My family’s from a farming community in Haiti. When my parents moved to Boston in their mid twenties, they had children pretty immediately. At the time, me and my 3 siblings lived in mostly illegal communities. It’s interesting because you don’t know that you live in that sort of community until you start meeting Americans who live a bit differently. We were very “green.” We used buckets of water to bathe instead of running shower water. Our front lawn was a garden. My parents were not accustomed to refrigerators so they became a pneumonia scare in our household. In fact, to them everything caused pneumonia and everything could be cured with a cup of tea.

“At the time, me and my 3 siblings lived in mostly illegal communities. It’s interesting because you don’t know that you live in that sort of community until you start meeting Americans who live a bit differently. We were very “green.” We used buckets of water to bathe instead of running shower water.”

Growing up I was a very, very inquisitive child. I constantly asked questions, and context clues meant everything to me. It always confused me how people would do things without asking why? My parents had a lot of difficulty answering my questions due to the language and culture barriers. They encouraged me to read more, with the mindset that the bigger the book, the smarter I would be. The older and dustier the book, the smarter I would be. The harder the cover, the smarter I would be. Really interesting context when you really think about it. I eventually started reading dictionaries and encyclopedias, searching for answers.

When I was 11 years old, I noticed an advertisement on the back of a magazine with the words, “Do you have questions?” I took this as a sign to get tons of questions answered. I ran away from home in search for the magazine headquarter, which happened to be in Boston. Upon arrival, there was a massive exchange of questioning and they soon realized that I had no idea what my address, phone number or birthday was. They sat me in front of a computer and taught me how to play solitaire until my mother eventually found me. My question started to shift from day to day questions, to questions around machinery, interface and context. That began my path into the world of User Experience.

How were you were first introduced to Computer Science and/or UX?

Well my mom brought me back to the magazine HQ the following Monday and told me not to tell my father. In our household, the girls were very protected. I was supposed to go to school and get home as quickly as possible. I was not allowed to make friends. But my mom was a bit of a secret feminist and encouraged me to outsmart the boys and teach her all I had learned in school. Staff at the magazine were pretty impressed by me and encouraged me to continue learning about technology. They eventually were able to take me to a place called The Computer Clubhouse while my mom worked. The Computer Clubhouse was a free technical after school program designed by professors and students at the MIT Media Lab. They targeted inner city kids as young as 8 years old and taught us how to use industry level technical tools. They believed exposing underrepresented individuals to a number of technical skills early on, could help bridge the digital divide. The additional blessing was the frequent visits from people of color at MIT pursuing PhDs in Computer Science and Media. At age 12, I played with actuators and sensors. I also was introduced to coding and programed the very first driverless lego cars.

When I was 14 years old, I ended up in foster care due to a variety of reasons including domestic violence and cultural friction. I ran away a lot and was very depressed through those middle school and high school years without my family. Despite all the personal struggle, I always found my way back to the computer clubhouse. I had all these cool tech skills and loved teaching. By the time I was 17 years old, I was teaching girls how to make their own web pages and remove the proof watermark off photos they had not yet purchased from school. I shortly became an assistant manager at the computer clubhouse, a Tech coordinator at the local YWCAs, the Museum of Science’s technology courses instructor and an IT risk auditor at Harvard University all while I attended undergrad.

“When I was 14 years old, I ended up in foster care due to a variety of reasons including domestic violence and cultural friction. I ran away a lot and was very depressed through those middle school and high school years without my family.”

Despite all of my technical ability, I was too scared to pursue a computer science degree. I believed it was a man’s job despite the fact that I was already doing it. So I went to school for Information Systems and sociology while teaching computer science on the side. When I was in my junior year at undergrad, I decided to take a java course and was pleasantly surprised. I already knew how to do a lot of this stuff. The wave of questions began again. “Does that mean I can code? What’s the point of the degree? Do you need a degree to be a coder? I’m confused. Can you just learn this stuff on your own? Are you not an engineer unless you learn to be engineer in school? Are Haitians who build bridges without degrees not engineers? Wait, what do I do with this sociology degree?” Sociology was the field that touched my heart and technology was the field that stimulated my mind.

I took several psychology classes and professors really felt that it might be my calling. But I could not imagine humanities paying back school loans. By the time I graduated I decided I wanted to do it all. I took to the Google search engine and typed in all my passions, “sociology, psychology, computer science, engineering, hands on, love, forgiveness…” And two fields popped up—human factors engineering and human computer interaction.

How did you make that transition?

I went to Michigan to pursue both degrees: a masters in human computer interaction and a PhD in Human Factors Engineering. It was EVERYTHING. I had somehow found fields that connected culture, engineering, empathy and compassion. And I got to doodle all day to top it off. The wonderful thing about the Computer Clubhouse is that it was funded by Intel. I was able to work my way through the network and worked as a human factors engineer while attending grad school.

At Intel, I met an amazing woman and Intel Fellow known as Genevieve Bell. Genevieve was an anthropologist and a human factors engineer who focused on cultural practices. That was the moment my entire life started to make sense. I had grown to a place where I truly appreciated cultural differences and empathized with day to day struggles of Keeping Up with the Silicon Valley Millennials. I knew I could help make life a little more easier. I wanted to help design products that showcased empathy. And I knew it was my destiny.

Walk me through your work and what you’re working on now.

I eventually went on to work on international projects as either a developer, engineer, or designer across many industries; from government to medical devices to worldwide leaders in IT. Today, I continue the great work at Google in the consumer operations space. I get to measure my work impact globally. I am also launching a personal global passion project called Tech Social Impact Conference in the first quarter of 2017. The conference sparks conversation about developing intentional awareness in product development. In Silicon Valley, we get to see how design and technology can provide social and ethical benefits (and sometimes consequences). I’d like us to share principles and approaches to contribute to a better tomorrow for the next billion users.

“Another goal I am working on is changing the way we do research in the tech industry. I want to make that our research takes into account social and economic backgrounds. Are we designing towards the average income in the United States? Are our studies mix gendered? Have we paid attention to accessibility? I’m all about making a difference in this world, and I know I am in a very privileged position to influence that change.”

Another goal I am working on is changing the way we do research in the tech industry. I want to make that our research takes into account social and economic backgrounds. Are we designing towards the average income in the United States? Are our studies mix gendered? Have we paid attention to accessibility? I’m all about making a difference in this world, and I know I am in a very privileged position to influence that change.

It’s so cool to see all of the ties to your work from your childhood to now. What parts of your work as a researcher really activate you? What do you love the most?

I get super excited when I get in front of people, and I mean real people (no offense to Silicon Valley folks), I’m so passionate and empathetic towards the people I design for. When they’re in front of me, I want them to be comfortable. I want to hear their truths. I want them to tell us how we suck. I want them to know that I appreciate it, and I want to make a difference for them.

It’s one of those things, when I’m in front of somebody, when I’m in front of an actual human being, to know that, “okay, maybe you don’t have the same technical abilities as I, or maybe you feel a little scared, but I’m going to change this for you. I’m going to make this easier for you.” It empowers me. I just ran eight studies today with folks, and every last one of them said, “I’m not really good at tech. I feel like I’m messing up.” I say, “This is exactly what I need. And you’re perfect. I need you to tell us everything we could be doing wrong, so we can fix this for the lot of you that may feel the same. It’s not about looking for a tech genius. If that was the case, we’d make no money. And we need you to keep paying us, so I need to know everything that makes you cringe and what makes you happy.”

I’m curious to know, in your eyes, the potential of research in tech and what are the problems that we should be solving with research? What are we not doing to approach this correctly?

The reason research is so beautiful is because it’s data. When folks try to say “This is how I feel this should be designed,” I can say “Well, 80 percent of people we tested won’t go through it.” Or when I hear, “Can these users really speak for the rest of the country?” I’ll say, “Well, you know there’s this little thing called sample sizing. Pretty dope stuff.” It’s just really empowering to influence people with research.

“We’re not building for just ourselves anymore. We’re a global society. Everyone is using our technology. There is a huge culture shift and focus on design for the next billion users and I think it’s a great direction. And guess what? Sometimes design requires contrast. That means we may need to have different people seated at the table to help us design. You might just have to hire that super poor person in the village you’re building for. It might just mean spending time living in the communities you are serving. It might mean better design for our products due to diversity of thought.”

The problems we should be solving for is cross-culture design. We’re not building for just ourselves anymore. We’re a global society. Everyone is using our technology. There is a huge culture shift and focus on design for the next billion users and I think it’s a great direction. And guess what? Sometimes design requires contrast. That means we may need to have different people seated at the table to help us design. You might just have to hire that super poor person in the village you’re building for. It might just mean spending time living in the communities you are serving. It might mean better design for our products due to diversity of thought. I see nothing but wins when you consider research as a primary practice to help think more critically about the ethical and societal implications of the technologies we design in this world.

Let’s go back to your personal narrative. Tell me about some of the bigger roadblocks and struggles, in your career that you’ve had to overcome.

Being yourself in a world where being yourself seems wrong. In the last year mentors have been telling me that I can fully be myself and be accepted. I never believed that. It wasn’t because no one was telling me I couldn’t be myself. The culture just didn’t seem to want me. So I faked it. I fake laughed at jokes, I fake pretended to see movies I hadn’t seen. I faked drinking beer when I thought it was disgusting. I tried to be a bro when there’s not an ounce of bro in me. It’s pretty draining because I would spend 80 percent of my day pretending to be somebody else­­ or I’d sit in silence when I’m not a silent person. There’s some parts of me I just cannot hold back, like when I disagree.

“In the last year mentors have been telling me that I can fully be myself and be accepted. I never believed that. It wasn’t because no one was telling me I couldn’t be myself. The culture just didn’t seem to want me. So I faked it. I fake laughed at jokes, I fake pretended to see movies I hadn’t seen. I faked drinking beer when I thought it was disgusting. I tried to be a bro when there’s not an ounce of bro in me. It’s pretty draining because I would spend 80 percent of my day pretending to be somebody else­­ or I’d sit in silence when I’m not a silent person.”

It’s still a work in progress but I’m trying to be unapologetically myself no matter where I go. I’m now about 70% myself which is pretty amazing. I would never have imagined that. And I have experienced so much good because of it. A mentor once told me that the Valley was a strange enough place where I could fit in and be appreciated for my differences because everyone is so different. Another mentor told me, “I don’t know if you know this, but when computer science first came out, it was considered a woman’s job. It was like secretarial work. But all of a sudden because somebody told us women we can’t do this­­ or that— that perceived ability has disabled some of our powers. It’s insane. And we as women are fully capable of doing any and everything in tech, if not better.” These words definitely helped.

When did your attention start turning towards educating minority communities?

I’m very passionate about that because someone took the time to show me that I wasn’t forgotten and look how far I’ve gone. And it’s important to know that it also took someone that looked like me. So I serve that truth right back.

I also truly believe this—if you want to hire somebody, look at their story. The story matters to me. That’s how you find out actionable potential. That’s how you know that you can take this kid off the street, show him a few lines of code, and all the sudden he’s the inventor of a killer startup. It’s about finding folks that are hungry. So I set up the environment, and the folks who are hungry, come to eat.

“If you want to hire somebody, look at their story. The story matters to me. That’s how you find out actionable potential. That’s how you know that you can take this kid off the street, show him a few lines of code, and all the sudden he’s the inventor of a killer startup. It’s about finding folks that are hungry. So I set up the environment, and the folks who are hungry, come to eat.”

How do you think the combination of your background and your life experiences impacts the way that you approach your work?

Everything I’ve done has been because of experiences I’ve had. At one point I wanted to prove my value because I felt tossed away by the world. Now, it’s about making people know they are valued and impacting the world that way.

Last question. What advice would you have for young women, young people of color who are really hoping to get into tech but just don’t know where to start?

Look at several LinkedIn profiles for individuals who are in the career you want. Write down all the things that interest you and the common themes/skills. Teach yourself those skills. Put said skill into practice. Slap new skill on resume. Rinse. Repeat.

The majority of the things I know came from tinkering, searching for free education online, and application of that education. Don’t believe the hype that you have to be in school to learn new things. Now I don’t mean drop out. College is awesome. Go to college if you can. What I mean is that you can teach yourself almost anything these days. if you allow for a little discipline. What kept me motivated was knowing that the short term sacrifice of taking the time to learn something on my own, was going to lead to longterm rewards.

“Look at several LinkedIn profiles for individuals who are in the career you want. Write down all the things that interest you and the common themes/skills. Teach yourself those skills. Put said skill into practice. Slap new skill on resume. Rinse. Repeat.”

And please, don’t be like me for the majority of my life and not ask for help. The world is so much better when you stay open and vulnerable about learning through others. Lastly, sounds cliche, but no such thing as a dumb question. Get your education on.

I’m Canadian. I was born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario—the capital of Canada. I was born to a quite young, single, soon-to-be-lesbian mother (she came out when she was three months pregnant) who had just left home. She didn’t know what the heck she was doing but had me anyway. There were not a lot of lesbians having children in the 70s, those who had them were coming out of straight marriages and had to be careful not to get their kids taken away, so she was a rare bird and it meant I also didn’t know a lot of other kids that had queer parents. So, my early years were unique in that way.

“I was born to a quite young, single, soon-to-be-lesbian mother (she came out when she was three months pregnant) who had just left home. She didn’t know what the heck she was doing but had me anyway. There were not a lot of lesbians having children in the 70s, those who had them were coming out of straight marriages and had to be careful not to get their kids taken away, so she was a rare bird and it meant I also didn’t know a lot of other kids that had queer parents. So, my early years were unique in that way.”

My mom was also an activist, feminist, and non-traditional woman (might be read as butch but never identified as such). She drove a taxi, did woodworking and construction, she DJ’d queer and women’s dances, and she was very active in Ottawa socially and politically. She was a role model for doing all sorts of different jobs and not knowing how it will all add up later.

She was also strong in math and logical thinking and that’s something I’m grateful for.  We’d play games at the grocery store doing the math on which size of a product was the best deal for the money. This was fun for me and a necessity for her. She didn’t earn much money so we never had a lot of stuff as I was growing up. My grandparents were my primary source of school supplies, clothes, toys, and candy, not my mom. She was on social assistance or earning a very low income so I was never certain I was going to go to university. I earned good grades and figured there might be scholarships.

My first 3 years of high school I was trying to fast track—my plan was to go to Queens University and be a lawyer, because I liked to argue. I was fast-tracking to do high school in four years instead of five by just doing the required classes instead of any electives so that I could get out of there faster, both away from my mom but also I needed to get the heck out of the country high school I was going to. Instead, I ran away from home at 17 and my school track slowed down. I ended up splitting my last year of course work back into a two year spread so I was only half time and just managed to complete high school while on social assistance. I filled out the university applications like everyone else, because it was free to do from high school, but I didn’t know how to follow up with interviews for the programs I applied to (film and animation) and I had no idea about student loans so I didn’t get into any of my choices.

“We never had a lot of stuff as I was growing up. My grandparents were my primary source of school supplies, clothes, toys, and candy, not my mom. She was on social assistance or earning a very low income so I was never certain I was going to go to university.”

At 19 I moved to Montreal from Ottawa and got involved in the political activism there through the women’s center at Concordia University. There I also learned about student loans and I applied again to University the next year. I was trying to get into film animation. I had always really wanted to make animated films but I couldn’t get into that program because I’d never taken enough art to have a portfolio. It was kind of a bummer because it’s like “I’m going to pay you for this degree, can’t I learn?” I had been drawing and doing comics my whole life, but not with any kind of formal training.

I ended up going into Women’s Studies because that’s what accepted me and I did a year and half of Women’s Studies. Then I dropped out when it got hard because I didn’t actually have any study skills. I did really well in high school without having to try very hard and suddenly, in university, I didn’t—I reached the limits of what I knew how to do off the top of my head. So I freaked out and dropped out and spent the next 10 years doing minimum wage jobs and evading loan collectors. That’s the early years.

At that point, I’m assuming you had absolutely no idea you’d be in Silicon Valley?

Oh my god no! I didn’t have any idea I’d be in Silicon Valley—didn’t even really think about its existence. I first was introduced to it in 2008 when I came out here to do an internship at Mozilla, which was across the road from the Google Mountain View campus.

I went back to school in 2005. I was turning 30. I was like, I need a job where I can get my teeth fixed. I figured I’d go punch a clock at IBM or something and have a decent middle-class income. And probably still live in Toronto, which is where I lived and went to school.

Discovering Open Source, getting involved with Mozilla, and then coming out here with a high-paying internship and being a part of the tech boom happening here—it’s nothing I could have imagined. I tried to move to San Francisco in 1997 as a young, broke queer. I worked under the table at a cafe and made $100 a week, which was barely enough to eat a Snickers bar for dinner and take the bus to work the next day. I didn’t know how to be an illegal alien here, had no safety net, and was not making enough money. At that same time a lot of my friends were being evicted, because of the first dotcom boom, and people were losing their housing, and moving further and further away from Mission/Valencia area. I was here for three or four weeks, and then had to go back to Canada, and go back to my own minimum wage jobs there. So I always wanted to come back and try again.

When the Mozilla job offer came through, I realized Mozilla would pay for me to move, and take care of my work visa, and I’d have health care. It felt like I had a red carpet rolled out for me returning. But I got back here to something akin to a funeral, for what San Francisco was. And again, people are being evicted, and there’s all this loss of radical queer & artists community. Then the housing market crashed. Everyone except for people in my industry was feeling it. At my job, we were still getting yearly raises.

“I went back to school in 2005. I was turning 30. I was like, I need a job where I can get my teeth fixed. I figured I’d go punch a clock at IBM or something and have a decent middle-class income.”

Wow. How jarring was it for you going from—I saw when I was stalking you online that six years ago you were making less than 10k a year, you grew up in poverty—and now you’re living a different life?

There’s an interesting trajectory there. I was very much—and my mom was like this too, spend everything you’ve got. You get a check and you spend it. In some ways, I was always very comforted by not having any money, because then I couldn’t sabotage it or mess it up. It was like, ‘I’ve spent all the money I’m going to spend, I have whatever groceries that are in my fridge, I have my bus pass in my pocket, I have my carton of cigarettes’ (when I smoked). I just took care of the things that were essential and then that was it. There was nothing else to worry about. I knew where to get free food. There is a certain ease to being broke when all your friends are also broke.  Everything we did for fun was free or super cheap.

I got a job offer at the end of my internship. I had been getting paid $5,000 a month to be an intern and I was saving it up to pay for the last year of school (eating 15 free meals a week at Google was instrumental in saving $), and I got a job offer of $60,000 for my first year out of school. To know that I was going back to school to finish up eight months and then to have a job right after, that paid so well, blew my mind. My mom was at the top level of her current career in government. She was—I should have mentioned this, she went back to school as soon as I left home at seventeen and she got a bachelor’s and a master’s really quick and then worked herself back into a middle class financial situation. She had grown up middle class. She got herself back into that and her partner, who she’s been with for 30 years now, comes from a  middle class background—two parents who are both PhD English professors, so they have a very comfortable life. They’re very thoughtful and conscious people who get to live very well. They don’t live extravagantly or anything, but they also make good money. And my mom, I think, has managed to probably catch up for all those years of struggling financially.  She’s supposed to retire in the next couple of years and I’m watching how that works out for her since she’s my main role model.

I observed her doing that, I observed another person who did that—going back to school then shooting up into a middle class job after not having money—and that was why I went back to school for a bachelor’s degree. I was also thinking “I’m doing it eight years earlier than my mom, so maybe I get eight years of advantage.” And I really did. I came out of the four year degree with a $60,000 job offer. My mom was making $92,000 at her top level government job. So I thought “Wow, I really am fast-tracking.”

