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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

Tell me more about the Ascend project.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are there social good hackathons yet?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you. That makes me feel great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, I still do.

And how do you overcome that?

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, very cool. Hopefully good things!

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

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

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

Exactly.

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

Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I grew up in New York city in the upper west side of Manhattan, which is very diverse. My mom is black and my dad is white so I grew up in a mixed-race household and went to a very diverse public school growing up. And so, I had the quite fortunate experience of growing up surrounded by a very brilliant, multicultural set of people for pretty much my entire childhood.

How do you feel like that’s shaped you in your work?

I loved growing up in New York City. There are a lot of points of independence that I took for granted as a kid there. I mean, I was getting myself to and from school and playdates by the time I was 11. You see everything in New York. You see wealth. You see poverty. You see the best and the worst of society. You see people from all backgrounds. You hear every language being spoken on a daily basis. It’s just such a multicultural upbringing, that I think it really shaped my view of what the world can or should look like.

I’m curious to know if you had any inclinations growing up that you would end up in the tech industry. What did you think you were going to be as a kid?

I never thought I’d end up in the tech industry. As a little kid, I thought I wanted to be a pediatrician, because that was like the only job that I understood. But, I never was interested in tech until coming out to Stanford and spending time in Silicon Valley.

“You see everything in New York. You see wealth. You see poverty. You see the best and the worst of society. You see people from all backgrounds. You hear every language being spoken on a daily basis. It’s just such a multicultural upbringing, that I think it really shaped my view of what the world can or should look like.”

What was the impetus for that?

I felt like I wanted to go back to school because I wanted to learn how to build a better non-profit. I was kind of just disillusioned with the disconnect between revenues and expenses of the non-profit sector. You’re always begging for money. So I decided the quickest way to figure out how to be able to do that was to go to grad school. And Stanford, of all the business schools in particular that I visited, seemed to have by far the most diverse student body in terms of professional background and professional address. It was the only place I went where I didn’t feel like a total freak for trying to do something in the non-profit sector.

I was in Harvard when Zuckerberg started Facebook. There was no (the way there is I think in so many college campuses today) dialogue around entrepreneurship and tech. It was like, “Oh, there’s this weird thing that we log into and you can post your photos.” It wasn’t in my vocabulary until coming to Silicon Valley.

Tell me more about your time at Stanford. Obviously what you do now came out of that, but what were your first impressions of Silicon Valley and of Stanford Academia, and this whole kind of new tech world that suddenly you find yourself in?

My first impression was that I was horrified because you had to drive a car to get anywhere and I’d never lived in a place where that was a requirement! I found it very isolating at first.  I was used to being in cities where you walk around and you see the life and the industry. In New York, it’s obvious how much is going on. You walk out on any street in Silicon Valley and it looks like nothing is happening, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I became more curious as I had more exposure, but I think the main thing was that the mindset out here was so different than what I was used to. The East Coast tends to be more traditional. People here are always interested in the disruption or the next new thing. If you have an idea, the response is often, ”Go for it. Try it out.”

“I sat down with Tristan for coffee. We started talking about the fact that, by year 2040, people of color will be the majority in the U.S. He’d read a book that projected the demise of the middle class as accelerated by the adoption of technology and was in a place of—if this is what’s at risk, how do we make sure that disenfranchised communities aren’t further disenfranchised by the adoption and of technology? That was what lead to the impetus for the idea—how do we make the tech sector more inclusive so that people of color—Blacks and Latinos in particular—are not kind of left further on the sidelines further oppressed as our economy rapidly transitions towards a technology-enabled, technology-driven economy.”

Walk me through the moment of creation of CODE2040.

The moment of creation came about almost a year after Tristan and I had left Stanford. I did a year of business school and was trying to figure out what to do over the summer, and a friend of a friend was starting a tech company and they had a product that was in soft-mode that they were interested in rolling out across college campuses. I had, in another lifetime started a program on a college campus and had this experience in getting a bunch of shoes galvanized around an idea, and they were like, ”Cool. Just take that and write a roll-out plan for the products.” It felt like something I could properly figure out. So I went and joined this company for a summer internship with the roll-out plan. I ended up running the product team, which included kind of a segment of the company. But because my background was not in product development when I took over the work, I took an approach of systems and process design that would allow for maximal creative input and use of data. That led me to work very closely with the engineering team, the QA team, the design team. I got a real appreciation of those skillsets. There is a lot of understanding that I did there as well, about engineers’ needs.

I transitioned myself out of the organization because having a non-technical person running product for a developer facing product did not make sense. I was coming out of that when I sat down with Tristan for coffee. We started talking about the fact that, by year 2040, people of color will be the majority in the U.S. He’d read a book that projected the demise of the middle class as accelerated by the adoption of technology and was in a place of—if this is what’s at risk, how do we make sure that disenfranchised communities aren’t further disenfranchised by the adoption and of technology? That was what lead to the impetus for the idea—how do we make the tech sector more inclusive so that people of color—Blacks and Latinos in particular—are not kind of left further on the sidelines further oppressed as our economy rapidly transitions towards a technology-enabled, technology-driven economy.

What has been the most exciting and activating parts of your work since its creation?

It’s hard to choose. I think that it’s been really exciting to see how individuals have been catalyzed by their time with us. They’re so talented, but a lot of them don’t have the access to the breadth of opportunities that could really launch them into being leaders in the field. But I think one of the most gratifying pieces of what we do has been working with the tech companies. It’s certainly not true across the board, but there are companies out there who feel like they don’t know how to do diversity right. To be a place where those companies can go and have that conversation and get resources, that starts initiate systems change. I think the third piece is probably the hardest to quantify or measure, but is about amplifying others. People on Twitter reach out and are say, “I just want you to know that I am so happy that you are doing this work because I feel less alone.”

What have been some of the biggest roadblocks and struggles as an entrepreneur and in building this product?

It’s been really hard for me to wrap my head around actually being the CEO and what that means in terms of terms of how I act and how people view me. I prefer to empower people around me. To take on as much responsibility as is humanly possible, and probably more than is healthy sometimes. I believe very strongly in distributed responsibility. I believe in a hierarchy, but you push decision making down the chain as much as possible. It’s really hard for me to remember that people really look to me for a specific level of authority and that my title conveys something, rightly or wrongly about who I am and the level of importance that I hold. I think that has been my struggle that has led me to be really slow to make certain choices or improvements in ways that I think has then made my own job harder.

“It’s certainly not true across the board, but there are companies out there who feel like they don’t know how to do diversity right. To be a place where those companies can go and have that conversation and get resources, that starts initiate systems change.”

What were some roadblocks specifically to launching 2040?

They’ve shifted a lot. Initially the big question was, “How do we get companies to believe that there is black female talent out there, that is ‘qualified’?” I would say our first inflection point was two years in when enough companies had had terrific experiences with us, that it switched to entirely inbound companies who want to work with us and hire our students. We ended up throttling our growth. That’s just really hard, period. I don’t know anybody who can solve that well-—anybody who has made that extremely efficient. I’d say for the next two years, that was a real throttle for us. How do we solve those operational expansions? We’re 18 people on staff now but we could have twice as many people and that would be super helpful. But that’s twice as expensive. Now, it’s a matter of how do we create a growth plan that’s really thoughtful and then funded in a way that’s really thoughtful. Now, it’s the question of how and when do we invest for growth. That’s the hardest challenge that we’re facing right now—how do we get the right resources someplace and deploy them as efficiently as possible.

“Black and Latina/o students often say, ‘Why would I want to go to an industry where I can never advance, and nobody’s going to value me and I’m going to feel like an outsider?'”

In watching your fellows move through the industry, what have you all learned through your experience about the cultural and behavioral patterns in tech around people of color?

A lot. We’ve seen a real and really beneficial shift in the narrative over the last four years. When we started CODE2040, the dominant narrative at the time was that tech is meritocracy. If there aren’t people of color in the industry, that’s because they don’t deserve to be there. We managed to move to a place where people were willing to question that assumption, but still felt like, “Well, yeah, maybe they deserve to be there, but we can’t find them. They don’t exist.”

I think people are still trying to figure out what is that other thing that is happening. A piece of it that we know from working with 75 tech companies and close to 200 students in the fall’s program alone, is that there is a culture component. It is a combination of a retention issue, and people who opt out. Black and Latina/o students often say, “Why would I want to go to an industry where I can never advance, and nobody’s going to value me and I’m going to feel like an outsider?”

I think there’s also a growing dialogue now about this false idea of the “hiring bar.” There just is no objective set of standards around hiring. I think what we certainly believe is that there is actually is no good measurement right now. We need to get better at that.

“When we started CODE2040, the dominant narrative at the time was that tech is meritocracy. If there aren’t people of color in the industry, that’s because they don’t deserve to be there. We managed to move to a place where people were willing to question that assumption, but still felt like, ‘Well, yeah, maybe they deserve to be there, but we can’t find them. They don’t exist.'”

What have been your biggest motivators in your work? What at the core drives you?

I’ve always, since I was a kid, had a really strong sense of fairness and justice. It’s not about who’s inherently good, bad, right or wrong, but there’s all these unseen threads that influence how we each act and achieve and show up on a day to day basis. I think that CODE2040 has obviously a strong direct service component. We work directly with students, we’re not an advocacy organization, but we do all that in service of being able to create larger systems change.

How do you think your background impacts the way you approach your work?

Essentially, CODE2040 is this giant code switch for people on both sides. Like how, if you’re a person of color, you had a certain set of life experiences. How do you show up in a room that looks like a tech company? And if you are a tech company, how do you show up in a way that lets people who just don’t approach the world the way you approach the world be included and comfortable? I was in enough diverse rooms growing up that I knew it was possible and that it didn’t have to be weird and uncomfortable. It could be super normal. This whole idea of  discomfort with diversity just never crossed my mind.

“Essentially, CODE2040 is this giant code switch for people on both sides. Like how, if you’re a person of color, you had a certain set of life experiences. How do you show up in a room that looks like a tech company? And if you are a tech company, how do you show up in a way that lets people who just don’t approach the world the way you approach the world be included and comfortable?”

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

In a lot of ways I’m way more optimistic than I was a few years back. I think tech has always been good at iterating and learning and failing forward and all of that. It’s historically been relegated to products and not people and I think we’re starting to see that ethos move into the people’s space as well. But there’s also a big question mark in my mind around—as tech becomes more pervasive across industries and across the country, now what? What does it look like when there’s a thriving tech sector in Austin? In Durham? All these places that have wildly different backgrounds and backdrops than California, both economically, culturally, ethnically, in terms of industry. I think tech in the future is going to look wildly different than it does today and I don’t know what it will look like.

How do you think tech can do a better job accommodating people of color right now?

One, we need to get serious about doing better on hiring. Treating that as a real competency where people are trained and there’s more structure around it. It’s like way too loose right now. So many companies have the intention to be more diverse but don’t actually have the actions to back it up. Tech undervalues HR.

The other piece is recognizing how important culture is and that it’s really hard to change. You have to seed it at the beginning but it’s possible to change it if it’s important to you.

What advice would you give to young folks, people of color, who really like tech and want to get into it?

Find your “tribe.” I find my most effective mentors are my peers, people who have different strengths and skill sets but also people who just have my back and who I can admit my failures to. I think if you’re in a situation where you’re not around your network, crafting a professional one can go a long way to making it feel like a more welcoming and exciting place.

“Find your ‘tribe.’ I find my most effective mentors are my peers, people who have different strengths and skill sets but also people who just have my back and who I can admit my failures to. I think if you’re in a situation where you’re not around your network, crafting a professional one can go a long way to making it feel like a more welcoming and exciting place.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh my gosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow. How did you end up in tech?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How’s your daughter liking San Francisco?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t pinpoint a specific moment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s been surprisingly positive.

That’s good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s so frustrating.

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

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

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

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

What are your biggest motivators?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



What has your experience been building Front & Center?

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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

What would you say are your big motivators?

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Full disclosure: I basically have handlers who will make sure I don’t say anything too off-color. But generally, the only things I avoid saying are partisan things because I run a non-partisan organization. Talking about being a woman in technology, or a gay woman in technology in San Francisco, is not partisan.

Or a “loud-mouth lady gay,” as you called yourself in your application?

Yeah. Being a loud-mouth lady gay led to me realizing that, “Oh my God, I’m no longer suited to work for other people.” The last boss I ever had said that she thought I would do much better working by myself. She was correct.

Okay. So let’s start from the beginning, Tell me a bit about your early years and where you come from.

