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 from Colorado. I grew up in Colorado Springs.

My mom is a doctor and a single mom. How do I describe my upbringing? Colorado Springs is famous for like “Focus on the Family” and super conservative Christians. But I wasn’t exposed to any of that, I just had my mom, her medical practice, and all her doctor friends. The problem with this question is that I got poisoned as a child, so I don’t remember anything from before probably thirteen. I have forgotten most of my life actually, I found out recently my husband and I had a wedding that I don’t remember. There are pictures and everything.

Holy shit.

So my whole childhood is basically gone. My mom remembers, you can ask her if you want [laugh]. The primary answer to that question is I don’t know, because it’s gone, all that stuff is just gone. I know I have two brothers and a sister, but I don’t have a lot of anecdotal things from childhood, or even more recently, because it’s just not in my brain anymore. My memory, if you can call it that, is stored entirely in a combination of other people and various kinds of recordings.

“I got poisoned as a child, so I don’t remember anything from before probably thirteen. I have forgotten most of my life actually, I found out recently my husband and I had a wedding that I don’t remember. There are pictures and everything.”

So, if you feel comfortable, what happened?

On my tenth birthday, my family­­ so my mom and my little brother, me and then I think two friends, I don’t know, some small group of people went to a hotel that had a pool to do ten-year-old birthday things.

And the hotel was negligent on their maintenance or something, I don’t remember. There was a lawsuit, I never read the findings, I was too young. So they were negligent and carbon monoxide and chlorine gas and some other gases leaked into the pool area, and my mom and my little brother and me and both my friends were poisoned. But my mom and I got the worst effects, we were poisoned the most. So, my mom and I went from being totally normal to having traumatic brain injuries, but by poison instead of war or football or whatever.

How did those injuries manifest in the early years, and how is it continuing to?

It has changed over the years. Gotten better and worse. I get attacks of uncontrollable shaking. My body is usually in pain. I get a ton of migraines, a fuck ton actually. My proprioception, which is like, the accurate sensation of where your body is in space, and the position you’re in is 80 percent gone which means my balance and walking have good and bad days. I am basically a grab bag of neurological issues: Alice in Wonderland Syndrome to Post-­traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s hard.

I seemed to improve slowly until I was in college, but then when my brain was under stress I got a bad relapse. So I guess my junior year in college I was all way back at the bottom. I couldn’t walk, I was having migraines everyday, I shook constantly. After that I was really bad for several years and I’ve been inching my way back out of that hole ever since.

What about your mom?

My mom, you would describe her as like a stroke victim. Even though that’s not what happened, that’s a thing people understand. She basically got a migraine for 8 years straight. She is doing much better now. Still dealing but better.

Wow. So you probably don’t remember but, as a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up­­?

My mom says I wanted to be a surgeon, which I am now like, “That is the most ridiculous thing I could have ever thought of.” But, of course that’s what I wanted to do. My mom was a doctor and her medical practice was very integrated into our lives so of course I wanted to do medicine. I think my initial “I’m going to college” was pre­-med, until I figured out about chemistry. I was like, “ugh, this is horrible.” Chemistry is the worst. Or at least that’s what I like to tell myself. That I had a choice, that I opted out instead of what really happened which is that I was forced out by my disability.

Did you have any idea at that time that you’d end up in Silicon Valley tech?

No. My BFA is in Theater, Film, and Television Production, so I thought I was going to go into Theater. But I got so sick at the end of school that all of my best laid plans were totally ruined. I was supposed to go work as an assistant stage manager in Tokyo. But I was too sick, there was no way I could take that job, or any job.

So walk me through the winding road that took you to VR.

So after college I was essentially on bed­rest for four years. I shouldn’t say bed­rest. I was home­bound for four years. Walking to the bathroom made me dizzy so I crawled kinda thing. So in that time, I started watching Art21, which is this contemporary art show made by PBS. It’s so fucking good. It’s a collection of artists talking about their work and their lives and their families and it changed my life.

I was laying there on the couch at 20 thinking that this painful bullshit was what the rest of my life was going to be like, and I decided, “Fuck it I’m gonna steal ideas from these people.” So I starting copying their work. Andrea Zittel and Ann Hamilton and Vija Celmins and Kara Walker. These women became my pantheon. Oh and Janine Antoni, Janine Antoni! She’s amazing! She’s from the Bahamas and she would place a tightrope right at the horizon and then she would walk across the tightrope on video and every time she took a step the line would just touch the horizon. So good. She also hand spun this huge rope with all these video tapes and clothes and just any material donated from her friends and family. Antoni made a rope so I made a rope. Zittel crocheted so I crocheted. Hamilton talked about social concepts in cloth so I talked about computational concepts in cloth.

I copied lots of work from Art21 because there was nothing else to do. It was just not what you want to happen right after you get out of college. Like, “I’m going to get an internship, and I’ll be out every night and­­—No. You’re going to lay in bed for four years and be bored.” That was basically the start of like, “I am an artist now.” The art was my entire life at that point, I guess it still is.

When I finally made my own work it was these brightly­-colored abstract crocheted sculptures the size of, ironically, the couch I’d been stuck on. I guess the first time I really showed anything was in 2009, with the Armory Show in New York.

“I was told my thesis work wasn’t art because I made a video game. It wasn’t even a game it was an interactive environment that addressed the contemporary way that we go about knowledge formation. They couldn’t see it. It was weird because I was interested in technology. The work that I was making before, the crochet, was about reenacting computational systems. But they had never seen that either, those works were talked about as “heroic women’s work”. It drove me crazy. The professors never could see crochet as data, as captured information in the shape of a linear thread. But I still graduated, so fuck them.”

*Just* the Armory? [laughter]

Yeah me and galleries have never been much of a thing. Then I used that work, and the credential of that show to apply to grad school. I went to the California College of the Arts over on Potrero Hill. That was the first time I was really out of the house everyday by myself in years. I was 24.

Some of it was great. I found a couple professors that were awesome.

It should come as no surprise that I did not fit in well at school. I had just spent 4 years alone with the exception of my boyfriend. I didn’t know how to human and I was learning to be disabled not just at home in a bubble of my own control but at the school, in classes, on the train etc. Once again I have very few anecdotes of grad school, what with my memory but I know it was both great and really stupid. I got really tough and focused because of school. I am a much better artist now, and I found one professor who I am friends with today who is brilliant and funny and really important to me. But because I wasn’t great at interacting with the other students, so they started calling me The Borg. They were like, “But it’s endearing because we like you,” and I’m like, “No, it’s socially separating and bullying.” But they never stopped.

I was told my thesis work wasn’t art because I made a video game. It wasn’t even a game it was an interactive environment that addressed the contemporary way that we go about knowledge formation. They couldn’t see it. It was weird because I was interested in technology. The work that I was making before, the crochet, was about reenacting computational systems. But they had never seen that either, those works were talked about as “heroic women’s work”. It drove me crazy. The professors never could see crochet as data, as captured information in the shape of a linear thread. But I still graduated, so fuck them.

So what happened after that? I got my first job. I was so proud of myself. I worked as an architectural assistant making drawings and writing their blog. I worked there until she couldn’t afford to pay me anymore. Then I started working for Axis dance company and they’re in Oakland and they’re physically integrated dance company and I worked there for almost two years, man, what I thought at the time was going to be a dream job turned out to be awful. Anyway I also wrote for KQED in there, writing about net art, the internet, and video games mostly, and I was doing a lot of both digital drawing and ink on paper which both turned into making gifs and prints and comic books. It was around that time, in 2013, I started making YouTube videos too. Again copying existing work I liked from Mike Rugnetta and PBS Idea Channel. Huh, twice now PBS has been foundational to my art.

The videos started as talking head style technology and cultural criticism pieces plastered with wild editing. It was a great way to restart with video. I had experience editing short films and features from college but the show, self-titled BlinkPopShift, also leaned hard on the writing and research skills I forged at grad school and KQED. It became a way to think across tech and culture and art and science the same way I had been exploring in my masters thesis, but now everyone, not just the limited pov’s of my professors, could see the result. Simultaneously I built a whole body of work exclusively on my phone, the Still Lives series, using a combination of photogrammetry and various gif making apps.

