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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you make that transition?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did your attention start turning towards educating minority communities?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m from Colorado. I grew up in Colorado Springs.

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

Holy shit.

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

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

So, if you feel comfortable, what happened?

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

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

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

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

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

What about your mom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Just* the Armory? [laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So you just… made a VR camera?

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

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

What excites you about that space?

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

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

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

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

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

What are the biggest motivators behind your work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t care.

That’s good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

Okay, I think I have a very interesting story, and I think what it all comes down to is that there is no single road into Silicon Valley. I graduated college with a degree in French Literature, and growing up I had always wanted to be an architect…

Me, too!

Really?

Yeah.

Okay, awesome. My senior year of college, I got into a Master’s of Architecture program at the Art Institute of Chicago. This little, little, tiny thing inside me was like, “Don’t go straight into that program, defer a year.” I deferred a year with the intention of moving to San Francisco to save money. This is in 2006, and I don’t know why I thought the word “San Francisco” and “save money” went hand in hand, but it did for me, I guess, at the time. I had family out here, and within like the first month I realized I didn’t want to be an architect. I realized what I loved about it was theory and history as opposed to actual drafting and designing, and so I started working in PR, doing communications. Web 2.0 was a thing at that time, but it just exposed me to the whole world of communications and editorial, and so I was just like, “Well, this feels right to me.”

Fast forward, and I thought, “I want to use these skills for something good.” I was working in policy, doing criminal justice reform, accountable development, working with non-profits and public agencies as a consultant. I was doing that for a couple years, and I got really bored at my job, just because I had this background. I was a French major, I wanted architecture, so I had this creative vein in everything that I do, but my work in policy wasn’t fulfilling that.

At that same time, I was kind of deciding to go natural. I had relaxed my hair using chemical straighteners for 15 years, and I decided that I didn’t want to do that anymore. I decided that it was such a big, monumental transformation that I wanted to document it and really do a lot of education about it and share it with the world. I started a website called Natural Selection and…

Such a good name, by the way.

Thank you, I’m such an evolutionary nerd. I was really into that in college.

I was like, yeah, so I’m going to double entendre that, started Natural Selection. It just continued to grow and grow and grow, and within a few, couple years, I ended up quitting policy and pursuing my blog full time, and I was an editor for a big curly hair website. I worked with a lot of brands and traveled around the world, to the Caribbean, to Europe, all over Atlanta just building this community of women going through the same thing that I was, and it was all just about our hair and going natural. It was really cool because I made all of these “hair friends”, and “curl friends.” The more that we grew our communities, the bigger the movement became, and it was a really cool moment in beauty industry history.

I had no intention of being in the beauty industry whatsoever, but I was. Then I ended up going to work at a different startup, because I was in San Francisco at the same time, and worked in a fashion startup, but then I got the itch to go back into beauty. Ended up getting connected with Tristan, and that was when everything really clicked. It was like, “Oh my gosh, here we are in San Francisco in tech, doing what I love the most, which is helping people of color feel comfortable and empowered with who they actually are.” A lot of it is through that surface of beauty, like the hair, the skin, et cetera. There was just this immediate synergy and shared sense of values from that perspective, and that is how I got to where I am today.

“I mean, I think we have the hardest job in the world. It’s not even VCs not getting it, it’s that our target consumer is still very traumatized by a razor, because they have historically been served tools that are not designed for them.”

As you know, I have such a brand crush on your company, and I think you guys are doing the best consumer facing brand work in Silicon Valley. I would love to know more about the philosophy behind your work and how you approach it.

Yeah, for me it really resonates from my hair blogging days and sort of what you asked me at the beginning of this interview, was like, “tell the real story.” I found when I was blogging, people really feel more connected when you’re authentic. Whether it’s good, whether it’s bad, whether it’s a success, whether it’s a struggle, being able to tell those stories is what really allows people to become inspired and it’s content that really resonates with them. I think that is everything Bevel taps into, how to create authentic stories from a brand perspective, and there are so many stories, and so we have so many platforms and opportunities on which we can tell them.

For sure. I’m curious, I touched on this with Tristan, about how VCs in Silicon Valley only really invest in problems that they can relate to, and there’s definitely a little bubble of people not understanding products that are created for people outside of their immediate experience. Despite all of these genuine stories of how your product is changing people’s lives, do you still experience skepticism outside of your company? How do you deal with that?

I mean, I think we have the hardest job in the world. It’s not even VCs not getting it, it’s that our target consumer is still very traumatized by a razor, because they have historically been served tools that are not designed for them. I’d say that, to me, is the area of understanding and education that we need to and are focusing on most. Encouraging, enabling, and educating men of color on how to shave properly.

What makes me really hopeful is that was the same issue that I experienced in hair. If you had told me 10 years ago that I would be wearing my hair natural, I would have been like, “Yeah fucking right. There is no way I will ever stop straightening my hair,” but I just think that just, the power of a movement and the quality of products does so much.  I’m just very hopeful and confident that what we provide is going to be a real key.

Yeah. Absolutely. A big thing I’ve been focusing on in this project is people coming from diverse backgrounds and how that affects their work and how it makes them better at building products and designing products. How bringing more backgrounds to the table informs better product design. I’d love to hear more about how you guys have hired and how that has really contributed to the success of your company.

For me, and what we were looking for is, you just want people that can perform. What I have personally realized in my life is you don’t want people who are just going to take a job for money. I think that we have to find people with whom our values and product resonate that can also perform and, in that center of the Venn diagram, is where we’ll find that core team. We’ve been really, really good at doing that, because you can really tell, somebody’s like, “yeah, you just do this,” and they want to apply some other things just to this, like a business model. When you find that person who actually cares, who understands, I mean, who can understand the needs regardless of ethnic background, then I think that there are lots of people out there who get it, which is really cool.

Absolutely. What would you say are your biggest motivators, what drives you in your work?

I think that there are just so many cool things that we can do, cool people to talk to, cool concepts to execute, but the fact remains that, as I said, we have the challenge of being able to show people a different experience and give them a high quality design and product experience. That’s what keeps me motivated every day. It always has and I think that’s what’s gotten me to this place. From my days of blogging, showing people that there’s a better way for them, just still rings very true.

What do you look for in your work now versus when you started, like what do you look for in a job?

Well, I think it kind of is a good dovetail from what I was saying before. I have made the mistake of taking an opportunity just for money, and it sucks, and you’re just working without any passion behind what you do. Whereas now, holding true to the fact that I want to do things that matter to me and that resonate with me, I’ve been able to bring a lot more of myself to my work. I’m really lucky and fortunate that I get to do that. I know a lot of people don’t, and make money the number one motivator. I had an old boss who drew this—I’ve mentioned Venn diagrams twice now but—he drew this triple Venn diagram, and it’s like, what I’m good at, what makes me money, and what I’m passionate about. In the center is, that is where the magic happens.

“Decades of trauma within our African American communities, and undoing that and showing that there is a different way. It’s just really hard to do. It’s not impossible, but it’s really hard to do. For men it’s this shaving situation. For women, it is the chemical products and thinking that people have to adhere to this Euro-centric standard. I think it’s just the hard thing to do, to show people that there is a different, better way that’s for them, and that they need to be authentic and true to themselves.”

Absolutely. Let’s go high level for a second in your work. In your experience working in tech, what have been some of the really proud and exciting moments for you, and what have been some of the biggest struggles that you’ve had to overcome?

Yeah. It’s so funny, because working in “tech”, quote, unquote, is such a thing that I don’t think I would ever say. I never lead tech first. I might be with somebody who’s like, “Oh, I work in the fashion biz, and now I’m working in the beauty biz.” I think, for me, what really excites me is to pull together projects that really resonate and drive our businesses forward, which is really cool.

Then what have been some of the biggest roadblocks or struggles that you’ve had to overcome in terms of work?

Decades of trauma within our African American communities, and undoing that and showing that there is a different way. It’s just really hard to do. It’s not impossible, but it’s really hard to do. For men it’s this shaving situation. For women, it is the chemical products and thinking that people have to adhere to this Euro-centric standard. I think it’s just the hard thing to do, to show people that there is a different, better way that’s for them, and that they need to be authentic and true to themselves.

Yeah, that’s an amazing thing. How do your friends and family feel about the work that you’ve done? 

Yeah, they’re super stoked. They always get talking points because people like to say the craziest things. Now I know how to do this, I know how to control a message, because it’s my job to be able to do that. I lead the PR team at Walker, so I can say, “Okay. This is what I do, these are the products, this is the positioning statement” and they get it. They are so excited.

