felt it was such a worthwhile endeavor that we participated in a mentoring ring together, that we all learned from each other, and that we have formed a support network and our work has lasted outside of that. I did a women in tech speaker series too, where I invited different people I knew within the industry to come and talk about diversity challenges, specifically for women in tech. All talks were published on YouTube. This year I’m going to be shaking that up. Internally our volunteer initiative is called Side by Side. That’s our broad diversity initiative to make sure that we’re being inclusive of all groups. We’re going to be recasting my speaker series as Side by Side so we can include a broader pool of diversity topics. That brings us to today.

“There was also this concept of mentoring rings that we ran in Silicon Valley. The idea is that it’s really difficult to find female leaders to be your mentor, because there are so few of them in tech. Yet all of us have something unique to contribute in terms of the skillsets, backgrounds, and the learnings we have through our work experiences.”

When was the moment for you when you realized when you were interested in women’s initiatives? Because obviously it became a huge passion.

Yeah. You know what? For me, it was a “start-stop, start-stop” thing. Because I really wasn’t sure what I was experiencing when I came back from maternity leave, from that first child. There was this group starting out in Silicon Valley at that time within Microsoft just getting together for lunch. I went to one of the lunches so I could feel a little more connected to the local campus, because I didn’t work with anyone on our local campus at all. I only worked with folks in Redmond and our field organizations. So I went and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, they have a bunch of pink balloons. I hate the color pink,” [chuckles]. I went to lunch and they just had a very casual lunch get together. The evangelist in me said, “Well, you know? We should have a speaker series. We should get more people rallied around this. Let’s make this more structured. Get more people to come by inviting a speaker. We can still do the networking thing but why don’t we start getting people to come speak about these different topics.”

Claudia Galvan, who was one of the chairs at the time—she’s gone into a number of other amazing women in tech initiatives, and she’s still very, very active—reacted with, “Well, you should join our board.” I said, “Sure, why not?” I figured it would be a great opportunity to stay more connected. But to be honest, at that time, I just didn’t really identify that much with the issues. It took actually participating on that board for me to hear what was going on with the people on the board and people that would come to our program. I built my empathy around what was going on with other women. I realized, “Oh, well actually, this thing where I’m being told I need to work on my soft skills is because I’m assertive and they’re not used to women being assertive. They want me to be the quiet mommy in the corner. Got it, okay.” Other people are experiencing that.

“I built my empathy around what was going on with other women. I realized, ‘Oh, well actually, this thing where I’m being told I need to work on my soft skills is because I’m assertive and they’re not used to women being assertive. They want me to be the quiet mommy in the corner. Got it, okay.’ Other people are experiencing that.”

It helped me identify and put a label to some of the problems that were going on and realize that, “Oh, it is actually part of this diversity stuff that people are talking about.” It’s an issue, I just didn’t realize that was the experience I was having.  It’s all part of this. When I left Microsoft I was really just focusing on getting my career back on track at Intuit and Yodlee and there were already staffers running initiatives like that. I didn’t feel a compelling reason to be a driver in that area. I was happy to be a participant and supporter. It was at Atlassian where I felt like there wasn’t as much of that support yet and that I needed to help bring that along. I’ve been really happy to be part of the volunteer groups that are starting to embrace some of those changes.

The wonderful thing about Atlassian is our strong values. One of them is “Be the change you seek”. I took that and ran. The mentoring rings that I introduced were also launched in Sydney after our pilot in San Francisco. The leaders there reached out to me about how to run it, what people get out of it, what the ground rules are. They ran a successful one in Sydney. They also still meet up more casually like our group does. I think they’re also considering more mentoring rings. It was amazing that word got out about the mentoring rings experience such that so many people wanted to sign up in San Francisco, we had enough for three rings for this year! I thought it was really neat and I was just so proud of the team just to step up and pay it forward.

Over the years, have you seen the issues women are facing change? Or have they been really constant over time?

That’s a great question. I think a lot of it has been constant over time. I don’t know if you saw—There were some reports the other day about how someone had launched a board list, a suggested list of women to put on the board. It’s great that it’s a recognized problem, but before we wouldn’t have even talked about that because there weren’t enough women at that level of seniority (a decade or two ago) that you could even develop enough of a list. I think, too, what’s sad and remarkable is that in the ’80s we didn’t have such a significant problem with women in tech. We had a problem, but it wasn’t as bad. We’ve dropped the numbers, since the ’80s. So the number of people that are coming in, that pipeline problem, really is significant. I think it used to be in the thirties and now it’s 18% coming out of school going into tech that are women. I think that’s sad. We definitely need to fix that problem, that perception of what life is like as an engineer or being a woman in tech.

“What’s sad and remarkable is that in the ’80s we didn’t have such a significant problem with women in tech. We had a problem, but it wasn’t as bad. We’ve dropped the numbers, since the ’80s. So the number of people that are coming in, that pipeline problem, really is significant. I think it used to be in the thirties and now it’s 18% coming out of school going into tech that are women.”

I get this question sometimes about, “Well, I’m in sales or I’m in marketing here.”—Whether it’s Atlassian or Microsoft or somewhere else—and they ask me, “Do I count as a woman in tech? Absolutely. You’re a woman in the tech sector. You’re affected just as much as anyone else with some of these issues that happen. And you do have that unique factor, even though you’re in sales or marketing, you have to absorb some of the technology language in the products we’re working with. Yeah, absolutely, you are a woman in tech. I think the severity in issues may increase when you are an engineer because there are fewer women in engineering.

The language and behavior of engineering teams can be really, particularly tough, especially in a day and age where, we’re very casual and we’re coming in with hoodies, t-shirts, and jeans. We bring our gaming behavior, our nerf guns, and other things that are okay for the bro club, but not very inclusive of women that come in. And it’s not with any malicious intent. I’ve had really good friends in engineering. A lot of them, obviously, have been male and it’s a problem in education, helping them to build that empathy. It’s not that they don’t— they’re doing anything specifically malicious, in many cases, it’s just helping them to understand that things they do that they don’t recognize exclude someone. It can be harmful for someone’s career.

“The language and behavior of engineering teams can be really, particularly tough, especially in a day and age where, we’re very casual and we’re coming in with hoodies, t-shirts, and jeans. We bring our gaming behavior, our nerf guns, and other things that are okay for the bro club, but not very inclusive of women that come in. And it’s not with any malicious intent. I’ve had really good friends in engineering. A lot of them, obviously, have been male and it’s a problem in education, helping them to build that empathy. It’s not that they don’t— they’re doing anything specifically malicious, in many cases, it’s just helping them to understand that things they do that they don’t recognize exclude someone. It can be harmful for someone’s career.”

What are your thoughts on the state of tech in 2016 and the changes that you’ve seen over time? What is really exciting to you right now? What is frustrating to you right now?

I think in the last year and a half it’s been remarkable to see as much coverage as I’ve seen around the diversity problem. I mean, the volume’s pumped up right now. There are tons of articles. There are new articles almost every day, which is great. So it’s more of that education. What I would love to see more of—and I know a lot of companies are looking at this internally—is how to make actionable positive changes. A lot of that’s turning into “How do we roll out our unconscious bias training and make sure that it sticks?” How do we make that effective and not just have a presentation where we make people aware and then leave them feeling helpless that, “Oh, it’s just  innate— it’s a by-product of the fact that we learn those behaviors from caveman days to survive.”

You stereotype people based on something that has been built into your brain to help make sure that you can identify danger really quickly and run, but we apply that in our daily work life to people in not the best way. I think there’s still a level of pragmatics around how we make sure that we can really make those effective changes.

There are women-specific VCs that are starting to crop up, where the real focus is funding female-led startups, which is great. I think until we see more companies that are actually being led by women, we’re not going to see significant and fast change, because by and large, most tech companies are still being driven by white men. We don’t want to start excluding white men in the conversation, but it’s about making sure that the company that you work for really includes as many diverse groups as possible. It benefits the company. There are all these reports about how the more diverse a company is, the better off the shareholders and the company can be in terms of providing the right tools and products to their customers and getting their share prices up. So there’s massive benefits in doing that, and yet we’re still so slow in making sure that happens, you know. There are still lots of baby steps.

“I think until we see more companies that are actually being led by women, we’re not going to see significant and fast change, because by and large, most tech companies are still being driven by white men. We don’t want to start excluding white men in the conversation, but it’s about making sure that the company that you work for really includes as many diverse groups as possible. It benefits the company.”

How do you think your background and life experience have shaped the way that you approach your work?

Because of the way I grew up, I’m really persistent and tenacious with that marathon syndrome of “You’re going to get through it, and survive, and do the best that you can, and you want to be successful.” I sometimes forget and I remind myself. I walk into my home and go, “Wow, this is really my home.” I have a nice, comfortable home in an area where I don’t feel afraid to walk around, and it’s a luxury to be able to do that. I may not have made it here, had I not really been determined in those early days to be successful and pursue my passion in tech and to believe in myself, despite the lack of support that I had back then.

So I continue to use that in terms of solving problems and marathoning through cultural changes or organizational changes that happen. Those changes happen in any tech company you go to. At Microsoft we had re-orgs regularly—you could even experience more than one in a year. You’d get shifted to different teams and in order to survive an environment that can be really dynamic, you need to kind of be open to embracing the change, because that change can provide new opportunities for you. I try to stay optimistic. I’m also very pragmatic about things too, because when you’re a survivor you take things in with a more pragmatic perspective. When I look at these broad problems around diversity, I try to identify the meaningful thing that I can do to help. I don’t want to be the helpless victim. I’ve never wanted to be the helpless victim, so I do what I can to impact change. In the areas where I’ve been able to contribute I’m really happy with that, because I feel I’ve helped to make baby steps forward in my area, which for some people has been big for them. I’m happy with that.

“When I look at these broad problems around diversity, I try to identify the meaningful thing that I can do to help. I don’t want to be the helpless victim. I’ve never wanted to be the helpless victim, so I do what I can to impact change.”

You’ve impacted the lives of many, many women. I feel like that’s more than a baby step for a lot of people. You know?

Yeah, back to what am I disappointed with. The numbers are so sad. I just posted a blog about getting young children engaged and really hooked on programming. My kids are between the ages of five and ten, and they have been playing Minecraft. I started doing research and I realized, “Oh you can do Java programming to create your own mods”. Those are extensions of the game, which I think are too advanced for this age group. So I started poking around and realized, “Oh, there is this custom server that you can run called CanaryMod, and then add a plugin called ScriptCraft that will enable you to do this in Javascript. That’s fantastic. That’s such an accessible language even at this age.

And so I set that up and started playing with the kids, and they showed me how to play, because I didn’t know how to play Minecraft. So they had to show me the basics of the game before I could be productive with them. Then I showed them, “Oh, you want to build a house? Sure. Let me show you how to do that.” Because they can manually make it. It will take them forever. But with programming, you can use Javascript and create a castle instantaneously. You can create another Javascript call and have a dance floor, or a bounce house, a castle, or you can spawn a cow [chuckles]. They just thought it was so cool.

I wanted to make sure that they knew that they could do that, that they were empowered as young girls. I wanted them especially to know that math, science, and programming, are not “boy things”. They should see too that Mommy has done it, and can do it with them so they can do it as well. I recently blogged about this, and I had some of the parents internally say, “Oh, I’m so excited about that blog post. My kid’s are also doing Minecraft. We’re going to try this out!”

I had some friends on Facebook who also in tech share that in their networks. That was great to see. I thought, “well, someone’s going to think this blogpost is lame.” I’ve tried to simplify this to make it accessible for—not just super tech-y parents—but any parent to sit down with their kid, and set this up and try it out. I hope people do more things like that. I know there are a lot of different programs—a lot of content out there—that focuses on teens, older kids, and college students. I think, especially for girls, you have to start a little bit younger to get them really excited about technology. It’s funny how stereotyping happens so, so early. When the girls starting coming home and saying, Oh, yeah, robotic stuff? That’s for boys. I thought, No, that’s not true. So I wanted to really provide a way for them to feel empowered—that technology is totally within their reach, even at this age.

I love that. One more question. What advice would you give folks who’ve experienced struggles similar to yours, who are hoping to get into tech, or stay in tech?

To people trying to get into tech, reach out in your network, see if you can find someone who’s in the tech arena already, who really understands the day-to-day of what it is to be in tech. People have all sorts of notions from Hollywood about what the tech life is, and that’s such a narrow, narrow view. There are just so many amazing opportunities in tech, that I wish kids would come and speak with us more, and ask us, what is it really like? I would love for companies to do more of the “bring your kids, bring your local classroom to work” day, so that more kids can be exposed to what that’s really like, and realize, “Oh, it’s totally accessible. There are women there. There are people that look like me here.” That’s really important.

“To people trying to get into tech, reach out in your network, see if you can find someone who’s in the tech arena already, who really understands the day-to-day of what it is to be in tech. People have all sorts of notions from Hollywood about what the tech life is, and that’s such a narrow, narrow view.”