I became super immersed in Youtube so I went to Vidcon and met Mike Rugnetta and Vi Hart and Malia Moss who all turned out to amazing friends and collaborators. A few months later I got a call from Vi asking “Hey, do you think you could build a VR camera?” And I was like, “Yeah sure, I don’t see why not. That doesn’t seem that hard.” And I was right, I mean it took months of work and cameras melting and trial and error and math but I did it.

“A few months later I got a call from Vi asking “Hey, do you think you could build a VR camera?” And I was like, “Yeah sure, I don’t see why not. That doesn’t seem that hard.” And I was right, I mean it took months of work and cameras melting and trial and error and math but I did it.”

So you just… made a VR camera?

I mean, yeah. We, along with Andrea Hawksley, the three horsemen of eleVR, have been working on various projects in VR, AR, and mixed reality every since. Vi’d hired me to work at the then Communications Design Group, Alan Kay’s Research Lab at SAP. Working for an open lab is great because with no pressure to publish traditional papers, we can write up everything on our blog for anyone to read.

I have to say I was so happy when fully spherical, auto-stitching cameras came on the market and I didn’t have to actually build them by hand with a fucking hot glue gun anymore, which was fun but also so tedious. I focus on studying how immersion works and how aesthetic techniques communicate to viewers. Recently I’ve been building the foundation of spherical cinematography so I can use that knowledge when designing immersive web systems.

What excites you about that space?

Making hybrid reality projects where linkages are no longer limited to computers and screens. When I write or make art, I like to put stuff everywhere but computers in their current conception don’t allow for creative messes. Sure, you can barf icons all over your desktop, but that’s not a creative mess. It feels heavy and in need of “organization.” Good messes feed my creativity through serendipity and flexibility. But my physical messes don’t have search for when I know exactly which bit of red paper has to go on the collage next. That divide between the physical and the digital will close, ‘cause me and my vice grip say so.

But that also means taking seriously the considerations of what the body wants. Because like, we are not fingers with eyes and ear holes. The way we do knowledge creation has a lot to do with this flappy meat thing. We completely disregard its wants and needs and its ideas about the world for what, a touch screen? This is the most embodied form of computational media that we have? Pinch and zoom and swipe and tap? Gross. There’s so much touch you can’t get in the little rectangles we carry around everywhere, it drives me crazy.

“When I write or make art, I like to put stuff everywhere but computers in their current conception don’t allow for creative messes. Sure, you can barf icons all over your desktop, but that’s not a creative mess. It feels heavy and in need of “organization.” Good messes feed my creativity through serendipity and flexibility. But my physical messes don’t have search for when I know exactly which bit of red paper has to go on the collage next. That divide between the physical and the digital will close, ‘cause me and my vice grip say so.”

What is it like straddling two worlds—art and tech—that often feel at odds with each other?

At work, I don’t feel at odds because like they specifically set up the lab for that kind of cross disciplinary flexibility. I am the most traditionally “visual art” person there, which I find funny since in grad school I was the most “tech” person, but being a weird inbetweener is kinda our thing at the lab. But when I’m out of my bubble it’s really hard because my work, and probably my personality too, is hard to parse as either or, as art or tech, as artist or researcher. A good example is that I don’t go to VR meetups any more. Everyone was too newness focused. There was no bubbling curiosity, no juicy conversation. It was just, sorry to say it but, a bunch of white dudes being boring. Ugh, tech Industry problems.

What are the biggest motivators behind your work?

I make art for two people, which people do not like to hear, but it’s true. I make sculpture for Steve Sedlmayr, my husband, who is such a fucking treasure, we’re 12 years this summer, and I make video for Vi Hart, who is one of my best friends and my boss. That’s it. The sculptural work is for him and the video work is for her. When I can make either of them tilt their head or think “What is that?” or smile or laugh or say “Yes. More please,” that’s winning.

There is definitely a subtle pressure from social media to care about a bigger audience and I do have a small audience online. Some people watch the videos online, and some people read the stuff that I publish, and that’s great but I don’t crave their opinions. For me, seeing Vi watch a video and afterward be like, “Damn!” That’s my chocolate sundae.

“I am the most traditionally “visual art” person there, which I find funny since in grad school I was the most “tech” person, but being a weird inbetweener is kinda our thing at the lab. But when I’m out of my bubble it’s really hard because my work, and probably my personality too, is hard to parse as either or, as art or tech, as artist or researcher. A good example is that I don’t go to VR meetups any more. Everyone was too newness focused. There was no bubbling curiosity, no juicy conversation. It was just, sorry to say it but, a bunch of white dudes being boring.”

I think it’s like you’ve miraculously managed to achieve something that I’m just starting to achieve—the “art of giving no fucks.”

I think it’s absolutely pivotal—or giving exactly the right fucks. You’re going to give a fuck about someone’s opinion, but just give it to exactly the right ones. My husband, he is also an artist. He makes games now but he knows a lot about sculpture and is really interested in sculpture. Making a sculpture for him is so powerful and awesome and his feedback really pushes me. Don’t give no fucks, just give the right ones.

I love it. What are your thoughts on the state of tech in 2016, both the tech that you considered tech and the tech that a lot of people consider tech?

Tech is so confusing. What even is the technology industry? Are search engines and camera manufacturers and Crispr therapies and video games really in the same industry? I feel like we use “the tech industry” the same way people used to “big business.” What is that thing I hear over and over about Uber? “Uber is a taxi company, not a tech company.” Bakers with online delivery are still bakers. Podcasters with an app are still in the business of podcasting. Tech is just a lazy over simplification of the Bay Area’s $785.5 billion economy that makes it all the more frustrating for people like me to take my work out into the world. I’m not an academic and I don’t make a product… I make art to do research.

Condensing all these different companies into a thing we call the tech industry does gives us something to blame for the city’s problems. The industry is refusing to act as proactive stewards of the place where their employees live. It seems like a lot of money’s being made and not very many taxes are ending up in city coffers. There is clear evidence that private corporate bus lines do increase evictions near their bus stops. Rents are increasing along with poverty.

“Tech is so confusing. What even is the technology industry? Are search engines and camera manufacturers and Crispr therapies and video games really in the same industry? I feel like we use “the tech industry” the same way people used to “big business.” What is that thing I hear over and over about Uber? “Uber is a taxi company, not a tech company.” Bakers with online delivery are still bakers. Podcasters with an app are still in the business of podcasting. Tech is just a lazy over simplification of the Bay Area’s $785.5 billion economy that makes it all the more frustrating for people like me to take my work out into the world.”

Homelessness is intensifying as more people are flooding into the Bay Area chasing after those sweet, sweet jobs. Did you know 70% of the homeless population in San Francisco was housed in the last year? Along with all these changes fear mongering about the collapse of San Francisco’s weirdo based culture. Most people would say that I’m being naive, that corporations have no obligation to nurture the community in which they exist, but if you don’t do that—if you don’t support the community—then all you’re doing is going to Southeast Asia and cutting down the mangrove forests and planting palm trees so that you can get palm oil. There it looks like environmental destruction, here it looks like community destruction. We have to grow out of the self centered capitalism that disregards the larger systematic effects until disaster strikes. We have to take responsibility for that because we’re not heartless idiots who just stomp around the world with our big dumb America boots. I don’t want to be that kind of America.

Man. It is kind of wild to think that big tech is actually necessary for new innovation to survive long term.

Oh yeah, I totally agree but also like big tech is completely dependent on Chinese money, right? Like a lot of VC money comes from China and that’s fine. I’m not saying it shouldn’t come from China but if that’s going to be true, then you also need to take into consideration the health of the system of products and money and labor is there too. The whole system should be healthy, not just any individual part of it. Why is making as much money as possible still a thing? Who in their right mind is motivated by I want to make as much money as humanly possible. Why? It’s boring. Come on. Look I was raised by a woman who taught me that holistic world views were the only path to true equality, whether that’s in a body or a society, and I hold that as a core value to this day.

“We have to grow out of the self centered capitalism that disregards the larger systematic effects until disaster strikes. We have to take responsibility for that because we’re not heartless idiots who just stomp around the world with our big dumb America boots. I don’t want to be that kind of America.”