For a while, as I was doing my blog, they were like, “okay, we don’t get it,” but now that they’ve been able to see how it’s evolved, and my friends are like, “wow, I can’t believe!” “I remember 7 years ago, when you had your blogger website, and were kind of like, ‘I’m going to bring back the black look with natural hair!” They’re like, “We just can’t believe that now you’re posting pictures of you and Nas on Instagram. That’s really cool.” And everybody else, I just get lots of compliments and hear that they’re so excited about it.

The alumni director from my upper school just called me. I told her that we’re going to be in Minnesota for Target next week. I’m from Minnesota, and she asks, “Can I finally meet you? This is so exciting, we’ve been watching everything that you’re doing with Walker and Company, and it’s so inspiring to have somebody from our community doing such a cool, unique thing.”

Even though you don’t really consider yourself in tech, you are definitely involved in the industry. How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What excites you about it, what frustrates you, what would you like to see change?

I’ve been in San Francisco for almost 10 years and I’d say the thing that frustrates me most is seeing how it has shifted the greater community. That really scares me, in a way. I think that this greater region has been the most magical when there are a lot of different types of people around. For me, it’s something I’ve always drawn a lot of creative inspiration from, that there are communities and people who actually care about the city that are really present in it. As those native communities have eroded, it’s really sad, and it’s really scary to see, just because a place that you love is being infused with people who don’t necessarily love it as much or for the same reason, is just hard to stomach.

I feel you. I dress down when I go out of the house at all now, because I don’t want to be misconstrued for someone who is here for the wrong reasons.  It’s a really weird time.

Right? I know. You just go on a dating app, and somebody’s saying, “I just moved here 2 weeks ago, woo hoo,” and I’m like, “Oh, boy.”

My last question for you would be, based on the things that you’ve learned in your career and your time here, what advice would you give to folks from similar backgrounds who are hoping to get into this industry and just getting started?

I’m going to end with the same thing I started with. There’s no “one road” into tech. Do what feels right to you, what your passion is about, and hopefully, and almost indefinitely, it will align, so don’t compromise who you actually are.

“I’m going to end with the same thing I started with. There’s no “one road” into tech. Do what feels right to you, what your passion is about, and hopefully, and almost indefinitely, it will align, so don’t compromise who you actually are.”

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 come from a big, New York City, Irish-Italian Catholic family.  I have eight older brothers and sisters and 21 nieces and nephews. I’m a bit of a black sheep in my family, politically and otherwise. I come from a very practical family of doctors and lawyers and bankers, and I was this artist and the performer. Nobody knew what I was going to end up doing including myself.

Interesting.

When I was young, I changed my mind every other day about what I was going to do, what I was going to be when I grew up. I probably stressed my parents out because they are very practically-minded. When it comes to language, they said, “Take Spanish!”, and I said, “I’m going to take French!” For a while, I majored in Art History, and my Dad recently admitted to me that he thought, “Oh my God, she’s never going to get a job.” To his credit, he never said anything at the time.

“For a while, I majored in Art History, and my Dad recently admitted to me that he thought, “Oh my God, she’s never going to get a job.””

I eventually majored in theater. It’s actually some of the most useful training that I did. You acquire an extraordinary set of skills in creating live theater. It’s highly collaborative, you have to work under stressful conditions, find ways around all kinds of constraints. It also develops your ability to empathize with other people and their stories, which is an essential skill for good design.

I definitely enjoyed the humanities and art, but I also had some interest in technology and science early on. Mostly as it related to how we can help people communicate or how can we use these tools to help people do things better and improve people’s lives. Always in an extremely applied way.

My graduate program really aligned with that kind of thinking. I was initially planning to apply to the NYU film school, but when I got the catalog, they had this program in it called the Interactive Telecommunications Program. The title sounds a bit dry, but the it ended up being a life changing experience for me. This was in 1994-95 when the web was really coming into its own, a time of really interesting experimentation. The program tries to meet at the crossroads of arts, technology, and people. It’s in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, so it’s kind of like a Media Lab run by poets. It’s really a remarkable place. Its student body was a mix of teachers, film-makers, policy makers, writers, journalist, artist and graphic designers. It continues to be an incredible advisory the experimentation. That’s where I taught myself how to build websites, then found myself in a startup, and a few acquisitions and 3 babies later, ended up moving to California to work for Google, then Youtube, and now at Facebook.

“I taught myself how to build websites, then found myself in a startup, and a few acquisitions and 3 babies later, ended up moving to California to work for Google, then Youtube, and now at Facebook.”

What was it like moving to Silicon Valley?

I should say I was born in Manhattan and then I grew up for chunks of time in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Tennessee. So we moved around a lot, but all on the east coast. I never lived west of the Mississippi. I went to college in Boston, then studied art in France where I met my Canadian husband. I attended ITP in New York City, and then we got married we moved to Williamstown, Massachusetts in the Berkshire mountains where I was at a startup called Tripod. Then we moved to Boston when Tripod was acquired by Lycos. At that point, I was pregnant with my second baby, and the industry was in the doldrums. I decided to stay home for a while and we moved to North Carolina to be closer to family and live on a leaner budget. You see, at that point I had had three kids in four years and so was home full time for about four years in the middle of all of my different jobs.

And then I went back to work when my youngest was two. I joined the design team at Wachovia of all places, may it rest in peace. It was a great company to work for and a great re-entry for me after four years of being checked out and up to my eyeballs in diapers.

I had established a lot of strong relationships with designers at Wired Digital which also got acquired by Lycos. People like Jeff Veen and Doug Bowman. Extraordinary designers who also happened to be good people. They had gone to work for Google and next thing I knew, so was I, dragging my husband and kids with me.

I remember when I got the offer from Google, it was a big deal to move the family. We had a nice house. The kids were in good schools. I was close to my parents. I was agonizing over it, because I was asking my husband to quit a job he loved, which is not easy, and to move three kids. And he said, “When you get asked to pitch for the Yankees you don’t stay on the minor leagues. You must go and do this.” And that was about eight years ago. So I don’t know. I feel like it’s been an extraordinary experience because the concentration of talented, passionate people is so insanely high here. Just the level of competency and ingenuity and energy that people bring towards things is really special. And I think if I were ever to move to live some place else, I know that I would miss that.

“I remember when I got the offer from Google, it was a big deal to move the family. We had a nice house. The kids were in good schools. I was close to my parents. I was agonizing over it, because I was asking my husband to quit a job he loved, which is not easy, and to move three kids. And he said, ‘When you get asked to pitch for the Yankees you don’t stay on the minor leagues. You must go and do this.'”

For sure.

That being said, it’s also an extraordinarily work-oriented place. When I visit other places that aren’t as work-focused, I am reminded that most people don’t live their lives this way, and that there’s a certain level of sanity associated with not having everything revolve around your work. When we go back to the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts to visit friends, they don’t ask that much about Facebook, or technology, or start ups to invest in. They want to talk about art, music, go for a hike, visit a farm. I miss that sometimes.

Silicon Valley is like DC and LA. They are one industry towns, and so all of your friends are your colleagues and all of your colleagues are your friends, and even if you want to not think about work, it’s almost impossible not to. It can also be a pretty isolating place to live if you aren’t in the tech industry. There’s so much value put on tech that it almost feels that if you’re not doing that, you must not be doing something worthwhile, and that’s a shame.

So it’s a remarkable place to work. I have absolutely no regrets about being here, and I feel lucky every day to work at Facebook, a company with leaders and that I admire and respect and a mission I really believe in. AND it would be nice to have a little more balance sometimes.

“When I visit other places that aren’t as work-focused, I am reminded that most people don’t live their lives this way, and that there’s a certain level of sanity associated with not having everything revolve around your work. When we go back to the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts to visit friends, they don’t ask that much about Facebook, or technology, or start ups to invest in. They want to talk about art, music, go for a hike, visit a farm. I miss that sometimes.”

How do you think your background and life experiences have informed your work, and how you approach design at a global scale?

Well…

That’s a loaded question, I know.

Listen, I’m a well-off white person. So I feel like I need to tread carefully on saying, “My life experiences have helped me design for the entirety of humanity.” It’s a big challenge for companies like the ones that I’ve worked at to try to—with all good intentions—design for the scope and the diversity of the human population when we are so un-diverse as a workforce. That being said, there are a few things about the way I grew up that shape my perspective.

I feel like growing up in a very large family with a lot of personalities helps me to be adaptive and collaborative in a way that served me professionally. I can get along with most people. I’m just naturally inclined to figure out compromises and facilitate conversations, because that’s what you do when you have eight siblings. It’s just a basic survival tactic. Working in teams of people from different backgrounds and disciplines, these kinds of interpersonal skills are not something I take for granted, and I think I have my family to thank for a lot of that.