For women in particular, many aren’t sure that they want to stay, and that worries me too. The drop-out rate for women who are mid-career in tech is something like 56%! 56% is huge. That’s too much. I saw an article a few days ago about a company starting to experiment with basically, interning their mothers back in via a program they are calling “returnship.” It’s a program to get women who have been gone from the field for a while comfortable with coming back. I love that concept because I think there’s some pushback with women coming back if they’ve taken a two, three year break. It makes it really hard for them to come back, where they have to start at a level that it doesn’t make sense for what they’ve done in the past.

The other factor is just fear for the women coming back, “Can I do it, it’s been a couple years or three years, or maybe longer, am I capable?” That slow path back in and that support network, I think, is really huge. I think, too, that there should be an active network within a company, whenever a woman is leaving for maternity leave to support them and let them know, “Hey, take whatever leave that you need, and when you come back, we’re here for you, and here are other mothers that have gone through this, talk to them.”

“For women in particular, many aren’t sure that they want to stay, and that worries me too. The drop-out rate for women who are mid-career in tech is something like 56%! 56% is huge. That’s too much.”

Whenever we’ve had people that have gone on maternity leave, I actively reach out to them and talk about the potential challenges. I also remind them “Hey, you know what, don’t make any rash decisions while you’re pregnant, while you’re on leave because your hormones are still super, super high and you can make some decisions you might regret. Talk to me, reach out to the other moms that are here. I’m happy to help you, let’s talk through anything that you might feel is difficult. When you come back, you’re also going to not have as much sleep as you usually have. It’s going to be a transition so, however I can help you, you let me know.” I think that’s important to be supportive, especially once you’ve gone through it, to just let them know, “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel and you can make it through.”

I am originally from North Hollywood, Los Angeles. Most of my early childhood and K-12 education was in San Fernando Valley. After high school, I moved to Japan for a decade-long stint, but upon returning to the Republic of California I have been traveling to/from Japan almost every 2-3 months for the past 16 years.

How did I end up in Japan? During my senior year of high school I was not sure what I wanted to do. Fortunately, I had many older friends in the animation industry, places like Disney; and the exposure piqued my interest to work in the animation industry. At the same time, there was a recession in the United States and a friend two years my senior, Ken Olling, told me I should move to Japan. He was already there. Given where LA was heading, I told myself, “Why not? Let’s do it.” and leaped from my cliff.

Through a series of autodidact experiences, I went from animation and storyboards to graphic design. From information design, to product management, to lecturing at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business,experience design, to product design. I did executive management and leadership for Fortune 500 companies and startups, before founding my own two hardware startups. Recently I have been helping at Stanford’s d.school, mentoring LGBTQ entrepreneurs, and advising a companies on the future of VR/AR peripherals, and bespoke rich retail operations with analytical insights, and home artificial intelligence.

What elements of it are the most exciting and engaging to you? What really activates you?

Some designers just like creating. Some designers like to create for the sake of getting their work out into the world. Some designers want to create work that persists so they can say I did that.

For me, I want to find the fundamental need and design to fill what is lacking. The most gratifying part is, finding a need, finding a way to create something that would delight, and wow, and make the end users smile when they experience that creation. What keeps me happy is knowing having the users love that creation as much as the team and I loved making it.

“I’ve never been one for conformity, or labels.”

Let’s go to the darkside for a minute. What has been some of the biggest struggles and roadblocks in your work? Either specific to a job or in the rest of your life.

Professional hard aspects were learning the grit and tenacity that’s required to try to raise venture capital as a queer entrepreneur. You know, I cannot say that I have had the darkest career experiences. Honestly, I think these and other previous hardships at Apple would be those experiences that consistently made me unhappy, but have galvanized and hardened me making me who I am today. I enjoy what I have done and absolutely love what I am doing. I am excited for what’s to come as my go forward.

What’s your experience is being a techie in the queer community?

There are levels of acceptance for nerdy and queer persons in the tech community. I’ve never been one for conformity, or labels, and I’m a staunch advocate for LGBTQ diversity and inclusion. Often times the Queer community in The City can be overly too serious and catty in acceptance of us outliers. Even CIS women can be quite catty, where I’ve recently run into this in women’s restrooms.

LBGTQ within the techie communities has been warm and welcoming, and very supportive, with the exclusion of fundraising with some VC’s. Sometimes the investment banking world has an unfortunate bro-culture within senior and midlevel partners. Younger generation VCs seem to be the exclusion. Where are the Queer VCs and funds? (laughing) 500.co and Women’s Startup Lab are the exceptions as they brand out advocating for these areas, I believe.

“LBGTQ within the techie communities has been warm and welcoming, and very supportive, with the exclusion of fundraising with some VC’s.”

My extraordinary queer corporate experience was great and I’ve seen support grow and flourish since 1994. My early days of Macromedia was extremely welcoming and inclusive. Adobe with their legacy Aquanet (Aldus days) queer community originating in Seattle and Apple Lambda have been safe environments. Sony when initially joining, I actually felt threatened, but through love and management support from my team in Sweden (Sony Mobile) and Japan (Sony HQ), we were able to work to ensure a safe and inclusive environment along with a successful corporate HRC index ranking. Throughout my time as executive leadership at Sony, we helped LGBTQ expatriates find safety and security in the San Francisco Creative Center studio. I affectionately referred to this as our LGBTQ underground railroad from Tokyo.

Unfortunately, the progress my team and I made in North Carolina at Sony Mobile and Research Triangle Park just took major bounds backward this past week. I stand with my brothers, sisters and others who are being put in harm’s way if North Carolina’s governor signs hate into law.

Trans people, especially trans women of color, are already at dramatically greater risk of violence and murder and policing restrooms sends a message to those who would do us harm that such behavior is condoned.

We, like everyone, deserve to live under laws that protect us from harm, not inflict it. 

“The biggest reason behind me not fully transitioning was fear for my 26-year career and financial implications for my family’s future.”

You’re the first trans person that I’ve interviewed for this project that hasn’t transitioned, and I’m curious if people feel the need to put you in a certain bucket or category trans-wise and have a hard time with it. Does that make sense?

[Editor’s note: Since this interview, Ana has decided to move forward with her transition, and this question has been edited. CONGRATS ANA!!!!!]

People have a hard time because of my size, age and need to categorize. I am 6’2’’, 300 pounds, and 43 years old. I am not a young, petite woman that is early in her career. I choose to manage my life circumstances accordingly. That said, transitioning means something different for each transperson from SRS to everything in between, changing their outward dress to align their heart, body, mind, and soul.

When we first spoke, Helena, the biggest reason behind me not fully transitioning was fear for my 26-year career and financial implications for my family’s future.

Since our initial conversation around this project, I have gathered my internal strength, focussed on bravery, with the support of my family and global community of loved ones, professional network, and have fully transitioned to a woman. I told myself, “Why not? Let’s do it.” and once again, leaped from my cliff like times before when moving to Japan, or starting my first two hardware startups, leveraging my core beliefs in Swagger & Whimsy, Humor & Tenacity, Creativity & Grit, has made this journey all the more rewarding. It’s a slow and steady experience and this project was the catalyst for my courage and my platform for the transition.

Dearest Ina Turpen Fried, you’re my muse, mentor <3 thank you for helping through my transition <3

What do you foresee happening to tech and design in 2016?

For me, 2016 is about heritage. It is about building products that are authentic and built to last. Like Le Creuset cookware, or KaiKaDō tea caddies we should craft technology and products that will not end up at the top of the e-waste pile every 6 months. That will be a major macro-trend for 2016. From a tech and design perspective, I liked what A16Z said as their sixteen predictions for 2016, two of which struck a chord with me.

The first one is Full Stack. Some people call it being T-shaped or being a ‘hybrid,’ being able to go deep in 1-2 areas and work interdisciplinary. It is one thing to be excellent in design, but to be successful in the future, you have to be able to know how to work across disciplines. For example, even if you are a designer and not an electrical engineer or mechanical engineer, you have become an expert in those fields to be in the trenches with them. You want to be able to communicate and understand them at a deep level to be successful. Andreessen Horowitz stated that they do not want to invest in companies or people that are not really full stack or have a full stack mentality.

The other trend that I see and am studying is the UI-less user experience. I am experimenting with UX agents that take natural gesture input, speech in particular.  Bots are the initial intelligence-singularity type of things that people will encounter. People on the creative side will need to get their heads around that whether we like it or not. It is going to be much like the movie Her. We will not be designing things that are screen or product based. Amazon Echo already does that to a degree. Siri’s not that great, but Google Voice is pretty darn good. Those are some of the big trends for me for 2016.

What advice would you have for those hoping to get into tech, based on lessons you’ve learned?

It’s a global world. People need to live abroad for a while or have done some meaningful life traveling. Through immersion, you understand other people’s situations from an anthropological perspective. Then you can better design meaningful experiences or products. You can’t do it if you’ve only lived in America. You cannot do it well if you’ve only lived in the Bay Area because our microcosm here is weird. For example, you can go to the Palo Alto area and everyone has an Apple watch. You go anywhere else in the United States, you go over in Japan or Europe, and you do not see many people with Apple watches. So we need to get out of this microcosm that we live in and actually experience the world to develop that skill set and sort of that tool set that you’ll be able to design and build meaningful experiences for the world. It is about perspective even if you may be designing for your geographic region going forward.

“So we need to get out of this microcosm that we live in and actually experience the world to develop that skill set and sort of that tool set that you’ll be able to design and build meaningful experiences for the world.”

I was born at home in San Leandro, in the East Bay, just south of Oakland, so I’m a Bay Area native. I have three sisters who were also born at home, one older and two younger. I soon moved to Hayward where my parents still live now, and grew up going to the New Haven Unified School District because my mom taught there. And she taught everything from performing arts to working with kids at risk and is now doing dropout prevention. My dad is a doctor and his practice is in Fremont, so we’d commute from Hayward not too far to Union City.

I would say looking back now one of my formative things about my upbringing is that I’m mixed. I’m part Native American. San Carlos Apache from Arizona, Eastern Band Cherokee from the Carolinas, Hawaiian a couple generations but originally from Cebu, which are islands off the Philippines and Japanese from Osaka. And English, hence my last name. Apparently some bastard blood from King Henry V or something crazy like that. My aunt, I think, did a bunch of family trees but at some point, everyone connects back.

I think given that ethnically diverse background, my parents’ approach to raising us was grounded more in a common indigenousity, a common indigenous approach to simply having a connection to this earth and to this land. So we grew up farming our whole hillside. Everything from beans and corn that are way taller than me. Tomatoes and kale and all sorts of greens and squash. All different types of flowers and succulents. It’s still thriving to this day. Growing up, it was really annoying to go into the backyard and do all of our compost and create our own soil, but I got a chance to help build that little organic garden.

It was frustrating being out there in the backyard watering, when other kids are playing and I was always out there working. Though I think it did ground me and I still have a deep connection and sense of place on this earth. It also reinforced a farmer’s work ethic from my dad and his father who farmed on the eastern shore of Maryland. So there was definitely some influence from my dad and influence from my mom. She’s a performing artist so I have the analytical side from my dad and the creative side from my mom. While I was a baby, she took me around on tour and she would do different types of modern performances. Integrating dance, poetry, theater, and native influenced stories. My mom was just so generous with everyone. I remember growing up being so annoyed that we’d have people over to our house all the time. Staying at our place or coming over for brunch. She’d really try to take care of people and give as much to the local communities as possible. To this day she’s dropping off car loads of food, clothes and gifts for people all the time. When I was a kid I think I was annoyed but now I realize it had a much bigger impact on me in terms of my perspective on giving, even when you don’t think you have anything to give.

Where we lived was also interesting in the sense that we were in the foothills so our area really felt quite safe and unique. Every home was uniquely built. In one sense I felt secure in our middle-class lifestyle. But then on the other hand, near us or below us in the surrounding areas of where I went to school and other parts of Hayward and Oakland there was much more disparity.

So I felt like I got to see a pretty big spectrum growing up and then going into school in Union City. The elementary school I went to was in Decoto which had some notorious gangs and unfortunately some violence. So I think I was also exposed to that just walking around from daycare to school or staying after school.

I think I was super lucky as a kid. My parents put me in a Chinese preschool. I have a few vague memories of making Chinese symbols. So that was interesting. And then with kindergarten, there was a morning session and an afternoon session but my Mom was working at school so I just stuck around for both sessions. I think as early as first grade I started staying after school in math club with Mr. Fogel who was able to make a lot of things, even algebra, super accessible and fun. Using tactile blocks and objects. I think those things probably were also formative early on. It’s silly to me to even think about that because for most kids who go to amazing schools now that’s probably the norm. But for a public school with a big population of immigrants and English as a second language and super diverse minority school, I think those kind of after-school programs were unique.