“I tried to move to San Francisco in 1997 as a young, broke queer. I worked under the table at a cafe and made $100 a week, which was barely enough to eat a Snickers bar for dinner and take the bus to work the next day.”

The first couple of years I could pretend I still lived on $20,000 a year and feel like I was doing really good, and I fast-tracked paying off all my debts. My moms had to lend me money to do this degree because I had defaulted on student loans when I was 20 and I couldn’t access any student loans this time around. They were giving me a monthly stipend and paying my tuition and the deal was I’d pay them back half of their total spend, with no interest, which was an amazing deal.  I owed them $27,000 coming out of school, and I payed that all back in the first year. I also payed back $15,000 worth of credit card debt from supplementing working 20 hours while being in school full time.  Then I had a list of things I had to take care of. I had to get a bunch of crowns on my teeth because I had a ton of root canals with only temporary fillings on them. Probably $7000 went into my teeth in the first couple years. I also wanted to get top surgery more than anything in the world, so I did that in 2010.

I was debt free for exactly one month before my then-partner and I, bought a house in 2011. I signed my name on a $457,000 mortgage. I was literally debt free for one month. I went on a shopping spree in New York and got some new jeans and an expensive shirt and was like, “Woo-hoo. I don’t have to carry any debt this month!” and then we bought a house in San Francisco.

After we bought a house I did the last thing on my “perfect world” wish list which was getting Lasik and now I’m like a bionic person. I remember a time when I thought, “all I want is to be able to always have cigarettes and buy a beer at the end of the work day.” Now things are different. I don’t want those things anymore. I make all this money. What am I going to do with it?

I’m trying to learn how to do good things with money. I spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. I can just give money away. I pay more than half of things when I make more than somebody. For example, with my current roommate situation, we split the rent based on our respective incomes.  We don’t just split the rent in half because she makes a third of what I make. It’s nice to be able to do that. I love buying people dinner. I spend a lot of money on travel too, for me and also for others. That was totally new to me, jumping into this class. I’ve been to Vietnam, Mexico twice, Europe a handful of times. I had previously left the continent once when I was 15 on a school trip to London & Paris that my mom borrowed $1500 from my grandparents to pay for and they never let her forget it. I also do this thing called vacation, where you go away and read books and lay in sunshine. I learned how to do that and how to travel in different countries.  I got a first-class upgrade once. It was to my grandmother’s funeral, so I was a little bit like, “I’m so excited to fly first-class, but it’s a red-eye and I should be sleeping, but I can’t sleep because we’re getting cookies on a plane! It’s like two in the morning and I’m going to eat these cookies and watch all the free movies!”

“I feel like I’m in this industry because I want to shovel out as many resources as possible from its coffers but also so that I can make a getaway after a few more years and then me and all my people who don’t make this kind of money, who don’t have retirement plans, who don’t have this kind of financial stability, we get to go have a good life somewhere quiet. I don’t believe in doing this just for me. I have to do this for other people too, as many as I can. It’s not even enough. The wealth gap is growing so fast and even with the money I’m personally making, I can’t stop it or feel like I’m doing enough to help others.  Sometimes I want to run away from making money, go back to when things were easier and I wasn’t part of a very hated industry.”

I used to just road trip around Canada and the US. That was what we did. Just get in the car and drive to someone else’s town and sit around their mall or whatever.

I feel like I’m in this industry because I want to shovel out as many resources as possible from its coffers but also so that I can make a getaway after a few more years and then me and all my people who don’t make this kind of money, who don’t have retirement plans, who don’t have this kind of financial stability, we get to go have a good life somewhere quiet. I don’t believe in doing this just for me. I have to do this for other people too, as many as I can. It’s not even enough. The wealth gap is growing so fast and even with the money I’m personally making, I can’t stop it or feel like I’m doing enough to help others.  Sometimes I want to run away from making money, go back to when things were easier and I wasn’t part of a very hated industry.

Let’s dig in deeper on what you just said. What is your experience straddling communities of different levels of privilege. One being tech, and others being the queer/activist communities. Especially in San Francisco. What is that like for you?

Moving to San Francisco and having most people not know me here before I arrived with a job in tech—sometimes I feel really ashamed. I’m like, “I went back to school so I could fix my teeth, and I come here and it doesn’t matter who I am inside. I just look like a douchebag to people who don’t know me,” and that’s—and not only because I work in tech, but because I pass as a white guy to most strangers. There’s all these ways in which nobody sees the complexities and in some circumstances those complexities don’t matter. I just have to live with that. People are going to make the judgements they are going to make but it’s scary in San Francisco because it’s a super radical activist community that I wanted to come out and be a part of but I tiptoed around it for the first couple years because I was afraid people weren’t going to like me. I went back to school in software development because I liked computers my whole life and was pretty confident with them but also because I thought it would be a good skill to bring back to my communities. I had worked with some artist nonprofits in Toronto and they’re using the oldest computers, and they’re locked into proprietary software they can’t update because they can’t afford to update it. There’s just all these inefficiencies within non-profits because of a lack of tech fluency, and I was always the person who could fix computers or took a natural shine to that kind of stuff, so I thought why don’t I enhance that in what I go back to school for. It seemed like a good fit, I’ve always liked computers, I was the kind of person if I went to someone’s house and they had a computer- because I didn’t have my own computer until 2003. If I went to someone’s house and they had a computer I’d be like “oh can I hop on your computer?” When I got here I joined this queer SF mailing list and I would send messages saying, “Hey, if anybody wants to learn programming, I’d love to teach you what I know.” Nobody took me up on it. Nobody was interested. And nobody was getting mad at me for it either, but it just felt like I shouted to the dark, and I didn’t really understand why.

“Sometimes I feel really ashamed. I’m like, “I went back to school so I could fix my teeth, and I come here and it doesn’t matter who I am inside. I just look like a douchebag to people who don’t know me,” and that’s—and not only because I work in tech, but because I pass as a white guy to most strangers. There’s all these ways in which nobody sees the complexities and in some circumstances those complexities don’t matter. I just have to live with that.”

Sometimes people will approach me and be like, “Oh, I want to learn how to do what you do,” because they see the part where I have this financial stability, and who doesn’t want that? And I want that for people. So I’m like, “Yeah,” and then they’ll say, “But I hate computers,” and say, “Well, then I don’t know if I can help you.” You have to like this stuff a little bit or find at least some part of it interesting.

Then I started to wonder if maybe my role isn’t necessarily to help with the actual technology, even though I do as much as possible, like I’ll get used laptops from my workplace to people for whom a 2 year old laptop is a game changer, repurpose older model cell phones. There are ways in which I can help out in random instances with hardware, sometimes maybe I help someone with a website, though I don’t have much time to do that now that I work so much. These days it seems like the way I can help my community more is often through straight up funding and spreading fundraising asks to my networks which now contain more people who are outside of queer & activist communities—so I can help tap new sources.

Personally I’m curious, as someone—I grew up in a tiny town, moved here with $40, was broke as shit for a long time. And now I make a good living, and I found success to a degree. And the most prominent feeling from the entire experience, that I still experience today, is guilt. I’m really curious if you feel that too?

Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely, I feel guilty. I managed to get myself a do-over and things went really well and I didn’t feel like I could take any pride in what I had done. Other people tell me I should, but I can’t. I have a really hard time with doing well while other people are suffering or struggling, and yet, at the same time, when I was broke, it wasn’t fun. I don’t miss that stress. I’m still so aware of some of that stress. I have the newest car now. I got a used Prius, a 2009, and it always starts. I get to do preventive maintenance on it, which no car I’d ever owned before got. I always had cars with weird electrical problems, horns that didn’t work, shot brakes, no heat, just stressful breakdowns waiting to happen around every corner.  It costs a lot more to have a car like that than it costs me to have this 2009 car but I would never have been able to qualify for a car loan before now.

I felt a lot of guilt when a friend of mine said, “You forget what it’s like to not have money,” or when I mention things like retirement. That’s the new thing I want to start focusing on, and I want to figure out ways of building a collective retirement fund or otherwise making sure that I’m not just saving for individual private success because my retirement is not going to be very fulfilling if my friends aren’t there. We don’t have a lot of ways to talk about this kind of stuff with people and I have a tendency to just try to give stuff away rather than be the person who has more. I’m not 100% sure that’s the best thing to do, but it’s all I know right now.

“When I was young and broke and people said how rich people have problems too, I’m like, “Whatever. They have money. I don’t believe you.” And now I make what to me is a ridiculous amount of money and I’m feeling that struggle to be happy. To be clear, some of the things I need to work on for my own happiness will exist at any income level but some of the factors are a direct result of being in such a different place than many of my peers. The guilt, stress, and shame are a constant source of exhaustion.  I don’t have any role models for this, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”

My ex is a public college teacher and she never got a raise the whole six years we were together. When we first got together, I was making almost as much as she was and by the time we split up I was making twice what she is. Every year I would come home and say I got a raise—every year that I got a raise—her face would just fall. She would be saying, “Oh, that’s really good for you,” but her entire face belied what she was saying because it was so obviously really hard for her to hear that and it was hard for me too. She should have been getting raises.  But did I wish I did not do it—not make more money, not get a raise, not bring that into our home and into our community? I don’t know.

Recently I have started to say I have five years left in this industry because I’m having a really hard time with the stress. When I was young and broke and people said how rich people have problems too, I’m like, “Whatever. They have money. I don’t believe you.” And now I make what to me is a ridiculous amount of money and I’m feeling that struggle to be happy. To be clear, some of the things I need to work on for my own happiness will exist at any income level but some of the factors are a direct result of being in such a different place than many of my peers. The guilt, stress, and shame are a constant source of exhaustion.  I don’t have any role models for this, and I have no idea what I’m doing.  I’m often curious how this works for other people who come from financially stable upbringings and who are making this kind of money in their 20s.

Yeah. Well, they probably never had to live on less.

I think they probably are saving a lot of money and not spending a lot of money. But that they consider themselves as not having a lot of money. Which isn’t how I approach it at all. I really had to learn how to save money and to learn to protect my savings account from myself. You know, the me that likes to just spend all the money so I don’t have to worry about fucking up with the money? Now I have learned to save money and then I have this little savings account that is growing with these automatic deposits and it got to a size where I was like, okay now I want to protect it—I don’t want to touch it. But I had never had that ability before to, like, put money aside and not touch it. I think that people who came up with money or who came up with security don’t worry about money like this—especially the tech guys who behave like “It’s not even about money. I just do it because I love it.” I call bullshit on that. You’re making money doing it! I don’t know if you’d be doing it if you also had to scramble for your next meal or didn’t have power and literally couldn’t do it because you didn’t have power. I think that they have a much more compartmentalized idea of budgeting and saving and things that let them think what they’re living on is what they have instead of counting their total wealth.  Not to mention anyone who might have someone preparing their meals, cleaning their home, doing their laundry, or raising their kids.

Yeah.

Imagine that saying:  It takes money to make money. For me, making money was a bit of a slippery slope at first because I was still doing things like spending a lot of money on a credit card and then paying it off with my next paycheck. I still haven’t figured out how to have the money for something I want to buy before I buy it.

Yeah. It sounds like we have very similar relationships to money [laughter].

Tell me more about the Ascend project.

That was my attempt to try to scale up what happened to me. I got involved in Open Source at Mozilla through school. I was a student at the time and I got to work on fixing bugs and was supported and grew into being a respected contributor to the Mozilla Project through continually showing up. That helped me secure an internship which helped me get my first tech job which helped me get to the $60,000 a year new grad gig. With all these code schools coming up, that were charging people, especially people coming from the underrepresented populations who are desperate for an opportunity to get a little bit of this tech money, it looked very predatory to me, and it still does. I wanted to see if I could do something where I could replicate what worked for me. Which was that you get involved, you get a chance to be free to do nothing but learn all day how to contribute to Open Source. Because contributing to Open Source is often a really important marker for someone who wants to try to break into a job in technology. And that’s often reserved for people who have this thing called “spare time,” which is really helped by someone else doing your laundry, cooking your dinner, and raising your kids. Right? This program was inspired by the thinking: what if we paid people to have the time to sit all day in a guided environment like I had with my teacher in school—where their only job is to learn how to be a contributor to open source to make a technical contribution by the end of six weeks.

I had an executive at Mozilla who was very supportive of my plan. We would pay participants an honorarium, cover childcare as needed, transit, we provided breakfast & lunch, we provide a work space, we provided laptops that they would get to keep after the 6 weeks were up and then we walked them through a lot of the stuff that I went through. I did a 12 or 13 week college course where I was in class once a week and then I did the project work in my own time. Ascend was an accelerator so we did six weeks, five days a week, nine to five. I wanted it to be only for people of color and that didn’t happen mostly for reasons of time and then also my own limits of knowledge & connection with Portland.

I had just read a study by the woman who wrote Unlocking the Clubhouse about women in CS and she did a second follow up study on Latinos and Blacks in tech based on L.A. high school students and she highlighted how those populations are actively dissuaded from getting involved in CS at all. Seriously—like “this isn’t for you.” I definitely wanted to work with people who are being told that they shouldn’t be here.

I was running it in Portland because Mozilla had an office in Portland. Immediately people were making fun of me for trying to do something that was reaching out to people of color in Portland because it’s 73% white. If it’s 73% white, that means there are people of color there and I only needed 20 people, so I still thought “this is possible.” I keynoted at a local open source conference to announce it. I was also able to hire a friend who was a WordPress developer and small business owner in Portland. She was a local person and she had freelancing skills I didn’t have so I asked her to come co-lead with me and bring those areas into the curriculum too. She also happens to be a black lesbian woman in tech. It seemed wise to have a good local role model/mentor because I was going to come in and teach and then go back to San Francisco.

“I had a manager who was really great. He was very clear about calling me she, as I had asked, and he would do what I call “pronoun showdowns” on my behalf which is when my manager is calling me ‘she’ to someone who’s calling me ‘he’ and they just go back and forth like that until the other person’s on board. I love watching other people do that instead of having to do it myself.”

I put the call out and I got 43 applicants and I had budget for 20 participants. I interviewed everybody who made it past a programming challenge (free online Javascript course) in order to select people. Out of 20 people, 18 completed the program. 1 of them had to go back to Mexico to deal with a family situation and then for immigration reasons was not able to return to Portland to complete. Another person I had to ask to leave the program because he wasn’t pulling his weight. He was falling asleep in class and not really participating. He just wasn’t at a level of maturity to be able to do the self-directed work that was required in this program. We were there to support and also to expose them to stuff and to try to help them connect the dots, but it was really a guided self-learning space. That was intentional so that each person was learning at their own pace, the idea being that wherever they came in at, six weeks later they were six weeks further from that point in terms of having picked up new skills. It was not the goal that they all hit each milestone in the same way.

It ended up being a really great cohort. There were a range of ages. I discovered a whole new demographic of people that I hadn’t even considered when it comes to not getting great opportunities in tech, which is women over 45 who already have experience in technology but cannot get interviews to save their lives because it’s like they disappeared from the view of anyone looking at resumes. The only advice I could give them was not to put the year they graduated on their resumes. We had three trans women and one trans man. We had 15 women and 5 men. Half the group were people of color. It was a mix of class backgrounds—some people who were actively street involved. The guy that I had to ask to leave was homeless at the time and when we talked about it not being a good fit he said, “It’s because I’m on the street.” I was like, “No, actually, it’s not just that. We asked you not to fall asleep in the classroom because it’s hard on the other 19 people to watch you sleeping while they’re trying to learn. We asked you to leave the classroom if you couldn’t stay awake and we provided a room where you could nap. You couldn’t stand up and go to the nap room and have a nap.” It was really that he wasn’t able to grab the opportunity this time around. He’s a really smart guy, and I hope there will be other opportunities.

I had lined up a few internships for these folks to apply to after. There were a couple internships at a place called Urban Airship. It was intentional that it be two so that the graduates could lean on each other and not be the only non-traditional intern coming in off the street. Outreachy had some internship spots, which is a Open Source Intern Project for non-traditional and non-student people. Three of the participants got into those. One of the women who did the program worked at AgileBits. She helped a couple of people get jobs there afterward. So there’s a pretty decent amount of success for folks that did the program. What’s sad to me, actually, is that the three trans women who did the program, not one of them got an internship or job out of this. And that’s something, if I could do it again, I would try to focus more on ways to move the needle on that segment of the population.

“I got involved in women in tech stuff as soon as I got here and each time there’s that moment where I walk into the room of all the other women and now, when that happens, usually I know at least one person there so it normalizes it pretty quickly if another woman shows she is being accepting of my presence there. Initially in the first couple of years it was really hard to go to those spaces and to hope I would connect with a friendly person who would recognize that I’m just a different kind of woman and be my friend, or just be friendly to me.”

Yeah. That segues into something I’m curious about. Your particular experience being genderqueer in tech—like I read the blog post about the Pinterest bathroom incident and your response to that. What is your personal experience been working in this industry as someone considered different in that way?

I’m pretty fortunate. At Mozilla I got to know several of the leaders in the project through the work I did at Seneca College because a lot of them happened to live in Toronto, some were even from Ottawa and we were all relatively close in age which provided the comfort of shared cultural history that Canadians of a certain age will have. They were all very geeky, friendly straight people, so I came into Mozilla with a safety net of sorts.

As I worked in the Bay Area office,  I shared more information about who I was and what I valued which was usually well received. There was a lot of crossover with where I was coming from in terms of queer/feminist/anti-capitalist beliefs and the values of Open Source. I had a manager who was really great. He was very clear about calling me she, as I had asked, and he would do what I call “pronoun showdowns” on my behalf which is when my manager is calling me ‘she’ to someone who’s calling me ‘he’ and they just go back and forth like that until the other person’s on board. I love watching other people do that instead of having to do it myself.

I got involved in women in tech stuff as soon as I got here and each time there’s that moment where I walk into the room of all the other women and now, when that happens, usually I know at least one person there so it normalizes it pretty quickly if another woman shows she is being accepting of my presence there. Initially in the first couple of years it was really hard to go to those spaces and to hope I would connect with a friendly person who would recognize that I’m just a different kind of woman and be my friend, or just be friendly to me. As I got more confident in those circles, I could move on to talking about what we were there for, whether it was learning Python or Java Script or trying to teach other people. I use a method of proximity and persistent attendance to build up relationships with people.  I suppose we all do that, I’m just doing it with the additional effort of being seen for more than my initial appearance. Once at a women in CS conference, sitting in a session, this woman turned to me and asked, “Why are you here?” I think she honestly thought she was kindly asking a man why he was at women’s conference. Stuff like that still happens.

“I use a method of proximity and persistent attendance to build up relationships with people.  I suppose we all do that, I’m just doing it with the additional effort of being seen for more than my initial appearance. Once at a women in CS conference, sitting in a session, this woman turned to me and asked, “Why are you here?” I think she honestly thought she was kindly asking a man why he was at women’s conference. Stuff like that still happens.”

I wrote that email to the women@ list at a couple of months into being at Pinterest and we have now hired more women so there are going to be women in my office who don’t know about that email, who don’t know me, and that always makes me nervous because that means over time the risk of someone being scared continues to be a possibility—actually, it might have happened the other day. I came to the office from the gym because we have a single stall, gender-neutral shower, which is really great. It’s a solo shower, so I don’t have to worry about using our gendered showers because I wouldn’t actually feel comfortable being in the woman’s shower as it’s a shared space with a bunch of stalls and then a common change room.  While I use women’s change rooms as needed in public gyms and pools, that’s not comfortable for me at work, even though some of my coworkers use my gym and we’ve run into each other there. Anyway, there were no towels in my shower—I call it my shower—so I went to the woman’s shower room and stuck my head in to see if there were towels and there were two people in there, where one of them was—I don’t know how naked she was, but she had a towel on at least some part of her. The other was somebody I knew so I asked her, “Do you have any towels because there’s none—” I said, “There’s none in the other one.” Afterwards I realized that was going to sound to the other woman like a man stuck his head into the room and asked for a towel. That bugged me for a little while, because I get frustrated with not being perceived as how I am inside but I have to let it go. I can’t take it back. Little moments like that can throw off my day sometimes.