“Listen, I’m a well-off white person. So I feel like I need to tread carefully on saying, “My life experiences have helped me design for the entirety of humanity.” It’s a big challenge for companies like the ones that I’ve worked at to try to—with all good intentions—design for the scope and the diversity of the human population when we are so un-diverse as a workforce.”

I also really cherish my humanities and liberal arts education because I feel like it’s made me more curious and empathetic towards people with different experiences than me. I really appreciate the push towards getting more people, especially women and underrepresented minorities, into science and engineering. At the same time, I worry a bit that we are forgetting how important the humanities are to rounding out your education. Subjects like philosophy, anthropology, and psychology teach us about humans and their needs and desires. Without that training, I fear we’ll know how to build things but we may not have the compass to understand what to build and why. And that compass comes in large part through the humanities.

And obviously my training at ITP. The founder, Red Burns, was an important mentor to me. She really influenced my perspective and my philosophy on things. I don’t think I realized just how much until she passed away a few years ago. She was a total firecracker of a woman. She wasn’t that interested in the question, “What can we do with technology,” but instead asked us, “What can technology do for people?” Really putting technology in in service of people and not enslaving people to it. That’s something I really feel really passionately about.

And finally, I think that the people that you surround yourself with ultimately are the biggest influencers. My husband is a really wonderful person. Just by virtue of him, being from Canada and growing up in Quebec and just having a lot of different perspectives on things, I feel like he’s influenced my learning and development a lot over the years too. We’re celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary this year, so I’m thinking a lot about that right now. Obviously I was 12 when I got married [chuckles].

“I worry a bit that we are forgetting how important the humanities are to rounding out your education. Subjects like philosophy, anthropology, and psychology teach us about humans and their needs and desires. Without that training, I fear we’ll know how to build things but we may not have the compass to understand what to build and why.”

Obviously! As a designer, what is really exciting to you about your work? What activates you?

Something that always energies and inspires me is when I get to observe or experience the way other people live and and how those life experiences might cause them to see or value the products I build differently than I do. Years ago at Wachovia, we did a lot of research into how we could better support customers with severe visual impairments; this work was way ahead of its time. For most of us, online banking is a convenience, so we don’t have to go to the physical bank branch. But the people we met through that study couldn’t drive to a branch to take care of it themselves. For those who are blind or have seriously impaired vision, online banking is the difference between having financial independence and having to rely on someone else to do your banking for you. And the independence was crucially important to their well-being on so many levels. That made me realize something I’ve observed many times since…these technologies can mean very different things to different people depending on their context.

Most people look at Google search and think, “It’s so convenient to be able to look up whatever you want.” But, if you live in a place that doesn’t have libraries, Google in the difference between being able to educate yourself versus not. Or YouTube. Some people think of it as a place with entertaining videos, but if you live in a place that doesn’t have freedom of speech, it’s the difference between knowing what’s going on through citizen reporting or not.

I get really excited when we launch something and then get to see what people do with the things we make. When you are designing for a huge global audience, you can have a sense of what problem you are solving and try to design it in ways that will work for most people. But invariably, people will take that thing and apply it to things you never thought of. A good example is how Facebook Safety check came to being. Facebook wasn’t created as a crisis communications system, but with so many people connected on the platform, it was the natural and logical place for people to let their friends and family know they are Ok in the wake of a natural disaster or even a terrorist attack. So a team at Facebook observed this and designed not just for people but with people. I find that idea of co-designing with humanity to be really inspiring and exciting.

“When you are designing for a huge global audience, you can have a sense of what problem you are solving and try to design it in ways that will work for most people. But invariably, people will take that thing and apply it to things you never thought of. I find that idea of co-designing with humanity to be really inspiring and exciting.”

Ultimately I gravitate towards working on things that are good for the world. I know that sounds like a platitude. But I have to feel like the thing I’m working on intends to lift people up, in a very broad and democratizing way. I love breaking down the hierarchy. Whether it’s media hierarchy, or communication hierarchy, or whatever it is. I like the fact that a blind person wouldn’t have to rely on somebody to drive them to the bank. Or that a singer songwriter would be able to support themselves through YouTube videos instead of having to sign with a record label. Or that people could raise money for a cause they care about and actually move the needle on medical research like the ALS folks did on Facebook through the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Sometimes people look at what I’m working on now—digital advertising tools—and think, “Wow, you’ve gone 180 from there!” But I don’t see it that way at all. Ultimately what I’m working on now is about economic development and job creation. I think sometimes we look at the world’s problems—poverty, inequality, you name it—in very surface level ways, and what I’ve really enjoyed over past four years of working on the business side of Facebook is becoming smarter about how the world works, how society works, how the economy works and understanding that if you can help people provide for themselves, you have less war, you have less poverty, you have less terrorism, even.  

I definitely have a bit of an activist in me. I hate injustice and I hate unfairness and so I think I’ve been on this, I don’t know, 20 year voyage just trying to figure out how can design be a part of the solution. Because I feel like design is still only being applied to a very small percentage of the problems that it can solve. That’s what I’m doing more recently in my writing; just trying to encourage more designers to look past the obvious flashy thing they can be working on and think, “What could I change if I applied myself to software for the government,” or “How can design get involved in making the criminal justice more equitable and humane?” These are all design problems. They may be less sexy, behind the scenes. It’s not necessarily going to get you a big splashy article in the technology magazine, but who cares?

“I definitely have a bit of an activist in me. I hate injustice and I hate unfairness and so I think I’ve been on this, I don’t know, 20 year voyage just trying to figure out how can design be a part of the solution. Because I feel like design is still only being applied to a very small percentage of the problems that it solve.”

When did you start writing about your work?

I’ve always enjoyed writing and storytelling. As a leader, one of the most important skills is to be able to craft a narrative, a vision for what you want your team to aspire to, that captures their imagination. So in some form or another, I’ve been writing and storytelling my whole career, though I didn’t as publish my writing as much until more recently. The big driver of that was fairly practical.  We faced a big challenge a few years back attracting people to work on the business side of Facebook. It wasn’t visible to people. They knew the consumer-facing Facebook products, and that’s what most people coming in wanted to work on. I get that. And if it was visible to them, many were like, “Mmm, I don’t really want to work on ads.”

Making the work visible to people, helping them understand the impact, both on Facebook as a business and on society as a whole, how we can help improve the experience that people have at work day to day, as well as grow economies and create jobs…those were the big things that I focused on in terms of writing. About business design, and the way designers can have impact on a whole host of important issues.

Occasionally I’ll just get mad about something and write about it. A few months ago, I published an article about my uterus [chuckles]. I don’t know if you saw that.

Oh yeah [laughter]. We’re going to get to that in a minute.

I have 100 ideas of things that I’d like to write about. It frustrating to me that I haven’t succeeded in more consistently making time for it because I feel like it’s something that I’m good at, it’s something that I enjoy, and I feel a connection to people when I do it. But it’s always about capturing the time. You know how that is. I’m sure that’s how you feel about photography and other things.

“I was so frustrated and fed up on behalf of women in this industry who are trying to position themselves as equals and sometimes deserving to be seen as superior to some men in the industry, and just constantly having to pay this tax that men don’t have to pay around having talking about their personal lives. Or having it being positioned as, ‘Wow, you did all this in spite of being a mother!’ It’s just constantly minimizing their professional contributions. I don’t have any problem with anyone talking about their families and their role as a parent. But it should be on their terms, and they should never feel obligated to do it, in a context where they were asked to talk about their professional accomplishments. That’s my beef. And if you are going to ask those kinds of questions like, ‘How do you do it all?’, then ask the men too.”

Yeah, this project will very much be a snapshot of tech culture in 2016.

I’m a maker. I got into management a long time ago and realized that in the corporate context, the biggest value that I could provide is that I’m really good at building teams. So I had to let go of a lot of the hands-on contribution in the interest of making space for other people to do it. But I still have the urge, the urge to produce things, to find an outlet for that, to connect with what other people that are making and to be inspired by that. So I find different ways—you know, we have the Facebook Analog Research Lab where we print beautiful posters. I love just seeing what they’re making, and I get so excited about communication design that’s going on at Facebook. I think it’s really magical.

And then personally I do all kinds of things. I knit a lot, and I like to draw, and so writing – in addition to doing it because I think it’s really helpful to my work – is just a creative outlet for me. I never thought of myself as a writer until more recently, which is kind of interesting. I’ve always thought  of myself as a visual person or a performer, but I’ve surprised myself with how much gratification I get from writing.

Let’s talk about your uterus [laughter].

Everybody else is, why not? When I published that piece, I said to my husband something like, “At some point, I will regret making my uterus a topic of public conversation. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but…”

You’ve written about the bias that you’ve seen on stage or at conferences. You also touched on, as you got older, you became more cognizant of bias in tech in general. Can you expand on that?