Eventually I took a GATE test that put me onto a whole other track from elementary school all the way through high school. It’s pretty crazy to me to think that probably fundamentally altered my whole course. I was in 2nd grade but then I got moved to a 3rd grade class. And so, it just started accelerating from there to the honors track all the way through high school. The environment of those classes is very different than the other classes that were probably more chaotic. A lot crazier. With diversity of levels of knowledge and access. So, it’s crazy to me to think that things like that exist and hopefully they’re still getting funding. A lot of those kids went onto Berkeley. I was the only kid to go to Stanford out of a high school class of maybe 4000 plus students, which is unfortunate. I think more folks should have the ability to go there.

The other thing that probably shaped my perspective on how I operate now is that my parents didn’t take care of everything for me and hover. I don’t know what these things are called, hoverboard parents or helicopter parents [laughter].

Hoverboard parents!! It’s the 2016 version.

Yeah exactly. Rather than my mom making me lunch in the morning, I would make lunch for me and my mom and I don’t know if they were intentionally doing that or not, but that principle of empowering me, or putting the responsibility on me to take action extended throughout my life. So, for example, as there were a lot of Latino kids and a big Hispanic community in this Decoto area, I remember going out for the first time at recess and somehow being invited to play this ball game. I still have a couple of memories of how exhilarating that was and just cutting and kicking and having a great time. So that naturally inspired me to want to play more soccer. I went to my parents and told them I’d really love to play in a league. I was probably around seven or eight years old. They just told me to go and make it happen. And I’m like, uh, okay. So I remember being so annoyed as a kid that I would always have to fill out the release forms and apply for these things on my own. Not to say that they weren’t supportive once I started doing it because then they would come to all of my games and obviously drive me around and buy me gear. But they really wanted me to take that initiative and once I took that initiative they were super supportive.

The recess soccer games were another small thing that fundamentally changed my trajectory because from that point on, I just started playing more and more soccer. First with a local club, called the Patriots. That was my first team. Very patriotic. And then I just excelled and got invited to play with a select team. That coach was from Germany. Coach Burnett. And because he came from Germany he had such a better understanding of the fundamentals of the game than any American coach. The types of drills and discipline that we would have was just so much better than a lot of the other teams and we did pretty well for not having much in the way of resources. Eventually I was noticed by a wealthier club, Lamorinda, which is a club in Lafayette over the hills of Oakland as you go into Walnut Creek. It’s a very affluent area. I got noticed by that coach and they recruited me to play with them as Coach Burnett was beginning to wind down his team. So that also then exposed me to a whole other world of wealth. Just a whole other extreme than some of the kids that I went to school with. So I felt like I really got to see a pretty big spectrum of socio-economic status.

With that team we traveled to many places around the world. To Europe. To Barcelona in Spain multiple times. To Sweden multiple times. That wasn’t always easy. I remember having to fundraise from my parents’ friends and family. It wasn’t easy compared to the other teammates whose parents would just pay for them to go on these trips. But nevertheless, I think it really opened my eyes to different cultures, whether in South America or in Europe. I think that also fundamentally shifted my perspective. I remember being in Sweden, just amazed about how clean and how easy the public transportation system was and how friendly everybody was. I was just like, “Wow!” How beautiful the people were. It was amazing. I had such a good time there and continue to go back when I can.

The next big shift was playing in these tournaments like the Dallas Cup, that got me noticed by some coaches from Stanford. I started developing relationships with those folks. I got hurt in my senior year of high school. I hurt my lateral meniscus in a tournament. And so, that was right at the time when I was in conversations with recruiting, who encouraged me to apply. I had exceptional grades like most kids who first get into Stanford but what I could get from financial aid was actually bigger than what I could get from a scholarship to play soccer. I think soccer influenced me getting into Stanford, but I think that the academic merit also equally contributed to getting in, so that was a cool to start another trajectory.

It’s so interesting to me, how much exposure you had to both the lowest socioeconomic status in school and the highest socioeconomic status through soccer.

Yeah. Like some of the mansions, and private this and private that, [chuckles] to other people immigrating from Central America, or elsewhere and really having to struggle. And you have to learn how to hang with both.

I think I went through different phases in school. Wanting to be more cool and rebellious and wear baggy clothes and get into rap music. I definitely went through that phase. I definitely had my fair share of getting into trouble, whether it was pranks or doing things that we weren’t of age to be doing. There was a point before actually going to high school where I did get into a little trouble and I remember my parents picking me up at school and just crying and bawling. This is all while I’m getting straight A’s but I had this kind of dual personality of being exceptional in the classroom but also wanting to be cool with the cool kids and the influence of gangs and other sorts of stuff in schools. Anyways, I remember my parents just bawling and being so upset with me. It was the first time I realized that my actions have an impact on other people. So I think that was the big sort of ah-ha moment before going into high school. I just felt so grateful that I had that experience before it was too late. I thought, “Hey, I’ve got to be more responsible. I can’t just go along with some of these bad crowds. I’ve got to make decisions for myself and recognize that I have to take responsibility for my actions.” That was a huge turning point that helped keep me straight through high school because I didn’t want to have that type of experience again. I felt really lucky that it wasn’t anything that affected my record.

“There was a point before actually going to high school where I did get into a little trouble and I remember my parents picking me up at school and just crying and bawling. This is all while I’m getting straight A’s but I had this kind of dual personality of being exceptional in the classroom but also wanting to be cool with the cool kids and the influence of gangs and other sorts of stuff in schools. Anyways, I remember my parents just bawling and being so upset with me. It was the first time I realized that my actions have an impact on other people.”

Did you have any idea at that point what you wanted to be? Was there a specific point you became interested in design or technology?

It’s pretty crazy. I’d go to Stanford for occasional events like Native American Pow Wows. I’d been on the campus, but for whatever reason I thought that Stanford was just all doctors, lawyers, and business people. I was totally unaware of engineering or design as a track. I don’t even recall using the word design. I was definitely exposed to art and performing arts because of my sisters and my mom. But yeah, even today, to just realize that when you’re in the Valley and you think everyone knows about all this shit. Many kids around this area and in east bay probably don’t.

I would say also one other thing that influenced me and my three sisters was that my mom came from a lineage of really strong, independent women. My grandmother on my mom’s side, was a nurse and she raised them by herself single-handedly. With my great-grandmother, it’s kind of the same thing. In Arizona, she had her own home and was really independent. Horses and cattle and riding around. I think that matriarchy and having three sisters also shaped my values and perspective on gender. It has continued to play into some of the work that we do to this day. Investing in diversity. I think just having more respect for women. My dad was just more reserved and calm and zen-like. My mom was much more of the fiery one that would really take the initiative on things. So I think that’s also had an influence, but yeah, back to the question on how I got interested in design.

“I’d go to Stanford for occasional events like Native American Pow Wows. I’d been on the campus, but for whatever reason I thought that Stanford was just all doctors, lawyers, and business people. I was totally unaware of engineering or design as a track. I don’t even recall using the word design.”

So getting to Stanford was amazing. And with influence from my dad, I thought maybe I should go down the pre-med track. I started off with Human Biology, which is a really great major at Stanford that’s pretty interdisciplinary and I finished most of my pre-med requirements. From stuff in the lab to all the fundamentals. I also took a lot of courses at the medical school and that was when I started to realize that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in these lab settings. It didn’t resonate as much with me.

At the same time too, that shit was kind of hard. I went from not studying ever to being with some of the best students in the world. So, I definitely remember being kind of shocked like, “Oh, wow!” I actually need to do some work here and at the same time playing division one soccer. That was challenging. I remember waking up super early for practice and after that I’d go to class. I would just be so tired. So sleepy and that was really challenging.

One of my teammates, Bronson McDonald was volunteering at this local non-profit called Mural Music & Arts Project in East Palo Alto. He was helping start their History Through Hip Hop program. He invited me to come out to some of the mural making that was going on at that time. That was the first time that I experienced research process like primary research, trying to figure out the local stories related to the theme like immigration which was a controversial theme at that time. Interviewing experts and local folks, and synthesizing all that. Getting everybody’s ideas out, and then visualizing it. That was the first time that I got exposed to the word design because that was a mural design process. So from the research to the design, to scale it on the wall, to unveiling it and having a big celebration.

That was when I first started having an awareness of the design process. It was just so powerful for me to spend time with local at risk youth which again is this conundrum in one of the wealthiest cities. All these resources and then to have a place so nearby where there’s so much disparity. It continued on this theme of having access to the folks at Stanford who are like princes and other crazy stuff, to folks that just don’t have the same level of privilege at all. Through the mural project I started to continue to volunteer and I started to realize, as they were applying for grants, there was this Community Technology Foundation of California (CTFC).

I looked around at my friends at Stanford. A lot of my friends didn’t go to East Palo Alto. They had no exposure to these stories. I’m like, is anybody actually going to come walk into the “ghetto” to look at some of these beautiful mural art pieces? And even if they do walk up to the wall, they’re not going to have a sense of all the stories and the meaning behind the wall. I thought what if we start putting these murals online? And started to think about a virtual mural tour. That’s when I started trying to apply the design process more to the web in software. I started hacking Google Maps which wasn’t open at the time and using different tools along with a couple of folks at the Mural Music and Arts Project like Zach Pogue and others. We pitched and got a grant to develop a project and document, digitally, many of the murals in the local Ravenswood City school district and up the peninsula to try to be able to expose these stories more digitally. That was the first web project that started to get me excited about the power of technology and power of software.

Concurrently I’d say one of my good friends from Stanford, Dan Greenberg, introduced me to Professor BJ Fogg at Stanford who’s done a lot around persuasive technology and how you can use technology for good. I ended up taking a Facebook class which is where I started to cross paths with Ben Blumenfeld, my co-founder at Designer Fund. That class was the first time that Facebook had opened up their platform for third party developers. Our objective was to build applications from scratch and launch them on the Facebook platform. We formed a small team. I basically worked on a status message app that has all the features that we kind of take for granted now, like embedding photos, linking, replies; that kind of stuff. Collectively with classmates who worked on a bunch of other projects, we got something like 10 million users in 10 weeks. Mainly making these spammy apps like hugs and kisses, but I think that had a huge impact on me because it was the first time I realized that we could have this mass interpersonal impact. I can’t think of another class in history that has reached that many people.

With the help of BJ, I started to do research in his lab on these mechanisms of how can you use social applications to get people to do good things. So, it really started to open my eyes to the power of software and that’s when I began to shift my courses into human computer interaction. I started to meet other people that were part of this small major at the time. It was inter-disciplinary between CS, linguistics, psychology and I started to take as many classes as I could in that track. That’s when I started to get more formal training in usability and user research. Around the same time at the end of that Facebook class, I presented my project and I got noticed by Chris O’Malley, who was at Venrock. Venrock is one of the oldest VC firms. They’ve invested in Apple. They’re from the lineage of Rockefeller money. He invited me to come on over, have lunch and meet the team. I didn’t have any awareness about venture capital, or really much about startups. Even though we did these kind of social apps. This is probably around 2008 or so. I worked in-house at Venrock with the senior designer and a couple of developers, and we would basically help build product for some of the companies that they were incubating. I spent most of my time with AskMeGo, which is a live questions and answer site. It was great. I got to help acquire a few hundred thousand users, similar to Aardvark which was acquired by Google. I worked on helping people get their questions answered and how to surface really good questions. That was a great first experience in tech.

So you joined Facebook Fund during college as well?

I then went back to grad school because I wanted to play for one more year. I got hurt one year at Stanford, so I wanted to play a 5th year of soccer, and I also wanted to keep going deeper into design. I lived off-campus and was biking down Lytton Ave in Palo Alto, near the old Techcrunch office and I ran into Dave McClure on the street, who I knew from the Facebook class. He was like, “Hey, what are you up to? Want to help work on this thing, Facebook Fund?” I was like, “That sounds cool,” but I just brushed it off. On top of everything that I was doing, playing soccer, taking super intense classes, then getting more into HCI, and doing research in the lab, I also worked most of the time, and paid my way through school.

One of the side jobs I had was at a high-end catering company that would do a lot of on-campus events. There was actually a VC related event that I was catering and I was learning about some of the start-ups and then I ran into Dave McClure again, and he was like, “Hey, man, you should probably come over and learn more and help out on Facebook Fund.” At that point I finally followed up, but I think it’s just crazy to me to think that you could have those kinds of serendipitous opportunities that are connections from class and you run into people on the street. The density of awesome people that you have access to is so easy to take for granted.

Then I joined Dave to help run design for “fbFund,” which was a joint venture between Facebook, Accel and Founders Fund. There were around 22 companies we invested in and I was responsible for running a small in-house design team to do short sprints with the portfolio companies around user acquisition, retention and revenue. It was amazing because I got to see all these companies in their infancy, when it was just a couple people around the table. Little companies like Zimride with Logan and John before they turned into the multi billion dollar company Lyft. Little companies like Run My Errand with Leah before she turned it into TaskRabbit. Alain and the Wildfire team before they grew it and sold it to Google for hundreds of millions. It’s crazy to see those companies form from the ground up.