Total side note, but maybe possibly related, I remember reading that you have received death threats for speaking your mind.

Oh yeah [chuckles] yeah, that was a problem. My team and I went to the first Oculus Connect, and there was an open panel, and it was being live streamed on the internet. And they were like, ”Anyone could come up and ask a question.” And there was 1% women at this conference and very few people of color and there were no female speakers and I was mad. So I went up and asked how they planned to prevent the clear race and gender biases of their conference and the industry as a whole from doing to VR what sexism and racism has done to video games.

And they answered it really poorly. It was so lame. But since I am female and it was live streamed that question turned into doxing, and death threats on 4chan and Reddit. We had to get our corporate security officer to intervene. It was scary. I hadn’t expected such an infantile response. I felt so naive. I’m still super naive, because I still assume that everyone wants everyone to be equal. Also, people who do death threats are so uncreative. I felt like they were just copy and pasting from Anita Sarkeesian‘s death threats.

I’m curious, are you able to give no fucks about that or­­…?

I don’t care.

That’s good.

Yeah but I have the ability not to care because of my privilege. 1. I’m white and cisgender and 2. I work for a place that can provide corporate security. Privilege means the death threats are less meaningful to me.

“The whole system should be healthy, not just any individual part of it. Why is making as much money as possible still a thing? Who in their right mind is motivated by I want to make as much money as humanly possible. Why? It’s boring. Come on.”

How do you think tech could be more accommodating right now to a more diverse set of people?

I mean hire them? I love Ta­-Nehisi Coates’s phrase “People who believe themselves to be white…” so I would say people who believe themselves to be white should maybe consider people who do not believe themselves to be white. People always complain the lack of diversity is a pipeline issue which is such blame shifting horse shit. If you think of people like crude oil who can only reach your factory via a standardized and maintained pipeline then maybe you shouldn’t be a company. Or hire people who you perceive to be less qualified. Because your perceptions of someone’s lower qualifications are based on your own biases. Go around saying that you’re biased. Be like, ”Hello. I’m white, and I have white people bias.” No one is going to think that you’re a horrible, evil person by acknowledging the fact that you’re biased. Everybody is biased, just acknowledge it, and then build systems to make sure that it doesn’t affect the population of your company. Super simple things. When you have a varied population of employees, go to them and be like, ”Hi. How are we not helping you to do your best work? Please tell me? We are trying to do better.” Be a person with feelings and failings for fuck sake.

What advice would you have for someone who wants to do meaningful work in tech, but doesn’t know where to start?

Pretend like you can accomplish the thing that you want, and write about it as though it were an inevitability. Write about how the meaningful tech that you want to make is the most important thing in your whole life. Read those writings into a camera. Publishing all of it online. Repeat. Thinking publicly and meaningfully about what it means to use a computer, what it means to use your phone, what it means to use stuff that you want to exist in the future will not only hone your ideas but attract interested bees. Write up design documents for your fake thing. Make drawing of it. Research. Don’t make a product. Go to the library. Because that’s what I do. I don’t make a product. I don’t make technology, really. I make art. I think deeply about the stuff I make and I write about it in clear ways people can connect with.

“People always complain the lack of diversity is a pipeline issue which is such blame shifting horse shit. If you think of people like crude oil who can only reach your factory via a standardized and maintained pipeline then maybe you shouldn’t be a company. Or hire people who you perceive to be less qualified. Because your perceptions of someone’s lower qualifications are based on your own biases. Go around saying that you’re biased. Be like, ‘Hello. I’m white, and I have white people bias.’ No one is going to think that you’re a horrible, evil person by acknowledging the fact that you’re biased. Everybody is biased, just acknowledge it, and then build systems to make sure that it doesn’t affect the population of your company. Super simple things. When you have a varied population of employees, go to them and be like, ‘Hi. How are we not helping you to do your best work? Please tell me? We are trying to do better.’ Be a person with feelings and failings for fuck sake.”

“Being an immigrant taught me from an early age to observe carefully. The thought was always, ‘This is how things happen here,’ and not ‘This is just how things work.’ That probably influenced my observation skills from a pretty early age. “

“When I’m seeing people like 10, 15, 20 years older than me in leadership roles that are not like me in any way, it’s really hard to imagine yourself and what you’re working towards.”

“When I went to my first Women in Design talk, it was really the first time I saw women who had careers I aspired to in front of me, and it really did hit me, wow, this feels more reachable now. Hilariously—but in a sad way I guess—I was one of the people who was giving a talk. So you have be your own role model sometimes I guess. And that’s hard.”

“As many people do, I’ve often asked myself what my career goals are. But kind of related to the role models point, it’s hard to be able to point to someone and say, ‘I want to be that person.’ And It’s not cut and dry, like I’m a lawyer at a firm and I want to make partner. So all I’ve really had as a goal was I just want to learn and do something that it makes the world a little bit better.”

“We need to look at solving problems that are beyond the cushy, privileged problems. This is why diversity in tech is critical, and not just a nice-to-have. We need access to a wider set of problems.”

“Ask a lot of questions. Because there’s a finite amount of careers that are told to people when they’re ten and fifteen and even twenty. It’s like, doctor, lawyer, now engineer. But there’s all these jobs out there, and if you ask around you might find one that will fit your interests and strengths and things you’re excited about.”

I grew up in the Bay Area. I was born in Berkeley and lived here up until the end of high school. Growing up, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to study science or do something more artsy. I had an undiagnosed learning disability, and I struggled with some of my academic classes, but did better in theater, art, and music. Once I was diagnosed with a learning disability, and able to get accommodations, I started doing much better in my academic classes. My AP Physics teacher my senior year of high school encouraged me to pursue physics in college, and that was the first time a teacher had ever said to me: you have a talent, you should do this.

So my freshman year of college, I took an intro theater class and an intro physics class, and I said to myself, whichever one I do better at, that’s the universe telling me what I should major in. I got such a good grade in my physics that I didn’t need to take the final exam. And I got the worst grade of my college career in the theater class, which wasn’t that bad but… I thought, okay this is the universe telling me that I should study physics. I ended up majoring in physics and continued doing it all the way through my PhD.

I’m curious to know what it was like being a lady in astrophysics PhD academia.

There have been a lot of articles about being a woman in academic science in the press recently. I participated in a Twitter hashtag (#astroSH) that got press coverage. The hashtag was motivated by some of the high-profile cases of sexual harassment in academia.

It was challenging being in a male-dominated field. Physics is 85% male. There are many ways you are made to feel different. There are hard interactions with male colleagues. I tweeted about a bunch of different things that happened to me over the years that were hard. For instance a guy walking by my lab, and I was wearing dish gloves because I was washing some parts of my experiment, and he said, “That’s what women are good for, doing dishes in the kitchen.” And men repeatedly told me that I got to where I was because there was some quota that needed to be filled and they needed to have a certain number of women in a program. Men would frame interest in me as being about my research, but then once I was in a situation where I’m alone with them, it switches to being a date. It’s hard when you are constantly reminded of your gender, or made to feel really uncomfortable and sad about the fact that you thought something was professional attention but it was actually about your gender.

“Men repeatedly told me that I got to where I was because there was some quota that needed to be filled and they needed to have a certain number of women in a program.”

What was it like transitioning into tech and what was the impetus for that?

When I graduated from my PhD., I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I applied for a lot of different jobs. I applied for teaching positions, research positions, and I applied for jobs in industry. In the end of my search, I had a bunch of different opportunities. What attracted me to tech in particular that it felt like a good way to apply my technical skills but in a way that was more down to earth.

A lot of my astrophysics research work was very obscure and theoretical. It was hard for me to feel motivated when there were maybe ten people in the world who really understood what I did. Tech is also a more casual industry than finance or consulting. I felt like it would feel more culturally similar to academia. I’m from the Bay Area and there’s a lot of tech jobs here. It meant that I didn’t have to move. I did my PhD at Berkeley so I was back here again. Ultimately I thought “Well, let me try this out. It means I get to stay here, it means I get to try this new thing. If I really hate it I’ll re-apply for academic jobs again in a year.” But immediately, I enjoyed the work so much and realized this is a much better fit for me, in terms of the day-to-day, than academia.

What are the most exciting things to you about your work? What really activates you?