Yeah. It’s interesting, often I’ll take weeks, even months to write a complex piece about design. But with the piece about women in tech, I wrote the bulk of that in about 45 minutes at a Starbucks. I was so frustrated and fed up on behalf of women in this industry who are trying to position themselves as equals and sometimes deserving to be seen as superior to some men in the industry, and just constantly having to pay this tax that men don’t have to pay around having talking about their personal lives. Or having it being positioned as, “Wow, you did all this in spite of being a mother!” It’s just constantly minimizing their professional contributions.

I don’t have any problem with anyone talking about their families and their role as a parent. But it should be on their terms, and they should never feel obligated to do it, in a context where they were asked to talk about their professional accomplishments. That’s my beef. And if you are going to ask those kinds of questions like, “How do you do it all?”, then ask the men too.

When I published the article on Medium, I wasn’t surprised to hear from a lot of women who said it really resonated with them.  But it was really interesting to hear from many men, too, who were like, “You know what? I’m really pissed because I realized nobody ever asks me about my family. I think it’s because they think I don’t care as much about my family as my wife does.” The whole thing is dehumanizing to everyone. It’s like, “Women, all you are is a group of people who help make families, and then also could work. Men, you are people who work, and maybe you have a family.” It’s all based on really unfortunate stereotypes and doesn’t allow people to define themselves and how they want to be seen.

I also noticed in your writing that you gave people books for Christmas and I did the same thing.

Oh really?

Yes. I gave all my best friends like 10 books that affected me deeply in 2015, because last year was a year of reading self-help books and being a hermit. You also mentioned that you’re not like a huge books person. What was it about those books that impacted you so much?

Well, it’s interesting. I’ll tell you something that hardly anybody knows because I’m still processing it myself. I just got diagnosed with dyslexia a month ago [chuckles].

For real?

[laughter] My daughter has dyslexia, and when we were going through the process of getting her assessed they interviewed me and my husband. And after they interviewed me they were like, ‘’You probably have some undiagnosed issues.’’ I’ve always been a very slow reader, and I struggle to keep up with a lot of written information. I reverse things all the time and have a terrible sense of direction. There are a lot of things that in hindsight make a lot more sense. And so when they said that to me I was like, ‘’Hmm, that’s interesting.’’ I thought, ‘’I think I’m just going to get assessed, too, just to find out.’’ So I went through a formal assessment with the clinical psychologist, and boom, here I am.  

It’s kind of a wild thing to find this out a lot later than kids like my daughter discovered it. But I think you’re much better off finding that out today then when I was a kid. I don’t think people really understood it then. I think they may have thought that it was correlated with intelligence, which it isn’t at all. Maybe you get put in special ed when you didn’t need to, you just needed time accommodation. You know what I mean? I just think there’s a lot less stigma attached to it today. I see my daughter going through that. She’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine. I’m not embarrassed about it. I have a bunch of friends who are dyslexic [chuckles].” It’s like no big deal.

“If you survey successful, CEOs, there’s a disproportionate percentage of them that have dyslexia, or some kind of learning challenge. This makes sense because for those people, everything’s harder. They’re just naturally inclined to be tenacious and have grit, and to work through problems, and to recover from failure, because that’s how it is when you are a dyslexic in a world awash with written information. That whole notion of going beyond what you were born with is really appealing to me. It’s such an optimistic way of looking at human opportunity.”

I’m still processing what that means for me. But generally, I’m excited because I’m just a big believer in self-awareness and self-knowledge. If that’s true of my brain, I want to know it so that I can figure out how can I work more effectively. Just the recognition that I’m probably working X percent harder than I need to, and maybe there’s technology and tools that can help me have to work less hard at things is hopeful and liberating. I think I’ve believed in some contexts that I wasn’t as smart as the people around me, but the reality is that the mechanics of my brain were just slowing me down. I think we should all be interested in understanding how our minds work and how we can harness technology to work better.

When the psychologist asked me, “Margaret, what’s your relationship to reading?” I said, “I love stories.” She’s like, “That’s not the same thing. How do you feel about reading?” I said, “I love audiobooks.” I asked my mother one time what I used to do when I was a kid and she said, “You spent hours in your room, listening to those books that had the records that went along with them.” So interesting. Kids are amazing. They just figure out sometimes what they need even if adult don’t recognize that there’s an issue. Because one of the classic recommendation for people with dyslexia is to listen to audio versions while you’re reading the same written material. I guess I figure that out when I was three.

Anyway, I have hundreds and hundreds of books. I love stories and narrative so much, and yet reading a book just really takes me forever. If it’s not unbelievably engaging, I just don’t get through it. Which is frustrating because I’m an incredibly curious person and there’s 1,001 things I want to learn about. But I’ve found other ways to learn and grow. I don’t need to feel bad about it anymore. The reason this relates to the piece that I wrote about growth and vulnerability is two-fold; and this is so interesting in hindsight.

One is that Carol Dweck talks a lot about people with learning challenges in her book Mindset, because if you survey successful, CEOs, there’s a disproportionate percentage of them that have dyslexia, or some kind of learning challenge. This makes sense because for those people, everything’s harder. They’re just naturally inclined to be tenacious and have grit, and to work through problems, and to recover from failure, because that’s how it is when you are a dyslexic in a world awash with written information. That whole notion of going beyond what you were born with is really appealing to me. It’s such an optimistic way of looking at human opportunity.

The hardest thing sometimes is for people to get over their fear of failure, whether it’s professionally or personally. They pull punches all the time. They don’t take the risk, because they’re afraid of failing, and they miss all of the learning comes from failure. Mindset is a book that’s really been influential to me as a person, as a manager and a colleague, and as a parent, quite frankly. I really try to drive this into my kids, like, “Do your best and don’t worry about failing. I don’t actually care what classes you take, or what you study. But, don’t shy away from something because it’s hard.

And then, Brene Brown — who doesn’t love Brene Brown.

That was one of the books I gave to my friends this year.

Have you listened to any of her audio books? Her voice, her accent is just amazing. And she is so funny. But I think that book has been really influential for me, and just her teachings in general. And by the way, not coincidentally, both of those I listened as audio books. I never read the physical book [chuckle].

Funny, I think one of the things that I realized about myself, and I don’t know why this is, is that I am in a lot of ways unconcerned with admitting to my weaknesses. Sometimes it perplexes me about why people are afraid to do that. It’s absurd to think that we are all great at everything. Like its just an absurd notion, and I always tend to feel like if you own your bad PR, nobody can say anything about you that you haven’t already said about yourself. It’s very liberating.

What advice would you give to kind of young puppies starting out that you wish that you’d known in the beginning?

Take risks, especially when you’re young. You can fall down, but you won’t fall down that far because you’re already close to the ground.

[laughter]

It always makes me sad when people in early career play it too safe. I believe you can take smart risks through your entire career and most of the good things in my life have come from going with my instinct with no guarantees of success. Just figure out what’s the opportunity that’s going to challenge you and help you grow the most and not worry about the short term outcome. Because what you’re doing is you’re just building your toolkit, building your confidence, building the scenarios where you can be effective.

“It always makes me sad when people in early career play it too safe. I believe you can take smart risks through your entire career and most of the good things in my life have come from going with my instinct with no guarantees of success. Just figure out what’s the opportunity that’s going to challenge you and help you grow the most and not worry about the short term outcome. Because what you’re doing is you’re just building your toolkit, building your confidence, building the scenarios where you can be effective.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me more about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where do you find your support networks?

Professionally or personally?

Both.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

I was born in Kansas City, Kansas, not Missouri. Very important distinction if you’re from Kansas City! I grew up with a very Midwestern lifestyle. My dad is a biologist, my mom was a nurse and a social worker—both of them super idealistic. For most of my childhood I lived on this state park, and my dad was the caretaker but also helping raise the money to permanently save the land. It was this 300-­acre plot of original prairie. A lot of my early memories were of him running this summer camp and taking care of all kinds of wild animals and running around on the prairie. I went to college at University of Kansas, so I stayed fairly local. I had planned to go to law school and follow a more idealistic path, follow in their footsteps, but ended up in college falling into video games. And that was the inflection point that changed everything.

Yeah, so you accidentally became the world’s first professional female gamer.