I am from Brooklyn. I’m a fifth generation Brooklynite. My family has been there since 1890 on the maternal side and since 1910 or so on the paternal side. So we’re pretty run-of-the-mill Eastern European Jews who left Europe when Europe became less-hospitable. I’m from the part of the Brooklyn where the accent is from and where hipsters still don’t live. So when you think artisanal crafts, do not think of the Brooklyn that I grew up in or the Brooklyn that my mother currently lives in. My mother would have no idea by what you meant by “artisanal soap,” “artisanal candles,” “artisanal gefilte fish.” She just wouldn’t know what any of that means.

I respect that. What part?

Bensonhurst.

Bensonhurst, I do not know Bensonhurst.

Bensonhurst is where the “Honeymooners” took place, where “Welcome Back, Kotter” took place, and where “Saturday Night Fever” took place.

Wow, that’s really amazing. No, you don’t have an accent, but you have the East coast swagger, which I appreciate as a fellow-East coaster.

Thank you.

When did you first get interested in tech, and separately, when did you become interested in politics?

Those actually overlap a bit. I’m older than I look, so the first time that I used the internet was my first week of college. This was 1995 and I was definitely an early adopter. I was one of the first people in my circle to learn HTML, and I took some entry level design courses in college.

I first became strongly interested in politics the night of the 2000 Presidential election. I was with a group of friends in North Hampton, Massachusetts, and we were watching the returns. When Florida went blue my friends were like, “Okay, great, Gore’s president,” and went to sleep. I was like, “I’m just going to stay awake and watch the rest of the returns.” This meant I was awake and alone when Florida was suddenly red.

“Being a loud-mouth lady gay led to me realizing that, ‘Oh my God, I’m no longer suited to work for other people.’ The last boss I ever had said that she thought I would do much better working by myself. She was correct.”

Keep in mind it was the middle of the night in Florida when this happened. First the state was declared for Gore and then — what was the story? — they found a truck filled with ballots for the Republican candidate, George W. Bush. This was a very surprising thing to happen in the middle of the night, and a very surprising thing to happen in what was an overwhelmingly Jewish section of Florida. And then the recount dragged on forever and wound up at the Supreme Court.

I think that night was the first time I became cognizant of how important voter turnout is. The presidential election should never come down to multiple recounts of ballots in a single county in America. At the same time, I was young and doing other things with my life. In 2004, I decided it was time to get more involved in politics. I met Sharif, a man who was staring a project called Swing the State. People would register as volunteer online with Swing the State, and Sharif would help them travel into swing states to do voter registration and get out the vote work. I told Sharif I wanted to help, and that was that. I was somewhat technical at that point, and this was a highly technical project. It was really just Swing the State and MoveOn.org that were organizing volunteers online and then deploying them on the ground back then. Swing the State was my first political tech project. I just kept going from there.

So, at first, you were working in tech, and politics was a hobby?

No, actually, I was investigating police misconduct for the City of New York.

Okay, walk me through this whole thing. I’m going to stop talking. You take me from the beginning.

My career path makes absolutely no sense. Let’s set the stage. It’s 2000 and I lived in Western Mass, because that’s where I thought young lesbians lived. In 2001, I came to my senses and moved back to New York, because it turned out that Western Mass is actually where middle-aged lesbians live. So, I moved back to New York, and puttered around for a bit. In 2004 I got a job investigating police misconduct for the City of New York. This was an awesome job: I had a badge, and cops had to answer to me, and that was great. I met Sharif that year and started running Swing the State in my spare time with Sharif and about ten of our friends. This was a fiercely partisan project. We were like, “We do not want George W. Bush to win re-election. That would be terrible, we must put an immediate end to this.”

The 2004 election did not work out the way we wanted the 2004 election to work out. I continued investigating police misconduct until 2007. Then I got a phone call from a friend from college and he offered me a job at MySpace.com. I literally hadn’t heard from this guy in years. Do you remember MySpace?

I was very active on MySpace. It took me a long time to get it out of my top Google results.

Oh, that’s really funny. I was active on Friendster and then someone I worked with investigating police misconduct literally said to me, “Oh that’s right, you’re old. You people are all still on Friendster. Young people are on MySpace.” And I was like, “I’m young too!” So I created a MySpace profile that I literally never checked. I never really used MySpace until my friend from college called to offer me this job. I was wholly unqualified for this job —I feel like this is a key part of this story. But he knew that I had been running a civic tech project, and as far as he was concerned this meant i worked in technology. I was like, “No, no, no, I have passion projects in technology.” But, you know, this was 2007 and you could accept jobs that you weren’t remotely qualified for. So in 2007 I stopped investigating police misconduct, moved from New York City to Los Angeles, and started working at MySpace.com when MySpace was pretty much the center of the online universe.

I got to LA and realized I didn’t actually have any friends in LA. This meant I had a lot of downtime and decided it was time to start another election project. And that’s where Long Distance Voter comes from. From me not having any friends in Los Angeles.

“This was 2007 and you could accept jobs that you weren’t remotely qualified for. So in 2007 I stopped investigating police misconduct, moved from New York City to Los Angeles, and started working at MySpace.com when MySpace was pretty much the center of the online universe.”

That’s beautiful.

It’s amazing what not having friends will do for your spare time and your creative drive. So backing up a bit, in 2004 I thought that the best way to increase voter turnout was to register more voters. This was a very common thought back then. So Swing the State and our partner groups, like Acorn and America Coming Together (rest in peace both groups), were part of this massive, nationwide, voter registration effort. At the end of the day, it didn’t seem to have much of an impact on turnout. Progressives were out registering conservatives four to one, but we certainly weren’t winning elections.

By 2006, I started to wonder if voter registration was related to voter turnout in any way. I’m not an academic, I didn’t have an actual funds to study this, but my gut told me to focus on something other than voter registration. I decided that my next project was going to focus on some group of people who were already registered to vote, who were highly motivated to vote, and who had some sort of roadblock that I could clear using the internet. If we’re being honest, I mostly wanted to stop doing door-to-door voter registration. I’d done a ton of that in 2004 and 2006 and it was just terrible. So late in 2006 I decided I would never again carry a clipboard.

Anyway, so now it’s 2006 and I’m in Vegas—where all great ideas are born—at a brand new political conference called Yearly Kos. A group of us were sitting around, and my friend John wanted to go ride a mechanical bull. Everyone was drunk, and I was like, “Do not go ride a mechanical bull. This is a terrible idea. Instead of riding a mechanical bull, I need you to help me figure out something.” And John was like, “What?” I was like, “I need to come up with a group of people who are already registered to vote, who are highly motivated to vote, have some sort of roadblock that we can clear using the Internet, because I really, really do not want to have to go door-to-door every again.” And he was like, “What about absentee voters?” And I was like, “What?” And he was like, “When I did absentee in college, it was really confusing and I’m still not sure if my absentee ballot was counted. Is anyone running an absentee ballot project?” And I was like, “I don’t think so.” And he was like, “Great, we should do that,” and then went off to ride this mechanical bull. And that is Long Distance Voter’s origin story.

“I’m working at Myspace during the day as a product manager. So during the day I’m identifying what people need from the internet, and what sort of tools we should build, and how you could run an engineering team. At night, I’m working with my friends, and we’re doing our nerdy voting project. I continued this pattern of having working as a product manager during the day, and volunteering with my friends to save democracy at night, through several jobs.”

I don’t remember how riding the mechanical bull worked out for John. He obviously lived to the morning, because we were all fine the next day. Anyway, that conversation happened in 2006. In 2007, I moved to Los Angeles, had no friends, and reached back out to John about his absentee ballot website. John and I recruited a bunch of our former coworkers (we had all investigated police misconduct together for the City of New York) and we started building the Long Distance Voter website. We had $5,000. I think there were ten of us—there were ten of us. Everyone took five states. We called the Secretaries of State, we asked them to walk us through it. We called every Secretary of State in America, and we asked them how you voted absentee in their state. (This is incredibly boring, I realize. Just picture us all investigating police misconduct, that makes it more exciting.) We built what was essentially a Wiki, with one page per state, and we had our first half million visitors within six months. So, we were like, “Alright, let’s keep doing this. We’re awesome.” And so we kept working on the site. Everyone was a volunteer.

We added more features to the site because users asked us to. People asked, “Hey, how come you don’t have a voter registration tool?” So we threw the Rock the Vote voter registration tool into the site, and quickly became Rock the Vote’s number one partner — in terms of registrations — out of 500 groups using their tool. People started asking us when early voting happens, so we created early voting page which is still the first hit on Google. So we just kept going with the site.

Meanwhile, I’m working at Myspace during the day as a product manager. So during the day I’m identifying what people need from the internet, and what sort of tools we should build, and how you could run an engineering team. At night, I’m working with my friends, and we’re doing our nerdy voting project. I continued this pattern of having working as a product manager during the day, and volunteering with my friends to save democracy at night, through several jobs.

That’s amazing.

Thank you. It makes no sense though. Everyone in voting assumed this was my full-time job. I’ve been Debra Cleaver from Long Distance Voters since 2008. At the same exact time, I was Debra Cleaver from Myspace, then Debra Cleaver from Truecar.com, and then Debra Cleaver from Change.org. It’s like I was Batman, but less cool. I had an election alter ego who did not get to wear a mask and a suit.

I feel like we’ve I’ve heard a lot of exciting things you’ve worked on, have we missed any of the really proud and exciting things?

No. Honestly, spending my twenties investigating police misconduct for the City of New York was awesome. I would also say—and this is a fact—that the New York City Police Department is the best trained, most heavily regulated, police department in the world. The fact that New York City has civilian oversight is really meaningful. A lot of the nonsense that happens in other places does not happen in New York, or doesn’t happen without immediate repercussion. New York City’s Internal Affairs Bureau is the model for Internal Affairs departments throughout the country. Living outside of New York, I’m astonished that there are police departments with no civilian oversight. If the police are only accountable to themselves, and not to civilians, then we are living in a police state. That is the literal definition of a police state: one where the police are only accountable to themselves. In New York City, the police are ultimately accountable to the civilians that they police. That doesn’t seem to to be the case outside of New York. New York City is certainly not without its racial and systemic biases, obviously, but it never felt like the wild west. Outside of New York, things seem nuts right now in terms of police misconduct.

What have been your biggest struggles over your career path, be it directly related to work or even personal? What have been the hardships you’ve had to overcome?

I loved investigating police misconduct. It was just awesome. I was also our union shop steward. In addition to investigating police misconduct and running Swing the State with my friends, I also engaged in a three-year battle with management. I filed all these large group grievances against management, and won them all, and that was just amazing. So I had this really amazing time, investigating police misconduct, and being a bad-ass, and driving the management nuts, and being a union shop steward. And then one day I realized, “I need to get the hell out of government.” Once you win massive group grievances, your career is pretty much over, you’re black-balled.

“Working at MySpace was amazing. If you saw a woman in the engineering department, there was a very good chance she was in charge of her team. The MySpace technical team was run by women. So my introduction to working in tech was to have all these bad-ass, fierce, unapologetic women running the show.”

So, MySpace came at the exact right time. Working at MySpace was amazing. If you saw a woman in the engineering department, there was a very good chance she was in charge of her team. The MySpace technical team was run by women. So my introduction to working in tech was to have all these bad-ass, fierce, unapologetic women running the show. The women were incredibly smart and really scary, and they’ve accepted me as one of their own, and I always had a great time at work. The guys at work would tell me that that wasn’t the case at other tech companies and that their wives and girlfriends had a much harder time working in tech. And, I said, “Oh, that’s weird, because I feel like MySpace is female dominated.” And they were like, “Well, MySpace is the exception to the rule.”

And then, I went to work at TrueCar.com, which was an automotive tech company. It was male dominated, but still a really wonderful professional experience. It wasn’t fun, the way MySpace was fun, but everyone was a professional. We came in, we did our work, and we were all paid well, so we were motivated by money, not necessarily our love for the automotive industry. Even though it was a predominantly male staff, I never thought it was a boy’s club. And then I moved to San Francisco, and the San Francisco tech scene was unlike anything I’d ever seen.

Tell me more.