There’s this whole thing here about, “Be your authentic self.” The longer I’m here, meaning in the tech industry, and the longer I’m at Pinterest, and the more I get to know people and feel confident in the value I provide in the job that I do, the more I get to be my authentic self. — Honestly, even at Mozilla, where I felt like I was a fairly visible and outspoken contributor, and a leader on some initiatives, I was maybe 10% of my “authentic self.” There’s a part of me that’s like, “You can’t handle an authentic me in this workplace, you really don’t want it. It would be distracting at best. It would be horrifying, maybe, at worst because I am radically opposed to a lot of the norms you take for granted and if I was speaking about that all the time I’d be alienating you instead of you alienating me all the time.”  I’d rather take the hit and be the outlier than make other people uncomfortable.  I’m being 10% of myself and that is enough to get people thinking I’m this eccentric person or this unique character, but it also does draws certain people in which can feel nice.  That helps me identify the folks I can create and dream a brighter future with.

Let’s go macro for a second. How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What excites you? What frustrates you? What would you like to see change?

One of the things that excites me, actually it’s something that Pinterest is doing. There are people here who are tasked with building up Pinterest’s being a good corporate citizen. It feels very genuine. If we can’t immediately destroy capitalism, at least people can work to make their organizations be good corporate citizens and yet a lot of companies aren’t even doing this. Pinterest does a lot of outreach and ground work in several communities in SOMA. We provide volunteers for meal service at a nearby soup kitchen. There are bi-weekly meals-on-wheels deliveries to seniors living in SROs in the Tenderloin as part of our new hire onboarding.  I’m part of a group of engineers who started a computer club at Bessie Carmichael, a middle school down the street where 95% of the kids are on free lunch programs and we’re showing up and trying to build relationships & mentoring as well as just showing the kids that there are non-family adults who care about them. Things like that give me hope that there’s some model for accountability among tech businesses in San Francisco.  To the extent that these types of programs help on the daily, we’re engaged and there’s never a question that it’s the right thing to do.

“Honestly, even at Mozilla, where I felt like I was a fairly visible and outspoken contributor, and a leader on some initiatives, I was maybe 10% of my “authentic self.” There’s a part of me that’s like, “You can’t handle an authentic me in this workplace, you really don’t want it. It would be distracting at best. It would be horrifying, maybe, at worst because I am radically opposed to a lot of the norms you take for granted and if I was speaking about that all the time I’d be alienating you instead of you alienating me all the time.”  I’d rather take the hit and be the outlier than make other people uncomfortable.”

I’m always going to want it to be more radical than it is. But here it’s being done in a way that’s very core to the company’s values and considering the size of the company and that they aren’t public yet, it gives me hope that this is going to be ingrained aspect of this company’s culture.

So then there’s the other side which is that a lot of technology in Silicon Valley is being invented for the convenience of the 10% who are making good money. That’s got to stop. When are people going to try to solve real problems? I’m really disappointed that all these people who have all these fancy degrees that they hold over the rest of our heads aren’t doing anything that’s more beneficial to more people. Also people keep saying, “Oh the bubble’s going to burst, the bubble’s going to burst.” I do want there to come a time where tech jobs aren’t so inflated in value. I would be happy to be earning $60,000 a year in a town where that was enough to be comfortable and housing costs were secure so that more people could also have $60,000 incomes and cities weren’t being overrun & overpriced because they’re the nexus of high-risk, high-yield startups.

I was talking with someone last night in regards to the homelessness crisis in SF.  We’ve been going out in the mornings to try (unsuccessfully) to stop the tent sweeps. Where are those people supposed to go? Why isn’t anyone taking Uber’s model and making land grabs of unattended and abandoned lots in San Francisco? Build tiny houses on them and just say, “Oh yeah. It’s like Uber for homeless people.” It’s housing. Real, cheap houses. And if someone who owns this abandoned land wants to actually do something with it, fine we’ll move. But until that point, it’s housing, and it’s safe, and it’s clean, and I don’t know, something really disruptive. It’s not specifically a tech thing. Actually, here’s a good one for tech. Why hasn’t anybody figured out yet how to make a containment system that police can use to stop people from hurting themselves or others without killing them? That’s a great technology problem. Bring on the hackathon for that.

Are there social good hackathons yet?

Yeah. There actually is one called Hack For Social Good. The thing about hackathons is that—and I have been in and organized them even— you don’t get a lot done in a weekend that actually can persist beyond that weekend demo. Also, the organizations you’re trying to create for sometimes don’t know how to scope what they want or what they need into a small enough project for a weekend of strangers skill-sharing. It’s great for getting ideas, and I think people were using them originally as a way to kick off their next start-up or application and then they trickled down into the underrepresented communities as this way for people to network and maybe learn skills.  Maven has done some great hackathons for LGBTQ youth and nonprofits who work with them where several folks have gotten a leg up into securing work in tech afterwards.  That’s a positive outcome, even if the hackathons themselves are mostly prototyping.

“A lot of technology in Silicon Valley is being invented for the convenience of the 10% who are making good money. That’s got to stop. When are people going to try to solve real problems? I’m really disappointed that all these people who have all these fancy degrees that they hold over the rest of our heads aren’t doing anything that’s more beneficial to more people.”

How do you think that your background—where you come from, the life experiences that you’ve had, who you are—impact the way that you approach your work? I feel like your whole interview is an answer to this question but I just want to see what you say. [laughter]

I bring sort of a socialist-communist perspective to things so that right there kind of changes a little bit of power dynamics that might exist that just don’t exist for me or that I don’t care to perpetuate. The feedback I get is that makes me really fun to work with and maybe that helps shape the culture in positive ways since by default I’m always dreaming of how we can do things in ways that are inclusive of the most people.  I like pulling people in to help me on—for example, a week long tech camp for LGBTQ youth. I’ll just tell the whole company what I’m doing and why it matters. Then I’ll get these people out of nowhere who will say they want to help. When they help, it’s transformative for them.  

What I really want, and what’s really at the bottom of anything I do, is I really want to transfer power and resources to places where those are limited and yet to never be the bottleneck of this transfer happening. I do stuff in a scrappy grassroots ways, so I’m teaching people to fish as I go.  I hope I’ll get better and better at that. Anything I do, like the Ascend Project for example everything about Ascend is in a public git repo so anybody could take our materials & notes and go make a similar project happen.

I really admire the programs and organizations that were started in the 60s & 70s that still exist today, and I spend a lot of time thinking about, “How do we do that now? Do we do that now? Is it happening and I’m not noticing it? Are we capable of creating lasting models for social justice? Do we need institutions?” Silicon Valley is trying to convince us everything should be “move fast and break things” but when you’re dealing with people who are marginalized surprise and breaking things can be very destabilizing.

“It’s really important to recognize that people might come into this at any point in their lives. We should be always be empowered to not know what we want to do in our 20s and still get to learn new jobs have dignity, autonomy, and opportunities for mastery of skills. Anyone at any age should be able to do what I do.”

What do you see yourself doing in five or ten years?

Five years from now I want to have my own business and be teaching in some capacity. I want to do the Ascend project but as a business—where I’m able to fund running a training center for folks to be learning tech skills on the job while we deliver products perhaps in partnership with federal government. Trainees can become worker/owners or go start their own thing—like take a couple of clients and go start their own thing because not everybody’s able to or wants to work for someone. Some people really need to be able to work from home or to have more flexibility and so creating opportunities for that is also a priority to me.

My last question for you—this one’s complicated for you. Because normally my last question for folks is like, “What advice would you give to folks who kind of come from similar backgrounds or life experiences or who are hoping to get into tech?” But it feels so much more complicated with you. So I’m like, do we restructure that question? Like, what would you want that question to be? It’s kind of like, “What lessons have you learned that you would like to share with the young ones just starting out?” But… I don’t know.

Well, first of all, I don’t know that it should just be for the young folks because I think it’s really important to recognize that people might come into this at any point in their lives. We should be always be empowered to not know what we want to do in our 20s and still get to learn new jobs have dignity, autonomy, and opportunities for mastery of skills. Anyone at any age should be able to do what I do.

When I did the Ascend project I was asking people to tell me about a problem they had solved. Because I think a lot of people confuse technology with liking computers. But that’s just a side note. Tech work is about solving problems. If you could tolerate getting stuck on something, bang your head against it, thinking you’re a total idiot and you’re never going to figure it out, and then managing to figure it out and get that euphoria of, “Oh my god. I did this thing. I didn’t think I could do a day, a week, a month ago.” And you get a little high from that and you’re willing to do it again, then you can do okay in technology. You could do well in a lot of different jobs. Technology is not this natural talent, a lot of the work we’re doing is not in any way rocket science. Which may or may not even be the hardest thing to do. I don’t know why that’s always the comparison. But rocket science is pretty exact. A lot of this stuff has room in it for you to bring your transferable skills from all sorts of other areas. I want to work with more people who have way different backgrounds, not just people whose lives have gone according to a plan.

I’ve had some people ask a similar sort of question at conferences, like the LGBTQ lunch that happens at Grace Hopper “What’s going to happen when school ends and I’m this genderqueer person trying to get a job?” and, “Is it going to be okay for me?” It probably will, because even though this place is full of white people with money and other privileged folks they’re all pretty nice. It’s a benign, institutionalized system of racism, sexism, heteronormativity. Whatever exists here, it’s super low-key so there’s microaggressions, guaranteed there’s microaggressions. So, you’ll survive and then it’s on people to figure out what they can tolerate and where they’re going to feel comfortable and successful.

That’s my advice, “You’ll survive at the very minimum!” Someone’s going to find comfort in that. You know what sucks is I can’t say you will thrive. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say that to somebody who comes from any kind of underrepresented population, that they will thrive in this environment. I don’t see even the people who fit the mold thriving here. I think the current Silicon Valley model has isolated and cut off its workers from humanity and so those of us who come in knowing a little more about what’s happening outside this bubble just feel the pain more acutely. However we also have outside communities to retreat to in healing, I’m thankful for the contrast and I hope that others coming in will have that already or create it as needed.

“That’s my advice, ‘You’ll survive at the very minimum!’ Someone’s going to find comfort in that. You know what sucks is I can’t say you will thrive. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say that to somebody who comes from any kind of underrepresented population, that they will thrive in this environment. I don’t see even the people who fit the mold thriving here. I think the current Silicon Valley model has isolated and cut off its workers from humanity and so those of us who come in knowing a little more about what’s happening outside this bubble just feel the pain more acutely.”

I’m originally from Queens New York, born and raised. I was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York. It’s called 40 Projects. I lived there until I was about 6. Once I turned six I moved to Flushing, Queens, Latimer Gardens Projects. A lot of my life was school of hard knocks, in the struggle. I like to describe my story as that “rose that grew from concrete” story.

I’ve been very fortunate and blessed, quite frankly, to have gone through that because it actually made me a lot stronger, a lot more resilient, a lot more confident in my ability to move faster out of need and necessity. That hunger comes out of nothing other than need. It’s just a part of me now.

Yeah, totally. I know this is a loaded question, but can you share some of those struggles that you faced in childhood that you had to overcome to get where you are?

Well one, living in the projects is not easy. Two, I’ve had to go through the whole welfare thing among other things, right? I had the great fortune to go to boarding school for high school on full scholarship, one of the best high schools in the country. At that point I got to see really how the other half lives. Going to school with Fords and Rockefellers and that sort of thing. It was a really inspiring thing to me because I got to see number one, that I could compete similarly at the highest level and with the best of them. No matter what our upbringings were. It also showed me that I had a hell of a lot to learn.

When I juxtapose my upbringing with that boarding school experience it’s kind of night and day. To be honest, I needed to have both of those experiences to become who I am.

“I like to describe my story as that ‘rose that grew from concrete’ story. I’ve been very fortunate and blessed, quite frankly, to have gone through that because it actually made me a lot stronger, a lot more resilient, a lot more confident in my ability to move faster out of need and necessity. That hunger comes out of nothing other than need. It’s just a part of me now.”

I want to quickly segue to your work now. I personally think you guys are doing the best consumer facing brand work in Silicon Valley. I am a super fan.

Thank you. That makes me feel great.

Tell me more about the brand that you guys have built and your philosophy behind it.

Yeah, my philosophy about branding is I don’t like describing our brand. I’ve got a lesson I learned a couple of years ago from a marketing professor I trust from Stanford. She said “Tristan, brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.” I really articulate our brand through our customer stories. Fortunately a lot of them are consistent!

I get emails all the time from customers that talk about the success they’re having. I got an email from a woman who said “thank you for finally helping single moms teach their sons how to shave.” Or “thank you for fighting for a product that works.”

You know that’s my story. A pretty important rite of passage. As a young man in the Army, you have to shave everyday. These are the stories that I need to hear, that we’re onto something special. A lot of these stories are incredibly similar. If we can tell those stories through our own kind of authentic narrative, then I think we’ve nailed something and we’ve done it, right?

I’m always hard-pressed to say, “Hey, here’s what our brand is right now” because it’s also so adaptive, but so far it’s been incredibly consistent and told through our own customers stories.

I love it. Tell me a bit more about how you hire and how that has contributed to the success of your company.

I think one thing I think a lot about is this term ‘culture fit’. I think it’s a silly, silly, silly, silly phrase, specifically because no one defines it. It is important to me to really define what that means to people. Before I raised a cent in money, I wrote down the six values of the company. Courage, Inspiration, Respect, Judgement, Wellness, Loyalty. They’re all defined on our website etcetera. It wasn’t enough to just put in on our website. I wanted to entrench it in every single thing that we do. If you get reviews, you are rated according to your goal attainment but also every single one of those values. Are you inspiring? Are you practicing good judgement? Are you being courageous and inspiring?

“I think one thing I think a lot about is this term ‘culture fit’. I think it’s a silly, silly, silly, silly phrase, specifically because no one defines it. It is important to me to really define what that means to people.”

Also our interview process. We’re going to ask leading questions to get at one’s courage. We’re going to ask leading questions to get at one’s loyalty and respect. It provides an objective framework for folks who are not me to scale the hiring process in a way that’s clearly defined. I think that’s contributed quite a bit to a lot of success that we’ve had, and because Bevel is probably one of the most diverse companies on the planet in technology especially.

Yeah, absolutely. Something that’s come up in this project is that VC’s typically invest in problems that they can personally relate to. I’m curious if you experience quite a bit of skepticism building products for people of color in tech…

Yeah, I still do.

And how do you overcome that?

I mean, I overcome it by delivering product that works, building product that people love. To this day, people still don’t think this thing is going to work which is crazy to me because it’s just so clear that there’s such a consumer demand for this. That’s fine. They can think what they want to but we’re just going to keep moving towards our true north which is just delighting our customers and making health and beauty simple. That’s it. I don’t need their validation.

Yeah. I feel you. Another huge thing in this project has been people feeling a sense of isolation not knowing anyone who was like them or came from an unusual background, something that I definitely felt when I worked in tech.

Yeah.

I’m curious about your experience early in your career coming into tech in terms of feeling isolated or not knowing anyone like you and how you feel about it now.

My whole journey here started in 2008 when I came out to go to business school. That was the first time I had even heard about Silicon Valley. I didn’t even know it was a place. I was very lucky to have an email address that had .edu at the end. It allowed me to speak to a lot of folks that I might not have gotten access to otherwise. Fortunately, they saw it as coming from a place of pure genuine interest. For me, the isolation wasn’t there insomuch as my ability to speak to folks. Primarily, it was inability to speak to folks that looked like me. There just aren’t enough people. One thing that’s important is to increase the number of folks. Some of the stuff that we’re doing at CODE2040 really speaks to that because I saw there was a need. Even some of the stuff that we’re doing at Walker & Company. I see bouts of isolation but nothing to really restrict me from chasing ambition I suppose.

“To this day, people still don’t think this thing is going to work which is crazy to me because it’s just so clear that there’s such a consumer demand for this. That’s fine. They can think what they want to but we’re just going to keep moving towards our true north which is just delighting our customers and making health and beauty simple. That’s it. I don’t need their validation.”

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

I think a lot about looking longer term. I want this to be 150 year old organization right? When I’m long gone, what’s the kind of legacy that I hope to leave? There are two things I think are incredibly important here. Number one (and this is the stuff that motivates me), I look at my son.

I want him to be treated as a first class consumer along with anyone else where his interests and needs are respected. Secondly, I want him to know and feel like he can produce at the highest level without bias.

When I think about my motivational driver, it’s allowing and getting him to live in that world.

“I look at my son. I want him to be treated as a first class consumer along with anyone else where his interests and needs are respected. Secondly, I want him to know and feel like he can produce at the highest level without bias. When I think about my motivational driver, it’s allowing and getting him to live in that world.”

Similar question, do you feel pressure as one of the few celebrated founders of color in Silicon Valley?

Well, I mean I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel any semblance of it. I have a responsibility. I’ve been given this amazing opportunity to give back. Period. I want to make sure that I’m doing right by the folks who have actually given me the opportunity and offering other folks that might be on the come up the same opportunity. Code 2040, Walker & Company, et cetera, I’m dedicating my life to this. I’m doing everything that I can to mitigate any need for that pressure. It’s less pressure and more responsibility. I have a responsibility to not only succeed but also to help others who look like me succeed. That just makes it easier for the next group of folks.

You’ve come up a lot in this project in other interviews.

Oh, very cool. Hopefully good things!

Good things and kind of profound things—like someone literally said “Tristan can’t carry the torch for us forever, you know.”

Nothing will have changed if that’s the case. That’s not something that I want. I say that because there are a lot of people doing amazing things that should be celebrated. Right? I get a ton of interviews all the time and folks reach out to me to talk and I’m like “stop talking to me.” Talk to these folks that really have an interesting story to tell. There are other folks and let’s celebrate them just as we celebrate Tristan because it should be done. There are some other folks who just say that Tristan’s sucking up all the oxygen. I think a lot of people think that I do that purposely. I actually try and … I really, really try to not do any of it anymore. It’s unfair. It really is.

I’m sure you’re frustrated with that, you probably feel like it’s a little lazy.

Exactly.

I get it. I’m really sensitive about it as the founder of this project, of “No, no, no, don’t talk to me. Talk to the people in this project.”

Totally.

“I’ve been given this amazing opportunity to give back. Period. I want to make sure that I’m doing right by the folks who have actually given me the opportunity and offering other folks that might be on the come up the same opportunity. Code 2040, Walker & Company, et cetera, I’m dedicating my life to this. I’m doing everything that I can to mitigate any need for that pressure. It’s less pressure and more responsibility. I have a responsibility to not only succeed but also to help others who look like me succeed. That just makes it easier for the next group of folks.”

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

Look, I don’t think about it. I just think about being the most faithful person I can be. I care about building the most important organization I can and I care about ensuring that my family is taken care of and safe. That’s enough for me to focus on. I can’t really focus too much on the ebbs and flows of macroeconomic stuff. If it’s not for the sake of my own personal business?

My last question for you before I send you off is what advice would you give to folks of similar background who are hoping to get in tech or just getting started.

Yeah, this is the same advice I give to pretty much anybody. I get it from Tyler Perry. What he said kind of fundamentally changed my life. He said “Tristan you realize your potential as an entrepreneur when you understand that the trials you go through and the blessings you receive are the exact same things.” What he meant by that was those trials you go through are just lessons. Lessons and blessings. You have to revel in that. It was the most important thing that I needed to hear because it’s actually made me a little bit more sane as a CEO. It’s given me more perspective. It allows me to focus on the right things right now. That’s something that should not only apply to business but just general life. Right?