I’m a data scientist, and essentially what I do is work with a lot of different people within my company to help them make decisions and decide what action they should take, based on what’s going on with the data. I help my company understand how customers are behaving, where there are inefficiencies, where we’re losing people, or where we are most successful. It’s really fun, because I’m constantly working on different areas and different focuses. Sometimes I’ll be working with the marketing team. Sometimes I’ll be working with our technical team. Sometimes I’ll be working with product. I have a very broad scope.

People come to me with open-ended questions, and I get to define how we might get to an answer and ultimately help them make the decision they need to make. It’s a really creative process. I have a lot of freedom of how I’m going to approach the problems. Then it’s also very technical. There’s usually a lot of math and programming and visualizing data. Then there is also a communication piece, where I’m taking this complex set of data and trying to explain it to people who maybe aren’t as technical, and help them understand what the data means, and how they might take those insights and translate them into some action. It uses a whole bunch of different skills.

People are usually super grateful. Everyday people come to me with their problems, if can help them solve them, they’re really excited by that, and so it’s a very satisfying job. It’s not customer-facing. My clients are internal, and I like that a lot because the people who I help, are the people that I interact with every day. So I feel very valued within my company.

The work is always changing. I never do the same thing twice. One day I’ll be doing something for our CTO, then the next I’ll be working on something for our PR team. So, I’m constantly learning, constantly having to think of new ways to approach problems. It’s not boring or repetitive at all, which is really fun.

“Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the areas where I have privilege. I’m white, and so I don’t really understand what it’s like to be a person of color. How can I understand that experience more and advocate more for people of color in my community?”

When did you turn your attention to feminism and inclusion?

It’s been a long-standing interest of mine. When I was diagnosed with a learning disability in high school I became very interested in advocacy for people with disabilities, and I founded a group at Occidental College (where I went for undergrad) for students with disabilities. Our goals were to create awareness in our communities about what having a disability means, what it entails, and how everyone can be supportive in various learning environments. We also educated people with disabilities on how to advocate for themselves, and communicate their needs to others. Being part of that group was really great. It helped me think about not only my own disability, but other types of disabilities. There were people in that group that had physical disabilities, or mental health issues. It very much broadened my perspective and helped me understand the way that these disabilities impact people’s lives.

In graduate school, I ran a women’s group for physics, astronomy, and planetary science students. We focused a lot on the gender issues is those departments, most of which had less than 20% women in them. I started learning about things like unconscious bias, imposter syndrome, the wage gap, stereotype threat, and the leaky pipeline within STEM.

When I graduated from Cal, I was asked to be on the Committee for the Status of Women in Astronomy (CWSA), which is part of the American Astronomical Society, (astronomy’s big professional society). As a member of the CSWA, I started writing for their blog and and eventually became the editor-in-chief. Then I started talking about these issues and engaging with them with the entire astronomy community. When you write about things on the internet, especially feminism [chuckles], you get a lot of pushback. Having (mostly online) conversations with people who don’t necessarily believe the things that you’re talking about, or don’t think that there’s still discrimination this day and age, well it has really helped me tune my debating skills. It has also helped me to take an intersectional approach to feminism, and not just think about women’s issues but the intersection of race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, class, religion and try to understand how all these identities interplay with each other.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the areas where I have privilege. I’m white, and so I don’t really understand what it’s like to be a person of color. How can I understand that experience more and advocate more for people of color in my community?

“My disability affects my reading and writing. I have something similar to dyslexia. The way that I frame it is that the neural paths in my brain that connect and decode the words I see and assign meaning to them are really jumbled. So, for me, it takes a really long time to interpret written words or to express my thoughts in written words. I read at about the twentieth percentile in terms of speed. My intelligence is much higher than that, so there’s this mismatch in how I perform when doing timed reading tasks versus the level that my intelligence says I should be able to perform.”

What is it like being in tech with a learning disability? Does it affect you at all now? I’m also curious to know, in your work in the community, what issues you’ve seen with other folks with disabilities in Silicon Valley.

Having a learning disability hasn’t been something that has affected me as strongly in the working world, because I’m not often in scenarios where I’m being tested or asked to complete some task with a very fast timeline.

My disability affects my reading and writing. I have something similar to dyslexia. The way that I frame it is that the neural paths in my brain that connect and decode the words I see and assign meaning to them are really jumbled. So, for me, it takes a really long time to interpret written words or to express my thoughts in written words. I read at about the twentieth percentile in terms of speed. My intelligence is much higher than that, so there’s this mismatch in how I perform when doing timed reading tasks versus the level that my intelligence says I should be able to perform.

I have figured out a lot of work-arounds for that. Like if I have to read something, I always have my computer read it to me, because I can comprehend things I hear instantaneously, but reading involves me going back a few times before I can understand it as well. And similarly, when I write, usually the first draft has tons of grammatical errors and mixed up words. But if I have my computer speak it to me then I can easily fix those things. Now I just know if I have to read something or write something, it’s going to entail this extra process.

In the working world, it’s not that often that you’re handed something and have to read it in front of someone while they watch you, so people don’t really notice that it takes me longer to read and write. But it is something that I have talked to with my managers about and just said, “Hey, this is something that I struggle with. If there is ever a scenario where I’m going to need to perform something or need to read something kind of in the moment, it would be better for me to have it ahead of time. When there is a really important report that I’m going to have to get out, it would be great if you could look it over, because this is a thing I struggle with.” People have been really understanding and I think I’ve gotten better with my own work-a-rounds such that it doesn’t impact me as much as it did when I was in school.

In terms of general disability issues in the working world, there are certain accommodations that are required by the American disabilities act like having accessible bathrooms or having accommodations for people who struggle with mental heath issues.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t tend to be a lot of conversations about disabilities at a company wide level. Most people don’t even understand the scope of how disabilities affect people’s work. For instance there is somebody at my work who has fibromyalgia, and that means that sometimes he can’t physically be at work because he’s in a lot of pain.

Luckily our work is such that we can do a lot of it remotely and so he’s able to work that out with his manager. If he wakes up and he’s having a really bad day, then he’ll work from home. Yet that involves having to disclose this status to his manager, and some managers are more understanding than others. So one thing that I try to do (in conjunction with HR) at places I work is to increase understanding as a company about how disabilities affect people and the ways that they can be accommodating that aren’t going to negatively impact the performance of the company. I think there is a general concern: “Oh well, if I hire someone with a disability, that person is going to be less productive, or less valuable to the company.” Just helping people understand that is not the case, as long as you’re willing to be flexible and give accommodations which allow people to perform at their best.

“I think there is a general concern: ‘Oh well, if I hire someone with a disability, that person is going to be less productive, or less valuable to the company.’ Just helping people understand that is not the case, as long as you’re willing to be flexible and give accommodations which allow people to perform at their best.”

How have you observed the cultures of academia and tech? How are they similar, how are they different?

Both are places that have very intelligent, passionate, quirky people who are trying to do something that no one’s ever done before. People who are pushing the boundaries of what’s out there. In both places there is a lot of competition and other people attempting to you, or do the same thing.

I would say that one thing that has been very different about being in industry (versus academia) is that there are not as strong power dynamics. In academia, you have these tenured professors who are famous, and they can pretty much make or break your career. You’re very dependent, especially when you’re a student or a postdoc, on these people to write papers with you, giving you access to their grants, giving you access to their experiments, and their telescopes. If there’s some situation of abuse going on or you’re having a personality conflict with someone, it’s harder to survive that in the same way as you can in industry. In industry, especially in the tech industry, as a data scientist or a software engineer, I’m in high demand. If a company is not the right fit for you, or you clash with someone, then you can easily find something else, so there’s not as much pressure to make a situation work.

Because of these hierarchies of power in academia it’s a little bit trickier. One bad relationship with someone could mean you have to leave academia, or switch research areas entirely. I think there are also more protections in place at businesses. Ultimately HR wants to make sure that nobody sues each other, and so they try to proactively deal with any conflicts. Whereas in academia, if a student is having a problem, often the university is incentivized to just get rid of the student or hide. They aren’t incentivized to protect the student. Ultimately (right now at least) there is a lot more jobs available in tech versus academia. When I was applying for postdocs, I’d be lucky if I got one or two postdocs in the entire country. If those didn’t work out, then there wasn’t that many options for me. Whereas once you’re in the tech industry, you are constantly being approached by recruiters to join the next new hot startup, so you feel like, “Okay, I have a lot of options and I’m not stuck anywhere. I don’t have to put up with a bad situation.”
In general, has your life improved as a woman since you go into tech? It sounds like it.