I came to San Francisco tech companies and I suddenly was surrounded by people who had never heard of professionalism. Everything from “please show up to work on time” to “please do not tell jokes during the day, this is inappropriate”. I’ve never considered professionalism and fun to be at odds. I was like, “Professionalism is what enables a diverse group of people to together.” My team at Myspace was widely regarded as one of the happiest teams in the company, and Myspace was a big company. My team was 50% loudmouth white homosexual, and 50% somewhat quiet engineer who had grown up in India. So this was not a group of people that you would expect would really gel, but we did. The quieter coworkers kept the loudmouths from being bonkers and off the wall. And the loudmouth homosexuals made things light hearted and fun. And we were absolutely the happiest team in the company, and professionalism was why we could work together. Ken, my lead developer, is a wonderful person, also a devout Christian. So just during the day I didn’t make off-color comments about religion, because that would inappropriate. We just didn’t make off-color race or gender jokes in general, cause that would be inappropriate. So we had this team at Myspace that was diverse in terms, and race, and religion, and country of origin, and still managed to laugh all day, every day.

Then I moved to San Francisco, and suddenly things were just not funny. It’s not funny when you’re in HipChat, and someone is literally telling dick jokes. And it’s not funny when you’re the only woman on a team of 35. I’m used to having more men than women on a team, but I’m certainly not used to having 35 men and one woman. And I’ve found that when you build a homogenous team, people forget all about professionalism because they don’t have to moderate their behavior to accommodate people who aren’t exactly like them.

“Then I moved to San Francisco, and suddenly things were just not funny. It’s not funny when you’re in HipChat, and someone is literally telling dick jokes. And it’s not funny when you’re the only woman on a team of 35.”

I’d never actually articulated to myself, ‘I work in a boys’ club’ until I started working in SF. I’m a short-haired, loud-mouthed dyke and I’m very comfortable with predominantly male environments. But a boys’ club is very different beast entirely.

You might need to pepper me with some questions now because good Lord, do I have stories. So many stories.

What have some of your experiences been like?

Okay, some of the stories are just kind of hilarious. I had one software engineer who would groom at his desk. He’d trim his nails and comb his very long beard and it was just kind of weird. And his hygiene just wasn’t great. Really sweet guy, but terrible hygiene. And he would take off his shoes and his feet smelled terrible. I just pulled his boss aside and was like, “You got to deal with this. We have to have a shoes on policy at work.” His boss looked pretty uncomfortable, but there was no way I was going to deal with that mess. I told the boss, “Maybe you can talk to the boys about hygiene. You don’t need to say any of us have brought it up but it would be great if people could bathe once a week. That would really be great.” That’s a funny story: you don’t expect to have to tell a 40-year old man to bathe, but not the end of the world.

“I’ve found that when you build a homogenous team, people forget all about professionalism because they don’t have to moderate their behavior to accommodate people who aren’t exactly like them.”

Less funny story. At one job a software engineer punched another software engineer in the face at the holiday Christmas party. Boys will be boys, I guess. One of the boys was mouthing off at another one of the boys, and the second boy had enough of it and punched the first boy in the face. On one hand, I would say a lot of us had wanted to punch this guy in the face. On the other hand, but you may fantasize about punching a co-worker in the face but you don’t actually do it. And they weren’t boys—they were grown men and we were at the company Christmas party. There was an open bar, and everybody was drunk and dancing, and out of the corner of my eye, I see people who look like bouncers and I think, “Those look like bouncers.” And then I immediately realize those are actual bouncers because one of the engineers just punched another engineer in the face. So that wasn’t great [chuckles].

I was like great, “I’m getting out of here.” And the CEO literally catches me as I’m leaving and he’s like, “Hey, what just happened?” And I was like, “Well, one of your engineers just punched another one of your engineers in the face.” And he was like, “Why?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I haven’t ever punched anyone in the face so I can’t really imagine.” And he’s like, “But you have to have some idea.” And I’m like, “Well, first, your engineers are a bunch of man children, and second of all the one who was punched in the face is really objectively very annoying, so he probably mouthed off to someone who’s much bigger than him and got hit in the face.”

At this point I’m just trying to leave because I was pretty drunk—there had been an open bar—and I’m like, “I just cannot be talking to this jackass CEO right now.” And he’s like still talking to me, and I was like, “Hey, I’m not trying to tell you how to run your business but you need to call the company attorney, like right now.” And he’s like, “No, no, I don’t think it’s a big deal. I don’t think we need an attorney.” And I’m like, “One of your employees just punched another employee in the face at a company-sponsored event. You need an attorney.” And he’s like, “No, no.” And I was like, “Oh my God, how can I make this clearer to you?” I said, “You need the other gay Jew. I am your product manager, the other gay Jew is your attorney. You need that gay Jew. I cannot help you with this situation. I don’t know why one of them punched another one in the face, but I do know that you need an attorney.” And, of course, the next day the attorney was like, “Thank you for having him call me.”

“I would also routinely wind up the only woman in a room of company leaders. This was a global company so we had 20 country directors at least 50%, maybe 60%, were women. But if we had a meeting of the country leaders, we would only fly men in.”

This situation was ironic because just a few hours before the Christmas party another product manager and I had gone to the CEO to the lack of professionalism with the engineers. He was like, “What do you mean?” And I was like, Well, in the past week, one of them stood up and yelled at another one for no apparent reason. Another decided that he’d had enough of a meeting that we were in, so he slammed the table and announced that he was “done talking about this.” And what he was done talking about was literally his team’s plan to finish a project, so he stormed out. We had another male engineer—I should stop saying male engineers, actually, they were all men—throw something in a meeting because he also didn’t feel like he should keep answering questions. And the questions were always about work, like, “When will this be done?”, or, “Can you help us understand why this project is four weeks late because we have outside partners who are waiting.”

So anyway, the day of the holiday party I went to the CEO to talk about the lack of professionalism, and several hours later one of the engineers punched another one in the face. Way to underscore my point.

God that was a long-winded story. I would also routinely wind up the only woman in a room of company leaders. This was a global company so we had 20 country directors at least 50%, maybe 60%, were women. But if we had a meeting of the country leaders, we would only fly men in.

What??

Right? So I started talking to the CEO about this, calling him out. The first time I walked into his office and said, “Hey, I think we need to talk. I just left a meeting of 15 people and I was the only woman in the room. And the only reasons I was there is that I happen to be based out of San Francisco, and the meeting was here, and I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t fly any women in.” And he was like, “What do you mean?” And I was like, “More than 50% of the country directors are women. So when you were choosing who to fly in, why didn’t you choose to fly any of them in?” And he was like, “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.” And I told him, point blank, “Listen, it’s pretty uncomfortable for me to say this, but I think you’re running like a boys’ club here. I don’t think this is conscious, but when you personally picture leadership, you seem to only be picturing men, and we need to think about what that means for our company.”

“There would be these meetings with say me, and the CEO, and say two other men. And I would just pitch an idea at CEO, and he’d say, ‘Well, that’s a terrible idea.’ And one of the other guys would repeat verbatim what I had maybe five minutes later (because we would have all agreed going into the meeting like that was the best plan), and the CEO would be say ‘That’s a great idea! Debra, why don’t you come up with ideas like this?'”

And at first he seemed pretty responsive to this, but nothing actually changed. I was good friends with the head of HR and we started to have unofficial conversations about this. Then then they became official conversations. And, oh my god, there would be these meetings with say me, and the CEO, and say two other men. And I would just pitch an idea at CEO, and he’d say, “Well, that’s a terrible idea.” And one of the other guys would repeat verbatim what I had maybe five minutes later (because we would have all agreed going into the meeting like that was the best plan), and the CEO would be say “That’s a great idea! Debra, why don’t you come up with ideas like this?”

The first time it happened everyone laughed because we all thought the CEO was kidding. And the CEO asks us why we’re laughing and one of the guys says, “Well, I mean this is Debra’s exact idea. She just said this five minutes ago.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s my exact idea.” And the CEO was honestly confused. It was like he hadn’t been in the room at all. That was the first time I had encountered sexism that was like cartoonish in nature.

“It started to feel like a comical exercise in gender stereotyping, only it wasn’t actually funny.”

I was at that company for about a year and a half. It reached the point where the conversations with HR were no longer unofficial, and the CEO and I would get into it regularly. I would say things to him like, “Hey, your revenue projections are nonsensical. I can’t even imagine where you’re getting these numbers from, but based on our actual revenue patterns, we’re going to have layoffs.” And he would say, “Well, you’re just not being optimistic.” And I was say, “No, I’m just being realistic. We have a huge staff, so I think this is a problem.” Other times he would say that I wasn’t metric-driven, which was really bizarre to me since I was always trying to talk to him about revenue. Once after he told me that I wasn’t “metric driven” I said, “I don’t know ‘metric driven’ means what you think it means, but the metric that I want to discuss with you is revenue. Revenue is a fancy way to say the money we need to operate our company. Whenever I try to talk to you about revenue, you shoot down the conversation, but then you want to spend literally hours every day second guessing every minor decision I make because you’re worried that it will have only a .4% increase in conversions instead of .6%.”

This became a constant refrain with him. He would routinely say, “Well, you’re just not numbers driven,” or “Debra, you don’t have good ideas.” Because money clearly wasn’t an important metric . And it started to feel like a comical exercise in gender stereotyping, only it wasn’t actually funny.

I was going to leave, but then we got this new female president. I decided to stick around, and see if things improved. Things got really shitty, and literally I would get criticized for the tone of voice that I used in email. As if emails have a tone. During the last two months the president started telling me—I am not making this up—that I needed to smile more during the day. But the reason I stopped smiling was that it was just not fun to come into work. My guys—my team—actually noticed and asked if I was mad at them. And I was like, “What do you mean?” And they were like, “You used to joke around with us every morning and now you don’t joke around at all. You just put your headphones on and you work.” And I was like, “No, no, I’m not mad at you guys. I have things going on in life.” I was amazed that they’d noticed because, like lots of straight men who work in engineering, they were just completely oblivious to what was going on around them.

Oh, and the one performance review I had read like that that article that was going on around on Facebook that highlighted the phrases and that are only used in women’s performance reviews. Like “abrasive.” I was “abrasive.” We did 360 reviews and this feedback came from from male colleagues who hadn’t been pulling their weight at all until I was on staff. I would say to them things like, “Hey, we pay you six figures and in return for that we expect you to do the work that you’re assigned during the day in a reasonable timeframe.”

I’m trying to think of funny stories for you, but none of this was funny. My life was a parody of stereotypical sexist behavior.

Man, you worked at a comical extreme it sounds like.

The amazing thing about this is I had just left this automotive tech company, which was just not like that at all. It was professional, it was fine and sometimes I was the only woman in a room, but only because it’s tends to be men who are jazzed at the thought of working at an automotive tech company. The company where I had the most negative experience was a social enterprise where people really prided themselves on how aware they were of systemic racism and sexism and things like that. Irony alert.

Major.

Do you want to know how that ended? This is the only good part about this entire situation. There was this project that the CEO was really stoked on even though it was a really stupid idea. It was a clusterfuck of a project but my team took it on because we’d been working on something else forever and needed a change. I spoke to the heads of every major division in the company and we figured out literally the only path forward. I got buy off from everyone before talking to the CEO. Then someone’s assistant scheduled like seven hours of meetings, and I was like, “We don’t need seven hours of meetings, but whatever.”

We start the very first meeting, there was a room full of people, and I said to the CEO “Hey listen, everyone in the company has agreed there’s only one path forward, so all we really need right now from you, CEO, is for you to sign off on this path forward so everyone can get started.” And he spends the next seven hours laying into me as a person. How it’s clear I “haven’t really thought about the project” and “I’m not taking it seriously”. After a few hours I pulled the other product managers into the meetings as well because I needed backup. Both of them repeatedly told the CEO that we all agreed that there was only one path forward. So the CEO starts saying how it’s clear (somehow) that I’m “not thinking about the metrics and blah, blah, blah.”

So seven hours later, it’s time to leave for the day, and someone has scheduled some dinner that I’m supposed to go to. But I’m in tears, which has never happened to be before at work (don’t worry, no one saw). And I called a friend from New York. This guy has known me for two decades, and assumes someone has died because I’m crying. And I tell him, ”I’m crying because I have feelings. And I’m not used to having feelings. And I don’t know what to do about this.” My friend tells me, ”Go home, get a pint of ice cream, and watch Scandal or something.” And I’m telling him I can’t just go home because there’s some fucking dinner I have to attend. And he was like, ”Okay. You know how to handle this. Do not talk during the dinner. Just sit at the edge of the table and drink your wine and don’t talk to anyone.” And I was like, ”Okay. Got it. Just drink quietly.”

“So finally I say, ‘You wanna know what’s going on?’ And I held up my fork and said, ‘I would rather stab out my own eyes with this motherfucking fork than talk about our goddamn job or our goddamn misogynistic prick of a CEO.'”

