Tell me a bit about your early years and where you come from.

I come from Canada.  My dad is an engineer and he always raised me to think about solving problems and building things, and my mom reinforced that too. I was one of those kids with a magical upbringing where I thought I could do anything. I thought the major problem with being an astronaut was that I needed glasses since I was five, not that I was not a man (there were no female astronauts yet). I didn’t think of myself as a girl or as a boy either, just as having unlimited potential.

I was socially very inept. I didn’t really know how to make friends. I could play with kids, but I didn’t know how to have an emotional girl relationship despite the couple of girlfriends who did their best to teach me because they were stranded with me in a small town. I was the top of my school in high school and just absolutely knew I was either going to become a professional musician or a professional engineer, and I had no doubt about being able to do either. And I picked Engineering, because I could always do music as a sideline.

“I was one of those kids with a magical upbringing where I thought I could do anything. I thought the major problem with being an astronaut was that I needed glasses since I was five, not that I was not a man (there were no female astronauts yet). I didn’t think of myself as a girl or as a boy either, just as having unlimited potential.”

Of course, I found university much harder than high school. Socially, again, I was still having huge problems. I was finding some friends that were amazing friends, who had the same interests as me, and we were connecting a way I’d never connected with other people before. Like the friends that I played “Magic: The Gathering” with after classes, and the friends I traveled to Gen Con with—the big gaming convention in the States. I traveled to Milwaukee from Kitchener-Waterloo for that convention. My studies were hard because now, I was with a hundred other students who had been the top of their classes. So I think that’s a pretty typical experience for men and women in Engineering.

I felt isolated for sure. I never knew how to analyze these things at a young age, so I was just oblivious. For example, I lost a friend in my first term who had been my roommate. After first term was over and we went off for our work terms and came back, I eventually realized she was no longer my friend, and I really must have been a social idiot to not know what I had done to make her not be my friend, and to take so long to realize that I had become not her friend. And by the time I realized, it would have felt really awkward to say, “Hey, why haven’t you been my friend for the last few months?” Like, to admit that I only just noticed. But I was so oblivious that at that age I could basically only shelve that information and try to understand it and process it later.

I really love solving problems and building things, and building on other people’s ideas. So my most successful times in University was when I got to do that, when we got to work on something together.  Sometimes it was outside of class like doing a creative writing workshop, and sometimes it was inside of class, like where we had to build a cardboard bridge for the Physics of Materials class. I knew that I would find that in industry, especially if I didn’t take a solitary engineering role. If I took a programming role and I stayed in front of my computer all day, or at least that was my image of it, then I wouldn’t be solving problems with people and be quite so collaborative. I’d be more isolated.

What I didn’t realize and what many people don’t realize is that engineers, even the ones who are called “individual contributors” are still incredibly collaborative. It’s hard to be an isolated engineer in the modern software industry. At least I was exposed to industry through my work terms. One of the fabulous things about my school was sending engineers off on work terms, six times in all. It was a five-year program so that they could send us off from January to April or send us off from June to August or send us off from September to December. So year-round, there would be engineering interns going off in all directions and some companies had this constant stream, not just summer interns, but a year-round rotation of interns coming through. And that exposure was fantastic for showing me that there were jobs that were people-oriented and collaborative. So the same thing I love about music, which was playing in an orchestra, I found that in computer science. It was initially being a program manager to bring together engineers with requirements and users and constraints and testers and making it all work, not instructing everybody what to do. So not like a conductor in an orchestra but the coordinator, the hub, the person who—by sharing the right information with the right people at the right time—could just make everything run smoothly.

What originally brought you to Silicon Valley?

Well I did have that moment of awe—of driving down the 101 and seeing one sign after another. In those days, it was seeing Sun and Oracle and AOL Online and Excite at Home. All of these signs along the freeway of companies I recognized—of innovative companies, one after another. So it was really fun to do that. I visited Silicon Valley from my first job up in Seattle before I moved to Silicon Valley. I spent four years in Seattle after university and I visited for conferences and meetings and things like that. And I knew where the interesting stuff was going on.