For the most part it’s been night and day better. One start-up where I worked, I was the first woman on the engineering team and for about six months until we hired the second woman. They were amazing. I never felt like my gender had anything to do with why I was hired. I always felt like, “You were hired because you’re the most talented person that we interviewed, and we think you rock.” That was really, really great. But simultaneously they were very careful to make sure that I felt comfortable and not have it be this like bro-grammer environment. There were many times when they checked-in with me, saying, “Hey, was that okay? Do you feel uncomfortable?” They really were thoughtful about making sure that it was a good environment for me, and that was amazing.

In general, I’ve just always felt like being a woman on the technical teams has, if anything, helped me. The men have been extra supportive, I guess, because they recognize that I am one of a few women and they want to make sure that I feel okay and comfortable, and so I have felt that people have gone a little bit above and beyond to try to make me feel supported.

I have had some interesting experiences with companies where the general culture at the company has been a bit bro-y, and so while my direct team has been really supportive for the most part, I’ve had to deal with general company culture that was pretty hostile for women.

One company I was at we had this policy that you should lock your computer when you leave it unattended for security reasons. And as kind of a joke / punishment, if you ever came across a computer that was unlocked, then you could send a message to the all-company chat channel from that person’s account. These messages were usually funny or silly. So my first day at this job, I forgot to lock my computer because, you know, it was my first day, and I was still figuring it out… and someone not only posted on the all-company channel from my account. “It’s my first day and I’m already drunk. Oops.” which was kind of embarrassing, but then also sent a private message to a senior member of my group saying, “It’s only my first day. but I already want you.”

And he knew right away that it wasn’t me, but his response was, “Keep it in your pants, Kirkpatrick.” And ultimately, it was just a very weird, charged interaction to have with a teammate on your first day at a new job. And so my response was, “Okay, I guess this is what it’s going to be like here.”

And another thing that happened at that company was that in my first couple weeks I was being trained to interview people for the data team. My first phone interview that I was conducting by myself, I was in a conference room and facing towards a glass wall outwards to the rest of the company. One of my coworkers was trying to mess with me during the interview, to make me laugh, or whatever. At first, he walks by and he’s being a little silly, like walking funny. I was not responding because I was trying to focus on this interview. So he just kept escalating and escalating, and it got to the point where he was pretending to masturbate and ejaculate on the glass wall, and was pushing people up against the glass and humping them.

I came out of the interview, and said, “When I am interviewing someone, that’s me being a representative of our company to an outside person. What are you trying to do by making me distracted or feel weird during this interview? That’s really not okay. Not only is it unprofessional and disrespectful to this other person, it also makes our company look bad to this outside party.” He said, “Oh, lighten up. Come on.” I said, “I don’t want to see you pretend to masturbate. But this is not just about you and me, this is affecting someone else and my ability to judge this other person.” I got really mad.

“At first, he walks by and he’s being a little silly, like walking funny. I was not responding because I was trying to focus on this interview. So he just kept escalating and escalating, and it got to the point where he was pretending to masturbate and ejaculate on the glass wall, and was pushing people up against the glass and humping them.”

I’m curious to know what it’s like being a local and watching this whole ecosystem change over time. What are your feelings about being a local in the tech community?

I definitely have a lot of weird feelings about being one of those techies that a lot of local people are resentful of because of the ways that the tech industry is gentrifying San Francisco, raising the cost of everything and all of these inequities between how much tech people make and other people in the community make. I work in mid market, so I work right near the Tenderloin. And it makes me feel very uncomfortable going from Civic Centre/Bart Station where there are people living in the BART station, sleeping in puddles of their own urine. People who are incredibly sick – physically sick – and clearly need medical attention. I walk from there into this fancy building where there’s free food and alcohol, and we have all these amazing perks. The dichotomy of it is so striking.

And especially because I went into graduate school thinking I was going to be an educator, and so I never anticipated making the salaries that we make in the tech industry… It’s way more than I ever anticipated having. Way more than my family had when we were growing up. It’s uncomfortable for me to know, “I am the one percent” of the US that we’re all talking about, like I’m the people that the protesters of the Google buses are protesting.

“We’re not serving those populations. We’re just pushing them away, hiding them. That’s very uncomfortable for me. There’s a lot of decadence and extravagance in the tech industry that I don’t feel is deserved, and I feel weird taking part of.”

On the other hand, when I was growing up, you wouldn’t go to the Tenderloin. You just don’t go there, period. You wouldn’t ever go to certain areas of Oakland. And now it’s ok to walk around those neighborhoods, and you don’t have to constantly worry about safety. It’s nice to see these neighborhoods becoming less violent, but at the same time, poor people are being pushed out.

We’re not serving those populations. We’re just pushing them away, hiding them. That’s very uncomfortable for me. There’s a lot of decadence and extravagance in the tech industry that I don’t feel is deserved, and I feel weird taking part of. For instance, I once went to a holiday party, and it was like a scene out of a movie. Every hour new entertainment came out. We would have acrobats doing aerial performances, or people on stilts, or a marching band. It must have been a $200,000 party. It was open bar and there was a tattoo artist doing temporary tattoos and a photo-booth. I just kept thinking, “This is so over the top. Why are we spending ten grand on acrobats when we’re not even a profitable company.”

While I understand in order to retain talent, you need to keep your employees happy, I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable with a lot of the decadence and extravagance, especially for companies that are being funded by investor capital and are not profitable. I guess the bottom line is, I don’t know how I feel being part of it. I’m so grateful for my job and I’m so grateful that I am well-paid, but there’s something messed up about the fact that there are people who are so wealthy next to people who are so poor. We don’t have the services in SF to help the homeless people, yet we’re spending all this money on the app “Yo.”

“While I understand in order to retain talent, you need to keep your employees happy, I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable with a lot of the decadence and extravagance, especially for companies that are being funded by investor capital and are not profitable. I guess the bottom line is, I don’t know how I feel being part of it. I’m so grateful for my job and I’m so grateful that I am well-paid, but there’s something messed up about the fact that there are people who are so wealthy next to people who are so poor. We don’t have the services in SF to help the homeless people, yet we’re spending all this money on the app ‘Yo.”

My last question for you would be, as a local, as a woman, as someone with a disability, someone from your background, how would like to see tech do better, or how do you think tech can do better, in general?

In general, I would like the tech industry to focus more on things that are sustainable — not just because we have a million users and they’re going to see ads, and ad companies are going to pay for it — but actually fulfill a need where there is a clear way to monetize. I just think that there is this different set of standards for tech companies than there are for brick and mortar companies, and I don’t know why. I’ve intentionally chosen companies where it is clear how they are going to make money, and I think that they are addressing a need that is not being addressed in another way. So I would like more of a focus on that.

And then if we’re going to be bringing tech companies and putting them into poor communities, we need to to be also supporting the community, and finding a way to lift up those communities, so that we’re not just this negative impact that is causing gentrification and housing prices to go up, and increasing traffic, but also a good force within the community. I would like that to be more of the ethos of what we see ourselves trying to do in the Bay area, in San Francisco, and in Oakland, as companies are starting to move to Oakland. I don’t know the best way to do that, but I’d be happy with taking a pay decrease, or having less extravagant parties, and having more of that money go towards supporting our communities. We don’t need to have this dichotomy where everyone in the tech industry is driving Teslas but walking over homeless people on the way to work. I would like that to be more a part of our belief system as an industry.