So I get there and no one’s there, and I start drinking. Everyone else was a full 30 minutes late. And then we sit down and I’m like at the very end of the table, and someone’s like, “Hey, Debra, come sit at the head of the table.” Because normally I’m the funny one. And I’m like, ”Oh, fuck.” But I tell myself, ”Just keep drinking. Just keep drinking. You have this plan.” And everyone keeps trying to engage me in conversations, but I’m not willing to talk. And none of these people have ever seen me not say a word for 90 minutes, so it’s starting to get weird that I’m not talking.

Someone, I can’t remember who, just wouldn’t let it go and kept trying to engage me in conversation. And at this point I had probably a bottle of wine on my own, and I was like, “I just don’t really want to talk right now.” And someone’s like, “No, for real. You’ve never been quiet this long. What’s going on? Blah blah blah.” And they just kept trying to talk to me about work and about the meetings we’d just had and whatnot. So finally I say, “You wanna know what’s going on?” And I held up my fork and said, “I would rather stab out my own eyes with this motherfucking fork than talk about our goddamn job or our goddamn misogynistic prick of a CEO.”

And then I went back to eating my food while everyone else sat there stunned and quiet. I ate my food, finished my bottle of wine, went home, the next day took a sick day, and the next day was told to come into work at 8AM (which is two hours before I get to work) to be fired. And so ended my illustrious career working for someone else. Misogynistic prick in question did not fire me himself, he had a woman do it. And while she was firing me, she was said, “I am really sorry about his behavior the other day.” Because she had been there in the all-day meetings.

I still think that the fork incident was my finest professional moment. I can see how calling calling someone a misogynistic prick would be a problem, if it wasn’t objectively true. But in my defense, he was a misogynistic prick. This was just a statement of fact.

As an aside, the guy who punched the other guy in the face—not fired. The guy who’s throwing things in meetings—not fired. The guy who posted a bunch of swastikas on Facebook publicly while identifying the company he worked for—not fired. None of these people were fired. Me—a bottle of wine in, state objective truth about our boss—fired. So, I don’t know. I still think it was a good way to go out.

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

I’ve never been interested in technology for technology’s sake. I’m not like, “Look at this awesome app that I downloaded that lets me throw angry birds at something.” I’ve always been interested in technology as a way to solve other problems. In 2004 when I first started wading into this political work it my question was, “How can we use the internet to organize volunteers?” Now, I look at the internet as a whole and think, “this is the most powerful and least expensive information distribution system we have ever seen.” The internet is the single most important advancement in human communication and information distribution since the printing press. Only it’s cheap It’s accessible for everyone. You could host a website for seven bucks a month at DreamHost and the whole world can see it.

“I’ve never been interested in technology for technology’s sake. I’ve always been interested in technology as a way to solve other problems.”

For me it’s not that we’re going to solve the issues plaguing American democracy with technology, it’s that we can use technology to amplify the solutions we’ve already identified. I’ve focused on education—how can we educate all Americans about voting without spending a bajillion dollars? We can use the internet. Every day I see so many examples of people using technology in creative ways to solve problems that are much bigger than “how am I going to get my laundry done” or “where can I find a taxi.” I love what we can do with technology, but I don’t necessarily love technology itself. I will use the most boring, established, non-sparkly technology to solve really big problems.

“For me it’s not that we’re going to solve the issues plaguing American democracy with technology, it’s that we can use technology to amplify the solutions we’ve already identified. I’ve focused on education—how can we educate all Americans about voting without spending a bajillion dollars? We can use the internet.”

In terms of culture there interesting things afoot in the tech world and in the valley. The younger women entering the field now have mentors that women my age didn’t necessarily have. And these mentors have had enough of this weird, sexist bullshit. There are a number of women in tech groups, and lesbians in tech, and a consistent topic of conversation is how do we protect these younger women? How can we make sure that sexism doesn’t thrive in the valley? And what do you do when your team is off the wall bonkers and out of control? A lot of us also think about how lack of diversity affects not just the companies, but the world. Who has access to technology and therefore who has access to information. There is so much thoughtful conversation going on around access issues.

I’ve personally come to believe that your user base will resemble your staff. If you have a staff that is 90% white men, you might wind up with user base that is 90% white men because your team will build a product that meets the needs of the people they know. You have these companies that are hegemonist and therefore the solutions they come out with are pretty defined and not very creative. In my field the way that plays out is through the techniques we use to reach underrepresented voters. We’re talking about low income voters, voters of color, young voters, urban voters. Basically people who aren’t straight white men. Traditional voter outreach tactics don’t seem to reach these groups, likely because elections and campaigns are generally run by straight white men. So these men run campaigns that speak to other straight white men, and a significant percentage of potential voters are left out of the fold. If we want to have an electorate that isn’t just straight white men, and we want to have candidates that aren’t just straight white men, we need to bring people who aren’t straight white men into the fold. I want to reach the people who are not being reached, and therefore I will not build a team of all straight white men, even if I live in San Francisco. If we all look the same, we’re going to reach the people who are already being reached.

“I’ve personally come to believe that your user base will resemble your staff. If you have a staff that is 90% white men, you might wind up with user base that is 90% white men because your team will build a product that meets the needs of the people they know.”

I think that’s true for every tech company. And just see right now in 2016, there is some sort of shift going on, and people are calling out the lack of diversity, they’re calling out the VCs, they’re calling out the CEOs.

Yeah, it could be why we’ve hit a wall with a lot of these unicorns, of like—you had all the potential to globalize, but at some point you hit a wall.

Yeah, you somehow were unable to reach people who didn’t look exactly like you. And it turns out there’s only so many users who look exactly like your team.

Oh, i just read a quote the other day on Facebook that was great. “When the lights come on, a unicorn is just a horse in a party hat with a fake horn.”

These unicorns, when you remove the VC funding, they’re often just failed companies.

I come from North Carolina. I grew up in a small town, Teachey, North Carolina, about 45 minutes from Wilmington, NC. Population: 200. I grew up doing a lot of farming, working the fields, tobacco cropping and things of that nature. But I had a passion for art and drawing. I was an artist. I used to draw on classmates clothes. I used to do paintings. Initially, I got into computer graphic design.

So you were a creative kid growing up. I’m impressed that you found that so early. I’m from New Bern, so I know what it’s like growing up in a tiny North Carolina town. I had no exposure to the word “creativity” until I moved to Raleigh.

Wow!

What was it like being a creative kid in the small-town South?

It was fun. I can’t remember what drew me to art and drawing, but it was something I just seemed to like to do. Like every kid, of course, I played sports, but I knew I liked to draw. I knew I wanted to paint. You know, every entrepreneur has a story about, “Oh, I used to sell lemonade in the neighborhood.” I think everybody has a great story around that, but for me, I used to draw on people’s clothes like graffiti or the Super Mario Brothers character or their initials, and that was my hustle. That was my side project. It was how I brought a little extra money for school shopping. Growing that’s what I did, and eventually, that was the beginning of my tech career. After high school, I was like, “What am I going to do?” I went to a one-year school for computer graphic design and ended up doing that and getting a job at the Jacksonville Daily News Paper for computer graphic design. An area which you know about, Jacksonville, NC.

“I feel like it’s rooted in my blood and my history to be a connector. Being someone who brings communities together.”

I know Jacksonville very well. I grew up 45 minutes from it.

I worked about four years at The Jacksonville Daily News. Two years where I was doing graphic design, newspaper ads and then two years in IT. I started doing desktop support and to show my age, I used to go to people’s houses with a floppy disk to set them up with dial-up networking. So I feel like it’s rooted in my blood and my history to be a connector. Being someone who brings communities together.

Yeah. So, when I first connected with you and discovered you seven or eight years ago, you were deep in the North Carolina tech scene in Raleigh and I was just a bartender who happened to like tech. You were one of the first people I discovered when I found Twitter and that whole network of techies in North Carolina. What was the North Carolina tech scene like at that time?

I moved to Raleigh in 1998 from Teachey, NC  and that’s the beginning of the end of the first dot-com bubble. Raleigh-Durham and The Research Triangle Park and that whole area were like, “We are Silicon Valley 2.0.”  The tech scene at that time had Sony Ericsson, Cisco, SASS, all these tech companies.  When the crash happened, it hit the NC community harder than other tech communities because it didn’t have the wealth to put back into the community like Silicon Valley has. A lot of entrepreneurs just didn’t survive. Innovation and the tech ecosystem wasn’t thriving and growing. It just came back to sports and universities. I felt like, “Wow, there’s still a lot of opportunities here, there’s a lot of community here, but we’re not coming together.” That was the beginning of blogging. That was the beginning of blogger meet-ups and then tweet-ups. Twitter launched in 2006. I was one of the first 1000 users to join Twitter. Then we started seeing the beginning of the web 2.0 movement. People were like, “Everything’s a fad.” I’m like, “No, this is great! It’s now connecting us with people all over the world. We can build relationships; we can create communities and awareness.” I started connecting with people at NC State and then we  began doing blogger meet-ups. Me being a geek, a nerd and working IT, I was into everything tech. I was reading everything that happened in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. I’m like, “We can replicate—at least from an event standpoint—what they’re doing over there in Boulder too. So the community started growing. There were a lot of people like my friend Ryan who’s at IBM. Another friend who was at an interactive agency, Kipp, who’s now the CMO of Hub Spot. We have another friend Jeff, who was working at a marketing agency. Now he’s a professor—I think in Chicago—teaching social media and business.

“When the crash happened, it hit the NC community harder than other tech communities because it didn’t have the wealth to put back into the community like Silicon Valley has. A lot of entrepreneurs just didn’t survive.”

We all came together and just started doing these events and replicating from content and an event standpoint what we saw in Boulder and Silicon Valley, like Ignite events. The community started growing and surprised some, but when you think about it,  it made sense because the universities and Research Triangle Park had an active iPhone development community. There were a lot of IOS developers who were one of the first teams to make a million dollars on the app store. Just like even today, there’s a Bitcoin community in the area. So the tech community was thriving, all the pieces were there, but we all came together to start making the events more community focused.

Walk me down that path from doing all this great work in the Raleigh tech scene to then moving to Silicon Valley and making moves there. What was the impetus for moving across the country to build something on your own?

So if I’m 100% honest, when I was saying that I was reading all of the blogs and reading everything that was happening in Silicon Valley, there was some jealousy there. Being a geek and being a nerd, you want to be a part of the energy. You want to be a part of what’s happening in tech. I’m not a person that’s a big fan of tradition or stereotypes, or being put in a box. I’m just like, if they can do it, I can do it too, right? That’s how I think and operate. And so, I got fed up for a while. I was just doing a lot of work in NC and a colleague reached out to me. He was like, “Let’s build this mobile app. It’s similar to Foursquare but just for the Raleigh-Durham area, we called it TriOut.

“Being a geek and being a nerd, you want to be a part of the energy. You want to be a part of what’s happening in tech. I’m not a person that’s a big fan of tradition or stereotypes, or being put in a box. I’m just like, if they can do it, I can do it too, right? That’s how I think and operate.”

I remember that.

Yeah, one of the few people. And so we came together, we launched the TriOut iPhone app and a social network. So from 2009 to 2011, that was what we did. We were a startup in the area, one of the few tech startups. And we grew the platform, the service, and had a lot of great support from small businesses, but even in that time the companies were not ready for location-based platforms or using a mobile app to reach the customers. Most of the businesses were not even embracing Twitter and Facebook, much less a mobile app. That took a lot of work and energy out of us, knocking on doors of businesses and trying to grow the startup in the area. We did get some interest from investors, but we ended up selling the platform technology to NC State University.

“We received tons of crazy press. We were in CNN’s documentary Blacks In America. CNN created some controversy, but we had people talking, and the show inspired thousands. Because for the first time, you saw African-Americans and women and minorities on TV doing tech startups. It wasn’t that common; African-Americans were like, ‘what’s that?’ They didn’t think it was for them because we just didn’t have the exposure and lack of role models in the tech industry.”

In 2011, the data came out that only 1% of tech startups are founded by an underrepresented individual and by that time I’m like, I’m part of that  1%. I know how hard it is. I’ve been in tech my whole life, what else can I do to learn but also educate others to be more successful. So I partnered with a colleague of mine, Angela Benton, and we had an idea for a startup house helping unrepresented entrepreneurs go to Silicon Valley for the summer. It would be a mix of the real world meets the social network, and we pivoted and just created an incubator-accelerator and moved to Silicon Valley for four months. That was the birth of NewME. We received tons of crazy press. We were in CNN’s documentary Blacks In America. CNN created some controversy, but we had people talking, and the show inspired thousands. Because for the first time, you saw African-Americans and women and minorities on TV doing tech startups. It wasn’t that common; African-Americans were like, “what’s that?” They didn’t think it was for them because we just didn’t have the exposure and lack of role models in the tech industry. So I officially made that move in 2012 from North Carolina to San Francisco.