Yes, very accidentally. I was at the University of Kansas living in a dorm on the Honors floor. I had been elected the president of all the dorms, so I was living in this apartment, not a normal dorm room. And I was hanging out with mostly all these guys. I had always had guy friends. They were telling me about this game they were playing and they started getting me playing Doom. I loved it, so I got into Doom with them. Then they started telling me about this other game that was coming out—a sequel called Quake. When Quake came out, we all played together and we formed a clan, which is like a Quake team. We formed one of the very first clans and it was me and seven guys. To me, this was totally normal. Our clan was actually pretty competitive, and we ended up winning the very first clan tournament ever. We eventually moved into a house (though I technically didn’t live there). The eight of us were in this house just playing Quake 24/7. And, we were hosting LAN parties and having all of these people come visit us from all over the country. Other Quake clans would drive from multiple states to come play with us in person. And, this is in the days of 21 inch CRTs that were so heavy, but we were carrying them around competing and playing. So we had this whole scene going on and we all got really good. I was competitive with those guys, with one exception. We had one player who was just phenomenal, one of the best in the world.

At that time we started getting to know some of the guys in Dallas around the shooter scene there, where some of the most noteworthy teams were making first person shooter games. We started getting to know them and that included the developers of Quake. We even drove down to Dallas to talk to them in person. On one of the trips down to Dallas, a friend had met John Romero, who was a designer of Quake. This friend knew I was really good at games, and on my behalf he threw down a challenge. He told Romero, “There is this girl… she could kick your ass, and she wants to play you.”

“There was a ton of harassment and hate and sexism and abuse. People would send me hate email all the time. The emails were not just things like ‘women shouldn’t be in games,’ but very intensely personal and insulting. Every inch of my body was criticized, every aspect of my personality.”

So without my blessing and on my behalf he had thrown the gauntlet down. I had no idea if I could beat the guy or not, but over a couple of weeks we coordinated the time and we ended up going down there for this match. By the time we arrived, a lot of people in the gaming community had heard about it and there was actually gaming press there. We played at his office in Dalla s­­he was like a legend at this point ­­he was kind of a celebrity in the video gaming world. We were playing best out of three death matches and he won the first of the three, and then in the second game we were playing to 25 and he was up like 19 to 3, and I remember at that point he said something sexist. I just remember thinking that I cannot let this happen. I can’t lose. I can’t stomach what’s to come if I lose this match and all of the taunting that will come with it. I can do better than this and I’ve got to turn this around. And just like that I went on a rampage. I ended up winning that match and the next one, so I beat him the best two out of three.

After I won, it turned into “a thing” and I got a lot of coverage in gaming magazines and he had to create an online shrine to me. It just all snowballed from there. I was in gaming magazines. I got an offer of sponsorship from a competitive league to be their first full time paid cyber athlete and help this organization recruit a team of other pro video gamers. I had sponsorships from joystick companies and I got the chance to travel around the world and play in video game tournaments. It was a blast. But, it was not planned. It was very much a surprise.

What were some of the best moments of that time for you. What were your favorite things about that experience?

The thing I remember most about that experience was that it opened up the world for me. I had never been out of the country. I grew up in Kansas City and had been there pretty much my whole life until this point. It opened up all these experiences and other cultures and things I never really even knew were accessible. I got to travel to other countries and people hosted me in their homes. It was a great education. And I had never really thought, “Oh, I’d love to leave the country but it’s not possible.” It’s almost like I didn’t realize it was out there to be experienced. So for me this was an awakening and the first time that I saw the rest of the world. It was also just a surreal experience being strangely internet famous. It came with lots of pros and cons, but it was also a very unique, singular experience that not a lot of people get to have. Thanks to my internet fame, I met a lot of friends and interesting people. It connected me to the world in a way that I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise.

What were some of the tough parts and the tough lessons to learn?

The worst part was that even at that time ­ it was pre­-Facebook and pre-­Twitter and all of that ­even at that time I got a lot of harassment. There was a ton of harassment and hate and sexism and abuse. People would send me hate email all the time. The emails were not just things like “women shouldn’t be in games,” but very intensely personal and insulting. Every inch of my body was criticized, every aspect of my personality. People would dig up old pictures of me in high school and new pictures and write these elaborate multi-­page teardowns of every aspect of my being. At one point an ex-­boyfriend posted a lengthy insulting, derogatory post on one of the biggest gaming blogs at that time.

It was exhausting because it just felt like I couldn’t escape it ­even at home. I didn’t get much harassment that went beyond the digital at that point thank goodness, but I did get a few phone calls. It just started to feel like I had all of the downside of being famous without any of the upside—like money. I lost a lot of privacy. But I wasn’t really making much money. I didn’t have any of the upside or protection that comes with some types of fame. There was no real benefit to this. The benefit of connecting with people was so drowned out by how bad it felt to be in the spotlight. It really made me realize that I did not want to live like that. It was not an enjoyable way to be in the world, and it took its toll on my relationships. It just made­­ it made me view people as much more hostile than I had ever thought they might be.

“It just started to feel like I had all of the downside of being famous without any of the upside—like money. I lost a lot of privacy. But I wasn’t really making much money. I didn’t have any of the upside or protection that comes with some types of fame. There was no real benefit to this. The benefit of connecting with people was so drowned out by how bad it felt to be in the spotlight.”

Yeah, for sure. So how’d you get out?

Well, I kind of slowly backed away, you know? I quietly just backed my way out of the room. I was in a relationship—I had ended up dating that designer of Doom and Quake. We were in a relationship and we dated for five years, and it was pretty serious, but I ended up breaking up with him. And when that happened I moved to LA and away from Dallas. I took an initial job in games, but I made a conscious decision that I was going to start to look at other opportunities that would be adjacent but not directly in games. I consciously made an effort to step back from some of the press opportunities. I just slowly backed away from the attention.

It wasn’t an overnight decision. I didn’t do anything dramatic. I just felt like, “I have to get away from this, because it feels miserable and exhausting on a day-­to-­day basis.” At that time, I was working for Warner Brothers and I met this sales guy, Matt Golden, at a vendor who was selling technology to us. I was making games at WB, but Matt and I really hit it off. I thought he was great, and at one point he called me up and offered me an opportunity to take a junior sales role working for him. I’d never done sales before and I considered myself quite shy. He said, “I think I can teach you to sell, and you’ll be selling a little bit to game companies, but other companies as well.” So I jumped at that chance and that was a fork in the road for me. Ever since then, I’ve touched games, I’ve never completely left them, but I’ve never worked full-time in the industry since that point.

Was there any reaction from the community of, “Hey, where are you, we want to keep abusing you?” Or did they just move on to the next thing?

They just moved on to the next thing. I would occasionally get little pings, positive and negative. Even to this day­­ it’s hilarious to me, but even now I’ll occasionally walk into a meeting and somebody will say, “Hey, I know you. I remember who you are.” Occasionally, things will pop up online or somebody will post about me, and it’s fifty­-fifty. Sometimes it’s kind of positive and friendly and other times it’s negative and derogatory. But more than anything, the interest just faded away, and I was grateful for that. It is honestly what I was hoping would happen. It really was a gradual pulling away from the entire thing.

And now you’re an executive in technology. How did all of that experience, good and bad, inform your work now?

It informs my work in so many ways. I have been quite lucky, because that experience in gaming opened a lot of doors. It is still a great conversation starter, or sometimes it’s the reason somebody knows my name and makes a connection. So I took that baseline and went down a different path and found some great mentors. These folks taught me new skills that could build on top of my knowledge of gaming.

One of the biggest things I took away from my experience in gaming is that it was (and still is) a male-­dominated culture and industry. But I thrived in that environment and I made some great friends and connections. There were many great things about that experience, and I feel like I learned how to relate and thrive in that very male culture.

Silicon Valley (where I work now) is actually not much different. A lot of my time since those days has been in sales and business development. It is still an extremely male culture. It’s also a culture filled with highly intelligent people. Similarly, gaming culture was filled with extremely bright and passionate people. I see a lot of the similarities between those gamers that I used to socialize with and the people I sell technology to now, even if they’re not gamers. The personality types are similar, the interests are similar, and the way that I’ve been able to relate to them and gain credibility is similar.

In the end, building on that experience has been quite helpful, and it makes me feel comfortable and at ease because this is my spot. Even though I’m still often the only woman in the room, I feel like this is my place, this is what I’ve always been a part of. That comfort level was gained through my experience in gaming.

“I was going into the office everyday and like, ‘Yep, everything’s amazing and this is great and I’m here to crush it,’ and just executing on my job and nobody knew. Nobody knew that at home I had this young daughter who was crying for her dad who no longer was willing to see her, and that I was about to be evicted.”

Throughout this whole time or most of this time, you’ve been a single mom. How is that?