I wasn’t a good fit at Microsoft because it is a big corporation.  It can be a shark tank, rat race or whatever animal model you care to choose. I found a romantic interest in the Bay Area, and when the time came that I felt comfortable moving closer to this romantic interest, I was also quite happy to leave Microsoft and look for a startup job. And I found one and it was wonderful. I got to hire engineers, and build a team, and design, and code.  In order to get that job, I had to pretend I was more of a programmer than I had been for the last four years, but then I quickly had to make good on that promise. I know from reading the literature that not all women feel comfortable doing the fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. They underestimate their abilities rather than overestimate and I certainly overestimated my abilities, but I had the incredible support of a romantic interest.  He just thought it was a no-brainer that I could do this and he gave me a lot of confidence. The confidence of a parent or of a boyfriend can be huge for giving that boost, making the ask, applying for the job, saying, “Sure, I can do that.”  

“A calendaring standard had been marinating in my head for years. I finally figured out I could make a proposal that people would be interested in. I made a proposal of, “Here’s the smallest thing that we could build as a calendaring standard, that we could implement and inter-operate between calendar servers and calendar clients”. That’s the interaction when you open your calendar and you get it from the server: something new will show up on the phone and you’ll see it even if you entered it in your computer. That was what I wanted to solve first—not invitations or scheduling—but synchronizing that specific kind of data between devices.”

What are some of the proudest moments of your career?

I think the thing I’m most proud of happened after working on Internet standards for years, after I worked on some standards for document sharing and Web standards. Because I was involved in that while I was still at Microsoft, I was sent to look into the calendaring standards.  Not that Microsoft wanted to do anything but it needed to have somebody there to fill the seat at the table. But I was exposed to that so four years later, I had another chance to look at it and I had these ideas. A calendaring standard had been marinating in my head for years. I finally figured out I could make a proposal that people would be interested in. I made a proposal of, “Here’s the smallest thing that we could build as a calendaring standard, that we could implement and inter-operate between calendar servers and calendar clients”. That’s the interaction when you open your calendar and you get it from the server: something new will show up on the phone and you’ll see it even if you entered it in your computer. That was what I wanted to solve first—not invitations or scheduling—but synchronizing that specific kind of data between devices.

So we should all literally be thanking you for being able to use our calendars. Thank you.

After that, I went from writing my own standards and leading working groups to actually directing a part of the IETF. Web standards, email standards, calendaring standards, instant messaging standards, and a few others; all the ones that people think of as the Internet. I was one of the directors of that area for four years (which means I got selected twice to do that). That was incredibly political work with a long-term horizon. And so, I was not just writing a document anymore that might become a standard. I was getting the people together that might form a working group, that might choose an editor, that might write a document, that might be edited, that might be approved, that might be implemented that someday people might actually use in their software. There are so many stumbling blocks on the road, in such a political process, to get approval to start these things to get community agreement. It was all about getting community agreement, getting consensus and the technical issues became sore points rather than the fun parts, because the technical issues were wrapped up in people’s egos and politics.  

“I went cold turkey on standards. I had been doing it nearly full time, it was nearly my whole job, and then I went away, I completely stepped away. I’ve never been back to one of those meetings. I didn’t mean to make a dramatic exit, but I was done.  No hard feelings against anybody in particular, but I was just done.”

I really did burn out on that kind of work, and I decided to go for something completely different. Instead of this ten-year time horizon, how about a two month time horizon?

So I went cold turkey on standards. I had been doing it nearly full time, it was nearly my whole job, and then I went away, I completely stepped away. I’ve never been back to one of those meetings. I didn’t mean to make a dramatic exit, but I was done.  No hard feelings against anybody in particular, but I was just done. I’ll do something new; I’ll figure out a new career. I guess another thing I was scared of: there are some cantankerous curmudgeons in these standards groups who have been there for twenty years, so I gave myself ten. I figured, if I don’t become a cantankerous curmudgeon in ten years, great, I’ll give ten years and that will be useful to the community and to the internet, but after that I should go, because the last thing I want to become is one of these people who says well, you can’t do it because of this, this, or this reason—always complaining and saying “you can’t, you can’t.”

What are some of your favorite things about working in tech?

The technology industry reinvents itself over and over again. Younger people or newer people come in and overturn the status quo. If I can’t make myself young again, I can at least make myself new again [chuckles]. I can jump into something I haven’t done before, and ask questions, and say, “Wow, why can’t you do that?” Or, “What if you did it this way?” Startups have turned out to be a place where I can perennially do that.