What were your first impressions of Silicon Valley like? What were you expecting and how was it similar or different to those expectations?

I haven’t been asked that question that way before. When we moved to Mountain View, I was expecting Mountain View to be more like how San Francisco is now. That was the first impression. I also was surprised how everything closed around 9 o’clock. Isn’t this Silicon Valley; this is where things are happening. I thought people would stay up and work all night at coffee shops. No, everybody’s gone at nine. So I was like, “Hmm. Surprising.” Later I learned most of the developers were hacker houses.

There was no Helio’s (a coworking cafe we both frequented in Raleigh) open ’til midnight.

No, there’s no Cafe Helio’s in Mountain View. But one of the biggest surprises that is still relevant to this day was that people say how competitive it is as a tech entrepreneur. It is very competitive, especially when you’re trying to raise capital. Everybody is trying to reach the same 50 to 100, 200 investors. But overall, because of the density of entrepreneurs, everybody’s willing to help. That was surprising because in North Carolina there was only a small hub of entrepreneurs, the same thing in Durham. In Chapel Hill, there’s community around UNC, but it’s so competitive because everybody’s trying to fight for those smaller amounts of investment and there’s a limited awareness of community. So that was surprising, like wow, there’s so many people that want to help you. It was also surprising as I learned about how the ecosystem operated, how people may or may not help you.  If you are working on something world changing, if you are cool, if you are getting into the right circles, if you are drama free. You know what I’m saying, if you’re a signal that the ecosystem measures entrepreneurs by.

When you got here, what was the community of underrepresented entrepreneurs like? How did people form support networks at the time and what were some of the biggest issues they were facing?

When we first came to Silicon Valley, people had started reading about us in the news. We were in the Wall Street Journal. We were in a CNN documentary, and then because of our relationships using social media, we had a network. We weren’t starting from zero, which was very, very helpful and valuable. When we came to San Francisco, there was an organization called Black Founders. They held a welcome brunch for us. When we got here, we were already working with Mitch and Freada Kapor. They were mentors and speakers in our program. We were connected to Ken Colemen, another was a mentor, Stephen Adams, who had been out in Silicon Valley for 20 years. These individuals who have been here, they were opening doors and embracing us, and that was important. It felt right because we came from North Carolina, and I was too surprised also. Everybody knows that there’s a sense of a problem that there’s a lack of diversity in tech. And some people have been out here for years who have made a lot of success for themselves and their network, but it hasn’t been pushed to the forefront of the conversation. And I was surprised why has that been the case. If you’re here, why hasn’t there been more effort? I was surprised about that. At the same time, I started understanding why, because there are unspoken rules that you don’t talk about race in tech. Because of the false belief of meritocracy. You don’t speak of culture because it’s the good old boys who work and the create the culture, it works, so why to change it. You don’t fit in. You’re not a culture fit. I started seeing how these communities operated.

Regardless, the community embraced us, but not everyone. Some people told me; “Don’t come out here and mess it up for us.” “I’ve got it good right now. I made it. Don’t screw it up for me.” Which is unfortunate, but I get it. So it was good and bad.

“I started understanding why, because there are unspoken rules that you don’t talk about race in tech. Because of the false belief of meritocracy. You don’t speak of culture because it’s the good old boys who work and the create the culture, it works, so why to change it. You don’t fit in. You’re not a culture fit. I started seeing how these communities operated.”

What have been some of the most exciting parts of building an incubator and building conferences? What has been some of the most fulfilling parts of that work for you?

Hearing the stories later. That has been some of the most inspirational aspects of this all. I do this work because I love it. I do this because it’s needed. I do it because I want to leave a legacy for my son, and he says, “Well, my daddy is doing this, and he did it for me.”  And I care! I’ve traveled to speak at conferences in Detroit and Atlanta and abroad, and you hear entrepreneurs and individuals say, “You know what, I read about you, and that inspired me to get into tech now. And now I’m working for this hedge fund.” Or, “Now I’m doing this startup.” Or, “Now I’m doing this.” Or, “I saw you on TV, I read this article, and now I’m hosting this event.” That is the most exciting part. It’s also un-measurable in some sense because you don’t know all the people you can reach or who’s watching you. You see the work you’re doing and hope for that they can learn and get inspired for themselves. So that has been the most valuable. And then there’re the other tangible aspects of it where somebody got a job through an introduction or someone met a co-founder or  some serendipitous meeting happened because of the work we’ve been doing. And then, of course, there’s the one where people just created a team, and they’re raising money because you introduced them to the right investor and so forth.

“I do this work because I love it. I do this because it’s needed. I do it because I want to leave a legacy for my son, and he says, ‘Well, my daddy is doing this, and he did it for me.'”

What personally has been the most challenging thing or the biggest hurdles for you as an entrepreneur?

Being an entrepreneur but also coming from North Carolina and being black, I still deal with confidence and credibility. I still deal with the fact that I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. I haven’t created a product that millions of people have tested or downloaded. I haven’t raised millions of dollars. I haven’t had an exit or created a 100x opportunity for an investor. I deal with imposter syndrome. Those things are all signals in Silicon Valley and tech people look at those terms of success metrics. That doesn’t mean it’s right, right? It’s just their signals in Silicon Valley / Bay Area, the system that’s been established. But those signals play in the back of my mind where even today,I was talking to my partner. She was like, “I don’t have to live up to those standards, and I don’t have to get those individuals approval, right? Who are they, and why should I be trying to get their approval or live under their standards? I don’t have to seek to get in that particular network. The work I’m doing is just as important or more and what I’m doing has better values and integrity.” So the biggest challenge is most definitely the confidence and dealing with credibility despite all the work and success I’ve had so far.

“Coming from North Carolina and being black, I still deal with confidence and credibility. I still deal with the fact that I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. I haven’t created a product that millions of people have tested or downloaded. I haven’t raised millions of dollars. I haven’t had an exit or created a 100x opportunity for an investor. I deal with imposter syndrome.”

Yeah, I feel like one of the biggest moments for me in the last few years was having this moment where I was like, “Oh, I don’t have to please and get approval from every single person. It’s a waste of time. It’s unproductive.”

Yes, and now I learned to stop caring about what other people think. Now I focus on being happy and what that means. Being happy with just yourself and being aware of how you think, having a cognitive awareness of how you process your thoughts, your emotions. Being inspirational to yourself and how you think and how you feel, thinking “You know what? I’m happy, I’m healthy,” and like you said not trying to please everyone.

“I learned to stop caring about what other people think. Now I focus on being happy and what that means.”

Have you had mentors or people that you’ve looked up to for inspiration or  people who have been pivotal in your career along the way?

Yes, one I mentioned earlier was Steve Adams. He’s  the entrepreneur at Heart also. Been in Silicon Valley for around 20 plus years, and raised over 20 or 40 million dollars over his career. He’s an African-American guy who pulled me along the side and just really has helped coach me and advise me on life. Sometimes it’s been about a product I’ve built but most times the feedback has been about my life. Another person is, Shellye Archambeau, who’s the CEO of MetricStream. Shellye is an inspirational mentor where she drops those little nuggets, life lessons like, “Keep doing what you’re doing. I believe in you, keep writing, keep story-telling, keep me updated.” Because all those things were a sign that someone cares, right? Another mentor is Cedric Brown. He’s also from North Carolina. He went to UNC, and he works with Kapor Capital For Social Impact. We have lunch every couple of months in Oakland and really just talk about life and relationships. Those individuals are people I call mentors but also friends, and it took a while for me to develop those relationships. There’s  also Steve Blank. Steve Blank is a guy who everybody knows in entrepreneurship tech. I got a chance to build a relationship over a two or three year period with Steve. I’ve been to his house a couple of times and talked about entrepreneurship, and he gets it. Being able to leverage his brand, his name and path to my career has been key. Also Kathleen Warner and Kelly Hoey, who both are on the East Coast, these two amazing ladies who I’ve met over my career, they get it, they care, and they just want to see good people win. It’s been good to be able to have those individuals in my life.

You’re from a tiny town. When I meet people who are from tiny towns in the South, I’m like, “Oh my god, you got out too, that’s crazy!” [laughter]  So I’m curious to know, where do you think you got those entrepreneurial qualities like that appetite for risk and the drive, where do you think that came from?

It originates from both sides of my parents. I look at my father. He and I spent a lot of time working on cars. That’s what we do in the South, right? We worked on engines; we worked on go-carts. We just like to build things with our hands, so I think that’s where the artistic side of me came from, but for me it was computers. My mom used to work for the government. She worked for HUD, the state, and always had that kind of entrepreneurship drive and spirit. She’s now had her own business in Teachey for ten, maybe fifteen years now. When she started, I helped her when it was a print business. Then she got into insurance and taxes, and it’s been her business for years. The house is paid for, and they are doing well in the South.

So I got that drive from both of them. When I look at my grandfather on my mother’s side, he died before I was born, he was a police officer. My great-aunt was a school teacher on my mom’s side. And my grandfather on my father’s side was an entrepreneur.  I remember going out with him; he used to take me to the farm. That was my summer job. I would work in a field all day starting around 6 am until like 3 o’clock, and we’d go to the farmers market and sell the vegetables, and he’d give me five dollars. I’d be like, “That’s all I get?”

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

With my immediate family, I have two sisters, a younger and an older sister. They all get it. My parents, they get it. I was always pushing tech on them.  “Hey, do this, sign-up for that.” I set up my moms’ network at her home office. Her home office network was better than the local town’s network, with more computers and printers. I would say that they are happy for me. It’s been tough because a lot of African American families—and people in the South, no matter what race, they don’t leave their hometown that often. They don’t go too far.

“It’s been tough because a lot of African American families—and people in the South, no matter what race, they don’t leave their hometown that often. They don’t go too far.”

At times, when I come home to visit, they sit watching TV. I’m like, “What are we doing?”. One of the things I remember  my first cousin telling me. We all have family who have been in and out of jail or things of that nature. He’s a cousin  who now is getting his life together, who’s working,  but he told me” You’ve  got to keep doing what you’re doing.” He’s like, “I tell my friends I’ve got that cousin who’s out in Silicon Valley who works with Google and all these other big tech companies. He’s out there making a name for himself.” For him to say that, inspires me to keep doing what I’m doing because he didn’t think that it was an opportunity for him, and you don’t see that many African Americans in tech.  I have a Slack group called BlackMenInTech.com, with about 300 black guys from across the country who work at Google, Facebook, Uber, etc. Some are entrepreneurs; some live in the midwest. We had a guy in the Slack group who lives in Cleveland, Ohio. He was like: “Wow. I didn’t know there were this many black guys working in tech.” Because if you are in Cleveland, Ohio or New Bern, North Carolina, and you read all the news you’d think it was just all white guys. You wouldn’t know that there’s any diversity out here at all. So the work that we all are doing is important,  these stories that you are doing are important.

“If you are in Cleveland, Ohio or New Bern, North Carolina, and you read all the news you’d think it was just all white guys. You wouldn’t know that there’s any diversity out here at all. So the work that we all are doing is important.”

It’s one of the biggest drivers of this project because I think people are going to come to this and for the first time see people that look like them and who are from where they’re from. I think so many people have no idea that Silicon Valley is even an option for them because they’ve never seen anyone like them in it. That’s a problem.

Or they don’t see any women. They don’t see any women in various roles. Women in leadership or women CEOs and technical positions, or even the fact that you can just create a real business using technology. It doesn’t have to be trying to go to IPO. It doesn’t have to be the next Instagram or whatever, but just great business. It’s getting so bad that the narrative out there is  that you can’t just live here and be happy [chuckles].

In the last few years, how have you seen tech culture change, particularly in being more accommodating to people of color. How has it changed, and/or has it gotten worse? How about right now in 2016?

Harvard Business Review and Fortune Magazine began publishing articles on diversity programs, and how they are not inclusive of white men and how white men are starting to fear a more diverse workforce and fearful of losing job opportunities. Then you start seeing these posts on income inequality from super well-known rich investors. Then stories about income inequality became a hot topic. I began to think that people with money who have been making money in tech, which has primarily been white males are now looking at this change regarding diversity inclusion and income inequality, computer science for everybody, and saying that “Isn’t it starting to level the playing field?” You look at all these VC posts and all these subtle changes, then the monopoly and the control they’ve been having, the power they’ve been having over who gets funded, how they get funded and controlling the market. It’s going to impact how they get access to early deals and opportunities to create wealth for them. That insinuates fear, and that bothers me because when people start taking emotional actions around fear where they don’t want change, that mindset is going to hurt everyone.  That bothers me.