That, combined with my own personal faith gives me a strong arsenal in executing my plans.

“Those trials you go through are just lessons. Lessons and blessings. You have to revel in that. It was the most important thing that I needed to hear because it’s actually made me a little bit more sane as a CEO. It’s given me more perspective. It allows me to focus on the right things right now. That’s something that should not only apply to business but just general life.”

I was born and raised in Boston. My parents are immigrants from South America, and I am the first generation American in my family. I grew up in acity called Somerville, a really nice area outside of Boston that’s been getting more attention lately. Mostly, it’s experiencing gentrification, partially led by Harvard, but ia nice diverse city made up of immigrant and working class families.

When my parents left Brasil for the U.S., they left behind interesting lives and successful careers there. A lot of people assume that every immigrant who came to the US was looking for a better life or to chase the “American Dream,” but my parents didn’t have much of a choice. My older brother needed open-heart surgery and the only hospital successfully operating on children was in Boston. So my parents came to the US so he could get the life-saving surgery and care that he needed.

“When my parents left Brasil for the U.S., they left behind interesting lives and successful careers there. A lot of people assume that every immigrant who came to the US was looking for a better life or to chase the “American Dream,” but my parents didn’t have much of a choice. My older brother needed open-heart surgery and the only hospital successfully operating on children was in Boston.”

Not knowing English or knowing anyone here, they realized pretty quickly that it was really hard work. With few options, they started their own house cleaning business. They made flyers that read, “We put your house to shining.” I was too young to really understand but when I found a copy of the flyer when I was about 13 or 14, I thought it was amazing. I showed my mom and we laughed for a moment, but we then talked about how hard it was for her to be a domestic worker.

After my parents divorced and my mother switched careers, I saw her blossom into this really awesome woman. She started her experiences and background to make positive changes around her. She became an advocate for immigrant women, survivors of abuse, domestic workers and became a bit of an organizer.  As a kid, I didn’t fully appreciate what she did. I just assumed, “Oh, this is my mom. This is what all kids do. They go to these rallies, right?”

In your pre-interview that by the time you were 18, you already dealt with depression and experienced homelessness, you survived domestic violence, and you’ve given birth to a child.

A lot happened in my young life and I think when young people share their tough experiences, society’s first instinct is to blame their parents. My parents loved me, cared for me, and worked hard to do a lot for me. The issues I faced were complex and layered and the reality is that they were struggling too.

Sometime in my journey through middle school, I became depressed. I wasn’t sleeping, I was anxious, and I was having a hard time finding myself. My doctor was hesitant to label it “depression” and convinced my mom to take me out of my current environment to see if a change of scenery for an extended period of time would help me. She did. I spent 2 ½ months in Brasil with her and my brother learning more about my culture, visiting family, riding horses, and being away from what felt like a negative and toxic environment. But the trip had to end and I eventually had to come back home.

I think my parents were convinced that my peers were driving me into a downward spiral so they decided at the last minute to enroll me into a private catholic school in the next town over. Horrified, I spent days crying in my room. The new school was supposed to be a new chance for me to be around people who were smart and driven. The problem was that dozens of other parents felt that way too and sent their kids to this school thinking it would resolve all of their core issues. It ended up feeling like a space, a breeding ground, for young people with complex issues who were turning to drugs for relief.

“Since it was a Catholic school, we definitely did not receive information about making healthy choices around relationships, dating and sex. We weren’t provided with information on how to keep ourselves safe or recognize signs of abuse. We, the girls, were just expected to keep our legs closed.”

And since it was a Catholic school, we definitely did not receive information about making healthy choices around relationships, dating and sex. We weren’t provided with information on how to keep ourselves safe or recognize signs of abuse. We, the girls, were just expected to keep our legs closed. And the message at home wasn’t much different. I was the only girl among my siblings and often felt the burden of supporting my mother to help provide for the family. I did a lot of cleaning and cooking and my mom reminded me that as a kid, she was already the head of the house, hand-washing everyone’s laundry, cooking dinner every day and responsible as the head caregiver for her own 4 siblings. Her expectation for me was not to be an adult, but I was expected to be responsible.

“Having a lot of responsibility and never really getting the help I needed to cope with my issues made me a vulnerable target.”

By the age of 14, I was in school full-time, involved in a ton of extracurricular activities, babysitting and working as a hostess in a local restaurant so that I could help pay bills. Every month, I would help my mom sort through the bills and make phone calls to service providers to dispute charges or request help. My mom knew how to do this, but she explained to me that she felt her english was so bad that people would never take her as serious as they would take me. That even though she was a woman in her 40s, her broken english meant a child with no accent would have more respect in the US. And she didn’t get this idea from nowhere, it came from years of people telling her that they couldn’t understand her or that she should leave the country if she can’t learn english properly.

Having a lot of responsibility and never really getting the help I needed to cope with my issues made me a vulnerable target. During a very troubling time in my life, I met  someone a little older than me who maneuvered his way into my life by offering what a young vulnerable girl needed at the time: support. And this isn’t an uncommon tactic. People can sometimes sense when someone is going through something or feeling very vulnerable, but there are certain kinds of people that feel that and use it to prey on them.

“During my junior year of high school, I found out that I was pregnant.”

During my junior year of high school, I found out that I was pregnant. I thought, “Oh my God! This can’t be happening to me. I go to a Catholic school! My parents will hate me.”

To of add a layer to that, I knew that my mother was also a young mom and then my grandmother was a young mom, that my aunt was a young mom, and it continues across several generations. And since they are Latinas, I like to talk about the reality of teen pregnancy in our culture. In our communities, young motherhood isn’t framed as a negative outcome. At the same time, young motherhood isn’t the expectation. But in a culture where women are denied access to quality education and/or prevented from pursuing careers, the next step in life for young women is marriage and/or motherhood. And that was the story for a lot of the women in my family. There was no reason to wait until 30. If you didn’t intend on going to college or establishing a career, what are you supposed to do for over 10 years between your high school graduation and the “ideal” age of motherhood. But what happened, at least this is how I see it, my parents assumed that because I was born in the US, that I would adopt American cultural norms and beliefs.

But I got pregnant at 17 and the first adult I told was my school nurse. In theory, you would think the school nurse would understand, what is essentially, your health condition and provide you with unbiased advice. You assume that as a medical professional, they will help you. Being in a Catholic school made my pregnancy a little more complex. What I heard was, “You already made a mistake so you can’t make another one.” Of course, this was the discussion around my reproductive choice and instead of providing me with all of my options and going through what the best choice was for me might be, I didn’t have a choice. Despite that, I walked away thinking about the reality that I could still get an abortion and no one would know. I could just do it, tell no one, and start all over. But I think my nurse knew that, so she told all of my teachers about my pregnancy. So here I am: pregnant, junior year in a Catholic school and I had nuns and teachers pulling me aside to tell me what decision I should make and shouldn’t make. “Oh, one sin can be forgiven but not two.”  

“But I got pregnant at 17 and the first adult I told was my school nurse. In theory, you would think the school nurse would understand, what is essentially, your health condition and provide you with unbiased advice. You assume that as a medical professional, they will help you. Being in a Catholic school made my pregnancy a little more complex. What I heard was, ‘You already made a mistake so you can’t make another one.'”

I was young and really relied on the acceptance of the people around me. And I really believed that if everybody knew that I was pregnant, then noticed my belly wasn’t growing, that they’d know what I did. I thought they would judge me and I thought I would end up regretting the decision. I was stuck in a position where I couldn’t make the best choice for myself. And maybe the choice would have still been the same in the end, but at that time my judgment was so clouded. So, I decided to continue with my pregnancy.

I told my mom first and she couldn’t believe that her daughter was pregnant. And I don’t blame her. There’s an assumption and a false stereotype about what kind of girls get pregnant. And I didn’t “fit into” that stereotype as a responsible daughter, honor roll student, and class representative. My parents were upset and I can understand why. They worked really hard in a new country and fought so hard to shed themselves from the stereotypes that Latinos face in the United States. Then they discover their teenage daughter is pregnant. It felt like the ultimate stereotype and they didn’t support me. They kicked me out that day and I had to pack my things and move in with my boyfriend.

Oh my gosh.

That period was really hard for me, because I was leaving a home where I felt safe and in with someone who I barely knew. I was isolated from the only support system I ever had.

“My parents were upset and I can understand why. They worked really hard in a new country and fought so hard to shed themselves from the stereotypes that Latinos face in the United States. Then they discover their teenage daughter is pregnant. It felt like the ultimate stereotype and they didn’t support me. They kicked me out that day.”

To make things more complicated, he was a marine getting ready to leave for training. Before my first trimester ended, he was already gone and for the next 6 months, I was completely alone. And since I was no longer living with my parents, I finished my junior year of high school and enrolled as a senior in a new public high school.

In September of 2005, I started my last year of high school as the new pregnant girl. To top off the experience, my new guidance counselor learned of my pregnancy and decided to remove me from my honors classes and put me in slower-paced classes. When I asked her to put me back into honors, she told me that I probably wouldn’t even graduate and that I should just try to get by in the lower classes – as if she was doing me a favor. But my pregnancy wasn’t impacting my ability to function in class, and I wanted to learn and I wanted to feel challenged. I wanted to continue on the path that I was on, and I couldn’t do that if people were making decisions for me without involving me. Luckily someone else in the school knew about the situation and really wanted to be an advocate for me, and so she stood up for me and said, “Put her back in honors. If it gets to the point where it’s not going well then that’s a whole different story, but put her back in honors.” And they did.

The assumption is that our peers are the ones who will pick on teen moms or give us the hardest time, but they were actually the most supportive to me. My classmates were amazing. They brought me snacks, they carried my books, and they let me cut the lunch line. They asked me questions about what my experience was like, they offered to babysit, and they spent time with me so I wouldn’t feel so alone. In school, it was teachers who were judgmental and mean.

“Older women are celebrated, supported, and the people around them will help in any way they can. That doesn’t happen for teenage girls. When we are in pain or afraid, we don’t get help. We’re told our pregnancies are punishments and this is the consequence.”

These small gestures helped so much. I was too proud to ask for any assistance, because I didn’t want to be the stereotype of what a teen mom was. I wanted to prove people wrong because I often heard, “You became a teen mom because you wanted free stuff, you wanted handouts.” That fear of judgment actually put me in worse situations because– when I should have asked for help and when I should have gone to people to tell them what was going on, I didn’t want to, because I was afraid they were going to say, “I told you so.” or “You’re just like all teen moms.” People really don’t know what it’s like for a teenage girl to be pregnant, unless you were one yourself. Older women are celebrated, supported, and the people around them will help in any way they can. That doesn’t happen for teenage girls. When we are in pain or afraid, we don’t get help. We’re told our pregnancies are punishments and this is the consequence.

My daughter’s father returned four days before I went into labor. During my daughter’s delivery, there was a moment when I started panicking. Her birth was recorded so I can still watch the moment when I went from grunting to crying to staring at the ceiling. See, throughout my entire pregnancy people said things like, “This child’s going to ruin your life. You’re life is over. You’re not going to be able to do any of the things you ever wanted to do. This is the worst thing that could happen to you.” So as I was giving birth to her, I started panicking, because I realized I was giving life to the person who would end mine. And how do I love someone who is meant to ruin my life?

Because of that experience and internalized belief, I had a very negative journey through the first few years of motherhood. I was diagnosed with depression and prescribed anti-depressants. To make matters worse, I was in a horrible relationship and was constantly told that teen moms like me are never taken serious and that no one wanted to love a woman with stretch marks and a baby. There was no one cheering me on, no one who believed in me, and I felt entirely alone.

At the same time, I was constantly facing barriers in school. The school was only required to offer me tutoring in 4 of my 7 classes during maternity leave. It was the minimum required to help me simply pass the school year. But I didn’t want to just pass, I wanted to do well in every class and graduate with a good GPA, like I would have before my pregnancy. So my psychology teacher volunteered to come to my house every week and tutored me in all 7 courses. She brought my exams and quizzes and held my daughter so I could take them. She held my textbooks while I breastfed and was always proud of my progress. Returning to school was tough, the other teachers weren’t as fond of me or my “situation.” They would refuse to meet with my after school for help and embarrass me in class. One teacher told me in math class that there was no way I could catch up, so I proved her wrong by acing the class.

“I even had to fight for things like the right to pump breast milk twice a day. The school didn’t want to let me because they thought I was trying to find excuse to get out of class. Right. Because what every 18-year-old girl wants is to like skip her lunch break so she can be sit in the nurse’s office pumping milk and nibbling on crackers.”

But I even had to fight for things like the right to pump breast milk twice a day. The school didn’t want to let me because they thought I was trying to find excuse to get out of class. Right. Because what every 18-year-old girl wants is to like skip her lunch break so she can be sit in the nurse’s office pumping milk and nibbling on crackers. That is so much fun.

I dealt with a lot of people who constantly tried to limit my choices and my future. Then closer to the end of that semester, I went back to my guidance counselor’s office to ask if she could help me look over college applications. Most of my friends had already applied and had already found out where they were going, and I was late but wanted to do make it happen. Her response without even making eye contact with me was, “Well, let’s see if you even graduate high school first.”

God.

I walked away from that and thought, “Oh, she’s probably right. I probably won’t be able to do this, and I should probably take things one step at a time.” So I didn’t apply for college. Now, the good news is I did graduate high school on time and I did walk the stage with my class. I did get to stay in my honors classes throughout the whole year, and I did well in all of them, despite being a teen mom. I think, actually, I did better in school because I was a teen mom and because I had something else motivating me to do even better.  But people outside of me and my daughter’s life didn’t see that.  

So, you graduated, you didn’t go straight to college—what were those next few years like for you?

When I was in high school I really, really wanted to go to med school. I wanted to become a psychiatrist. Having been a young person who coped with depression, I knew what people like me needed and I understood the differences in cultural understanding of depression. For example—parts of my family are really religious and there have been times people said things like, “You’re not depressed, you’re just dealing with something. Pray to God. You’ll be fine.”

“No one in my family filled out a college application. I had no idea of what that process was like, I had no idea of what you were supposed to do, when you were supposed to do it, what was normal, what wasn’t.”

I knew at a young age that this was not right.  I just couldn’t articulate or figure it out, but I wanted to become a psychiatrist so that I could serve and help young people, like me. Now, the idea of going to med school was really overwhelming because again, my parents were immigrants and they weren’t citizens, and they weren’t in the best financial places, and no one in my family had ever gone to college. So I knew that first, they wouldn’t able to co-sign loans for me and I felt overwhelmed at the thought of the expense. And even if I chose another career, I didn’t know how to navigate the process.

No one in my family filled out a college application. I had no idea of what that process was like, I had no idea of what you were supposed to do, when you were supposed to do it, what was normal, what wasn’t. The idea of a young mom with no support becoming a psychiatrist felt way too overwhelming. It felt unattainable. So what I did was, after I graduated, that summer I looked at local state and community colleges that would accept late applications.I might not be able to become a psychiatrist right away but I can start the process  by becoming a nurse. It seemed a little more attainable and promised a guaranteed job.  So I applied for college, started in the fall, finished off my prerequisites, and prepared for a career in nursing.

“I entered college with a new identity. I didn’t tell anyone that I was a mom, including my professors. I just so badly wanted to be treated the same as everyone else.

I entered college with a new identity. I didn’t tell anyone that I was a mom, including my professors. I just so badly wanted to be treated the same as everyone else.  The problem was that I was still facing unresolved issues and an internalized belief that I was not valuable. So I didn’t ever explain anything to my professors and by my second year of school, I dropped out. I didn’t have reliable childcare, I was still coping with depression, and I was working a full-time job and living on my own.  I decided that if I was going to accomplish anything, I needed to take care of myself. That I was going to focus on being a good mom and practice self-care.

Wow. How did you end up in tech?

That’s a great question. It’s quite a little bit of a journey from that point to getting into tech. I don’t have a traditional tech background, as I think a lot of people do out here. After I took this break from school I started focusing on myself. I started to deconstruct and redefine what it meant to be a young woman and single mother in today’s society. I started talking to other young moms—which was life-changing—because it really helps when you don’t feel as isolated.

I started realizing that thousands and thousands and thousands of young women across the country are dealing with the same exact thing. 100,000 teens give birth every year—more than 80% were unplanned—and so many of them drop out of school, or feel pressured to leave or didn’t receive the support that they need to stay. Yet, many some of them share that it’s not actually pregnancy and parenthood that makes their lives hard, as we often hear, but it’s actually the way people treat us. It’s the way that our educators treat us. It’s the way a lot gate-keepers treat us. It’s the ways in which people invalidate who we are as just women and humans in society. The minute we become young parents we’re labeled as irresponsible, and told we’re awful people, and that we should just be isolated and not exposed to the general public because we’d cause an “epidemic.”

So I began looking at ways to counter-message the false reality that young mothers are not productive members of our society by leveraging the power of new tech, like social media. My first time trying out this theory was with the Children’s Hospital in Boston, where I developed a comprehensive strategy for using new tech to eliminate the feeling of isolation among over 500 young parents in Boston. That opportunity led to a hire at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital where I expanded the program to make an impact on reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes in the lives of young mothers of color in Boston. Then I was hired by  the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy where I worked on a $5M dollar grant from the CDC to reduce the teen pregnancy rate in two cities by 10% in five years. In a few months, I helped develop a social marketing campaign for two cities. We reached our 5-year targets before year 3.  

“Initially, I thought, ‘There is no way I want to work in tech. I can’t give into that culture or space because, well, it’s tech.”  I thought, ‘I can’t do that. I can’t be for racial justice and reproductive justice and work in tech. That doesn’t make sense.'”

While all of this was happening, I also started a grassroots campaign called #NoTeenShame to change a terrifying message that organizations like the Candies’ Foundation and multi-millionaire CEOs like Neil Cole share with teenage girls about sexuality and choice and I partnered with six other young moms from different parts of the country for its launch and within a week, it went viral and we were being featured in everything from Ms. Magazine to Business Insider.  It was exciting for people to see seven young moms of color across the country were starting a campaign against this multimillionaire CEO. It went viral to the point where he caught wind of it and wrote a response on The Huffington Post about it. It was not the response we were hoping, but it was a win for us none the less. Once that happened, we started getting contacted by just about every organization in the United States that was working with young people to get our insight on how to do the work better and more effectively. We got really busy really fast and people just started reaching up to us and asking, “Well, how can we replicate the models that you guys have used in your respective organizations to help young people? What should we be doing differently?” The series of all those events led to me developing strategic frameworks for using new technology for social impact and finally presenting at a tech conference here in San Francisco last year.

For a long time I envisioned tech as the enemy—I’m a reproductive justice activist. I’m a racial justice activist.

When I wased in San Francisco, I met someone on the executive team at a startup called Honor (where I work now) who was interested in the work that I did,how I accomplished it and how creative I was in using very little resources to accomplish a massive goal. And so we started talking, and I met other people on the executive team. Initially, I thought, “There is no way I want to work in tech. I can’t give into that culture or space because, well, it’s tech”  And so coming into this space, I thought, “I can’t do that. I can’t be for racial justice and reproductive justice and work in tech. That doesn’t make sense.” I had this assumption that social justice didn’t fit into tech, but I think that’s because I based my opinions on the negative stories I heard on the east coast. But once I met the people that were leading the company, I realized that so much of what I assumed about the people in Silicon Valley were wrong. But also that someone like me can still be in tech and be a valuable asset to the work. And as weird as this sounds, I do think I found that special startup that actually developed a really good frame from the very beginning of how they do work. So, I waited a while and I thought about it, went back to Boston, and decided to pursue the opportunity. I thought to myself, “Oh my god. I was 27 years old. I have a daughter. I’m a single mom, and the only family that I have in the US are just four people who live in Boston. And now I’m accepting the  opportunity to move to San Francisco to work in tech.” And that was hard to wrap my head around.