A lot of people want to say, “What industry are you interested in doing a startup in?”  This comes up when I network, which I do constantly trying to find my next startup. If I am in a startup for a year, that’s great, but I’m constantly networking because it takes time to find another startup. When I say, “Do you know any interesting startups?”, people say, “Well, what industry are you interested in?” Well, anywhere where I can be useful and new at the same time.  Where I can have that excitement of digging into something new, and the utility of bringing this pattern-matching experience, like the experience of looking at big systems, and deep diving into protocol issues, and various startups—bringing all that experience to a brand new problem. It’s pretty useful [chuckles]. I can say that with confidence.

What have been some of your biggest struggles and roadblocks?

So some of the first problems that I ever had an inkling of were the problems of camaraderie.  I’m pretty sure what screwed my first term at university was a little bit of sexual liberation, of looking like a sex object to the guys in engineering. That meant that I couldn’t be a colleague, or couldn’t consistently be a colleague. Oh my God, once a guy in first term engineering from another class ran into my classroom and dumped a box on the table in front of me, in front of all my classmates, just before class started. They asked, “What’s that?” I looked, opened it up, and it’s a necklace. Instead of saying, “Oh, what an idiot that guy is,” they all looked at me: “What did you do to have this guy dump a necklace on you?” It made me stand out and be judged. Was I making women in engineering look bad? Well, it was my first time in college! Duh! [chuckles]

“I’m pretty sure what screwed my first term at university was a little bit of sexual liberation, of looking like a sex object to the guys in engineering. That meant that I couldn’t be a colleague, or couldn’t consistently be a colleague.”

Anyway, I was kind of shunned. That was really hard. I toned everything down. I started dressing more conservatively again. I stopped flirting. I resolved, “Maybe I shouldn’t have coffee with guys. We’re either working on homework or I can’t have coffee with you.” I made all sorts of restrictions like that and I became much more conservative again and good girl and serious and keep my glasses on more and my contacts in less. All the little things of holding myself to a mold that would not be mistaken for a sex object. Instead, geek girl: the geek girl mold allowed me to reclaim some camaraderie.

It’s not always possible. The first team of people at Microsoft that I loved working with and I wanted to be part of the team as much as anybody else on the team, well they played basketball together. Actually, I played basketball in high school and I missed it, so I thought, “Oh, this is great! I’ll come play basketball with you guys since you say it’s a casual pick-up game.” But after a couple times, they started sneaking out without telling me they were playing basketball. My best guess is that they didn’t like bumping into me. I was the only girl on the court. They didn’t want to hurt me. They didn’t want to come down with their elbows and get me in the face. They didn’t want to have to treat one person on court differently. They just didn’t want me in that pick-up game, so they stopped letting me know when they were going and it was clearly not working, so I needed to find other ways of finding that camaraderie. I did. I played networked computer games and I loved them. In many ways it was easy for me because I love video games. I got into juggling, I just did all kinds of geek stuff. I’m like, “Sure, I’ll do that geek thing, because here I am among geeks and it’ll be fun.” I really did enjoy that. But there were some sore spots there too.

“I was kind of shunned. That was really hard. I toned everything down. I started dressing more conservatively again. I stopped flirting. I resolved, “Maybe I shouldn’t have coffee with guys. We’re either working on homework or I can’t have coffee with you.” I made all sorts of restrictions like that and I became much more conservative again and good girl and serious and keep my glasses on more and my contacts in less. All the little things of holding myself to a mold that would not be mistaken for a sex object. Instead, geek girl: the geek girl mold allowed me to reclaim some camaraderie.”

Have you had other experience where you are treated differently as a woman in tech?

I do get underestimated. One of my favorite examples of being young and being underestimated, it’s very easy to walk into somebody’s office and just start asking questions like I need to learn this area, “can you answer some questions for me,” and ask a bunch of questions. But what I’m really doing is I’m getting time with a developer who would otherwise be prickly and defensive, and convincing him to change something that he holds dear by asking innocent sounding questions. And I learned to do it, and I felt manipulative, but it felt like it was really working so I tried to professionalize it.  I realized years later that what I was doing was the Socratic method. When you want to teach somebody something, and you ask them questions to arrive at it, that is called the Socratic method.

“One colleague who’s younger than me and less experienced than me, who thought it would be appropriate to give me some feedback after my first year as an Area Director.  He said, ‘Sometimes I think you don’t know the answer to something that I think you should know the answer to, so I think your weakness is you should be more technical.’ I had to say, ‘It’s called the Socratic method.’ And he boggled. He hadn’t considered that I really did know these things.”