“You look at all these VC posts and all these subtle changes, then the monopoly and the control they’ve been having, the power they’ve been having over who gets funded, how they get funded and controlling the market. It’s going to impact how they get access to early deals and opportunities to create wealth for them. That insinuates fear, and that bothers me because when people start taking emotional actions around fear where they don’t want change, that mindset is going to hurt everyone.”

That’s just one case, and it’s why we need inclusion in tech. We need to show that diversity is good for the world and good for the American economy. We need to do what we can to close the wealth-access gap. Because that whole economy is going to crash if we don’t.

Whoa, that is blowing my mind for second right now, the idea that diversification of entrepreneurship makes VCs lives harder because it messes with the system they’ve built and optimized for.

Yeah, [chuckles]. It’s an uncertain outlook, but if you look at how things are being portrayed, that’s what’s happening, right?

Yeah. Absolutely. That’s a major thing, and well-founded. This is the year of VCs biting their tongue, that’s for sure.

I know, right? But the good side of it is the fact that these stories are now being told, people are taking action. With action comes accountability, with awareness comes responsibility, more resources towards education. People are starting to care more. We call it a tech business, but everything we do affects people. We have to care more about people no matter what race, what gender, ethnicity, or religion. We have to look at ways of how we can create wealth because tech is one of the only industries in the world where we don’t have to go to a four-year university to get a job, even though that’s where the bar is set with ivy league schools, right? You can come into tech; you can learn to code or be great at project management, or have the right passion and get a job,to create wealth and impact not only in your life, but your family’s life. We need to do that with the income gap,  the education gap,  the average salary gap, and the unemployment gap. We need more people in tech from all races, genders, and cultures.

Personally, how do you think tech can be more accommodating to underrepresented entrepreneurs in the industry?

For me, I believe tech can be more accommodating when we look at the workforce. We need people who care in leadership and are who are held accountable. They are in positions that can be nonthreatening or non-bias towards diverse individuals. I think that’s some of the hardest problems we’re facing right now, that a lot of the workforce is only 2% black, 1% Latino, about 11% women. How did that happen? That’s just the workforce. People have to care and be accountable, and they haven’t been. If they were, it wouldn’t be as it is. For entrepreneurs, it’s going to come down to the biases that investors have regarding what makes a successful team because it’s not just the money, right? It’s the opportunity they get. It’s the chance to test your hypothesis to see if this problem that you’re solving has a particular value. Everybody doesn’t get that opportunity. Because even if you get the money,  then it’s the mentorship, it’s the relationship, it’s the open doors, the partnerships, everything that comes with the relationship with investors.

I see so many great entrepreneurs who work their asses off. But it’s everything else. They get special access because they’re in a particular network, but if you don’t fit a particular stereotype, you don’t get that same opportunity. We need to change that in entrepreneurship. At the same time, I can’t speak for the Latino culture because I’m not Latino, but for the African American culture, we also need to look internally, look at our culture and how can we change our priorities. How can we change our focus? Regarding where I grew up, yes I got into art, but it was all about Michael Jordan, it was all about Michael Jackson, it was all about Eddie Murphy, and the comedians. That’s why we have this next generation of Kevin Harts, and just repeat, repeat, repeat. We’re in 2016; now we need more role models in tech. We also need  to disrupt the African American culture and our values, get focused on creating wealth. That’s not on the street, it’s not on the court, it’s not on the stage.

“Regarding where I grew up, yes I got into art, but it was all about Michael Jordan, it was all about Michael Jackson, it was all about Eddie Murphy, and the comedians. That’s why we have this next generation of Kevin Harts, and just repeat, repeat, repeat. We’re in 2016; now we need more role models in tech. We also need  to disrupt the African American culture and our values, get focused on creating wealth. That’s not on the street, it’s not on the court, it’s not on the stage.”

What are you working on right now? Either for others or yourself?

You made me pause because you said for myself and I’m like, what do I do for myself? [chuckles]

Right. I know the feeling.

For me, I just really like being healthy. Being healthy and happy. Being fit is also part of the San Francisco culture. But I just really like being happy and healthy, emotionally, intellectually, and also physically. That’s taking care of yourself, as number one.

Yeah. It’s hard to prioritize, isn’t it? Honestly. I finally figured it out this year, but I sympathize with people who can’t figure out how to make that work because they’re trying to make it work career or money-wise.

It’s hard to balance. Professionally I did a lot of cool projects over years. In 2014 I created a non-profit BUILDUP. In 2015 my partner, Melinda Epler and I started Tech Inclusion because we had begun seeing all the conversations around diversity and inclusion in tech, but most of the conversation are around the problems. We were like, we know too many people who do amazing work, but they don’t know each other. We also know a lot of the new diversity hires, a lot of individuals having this conversation, but they are not connected. Everybody was looking for solutions. We thought” how can we bring people together?” So we created the Tech Inclusion conference in 2015 and recently announced a new partnership with Google For Entrepreneurs; and we’re going to have the conference in New York and San Francisco. We hope to create opportunities and the spaces to solve these problems.

Where do you see yourself in five or ten years? Do you think you’ll still be in tech and what kind of problems do you see yourself solving?

I’m always going to be in Tech. So I pause, and I laugh because I’m like—where I see myself in five years could depend on how the presidential race goes in 2016, and where I am in the country or out of the country. Regardless, in five years, I hope to continue to support the early stage entrepreneurs, and my passion is to have a venture fund one day. I’m going to put myself in the position to be on that path. Maybe get into education by teaching, and I still have some aspirations for entrepreneurship—a couple of ideas.  I have asthma, so I want to do something in asthma and biotech.

My last question for you is: what advice would you give to folks from similar backgrounds as you who are hoping to get into tech? What do you wish you’d known in the beginning?

My advice is to keep learning. There’s a book called Mindset, by Carol Dweck and I think everybody should read it because it’s about knowing the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. If you have a growth mindset, you can learn anything and have the confidence to complete your goals. I think that’s like number one. Number two, believe that no door is closed. If you just learn how things work, you can open any door. Number three is to travel. If I never got outside of Raleigh, I  wouldn’t be in San Francisco today. So, travel the world, get out of the country, get your passport and just go!  Learn, see the world, build relationships and then be mindful that we have so many ways of communicating today. Create a real strategic plan of how you are going to communicate with your network. This sounds so basic, but in this world, if you put out positive energy, put out to the world that you are somebody and want to help others, it will come back to you. You just have to continue to put out positive energy. Last, build something. Whether your build a product,  a community,  a service,your network,  your intellect, build something!

“In this world, if you put out positive energy, put out to the world that you are somebody and want to help others, it will come back to you. You just have to continue to put out positive energy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did your focus turn to inclusivity in tech?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was born in Virginia, but I was raised outside of Philadelphia, in the suburbs—like really, really suburban. I was kind of shy as a kid. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to socialize, I just couldn’t seem to figure out how to do it. Or how everyone else was doing it. I went to a small private elementary school, there were about 35 kids in my whole grade, and everyone there was nice, like there wasn’t any bullying or anything, but it was just an incredibly homogeneous school.

I got this label of being the “smart kid.” But the reason people thought I was smart was because I got good grades. And also because I had started kindergarten early, ‘cause I started reading really young, so I was a year younger than everyone in my class. When you’re like 8 years old, that one year makes a big difference. And I didn’t think getting good grades was interesting at all, and reading was just like, something that happened. Like I literally found a book on the side of the road and I took it home and it was this book of animal poems and that’s how I learned to read. Getting good grades was just what was expected of me by my parents, you get straight A’s in school, like that’s what you do. I didn’t feel intellectually challenged in school at all. And so I kind of hated that label, I hated being “the smart kid,” it was like because I got good grades in school, that was all anybody knew me for. Because everybody gets a label, right. There was one girl who liked to draw, so she was the “artsy kid.” But if you were the “smart kid” you couldn’t also be the “artsy kid” because you can only have one label at a time. And I hated being reduced to something so one-dimensional just because I’d done what was expected of me.

I found a lot of the people and the kind of stimulation I was looking for online. We got AOL when I was 8, and I would play a lot of RPGs through chat rooms and mailing lists on there. I loved MUDs, which are these text-based RPGs, no visuals, everything is a written description. They’re still my favorite kind of game. Especially the smaller ones, where the people who made the game were just other characters you hang out with in the game, and there was such a strong sense of community that was built by the players themselves, not handed to you by some big game company or whatever, and the makers were always building new areas for you to explore and doing silly things, because it was just text, right, so it was easy to make more stuff. But those games became my world, like my whole social world.

“We got AOL when I was 8, and I would play a lot of RPGs through chat rooms and mailing lists on there. I loved MUDs, which are these text-based RPGs, no visuals, everything is a written description. Those games became my world, like my whole social world.”

I’m really old school about games, I like where people just sort of agree on a set of rules and then the rest is left to your imagination. I love how you can turn those worlds into anything you want. I think at some point in real life, like way into my adult life, I realized “fuck it,” like you can do that in real life too. Everything is malleable. It’s this really beautiful thing, like games are actually just reality and vice versa.

I kind of stopped playing games in high school but then I ended up spending a lot of time on random online forums and making friends on there. It was the same sort of thing where you had to figure out all these social norms and learn how to make friends and politic a bit. And that felt more natural to me, reading and typing and making friends that way, than doing it in real life, where in real life people kind of look at you and tell you who you are based on something that’s sort of out of your control. Like I didn’t know my dad had an accent until I was in junior high. I didn’t know I didn’t look white until somebody told me. I didn’t know I was like, a woman, until I started getting that kind of attention.

I think I just got along better with people online because nobody knew who anyone was in real life and it didn’t really matter. Like I was in this guild for awhile and they finally figured out I was 9 years old and then it got awkward. It was a big deal if you even knew someone’s first name in real life instead of their character name or username. I mean this was all pre-Facebook or whatever. And I remember people would have, like, one photo they would upload to the game website and be like “This is me! This is what I look like!” So yeah it was just very detached from the real world and I liked that I could just be me and not be this flat “smart kid” character, where like, any time you had an original thought people were like “oh, it’s ‘cause she’s smart!” which seemed incredibly reductive and boring and not interesting to me in real life.

“I think I just got along better with people online because nobody knew who anyone was in real life and it didn’t really matter. Like I was in this guild for awhile and they finally figured out I was 9 years old and then it got awkward.”

Anyway. So then I went to a Quaker high school, which was super impactful in the way I was brought up. It was much more challenging and interesting. It just kind of like—it just gave me really good framework on the rest of life. Quakers are sort of like the hippy branch of Christians that are all about equality, and everything was about sitting in a circle and talking out your feelings. They believe everyone has this same sort of “that of God” inside them, everyone has something worth sharing, and that’s what brings us together. So it was just really influential for me.

Let’s see, what else? My dad is Persian, but he grew up in Germany, and my mom is Chinese-Indonesian, but she grew up in Indonesia. I was in suburban Pennsylvania so there was a lot of culture mixing and everything. My mom lived in Indonesia when I was younger and my dad was in Pennsylvania. I spent a lot of time in Indonesia and a lot of time in Pennsylvania. I’ve always just kind of felt in between everything. Everything is kind of the same, it’s all a matter of perspective and I think that’s carried with me throughout the rest of my life.

I went to college at Tufts in Boston, came out of college, wanted to move to San Francisco because it was warm and different. I had been on the East Coast—North East—my whole life. San Francisco was like a whole other world for me. Being in a super suburban environment was—I just kind of felt like I never really belonged. It was not a great place for creativity to thrive. I even felt like being in Boston or D.C. or wherever, there was just such an East Coast way of doing things, and on the West Coast it was like, “Be free! Be yourself, whatever.” I was really overwhelmed when I first moved to San Francisco because I was like ,”Oh my god! There are other people my age that are doing things that are crazier than me, and like, how did I miss out on this? My life is over. I’m 21.” Not true, of course—and I sort of learned to get into the flow and the balance of things. Everyone here is so, so introspective and there is always something you can fix and change about yourself. And that appeals to such a big part of my brain and is very exciting. But then, I think especially in recent years it’s kind of been around managing, like, alright, there’s a point where you can be happy and where you can decide what you do and you don’t want to do. So, yeah.

“I was really overwhelmed when I first moved to San Francisco because I was like ,’Oh my god! There are other people my age that are doing things that are crazier than me, and like, how did I miss out on this? My life is over. I’m 21.'”

When did you first get interested in tech as a career?