It was actually my mom who said, “Natasha, you can do this. You’ve overcome way harder things in your life.” When she was 27, she was on her way  to the US for a completely different life. And so she said, “I did it, and I’m not saying that we’re the same. But you can move across the country to pursue this. You can do this.” She also reminded me that I had to think about my daughter who’s really interested in science and has been going to all these science clubs. I now have an opportunity to actually be in this field, to actually be in tech, and provide her with an inside view of what this world is really like. She can watch me go through this process and this journey, and she’s going to see how hard it is. She’s going to see the good and the bad, but she’s going to see it. And she’s going to appreciate it. So, it was a combination of those things that made me decide to say yes to the new field and the big move.

So, what was Silicon Valley like for you when you first got here?

There’s been positives and negatives. One of the things that I actually had to overcome when I came here is how fast everything moves. It’s really fast-paced. Everybody told me it was like this, but it was ten times faster than what I’d prepared myself for. And initially, it was really hard, but I also had a really supportive group of people here where they were willing to help me adjust.

“I love that when I’m having lunch and sitting at a table with people who are amazing engineers, or accomplished healthcare professionals, and talented organizers. And we all sit at a lunch table enjoying each other’s company and discussing the very different experiences we’ve had—and how those diverse experiences shaped such an incredible company.”

The other difficult transition is coming from a space where I talked about racial and reproductive justice 24/7 without filtering myself. Prior to this role, I went to networking events where we introduced ourselves by identifying which pronouns we prefer, the issues we’re working on and how we identify. It’s much different here where I’m often asked to introduce myself by position, educational background and accomplishments. And even when I went to events centered on inclusion, I didn’t feel included. How are so many companies  hosting an event on improving inclusion in the tech sector, hosting in spaces that are difficult to access, and not offering things like child-care?

What has been most exciting of activating for you in your work here?

What’s been most exciting is the people that I get to work with. I love that when I’m having lunch and sitting at a table with people who are amazing engineers, or accomplished healthcare professionals, and talented organizers. And we all sit at a lunch table enjoying each other’s company and discussing the very different experiences we’ve had—and how those diverse experiences shaped such an incredible company.

Despite growing up 5 minutes from Harvard and 10 minutes from MIT, I felt so disconnected from people in tech. They seemed so unreachable and different. And I didn’t always see them as the people I wanted to aspire to become. The Harvard grads were the ones moving into our community, pushing families out of homes, so 5 or 6 students could move in, bumping up rent from $1000 to $3000, a profitable idea for landlords. So I witnessed how the growth and expansion of schools like Harvard led to the immersion of grad students into my community, which meant the immigrant and working class families had to leave.

“Despite growing up 5 minutes from Harvard and 10 minutes from MIT, I felt so disconnected from people in tech. They seemed so unreachable and different. And I didn’t always see them as the people I wanted to aspire to become.”

That played a role in how I perceived tech, even though I was using platforms like Facebook. It didn’t occur to me that someone not too distant from me created this. To the teenage me, it was just something that was created by someone somewhere. It took years before I learned that it was created 5 minutes from my house.

It was cool, but it frustrated me because I felt like there were so many issues impacting young people in Somerville and Cambridge and no one seemed to care. And it was frustrating to see people come from all over the world to study here, learn from the community, then leave forever. Now that I’m on the inside, I see how difficult it is to create tools that are genuinely helpful to people—especially if it’s for people of low-income. And it’s frustrating.  

I’m curious to know how that experience, seeing that tech ecosystem in Boston affects the way that you feel about the state of tech here right now?

Boston’s tech scene is very different than it is on the west coast. It’s thriving, but in a very different way. So although I was involved there, it didn’t help much when dealing with imposter syndrome. I think we often frame and consider imposter syndrome as a one time occurrence that we overcome. But what I learned is that it’s a life-long issue that you’re constantly battling. See, when my Boston friends learned the news of my move to San Francisco to work for an Andreessen-Horowitz backed startup, they were amazed. To them, I was doing what so many wished they could do and I was supposed to feel like “I did it!” And I did, but there’s still the reality that you’re constantly needing to be ahead of everyone else and doing incredibly well. I love the field and where I work, but there’s internal self-created pressure to make sure I’m outdoing myself.

“When everyone around you has very similar background, you can sometimes still feel like an outsider. I didn’t have the typical college experience, I didn’t have those amazing internship opportunities, and I didn’t have parents who could introduce me to really cool people or get me jobs or even read over my essay to see if they were grammatically correct. Growing up, I had to do and figure out all of those things on my own.”

But when everyone around you has very similar background, you can sometimes still feel like an outsider. I didn’t have the typical college experience, I didn’t have those amazing internship opportunities, and I didn’t have parents who could introduce me to really cool people or get me jobs or even read over my essay to see if they were grammatically correct. Growing up, I had to do and figure out all of those things on my own. So part of the culture shock is being lost in the conversations centered around privilege.

The other thing too that I notice out here that never happened to me before is we meet people and they’re constantly extracting from you. “What are your thoughts on this?” and “What are your thoughts on that?” And I’m hesitant to share information because also as a woman of color and having done really great work over the past decade I’ve constantly experienced situations where people with power will take a little bit of information from me and then turn it into something that they get credit for. And so, there’s this constant erasure that happens to young woman of color, so I’m hesitant to engage based on this historical experience. Especially if they’re not being transparent with me.

“I’m hesitant to share information because also as a woman of color and having done really great work over the past decade I’ve constantly experienced situations where people with power will take a little bit of information from me and then turn it into something that they get credit for. And so, there’s this constant erasure that happens to young woman of color, so I’m hesitant to engage based on this historical experience.”

The other piece is that I have internalized stigma as a teen mom and it pops up from time to time. I tend to find myself avoiding conversations that might turn into a discussion about me being a single parent that turns into facing a series of invasive questions. Because it happens. Too often. And it’s not intentional, but their unconscious bias just starts surfacing, and they ask, “Well, how old’s your kid? How old are you? Oh my God, that mean’s you were in like…” You literally see them every time look up, do the math, and they’re like, “Oh my god, you were 17! What was that like? What did your parents say?” And it just turns into this whole dialogue that I don’t want to be a part of. Interested in my story? Go read about it or watch Gilmore Girls. I don’t want my struggles to be the center of discussion, especially in a society where we were made to believe that teen parenthood is a bad thing.

How has everything we’ve talked about, both your experiences in tech so far, and your upbringing, and all of your cumulative experiences, how does that effect what is priority to you here? What is priority in a job, what is priority in what you’re trying to get out of Silicon Valley?

So it’s actually really interesting, because I feel like a lot of people out here are really focused on long-term planning. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s necessary, but I feel like my goals are very different than a lot of people in my position. And that has a lot to do with the reality of how much progress I’ve already made in the past decade. I’ve met and exceeding so many of my own expectations for this period of time and I wanted to spend time acknowledging that and perfecting and improving everything I do now. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to push myself to grow more. I’m focused on ensuring what I do on a daily basis is amazing and meaningful—I’m focused on leaving behind a legacy that my daughter would be proud to share with her grandchildren.

I think a lot about how my mother’s move to the US changed the entire future of our family. So I can’t help but wonder what amazing choices I can make that will continue to do that. If I have the power to shape an incredible future generation, I will do that. And I want to be present today, enjoying my life and my daughter’s life—not waiting for happiness in the form of monetary success.

I’m curious to know how much you’re balancing what you’re working on now and the activism that you’ve been involved with so long, and what it’s like being a part of both of those worlds, especially in the context of San Francisco.

After accepting a position in tech, I thought that I could still be an activist and a writer. But I realized that it was going to take a lot of my mental capacity and energy to adapt to startup culture and do my work really well. Although my personal work is always with me, I knew that I moved across the country for this amazing opportunity and I wanted to dedicate as much a possible to meeting my expectations. Prior to my move to San Francisco, I was presenting at different conferences and organizations across the countries and being asked to do a lot of consultant and advisory work. I had to start declining a lot of those opportunities. And I had to adjust to the realization that nobody in this sector knows me, which is different than Boston.

“Prior to my move to San Francisco, I was presenting at different conferences and organizations across the countries and being asked to do a lot of consultant and advisory work. I had to start declining a lot of those opportunities. And I had to adjust to the realization that nobody in this sector knows me, which is different than Boston.”

Outside of work, my only priority is being a really amazing mom. That can be challenging when you’re working in an environment where working moms aren’t the majority. The ways in which you use and prioritize your time is different and participating in after-hours anything is often a challenge, even though they’re usually necessary and important. Childcare is an obstacle when you’re a single mom in a state where you have no family and feel like you’re already spending too much time away from your kid.

How’s your daughter liking San Francisco?

She loves it but hates the hills. I hate it more than she does honestly but she likes it here a lot. Ha!

She’s really thoughtful and friendly so she made a new best friend within her first week in school. It’s been super easy for her in that way. And like I mentioned earlier, she’s now really interested in Science. Back in Boston, she participated in many different science clubs and programs. It helped expand what her understanding of science was and she became really excited about the opportunity for me to work in tech. And I’m glad she felt good about the choice because I hope she can face an obstacle one day and remember that, “My mom went through this too.” And we have deep conversations about girls in STEM and what it’s like to be a girl in a lot of the science programs. It was interesting to me that she wasn’t interested in the field because of the cool “perks” but because she sees this space as the space where she can do amazing things. Her mission is to promote eco-friendly lifestyles and find a cure for Alzheimer’s. After my grandmother passed from Alzheimer’s, she felt deeply connected and spent a year asking me countless questions. She knows we’ve created tech to do some amazing things and hopes she can do something amazing too. And I’m going to nurture her interest in science until she does exactly what she wants to do.

“I think a lot about tech’s impact on marginalized people, and not just how they use the service but how they actually can be included in the development of new tech.”

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

They’re really happy for me. Actually, I had one friend who she really said, “Natasha I think you did everything you could here. You literally accomplished everything and there wasn’t a better next step than this.” My mom is really proud.

How you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What excites you, what frustrates you, what would you like to see change?

I think a lot about tech’s impact on marginalized people, and not just how they use the service but how they actually can be included in the development of new tech. This is where my previous experience overlaps with what tech is missing—the ability to always center the needs of the people they’re targeting. When we’re talking about young people, I’d love to see them getting the support and resources they need to turn their innovative ideas into reality.

“As a mother in tech, I also faced the reality that so many of the programs meant to nurture girls’ interest in STEM are not easily accessible. The programs are often replicating the very same systems that worked for people already in tech. I’ve found myself feeling like the burden falls on parents to fix the pipeline issue and get girls into STEM.”

As a mother in tech, I also faced the reality that so many of the programs meant to nurture girls’ interest in STEM are not easily accessible. The programs are often replicating the very same systems that worked for people already in tech. I’ve found myself feeling like the burden falls on parents to fix the pipeline issue and get girls into STEM.

One example is my daughter had science club on Saturday mornings, and it was at a college campus, which has its pros and its cons. The pro is that it’s great to send girls to a college to see what that environment is like. The con is that it’s often inaccessible for a lot of parents and families and it requires a lot of commuting. And then the classes are so short that parents, can’t just drop off their kids at the program and then go home or doing something else and then come back. They must sit there waiting. So parents are asked to spend a few hours every weekend getting their kids to this program, waiting for them, and then commuting back home. And that could be a barrier to some. The other barrier, of course, is a lot of these programs are really expensive, so if you’re creating programs that are supposed to improve diversity but they’re really expensive, only the people who make enough money to afford it it will be able to get their children into it. There’s usually a financial aid or scholarship application, but it puts the burden on parents who are now of low income to prove to the program that their children deserve a chance. Now you have moms and dads or grandparents, being asked to fill out applications that ask invasive questions about their finances.

“They’re asking parents who are already dealing with a lot to prove and to open up about these issues with people they don’t even know, so that their kid can have an opportunity that they deserve. What if parents don’t even speak English or what if they’re undocumented and don’t have tax documents proving they are of low income?”

They’re asking parents who are already dealing with a lot to prove and to open up about these issues with people they don’t even know, so that their kid can have an opportunity that they deserve. What if parents don’t even speak English or what if they’re undocumented and don’t have tax documents proving they are of low income?

This is probably related to gender diversity, but you wrote in your pre-interview that you think men should lean out.

Before I joined tech, the concept of “leaning in” surfaced onto my radar. Initially, it felt like this was being proposed as a new idea, something that’s rarely been done before. It frustrated me. I’ve spent most of my life leaning in for survival. And leaning in is simply what marginalized women across the nation have been doing for their basic human rights for decades.

“Before I joined tech, the concept of “leaning in” surfaced onto my radar. Initially, it felt like this was being proposed as a new idea, something that’s rarely been done before. It frustrated me. I’ve spent most of my life leaning in for survival. And leaning in is simply what marginalized women across the nation have been doing for their basic human rights for decades.”

And when I look at the core issue, it’s equity in the workforce. Women aren’t paid fairly, but women didn’t create the unfair ways in which women are compensated. And women of color make significantly less than white women, and face higher rates of discrimination at work. Women leaning in can help change the ways in which women are perceived and treated, but men leaning out create genuine opportunities for women to rise. Leaning out as a man can mean giving up your spot on an all male panel to offer a woman on your team the opportunity, or giving press ops to women, being vocal about the important roles women hold in the company, and of course, paying them a fair and equitable salary. Because the burden of making the workforce fair and equitable shouldn’t be ours to carry.

“Leaning out as a man can mean giving up your spot on an all male panel to offer a woman on your team the opportunity, or giving press ops to women, being vocal about the important roles women hold in the company, and of course, paying them a fair and equitable salary. Because the burden of making the workforce fair and equitable shouldn’t be ours to carry.”

What advice would you have for those of similar backgrounds hoping to get into tech?

We’re all facing different obstacles or adversities, and there are periods in our lives where we may feel like we can’t do what we want. And when we live in a negative environment, you’re not just internally facing challenges, but you’re getting that external negative validation. Whether you are a teen mom or a young person facing any of the many obstacles that make our lives unnecessarily harder than it needs to be, stay focused on your own dreams. Find a mentor or two who are smart and kind, and only trust them for advice and guidance.

And constantly work on yourself and making you the best version you can be. We like to believe that at some point in our lives we reach our full potential, but what if it’s a life long journey where we’re constantly learning and constantly changing and improving? Don’t feel like you have to be the final version of you at this very moment, just be willing to learn. Stay true to who you are and accept that you are a work in progress.

“Don’t feel like you have to be the final version of you at this very moment, just be willing to learn. Stay true to who you are and accept that you are a work in progress.”

I grew up in a multicultural working class community, consisting mostly of immigrant families, right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. It wasn’t the safest or nicest neighborhood, but for my parents it was a step up from the situation back home on the Cape Verde Islands.

“I love it when people tell me I can’t do something and then proving them wrong. I get a kick out of that.”


After the birth of my youngest brother, my mother made two key decisions that would significantly impact our lives and futures. First, she decided to move her family from a troubled neighborhood in Boston to a much safer community. And second; she sent us to a private Catholic school in said community. These events limited our exposure to drugs and gang violence, and got us access to quality education.

My high school was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to supports its innovative model where students would attend regular classes for four days. The fifth day was reserved for a full time job shared amongst five students. We learned valuable, real life skills and could put away the earnings towards our tuition. This is where I was exposed to technology for the first time. I worked with engineers and was quickly captivated by all its potential.

“One of my biggest insecurities is language. English is not my first language, and because of that, I don’t feel like I have the vocabulary to be as persuasive as I’d like to be. Immigrant parents combined with marginalized, low-quality education doesn’t really build a ton self-confidence.
”

Despite the proximity of universities like Harvard, MIT, and Tufts to my home, I never really thought about college until my cousin invited me to spend a weekend with her at Boston College. That experience was transformative for me because suddenly college felt like an obtainable goal. If my cousin could make it, so could I.

My college experience was, like it is for many people who look like me, very challenging. I had to balance lectures and exams with jobs, but that’s how I ended up working for Karmaloop. And at Karmaloop I got exposed to design, art, streetwear brands, marketing – brands like Supreme and Married to the Mob – all of which had strong foundations in graphic design. After I got my degree in neuroscience, I decided to do something for myself. I bought a one way ticket to San Francisco and left everything behind. In San Francisco I found design, technology, art, and myself.

For the first three years I worked as a user research lead for a startup that allowed me to travel all over the world. I got exposed to the long hours and high pressure of tech, but was able to tap deeply into my passion for design.

I worked in tech as interaction designer for a few years now. Those years gave me enough insights into the treatment of women. But one of my biggest issues with the whole diversity conversation is that is it’s often too much conversation. As a designer, I wanted to build and test something that could actually be shipped.

“I fondly remember Ben Horowitz telling me, ‘There’s offense, and there’s defense. And what you’re telling me right now is that you’re taking people of color, who are naturally creative. People of color invented hip-hop, jazz, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll, and you’re putting them in an arena where they’re positioned to win. I think it’s a great idea. Let’s go tell Kanye about it.'”

I quit my job in early 2015 and founded Front & Center. I wanted to expose creative young adults from underrepresented communities to non-engineering roles in tech. I researched and worked with design leaders from Facebook, Google, KPCB, Vice and many others to define a basic set of required skills for product designers that don’t pursue a traditional academic path. That research resulted in a design training program consisting of basic design, communication and presentation skills. Today, I mostly mentor through Front & Center, consult as a designer.



What has your experience been building Front & Center?

I’m very lucky because my partner has been an entrepreneur for years; he helped me out by coaching me on how to avoid typical first time founder mistakes. But even with his help, there is a lot of falling on my face. I saw a problem, but had no solution. So I started building what I thought was right, but while speaking with investors I figured out it’s very hard to find a model for something that usually fits within the non-profit mold. So I had to do a lot of catching up on how to run an actual business, so I wouldn’t look like a fool. And one of my biggest insecurities is language. English is not my first language, and because of that, I don’t feel like I have the vocabulary to be as persuasive as I’d like to be. Immigrant parents combined with marginalized, low-quality education doesn’t really build a ton self-confidence.


“You know when they say, ‘just fake it till you make it,’ right? Well–it’s super hard for me to fake anything because I have no reference points. Getting help from someone that’s gone through similar hurdles is practically impossible because there are very few people who look like me that do what I do. Finding people you can look up to and model your progress after is so important to individual development. Even today I struggle to find role models. There are very few successful black women who made it as designers.”

I’ve been able to expand my network with some amazing people. I fondly remember Ben Horowitz telling me, “There’s offense, and there’s defense. And what you’re telling me right now is that you’re taking people of color, who are naturally creative. People of color invented hip-hop, jazz, blues, and rock ‘n’ roll, and you’re putting them in an arena where they’re positioned to win. I think it’s a great idea. Let’s go tell Kanye about it.” Now these kinds of things happen in Silicon Valley, but all I could think of was “Oh my god, I get to meet Kanye West.” Moments like these don’t come often when you’re a founder. They definitely don’t come when you’re a founder from a marginalized community. But moments like these keep you going, wherever you’re from as a founder.

Tell me more about just the struggles you’ve overall had in your time of tech. What are the roadblocks you’ve had to overcome?

You know when they say, “just fake it till you make it”, right? Well – it’s super hard for me to fake anything because I have no reference points. Getting help from someone that’s gone through similar hurdles is practically impossible because there are very few people who look like me that do what I do. Finding people you can look up to and model your progress after is so important to individual development. Even today I struggle to find role models. There are very few successful black women who made it as designers. So you have to look beyond your appearance, One person that has inspired my way of thinking about the world is Elle Luna. She’s a person that lives her truth, and I’m thankful to have learned that it’s enough to be inspired. Having role models that look like you is great. But when there aren’t any out there, you need to learn to look up to individuals that don’t necessarily look like you.