“If we’re going to be bringing tech companies and putting them into poor communities, we need to to be also supporting the community, and finding a way to lift up those communities, so that we’re not just this negative impact that is causing gentrification and housing prices to go up, and increasing traffic, but also a good force within the community. I would like that to be more of the ethos of what we see ourselves trying to do in the Bay area, in San Francisco, and in Oakland, as companies are starting to move to Oakland. I don’t know the best way to do that, but I’d be happy with taking a pay decrease, or having less extravagant parties, and having more of that money go towards supporting our communities. We don’t need to have this dichotomy where everyone in the tech industry is driving Teslas but walking over homeless people on the way to work.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I grew up on a farm in Oregon in the 1970’s-80’s. My dad built a computer for me and my siblings in the late 70s when I was in grade school, and I still have it. It has a wooden case. You can’t plug it into a TV anymore, because that sort of TV doesn’t exist anymore, but it’s how I first learned how to program using BASIC. It had a cassette drive that connected to it to store and load data. I would write one program at a time or I’d copy a program out of a book. Then I’d be able to play PacMan or Caterpillar, or some game I wrote, for hours and days. That computer was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I went to college at University of Washington in Seattle, and by then I had gone through a Commodore 64 and a couple of Macs: first an Apple II and then a Mac Classic. I finished degrees in statistical computing and economics at University of Washington in 1993, where there were very few women in programming and statistics.

“I grew up on a farm in Oregon in the 1970’s-80’s. My dad built a computer for me and my siblings in the late 70s when I was in grade school, and I still have it. It has a wooden case. You can’t plug it into a TV anymore, because that sort of TV doesn’t exist anymore, but it’s how I first learned how to program using BASIC. It had a cassette drive that connected to it to store and load data. I would write one program at a time or I’d copy a program out of a book. Then I’d be able to play PacMan or Caterpillar, or some game I wrote, for hours and days. That computer was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

After university I went to work for a startup cell phone company called McCaw Cellular. I was a statistician and used neural nets to do predictive modeling. I worked in the database marketing group and did analysis to predict whom to target with marketing based on how they were using their cell phones (analog phones at that time—bricks and flip phones). I was analyzing data with a Sun SPARCstation running HNC neural network software and SPSS. The SPARCstation was one of the fastest desktop computers at that time and now they are essentially doorstops—they didn’t even have 1GB of RAM and they were considered fast and powerful. [laughter]

McCaw Cellular owned the Cellular One networks in the United States and they were the largest cellphone company in the early 90’s. While I worked there, they were bought by AT&T and became a part of AT&T Wireless Services. About the same time that AT&T was buying McCaw, NCSA came out with Mosaic—the first graphical web browser. Mosaic turned into the first version of the Netscape web browser. I decided that creating things in HTML was more interesting than analyzing data and I looked for a job in San Francisco. I moved to San Francisco in 1996.

I worked for a small web company—now a huge web company called Organic Online—as their QA Manager. I left Organic to work for a startup called Electric Minds. That startup died about four months after I started there. It was 1997 and there was a lot of demand for freelance work. I started doing consulting work and then started my own consulting company.

“During the 17 years that I was the head of my own company, I would often go to meetings with prospective clients. If I brought along a man, who worked with/for me, then often the prospective client would assume he was my boss. Repeatedly—that experience never faded over all of those years.”

I named the company OTIVO and we provided a variety of research and testing consulting services—browser compatibility testing, automated testing, accessibility testing, server performance and load testing, user research and user testing. The company grew from just me to 30 people and then the NASDAQ crashed in the spring of 2000. By the end of 2000 the company had reduced to 5 people, as the dotcom bubble burst and hundreds of companies (including our clients) died.

I ran that consulting company for 17 years until I started at Dropbox about two years ago. I wanted to work with a team in a larger company and be a part of projects that lasted longer than a consulting role.

During the 17 years that I was the head of my own company, I would often go to meetings with prospective clients. If I brought along a man, who worked with/for me, then often the prospective client would assume he was my boss. Repeatedly—that experience never faded over all of those years.

“I’m acutely aware that diversity in the tech industry has progressed very little since I first started working in tech in 1993. It was mostly men then, and now, 23 years later, it’s still mostly men, particularly in engineering, product, design, and sales.”

In the fall of 2013 I put together a resume (which I hadn’t done since 1996), let everyone know I was on the market, and researched how to interview for jobs.

I joined Dropbox in May 2014 and started to grow a research team.

Tell me more about your philosophy behind growing a diverse research team at Dropbox.

I’m acutely aware that diversity in the tech industry has progressed very little since I first started working in tech in 1993. It was mostly men then, and now, 23 years later, it’s still mostly men, particularly in engineering, product, design, and sales. As I was interviewing dozens and dozens of people for research positions (to grow the team), I made a plan in my mind to create a diverse team.

A lot of people think that it’s hard to hire a diverse team in tech. It’s not. I think it’s all about where you’re looking for hires and how you’re evaluating their qualifications. If you’re relying on referrals, then you’re going to get more people like you. If you’re only looking at people from specific universities or specific companies/industries, then you’ve narrowed your pool of potential hires to a small group (who are probably fairly homogenous).

Look outside your networks, look outside specific roles, take a second or third look at a resume that you dismiss. If you don’t know the school or the company or the industry or the roles, do some research. Often you will find smart creative people who are a good fit for the role from other industries/companies/universities/roles who can apply their experience and skills very adeptly to the role you’re hiring.

“A lot of people think that it’s hard to hire a diverse team in tech. It’s not. I think it’s all about where you’re looking for hires and how you’re evaluating their qualifications. If you’re relying on referrals, then you’re going to get more people like you. If you’re only looking at people from specific universities or specific companies/industries, then you’ve narrowed your pool of potential hires to a small group (who are probably fairly homogenous).”

I hired a very diverse team of 20 people—millennials to genX (genX is “old” in the current tech industry), from a lot of different backgrounds, including different schools, races, genders, and cultures, and from a variety of different companies and industries. Some with kids (which is also not common in the current tech industry), and some queer and some straight. That team is the most diverse team at Dropbox.

Then, in February 2016, I changed my role and moved to the Marketing team. Most of the team I created has stayed in Design.

“Look outside your networks, look outside specific roles, take a second or third look at a resume that you dismiss. If you don’t know the school or the company or the industry or the roles, do some research. Often you will find smart creative people who are a good fit for the role from other industries/companies/universities/roles who can apply their experience and skills very adeptly to the role you’re hiring.”

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t joined the tech industry. In college, I was recruited to become an actuary (because I scored high on their tests). At the time, the biggest reason I didn’t consider that job is because I was told I would have to wear a dress or skirt to work. My pants and jacket weren’t acceptable office wear. That was only 20-some years ago. While the tech industry is great for individuality of expression as far as not caring whether most men or women wear dresses or suits, it doesn’t mean that women achieve the same heights of leadership. It’s disappointing, to me, that it’s 20-some years later and that great individuality of expression hasn’t bridged the diversity divide, and we’re still in some ways talking about the same (or even bigger) issues with diversity in tech.

How do you think the culmination of your background and life experience impacts your approach to research and building teams?

When you do research for a product that has hundreds of millions of people using it, then you know that those people have two things in common: (1) they’re human and (2) they’re using some device to access your product. If you’re a team that’s doing research to represent the people who use your product (or, by same logic, if you’re a product manager or designer or engineer building/designing product for those people) then it helps to have a team that represents those hundreds of millions of people.

“The more diverse your team is, the more you’ll empathize with a wider swath of the people who use your product, and the better your product will become for the people who use it. When the team gets together to meet, then there are a lot of different life experiences and perspectives to improve the discussion.”

The more diverse your team is, the more you’ll empathize with a wider swath of the people who use your product, and the better your product will become for the people who use it. When the team gets together to meet, then there are a lot of different life experiences and perspectives to improve the discussion.

For example, everybody can look at a chair and say it’s blue, but if you ask if about the chair’s style, then everyone will use their subjective experiences and knowledge and data to say something different about the chair.

Of course, you can do amazing work and create excellent products with a homogenous group. However, I’ve worked with hundreds of different teams throughout my career and have noticed that more ideas are created with a group that has more differences. It’s simply because how you experienced life lends differently to the work that you do.

For example, I grew up on a farm, you grew up in a city, I went to a public school, you went to a private school. Those experiences will give both of us different viewpoints and perspectives that will give me ideas and you ideas we wouldn’t have thought of on our own.

It’s important to show up and be yourself in tech, particularly if you aren’t a part of the majority. We all have limited time here on the planet and we’re all better for the experience of working with and collaborating with and hanging out with people who are not like us. I learn better and work better when I’m around people who aren’t all just like me.