Yet still I had colleagues… for example one colleague who’s younger than me and less experienced than me, who thought it would be appropriate to give me some feedback after my first year as an Area Director.  He said, “Sometimes I think you don’t know the answer to something that I think you should know the answer to, so I think your weakness is you should be more technical”. I had to say, “It’s called the Socratic method.” And he boggled. He hadn’t considered that I really did know these things. So all these guys who thought I was asking innocent questions, they underestimated me, and this colleague who knew me really well, we’d worked together closely for a year, he still underestimated me, thinking all these questions meant I didn’t really know any answers.

It take a lot of seniority for a woman to start being able to give answers instead of having to couch answers in questions, and I have gotten there. I still sometimes get horribly defensive and I hate to feel myself doing it. I start listing my credentials like I’m bragging to establish that I have that ability to give answers sometimes. Sometimes I’ll preface an answer with, “Here’s all the reasons why I’m going to give you an answer, and you need to respect that and not dismiss it.”

“I still sometimes get horribly defensive and I hate to feel myself doing it. I start listing my credentials like I’m bragging to establish that I have that ability to give answers sometimes. Sometimes I’ll preface an answer with, ‘Here’s all the reasons why I’m going to give you an answer, and you need to respect that and not dismiss it.'”

When I became a mom, something else changed completely. I started noticing that my commitment, my passion was now completely in question, and it hadn’t been before. When I was childless, I could be a geek—almost like people said, “Well, she must be basically a man in a woman’s body because look at how much she loves protocols, and architecture, and systems.” But then when I got pregnant and I very clearly was not a man, I noticed that was just overwhelming to people. People started saying things like, “Well, I guess you’ll be glad to leave work when you have the baby.” That had not been questioned before, and even the second time I had a baby, even though people knew I had previously had a baby and returned to work—the second time I had a baby, my board of directors was asking my CEO, “so are we going to lose our VP Eng after she has her baby? How do we know she’s coming back?”

It was when I had my first baby that I started reading a whole bunch of feminist literature and for a time period I became quite bitter and ranty. I started putting together patterns, like what had happened in that first time when I thought I was making friends in my engineering class and then the friendships collapsed and I had to find friends elsewhere in the university, in the math department and other engineering classes. I think I finally did analyze that correctly but I didn’t do it until 15 years later. After becoming bitter and over-educated about the barriers that I had been oblivious to, I started thinking, if only I could become oblivious again. I did manage to in some ways. I managed to put it out of my head.

“When I became a mom, something else changed completely. I started noticing that my commitment, my passion was now completely in question, and it hadn’t been before. When I was childless, I could be a geek—almost like people said, ‘Well, she must be basically a man in a woman’s body because look at how much she loves protocols, and architecture, and systems.’ But then when I got pregnant and I very clearly was not a man, I noticed that was just overwhelming to people. People started saying things like, ‘Well, I guess you’ll be glad to leave work when you have the baby.’ That had not been questioned before, and even the second time I had a baby, even though people knew I had previously had a baby and returned to work—the second time I had a baby, my board of directors was asking my CEO, ‘so are we going to lose our VP Eng after she has her baby? How do we know she’s coming back?'”

You’ve got to take every interaction at face value. I can’t assume that every interaction might be polluted by bias. I just have to assume it is what it is. “He didn’t like my idea. I didn’t convince him. I didn’t try hard enough. I didn’t put it the right way. He is not ready to hear it.” I don’t necessarily always blame myself, but I do leave it open. I don’t say, “Well, he didn’t listen because I’m a woman.” because that would just poison my life. I just say, “Well, it doesn’t always work. I’m not always able to convince somebody and what do I do now?” I just think that way. Take everything at face value.

I’m now at a point where I can identify in other women whether they are at that oblivious or denial phase or whether they’re at that eyes-open, perhaps bitter phase—and it is a phase change. You can see somebody making that phase change sometimes. You can see somebody approaching it and then stepping back if they choose to remain in denial.

“After becoming bitter and over-educated about the barriers that I had been oblivious to, I started thinking, if only I could become oblivious again. I did manage to in some ways. I managed to put it out of my head.”

How do you find balance between the two?

It’s more by compartmentalizing. In college, it was not possible to compartmentalize and even in my first few years out of college everybody made friends with everybody else from work. Being a cohort at Microsoft of new grads made us all potential friends. We sorted out into subgroups of close friends, but there was so much overlap between work and personal life that I couldn’t compartmentalize.