I can’t stress enough how important role models are. And I want to be that role model for the community that I’m from. When I hear celebrities say, “I’m not a role model, I’m an artist, I can do whatever I want”, I say no: You’re one of the few that made it out. You can show others how to do that. Passing on information is so important to break the cycles of division and separation. I’m in a unique position to set the example for future generations.   


I’ve been thinking a lot about tech-debt in communities of color lately. Access to technology in communities like the one I’m from is incomparable to the access to technology that most people who become successful in Silicon Valley have. Most Black schools have pretty abysmal computer science labs. Students don’t have computers at home, let alone an internet connection. So next to figuring out what stock options mean, a lot of people who are trying to break into technology need to catch up on people who’ve been exposed to tech for much, much longer. I had the privilege to get my first personal computer when I was 14 years old. And I didn’t really know what code was until I was 19. But most of my peers in tech have had access to technology for all their lives, and role models that encouraged them to explore. For people who come from communities like mine, a career in tech is like a pipe dream. There is nobody around you who’s made it in tech, and no parents of family members who can tell you about the career opportunities. Sure, leadership skills come somewhat naturally, but communication can be a challenge when you haven’t been exposed to tech culture like so many of the people around me have.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about tech-debt in communities of color lately. Access to technology in communities like the one I’m from is incomparable to the access to technology that most people who become successful in Silicon Valley have. Most Black schools have pretty abysmal computer science labs. Students don’t have computers at home, let alone an internet connection. So next to figuring out what stock options mean, a lot of people who are trying to break into technology need to catch up on people who’ve been exposed to tech for much, much longer.”

How do you think your background in behavioral science helps you in your work? Both as a product designer and as an entrepreneur.

Having an academic background has mostly triggered a thirst to keep learning. I like watching things and studying their patterns, which is another side to this inclusion discussion that I find remarkable. When people stop learning and stop questioning the way the world works around them, things like bias, discrimination and racism come into play. I’ve been trying to fix that conversation by prototyping solutions that can actually be implemented, and found that in order to work in tech – an academic path is very beneficial but in most cases, not an absolute necessity. Especially in the field of design.

What would you say are your big motivators?

I love it when people tell me I can’t do something and then proving them wrong. I get a kick out of that. I decided to speak out more because I want kids to know how to deal with similar situations. I want them to say, “I want to be like Melanie when I grow up.” I didn’t have anyone I could be like growing up. So I collected all this advice; some of it I can use, some of it I can’t. Bits and pieces of people that have inspired me along the way, and I try to keep improving myself like that.

Okay, let’s just go macro real quick. How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What excites you, what frustrates you, and what would you like to see change?

I’m most excited about  companies that exist to do good and challenge the way we think about the world, so I’m really in love with Honor. I love what they’re doing, I love the problem that they’re solving. It’s really exciting because it’s a human problem and everyone benefits from it. The workforce, the families, even the way they run the company.


The things that frustrate me? There are still too many non-problems being solved. Things that are only accessible by a very controlled, homogenous audience. I’m worried about the accessibility of technology. Many processes continue to optimize and drive down prices, making things more affordable – but there very few processes that focus on making life more enjoyable.

What advice would you have for folks coming from similar backgrounds as yours who are hoping to get into tech?

You need that hustle. A strong will to succeed because you will hear “no” more often than people will tell you “yes.” Shit will get hard. But if it’d be easy, anybody would be doing it. We experience racism and other difficulties every single day. Use that sadness and anger to lift yourself up in the right direction. If people don’t believe you, build whatever you can and try to prove them wrong. With Front & Center I’ve tried to hack a system that I found didn’t make sense. So I decided to make a change. I measure my success by the opportunities I create for other people. I want people to join me in designing a more inclusive future.

“You need that hustle. A strong will to succeed because you will hear “no” more often than people will tell you ‘yes.’ Shit will get hard. But if it’d be easy, anybody would be doing it. We experience racism and other difficulties every single day. Use that sadness and anger to lift yourself up in the right direction. If people don’t believe you, build whatever you can and try to prove them wrong.”

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.

Early years. So I was born in the Dominican Republic. Me, my mom, and my sister—well my mom and my dad were never married at any point, so technically I’m a bastard child if that’s how you would like to call it.

It’s the same in Norway. Most of my family isn’t married in Norway and that’s normal. They all just make babies together.

[chuckles] Then my mom took me and my sister to New York at a very early age, at like five years. This is hard because I hardly ever talk about my mom because we’ve had a very rough history.

My mom was a single mother. She came to a new country, didn’t know the language at all, took on some small jobs here and there as a housekeeper—when I was very young—in New York. I was like five or six. I don’t even remember any of this really. It’s all stories that I’ve been told.

“It was a hard time for me when I was really young. We were poor and we all slept in one bed in New York City.”

During that time, she also got into the system. She applied for and received welfare, and then once I got a little older, I started seeing how my mom started to change. This is a touchy subject because I don’t really talk too much about this because it is kind of a dark period of mine—but my mom kind of got really unmotivated, stopped working, starting taking out a lot of student loans and doing college classes, even though it seemed like she wasn’t really into the profession and was just using it as a means of getting free money and really not spending too much time at home.

It was a hard time for me when I was really young. We were poor and we all slept in one bed in New York City. It was in the Upper East Side, and at that time that area wasn’t the Upper East Side that it is today I guess. It was higher up in the hundreds, so it was almost borderline East Harlem. So I was your typical poor kid in public school system growing up in New York

My dad, who I’ve been in contact with here and there, was actually—he’s a very smart businessman. His business started expanding and getting very big. At one point he came back to me right before I started junior high school, and saw how I was developing and wasn’t very happy. I would say I was a little bit of a rebel. I was staying out all the time. I was kind of like the independent, young New Yorker that most New York kids are really [chuckles]. Super independent, living our own lifestyles, doing whatever we wanted. He wasn’t very happy so he asked me if I wanted to come back with him.

At that time that was a really hard decision. I didn’t want to leave my mom. I knew that she was having trouble and I wanted to help her out, but I couldn’t really. It’s just hard for a young New York kid. I was maybe 14 or 15, I don’t remember exactly how old I was at the time when I moved to the Dominican Republic with my dad and went to junior high school and high school there. It’s funny because I look back at it and it’s probably the best decision I ever made. My dad was doing very well. I was able to live a different lifestyle that I’ve never lived before. It was much better than what I had in New York, surprisingly. It was also like the Dominican Republic In general, is a very family oriented country. A lot of the families stay together and they’re very close, so I got to meet my family, and be very close to them at all times. People that I’m so happy that I’ve gotten much closer with by moving back home. Since it was just me, my mom, and my sister.

So I’m going to take a step back, cause there’s actually a lot of stuff that I left out. [laughter]

Let’s go back. Let’s dig in.

Let’s go back a little. [chuckles] This is going to be a little weird. So when I was in New York, my mom (for a short while) worked for a couple of people that I hold very dearly to my life, and have helped me get to where I am right now. This couple hired my mom to be a housekeeper for them, and then they met me and my sister and took us under their wing. Almost as their own, but we never actually lived with them. But they were mentors to my sister and I when we were very young. The reason I never steered too far to the point of no return, was because of them. They were able to help guide and provide for us, which was something that we didn’t have when we were young so we’ve always held them as really close family members.

When my dad came to ask me to move back to the Dominican Republic is was a hard decision. It was one of those decisions where you’re like, “I’m going to leave this new family I have here, this small family that I just started making my own.” Then there was my mom who was having a lot of problems, so it was a really hard decision. I just took it and just went with it, but then again, I look back and I have no regrets.

In the Dominican Republic, it’s totally different. The lifestyle there is much more laid back. It’s not as hectic, and there isn’t so much childhood pressure that you would get in New York City. There were things that interested me that I could actually focus on.

I was a very creative person from a very young age and I was able to take the time and develop certain skills that I probably couldn’t have developed if I stayed in New York. Really, it was funny that a country like the Dominican Republic, where design isn’t as important, would help nurture me. I don’t know if important is the right word, but it is something that’s not always the forefront of a small country. I think countries like the Dominican Republic and smaller countries are very focused on creating businesses and things like that, and design is not really part of that equation —at least not yet.  

“Really, a lot the stuff that I learned was on my own. I just sat there. I played around with things. I spent a lot of days sitting in my room designing a little bit, (or at least what I thought was designing). I don’t know. If I look back on it, it’s probably crap now [chuckles], but it’s still good stuff.”

At that time, I saw an opportunity to help out with small marketing projects. I made some promotional flyers for nightclubs and stuff like that because they were like marketers basically and marketers needed creativity. Without creativity they can’t do their marketing. That’s where I got my start. I was 15, 16 years old and finally getting my hands on a computer with Photoshop and learning things like CorelDRAW, Photoshop Illustrator, Swift, Flash and all kinds of programs. Once I got my hands on those tools I started to expand from paper and just started playing around with new things.

In between that, the distractions were really around and I thought to myself should I be doing this? I think my dad did the right thing by never really talking to me about what direction I should go in because if that were the case, I probably wouldn’t have stuck with design. I think it was just a part of everyone’s mind that design just doesn’t equal success or an opportunity to be successful, but I was able to continue with that. Really, a lot the stuff that I learned was on my own. I just sat there. I played around with things. I spent a lot of days sitting in my room designing a little bit, (or at least what I thought was designing). I don’t know. If I look back on it, it’s probably crap now [chuckles], but it’s still good stuff.

Honestly, I think what really boosted me was in part what my dad did for me. He asked me to create branding for a new company that he was starting as a pharmacy chain—expanding the pharmacies that he already had—and I was able to create the branding for them. That’s where I saw the opportunity of getting into a professional field of design. So once I did that branding—I Googled what branding was and I was studying stuff like IBM and all these guys, just looking at what they were doing with the bold colors and textures and stuff like that. If you look at that pharmacy logo it’s very much inspired by that era [chuckles]. From there, it actually went off really well. I was able to learn a few things, how to work with print shops to get the logo right and do small things like that. That opportunity was huge for me. I think that really changed my direction of where I wanted to be headed.

“Anything I was able to get my hands on, I learned it by myself, and probably in the best way possible by grinding through it and doing extra class projects that weren’t mandatory.”

At the same time, the internet was really intriguing for me. It was really slow, [chuckles] it was painful in the Dominican Republic. We didn’t really have good internet there for a very long time until recently. I was super interested in web design, but I knew that my interest in particular was graphic design. That’s kind of what it was classified as. Just graphic design. At that time a lot of the schools that I was looking into when I was younger—during high school and after high school—they were all just advertising graphic design. I didn’t really know there was a web space or a product space. I think my abilities to see something and kind of shift to it what I thought was important—something that I knew was going to be big or huge at the time—is what also helped me a little bit. Taking matters into my own hands and learning things that I want to learn and doing things that I want to do, as stubborn as that sounds, is something that just helped. I never really spoke to my parents about my professional career, what I wanted my professional career to be, and that’s also helped, and they just let me do it. I went to school and did whatever I could do to get by.

I’m curious, I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina, and I don’t even think I heard the word “creative” until I was maybe sixteen. Where did you first get bit with the creative bug? Where were you when you were introduced to design as a concept?

It was in Manhattan actually. When I was really young, I took art classes in public school in P.S. 75 in New York. At that time, all my teachers really loved that I was super creative. They would push for me to continue being that way, and I remember right before I graduated junior high school, one of my teachers was pushing me to try and go to La Guardia high school, which is a design art school in New York city. So, I kind of had the knowledge that, “Hey, there is a design art field out there.” And really it just stuck with me. This is what I want to do, I’m really happy, and people enjoy my work. So at a very early age, I think living in New York just opened me up to that idea. And then after moving back there for college, I got to concentrate and just focus on it because there were very little distractions for me.

So walk me through the path from designing logos in your hometown to being in the middle of Silicon Valley.

So that was a little interesting. There’s going to be a little bashing in here. So when I was looking for colleges in New York—since I was technically a citizen at that time—I was able to look at U.S. colleges and I told my dad that I wanted to go to college and I’ll pay for it if I have to do it. But I want to do it in the U.S. because it’s design, right? In the Dominican Republic none of the universities taught design or had a big design field. There was one that partnered with Parsons but then still, I’d have to go to Parsons to be able to do a Dominican Republic kind of thing? So I decided to just bite the bullet and go. One school that accepted me and gave me somewhat of a scholarship was New York Institute of Technology. They’re a technology school in New York and had a graphic design program. And I was like, I’ll give it a shot and see how it goes.

“It was 2008, there was the peak of the recession. And it was so hard to find work, I think I probably interviewed like 20, 30 times with a range of people.”

Once I started there, it was kind of immediate to me that they didn’t seem to really specialize in the graphic design field—it was very much a traditional design kind of curriculum. But at the same time, I was starting to get into web design, and just the web in general. So there’s a few things that I did in college that leaned towards web design. I was already really proficient with different programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Design. Anything I was able to get my hands on, I learned it by myself, and probably in the best way possible by grinding through it and doing extra class projects that weren’t mandatory. I’d even say that I was way ahead of the school curriculum, because they were trying to teach us those tools that I already excelled in. So during that time, I guess I just decided to learn HTML/CSS for one, which is probably the best thing I did in college—opening up code books and starting to learn it. In fact, that helped land me my first job and I’ll get to that later. Learning HTML/CSS during school was challenging because it’s not a school that was—it was very traditional, we were just drawing type on paper and learning lettering, whatever traditional graphic designers learn. But I love tech. I love anything that has to do with tech. I was into computers a lot so I got enough to afford a nice system that I just started to work on. And then I began to learn how to code, little by little, starting by building basic webpages and learning a little bit of Flash—something that I’m actually really happy that I dropped after a while because eventually it didn’t end up being that big, luckily. At that time people were like, “Flash this, Flash that, do Flash!” And I’m like, “ehh, no, no. I’ll learn how to build a webpage first and see how that goes.” And luckily I did that because soon after, Flash just died down really quickly.

Yep.

So I went through four years of college, four years of drawing and design and all that. It’s stuff that I enjoy doing, but I knew that in order for me to do what I like to do, which is like building things, and just being a part of a team, and doing stuff like that, web was like the place to be. I did some freelancing graphic design, and I wasn’t too happy with it. I freelanced for Scholastic Books for a while, and at that point, I just felt like it wasn’t challenging enough. It was a lot of small effortless jobs, doing a lot of designs that had already been done. There was not much room there to innovate and really excite me. But, when I looked at the web, it was the opposite. There was a lot there that wasn’t boring and I feel like at that time, I was reading articles about places like Facebook, and Google for instance, that were really interesting into how they built things, and how things were so new and fresh and exciting. So, once I graduated, I started looking at web agencies, like Huge Inc., and places—and small startups here and there, in Comcast. You know, things that were a little bit more in a digital range, to see if I could get my foot in the door and started learning more. Luckily, one of the startups, which was Livestream, allowed me to come in at the time. Mind you, at this time, it was really, really difficult to find work. It was 2008, there was the peak of the recession, [laughter] whatever the recession was. And it was so hard to find work, I think I probably interviewed like 20, 30 times with a range of people. When I interviewed at Livestream, they were just looking for a junior web designer, and one of the requirements was to hopefully know how to code. I actually had some prior knowledge of coding but I wasn’t great. And then I was like, “Yeah, I’ll take it.” It’s my first job and the only one that really gave me a concrete offer and I was just like, “I’ll do it.” [laughter] And that was my door into product design, and then that was my path. It was awesome at that point.

Were you still in New York at this point, or in Silicon Valley?

No, no, no, this is in New York. So, I went back to New York for college and I stayed there. Livestream is still located in New York and hired me after I graduated from college. Like, three or four months after college. Three or four months of excruciating job searching [laughter]. Yeah. It was also kind of difficult because my degree was for graphic design, so to prove that I can do web I had to build my own portfolio online. This isn’t something I would recommend anyone doing anymore because this is a new age, but I did some redesigns of websites that I thought needed the redesign and small things like that, but nowadays it’s not a great thing to do [laughter] so I would never recommend it. But at the time, anything was good to show and it was still kind of early, so why not.

What were those first years of work like for you?

Hard. I think I learned more in one year at Livestream than four years in college. It was extremely difficult. I had to really build my coding skills a lot, to the point where I was like a beginner and now I’m more than like—I’m pretty good [laughter]. And it was because of the fast paced work at Livestream. We had clients that required strict deadlines at the time, and I was doing a lot of custom development for some clients, so I had to build these Facebook apps. At that time, Facebook had page apps so I was doing a lot of that stuff, so designing them and then building them, and sometimes I had to build three or four apps a day.

Wow.

It got insane, yeah. It was really a lot of work. And then throughout that time I got to learn a lot about iconography and building UI and all that stuff. I was able to design one of their first iPhone apps and one of their first iPad apps at the time. That was all extremely exciting for me because the iPhone and similar gadgets were on the rise. I’d say I’d learned so much during that time. I was at LiveStream for four years, and those years were all difficult.

That’s a whole lifetime in startup years.

Yeah, I guess I got a little, I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know. It was interesting. It was a lot of exciting work. I was learning a lot, so it kept me very busy and entertained. I guess I didn’t see myself needing to go anywhere.

I started at a very, very low salary. This is like a common story for a lot of people I bet. Especially women and minorities in general. Towards the tail end I started noticing a few patterns—I had to go through tough salary negotiations where I could get a livable wage. Even then I didn’t really feel like they wanted to take care of me, so eventually I just left.

“I’m happiest when I’m given the biggest challenges. It’s just like, ‘Look. We have something that we don’t know how to do. Can you help us out?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, let’s build a house [laughter]. Why not?’ I’m that person. You give me some crazy task and I’ll probably give it a try and see where I get to. It may not be perfect. I’ll probably warn you and be like, ‘Look. If it fucks up, I’m sorry [laughter].’ But I’ll give it a try. I’m not really scared of challenges and that’s helped my career out a lot I think.'”

It was really difficult at that time. A company came up to me—well actually a recruiter came up to me with an opportunity to kind of lead design at a small company, and I took it. This was just another step of a lot of learning. The company was called NewsCred. They’re still around and also in New York. I interviewed with them, and met their CEO and immediately we clicked. I was able to help lead their product design for their company. It was new to me, because I’d never led a team. Not anywhere remotely to that so again I had to quickly learn how to build a product from scratch, basically on my own from a design perspective, to actually being the UI engineer as well because we were really short staffed. So there was nobody to do the front end work.

So in like a year we built a product, a huge product for marketers that was like huge for them. And it was a huge win for me career wise, and that’s where I got, I guess that’s where, I still don’t know how Facebook found me, but that’s eventually how I came to Facebook a year later [chuckles]. Yeah, so it’s kind of a long road. There’s a lot of things in between.

I can relate. When I worked in start ups of like you’re just taxed with doing things you’ve never done before and you do whatever it takes to learn to learn them and do them. I’m just curious—when you encountered that atmosphere on day one of your first job, did you automatically feel like, ”Okay yeah, cool. I’m going to learn that shit and I’m just going to do it,” or were you just terrified? Did you have to go through any sort of personal process to convince yourself that you could do this stuff or did you just resolve to go do it?

No. I can do it, I’ve got to go learn it. I think that’s me. I think the last one’s me.

I’m happiest when I’m given the biggest challenges. It’s just like, “Look. We have something that we don’t know how to do. Can you help us out?” And I’m like, “Yeah, let’s build a house [laughter]. Why not?” I’m that person. You give me some crazy task and I’ll probably give it a try and see where I get to. It may not be perfect. I’ll probably warn you and be like, “Look. If it fucks up, I’m sorry [laughter].” But I’ll give it a try. I’m not really scared of challenges and that’s helped my career out a lot I think.