“One of the side jobs I had was at a high-end catering company that would do a lot of on-campus events. There was actually a VC related event that I was catering and I was learning about some of the start-ups and then I ran into Dave McClure again, and he was like, ‘Hey, man, you should probably come over and learn more and help out on Facebook Fund.’ At that point I finally followed up, but I think it’s just crazy to me to think that you could have those kinds of serendipitous opportunities that are connections from class and you run into people on the street. The density of awesome people that you have access to is so easy to take for granted.”

Facebook wanted to have these companies build their products with “social” built into the product. Facebook Connect, the little button that you see around to log-in everywhere was new at the time, so they wanted more companies to showcase that. This is also when I started to realize that I needed to scale myself. I couldn’t serve all 22 companies. It wasn’t possible. So I started to think how could I take a lot of the learnings from the design school. How could I take a lot of that design thinking and prove that it works in the context of early stage start-ups. That includes office hours, talks, workshops, etc. I brought over whiteboards that I borrowed from the d.school. Scott Doorley who is now the Creative Director was so gracious to literally let me come with a truck and pick up a bunch of their equipment and take it over to Facebook. I had to figure out how to scale design and with the success of Facebook Fund, Dave went on to start his own fund.

As I was finishing up grad school, I was also starting to go deeper into design. I took a course, entrepreneurial design for extreme affordability. On one hand, I’m exposed to of all these social apps that are scaling and on the other end of the extreme, I’m working on low-cost water pumps, storage, and irrigation for rural farmers in Burma (Myanmar). It was a year long course where we did a lot of research, prototyping, testing, and went out to Burma during spring break. Being out in the field trying to empathize with people rather than just trying to push our solution onto them. Really trying to understand their needs. I remember sitting there in the field, observing this young girl, who was probably the same age as my sister at the time, a young teen, or maybe even younger, squat down and pick up gallons and gallons of water on her shoulder. She would go back and forth with tons of water over the course of a day. That’s one of the big things keeping her from going to school. I just had empathy for her. Especially given that I had a sister too, around her age. That again informed my perspective on what is meaningful impact. What’s the power of these technologies to really fundamentally affect people’s lives. I continued to do projects like that through grad school. For example in South Africa with FrontlineSMS:Medic. I worked on mobile texting apps to help virtual health workers report infectious diseases. Another amazing experience. That was another thing that opened my eyes to the power of technology to help. Walking into some of those hospitals and seeing people on stretchers. I think it grounded me in terms of technology that actually matters, that makes a difference, versus technology that just plays at our egos and our vices.

After finishing up grad school, I remember working harder during that time period, than ever. Of course, not sleeping, and all of the classic things. Anyway, 500 Startups didn’t have a brand, or even a name. We didn’t have a logo mark, or a typeface, or a website, or any money in the bank, or any space, or anything. The job, really, was just to do everything that I could, to help get 500 Startups off the ground. Launching our site, designing and helping close on 10,000 square feet in Mountain View, and doing that buildout. I really credit Dave, to just empower me. During my time there, I focused on our accelerator program and the problem of how to scale design services. How to scale great design, to dozens of companies at a time.

“I worked on mobile texting apps to help virtual health workers report infectious diseases. Another amazing experience. That was another thing that opened my eyes to the power of technology to help. Walking into some of those hospitals and seeing people on stretchers. I think it grounded me in terms of technology that actually matters, that makes a difference, versus technology that just plays at our egos and our vices.”

I experimented with everything. Design Sprints, talks, workshops, pattern libraries, UI kits, all sorts of things. It was great. I got to work with companies like Punchd, that was acquired by Google, and invested in Bēhance, which was acquired by Adobe. I worked with Tiny Post, acquired by Trip Advisor. I got a chance to not only help hands-on with companies, but also start to invest. One day while meditating at my place in Palo Alto, I just had this a-ha moment, which was like, shit, am I having long term impact with these companies? If I follow up, three, six months or a year down the road, how many of these companies will still be practicing these human-centered methods? What I noticed was that it was exponential decay. You would improve someone’s design sense, or their awareness of customers, but then if no one on the team was there to help sustain it, and to continue modeling and practicing these design behaviors, it’s not sustainable. People would just revert back to whatever they’re comfortable with. If you have an engineering background, you’re probably just going to focus more on solving problems from an engineering perspective, or a business perspective. It really bummed me out, that as I started to look back, I’m like, man, I’ve been working on all these companies over the past few years, but am I having long term impact with them?

In one of the books that I was reading at the time, Disrupt, or one of the conversations with John Lilly, the lesson was to do the opposite of what you’ve been doing. I was like, okay, I’ve been spending all of this time trying to make startups more design oriented. What if I do the opposite and help designers take the path of entrepreneurship with the thesis being if they get involved earlier on with great engineers and business people, they’ll increase the probability that they could make better designed products and services in the long run. That would also make my job a lot easier rather than trying to parachute in and solve people’s design problems. They would build that core competency in-house.

Simultaneously, Ben’s and my path crossed multiple times, at the Facebook class, Facebook Fund and we even collaborated on projects like peace.facebook.com. We kept in touch felt similar challenges and started to interview over 60 designers that we really respected and tried to understand why aren’t more designers taking this path of entrepreneurship. It kind of boiled down to lack of education, role models and capital. If you look at most of the most of the sources of capital, even going into schools, it’s primarily engineering based. When you look at professors and programs, they weren’t really preparing designers to start companies or to join companies early on. Or to be designers in the way that we expect them to be now. Every designer we spoke to was like, “Hey, if you try to solve this challenge, I’ll help you with time and/or money.” That was really encouraging. All these early conversations with influencers like Scott Belsky and others who said, “Yes, I’ll help.” I just remember thinking back, like, “Wow.” If those people didn’t say, “Yes I’ll help,” and want to pay it forward and give back to the design community, I don’t think that we would have continued on. That eventually led to Ben to take a sabbatical because he was maybe the fifth or sixth designer there and had been there for five or six years. He wanted to take a little break. We started going on hikes like Hidden Villa in Los Altos and then maybe working one day a week and then two days a week and then three, and it turned into all of our time trying to figure out how we can help more designers build businesses with meaningful impact.

Walk me through the decision to officially start Designer Fund.

It was around 2011 that we were doing the designer interviews. We felt like there was a real need to create a community of designers who were in tech who were building these companies from the ground up or joining early. At the same time, I felt, philosophically, that I wanted to work with less companies. I wanted to have more impact. That means, inherently, there’s just less companies that I can work with. With Dave’s blessing, I wanted to start to focus on Designer Fund full time. Over the course of 2011, I started to progressively decrease my time at 500 Startups and increase my time working on Designer Fund as an independent entity. I’m super lucky that Dave along with a number of other awesome investors were early supporters of Designer Fund. I’m super grateful to Dave McClure, Vinod Khosla, Jonathan Heiliger, Marc Andreessen, Eric Thomas, Shannon Callahan, Dave Morin, Chi-Hua Chien, Brandon Zeuner, Ryan Swagar, Marcus and Andrew Ogawa, John Lilly, Alex Diehl and many others. Folks that, I think, really just believed in the importance of creating an ecosystem and they saw the importance of design and were willing to support different educational events.

We then started giving grants to designers who were starting companies. For us it was an awesome way to give back to design community through free events, resources like our Designer Founders ebook, and through grants. As we moved into 2012, we started to formalize some of those things like writing larger grant check sizes and developing a better system for running different types of events. I think that’s when we even started with our first Women in Design event that Maria Molfino hosted. We went from mentorship programming to helping set up designers with formal advisorship positions with an equity stake. And also starting to operate as a band of angels where we’d help get our friends to co-invest in companies started by designers. We built on that momentum and then by 2013, we started to realize, “Wow, there’s a huge need need here.” Our inboxes were full of all these designers who are coming to us seeking support in one way or another, from funding, to transitioning to a new opportunity, to improving their career, and then all these companies were coming to us wanting to build their design teams, and so that led to the genesis of Bridge. We had all these great people coming to us but it was just Ben and I. We had to create some better way, a more scalable way of doing this. Previously I had built some internal tools with Kevin Xu, who’s now at Stripe, and the first version of a way for us to help process applications. We had all these applications for designers who wanted grants and so we thought maybe we can repurpose some of this technology to help us process all these applications from designers and all these applications from companies. That was also another big lesson for me, that some of the technology that you build early on, even if it’s scrappy MVP, really could accrue value over time and really magnify and scale your ability to serve people rather than just trying to do everything manually. That is obvious in retrospect. So we went from experiments in 2011 to formalizing events and grants in 2012 and then we launched Bridge and started angel investing in 2013.

Given our mission is to help designers build businesses with meaningful impact, one way of doing that is by helping designers build companies from the ground up as co-founders. What we soon realized was not every designer should be a co-founder, and actually, starting a company from scratch is hard as fuck. It’s so hard. At the same time there’s another path. Designers join existing companies that are doing well and on a growth trajectory. The next Facebook, the next Uber, etc. Joining one of those companies early on, arguably you could have just as much impact and you’re going to have a great experience learning. You’re going to meet a bunch of awesome designers and engineers. You might have a life-changing economic outcome, and just be in a better position to start a company yourself in the future.

On one hand, investing is great to help designers who are ready to be founders. Bridge, on the other hand, is about investing in future design leaders. It also related to our thesis that we believe that companies need to build design at their core. They can’t outsource it. It’s just like you don’t want to outsource your engineering, and great engineers attract other great engineers and so great designers attract other great designers. We felt strongly that helping build and educate design teams would bring a lot of value to companies and help accelerate the growth of designers.

When we launched Bridge, it was an experiment. We didn’t really know what was going to happen, so I just quickly worked with another designer and mocked up a site and worked on the positioning, but I didn’t spend a ton of time on it. I didn’t know if this was actually going to actually going to work. We partnered with some amazing photographers like you (Helena Price) and with the help of Laura Brunow-Miner and others to try to get perspective of a day in the life and what it’s like to be a designer at some of these top companies. Like Pinterest, Airbnb and Dropbox. Places that we felt truly value design. We’d meet the founders, we’d meet the design team. We’d check out the product. We’d make sure it’s a place where we would want to work ourselves because there’s just so much noise out there.

“We believe that companies need to build design at their core. They can’t outsource it. It’s just like you don’t want to outsource your engineering, and great engineers attract other great engineers and so great designers attract other great designers. We felt strongly that helping build and educate design teams would bring a lot of value to companies and help accelerate the growth of designers.”

And when we launched, it just got an overwhelmingly positive response. Way more demand from companies and designers than we could possibly fulfill. It was profitable since day one and we wanted to see if we could do it again. We ended up running another program that same year in 2013, in the Fall. Again we had amazing results of tons of designers applying, tons of companies wanting to participate. So then we realized that it wasn’t a fluke. Again in 2014 when we launched it again, Bridge 3, there was an amazing response. Our acceptance rate was tougher than Stanford or Harvard. We were really solving a need here for companies to help build and educate the design teams, to help designers accelerate their careers and hopefully become better designers and leaders.

And at the same time too, we started to get more and more companies coming to us seeking funding. They knew that we could actually add value and help build and educate design teams. There’s only so much that Ben and I can do as angel investors. There’s only so much we can do by calling up our friends to try to pool our money together to invest in them, so we thought, “Okay, I think we have enough data here that we’re ready to raise our first fund.” That was in 2014. We raised primarily from individual designers, great folks from some of the top companies around the valley, entrepreneurs, a couple of families, our own money and a few institutional funds. Now we’re managing over 20 million and we have a much clearer value proposition for people when they come knocking at our, we can say, “Hey, we can invest between $100K and a million dollars. Our average check size is $250K.” Ultimately we wanted to create a better experience for designer founders and designer entrepreneurs we wanted to partner with.

That was 2014. I think looking back, I don’t think we looked like anything else at the time. I don’t think there was any fund that was focused on design. There was no fund that also had this professional development program that was generating revenue and being profitable and had this community of designers. We just looked very unique, I think. Very different compared to the classic fund approaches. We wanted to build this ecosystem. Ben and I aren’t MBAs or coming from stereotypical investors wearing khakis and a button up shirt every day and vests and stuff. I think people were pretty surprised. I don’t think I was aware at the time, so it’s only looking back that I realize there’s not many diverse investors out there. Certainly not at the time from these different design backgrounds. Not at the time from an ethnicity perspective. I just met with a friend recently who told me that he’s been doing some research and there’s only about 30 general partners out there who are Hispanic and I was like, “Uhhhh, oh, okay.’ I didn’t even know that at the time. So if I factor that stuff in, probably the odds weren’t in our favor. We just didn’t have a long investment track record. We didn’t have a traditional background. Didn’t have what people who invest in funds would traditionally look for so thinking back I’m super grateful for all the folks like our advisor, Steve Vassallo, who took a chance on us and believed in our mission and believed in our approach.