Kind of by accident. So I was—I thought I was going to go into environmental policy after Tufts. And then I ended up doing stuff around impact investing and working with foundations and university endowments to invest their money into more socially conscious things. That ended up giving me a little bit of a detour. I ended up going to San Francisco and working with a strategy consulting firm that specialized in nonprofits. And so I got placed with an education nonprofit. And that education nonprofit happened to also be a website—it was called GreatSchools. And so they provide free K to 12 data for parents and teachers and students and whatever to help them choose a school. I just thought that was really cool because they were just offering this information for free. They were just doing it because they thought it made sense. That was my first introduction to technology, through the nonprofit site. I saw technology as kind of a way to influence ideas more quickly than I was able to in nonprofit roles. I still felt like I had the same sort of goals and objectives as I did in nonprofit world. There are a lot of things that are so slow-moving when it comes to nonprofits, and with tech it’s just like, “You have an idea? You can get implemented. You can do it.” So that really appealed to me.

“Sometimes I feel like playing around in venture, and sometimes I feel like playing around in startups or whatever. But I want to be wherever the best place is for ideas to happen.”

Walk me through your next steps. You’ve done entrepreneurship. You ended up in VC. You’re working in open source world. Walk me through all of that.

I don’t really know how I ended up doing all sort of different things [chuckles]. I think after being at the education nonprofit, I left to start a company with my roommate at the time, because that’s what you do. It was sort of like me wanting to try my hand at something fun. I don’t think there is really anything deeper to it. I was learning how to code at the time and teaching myself how to code. It was fun and we kind of made something. I was super inexperienced. I remember when we made the website. I was like, “I think I can put a website together, maybe,” and my co-founder was like, “Sure. Whatever.” So it was just kind of like a fun project for us, that started growing into a business. And that was really exciting.

We went through the 500 Startups accelerator. We went into raising money, and kind of seeing how well-supported startups and venture were—and how well the ecosystem works. Basically, if you have an idea, there’s going to be capital out there to support you. No one is saying that startups don’t get funded enough. I think, fundamentally, it was just really creatively enabling to realize that you can do that. I kind of wanted to be able to provide that to other people too, right?

“I love the idea of being able to enable other people to be creative. I love the, just the idea of helping people be the most ‘them’ that they are, and just pulling out whatever is unique and special about people and really encouraging it. And so funding can be a really great mechanism for that because you’re enabling somebody to do something.”

So being on the venture side afterwards—we ended up selling our company to a food brand—because we realized cooking was not our lifelong passion. But it was fun.

So I ended up joining this venture capital firm. It was a lot of fun. I just started feeling really sucked into [chuckles] the machine of it all. And that’s not a knock against funders, it’s not even a knock against venture capital.

I think I’ve moved around a lot of different sectors because I actually didn’t really grow up thinking of myself as a creative person, but now people keep telling me I am, so maybe I am. In just the sense of I kind of want to do whatever I feel like doing. And so sometimes I feel like playing around in venture, and sometimes I feel like playing around in startups or whatever. But I want to be wherever the best place is for ideas to happen. And I felt like, with venture—and I think that’s why I’ve been drawn to the funding side, even with impact investing stuff before. I love the idea of being able to enable other people to be creative. I love the, just the idea of helping people be the most “them” that they are, and just pulling out whatever is unique and special about people and really encouraging it. And so funding can be a really great mechanism for that because you’re enabling somebody to do something. But, I think they’re—it sounds like that on paper with venture, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

And right now, working in open source and basically I’m trying to help people understand a lot of the risks and problems in supporting open source infrastructure right now. And the best part about it right now is being able to work with really, really creative people all the time. I love hearing people’s crazy stories. I love hearing how they’ve had to grapple with other people. I think the coolest thing about open source right now is that it is just—it all comes down to community and working with people and there’s nothing you can really automate about it, it would just never work. So you have to learn how to talk to people, you have to learn how to get along with lots of people and make it all come together somehow. So I feel really happy just being around creativity and feeling enabled and validated and all that.

“I think the coolest thing about open source right now is that it is just—it all comes down to community and working with people and there’s nothing you can really automate about it, it would just never work. So you have to learn how to talk to people, you have to learn how to get along with lots of people and make it all come together somehow.”

Let’s back up. Tell me more about what it was like being a lady entrepreneur. Being part of that world, fundraising, eventually selling. What was that experience like?

I wasn’t doing most of the fundraising so that made that part easier. [laughter] It was actually kind of funny. I was the person building the products and people would always go, “Oh, you’re a female coder!” or whatever, which was sort of funny, but I guess worked to our advantage because it was a positive expectation for people. The thing that bothered me about being a founder was that if I told people that we had a food company, they would always assume my co-founder was female and they would just be like, “Oh, women, food. Makes perfect sense. Women do fashion companies and food companies and stuff,” and I never thought of myself as that—it was just something that we wanted to do at the time and it was just like, “You’re my roommate,” you know.

“I was the person building the products and people would always go, ‘Oh, you’re a female coder!’ or whatever, which was sort of funny, but I guess worked to our advantage because it was a positive expectation for people. The thing that bothered me about being a founder was that if I told people that we had a food company, they would always assume my co-founder was female and they would just be like, ‘Oh, women, food. Makes perfect sense. Women do fashion companies and food companies and stuff.“‘

I felt like I was being forced into some sort of weird stereotype that I didn’t really identify with. Yeah, actually, I really love cooking, personally. I still do, but it doesn’t make me womanly, that I like to cook. There are plenty of guys who like to cook. It was just this weird pushback against my gender. The same thing happened in venture, where everyone calls you a woman VC. I was like, I don’t want to be a woman VC. I just want to be an investor, like anybody else.

It definitely has its advantages. I have no way of proving this, but I felt like it was easier for people to open up to women in a one-on-one conversation. At least, I found that I would learn things very quickly, like really personal stories, about founders that I talked to. That was cool. Then on the other hand, there would be boundary crossing with other investors in other firms, or with founders I talked to, where it suddenly gets a little too close, and it’s like, “I don’t know how to manage this.” I feel like there’s always this adjective being attached to everything I’m doing, that’s like, “You’re the female.” Like, “So cool. You’re a woman.” I’m like, “Yep, I’m a woman. I don’t really know what else you want me to say.” I only want to do things that feel really natural to me, so this stuff feels really natural, and so that’s why I do it. It feels awkward when somebody retroactively puts this adjective on me that I don’t even feel like I identify that strongly with.

“I don’t want to be a woman VC. I just want to be an investor, like anybody else.”

You brought up that you downplay your gender in the workplace, which I could totally relate to when I worked in tech. I am so much more feminine—I’m still not super-feminine, but I’m so much more feminine now as a photographer who works for myself than when I was in tech.

It’s odd because sometimes I don’t know whether I feel like I don’t identify that strongly with the woman label because identifying with it would downplay my own power and influence, or whether because I truly don’t identify with it. So it’s like a really odd thing to manage. I make a point to wear basically the same thing all the time.

“It’s odd because sometimes I don’t know whether I feel like I don’t identify that strongly with the woman label because identifying with it would downplay my own power and influence, or whether because I truly don’t identify with it.”

All black? Yeah me too. [laughter]

Just dress down, like don’t wear anything that’s too form-fitting, err on the side of pants and sneakers and stuff. People joke around with me about it. I’m like, “Honestly it makes a difference.” It makes me feel like when I talk to people they’re at least not looking at my body or something. It’s sort of weird that we have to do it. But I hate being looked at. I think that’s why I prefer writing to speaking, honestly. Or just being behind a screen. Because then I feel like people are paying attention to my ideas instead of my face or what I’m wearing or whatever.

“I hate being looked at. I think that’s why I prefer writing to speaking, honestly. Or just being behind a screen. Because then I feel like people are paying attention to my ideas instead of my face or what I’m wearing or whatever.”

I totally get it.  Have you experienced in the same way that I did, people making assumptions about why you were even around, in a networking sense, at events or things like that?

I haven’t had anyone say that to my face, thank goodness. But definitely a lot of the—I’m standing in the circle with a bunch of people, and all the guys get asked what they do, and the woman is just assumed to be, “Oh, she’s probably someone’s girlfriend.” Even if the conversation is highly relevant to what I’m doing, I jump in and make comments about the ideas like anyone else would. And they kind of just look at you like, “Oh, that’s cute,” and keep talking. The most validating time, I have to say, to have this happen was being in VC. Because when you say the word VC, the mic drops and everybody’s like, “Oh my God, you have money.” Which I thought was just funny because people’s tones would just change completely when they realize that. And I’m like, “Yep. You probably shouldn’t do that.”

“I’m standing in the circle with a bunch of people, and all the guys get asked what they do, and the woman is just assumed to be, ‘Oh, she’s probably someone’s girlfriend.’ Even if the conversation is highly relevant to what I’m doing, I jump in and make comments about the ideas like anyone else would. And they kind of just look at you like, ‘Oh, that’s cute,’ and keep talking. The most validating time to have this happen was being in VC. Because when you say the word VC, the mic drops and everybody’s like, ‘Oh my God, you have money.’ Which I thought was just funny because people’s tones would just change completely when they realize that. And I’m like, ‘Yep. You probably shouldn’t do that.'”

What was the impetus for turning your attention to open source and giving back to the industry in a way?

There were a lot of things. My story changes a little bit every time, because it honestly was a lot of different reasons. I think that, honestly, I was feeling a little bit burned out by venture. It was truly the most fun and the most hard job I’ve had so far, but after I left I really thought about, “Do I even want to be in tech any more? Like, I should just go.” Like, “Fuck this place.” And really thought about moving out of San Francisco. Really thought about whether I just want to do something completely different. And even experimented and talked to people about it and really gave it some serious exploration, and in the end I realized, “I actually love technology.” Like, there’s a reason why I came into this sector. I really, really, really, really love it. I could not picture myself anywhere else. And that comes with all these other strings attached, but I love being here. And so I kind of had to find, “What is it that I still love about it that can make me happy?” And I realized that chasing after the next unicorn or trying to get into the next hot deal is just not fulfilling for me. And I think it required a lot of mental adjustment, too, because you get told—when you’re in the startup-venture binary—being in venture is like you hold the purse strings; you have all this cachet and people invite you to things and people think you’re important and whatever, and so you get this false sense of status which is kind of ridiculous. And it felt weird to be like, “Why don’t I want this”, or like “Why doesn’t this make me happy?” It took awhile to just let that go and say this is not where I want to be and if I do this I’m going to be really unhappy and I want to be around things that make me happy and so it just started with like, “What can I do that makes me happy?'” and like “Where do I want to be?” and that’s how I ended up here because once I started talking to people in the open source world, I just felt really happy. I felt really at home. I felt like people understood me and my mindset and I wasn’t feeling like I had to defend this core sense of identity all the time so, yeah, that’s why I’m here.

“There’s a reason why I came into this sector. I really, really, really, really love it. I could not picture myself anywhere else. And that comes with all these other strings attached, but I love being here. And so I kind of had to find, ‘What is it that I still love about it that can make me happy?’ And I realized that chasing after the next unicorn or trying to get into the next hot deal is just not fulfilling for me.”

What fatigued you on the industry during your time either as an entrepreneur or a VC?

Many trends over time, and there was plenty of good stuff too. I still feel like I have great friends in the industry. I just felt fundamentally not like me, which was like this gut feeling. I felt like there were constantly people around me telling me I had to be a certain way that I wasn’t and I guess I actually didn’t really realize how feminine my outlook is, if you can call it feminine.

In VC for example, people talk about, “Are there enough women in venture”, and they talk about discrimination. I actually don’t think the discrimination is that obvious. It’s not really about, did someone make a sexist remark at you or something, but it’s more of, I feel like my point of view was just not compatible with venture. Where venture is highly, highly competitive, and it’s about bravado, and I don’t know, just posturing, being something you’re not, whatever. And this is true with founders too, I think. I’m super, super cooperative, I like finding ways to bring everyone together, and let’s work towards a solution. I’m really inspired by multiple sectors, and how do nonprofits and for- profits work together. Like venture and foundations. And so I love just thinking across a lot of different things, and I felt like that was just not a point of view that was appreciated. Even with startups, it’s like, “execute execute,” “hustle hustle.” And then just, aaahh, I just want to—it was so binary for me to think that way, and I think very fluidly. And there’s trade-offs for both, but it’s just I think I felt burnt out over time, because I felt I was being forced to be this binary supercharged hustler. It’s like, “That is not who I am, and is that okay world, if I’m not?”

Did you have early support networks when you came here, and where do you find those now?