Being a full custody single parent is difficult, regardless of the circumstances. It is by far the hardest thing I have ever done. Trying to combine being that with being a tech executive has been incredibly challenging. All along I knew what I wanted for my daughter: I wanted to build a career that would inspire her. I also knew that I didn’t want to give myself up. I didn’t want to follow the motto of parenting that says, you dedicate all your time to your child, and you minimize time away. I wanted to have a life, too, because I wasn’t done living. My philosophy on parenting is that you build a life that shows your child how rich life can be, and how great and rewarding a career can be, and how great your friendships and relationships can be. So, I had this idea in my head of building an amazing life so she could see that and have that model. I feel like I’ve mostly done that, but it has been exceedingly hard because I feel like I have lived on a treadmill for the last decade of my life. From the second I wake up in the morning, I have a job. I have a job at home, and I’m a mom and I’m doing that and I go to work and it’s extremely intense and focused. And then I get home and I value that time at home with her so highly and I want that to be quality time. I try to give her that at the level of quality, the level of engagement that she deserves. It’s hard to succeed at that when I am so exhausted from working so hard all day at a challenging job. It’s tough, and trying to keep up the facade at work that I’m fine and I’m not exhausted and I’m not just completely run ragged is not easy.

For the first five years of single parenting, I was also extremely broke. Right after I moved to San Francisco as a newly single mom, I was about 12 hours away from being evicted from my apartment here. And it was absolutely terrifying. And yet, I was going into the office everyday and like, “Yep, everything’s amazing and this is great and I’m here to crush it,” and just executing on my job and nobody knew. Nobody knew that at home I had this young daughter who was crying for her dad who no longer was willing to see her, and that I was about to be evicted. Trying to keep up that dual existence was just incredibly hard, and I am grateful it’s easier now. But I am also acutely aware of the fight that single parents must fight. It’s not easy.

Balancing work and single parenting, I’ve often got this insanely ridiculous challenge going on at home, and yet the second I show up to work, I need to execute at a high level as if I’m just one of the other guys who’s 25 and single. Trying to maintain that level of energy, the enthusiasm, that facade that everything is fine­­ that has been the hardest part.

Where do you find you support networks? 

I am extremely independent. I’m not good at asking for help and for the first six or seven years of being a single mom, I really did not ask for help unless it was truly an emergency. I kept to myself and I did not let people help me or even know I might need help. Over the last few years, I made a conscious decision that I need to let more people in, and I have formed this amazing network of really wonderful, supportive friends. I’m working on learning to be more vulnerable and tell them when I need help. They are amazing and always show up for me. The biggest change on this front was actually just a couple of months ago. I moved my mom, who is retired, out from Kansas City and into my house. Now she’s living with us, and we have a three generation female family going on right now [chuckles]

“I am extremely independent. I’m not good at asking for help and for the first six or seven years of being a single mom, I really did not ask for help unless it was truly an emergency. I kept to myself and I did not let people help me or even know I might need help.”

Amazing. I want to go backward a little bit. Just even out of my own selfish curiosity. I deal with a tiny bit of hate that slowly increases every time I do better at something, but I’m learning to not give a shit, and I feel so much better about it since starting to learn that process and apply it. Like the fact that you have had every inch of your body criticized and yet you were able to pose for Playboy—how are you able to go from experiencing what no human really should experience in terms of humanity and then just et it roll off your back? Or does it never roll off your back?

Honestly, it never rolls off my back. As much as I wish I could tell you that I don’t give a shit, I do ­ even when I don’t want to. And it’s really hard. It still bothers me, always. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that sort of harassment or abuse to just roll off. It’s an inhumane task, and I think it puts undue pressure on the receiver of that abuse. What I’ve gotten better at is shortening the amount of time that things bother me. I give myself permission to be upset and be offended and be hurt because I deserve that. I should be offended, and it’s not OK to be treated like that. But then I make a conscious decision that continuing that letting myself feel bad any longer is actually hurting me. So there’s an end to it. I make a conscious decision to move on. I’ve accepted that this stuff is always going to bother me. I’m always going to care. I do make different decisions now, because I know the weight of online abuse. But I’m also extremely competitive, and I firmly believe that the best form of revenge or payback is simply to win. Any time I get upset, any time I’m hurt, I just let it flow through. And then I double back down and I tell myself that I’ve just got to fight through it. And there may not be an immediate victory, there may not be that sweet feeling of revenge right away or a sense that I’ve avenged a wrong. But I know that in the fullness of time, I will succeed and that that will be the proof that the critics were wrong.

“Honestly, it never rolls off my back. As much as I wish I could tell you that I don’t give a shit, I do ­ even when I don’t want to. And it’s really hard. It still bothers me, always. I think it’s unrealistic to expect that sort of harassment or abuse to just roll off.”

What would you say are your biggest motivators?

My number one motivator in life is providing a great life for my daughter. I am a big believer that providing a great life for my daughter includes living a great life myself. That central desire to show her what a great life looks like guides a lot of my decisions. It guides me to take risks and to push myself to go out and even have fun when I might be more inclined to isolate and stay at home. I don’t want her to see me as this person who just isolates and sits on the couch. That idea drives me to push myself in all areas. Beyond that, I am compelled by learning and challenging myself. I love to be challenged and to feel like I’m always growing. I know that when I feel that little hint of discomfort, that I’m probably doing the right thing. I know I’m challenging myself just a little bit in a way that I’m not comfortable with, and I like that feeling because that’s how I know I’m on to something.

How has having a kid­­ and really all of your experiences affected your priorities? Particularly in terms of what you look for in a job and future jobs?

Having a daughter has made me look at opportunities differently than I would have expected. I think I would have expected that it would make me more cautious, but having her actually has made me a little bit more of a risk taker in some ways. I feel a little more compelled to take a shot at things that might seem unattainable. There’s always this balance in my head of risk versus playing the role of the caregiver and sole breadwinner in my family, and needing to ensure our financial security. So there’s always the pull of needing to play it safe with really swinging for the fences for my daughter to watch. And usually that “swing for the fences” desire wins out. I try to push myself in that direction. I’ve never been very good about middle ground. I don’t do well in the gray area. I’m in or I’m out. I don’t like to just hang out and chill. In every role I’m in, if I’m not 100% invested and I am not in it to win it, then I might as well not be there. I’m not really capable of doing the normal 9 to 5 thing. I suppose that having my daughter has intensified both the desire for security and the desire to take risks. But that desire to take risks is the one that usually wins.

What do you love about working in tech after all these years?

I love working in tech because it forces me to be creative on a number of different planes. You have to synthesize so much information, whether it’s about technology or solutions or people. There are so many aspects to consider in a situation, and you’re often solving new problems. There’s no clean template to work from. That multifaceted challenge is what I enjoy. Most of my time in tech has been in some kind of a sales role, and usually I’m doing highly technical sales.

My job often feels like piecing together a puzzle. I love figuring out how to motivate another company with very, very intelligent employees to work with your company and use your technology. It takes more than people skills and it takes more than technical skills. The blend of those two things is really compelling for me. I feel like I’m always having to find a new strategy, and really deeply listen to people to understand how to be successful.

“I love working in tech because it forces me to be creative on a number of different planes. You have to synthesize so much information, whether it’s about technology or solutions or people. There are so many aspects to consider in a situation, and you’re often solving new problems. There’s no clean template to work from.”

Yeah. Let’s go macro for a second. How do you feel about the state of tech in 2016? What is exciting to you, what’s frustrating to you, what would you like to see change?

I think the state of tech is pretty frustrating. I don’t feel like the situation for women has improved in any meaningful way over the last few years. I see a lot of talk about it, so many tweets and posts and meetups. But my own experience has not improved in that time, and in talking to my peers and my mentors their experiences aren’t improving either. I find that really disheartening.

The reality still is that there are pockets of more diverse teams and there are pockets where there are more women. But I’m not encountering those pockets very often. It’s still a very isolating experience to be a woman in tech for me. There are some brilliant, badass women out there, but in my day-­to-­day it is rare for me to interact with women.

“It’s still a very isolating experience to be a woman in tech for me. There are some brilliant, badass women out there, but in my day-­to-­day it is rare for me to interact with women.”

I’m excited about so many of the new technologies that are being built that are going to fundamentally transform the way people live. I want to be a part of transforming peoples’ lives and making them better and easier. That’s exciting to me. What is concerning to me is the dearth of women on the teams building those technologies. Women’s needs and the way we live our lives are not necessarily taken into account in the same way when this new tech gets built. Some of that is intentional, but I think more of that exclusion is simply out of ignorance.

When people design products, they are limited by their own life experience, needs, and perceptions. It’s only natural that men would design experiences for their needs more effectively than they might design for women. I worry that as they become so much more prevalent and so much more mainstream that the divide between men’s and women’s experiences of the world is only going to get bigger.