“Ben and I aren’t MBAs or coming from stereotypical investors wearing khakis and a button up shirt every day and vests and stuff. I think people were pretty surprised. I don’t think I was aware at the time, so it’s only looking back that I realize there’s not many diverse investors out there. Certainly not at the time from these different design backgrounds. Not at the time from an ethnicity perspective.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is, each of those steps along the way from Venrock, to Facebook Fund, to 500 Startups to Designer Fund was uncomfortable. It was a stretch. It was almost that beginners naïvety. Looking back I don’t even know if I would do it again. Looking back it just doesn’t line up with what the norms at the time.

There were a lot of sacrifices too. Ben and I didn’t really pay ourselves. So many nights just working at our dinner table and doing all the classic stuff that I think any start up needs to do. Being super frugal, doing everything that we can to find alternative streams of revenue, engaging our community and a volunteer base. So scrappy. Doing events and getting sponsors and if it wasn’t for them I don’t know if I would pay rent that month. Just all the things that I think any entrepreneur would have to do. Seeing your bank account at zero or negative. In that way I think it was really great for Ben and I to have that deep empathy with all the companies that we invest in. I think it’s important never to lose sight of the struggle.

There’s all this hype that’s going right now and all these folks flocking to Silicon Valley maybe for the wrong reasons. It’s not a lottery ticket. Whereas for us, I don’t think we really ever wanted to be investors just for the sake of being investors. We felt that by investing, we could have a long-term impact with these companies. We could have an equity stake and be long term partners versus just consulting and parachuting in.

“There were a lot of sacrifices too. Ben and I didn’t really pay ourselves. So many nights just working at our dinner table and doing all the classic stuff that I think any start up needs to do. Being super frugal, doing everything that we can to find alternative streams of revenue, engaging our community and a volunteer base. So scrappy. Doing events and getting sponsors and if it wasn’t for them I don’t know if I would pay rent that month. Just all the things that I think any entrepreneur would have to do. Seeing your bank account at zero or negative. In that way I think it was really great for Ben and I to have that deep empathy with all the companies that we invest in. I think it’s important never to lose sight of the struggle.”

For example we have a poster from Facebook’s hacker way. “We don’t build products to make money, we make money so that we can build better products.” I think that’s always resonated with us. Where investing is not an end for us. It’s a means for, again, having meaningful impact and ultimately we want better designed products and services in the world. When we say better design, I think of that in a holistic sense. I think of that as an opportunity to impact someone’s life at a really deep level, and the opportunity to have breadth and scale across their life and across the globe. Of course we want to make a ton of money and generate great returns, but we think we can do that in a way that is aligned with our values.

“we have a poster from Facebook’s hacker way. “We don’t build products to make money, we make money so that we can build better products.” I think that’s always resonated with us. Where investing is not an end for us. It’s a means for, again, having meaningful impact and ultimately we want better designed products and services in the world. When we say better design, I think of that in a holistic sense. I think of that as an opportunity to impact someone’s life at a really deep level, and the opportunity to have breadth and scale across their life and across the globe. Of course we want to make a ton of money and generate great returns, but we think we can do that in a way that is aligned with our values.”

Since closing our first fund in 2014, we’ve been able to invest into some really great companies. Our largest investment is in Stripe, the global payments platform that’s really empowering commerce and online payments around the world. They’re now allowing anyone to set up US businesses and get that off the ground, it’s just amazing. Another one of our portfolio companies, ZenPayroll which is now re-branded as Gusto, is helping all these small business owners across the country, many not in tech, run their payroll. That’s really the backbone of the American economy, small businesses. We’re also investors in companies like Omada Health, which spun out of IDEO’s health practice. They help prevent people from getting diabetes, which then saves employers money and makes health plans more efficient. It’s like everybody wins. Individuals, the company, society. I just wish I could find ten more of those types of companies in all these different sectors that have, traditionally, been underserved from a user experience standpoint like financial services, education, health, business tools, creative tools. Over time I think we’ve been really blessed and fortunate to have lots of great people around the table to support Ben and I. An approach that we’ve always taken is that we’ve always surrounded ourselves with people that are amazing at what they do. When we first closed our fund, before even starting to invest, I think we interviewed maybe two dozen top investors that we respected and got perspective on what they thought worked and what didn’t work. We’re constantly practicing our own design process on ourselves and on our own business. We’re not just preaching design. We’re actually being hands-on and making our own tools, making our own site, doing a lot of our own stuff. Branding for example. I think it’s important to not lose sight of that. We primarily have been focused on just building, helping our companies and letting the work speak for itself, because I think you just see how there’s so much noise out there. We prefer to focus on the fundamentals of building a product that really solves a consumer’s pain point and need.

So, I have a question. In another interview, the idea was brought up that people tend to invest in what they know, and the problems that they can relate to. From your perspective, with your upbringing and being exposed to so many different socioeconomic backgrounds and cultures and not coming from the Silicon Valley pedigree—how does that affect you and what you choose to invest your time and money in?

I think there’s a number of companies that we’ve invested, for example ZenPayroll, which is now Gusto. We felt the pain of trying set up our own payroll, and file taxes, and all this back end office stuff. It’s like the last thing that we want to do with, especially when you’re really small. So I think in those cases, we felt that pain. Even creating our free resources like our Designer Founder’s e-book. We used Stripe to process payments. We used some of those tools ourselves as users and that’s one of the things whenever we look at a company—whether or not we’re the target user or not—we really try to use the product, and really dig into all the interactions. Which I think it’s pretty surprising how often most investors don’t do that.

Most investors aren’t really product focused and don’t really use the product which continues to surprise us. That’s okay, everyone has a different approach. When you start to dig into a product and start to put yourselves in the shoes of the user, even if we’re not deeply familiar with the problem, we can still try to put ourselves in their shoes and experience what that company is building. I think our ability to empathize with folks who are different than us allows us to imagine how a product or service could really impact someone’s life, hopefully for good.

“Most investors aren’t really product focused and don’t really use the product which continues to surprise us.”

Of course there’s some things like design tools, for example, like Framer Studio. We invested in them, and it’s like, “Yeah, we totally understand the need to prototype mobile web apps with code. With live data where you can make one change really easily and propagate that to a bunch of other things versus static mockups. We totally get that we’re moving towards a world where we need to build interactive prototypes. Some things like that, it’s really obvious for us to be able to have a point of view on. But then there’s other things where we’re actively looking for things that are outside our comfort zone. What are those areas that are traditionally underserved from a user experience standpoint? What are the industries with old, dinosaur incumbents that don’t really care about the user and just take advantage of them? Insurance, for example. They win based off of advertising campaigns, not on product and not by the user experience. I think there’s so many opportunities like that where because we are naturally curious, we’re going to go explore those spaces even if we don’t intimately know them or have experienced them.

“We’re actively looking for things that are outside our comfort zone. What are those areas that are traditionally underserved from a user experience standpoint? What are the industries with old, dinosaur incumbents that don’t really care about the user and just take advantage of them?”

I think in that sense, we actually like when we come across something that we don’t know a lot about initially, and then we have a whole research process. We bring in experts to help us. I’m actually looking for those opportunities where it’s going to be outside of my comfort zone because that’s where design could have the biggest delta or the biggest impact. Of course I’m going to look for the stuff that I know already is obvious. But the non-obvious things are going to be the most exciting things for us. Back to the example with Omada Health. My grandmother and great-grandmother have diabetes. So I remember seeing those needles, and just how horrible that process is. I know that my mom and others are at risk of being diabetic and that I actually was able to get her to go through the Prevent program at Omada, and lose ten pounds so I could see the impact that it was having in my personal life. That being said, we’re still open to finding more opportunities, whether it’s in mental health or other chronic illnesses, that just are totally preventable and with the help of technology we can accelerate prevention. I hope that in the future, we’ll be able to have more alignment with the health industry and the government to be able to even prescribe some of these digital therapeutic technologies.

My last question for you would be, just based on the lessons that you’ve learned, what advice would you have for young entrepreneurs or designers just getting started out in this industry?

One lesson is finding the right partner with complementary skills. Ben and I have really complementary paths. Me going through more of a Stanford HCI and research approach and Ben coming from UCLA with a formalized visual and graphic design approach. Me coming from early stage startups through venture capital firms and Ben coming through the rocket ship of Facebook, one of the most successful tech companies of our time. Another lesson is don’t underestimate the importance of finding a great opportunity. Just finding a company, a brand where you can learn a ton at, make a bunch of relationships with great engineers, designers, expand your network, and get exposed to what it takes to build a great product and scale it. If you get exposure to that early on it’s going to set you up for so much more in the future.

I want more designers to start companies. But I don’t think that’s always the right path for a lot of people. I think by joining an existing company right before that inflection point of growth, I think there’s a lot of benefit to doing that and I think you’re going to set yourself up to be in better position if you want to start a company in the future. There’s going to be exceptions and people like Joe and Brian who started Airbnb. They came from a very non-traditional route. Joe being an entrepreneur and Brian working at a design consultancy. It’s totally possible to start something when you don’t look qualified. You don’t look like any of the other teams that most investors look at. That’s totally possible but I think those guys were naturally entrepreneurial. If you are going to go that path to entrepreneurship, then I think it’s so important that you find a partner. For me I found Ben. Using the example of Joe and Brian, Airbnb wouldn’t be possible without their technical founder Nate. It’s so important to find both a design and engineering partner in that early team. I think that’s arguably more important than anything else at those early stages. To summarize, join a successful brand while it’s on its upward trajectory and learn everything you can while you’re there. Or if you are going to start something, really make sure you’re partnering with someone that you can make a long-term commitment to. Like Ben and I have made a minimum 10 year commitment to our mission and to each other. If you can’t make that type of commitment to someone, then maybe reconsider whether or not you want to get married and start a company together. [chuckles]

“Don’t underestimate the importance of finding a great opportunity. Just finding a company, a brand where you can learn a ton at, make a bunch of relationships with great engineers, designers, expand your network, and get exposed to what it takes to build a great product and scale it. If you get exposure to that early on it’s going to set you up for so much more in the future.”

I am a Bay Area native. I was born and raised in San Francisco and Daly City. Then I moved to a suburb, and then moved back. Actually, moved to a suburb, then moved to Sacramento, which was terrible, and then moved directly back to San Francisco.

I went to college because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do after high school. I always prioritized my social life and my friends and fun before anything else. I would do this thing where I would just go into random classes and not really be fully participating in any. I ended up going to college for seven years, and I did three or four different major tracks. I was about ten credits short for three different majors. Then they finally just came back, one of the deans were like, “You need to graduate. You need to leave.” I made a special major out of basically a theory that I would write in a paper format for a cumulation of what I had learned over the years. My actual college degree is a  communication analysis of the performativity of lesbians in mainstream media from 2001 to 2007. So, I like to joke that I majored in the L word. That’s pretty much what I majored in.

“I went to college because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do after high school. I always prioritized my social life and my friends and fun before anything else. I would do this thing where I would just go into random classes and not really be fully participating in any. I ended up going to college for seven years, and I did three or four different major tracks. I was about ten credits short for three different majors. Then they finally just came back, one of the deans were like, ‘You need to graduate. You need to leave.'”

While majoring in the L word, I would work odd jobs to make up the gaps for my scholarships. That’s how I found my way into computers. I started out in sale at Best Buy. I moved from sales at Best Buy to sales at Geek Squad, to tinkering in Geek Squad, to independent consulting work, to working at an enterprise and fixing computers there, to provisioning computers, and then moving into Linux System administration and systems work, and then bouncing around at different areas of a start up. Which is how I’ve landed at Twilio.

When you were first entering computer land, selling computers at Best Buy, did you have any inclination that you would end up in Silicon Valley or was this more of a, “I gotta pay my bills” situation?

It was a little of both, actually. Initially I wanted to work in tech but I didn’t actually want to be a technical person. All of my friends and all of my background has been really focused on communication analysis. So, I really wanted to be in PR. I thought that by having a family friend that had worked at Google—and this was back in the day when, actually, having a family friend working at Google meant something—I thought that I would have an in after I graduated. Because I took so long [in school] and Google blew up the way that it did, that was no longer valid. So, when I first started working in tech it was just a way to pay the bills. Then when I worked at Sales Force it was mostly to pay the bills but also it was that really small foot in the door. Every position I applied for out of that consulting position, none of it was engineering focused. I applied for human resources, for marketing, for project managers, for an admin in their real estate department. I kept going for literally, again, anything other than technical.

When was the moment that you discovered coding and was like, “Oh, this is my shit.”

The part where it was “the shit” was probably not for a long time. I was on this rotating consulting gig. The team was me and less than 20 other people. We all hated it because we were paid nothing compared to what other people were paid. And by nothing, I mean, our consulting firm happened to be based in Dallas, Texas and so we were being paid Dallas, Texas wages. It just so happened that the people sitting next to me were a consulting firm based in San Francisco. We were doing the exact same thing and being paid vastly different amounts.

“I found programming as a shortcut to doing things versus falling in love with it.”