“Of course, you can do amazing work and create excellent products with a homogenous group. However, I’ve worked with hundreds of different teams throughout my career and have noticed that more ideas are created with a group that has more differences. It’s simply because how you experienced life lends differently to the work that you do.”

I’m a middle aged lesbian, and a mother, so it’s super easy, in the tech industry, to work with people who aren’t just like me (middle aged lesbians with kids are usually a minority in tech). But I could, of course, go back to consulting, or find a company that has more people like me, and be familiar and comfortable and, quite frankly, be completely bored.

Our experience at work is made better when we work with and talk with people who didn’t have similar life/work/education experiences. We find that we all have human experiences in common that aren’t necessarily defined by demographics or university affiliations.

In your personal experience, what have been some of your biggest struggles in the industry, either as a woman or part of other minority groups?

There was an article in the New York Times recently about why young women aren’t identifying with Hillary Clinton and there was one piece in that article that really struck me. It’s that young women in college haven’t been in a workplace yet so they don’t identify with somebody who talks about workplace struggles because that’s not something that’s happened to them yet. But women over 30 tend to identify more with Hillary Clinton because, when she talks about issues in the workplace, those women have already been in the workplace long enough that they’ve seen things happen, and they realize, “Oh, yeah. This is true.” That was me in my 20’s—I’d had a few experiences of gender discrimination but I wasn’t yet a parent and I hadn’t yet had decades of work experience and micro-aggressions and discrimination based on my gender.

I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that it’s sometimes more difficult for women to get promoted because it’s the men who are doing the promoting and they tend to promote other men. I’ve noticed this across dozens of companies where I’ve consulted or worked—not any specific company. The people who are in charge of hiring or promotions often tend towards hiring and promoting the people who look like them.

“I’ve noticed, anecdotally, that it’s sometimes more difficult for women to get promoted because it’s the men who are doing the promoting and they tend to promote other men. I’ve noticed this across dozens of companies where I’ve consulted or worked—not any specific company. The people who are in charge of hiring or promotions often tend towards hiring and promoting the people who look like them.”

This means that if you’re a woman you have to do more to make yourself stand out and be noticed, because you don’t just automatically stand out and be noticed because you don’t look like the people who are making the decisions. That was the theme in the article about Hillary Clinton. In my experience, most women I’ve worked with have experienced or heard stories of seeing men get promoted and recognized when the women are doing exactly the same work. I would love to see someone do research and put hard and fast numbers on this but, since this happens inside of groups and teams, you can’t easily do research on that.

You’ve stuck it out and there are positives to your career. And you’ve done a lot of amazing things. I’m curious, what’s the glue that holds you in place? What are the things about your work that really continues to activate you and what else is keeping you here? Is it support networks? Has it been mentors?

I love the tech industry for the challenges and problems to solve. There’s always more to do than time in the day and it forces prioritization and organization. I like working on a team of people who are working on different projects. I started to get lonely towards the end of the 17 years of running a consulting company. It’s more social, with more opportunities to get to know different perspectives, in a larger company.

I saw a friend of mine recently who has also been running his own consulting company for a while, and he asked me, “Do you miss it?” And I immediately responded, “Absolutely not.” As much the continued diversity issues in tech frustrate me, I still love working in tech.

I like it for working on problems and solving things, or not solving things, or creating things and failing, or creating things and succeeding. It’s much more interesting to me than the consulting work I did where I’d work with a company for four months, work on one thing and then leave. I like being in a more dynamic atmosphere. Tech gives you that, and other industries give you that too—medicine gives you that, law can give you that, politics gives you that. There are a bunch of different types of work that give you that.

“There’s a stereotype of women, of moms and of grandmas, of not being tech-savvy (though most women over 70 are quite tech-savvy). Also there’s an assumption that I often hear, that if you’re over 40 or over 50 then you aren’t a tech native and you probably have a hard time with technology compared with a millennial. I’m not offended. When I hear this (at least once/week) then I point out that I’m one of billions of people in my age group who know how to do a lot more than just turn their phone on and off.”

Back to ageism, I’m curious to know if you have started experiencing any. You joked about being people’s mom’s age, but I’m curious to know if you’ve started experiencing what might be microaggressions, or if you’ve been hearing about the same kind of things from your peers, that sort of thing.

If you glance at me you might not think that I’m in my mid-40’s, so people usually think that I’m in my 30s and say things to me like, “We need to make this easy enough for moms to use. Moms can’t usually figure out something like this.” I’ll let them talk some more about their ideas and then I’ll mention that I’m a mom. Or someone will say, “only young people do this, like you and me” And I’ll ask, “What’s young? I’m in my mid-40’s.” Being tech-savvy or using a lot of tech is not only the domain of people under 35 (any more).

There’s a stereotype of women, of moms and of grandmas, of not being tech-savvy (though most women over 70 are quite tech-savvy). Also there’s an assumption that I often hear, that if you’re over 40 or over 50 then you aren’t a tech native and you probably have a hard time with technology compared with a millennial. I’m not offended. When I hear this (at least once/week) then I point out that I’m one of billions of people in my age group who know how to do a lot more than just turn their phone on and off.

From a high level, how do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What excites you about the future? What frustrates you and would you like to see change?

I wish someone would solve the video conferencing problem—video conferencing still does not work really well. I want a less bulky Android watch. The new ASUS zenwatch is smaller than the first one but still not slim and streamlined.

I anticipate some general anxiety about the tech industry because I think that we’ve already hit a bubble and we haven’t realized it yet. I fear we may see lots of companies dying and we are already seeing people leaving the city and getting laid off.  I hope this year doesn’t become as bad as I fear.

I’m also curious to see what happens with all of the contract work that people are doing because there aren’t good laws to protect contractors. A lot of tech companies have started up in the last few years that rely on contractors. I don’t know if it will happen this year or next year but it will happen sometime soon; either people will band together and unionize or they’ll start demanding higher wages or demand to be employees, or all of the above.

I believe and hope that automation and assistive robotics will become more integrated into our lives over the next 3-5 years.

“I anticipate some general anxiety about the tech industry because I think that we’ve already hit a bubble and we haven’t realized it yet. I fear we may see lots of companies dying and we are already seeing people leaving the city and getting laid off.  I hope this year doesn’t become as bad as I fear.”

My last question for you would be, what advice would you have to folks from similar backgrounds to you hoping to get into tech?

Getting to know as many different types of people as possible will help you in any career, but it will particularly help you in tech, because tech is basically a network of people who will keep you and hold on to you if you belong to the group.

As soon as people know who you are—they know what your skills and experience are, they’ve worked with you, they’ve done something with you, they’ve enjoyed conversations with you—they will stick with you. And I think that that isn’t valued enough, and it certainly wasn’t valued by me when I was straight out of college or in my mid-20s. I just thought, “Whatever, I know everything, I can do anything, nobody will ever discriminate against me.”

Now I know it’s imminently important to show up, to get to know lots of different types of people and to be present and to talk and be true to myself. If I show up and I talk and I connect and I listen and I make conversation then I’m a whole person instead of a middle aged woman, a cute woman, a potential date, a young woman, whatever it is that you’re judged/labelled in the first couple seconds you’re seen.

“Now I know it’s imminently important to show up, to get to know lots of different types of people and to be present and to talk and be true to myself. If I show up and I talk and I connect and I listen and I make conversation then I’m a whole person instead of a middle aged woman, a cute woman, a potential date, a young woman, whatever it is that you’re judged/labelled in the first couple seconds you’re seen.”

I moved to the Bay Area from New York City in January 2015. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. My parents moved to DC in the early 1970s for work. I don’t think they ever thought that they would stay there as long as they did but they both began their careers in DC. My dad’s originally from Brooklyn and my mother is from Germany. They now spend half their time in New York and half in DC.

New York is really home for me. That’s where most of my friends and family are. I moved there for college in 1997 and pretty much stayed through the end of 2014.

Tell me a little bit about your legal background.