I appreciate all of the work being done on the “pipeline problem” of bringing more women into the tech workforce. That is important work. However, I strongly believe that the pipeline is not the core problem at this point. There are some deep cultural issues we need to face as an industry to reduce churn before filling the pipe can ever be really effective.

“When people design products, they are limited by their own life experience, needs, and perceptions. It’s only natural that men would design experiences for their needs more effectively than they might design for women. I worry that as they become so much more prevalent and so much more mainstream that the divide between men’s and women’s experiences of the world is only going to get bigger.”

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

I do not think I will live in the Bay Area. I am really fortunate to own a home here, but even being in the top 1% of income earners, I struggle to maintain the type of life I want for my daughter here. It’s exceedingly hard to raise a family here. We’re failing the kids in our public schools here while rich kids just go to private school. Living in the Bay Area and working in tech feels like a treadmill that I can’t quite get off. I’m having fun; I’m still running and I’m smiling, but I’m 39 years old this year and I’m starting to think about how sustainable this is. Can I continue? Absolutely. Do I want to continue to run at this pace with so little gain? I don’t think so. I want to keep building businesses and I want to participate in this, but I also want to change the game for myself. I would love to see myself in five to ten years owning my own company, but not necessarily a venture backed company. I would love to start more of a lifestyle business that I can feel good about and believe in, but is also compatible with having a family, and having a great home life, and enjoying life. Life is short, and I want to enjoy that time and not lose my entire life to this work.

What advice would you give to young women hoping to get into tech? 

The number one piece of advice I would give to women in our position would be to be aggressive even if it is not your nature. Get out there and advocate for yourself. You don’t have to change your personality. But you do have to fight for yourself and for your outcomes. There is such a level of reward for aggressiveness and the “cult of the hustle” is so celebrated in the valley. There are some good reasons for that, because hustle is great and it gets things done and it gets you out there and gets your product out there. Relentless hustle is often required to build a successful business. And what I find is that other styles aren’t necessarily as celebrated or appreciated today in this world. Right or wrong, if you want that opportunity you have to adapt and be aggressive and hustle and put yourself out there without apologies. Don’t feel bad about it, don’t be ashamed of it. Ask yourself, “Why not me?” When you look around at different opportunities, whatever they may be, look at the people there and say, “Why not me? Why couldn’t I do that? Is there a real reason that I can’t? Is there something special about them that I don’t have?” And the truth is that almost always there’s not. There’s no reason why you can’t get there. I remind myself of that when I start feeling a little “less than.” I’m every bit as capable and intelligent as my competitors. The other thing that I try to remember is that everybody feels that level of insecurity. That is not abnormal.

“The number one piece of advice I would give to women in our position would be to be aggressive even if it is not your nature. Get out there and advocate for yourself. You don’t have to change your personality. But you do have to fight for yourself and for your outcomes.”

The truth is that we are the adults that we’ve all been waiting for. Everybody feels like they are waiting for the adults to show up, for somebody more competent or knowledgeable, but the truth is, we’re those people. You’re that person. So own it and don’t ever believe you are less than that.

1987, I was conceived, no—where I came from—as it relates to being a quote-unquote woman in technology, the origin story is probably about like this: I was a science nerd in high school. I was really into chemistry. I really liked my AP chemistry class. I was president of the science olympiad team, in Nashville, Tennessee. It was not a school that was particularly known for its academics, to be totally honest. I found my spot there.

I was born in in Fremont, California. There were a few reasons my family moved to Nashville. One of them was the chaos of being a student in the Bay Area at that time. My parents are aging hippies and they just weren’t that into exposing their kids to that level of insanity. I sort of did my own thing for high school and I seemed to turn out okay, so I appreciate that. I was a science olympiad nerd. I applied to a couple of different schools. I got into M.I.T. to study chemistry.

That’s actually my first degree, I have a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry. While I was pursuing a chemistry degree, I had a bunch of friends who were pursuing computer science degrees. I would look at them out of the corner of my eye and see what they were learning. It seemed pretty different. Compared to what I was learning it seemed like they were learning a toolkit for solving arbitrary problems in the world in a way that was really cross-disciplinary. I felt I was learning the history of chemistry in a way that could be really fun for some people, but what they were doing seemed very broadly appealing and relevant. I ended up taking a couple of CS classes. I actually sort of illicitly pursued a computer science internship without telling my chemistry advisor. He was quite unhappy with me when he found out about that. I ended up liking it a lot, and I ended up getting a bachelor’s degree in computer science as well. I got a master’s degree in computer science, and the rest is history.

That’s how I got started. I did take a couple programing classes in high school, although I wouldn’t claim that I understood the power of it then. I really started pursuing the discipline in college. I think that’s actually important to note because a lot of my friends at school had been programming since they were babies. This meant that I had a lot of catching up to do. This instilled in me a very serious and personal empathy for beginners. I also had to validate for myself that if you work hard, and if you work harder than anybody else you can catch up.

So I did that. As I got my master’s degree, I had some friends who were starting a startup called KSplice. KSplice’s story is the gift that keeps on giving, like the Silicon Valley, like the HBO show Silicon Valley has derived a number of entertaining stories from KSplice the start up. We were all computer nerds together at MIT’s computing club. They started KSplice around a technology for rebootless kernel updates on Linux. It’s like a very exciting, serious, distance program, a challenge.

“The good people and the smart people are going to treat you equally and like a human being and not like a woman in technology.”

They were a little bit older than me so when I graduated, I joined them as an early kernel engineering hire at the startup. We built it into a real business that ended up making money, being profitable. We did a bunch of goofy stuff during that time. This is like the authentic startup experience where we were working at the house where all the founders lived. It was a disaster. Dubiously zoned. We’d all have to hide when the landlord came by. There were mice everywhere. Dudes were showering with their girlfriends during the workday. All kinds of goofy stuff that has made it into various Silicon Valley episodes. It was a really good experience in learning what it means to build something from scratch.

Totally self-funded. Didn’t take any outside investment. We worked all the time, didn’t pay ourselves for a long time. That company was acquired by Oracle, and we hung out at Oracle for a little while. We left Oracle, went back to one of our apartments and continued to startup number two with the same team. Startup number two was called Zulip, it was building a real-time collaboration service for businesses. Sort of like Slack before Slack was Slack. Did the Zulip thing for a while. Zulip was acquired by Dropbox about two years ago. Now I’m at Dropbox where I’m an engineering director and a chief of staff for a VP of Engineering.

How was your experience as a female entrepreneur?

The good people and the smart people are going to treat you equally and like a human being and not like a woman in technology. The people that I was very intentionally surrounding myself with, like my peers at MIT and then my co-founders, are awesome and we work well together and we trust each other. I would take a bullet for those guys.

There was never an issue. I wasn’t the face of fundraising because my role as a founder was to run engineering organization. Our CEO and our COO were all fundraising while we were busy building the product.

The first time in the context of my professional career that I had a rude awakening about this: We had this really, really successful blog. We got really good at writing blog posts that we’d get a bunch of attention from the tech community. We knew how to get to the top of hacker news. We once made the mistake of having a blog post that included a picture of us. That is when I had the great pleasure of receiving a lot of commentary about how I looked in a blog post that was, otherwise, about engineering.

That was maybe the rudest awakening. There were also a lot of people misgendering me when talking about the author in the blog post, even though my name in Jessica. That would be a small cut in a death by a thousand papercuts situation. I don’t really try to put my face out on the internet, especially on things that are closely associated with my social media, because it’s not that fun.

I always felt really good about running a startup and the people I was surrounded by. Now at Dropbox, I am the most senior woman at the company currently. I believe I have a tremendous amount of freedom and flexibility and respect. I feel good about that, but again, I think it’s who you surround yourself with that matters. There are plenty of assholes that you could maybe end up being surrounded by, but the good people and the smart people, they know what’s up. They know what actually matters is having great people, totally respective of their gender or other qualities.

How did you end up as a technical consultant for Silicon Valley (the TV show)?

The show is this wonderful uncanny view of the valley and what’s uncomfortable about this industry. I only worked it tech for a few years, but I made it through one episode and it was like “This is too real” and I couldn’t get through. Like I said, Ksplice is really like the gift that keeps on giving. So what happened was that the Silicon Valley writers they were doing a tour of a bunch of the startups in the valley and they came to Dropbox.

Our PR team was like, “Who are some entertaining people in engineering?” and my name came up. They shoved 25 people into a conference room to ask questions. They wanted to just hear ambient stories that could be interesting and they wanted to dig in a little bit on storage, which is part of a plotline for season one.

I seized upon the opportunity to regale them with many amusing anecdotes from Ksplice. It was all kinds of goofy stuff. The service we were building is a technology for rebootless kernel updates on linux. You care about rebootless kernel on linux if you have a lot of computers and if you have a lot of computers frequently you are a hosting company or you are in the porn industry.