I think being a little brave and a little naive has helped a lot. Even with NewsCred, they knew that I never led a team before, but then they gave me a big task and knew that I could run with it and build something. In the few months that I started there, they had an idea of what they wanted. I was able to provide some kind of vision and just keep going with that and that kind of momentum it sticks to you early on in the production process. Once you’re able to at least come up with a defined vision and idea, it’s just like, “Yeah, that’ll stick. Let’s try and execute.”

“I think if you get scared about doing any minimal task, then it’s going to be harder for you down the road, because problems usually just get bigger.”

I feel like I’m the perfect person to be on product because it’s like I have enough experience now and enough know-how—I’ve made so many mistakes throughout the years—just kind of a better idea of where things should head in general. I was able to use that knowledge that I’ve built up from Livestream, all the mistakes that I’ve made and just like—let’s start over, let’s try something new and see how that process works. Maybe I’ve just been really lucky.

Anyway, it’s—yeah, I think that’s what works for me. I think it’s just—the bigger the challenge, the more excited I am and that’s a good thing for product designers.  I think if you get scared about doing any minimal task, then it’s going to be harder for you down the road, because problems usually just get bigger.

Totally. What is the most exciting thing to you about working in Silicon Valley right now, like building tools that are used by a billion people around the world? What do you love about your work?

I build tools for advertisers, so I’m on the advertising side of Facebook. And these are tools specialized for agency advertisers. This field excites me a ton. I think what we call business design is something that’s usually overlooked by a lot of designers. I think a lot of designers, like the more higher-visibility work and the nicer mobile apps and stuff like that. But I get more interested in complex challenges and complex problems. And being in business design at Facebook actually makes me super happy, because it’s a field that’s still kind of relatively new again, and this is something that I learned at NewsCred as well. NewsCred was also kind of like a B-to-B, it wasn’t like a B-to-C. And doing that I actually learned that, “Hey, this is actually a pretty cool field.” You can do some great things. What we’re trying to do at Facebook is humanize our products, and make those products easier for everyday use for advertisers. It’s a great challenge. Working for Facebook, at this scale—even at the scale of advertisers that we’re working for—is pretty insane. There’s a lot of pressure, but at the same time there is a lot of, how do you say that—gratitude?—for the work I’m doing. Is that right? I don’t know if that’s the right word.

Value.

Yeah, it’s super fulfilling. Honestly, Facebook is an awesome place to work at, just in general. I feel super grateful working here. It’s kind of like you’ve made it, in a way, especially for somebody like me that’s just been all over the place—just jumping left and right, crawling my way up. Then you’ve reached the top, and you’re just like, “Woah. This is a different world here. It works differently.” I’ve been extremely lucky. Just the path that I’ve taken and coming here to Silicon Valley—it’s great. I’m working with like-minded individuals—super smart individuals—and get to work with great designers that I look up to everyday—people that inspire me everyday. We just build off of this huge momentum and keep working on these great products all the time.

I love how the work that you’re doing ties back to the original work that interested you in the first place—designing for businesses as a kid.

Yeah, it’s great. I’m at a perfect place now. I’m an illustrator as well, so at times I miss doing consumer work in a way. I do miss that side of it a little bit but at the same time I’m super happy where I’m at. I come to work smiling every day. I’m one of the happiest people that comes in. Just knowing where I’m at now and just working with the people I work with, I’m super happy where I’m at.

“I feel super grateful working here. It’s kind of like you’ve made it, in a way, especially for somebody like me that’s just been all over the place—just jumping left and right, crawling my way up. Then you’ve reached the top, and you’re just like, ‘Woah. This is a different world here. It works differently.'”

What were your first impressions of Silicon Valley when you got here?

I was scared. I had no idea what to expect. One, I was one of those kids that just like loves small companies; loves small families. I used to bring the culture as much as possible to every small company. I’m the one that organized the karaoke events; the beer Fridays. I loved having that culture and building those things and working with people that just like to have fun while they’re working. So I was actually really scared. I read a lot of articles at the time that were like, “Oh, big company culture. Cubicles,” this and that. And then I was reading a lot about Facebook who tried to break down those barriers a little bit.

So that interested me a little bit. I was like, “OK, this is open, weird culture.” Still, what’s the top-down level? I’ve always had to deal with some kind of hierarchy that made my work a lot harder and at times—I was still scared. There’s so many people, and so many hurdles. Will I still have the control that I enjoy in my work, and would I still be able to influence and provide any kind of impact to the work that I’m doing? How many people am I working with? Am I just going to be editing buttons, and text inputs, and stuff for weeks? That would put me to sleep.

I came and interviewed, and even after the interview I was a little skeptical. I knew that the place was awesome. I was like, “Wow. This place is cool. This is like Disneyland for adults. It’s crazy.” Then I thought “How many other opportunities will there be for me to work at Facebook?” Why not give it a try? It was a company that I’ve always looked up to, and the design, and product work that they’ve been doing. Their mission is something that I have always—who can’t agree with their mission? It’s amazing, right? So I ended up biting the bullet and doing it. I don’t think it was a bad decision at all. I think it was actually a great decision. It’s worked out really well so far.

Awesome. What do you think are your biggest motivators or influences?

The more I talk to designers here, I always feel like they have specific examples of what these things are. I am going to be one of the few people that will tell you that it’s hard to say what it is. The challenge of the problems motivate me more than just specific people or influencers. I don’t have any influencers that are really big. I’ve always tried not to get too influenced by people, because then I feel like my work will depict that exact thing. It can be very easy to fall into that, but it is a good question, and I’ve never really thought of it that way. The people that influence me all the time are my coworkers. My immediate coworkers. The people who along with myself, solve these problems together. Also, just the problems, themselves, and who we’re solving these problems for.

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

The way my life has been, it’s kind of been all over the place. It shows that I’m not afraid to try new things. And that is exactly how it impacts my work. I’ve always been able to try and challenge my limits and try something new and push outside of my comfort zone, right? And that’s really defined a lot of my work. I’ve been able to do a lot of things with that like at Newscred and be able to build a new product that looked nothing like anything out there for the field because I can keep pushing and looking away from competition and trying that. I think that’s how my life has really benefitted my work, it’s just like don’t be afraid. Try it, do it and see what happens.

Yeah, for sure.

Even with Facebook I’ve been able to do that. Which sounds weird but, yeah, I can.

How do your family and friends from home feel about how far you’ve come and all the work that you’ve done?

You know, they don’t say much. [laughter] I think though, honestly—I know they’re very proud of me. My dad is super successful. My whole family is a huge success I think, and I’m really proud of them and they’re excellent people—amazing people. And having their support all the time has been—it keeps me going, makes me super happy. And my wife now too, she’s super supportive, she’s one of the best people—the best person I can be with right now and makes me super happy. We’ve been together for like eight years so she’s been through a lot of this stuff that I’ve been going through. And I guess back home, my family, they’re just very super happy, like always positive people. That’s kind of how I am and when I go home I’m just part of the family, I’m not any different really. And I love it that way, that’s how I want it to be.

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

Oh shit, that’s a good question.  You know, to be honest with you, I’ve always had a dream of finally owning what I’m building at one point. I’ve built so many great things for so many different companies and people and users, and I still want to build for users and people all the time. But I do want to eventually maybe do my own thing, like have my own creative business or boutique or whatever. And I’m really still kind of open to that idea, I’m hoping it just lands on my lap somehow, which it probably won’t, so I don’t know. We’ll see.

Well, I mean the cool thing about your work experience—having just done so much different stuff—you’re the kind of person who’s perfectly equipped to start your own thing later, you know?

Thank you for that. That’s a nice thing, I’ve never heard somebody say that.

Having done it myself, I’m so glad I worked in tech doing a million different things. And now I’m a photographer, but all of that stuff I did before is such a huge reason I’m successful. It’s so good to learn all those random things. It doesn’t make sense immediately, but it does later.

How’s that been for you? This is kind of like your own thing, right? I mean it’s super impressive.

Just a side project—that’s gotten really big.

I love your work by the way.

Thanks. Yeah, I mean it’s the best decision I ever made. You know, I still get to tangentially pop in and out of tech, and be involved however I want, but I work for myself, and I have complete control over who I work with, and I make way more money, and everything is better.

Yeah, that’s so cool. Yeah, it’s one of things like, you know, people have never had their doors open for them. It’s like I feel like I can do it, right, I’ll just work through it and find something great and do whatever I can. That’s a nice thing to have I think. I feel like my career, even though it’s been like painful a lot of times, is like, “Hey, I got here mainly on my own, just as much as possible, just working hard, and doing what I love.” So the creative field’s great. I love the field, it’s awesome. [chuckles]

Okay, last question, this is important. What advice would you give to folks from similar backgrounds to you, who want to get into tech?

Yeah, it’s an easy and hard question, because I feel like the advice I would give them would be very similar to what I did, right? But at the same time, I feel like the field itself has transformed to a lot of the young designers have learned things that at one point, I was the one learning it on my own, and these guys are learning it from school or on their own as well. I feel like the hacker mentality of building things and doing things that are unknown, is so much more natural these days than it was eight or nine years ago. It’s interesting because my advice to them—to the young adults coming out of college [chuckles] with a lot of knowledge in the tech industry and products and being surrounded by products is just take it all in and try and build things at all times. Build the smallest things to the biggest things. Just try and build stuff really. We’re all builders and even if it’s just a coffee table or any small thing, it’s important. It’s something that you’ll learn from. I would even say start small. If you want to start big, go ahead [chuckles]. There’s no real wrong path as long as you’re building and working. It’s funny because like five years ago, I would’ve been able to give you a better answer, but now days, I’m like, “These guys are doing pretty good.” I’ve seen a lot of these young university students graduating, and I’m super impressed by their work.

What about any thoughts for the Dominican Republic, your homeland?

For the Dominican Republic, I want them to take design more seriously because a lot of it is still thought to be extremely superficial, but design can do a lot of things to better a country in general—there’s a lot of possibility there. It’s not just graphic design anymore. In order to do that there needs to be work done around access to the internet. I know the internet is still extremely expensive and inaccessible for most of the country, but there’s so many things that you can do online right now that can help grow and nurture existing and new businesses while opening doors for engineering and design.

I hope it gets to the point where we can just have a lot of people like me just move there and work. One day, hopefully that’s the case.

“Just take it all in and try and build things at all times. Build the smallest things to the biggest things. Just try and build stuff really. We’re all builders and even if it’s just a coffee table or any small thing, it’s important. It’s something that you’ll learn from. I would even say start small. If you want to start big, go ahead [chuckles]. There’s no real wrong path as long as you’re building and working.”

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 was born in Richmond, Virginia, nowhere near Silicon Valley or any really tech hub. DC is rising but it’s nowhere near like SF, New York, and LA. I grew up with that cliche story of growing up in a lower income area, growing up in the projects, not growing up with a lot, having a single mother. I try not to harp on that too much because I know there’s so many others that have dealt with that same background and those same problems. But growing up was actually pretty normal to me because when you grow up and struggle that’s all you know. When you don’t see other people who have a lot, you just think living the way you do is normal. You think gunshots are normal. You think drug dealing is normal. You think not having enough to eat is normal. So I never grew up thinking that I had it rough or I had it hard. I knew it sucked at times but I never really felt like we were poor. It wasn’t until I got my first job at 14 and I realized that, “Man, there’s people out here that are doing a lot better than I am.”

Growing up it just felt  really normal. And like I said, when I first got that first job it was at this museum and I started to see white people for the first time. Just imagine like seeing white people on TV and seeing these people but never really integrating with them or interacting with them. Because I came from a side of town that was mostly black and Latino. So I started to see those things, and I saw nice cars; I saw families seeming so carefree and just frivolous about their spending, and I started to realize that there was a whole ‘nother world out there. And then that’s when I really started to get into the internet and really started to research, and I saw that the was a whole ‘nother world outside of what I grew up in.

“Growing up was actually pretty normal to me because when you grow up and struggle that’s all you know. When you don’t see other people who have a lot, you just think living the way you do is normal. You think gunshots are normal. You think drug dealing is normal. You think not having enough to eat is normal. So I never grew up thinking that I had it rough or I had it hard. I knew it sucked at times but I never really felt like we were poor. It wasn’t until I got my first job at 14 and I realized that, ‘Man, there’s people out here that are doing a lot better than I am.'”

And that’s really what made me start to love technology—the ability to connect with people outside of me few block radius and from what I knew. From there it was just working and supporting my mom. You know, my mom didn’t go to college. No one in my family went to college. She worked as a custodian for the Federal Reserve Bank and she didn’t make a lot of money. I was paying a lot of the bills. Like I said, I started working at 14 years old and, yeah, it was definitely a struggle.

Throughout my highschool years, we maintained but there was certain that happened within my family with financial struggles that led to me being homeless. I don’t like to talk too much about my family because I just feel like that’s their business and this is family business and so I kind of like put the focus on me being homeless. I don’t like talking about their situation because I just don’t feel like its right to put out their situation. There was a series of events that led to me being homeless for a year.

“My mom didn’t go to college. No one in my family went to college. She worked as a custodian for the Federal Reserve Bank and she didn’t make a lot of money. I was paying a lot of the bills. I started working at 14 years old and, yeah, it was definitely a struggle.”

It was my senior year of high school and it was really, really a tough time for me. I lived out of my car that didn’t work so I couldn’t even turn the heat on or anything like that it was just parked, and yeah, it was tough. I tried to make it to school—my goal was three days a week. Some days I would have to go to school without showering for a few days.

It was just tough for me because I was always such a social guy and I felt afraid to interact with people because I felt like I smelled or I was wearing the same clothes or things like that. I would do a bunch of different odd jobs like cleaning people’s windshields at gas stations and just hanging around until the owner of the gas station would chase me out or shoveling people’s snow, or raking their lawns, or doing whatever I could to make money and afford a motel for myself and things like that. It was a really, really difficult time in my life, probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

“There was a series of events that led to me being homeless for a year. It was my senior year of high school and it was really, really a tough time for me. I lived out of my car that didn’t work so I couldn’t even turn the heat on or anything like that it was just parked, and yeah, it was tough. I tried to make it to school—my goal was three days a week. Some days I would have to go to school without showering for a few days.”

I know breaking through tech is tough, especially for people that look like myself, but finishing school and still making something of myself after that year was probably the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to do. I still was able to graduate high school and make my mom proud. That’s probably my biggest accomplishment.

I was fortunate that my girlfriend at the time, her dad didn’t know I was homeless, but he knew I was in a bad situation. He paid for one college application for me. That college application was to Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech really appealed to me because I was so enamored with tech, technology, computers. I really thought I wanted to be a computer engineer. I ended up going to Virginia Tech, but I didn’t know anything about financial aid or anything like that. So I applied to financial aid late, and I didn’t get enough money to cover my first semester, so I needed to get a job. My first job happened to be a marketing role at United Way. I was able to blend my love for technology with marketing. I was like, “Why does our website look the way that it does? We need to optimize this. Why are we using Facebook to promote our events? Why are we using social media? Why are we collecting e-mails and have a newsletter? Why aren’t we working on our search rankings and things like that. It was just my introduction to technology, and I didn’t know at the time what I was doing. I didn’t know about digital marketing and growth marketing and things like that. It just was like an uncanny ability for me to understand both sides and the tactics to help grow a company. That kind of led to where I am now. A year after that I started my first company at 19 years old, which I actually sold years later. That’s the beginning.

“I used to go to the public library, I didn’t have internet, and things like that, or reliable internet at home. I used to collect the free monthly trial AOL discs just to access the internet.”

How did you first get exposed to tech?

At the local library! At my job we had a computer. I would sneak on a computer and look, and research things, and I saw all the cool things happening. I remember just watching Facebook, and I was so mad because I wasn’t in college and I didn’t have a college e-mail address, and I couldn’t access Facebook.

There’s this cool thing just happening in front of my eyes. Reading all these articles on the web and what was going on, and none of my friends were talking about this, it seemed like a completely different world. I was like a kid in his own imaginary world, it was just great to do that. I didn’t really have any friends or anybody else that was really interested in it because you’ve got to understand when we started becoming teenagers, my friends started becoming drug dealers. My friends were caught up in other things that were street related. They weren’t really worried about tech or anything like that, so it was two different worlds. I used to go to the public library, I didn’t have internet, and things like that, or reliable internet at home. I used to collect the free monthly trial AOL discs just to access the internet.

I just found different ways to play with tech even though I didn’t have the money for it. Though marketing was never anything that I thought I wanted to do. It’s interesting because when I was a kid, I used to sell, which is part of marketing smart drugs by the way. I used to buy like candy and bubble gum and indifferent things, and then I would resell it at a premium price at school. That’s when I really started understanding supply and demand before I even took any business classes. Because I could buy a pack of bubble gum at 50 cents and then sell each piece for 50 cents. I had a love for that entrepreneurial spirit and marketing and selling.  And, when I came over to United Way, there were a lot of things that really made sense to just blend the things I learned about technology and the web.

Tell me about starting a company at 19. How did 19-year-old you have zero risk aversion and just feel like, “I can do this?”

You know what’s so funny? When I started this company, I didn’t tell a lot of my friends. It was one of those things I wanted to try and do on my own. It was all bootstrapped. I was using a little bit of money that I was making from United Way. They started me off at $7 dollars an hour or something like that. I ended up at $9 when I became full-time. Putting a little money away there and was doing a little consulting on the side.

I imagined working as a marketing consultant, doing things that I probably would do now and charge so much money for, for like $12 bucks an hour or $15. I thought I was making bank at the time and I didn’t realize how much they were getting over on me. Back then, you could probably get a whole marketing strategy from me for like $75 bucks. And I thought I got over on you!

Anyway, at 19 I liked to party. In a lot of places there’s a very strong bar culture of 21+ people. I was like, well what about us 18 to 20 year olds? There’s tons of us and we don’t really have anywhere to go. So I created a platform. I created a strategy where I would take these events and I would go to different warehouses, or clubhouses, or restaurants, or wherever, and throw parties and live events there where you didn’t have to be 21. You didn’t have to drink there and people 21+ joined too. They thought  “Oh, these parties are happening, these live events are cool.”

Then I match that with my love for technology and digital where I really implemented Facebook as a strong growth driver for my events. I was lucky back then. Facebook events started coming out, it was like a strong driver for growth of getting people involved in the events, and then also setting up my own digital platform for the company where people knew that you could keep updated with all our different events and things like that.

One of the biggest drivers of growth was photography. You have to remember, this is back in 2007, 2008, when people didn’t have these fancy iPhones, with these great cameras. When people came out to our parties, you could get a really nice picture done, and you knew that one or two days later, you’d be able to see those pictures on our platform. Also on Facebook as well and different Facebook groups. We were able to blend tech, the digital space with photography, with live events that kind of make a really, really cool company.

It was really successful for a while and it died down a little bit when I started getting more into my academics. Then I started up again and it was doing moderately well, but then I actually had someone who was in the live events business that wanted to kind of adopt my model. By this time, Instagram had came out and all that stuff, so our photography hook wasn’t as strong. So they bought my company. It wasn’t like a huge amount or anything, but it was the most money I’ve ever seen in my life, and it was a huge, a huge, huge accomplishment for me. Life changing.

So then you ended up being a marketing executive in your early 20s.

I did. So I sold my company and also I was working for Neil Strauss, famous author and entrepreneur, radio host. He had really popular books like The Game and Emergency and things like that. The Game is probably his most famous book. He used to write for Rolling Stone. He has his own masterminding group. He also has his own radio show on Sirius XM, so I was doing digital initiatives and digital marketing for him.