But I did manage to compartmentalize eventually. I found knitting groups and I expressed myself in fiber arts. I am a very technical knitter, no surprise. I knit some of the most challenging lace projects out there in order to challenge my brain.  I meet up with other knitters who are almost universally women and I geek out with them in a totally different way.  “Feel this fiber,” and “Yeah, this fiber that’s silk,” and “Oh my God, I could roll in it.” Knitters are wonderfully supportive and friendly, especially the geeky knitters, because nobody who’s a software engineer AND a knitter wants to exclude anybody, because they’re so niche already. I was able to go to contra dances, I was able to bring back the music into my life, and dress up girly, and twirl around in skirts in my thirties. I would leave work and go to a contra dance, and only if somebody asked, “what do you do?”  would I say, “I’m an engineer.”  I didn’t worry about being taken seriously because I’m just dancing.

“I’m now at a point where I can identify in other women whether they are at that oblivious or denial phase or whether they’re at that eyes-open, perhaps bitter phase—and it is a phase change. You can see somebody making that phase change sometimes. You can see somebody approaching it and then stepping back if they choose to remain in denial.”

What are some of your biggest struggles as a VP level woman in tech?

I’m finding ways to deal with it, but it for sure has because the number of decisions I have to make just goes up and up.  I’m not just deciding how to architect something, but how to tell somebody how to architect it, or whether to let them try it their own way and perhaps not do it right, and whether to hire somebody, whether to fire somebody.  Whether to make things blue or green – well not exactly, but that kind of low-level and high-level decisions all mixed in together in a day. And I get decision freeze sometimes, just where I don’t want to make one more decision, I don’t want to organize one more thing, or send one more email, or set up one more meeting. Because I do love my job, my social life has gone down.  Especially since having kids. I used to be the social coordinator for my geek group of friends in Seattle, and I’m just not that person anymore. I don’t have the capacity for it anymore.

What do you enjoy most about it?

It’s very high up the Maslow hierarchy of needs; it’s fulfilling work. It’s work that makes me feel, “I’m so excited to be putting together this picture, and sharing it with somebody else and including their ideas, and figuring out a way to picture it all so that we can convince the rest of the company to do it.” Those moments, I live for, and I try to seek them out.

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

We’re going through a couple of major changes that may be linked.  startups can build more functionality cheaper than ever with fewer people because we’ve evolved our web technology to be powerful and modular, so that you can build a little piece and hook it to five or ten other little pieces. When you build a website these days the internals are modular. You can pull in a module that does the login for your site and integrate that with a few tutorial steps and now you’ve got logins. Integrate a module that does image viewing and zooming; two days later you have image viewing and zooming. Those are both code modules that are open source, somebody else wrote, and you bring them into your project. But there’s also powerful services, for example pulling restaurants and photos people take in restaurants from Foursquare. You can integrate a service in a couple of days. It takes a lot longer to make everything work together smoothly, but the basic pieces can be pulled together so fast that a startup might only need one engineer to build its first product and show it. It might only need four months. It used to be that a startup always needed $6,000,000 minimum to get off the ground. The first startup I joined needed $6,000,000 and now people think that a couple $100,000 might get you off the ground. That’s more than an order of 10 drop and that is a game changer.

“You can integrate a service in a couple of days. It takes a lot longer to make everything work together smoothly, but the basic pieces can be pulled together so fast that a startup might only need one engineer to build its first product and show it. It might only need four months. It used to be that a startup always needed $6,000,000 minimum to get off the ground. The first startup I joined needed $6,000,000 and now people think that a couple $100,000 might get you off the ground. That’s more than an order of 10 drop and that is a game changer.”

I wonder it’s linked to the prevalence of women, or if it’s just coincidental that this has been the year of the women in my industry talking about getting harassed, women in the gaming industry particularly. Brianna Woo and Anita Sarkeesian. Twitter trolling happens publicly.  It always did used to happen, but it happened more in niches that fewer people could see. I’ve seen stories surface now about that happening 10 years ago. Where was the outrage 10 years ago? It apparently wasn’t surfacing high enough to be noticeable. I think that in the reaction to that, the backlash is happening because there’s pressure to change it for the better. The backlash is coming from people who don’t want that change.