Everyone on the Dallas team were leaving. One dude was leaving and he was the only person to support Linux machines at Sales Force at the time. He turned to me and said, “Dude, I’m leaving. I’m going to Yelp. Do you want this book?” I said, “Yeah. Of course I want this book.” I ended up just filling the gap after he left. As I became the only person supporting Linux machines, I found that a lot of the same things were happening over and over again so I would just script certain things. I found programming as a shortcut to doing things versus falling in love with it. I didn’t fall in love with programming until I went to Twilio and started actually developing.

Interesting. You used the term community-taught to describe your past engineering. Tell me more about that concept.

A lot of people like to say self-taught, self-taught, and I feel like that’s a little too elitist for me. Community-taught comes from the authors who wrote the beginning books that I read to the online tutorials that were always free. I utilized a lot of people’s time. There’s two different camps of people I learned from:  people who wanted to teach and people who just got stuck teaching me. When I didn’t understand something, I would start off by tapping them on the shoulder. When I realized that wasn’t productive, I would actually just carve out time with them. I had to show that by taking two days just to teach me how to do something, it would in the end help me ramp up faster, and I would bother them less if they just took two days, two hours, whatever to teach me.

“A lot of people like to say self-taught, self-taught, and I feel like that’s a little too elitist for me. Community-taught comes from the authors who wrote the beginning books that I read to the online tutorials that were always free. I utilized a lot of people’s time.”

I really need to give credit to these people. I bugged them relentlessly when I was first starting. People who spent their free time learning how to create easier ways for people to grasp concepts. They did that in their free time, too. It’s not fair to say that I learned this all on my own because I didn’t.

What would you say are the most exciting things, to you, about working in tech? What parts of the work really activate you?

Growing up, I really wanted to be an inventor. I knew that inventing something new was going to put me on the map. It fostered creativity. Now I get to invent things, or new ways to interact with things, every day.

I think that where we are right now in tech, or in computer engineering, in general, is at a larger scope than we’ve ever had before. We have people and ideas that are solving problems that we never thought imaginable.

“Growing up, I really wanted to be an inventor. I knew that inventing something new was going to put me on the map. It fostered creativity. Now I get to invent things, or new ways to interact with things, every day.”

There’s this one project that I keep thinking of where these two students figured out a way to use Google to send Doctors Without Borders a text in when they saw outbreaks of diseases. They would map it to a Google heat map and use an algorithm to track the progression of a disease. They were able to send resources before a disease was going to have an outbreak in a certain area—just by using an algorithm. We have all of these minds! Sometimes they’ll do something silly like create new ways to say “Yo” to each other. Other times you have people who say, “Here’s a problem that I totally think that we can solve together.” Generally, the people who really, really want to solve a problem have come at it from a place of passion versus a place of greed. It’s so amazing to see what people come up with.

When did your focus turn to inclusivity in tech?

It kind of bounced around inclusivity in tech. When I was at Sales Force and I didn’t feel like I was a part of the technical community. I thought using employee interest groups would be a way for me to network. That’s kind of how I got started with inclusivity.

When I moved to a smaller company, I realized that things were way different. We had started an inclusion group about eight months after joining. A colleague and I were leading that for a while. When that person left, we started to feel a lot of the impact of having a person leave or why people were starting.

It wasn’t until someone explicitly pointed it out to me that I was the only girl in the room or that I was the only gay person on the team that I moved into the diversity inclusion work. I was constantly the spokesperson for this entire identity. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. Someone pointed it out it was like, “You know you wouldn’t have to be that if there were more people of color in your company.” And I was like, “Oh, shit. I probably wouldn’t have to be the spokesperson.”

“It wasn’t until someone explicitly pointed it out to me that I was the only girl in the room or that I was the only gay person on the team that I moved into the diversity inclusion work. I was constantly the spokesperson for this entire identity. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. Someone pointed it out it was like, ‘You know you wouldn’t have to be that if there were more people of color in your company.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, shit. I probably wouldn’t have to be the spokesperson.'”

It wasn’t until I  joined Lesbians Who Tech that I realized that I could have a positive lesbian role model in my life. I was like, “Holy shit. They exist.” They’re not just at home with their wives and cats, or girlfriends.

I started to ask why don’t these groups exist? Why was it hard to get into this industry? When I ask people – whether they’re people of color, or people who identify as female, or LGBT people, or someone with a disability, associating background – there are one of two camps. One: they will believe fully that they got where they are because of who they are and their skill set. And there are other people who are like, “Holy shit. I am so lucky to be here. And I worked my ass off, just like everybody else, but the system worked against me way more than it did everybody else.”

I’m in the camp where I think that the system worked against me a lot and I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for opportunity. It’s not fair that I’m the only person to have gotten that opportunity. That I found some random loophole or some random person to give me a shot. I owe almost everything in my tech career to two people. Two people who I interviewed for a position that I definitely was not good for. I left that thinking, “I don’t know why I went to this interview.” They gave me a shot. They did this thing where they assessed what I knew and what I knew and how long it would take me to get up to speed. That’s something I’ve never forgotten and something that I want to give as an opportunity to everyone else.

“It wasn’t until I  joined Lesbians Who Tech that I realized that I could have a positive lesbian role model in my life. I was like, ‘Holy shit. They exist.’ They’re not just at home with their wives and cats, or girlfriends.”

I’ve focused a lot on inclusivity in tech and making sure that the way that I interview a Harvard or Stanford or MIT grad is not going to be the way I interview somebody who is a person of color. The way that I approach a negotiation tactic is not going to be the same for the way that I would interact with somebody who doesn’t have my identities. I need to give these opportunities to people who never even thought these opportunities were available for them.

Let’s go to the dark side for a minute. What have been some of your biggest struggles that you’ve had to overcome during your time in tech?

I have consistent impostor syndrome. I had an interview a couple of weeks ago where they asked me a question and I felt like the answer was way too easy. So, I didn’t say it. And I was just like, “No. There’s no way that the answer is this.” It was, literally, one of those things where it was like, “Tell me one of these things is not like the other.” And it was the equivalent of all of them being blue except for red. I thought, “Nope. That’s not it. They’re tricking me.” I refused to believe that I knew the answer that quickly. I ended up second guessing myself the entire interview.

I am absolutely a workaholic and this industry has definitely helped that. It’s not uncommon to get an email at two in the morning. It’s not uncommon to see people in the office 9:00 at night. It’s generally because we like what we do. It’s not a case of having meals catered and transportation taken care of and lack of dependencies on being home at a certain time. It’s the fact that you love what you’re doing and you believe in what you’re doing. It’s so easy to just lose track of time. Especially if your days are filled with in-person meetings or interviews. By the time six o’clock rolls around, you can finally start doing your work.

“I’ve focused a lot on inclusivity in tech and making sure that the way that I interview a Harvard or Stanford or MIT grad is not going to be the way I interview somebody who is a person of color. The way that I approach a negotiation tactic is not going to be the same for the way that I would interact with somebody who doesn’t have my identities. I need to give these opportunities to people who never even thought these opportunities were available for them.”

In the past while I was fixing computers, having to continuously prove myself was exhausting. It’s compounded by having two kinds of people that you prove yourself to: the ones who have no idea they’re undercutting you and the ones who know that they’re undercutting you, and they expect you to prove something. It makes you work harder, which makes you work later. Before you know it, you’re only sleeping two-three hours a night.

What is it like being part of both the tech community and the queer community? I’m curious to know from your experience what it’s like being queer in tech and being a techie in the queer community here?

Being queer and tech is one thing. Being queer in tech, especially being a female identified queer person in tech is almost invisible. I say that because when you work in a male dominated team, especially a millennial male dominated team, a lot of people will always think, “Oh, yeah, it’s totally cool that you’re gay. Don’t worry about it.” It’s a millennial time where you’ll hear things like, “Oh, yeah, I totally dated a bi chick once.”  I don’t care about that. When I was younger and men were trying to find a common ground with me through male dominated activities. They would say things like, “Yeah, did you see the ass on her?” Or, “Would you hit that?” It’s like, “We both like women, but I like and respect them, and you don’t.” I found that it was so much easier for someone to see me as one of the guys versus someone to see me as a queer person, especially a queer woman. That was always a struggle for me and that’s why I left a previous company.

“I found that it was so much easier for someone to see me as one of the guys versus someone to see me as a queer person, especially a queer woman.”

As far as being a queer person who techs, I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on me. It’s not necessarily because I’m a queer person in tech. It’s more or less that I am a queer person in tech who is also female identified, who is also a person of color, who also came from a lower socio-economic background. Those are so many groups of oppressed people who are looking at you like, “You made it. What else can we do? How can you bring us with you?” It’s like, I can’t carry four groups of oppressed people on my back right now.

It’s also those things where a diversity company or a diversity focused initiative will come to you, and just say, “You want more diverse talent, right?” It’s like, “Yeah, I do, but I want the right talent, and I want to give equal opportunity without you forcing people that you know aren’t right for this position.”

I went to a career fair recently just to recruit people, and they were like, “We’re diversity focused, diversity focused.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s great.” I would love to hire more people that are like me, or that are in groups that I feel have been oppressed, and have more obstacles than others. The candidates that were thrown at me, just at this particular conference, had never programmed a day in their life. There are a lot of great candidates who identify with these groups but are not as entry level. People expect you to make certain changes or judgement calls because you’re a person of color and I don’t think that’s fair.

What is it like in your experience being both a techie and a local?

I have tried very, very hard to not say this and to not blow up at this. I have felt this bubbling below the surface for a quite some time now. My family was pushed out of San Francisco. It was San Francisco before the first bubble burst back in early 2000. I remember watching my family be a little devastated that they could no longer afford the place that they had lived in for decades. Moving us up to the suburbs where my dad had to commute two and a half hours to work and my mom had to commute an hour and a half. I remember not being able to be with my family because they were always working and commuting in order to pay for our house in the suburbs.

I went to school. I got a great education and I worked really hard to be where I am. That’s when I moved back. I actually moved back to the same neighborhood that I grew up in. People call me “Techie Scum” and that I’m gentrifying our neighborhood when I’m really just taking back the neighborhood I was kicked out of. It really sucks. People who have been here for six years will tell me that I’m ruining the neighborhood, or that because of my company, or the industry that I’m in, that I’m the reason that they’re being evicted.

“My family was pushed out of San Francisco. It was San Francisco before the first bubble burst back in early 2000. I remember watching my family be a little devastated that they could no longer afford the place that they had lived in for decades. Moving us up to the suburbs where my dad had to commute two and a half hours to work and my mom had to commute an hour and a half. I remember not being able to be with my family because they were always working and commuting in order to pay for our house in the suburbs. I actually moved back to the same neighborhood that I grew up in. People call me ‘Techie Scum’ and that I’m gentrifying our neighborhood when I’m really just taking back the neighborhood I was kicked out of. It really sucks.”

I understand it because I went through it for a long period of time. I moved back because I wanted to be home and I wanted to feel like I was safe again. My grandmother actually lived and has lived for a number of years, one block away from where I live or where I work now. When I was growing up, I was told never to leave my grandmother’s house and go anywhere, except for going straight to BART. Now the rent is more than she’s ever made in a year, probably. It’s so infuriating to see people who actually just fit that mold of what everybody hates, and then to be put in that same bubble. I don’t think there’s anything that I could actually do to make my voice heard in that.

There are people who complained about the homeless population in San Francisco, or the people who like to capitalize on buses, or who like to celebrate sports wins in a violent way towards the city. You know when I was growing up, they were giving out Giants tickets on the streets, begging people to go to those games before it was relevant. While I was growing up, 49ers game was something that we don’t even go to because it wasn’t in a safe neighborhood. And now, people are basically just reclaiming it, and claiming that they’re natives after six years. It’s just infuriating, really. I love San Francisco. I grew up here. It’s great. It’s changed a lot. But the hostility from six-year locals is almost enough to just not want to be here anymore.

“I love San Francisco. I grew up here. It’s great. It’s changed a lot. But the hostility from six-year locals is almost enough to just not want to be here anymore.”

We’ve touched on this but where do you find your support networks? Where did you find them earlier in your life and where do you find them now?

My support networks have been people who’ve watched my progression of change over the years. My biggest supporter is probably my brother. He’s seen me through everything. My best friends from high school because we’ve literally gone through everything together. They were there from first kiss to me coming out to somebody’s first marriage and divorce and first kids and everything. My support network are the people who I know I’ve been vulnerable with. People I know who would never judge me for that. Sometimes I know that there are friendships where people feel like they’re depleted because the friendship seems one-sided but these friendships that I have, they’re people I could not talk to for six years and come back and just say, “I need you right now.” And they’re fantastic people.

My technical support networks have been the people who have mentored me and I can, in turn, return that favor. I’ve never felt like that was a one way street. One of my seniors, I probably go to him ten times a day to ask him a question. I try to reciprocate in being like, “Hey. This is an easy request. Let me take all of the easy stuff off your plate and I will work five to ten extra hours a week because I know I took up some time of yours earlier.”