I went to (City University of New York) CUNY School of Law, which is one of the rare, public interest law programs that exists in the country. The curriculum focuses on “client-centered lawyering,” and Queens, where the law school is located, is said to be the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world. As a student I worked on public benefits, housing, immigration, and domestic violence related cases. It was a great place to work on cases because the clients were so diverse and they brought with them so many different ideas about how they wanted to resolve their issues.

My career after law school spanned legal and non-traditionally legal work but all in the social justice / nonprofit sector. In 2010, I began working with a criminal defense firm that handled mostly federal cases. I primarily worked on what are known as “CJA” or “Criminal Justice Act” cases, which are indigent defense cases assigned to private attorneys by the federal courts.

There’s a lot of dysfunction in our criminal justice system and being surrounded by problems can be exciting. The difficult part though is that often your hands are tied, and that’s the real struggle. You see tragedy on a daily basis, and for most things, you can’t do much to make things better. For me, the victories were typically small ones—shaving off a few years of someone’s sentence, securing a decent plea agreement from an aggressive prosecutor, visiting a client in jail when the vending machine is actually working so that you can buy him some junk food. Small victories. I think this is particularly true for federal criminal defense work, which is mostly what I did.

Walk me through your transition towards tech.

I started with creative projects that presented experiences of criminal justice in the U.S., and I turned to digital technology as a tool. I launched my first project, a questions and answer project called Ask a Prisoner, at the New Museum’s Ideas City StreetFest in 2013. It was a collaborative effort with a friend, Sheila Rule, and the Civic Duty Initiative, which is a group of incarcerated men committed to giving back to the communities that they once harmed. The project lives on a Tumblr site. It was super simple.

A few months later, I ran into an old friend, Luke DuBois, who had just recently been appointed the director of a digital media program housed within NYU Engineering School. We started talking about things, I told him a little bit about what I was working on and thinking about. He successfully sold me on enrolling in his program.

Going back to graduate school changed a lot for me. Initially, I wanted to make art and tell stories. But most of the courses I took were about digital product development and user experience design. And then, I naturally gravitated towards product development in the areas that I already thought a lot about—the law, the criminal justice system, government. A professor of mine, Beth Noveck, introduced me to the civic technology world—building digital tools to help government provide better services. For a course of hers that I took during my first semester, I developed a simple data project through which I transformed clunky data from the New York State Parole Board’s website into a more usable format for researchers. At the time, I was representing a man in front of the parole board so the course gave me an opportunity to think about my legal practice from a new angle.

For 2015, I worked as a fellow with Code for America, which gave me an opportunity to build a digital civic engagement tool in collaboration with two other teammates. I recently accepted a position with 18F, a consultancy that helps federal agencies develop better ways of delivering digital services.

What is it like working in Civic Tech and Silicon Valley?

The civic tech world is pretty wonderful, I find. I really feel like I stumbled into a community of smart, thoughtful, hard working, creative people with diverse talents. I’m working on similar issues to those that I handled as a lawyer, since usually my legal work involved managing interactions between individuals and government agencies (whether that individual was trying to secure public benefits or challenge a criminal charge). My work now focuses on systemic change rather than client advocacy, but the end goal is similar: to make government better serve the public interest. Right now is a particularly exciting time to work on digitizing government services because it’s relatively new. The agency that I’m working with, 18F, hasn’t even been around for 2 years. I feel like we’re all figuring out a new path together, which is exciting.

As far as Silicon Valley, I don’t go there that often since I work mostly in San Francisco. Even the metaphorical Silicon Valley.

I guess I’ll mention the emphasis on change, impact, and scalability. Lots of people want to make things really big around here. But I’m used to representing individuals. So in the past, keeping a client from serving a prison sentence would be an example of success. And hearing updates from them over the years about how they’re doing alright would bring me happiness. In other words, the personal relationships were what made the work meaningful for me.

I hear more of this ‘big’ talk when I’m  out and about, at conferences, or at social events. I hear public interest work talked about as “change making.”  I often hear people say things like, “I really want to make ‘impact’” even though they’ve likely never even volunteered an hour at a soup kitchen. I hear people talk about how big they want to make something before being clear about what the actually want to do, and why they want to do that thing. Scalability and impact make sense when you’re selling something, and I think this is one reason why people talk about this so much out here—most people in tech are in the business of creating products for market. But when you’re caring for people, these terms can come off as dehumanizing and impatient. For me, it kind of shoves the heart of public interest work out of the conversation.

I’d love to hear anymore differences that you’ve noticed switching industries, switching cultures. What else has been noticeably different for you?

A lawyer friend once said to me, “there’s no beta appellate brief.” I think that really sums working in law versus working in early stage product design. In law, you don’t really get to get feedback and do it over in the same way.  You polish up your work and you put it out there and that’s it. And there’s a lot at stake.  The law is iterative if you look at how our laws adjust over time, but practicing law isn’t that way.

In your point of view, for the question of what struggles have you faced during your time in tech, you just put the two words “fitting in.” I’m curious to hear you elaborate.

Yeah, in ways, I feel like a bit of an oddball. I’m a lawyer by training though these days I work mostly with designers and developers. I often find myself thinking about risk mitigation when colleagues are thinking about creating cool, cutting-edge features. I think we learn a lot from each other, but I notice how much my background influences the way I think about my current work on product teams.

Something I am focused on is how one’s life experience perfectly informs us for the roles we play in this tech world. You could have spent 15 years doing something in tech, but that would not have equipped you mentally or emotionally for what you’re doing now. But it’s common for people to not value a breadth of experience versus laser-sharp specialization. It’s ironic.

True! Perhaps because it’s harder to measure and to understand? But I also feel like here there is a certain softness and acceptance towards people who’ve taken different paths and changed. I think in New York it’s it’s much more like, “how many years did you stay there? Where did you go to school? What is your linear trajectory?”  And here if you say, “I did this, and then it didn’t feel right, so then I did that.”  People are like, “Cool, tell me more about that.”

I think about the differences between New York and San Francisco. In New York, there are so many more equalizers. In food, there’s the dollar slice, the bagel, everybody eats those. Everybody engages in some of the same core things in that city, and it preserves culture in a way that it doesn’t, here. 

The subway functions as an equalizer as well. It’s cheap, it runs all night, it goes almost everywhere, and most people use it—regardless of income, age, nationality, etc.

There’s a lot more mixing in New York than there is in the Bay Area. It’s a much larger city than San Francisco so there’s more opportunity to have interaction with people who are different from you.  And living is rougher there so everyone is familiar with putting up with discomfort, having less space, less quiet, and making the best out of what there is in the moment. Exploration is a big part of enjoying New York—discovering something new or opening up to a new kind of conversation. So when tech companies offer in house food, in house health care, transportation—they’re consequently isolating their staff from these things. It’s good to have all of these perks but it’s also not good.

What do you see yourself doing in the future?

I definitely feel like I’ve found a cohort in the civic tech community. Then, having practiced law, I care a lot about applying my new skills to help to under resourced advocates including legal aid attorneys. I also think about teaching and writing.

What advice would you have for someone working in tech who wants to use their skills for the greater good?

There are many local nonprofits with thin resources that are doing really important work like protecting digital rights, increasing digital literacy, and just more generally using technology to serve the public interest rather than to create commercial products. And then there are many Bay Area organizations that are not tech-oriented but care for the many marginalized individuals throughout the Bay area. Idealist.org is a good place to look and see what interests you.

Give yourself space to try to learn about a new problem without feeling pressure to build anything. If the only thing you are able to accomplish is that you start to understand and relate to someone else’s struggle, you’ve done something hugely important. If you are up for talking about what you learned with others, maybe writing about it, that’s another helpful that you can do. Just because you’re an engineer or a designer or whatever you normally do, doesn’t mean that that’s all you have to offer.

Be ok with small victories. It takes time, resources, and support to build tools that will actually be useful. Social problems are typically complex and involve lots of stakeholders. It’s hard. I’m a big advocate of supporting existing projects rather than trying to start something of your own from the start.

Support efforts to make your workplaces more inclusive environments.

If you are interested in helping improve government service delivery, check out 18F and USDS as they’re always looking to grow their teams. Code for America focuses on improving service delivery at the city and county levels and they have local volunteer groups called brigades that lead weekly hacknights.

If none of this stuff interests you, giving money to local community based organizations works too.