I would like to see modern Web architecture, these modular tools that I was saying that make it possible to build stuff fast, and ways of working that give engineers a lot of autonomy—I would like to see those spread inside larger companies because I think larger companies have a lot of pent up, underused expertise and value. I don’t mind seeing big companies become better. I want to see Oracle become better and faster, and I still think there will be lots of room for small companies. It’s interesting to me how slow sometimes the adoption curve can be for something that, if you adopted it now, you’d be saving time within six months when the engineers are trained up, and yet five years pass before a company adopts that thing. There’s a saying in science, that science advances funeral by funeral. A generation of scientists has to be replaced by a new generation in order for a big idea to change the landscape and take over as the accepted idea. In my industry I think it’s the speed of hiring and firing—that a generation is how long people stay at a company. But I’m always excited to see that change happening, even if I think it’s inevitable.

“Twitter trolling happens publicly.  It always did used to happen, but it happened more in niches that fewer people could see. I’ve seen stories surface now about that happening 10 years ago. Where was the outrage 10 years ago? It apparently wasn’t surfacing high enough to be noticeable.”

Of course I want to see more women feeling happy about staying in technology. I want to see great paternity and maternity policies. I want to see it be okay for a guy to say he took time off to be with his baby, like one guy told me today.

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

I don’t. I have a best friend who’s a CTO or VP Eng at successive companies.  She’s my peer, but we go to each other for advice, supporting each other. I don’t really have mentors that I can look up to and model myself on.

Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years? Do you think you’ll stay in tech?

I do. I love what I’m doing. And I have a lot of appetite for being in a small company. I often find being in a large company as stressful as being in a startup, which is not the normal experience. I find in a startup, the politics are at a manageable scale, and the priorities are very clear to everybody.   I can be a lot less stressed relative to other people in a startup. I don’t panic. When the services are down, you know it’s just a startup. It’s not 10 million people using it yet, so I don’t panic. I know people who panic in a startup because of being the only one there—the one in the spotlight. Well, I know people who panic at big and medium size companies too. But I actually think it’s more relevant when it’s a big company. Just because the blame can be spread more widely, doesn’t mean that an outage that affects 10 million people is better. It just has a bigger effect on the people who feel responsible. I’m able to put that in perspective when I work at a startup. It doesn’t have a lot of users yet, and so I say, “Okay, the system went down the weekend. We’ll write the tests to make sure it doesn’t happen again. No need to panic. Let’s just move on. Learn from it.”

“I don’t really have mentors that I can look up to and model myself on.”

So I see no reason why I won’t still be here in five or ten years. I would like to grow one of the startups that I join—and I know it’s never certain that I can do it—I would like to grow one of them to be a 200 person, a 300 person company. I want to be the CTO or VP Eng, one of the lead technical people. I don’t have to be the top. I can share responsibility very well. My co-founder in the last startup—we are excellent work partners. We fill in for each other’s weaknesses. I don’t do all the tech and he doesn’t do all the people stuff even though we obviously have strength in those directions. I could see myself sharing the responsibility at the top level of a company of 200 or 300. That’s where I’d like to be.

Lastly, what advice would you give to folks from similar backgrounds who are in tech or hoping to get into it?

Well, I find it hard to generalize my advice. I do give advice to people and I try to pitch it to the person where they’re at. I met an intern from my alma mater and she must be about 21. She’s in San Francisco for a work term and my advice for her was that this is a great time to meet with people. Say, “I’d like to pick your brain. I’d like to have coffee, and I’d like to know what you’re doing. I’d like to know why you started that startup,” and so many people will say yes if you reach out. Every person you have coffee with, you could say: “This is so great talking to you. I like what you told me about this. Can you suggest somebody else I could talk to in this area?” and they’ll suggest two more names. So, you can just go on having coffee with fantastically interesting people every week, and you will find it so rewarding to build that experience and that breadth of mindset.

So that was my advice to a twenty-one year old, and my advice to a twenty-eight year old entrepreneur was to get bloody minded, to stop worrying about the things that weren’t the most important things or whether as the founder of the company she should be doing engineering hiring. I said, “Is it the most important thing? Can you do it right? It is your most important thing. You need to do it right. Be bloody-minded about that. Push the boundaries. Go hunt people down and hire them for your startup. You can’t do the normal things.” So I was telling her to push the boundaries, use the bloody-mindedness to work the problem of hiring the way she would work a problem in math.

My advice for somebody who’s thinking about becoming a mom is to flex it.  Be flexible in your picture of how things are going to be. Be flexible about whether you’re going to have a nanny or a daycare. Be flexible about whether you’re going to cook nutritious meals yourself every night or whether you can hire a cook or bring your kids to the company cafeteria. Be flexible about everything and always be reworking the problem. Every year with kids the situation changes. Flex it.