My partner, of course, has been my biggest support network. I’ve never met anybody who has been as supportive as she is. I’ve absolutely never met anybody like her.

“My technical support networks have been the people who have mentored me and I can, in turn, return that favor. I’ve never felt like that was a one way street. One of my seniors, I probably go to him ten times a day to ask him a question. I try to reciprocate in being like, ‘Hey. This is an easy request. Let me take all of the easy stuff off your plate and I will work five to ten extra hours a week because I know I took up some time of yours earlier.'”

What do you look for in a job now versus when you started? 

When I first started looking for jobs I was looking for the right company. Once I got in the door of the company I would find out if the company had a volunteer program. Did it have employer resource groups? What was their PTO like? Did they have food catered? Did they allow dogs in the office? I was all about the perks.

Now, the first thing I think of is, “What does your company look like? What does your board look like? And how does that reflect on where I’m going to be in a couple years?” If I can look at your company and know that these engineers, who just happen to be engineers of color or women engineers, have not progressed in their career for the three years that they’ve been here, that’s going to say something to me. That’s going to either say that they were not set up to succeed or that no one is checking in and seeing what the progression of somebody’s career is. How often are they going to ask me to be their diversity advocate? How often are they going to ask me to be at a table to recruit or to speak on their behalf? Which I’m happy to do but if they means that I’m going to miss a meeting in which I’m going to miss a promotion I don’t know if I want to do that anymore.

“If I can look at your company and know that these engineers, who just happen to be engineers of color or women engineers, have not progressed in their career for the three years that they’ve been here, that’s going to say something to me. That’s going to either say that they were not set up to succeed or that no one is checking in and seeing what the progression of somebody’s career is.”

I’m really focused on what they look like when they work remotely. I have very bad ADHD and a little manic so if they have an open floor plan I can’t work productively. I have to spend one to two days just working at home or in a quiet room. If this company doesn’t know how to work remotely then I can’t be a part of this company in the way that is set up to succeed.

I like to look at where their focus is, as far as how they give back to the community. I like to look at whether they have a dot org and if I can tell that their dot org or non profit branch seems like it’s because it’s a great tax benefit or because the people actually believe in that mission. I like to look at their onboarding process; if they just throw me in the deep end and I’m on call the next day, that’s really shitty, but if they look like they have a 90 day plan to have people succeed that’s fantastic. I look at the things I love from my previous positions and hope that the next company can do better or is open to doing better.

When I worked in tech a primary feeling I had was that of isolation—I mean, there were chicks in tech at that time but it was more socioeconomic for me. I’m curious to know how your socioeconomic background contributes to the way that you feel in the industry. I’m curious if you can relate.

Yeah. Actually, a lot. That’s just something that I don’t think we talk about enough in the industry. We talk about diversity and we always talk about the visible things. As someone from a lower socioeconomic background, it is amazing the difference in ways that people see things. For instance, the first thing is you’re surrounded by people who make so much money and spend it like it’s nothing. The people that you sit with every day may not have the mounds of student loan debt that you do. Or if you are helping your family out, they don’t have to help their family out.

I recently heard a story where there were two people in a sales division at another company and, basically, they were both caught fluffing numbers, essentially. And one of them was a CIS white man who came from an affluent, affluent family. And the other one was a Latina woman who was a single mom and she had just graduated from a state school. And the Latina woman was like, “No. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.” And the company came back and it’s just like, “If you just tell us you’ll be fine. Just tell us that you did it.” She like, “No. I didn’t do it.” They tell the same thing to the guy and the guy’s like, “Yeah. I did it. My bad. I didn’t know.” And they ended up firing the Latina woman for lying. And somebody comes back and was like, “Do you know what you just did?” She lied because that was her only source of income and you just cut it. You rewarded an affluent person because he told the truth knowing that if he lost his job he would have his trust fund to fall back on. He would have these resources to fall back on.

“We talk about diversity and we always talk about the visible things. As someone from a lower socioeconomic background, it is amazing the difference in ways that people see things. For instance, the first thing is you’re surrounded by people who make so much money and spend it like it’s nothing. The people that you sit with every day may not have the mounds of student loan debt that you do. Or if you are helping your family out, they don’t have to help their family out.”

A lot of the people companies employ people to clean the offices or to serve food are people of color. That’s when you can really tell who came from a background where bussing their own tables is foreign to them. I will definitely see somebody cleaning off their own table or cleaning out a workstation on their own or offering to hold the door for somebody who’s in the service committee because they recognize those faces. They recognize people like that.

I remember when I got my first offer. I was so excited. My first offer was more than both my parents made combined. I was so excited for a whole month. I remember texting my partner, “I have enough for all of my bills and I can eat this week and I still have more money to put into savings than I know what to do with.” It was amazing and then someone was like, “Oh, cool. I’m so happy for you. What did you make?” I was feeling really good and I told them. They’re like, “You know that your offer was thirty thousand less than what you’re supposed to be making, right?” I was like, “Ugh. I’m an idiot. I feel like shit,” and it was also because I never learned to negotiate. People who come from a lower socioeconomic background learn to be happy with what they have got.

“I remember when I got my first offer. I was so excited. My first offer was more than both my parents made combined. I was so excited for a whole month. I remember texting my partner, ‘I have enough for all of my bills and I can eat this week and I still have more money to put into savings than I know what to do with.’ It was amazing and then someone was like, ‘Oh, cool. I’m so happy for you. What did you make?’ I was feeling really good and I told them. They’re like, ‘You know that your offer was thirty thousand less than what you’re supposed to be making, right?’ I was like, ‘Ugh. I’m an idiot.'”

I spent my college years driving an hour and a half back to my parents’ to clean office buildings from 11:00 PM until 3:00 AM, and then I would drive back to the city, and go to school from 8:00 AM until 5:00 PM, and then I would go to another job from 6:00 to 11:00, and then drive back to clean office buildings. That’s how I could afford rent and that’s how I could afford ramen – and ramen back then was ramen. Ramen was not $11 a bowl. It was like, “Hey. I spent $3 and I got six weeks of food.” There’s so many different aspects. You hang on to the things that you are so afraid to lose because you know that as much as you save, you could lose this job. And this job can be the only opportunity for you crawl out of a hole of debt that you’ve been told to invest in. The amount of times that you hit up for get rich quick schemes, for borrowing money, and everybody who’s asking to borrow money from you is your family, your homies, your best friends. You all grew up the same way and you can’t say no because you know where they’re coming from and you feel guilty for all the money that you make. I think being in tech from a low socioeconomic background is more guilt than it is ever pleasure.

How do your friends and family from home feel about how far you’ve come?

A lot of them make fun of me. Not that I’m the one that made it or anything like that.They’re just like, “Dude. You were the class clown and you never took anything seriously.” And they’re seeing me being featured on random articles or something or being mentioned in certain things. And they’re just like, “Who are you right now? When did you grow up and become and adult?”

I think a part of that is because when you grow up in a different socioeconomic background it’s so much easier to get caught in those loops. I still know people who are at Best Buy and who it’s easier for them to climb up that corporate ladder than to take a risk and leap somewhere else.

My dad keeps giving me all these random rules to live by so that I won’t lose my job. His rules are so outdated where it’s like, “Don’t you ever check e-mail from your work computer.” It’s like, “Wait. What?” I think we got into an argument today because I sent him a Google link from my work computer and he was so afraid that I was going to get fired over it. I think that fear rules because people—whether they’re people of color, or from a different socioeconomic background, or people who’ve ever just been fired before —are in a constant level of fear to never let anybody they ever know, make the same mistakes that they did. It’s one thing to get fired if you have a safety net, but if you come from a lower economic background getting fired is not an option.

“It’s one thing to get fired if you have a safety net, but if you come from a lower economic background getting fired is not an option.”

We’ve definitely touched on this, but how do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What is really exciting to you? What frustrates you?

Exciting, again, is that something is going to come out, that I’ve never even thought of. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. We have all these really, really great minds that are learning to exercise a muscle in ways that they’ve never knew was possible. This big focus on pushing towards diversity.

My biggest fear is that it becomes noise, versus action. I really hope that the right people get involved, not just these companies that want to solve the problem, and not just recruiting in HR, that’s like, “No, we should totally hire more people of color, and women,” but people who are in a position to hire, or in a position to move a product forward, I hope that they will look back and say, “You know what? I can skip this product cycle, and we can really invest in our team, here.”

I’m afraid that the bubble is going to burst, and what that means for the bubble to burst, especially for the people who came out of nothing, and worked their entire asses off, just to get to the brink of it can have it burst on them. People who are entitled to get a dose of reality, if that does happen. The stereotype is just like there’s no wrangling it. There are so many emotions out there like I don’t know what to feel because it’s too much effort to try to wrangle  those emotions because it’s mainly fear.

Yeah. What advice would you give to folks from similar backgrounds to you who are getting a start in tech or are hoping to get into it? What do you wish you’d known in the beginning?

I wish I knew that I belonged here and I didn’t have to continue to try and prove myself everyday. When people give me a compliment, that they mean it. I don’t have to deconstruct it. They were happy with my work and I don’t have to find reasons that they shouldn’t be. I wish that I knew not to be so afraid of losing what I have in working here, and that a risk is worth taking. That it’s really, really, really hard to take when you know what you can lose. That’s why it’s so hard for people who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to start their own company. Probably people from affluent backgrounds just sitting there and judging you and the statistics the way that they are, probably people who were male, white, CIS just sitting there and judging you as I was like a person of color just asking for money. Those are the biggest things that I wish that I knew.

“I wish I knew that I belonged here and I didn’t have to continue to try and prove myself everyday. When people give me a compliment, that they mean it. I don’t have to deconstruct it. They were happy with my work and I don’t have to find reasons that they shouldn’t be. I wish that I knew not to be so afraid of losing what I have in working here, and that a risk is worth taking. That it’s really, really, really hard to take when you know what you can lose.”

Early years, how early are we talking?

Where were you born?

I was born in the exotic land of San Jose, just 45 minutes south of here. My parents are Vietnamese, so, I’m Vietnamese-American. San Jose is supposed to be the largest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam, I think.

How did you end up in Texas?

My parents moved my brother and I when was 16. I like to say that I’m born and raised in the Bay Area, and then misplaced in Texas. They kind of just gave us a month’s notice before we left. Just, “Oh, and we’re moving to Texas. Pack up your things, say bye to your friends.”

The more interesting version of this story is that my mom followed a monk there. I’m not sure if that’s true, really – that’s what my aunties told me. My mom is incredibly Buddhist, she’s super religious, so it’s completely believable that she followed a monk to Texas. I think the less interesting story is that, financially, it was easier to move to Texas and sustain living there. We moved at a rough time for me and I was pretty distraught. At the time, I had just finished my sophomore year and was coming in as a junior. I was about to be an upperclassman in the food chain of high school. I had found my group of friends and was starting to become stable with my identity. We had such little notice and had to start over in Texas. For a long time, I resented my parents for it and really didn’t understand their decision.

What was it like growing up in conservative Texas after being in California?

The majority of the population in San Jose is Asian and Hispanic, and that’s really all I knew growing up. Coming to Texas, we moved to a small town northwest of Houston. If you drove for 30 minutes, you hit Confederate flags. I experienced culture shock, what I recognize as culture shock, years after. I think what I’ve come to understand, is my place and identity as a daughter of immigrants. San Jose had been full of Vietnamese, and so the culture I carried with me was more easily integrated into my day-to-day. Now, all of a sudden I was in Texas, where many of my common practices and cultural norms felt wholly out of place. It made me very self aware and, for a while, it tormented me. It added complexity to the already difficult experience of being a teenager trying to figure out my own identity. And to this day, I remain consciously aware of my heritage and feel the pressure to carry on those traditions. But I embrace it, and have been learning to balance the two. I speak fluent Vietnamese, I can read and write probably at the level of a kindergartener, and am really happy and somewhat prideful when it comes to sharing traditions.

Eventually, you came back here?

So I’m a designer now. I’m an experience designer at Airbnb. I had always been interested in graphic design. When I was a kid, I loved this virtual pet website, Neopets, and designing “Neopet banners,” which were banners for your pet’s webpage. I started to learn HTML and CSS that way, adding snippets of code to my pet page. And then it grew to designing blogs like Xangas, Myspace, and Livejournals. I was always “revamping my blog”, my angsty teen blog. And then posting about angsty teen things.

Did you have an animated cursor?

Yeah, animated cursor, some marquees, and the Friends theme song that automatically played when you got there. I remember in high school I also loved books, and I had navigated my way through the internet to find maybe five percent off books. I would buy and sell these books, not even making money off of it, probably spending more money than making any, so I could deliver my friends our favorite books with some well designed receipts.

Did you know that you would pursue tech or design as your adult thing?