Yeah, that’s a good question. Nobody has asked me that.

I did not really know anybody when I moved here. I had one friend from Tufts who I didn’t know super well but we’re now really close friends. I had a couple people that I knew through this fellowship that I was doing when I moved out here, and cobbled together a friend network from that. Those people ended up becoming my closest friends, so I felt supported in that way. And my partner, who’s my biggest source of support and positive influence in my life, he came out of that circle of friends, too.

In terms of support network for tech, it happened slowly and over time. I’m trying to think back. There were a couple people that were really, really useful and supportive early on. Literally, a couple. Anything I knew that I wanted to do, probably came from popping into a network of sorts. When I learned how to code, there weren’t a whole lot of bootcamps or courses. It was still a fairly opaque process. I joined the Women Who Code group in the meetup here, and it just gave me such a safe space to do something that was so intimidating. I’m so thankful for Women Who Code. Just having people around you who are willing to be helpful, and sharing resources, that was just very helpful, to tap into something where by tapping into one thing, you’re connected to a whole bunch more stuff. Then with being a founder, 500 Startups helped tap into a certain network as well. I think that’s probably the benefit of accelerators for a lot of people. It’s like, “Oh, now you’re part of this network and part of this family,” or whatever. Then with doing VC, I think being at a fund that already had a great reputation was so, so helpful. People would just be like, “Oh, I know your partner,” or, “I know your investments.” And like, “You guys are a great fund,” and whatever. That’s like the ultimate tapping into a network. VCs are everywhere. That probably expanded my network the most.

I’ve never been great at asking people for individual support, like one-on-one support. People will make fun of me for it. I kind of suck at finding mentors and whatever. But I just try to be nice and make friends. Trying to give as much as I can is—I know it sounds like everybody says it, but—when you do that a little bit, it ends up coming back and helping you. I just try to take a really—and there have been some friends of mine who have really influenced my thinking on that, of just being like, “Give, give, give! Be super, super, super fucking nice,” and like, “Never give anybody a reason to hate you.” That works really well. I guess I never really thought of myself as a super social person or like a networky kind of person. I think of myself as actually sort of antisocial, but then all my friends are always like, “You are the most calendered antisocial person I know.” So, I don’t know. It sort of happens, I guess. I try to be nice and friendly, and stuff just sort of comes my way that way. I wish I were better at asking for help though.

“I’ve never been great at asking people for individual support, like one-on-one support. People will make fun of me for it. I kind of suck at finding mentors and whatever. But I just try to be nice and make friends. Trying to give as much as I can is—I know it sounds like everybody says it, but—when you do that a little bit, it ends up coming back and helping you.”

No, I’m exactly the same. You can probably relate. I had no money or power in tech, so my currency was social.

Yeah, totally.

I would intro people to people, or I do favors for people, or whatever. I would do anything for people because it was free, and that’s like literally how I built my value in tech.

It’s actually a funny mindset. I used to, like, literally—“I will help you with whatever, just let me help you.” Now I have to think about, “All right, what do I actually need to say no to, to manage my time better”, and it’s been a funny mindset to transition out of, or like, scale out of. Because I really want to be helpful to everyone. But, oh yeah, I can’t just go and do 20 different projects. I need to do the one that I want to do. But I think it’s like—it has felt that easy to just sort of be helpful wherever I can. But to look back at it, I feel like, “I don’t know how all that worked out.”

Yeah, if you haven’t read Essentialism yet, it’s probably a good time in your life to read it.

Oooh.

It talks about the paradox of success and how we became successful because we had this vision, and we work super, super hard and we’re opportunistic. So you get to this level of success and then you suddenly have a million inbound options and opportunities to choose from. You have people who want to work with you, people who have cool projects for you, job offers, people who want to get coffee with you. An you’re an opportunistic person, and you want to be helpful so you want to do all those things, but then you end up stuck at this plateau because you’re busy, your energy’s now distributed towards addressing all of these options and opportunities and then you forget what you’re even going for in the first place. It’s a great book, would recommend.

That actually describes my life right now. I need to read this.

I always have a copy at my house, so when you come and take your picture I’m probably just going to send it away with you.

Yay. [chuckle]

What are your biggest motivators? What drives you?

What drives me? I really believe strongly on the power of creativity in individuals and to unlock that underlying ability. I know that’s super cheesy but it’s just so true. When I think about everything even in my personal life, like my personal interests, friendships, relationships, everything—it’s all about enabling some personal weirdness about myself and other people. If people feel like they can’t be really them, how can we make it so that people feel comfortable? I love one-on-one conversations with people because it’s just a matter of kinda drawing all their stories and, how do you do that to hopefully get them to open up? It makes me happier than anything else in the world. I’m very story driven. I just love hearing things that are different about other people, getting other people’s perspectives. Its why I love doing what I’m doing right now, because it’s tons of weird stories and you have to talk to people and earn their trust and then they might open up to you. Everything I do, I want it to be around that.

That’s awesome. It’s like what I tweeted like a week ago or something. “There are extroverts and introverts, but there’s need to be a word for people who get their energy exclusively from one-on-ones.”

Yes.

I am that person [chuckle].

That’s a word that’s really hard to scale a time to, because I love meeting people even if it’s somebody that in the end there’s no real way for us to work together or whatever. I just love sitting there and listening to them. Like, “That’s awesome, tell me more” [chuckle]

How do your friends and family at home feel about the work that you’ve done?

My mom has been actually super awesome and supportive. Both my parents have been really supportive. I wouldn’t have thought they were going to be when I first graduated and everything. My dad is always super, super encouraging—motivating me to “do what you need to do.” He’s always supported all my weird travel adventures and everything.

I remember when I first told them I wanted to start a company with my roommate. They didn’t know what was going to happen, but they were so, so, so supportive. Then I went to VC and they were really supportive. They’ll send me articles, right, because they’re my parents. The articles will change depending on whatever I’m doing and they’re researching all the time, which is so nice of them. My mom—when I told her I wanted to do open source stuff she’s like, “I don’t know what this is, but I’m reading about it all the time.” I was like, “Oh my God. You’re reading about open source? What? Do you even—even my friends here don’t know what it is.” It’s been really, really awesome to have that level of support from my parents. And with friends—I think the friends I keep over time are friends who understand my kookiness a little bit. Even within tech and stuff. So they’ve all been really great and supportive. I think that’s one of the most important things is: just having people around you who believe in you.

Yeah, for sure. How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What excites you, even particularly in open source? What frustrates you?

I’m so curious what is going to happen in the future [chuckles]. Everyone is obviously talking about—I don’t want to say the word, but—bubbles. But it’s kind of funny, so the short time that I was in venture, was apparently, now looking at the charts, one of the peak times in spending, so no wonder I thought it was fucking nuts, and last quarter, spending dropped like crazy. So, I can’t tell from the outside necessarily what is going on, but my friends I’ve talked to have said yeah, we’re investing way less, we’re examining things a lot more carefully, and so it’s kind of like, man, I wonder what it’s like to be in venture now. So, yeah, but I think, my theory is, it’s very hard to think long term about an industry that has a short history. My theory is the world has periods of high high growth and periods of figuring out how to sustain that growth, like grappling with whatever we’ve done. And so maybe right now we’ve passed through the hyper hyper growth periods and now we’re thinking about how to sustain things, and so, I mean, there’s plenty of politics around all this stuff, but there’s more talk about nonprofits and funding long term research and partnerships and initiatives that are reaching across certain sectors, and we’re talking about basic income and it’s not a joke anymore. That’s so cool.

“It’s very hard to think long term about an industry that has a short history.”

I’m really excited about maybe potentially we’re entering this time where people are thinking a little bit more around sustainability and ensuring these long-term things are around, that we can help fund creativity. I feel like creativity itself has been so validated as the power of the individual to make significant contributions which is why stuff like basic income doesn’t seem crazy. I mean it should be crazy. I think it’s just so funny that people are into basic income because other things sound like socialism or communism to them but then it’s like, “Oh, no, basic income is great,” and it’s partially because we believe in people. I think it’s a really cool time right now because that’s what I believe and I really hope that more people invest in it and care about it.

The one thing that bothers me right now or feels weird is just all politics and conversations getting more polarized than it was before, and I’ve definitely noticed this about diversity conversations in tech, where I can’t even take part in them. It’s just really frustrating because I think that there’s two philosophies around diversity. One is around hyper-polarization and separation into different shells, like, “I’m black and you’re not,” or, “I’m a woman and you’re not. You can’t understand me. You can’t possibly understand me.” That’s one school of thought and the other school of thought is more around things like unconscious bias where it’s like, “We’re all sexist. We’re all racist.”  We’re all scared and vulnerable and know what it feels like to be rejected on whatever level, and so use that as a uniting, empathic connection. Obviously, I resonate more strongly with that camp, and I feel like it’s missing from the conversation around diversity, because diversity can be all about highlighting what makes you different from others, or it could be all about highlighting what’s common between us. I really hope that is part of the conversation. I’m not very optimistic that it is and that makes me kind of sad.

“I think that there’s two philosophies around diversity. One is around hyper-polarization and separation into different shells, like, ‘I’m black and you’re not,’ or, ‘I’m a woman and you’re not. You can’t understand me. You can’t possibly understand me.’ That’s one school of thought and the other school of thought is more around things like unconscious bias where it’s like, ‘We’re all sexist. We’re all racist.” We’re all scared and vulnerable and know what it feels like to be rejected on whatever level, and so use that as a uniting, empathic connection. Obviously, I resonate more strongly with that camp, and I feel like it’s missing from the conversation around diversity, because diversity can be all about highlighting what makes you different from others, or it could be all about highlighting what’s common between us. I really hope that is part of the conversation. I’m not very optimistic that it is and that makes me kind of sad.”

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

Hyper-collaboration [chuckles]. I just believe that positive communication is the key to everything. Or people just being able to trust each other and be vulnerable with each other is the key to everything. I think that maybe is why building support networks and stuff doesn’t feel unusual to me, because it is just a natural part of that—of building trust with somebody else. You honor them and their willingness to trust you, and you expect likewise. I think that’s just a really powerful currency and a way of just communicating with people and making people happy. It’s the most, most important thing of anything I do with work. Making sure that I have other people’s trust and confidence and that I don’t ever violate that. That people feel welcome and included and no one ever feels shitty because I think those emotions are so universal. Everything we do can kind of be boiled down to, “Do I feel shitty and rejected for who I am, or not?” I’ve felt that in so many different ways growing up and I never want to inflict that on anybody else.

“Everything we do can kind of be boiled down to, ‘Do I feel shitty and rejected for who I am, or not?’ I’ve felt that in so many different ways growing up and I never want to inflict that on anybody else.”

Sounds like a very good quality for a founder or VC to have.

Yes, or a person.

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

Maybe. It’s hard to plan that far ahead. I’d like to be a little more flexible, and travel. But this still feels like my home for sure. I don’t know. I really suck at thinking far ahead for anything. [chuckles] I kind of just think ahead to like the next year. As long as my bills get paid, and I’m having fun every day, then I know I’m in a good place.

What about this year? What are you like working on either yourself or for work?

Right now it’s kind of a funny—I never really know how to explain what I’m doing right now, because I’m basically being supported by a foundation to bring more transparency to an issue that’s really important to technology. So I see sort of like the first half of this year just kind of being around getting people together, getting them talking, writing about open source so that it’s accessible. That helps bring some of those stories out of just within their communities and more to other people who might not have heard them. So that’s like a really important part of it. The reaction has been so much stronger than I expected. That’s a really positive thing. I feel like now it’s kind of time to also start thinking towards how can I help support that stuff long-term. So thinking through like what would an organization look like that can help support and sustain, or just be a resource to people in those communities who need support or need help and there’s nowhere really like that right now. I think that’s the fun part that happens next as people get excited and engaged. The question is, “What do we actually do about it?”

The last question: What advice would you have for people from similar backgrounds who are hoping to get into tech?

I’d say, “People are just your best resource.” I think that’s especially true in tech. And it’s especially true in Silicon Valley tech more than anywhere else.

Where people are just so willing to help in this industry maybe more than anywhere else. I haven’t worked much in other industries but it just seems like it here. So if you don’t know how to do something or you want to learn how to do something, just cold email people and say hey. Or go attend an event and introduce yourself to people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and then also give as freely as you receive. Honestly like 90% of the work is just be nice and help people.

“So if you don’t know how to do something or you want to learn how to do something, just cold email people and say hey. Or go attend an event and introduce yourself to people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and then also give as freely as you receive. Honestly like 90% of the work is just be nice and help people.”