Sean Ellis reached out to me, which most people in the tech industry know as the most famous marketer. He’s known for coining the term growth hacking, by growing companies like Dropbox, Eventbrite, LogMeIn, Uproar – numerous IPOs, numerous billion dollar companies, and he gave the keys to marketing for his company to a 23-year-old kid, and it was really, really exciting.

We worked on Qualaroo together and got to the point of being profitable. We all know working in start ups, especially SaaS businesses, reaching profitability is hard. To help with marketing and lead a company into the green was really exciting. Along with that, starting GrowthHackers.com with him and that turning into its own entity in this own company itself. It was a very exciting time for me as a marketer. It really strengthened my skills and my technological skills, and my marketing skills during that time was awesome. At the time I was running marketing and I end up becoming the head of growth over at GrowthHackers.

“I would literally work maybe like 6:00 AM and work until 7:00 pm. On the way home, I would stop at Subway every single day. I would grab a tuna sandwich. I’m a man of habit. I would grab a tuna sandwich, scarf that down, get home, and literally start working on projects and different things that I was doing until  3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.”

At the same time, I started MilliSense, which is my marketing firm that I am CEO of today. I was having a conversation with my mom, and I was like, “Hey, I have all these people coming to me about consulting or whatever. It’s killing me tax-wise. Look, I need to start something, start a company.” I’m sitting there with my mom, and I’m just like, “I really want to dedicate something to her.” I was like, “Hey mom, I want to name my company after you.” And she was like, “No, no you’re not. Whatever.” And I remember sending her pictures when I got the LLC and things for MilliSense. The name comes from my mom’s name, which is Millicent. And because my mom always made sense of things.

That’s what we kind of do when we work with a lot of tech companies, a lot of startups, a lot of companies that are boot strapped. I try not to take that mentality of those agencies or marketing firms that try to overcharge people and things like that. I really want to help entrepreneurs and people be able to accomplish their dreams. So there’s really no set price for us to do things. We’re all about negotiating.

I would literally work maybe like 6:00 AM and work until 7:00 pm. On the way home, I would stop at Subway every single day. I would grab a tuna sandwich. I’m a man of habit. I would grab a tuna sandwich, scarf that down, get home, and literally start working on projects and different things that I was doing until  3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. It was pretty crazy.

I was running growth and doing stuff for growth hackers while running various other projects. I was reached out to by Sticker Mule. I was 25 years old at the time, and they offered me the opportunity to be their chief marketing officer at 25 years old. It was a huge opportunity, because a lot of people aren’t aware of Sticker Mule. Sticker Mule isn’t your average start up. It’s really a mid-size business, but the revenue they’re generating, the number of employees that they have, made it a major operation. To manage a marketing team of that size and be a C-level exec at a company like that was amazing. I was able to have a lot of success there and it really built my profile even more. We grew revenue almost 50% during my time there. We almost tripled website traffic. I was so nervous going into that role, and I did my thing. It was great.

I was balancing that with MilliSense, so I was CEO of MilliSense still, while serving as CMO of a multi-million dollar company. Call me crazy.

That is crazy. I’m so curious. Your hustle comes from your background for sure. But I’m also curious, you were able to confidently go in as a consultant as a teenager, and you were charging just $12 an hour, but you were still selling it. I’m curious to know, where did you get that belief that you could do it? You know what I mean? It’s like you didn’t get that crippling gene of self-doubt.

Actually, I would disagree with that. I’m my biggest critic. I doubt myself a lot. I just don’t allow self-doubt to prevent me from accomplishing the things I want to do and making my dreams happen.

One of the people that worked at United Way with me, her friend had a small restaurant in Blacksburg and just needed help with creating a Facebook page and doing some social media stuff and marketing, and she was like, “Hey, you know, I’ll pay you $10 an hour to help me out.” And I was like, “$10 an hour. Yeah, I’ll absolutely do this.” So once that happened, there was a chain of events where just word of mouth, and then it just made me more confident that I could do the things that I could do and be able to say, “No, I actually want $25 an hour or $30 an hour or $50 an hour.” It kind of just spiraled from there, but yeah, I go back and forth in my head about a lot of things all the time. Sticker Mule was one of them, and that was one of the latest things that I did.

“I’m my biggest critic. I doubt myself a lot. I just don’t allow self-doubt to prevent me from accomplishing the things I want to do and making my dreams happen.”

By the way, to update, I’m back and full-time as CEO of my company, MilliSense. I’m also working on some software to go along with the consulting service as well, which I’m excited about. I’m also full-time with Microsoft as a consultant. We’ll try to do the numbers, try to figure out the numbers, but I’m working on new projects with Microsoft that I’m really really excited about. I’m leading growth and marketing strategy.  It’s cool to get enterprise experience on a tech level too.

I’m pretty sure we’re going to talk about struggles later. One of the biggest things was, it is an absolute bias in Silicon Valley about working at a Google, Facebook, or Twitter, or Yahoo beforehand and you will just not have doors open up to you if you hadn’t worked at one of those companies.

Yeah, why don’t we just dive in, tell me more about your experiences with big company bias.

That’s been really tough for me because I understand my skill set and my abilities and I know I can do that at a larger scale, but I’ve literally been turned down by some really successful companies for roles because they told me I didn’t have the enterprise experience. That’s really disheartening to me because I feel like the things that you have to do at a small or mid-sized company pales in comparison to some of the things that you have to do at an enterprise.

“There’s also a bias for people who speak out on diversity, that speak out on social issues, that are voicing their opinions and not being quiet.”

My friends that have worked in enterprise companies don’t realize what it feels like to know that hey, if I don’t work today that literally might affect the bottom line of my company, my livelihood and so there’s a lot of bias there if you haven’t come from one of those companies.

That leads to a whole slew of problems because people that look like me aren’t at those companies or aren’t getting those opportunities especially if you didn’t come from a Stanford or some Ivy League school or whatever. It’s really, really disheartening and the you see the new Unicorn companies the Snapchats, the Ubers the IBMs, what are they doing? The exact same thing! They’re trying to get the Google people, the Facebook people, and they want people with the same pedigrees that look like them.

It’s a wheel that keeps turning. It feels like you’re not going anywhere. No matter all the success I’ve had, the credentials I’ve built, a lot of people will say, “Oh, you’ve made it,” and they don’t realize there are still a lot of doors closed to me just off the strength of big company experience.

There’s also a bias for people who speak out on diversity, that speak out on social issues, that are voicing their opinions and not being quiet. The one thing I’ve noticed about many people that I’ve met, black employees at the Googles, and the Microsofts, and the Apples,  they stay in their lane. They stay and keep that cookie cutter image no matter how they may feel internally where they won’t speak out on things, where they won’t step out and be who they really are because they know they have to fit this certain image for this company.

It’s really disheartening that some of the more successful people had to do that. I’ve actually ran into this at companies I’ve been at where they say, “Hey, you can’t really speak out on these things,” or “You can’t say the things you do because our customers see that and things like that.” I can’t be a part of a company where I can’t speak my mind, and stand up for the things that I believe in, or the things that I feel that are unjust.

It definitely closes doors to you because they’ll see you not as a person, but as a problem. They’ll see you also as someone who has their own personal brand. You look at a company like Snapchat– can you name one person at Snapchat that has a personal brand outside of Evan Spiegel? Everyone just falls in line. I think you should be able to try to be the best person that you can be. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen a lot of times in tech.

“I can’t be a part of a company where I can’t speak my mind, and stand up for the things that I believe in, or the things that I feel that are unjust.”

You mention you touch on your experiences with age bias and retro bias and your pre-interview I’m curious to hear more about your experiences.

On age and racial bias – Before I took a job with Sean, I was applying to a lot of tech jobs, and I wasn’t getting responses back. I had a LinkedIn profile, I had a really good resume, I had run marketing at a few different companies, I had successfully sold a company, and I still wasn’t getting responses back, and I couldn’t figure it out.

My spidey senses were tingling when it came to racism, and so I created a fake LinkedIn page with a white person stock photo, changed up the name to be very, very let’s say proper, and pretty much had the same resume. I sent this out to 10 people, because I’m all about testing. I sent the A/B testing racism here in the 7 out of 10 people that didn’t respond to me actually responded to that fake profile.

You probably tried to find me on Linkedin and you realized I don’t have one. I never felt the need to use Linkedin because I just was so turned off from that experience. I know a lot of people that are judged by their Linkedin profile. The color of their skin. The way that they look. I deleted my profile and I was just like, “Man that’s sucks.”

“I created a fake LinkedIn page with a white person stock photo, changed up the name to be very, very let’s say proper, and pretty much had the same resume. I sent this out to 10 people, because I’m all about testing. I sent the A/B testing racism here in the 7 out of 10 people that didn’t respond to me actually responded to that fake profile.”

It is similar with young people. I even talked to–I’m not going to name his name, but he is a white young male CEO of a successful startup right now. They’ve raised millions of dollars in capital, and he said that to get a job he actually had to photoshop his face to make him look older in his linkedin. That’s coming from a white male, so there’s definitely ageism and racism when it comes to this stuff.

I’ve literally been told, “Hey, you need to wait your time and put in more time.” And things like that. That is completely related to age, because as far as the steps I’ve needed to take to get to where I am, I’ve been successful.  Everywhere I’ve went I’ve got the experience. I have proven results. I’m not a person who doesn’t have results. I’m all about data, and so the fact that people still judge me off my age is crazy. I used to wear that as a badge of honor because I was like, “I’m 25, I’m 24, I’m 23, and I did this? I thought that was awesome.” And then I started to realize that a lot of people resent that unfortunately. Because a lot of people look at you like, “Hey, when I was 25 I was still a product manager making $50,000 at wherever, and you want to be a VP.” So it’s tough.

“I’ve literally been told, ‘Hey, you need to wait your time and put in more time.’ And things like that. That is completely related to age, because as far as the steps I’ve needed to take to get to where I am, I’ve been successful.  Everywhere I’ve went I’ve got the experience. I have proven results. I’m not a person who doesn’t have results. I’m all about data, and so the fact that people still judge me off my age is crazy.”

On the racial side, there is just blatant ignorance when it comes to the skills and abilities and people of color. Like, people just literally look past us and think that we’re not equipped, or because we look different or may dress different or not come from the same background as you that we can’t do this job. I’ve actually been turned down from jobs which should have been like my expectations and things like that because I feel like people judge me for things outside of my work and my resume. So it’s definitely been tough.

I remember when I was head of comms, and like 22 years old, and I act so much younger now than I did then, because if anyone found out how young I was, their demeanor to me immediately changed, and they literally started treating me like a tiny girl-child, but I just pretended I was in my 30s my whole early 20s. It was the only I could be taken half-seriously.

I’m also interested in talking about kind of anti-marketing bias, like I worked in comms for instance, which is non-technical.  Even though growth hacking is very quantitative and data driven, it’s still kind of lumped into that soft-skill or not-necessary-skill category. I’m curious to just hear your thoughts on that bias.

Yes, it’s so bad. It’s really, really bad because a lot of people are from that engineering background, and they think marketing is so trivial. A lot of engineers I’ve met, surprisingly enough, think they’re good marketers. They think that they understand, and I’m like, “You’re not, you’re not a good marketer.” And it’s almost like– I’ve come across a lot of engineering founders that is not more so, not that they’re looking for marketing help because they feel like they need someone else’s expertise, but because they don’t have time for it.

They still, in their heads, think that they are the best marketer for the company and things like that. And that’s really, really, really tough to deal with. And whenever I come into a new company, it’s almost like a stare down with the engineers. You got to prove that you’re not going to back down, and that you understand the things they’re doing, you understand the lingo. I would say this to a lot of marketers with in tech. Even if you don’t learn, learn how to speak, learn the lingo. Learn, and maybe to do basic things so that you can at least have conversations with these people.

Make sure that everything you’re doing can be proved with data because that’s what they’re going to respect. A lot of engineers think we’re just people that just come up with ideas and thought at a wall, but if you come in and you have an actual organized disciplined data that you’re having processed, they’ll respect you a lot more. I feel like marketers have the shortest leash when it comes to start-ups and tact.

“Make sure that everything you’re doing can be proved with data because that’s what they’re going to respect.”

I know engineers that are chilling, they just do the minimum and especially if you have a founder that’s not technical. Engineers get away with murder especially if they don’t understand what the engineers are doing. Marketers they give brain for everything and a lot of times it’s stuff that has to do with market fit and the product still needing to be developed, but if the product isn’t selling and the marketer’s getting blamed for it.

I was actually just having a conversation with somebody growth hacking. It is like that cool thing in tech right now but it’s tough because people look at us, is like these unicorn marketers that are supposed to just come into your company, and then, boom hockey stick growth and that’s not the case. And so, a lot of the guys that I know that work in growth and marketing are at places maybe, 8 to 12 months and that’s it. These are the people that get blamed for when the product isn’t selling, when they’re not getting traffic and things like that, and is not looked at engineering product.

So, that’s probably been the toughest thing for me. I was mentoring at a tradecraft in San Francisco, and one of the things that I told him was that to be a growth marketer is a nomadic lifestyle within start-ups and Tech, because when things go wrong, you’re going to be looked at first. And you’re going to be the one that is let go, or you’re going to be the one that gets to blame. And so, just realize that if you want to be a marketer at Tech unless you’re at a big company where you more relaxed like in Facebook or things like that, you’re going to be jumping from company to company, because you’re going to get into a lot of bad situations.

What are the things that you love about being your own boss and approaching work that way?

The biggest thing that I love is – and you don’t hear me talk about it a lot – is being able to give back to the community and do volunteer work. I don’t have to worry about meetings and calendars. I’m able to volunteer every week and do the things that I love to give back.

I remember being cooped up in offices at startups, working from dusk till dawn on projects and not having time to myself. To have that flexibility to do the things I love and to be able to give back, and to travel. A lot of my travel is related to business. I’m headed to Boston, then St. Martin, then Beijing and Nevada and all these places but even though is work related, I still get to enjoy traveling and doing things.

I could say that, because I’ve built something for myself and that feels really good. I don’t feel like I’m a slave to someone else’s company or beliefs, or whatever. I’m able to speak freely and do the things that I want to do, because I know that I’ve built a skill for myself and I’ve worked hard, and I say this with the most humility, that I know that I have talent. I know that I can bring something to the table, and so, because I continuously work every single day to get better as a marketer and as a leader. I have that value proposition that you have to let me be who I am if you want to work with me. That’s what’s been great so far and has led to a lot of great opportunities, and I’m loving it.

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

They think I’m a celebrity.  No one from where I’m from really makes it out, or does these things, or is printed in magazines, and have articles written about them, or get to be interviewed by people like you. This doesn’t happen. It’s all pretty crazy to them. They still look at me like the same person though. They’re still going to make jokes about me. They’re going to still be hard on me, but at the same time they are definitely enamored with the idea that so many people are appreciative of my story. People want to hear from me and want to work with me and they’re definitely really, really proud. That’s something that means the world to me. Got to keep pushing!

How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What’s really exciting to you? What frustrates you?

I’m very excited about the overall interest within the tech industry and how everyone’s kind of throwing their name in the ring. I know some people don’t want other people invading Silicon Valley. They don’t want so many people gaining interest. What they don’t realize is that these mainstream people or people from different places gaining interest will only affect the youth.

When I get to talk to kids from back home, and I tell them about how basketball players and celebrities are involved in tech. It’s just really inspiring to people. I really like the work that CODE2040 is doing. Black Girls Code and all these different organizations raise interest within the black, Latino, and minority communities and movement into tech. Those are the things that I’m most excited about, personally.

“I don’t really see any change when it comes to diversity. I hear a lot of people talking and then you see the actions of people and it doesn’t really change. That’s really disheartening for me to see within tech, that I really feel like things are not going to change. When you look at these companies that are talking about diversity and how much they want to change, you’re like, ‘Yeah, they’re going to change.’ Then you look back in 2012, and they were saying the same thing and still have the same numbers.”

The thing that I dislike is this whole unicorn bullshit and these crazy wild valuations, talk about how the bubble is bursting, how that’s affecting actual, real quality startups that’s coming out now, that are struggling to get funding because you’ve had so many of these flops or these companies that got way too much money without any type of validation.

I think it’s just going to be really, really tough for people. All the startups I’ve started, it’s all bootstrapped. It’s all stuff that I did myself, so I’ve never had to raise money for any of my companies. It’s now a really, really tough time for that.

I don’t really see any change when it comes to diversity. I hear a lot of people talking and then you see the actions of people and it doesn’t really change. That’s really disheartening for me to see within tech, that I really feel like things are not going to change. When you look at these companies that are talking about diversity and how much they want to change, you’re like, “Yeah, they’re going to change.” Then you look back in 2012, and they were saying the same thing and still have the same numbers. So that’s something that I don’t really like as well. There’s a lot of things I don’t like, but I won’t harp on them. Hopefully, they’ll be changed.

People have to understand that having white women at your events and conferences does not mean diversity. Yes, a white woman is diversity, but a lot of people, it was like, “Oh, we have have a black man and we have a woman, so we have black representation and woman representation.” No, you can have a black woman and you can have a Spanish woman, you can have a Native American woman, you can have different women of color at these events. Just because you have a woman there, does not mean that you have diversity, and I absolutely hate that. It annoys me so much. Or just try convincing conferences that just don’t have any color at all, and I’ll call them out. I’ll call them up. People think sometimes that I’m calling them up because I’m jealous because I’m not speaking there or whatever. That is absolutely not the case. It’s just like, I just want to see people who look like me. I want to see people from diverse and different backgrounds speak at these events. And I feel like there’s so many people to choose from and you just don’t see it at all. I could probably go on and on about things that I hate about tech in 2016, but, yes, that’s some of it.

“People have to understand that having white women at your events and conferences does not mean diversity.”

What advice would you give folks who come from tough backgrounds, backgrounds similar to yours, who maybe want to get into tech, but don’t feel like it’s even possible?

Well, first of all, I would say build your skills. There’s so much free information online. You can learn how to code online. You can learn different marketing skills online. There’s so so many different things that you can do right online to build your skills. There’s going to be a lot of people that don’t give you an opportunity or chance.

Create things for yourself, it’s so easy to set up. Like the Shopify store where you’re selling some T-shirts or whatever. It is to prove that I can do marketing. Look I’m 18, 19 years old and I sold $20,000 dollars in T-shirts in a year. That might not be a lot, but that’s a lot. That’s crazy to do that at 18 or 19 years old.

“Just because you have a woman there, does not mean that you have diversity, and I absolutely hate that. It annoys me so much. Or just try convincing conferences that just don’t have any color at all, and I’ll call them out. I’ll call them up. People think sometimes that I’m calling them up because I’m jealous because I’m not speaking there or whatever. That is absolutely not the case. It’s just like, I just want to see people who look like me. I want to see people from diverse and different backgrounds speak at these events. And I feel like there’s so many people to choose from and you just don’t see it at all.”

You start putting a portfolio together of the work you’ve done. Whether you’ve built apps, or built websites, or you started a blog and you’re able to push this much content. It’s never too early to start working on your personal brand as long as you have built skills to go along with that and expertise to go along with that. Just start building that brand for yourself and have value that you can bring.

Don’t get discouraged because the Googles of the world and the Microsofts and Apples or whatever don’t want to hire you. There’s a lot of small, bootstrapped companies that need your help. Do whatever you got to do. If they’re barely paying you, then work nights and weekends and do whatever you have to do but just gain that experience as quickly as possible.

“Don’t get discouraged because the Googles of the world and the Microsofts and Apples or whatever don’t want to hire you. There’s a lot of small, bootstrapped companies that need your help. Do whatever you got to do.”

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.”