I always wanted to be a graphic designer. I just loved what I was doing. I eventually started entering crowdsourced competitions. I remember finding 99designs, which is now the bane of existence for designers. But when I was around 17, I would submit logos and win once or twice. And I was like, “$50! I’m going to be rich!” I had always wanted to be a designer, but my parents never really supported arts degrees. And as immigrants they kind of frowned upon it. Now, looking back, I understand, and really respect my parents for having their American Dream, and trying to give me the shortcut to success. I recognize it now, but before it was just, “Why won’t you let me do what I love to do?” They were always pushing the suggestion of more typically successful careers, becoming a doctor, lawyer, something that requires a PhD. My parents frowned upon it so I pursued it on my own.

You pursued it on your own time, and then you ended up doing something totally different in college.

Yeah. I left home at 17. My mom and I had a really rough argument. It had been a struggle with my parents and it was a long time coming. My parents are very traditional and they’re very strict. They kind of pushed suggestions on my behavior, my identity, passions, way of living, and expectations of living. I never felt like I did anything right and I never felt like their expectations of perfection were achievable. I was rebellious, confused about who I was, what I wanted to do, and felt like my own voice didn’t exist with them.

They also had this idea of respect, that when they had their say, even if they were wrong, any sort of response, even a correction through a miscommunication, is considered talking back and disrespectful. This was their definition of respecting elders. Eventually I got tired of having to hold my tongue, and that’s when I became rebellious and defiant.

I’m the eldest. I have a younger brother, and I always say they consider him the golden child. As the oldest, you’re the guinea pig. Whatever you do is always wrong, and they’ll adjust their parenting methods and they will treat my brother better. 

I remember that in my family [chuckles].

Yeah.

It sucks.

You can relate?

Totally. So you bounced?

Yeah. I left early. I forgot the question. Sorry. [laughter]

This is all leading up to college? And doing something different in college than design?

Long story short, I ended up going to school at the University of Houston. I had initially pursued Architecture and then Marketing, looking for a major that would satisfy my love for design, but still would set me off on the right foot in terms of a career. I eventually ended up in Management Information Systems. I thought that since I wasn’t going to study design, I would study something that supplemented it. And through MIS, I studied more coding languages, learned about database architectures, and practiced project management.

And then from there, how did you end up in Silicon Valley?

By that time I had left home, I was already freelancing. I had made logos, built websites, done some branding work. I was also juggling two or three jobs, like hosting and waitressing, trying to sustain myself through college. Instead of finding project management jobs through my major, I would attend the same career fairs, but pitch myself as a designer. I made connections with people who were trying to hire students for project management jobs and ended up designing their websites, or working on their brand and identity. Word of mouth spread and I kept building websites and designing identities for start-ups, corporate companies, and restaurants in Texas. That’s how I started my portfolio.

Since I had moved, all I wanted to do was come back to the Bay. Growing up in Texas, as I established friendships and found my own identity, I recognized what I wanted to do and where I could do it best was where I wanted to be – back in the Bay Area. Getting a job out here was hard. I applied to every design job I could find. I would fly back here pretty often just to attend events and network with people. I had business cards and a resume ready. I had even made a Google Voice phone number with a 650 area code so people would think I lived here, so that the idea of me living elsewhere wouldn’t keep me from getting a job. Each time before I flew out, I did research on companies to find out who was hiring. Then when I got here, I would stop by their offices, drop off my resume, and let them know I was interested in the job.  A lot of times I just cold contacted people. I used LinkedIn to email recruiters, let them know that I was interested in their company, the jobs that they had open, and forwarded them my portfolio and resume. I was turned down or ignored a majority of the time, but ended up landing a job at Playstation.

Awesome. What was your first experiences like working in Silicon Valley?

I had grown up loving video games through my brother, so I was ecstatic when I received the internship offer. I worked as a Web Developer Intern for their Developer Operations. Even after working at companies in Texas, I thought Playstation was incredibly corporate, especially in comparison to today’s tech companies. It was my first introduction to working at a large company and designing for a company whose product I used and admired.

Honestly I wasn’t sure what I had expected. I think I thought it was my dream job. I was given a travel stipend, housing, and it was a paid internship. I made great connections with people in the industry who I still keep in touch with. I really couldn’t have asked for more.

Then, LinkedIn after that?

Not yet. When I had my internship at Playstation I was still in school, but I managed to connect with my professors and was really honest with them. I let them know that I was working and would be absent a lot, wouldn’t be attending a lot of classes either, but I promised that I would catch up on all the lectures, do my homework, and make it to all the exams. After most of the internships had ended at Playstation, I extended my internship for another couple of months and worked there even though school had started. When I came back to school later in the Fall, I got an internship at a design agency in Houston.

I was nearing graduation and had applied at a bunch of jobs at tech companies, with no luck. A friend of one of my co-interns at Playstation worked for LinkedIn referred me there. I remember having a whole week of finals at the time and I hadn’t told the agency I was working for then that I was interviewing. I ducked out, flew out here, and was offered an internship.

It was actually an incredible experience. This was my first time being at a full fledged tech company. I met so so many incredible people with all different kinds of backgrounds and experience. I was offered a full time job on my very last day as an intern. My manager at the time decided not to tell me that I was getting the job and made me worry and scramble for a new job until the very last minute. He decided to tell me the day of, the day that I was leaving, that I got the job.

Oh man.

Yeah! I stayed at LinkedIn for three years. Looking back now, the connections I’ve made, the people that I had met, and just the experience I had were irreplaceable.

And then that leads you to where you are now?

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Awesome. What have been some of the highlights for you, just for your overall tech experience?  

So there are two things. I think the biggest thing that I had learned even from the beginning, flying out here and networking with people, and then working with so many people is that, even though we’re all in tech, everyone has a different story about how they’ve gotten here, what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and why they’re doing it. In the same way that I think you’re interviewing people, it’s just– the people you meet– you’ll never meet the same person twice. I’m constantly blown away and often inspired.

The second thing is being able to learn from everyone and everything. I think not coming from a traditional design background, I feel at a disadvantage. But you learn from being on the job day to day and being around so many talented people. You learn through guidance but also through osmosis, I think, from being around these incredible people. I’m always open to learning and trying new things and I’m so excited that there are endless possibilities and opportunities here.

What have been some of the biggest challenges?

I wouldn’t say the challenges I’ve faced aren’t necessarily caused by tech, but that they’ve been brought into the light through it. I’ve already mentioned that my parents were incredibly traditional and strict. They were tiger parents.

They had me learn every possible skill, hobby, sport. I played tennis, I played piano, swam, Tae Kwon Do, clarinet, basketball, badminton, a million things. They threw every possible skill at my velcro wall of life to see what stuck. I had started piano when I was 4 and played for 18 years.

My parents’ style of teaching and encouragement was through discouragement with an expectation of perfection.

I think one of the things that I remember the most was when I was learning piano, my auntie – my mom’s sister – was my teacher. I was playing a song during a private lesson and I wasn’t doing too well. My family friend, who was also a student and a child prodigy, was also there. My auntie asked me to play it a second time, and this time, have the family friend count how many mistakes I made. And then they asked him to show me how it was supposed to be done and play it correctly. And it was kind of like that all of my life, always being encouraged through discouragement.

Through my upbringing I recognize that I’ve developed self-esteem and self-consciousness issues, where I have this need for reassurance or recognition, whether it be my parents, employers, or managers and I have this need to strive for the utmost perfection.

What I’m constantly learning is that I don’t need to satisfy anybody else’s criteria of whether or not I’m succeeding.

In my experience, I’ve come across personalities that are egotistical, flashing around their title, that would speak from a perspective of authority rather than a place of humility and empathy. And in my self-conscious nature, I’m always cautious, always thinking that I’ve done something wrong. If there was a negative comment I would always think, “Was it me? Was it something I did?” Rather than realizing that it may not be anyone’s fault at all. I always took the blame or I always took it personally. That’s something that I’ve been trying to overcome.

Imposter syndrome is one of the biggest things I recognize in myself. I’m always thinking, “It’s a matter of time. They’re going to find out tomorrow that I’m not exactly as good as I’ve presented myself and that I’m actually not supposed to be here.”

But what I’ve come to acknowledge is that these are things that I’ve actually achieved. I need to take a step back and celebrate my successes and where I’ve gotten, rather than counting all of my misses and what I’ve done wrong. Not only that, but considering those things as stepping stones to getting where I need to go, as points of growth rather than, “This is where I f’d up.”

In tech there is a battle of titles, compensation, experience, all kinds of things. And it’s so easy to feel beaten down by someone else’s ego and to want to compare yourself to them. But I’ve realized that it’s not about me or anyone else, it’s about how I’m doing for myself.

Was there a person or a moment or an event that switched that for you? A kind of epiphany of just like, I don’t have to count my mistakes, I don’t have to worry about these people thinking that I’m not worthy or that I’m not doing it right. Was there a moment where you’re like, “I’m doing fine?”

I don’t think that it was an epiphany really, I think it’s been a long time coming. When I was at LinkedIn, the director of design, now VP of design at LinkedIn, was a mentor to me.

I remember I had really messed up my interview at LinkedIn, I had bombed my interview so badly and I knew it. I had lost my design challenge the morning of my presentation, came late to the interview, frazzled, shirt buttoned incorrectly, like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I messed this up.” I walked through my presentation, my portfolio, and spent the entire day interviewing.

At the end of the afternoon, the director came in, he could tell from my posture – he’s really good at reading body language – he knew I was defeated. He was honest and said bluntly, “I’m going to tell you the truth. I don’t know if the team thinks you’re qualified enough to be full-time on this team. If we do hire you, we’re looking at an internship. If not, I can give you advice on what you can do to improve.”

And I actually really appreciated his honesty. He was straightforward and said, “Let’s just cut the bullshit. Tell me how your day was. Tell me how you feel.” And we just kind of talked through the experience. He told me that it’s either an internship or maybe it won’t work out, but, whatever happened he would personally contact me and give me advice as to what to do next. Three weeks later he gave me a call and told me, “You have an internship. I want you to learn from the team and become better. This is your job to lose.” That’s how he became my mentor and my internship at LinkedIn started.

Through my experiences at LinkedIn, often times I felt like I wasn’t achieving enough, felt beaten down by failures that you inevitably go through. I took that personally as I normally did, and he helped me rationalize my thoughts, made me think objectively. “Did you really do this? How can you improve? These are the right emotions that you’ve gone through. There’s no one to judge you but yourself.” He helped mentor me through my self-esteem and self-consciousness to see my successes and that failures aren’t truly failures. I’m incredibly grateful for that.

What are your biggest motivators? What drives you?

For a while I think I was lost. My biggest goal since I had moved was to come back to the Bay Area. So when I worked for LinkedIn, I had achieved my biggest goal, “I’m back in the San Francisco Bay Area, now what?” And for the longest time I was trying to figure out what’s next for me, my next milestones, and figuring out what I wanted to achieve. I know that I want to leave an impression somehow but how do I do it? I think that’s why I stayed at LinkedIn for a long time, because it was stable, and safe. Familiar.

I think I had finally reached a point at my job there where I felt like it wasn’t enough for me anymore and that I wasn’t growing as much as I wanted to and eventually I moved to my job now, at Airbnb.

For me, I think motivation is, always learning, always feeling challenged and most of all fulfilling my passions, doing things that make me happy and that I’m proud of. That’s what always keeps me going.

What do you think about the state of tech now, in 2016? What excites you? What frustrates you?

I think what we lack sometimes is humility and an awareness for everything but tech. I think taking your experiences in tech and applying it as a perspective and viewpoint to learn is great, but I don’t think that it should be your only perspective. I think both the design and tech scene gets caught up with itself and we forget a world outside of it exists.

I think we foster great opportunities for anyone and everyone and that we have become more self aware of things like diversity and equal opportunity, making it a progressive industry that will only continue forward.

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

Thinking through my background and life lessons I have a couple of thoughts:

First—that we’re all imposters. I think we all feel like everyone else thinks we’re a better version of ourselves. I’ve learned to embrace my imposter, celebrate the achievements that make up the identity of my imposter because they are my own achievements.

Second, I’ve decided that perfection doesn’t exist, but I will always strive towards it. Thinking you’re perfect means that you’re accepting that you’ve reached the highest level anyone could ever achieve. That means you’re no longer open to learning and lack humility. I think that striving for perfection means that you’ll always be open to learning, to becoming better.

Lastly, I like to remind myself to do what I’m passionate about and that I’m doing this for myself and not for anyone else.

My last question to you would be, what advice would you give to people from similar backgrounds to you who are hoping to get into tech?

We all have our insecurities. I always think about whether I’ll make it or worry about taking risks and whether or not this is the right time or the right step.

I think my advice is to go for it. Just because you’re taking a risk doesn’t mean you’re going to lose it all. Learning from your failures gives you a better chance the next time you take the risk.

And as an imposter I worry about not having had a background in design and that someone will find me out. I moved to San Francisco just on an internship with LinkedIn, not even a full time job. If I hadn’t done that I don’t think I would have gotten to where I am now.

My advice would be that, take the risk, acknowledge your imposter, succeed from your failures, and do what you love.