I just have so many stories around debugging technical issues on the computers of various companies in the porn industry, and they are just very funny. I thought that if it could tell a bunch of these goofy stories to the Silicon Valley writers and they thought I was sufficiently entertaining that they wanted to keep talking to me so we kept meeting.

They would ask me funny questions and I would tell them stories. I ended up becoming a senior technical consultant, which is important because James Cowling, who is another person from Dropbox, who is a technical consultant for the show, he’s just a technical consultant. So my name is in every credits and his is only in the episodes he directly contributed to.

That was fun and we- James and I together- helped design their little data center from season two. They invited us to the taping for scene one of episode one of season two, which is filmed at AT&T Park. They had all the celebs out, the Winklevoss were there. Drew and Raj made the cameos in their goofy stuff. It was fun to watch the behind the scenes take on how this stuff gets made. It was fun.

I love it. Let’s go into some of the other things. Aside from your job at Dropbox, you do a lot of work on improving diversity and inclusive culture at work and in the Python community. Tell me more.

I started using Python in school. It is one of the primary languages that many IT classes are taught in. I used Python in all my internships. I’ve actually used Python in every job I’ve ever had.

My first ever contribution to an open source project was while I was an intern at VM Ware. I was using this library called Twisted, which is a Python library for event-driven networking in Python. I had noticed that some of the documentation was confusing, and I thought that this might be an opportunity to contribute back to an open source project. I heard that was a thing that you could do. It seemed scary, but maybe I could figure it out.

I decided I was going to do it, but I was super nervous about it. I quadruple-checked all of the new contributor guidelines for this incredibly simple documentation badge. I agonized over the ticket creation, the title of the ticket, and the body of the ticket, and hovered my mouse over the submit button for multiple minutes, and it was like, “Someone is going to yell at me. This is going to be terrible.” I finally hit the submit button, and then, they’re like, the nicest people.

Glyph, who is one of the creators at Twisted, who is now a good friend of mine, personally helped me through getting this first patch applied. He is super patient and helpful and nice. He is not at all intimidating, even though he’s the creator of the project, and had every reason to not help me. Despite being incredibly nervous, I had this super, super positive first experience with open source contribution, which is not what most experience.

Anecdotally, that is not a typical. I think it ended up being good for Twisted, because I ended up contributing a lot more to the project. I ended up becoming a core maintainer for the project and writing a book on Twisted with O’Reilly. I really invested in the community over the years after that initial contribution. It also made me very aware of the fact that this is not an experience that everyone necessarily has. It made me very committed to wanting other people to have that experience as well. That has become my personal direction open source.

That was happening and then in sort of a parallel work stream there was this program that was happening on the West Coast while I was still in Boston as a student. It is called RailsBridge, which is like one of the earlier efforts in this wave of diversity outreach, to get more women into the Ruby/Ruby and Rails community.

I got to talking with Ashish Leroya, a friend who is also an open source nerd too, about doing something like this in Boston. We didn’t know Ruby. We knew Python. We thought, “What if we just do this in the Python community?” So we hooked up with the Boston Python user group and convinced and Ned Batchelder.

We convinced this guy Ned, one of the long time organizers of Boston Python, to let us run an intro to Python workshop, specifically for women in Boston, under the Boston Python User Group. It was sort of a bold thing to do because I didn’t really know who we were. Getting the right messaging out can be a little tricky, but he was game for it. We ended up selling out, basically, immediately. It was free, but it ended up filling up immediately.

We ended up running a bunch of these. I became an organizer for the Boston Python User Group. Then the Boston Python User Group, in large part due to these types of initiatives and other very intentional initiatives around providing a more inclusive user group for people of various backgrounds.

“As it turns out, if you make an effort to be welcoming to one set of people, you will probably actually become more welcoming to everybody, which is the secret to all diversity, everybody just actually helps everyone.”

Boston is a great testing ground for this, because it has a very high density tech population. It is adjacent to a bunch of other stuff, like bio-tech, a lot of entrepreneurs, music is very big—so there are a bunch of adjacent fields that leverage programming that you can tap into if you do a good job of being welcoming.

We ran a bunch of these diversity outreach workshops, and then a bunch of crazy statistics occurred. We set out a goal – it’s as true in my day job as in these open source communities – like you set a goal and then you measure it to know if you’re like actually doing what you intended to do. We had this goal around increasing the representation of women at user group events. We started at nearly 0% at user group events for women, wanting to boost that to 15%. We instantly achieved that by running these intro workshops and some follow-up events. It really became a pipeline of events.

Then we were able to sustain that participation rate for several years. I’d have to check in with Ned about what the latest stats are, but while I was there in Boston, this represented a huge leap in the actual composition of the user group but also the way that it felt. It became a real poster-child/example set of processes that were adopted by user groups around the United States and globally. We gave a talk about this at PyCon, and it’s been replicated like all over the world, which is pretty amazing.

So I was an organizer for the Boston part of the user group, which is part of this initiative, became the largest user group in the world. As it turns out, if you make an effort to be welcoming to one set of people, you will probably actually become more welcoming to everybody, which is the secret to all diversity, everybody just actually helps everyone.

I then ran for and then became a director for the Python Software Foundation, which the non-profit and stewarding organization behind the Python programming language and community. I served as a director for a couple of years and I was also a co-chair for our Outreach and Education Committee, which provided a lot of funding to educational initiatives. They use Python.

For the last three years I’ve been the diversity chair for Python. There are many Python conferences around the world. Python is the original big international conference that’s held in North America somewhere once a year. I’ve been the diversity chair for the past three years, so in the three years I’ve always had that role formally.

There’s a pretty sick set of statistics about this. If you look in the old Twitter feed, like three years prior to me having this role, the percentage of speakers at Python who were women was one percent, and then it was 5%, and then it was 10%. When formalized, and I was investing time in and getting other people to invest time in, it was 15 %, and then it was 33%. By the time this project launches, that number will increase to 41%, which is insanely high for a very prestigious open source conference. This is a conference with a highly competitive and actually mostly blind selection process, so this is a pure top of the funnel investment with real payoff.

You’ve engineered a system that was successful in increasing diversity in this specific culture. What are the things that have worked and what are the roadblocks that you see that make it tougher to replicate across all tech?

I should caveat the whole prior discussion with the fact that gender is not the only demographic that matters. Gender happens to be relatively easy to measure, in a way that’s not super creepy, and track over time. Women are half the population. It’s a very obvious needle to move. Let’s pretend that we wish there were more women in engineering in our company. It can be women, or it can be any other demographic that you’re trying to optimize for. Here’s the process:

Step zero: it has to actually be a place where people want to work. For example, it has to be a place that equitably retains and promotes women. There’s no point worrying about and investing a bunch of time in the hiring process if once people join, there they’re going to be unhappy and they’re going to quit. That’s step zero. You have to measure this stuff or you won’t know if you’re doing a good job. Do that.

Step one: You have to have an equitable evaluation pipeline.You’re the only one who’s measuring it, so you need to measure segments broken down by the demographics that you care about. If your evaluation process is fair, and has equitable outcomes, this will stabilize across the demographics that you care about. There’s a standard pipeline analysis for this, which is like your pre-onset to onset, and your onset to offer, offer to offer accept. You have to ensure that whole process is equitable.

“If all it is a math problem, what it really is, then is just a prioritization question because anybody can do the math. It’s a question for you as the head of a company, what is the appropriate way to prioritize this problem? If your company is running out of money tomorrow and has a bunch of other problems, maybe this isn’t the thing that you need to be paying attention too. But I suspect if you want to be a company that’s around for the long haul and you want to attract the best talents and retain it, you probably have to care about this whether you like it or not because people like me are going to opt out of working at your company if you don’t make it a priority.”

The beauty of this is that when you achieve steps zero and one, it becomes a numbers game. You have to pass through raids on an evaluation pipeline that is equitable and dumps candidates into an environment that is equitable, all you have to do then is have some outcomes that you want, back up the math on that and that’s a set of top of funnel targets that your job. Your job is to incentivize a diverse top of the funnel that will cause the math to happen from the pipeline that has those outcomes. That’s all it is. It is just a math problem.

If all it is a math problem, what it really is, then is just a prioritization question because anybody can do the math. It’s a question for you as the head of a company, what is the appropriate way to prioritize this problem? If your company is running out of money tomorrow and has a bunch of other problems, maybe this isn’t the thing that you need to be paying attention too. But I suspect if you want to be a company that’s around for the long haul and you want to attract the best talents and retain it, you probably have to care about this whether you like it or not because people like me are going to opt out of working at your company if you don’t make it a priority.

Then, it’s a prioritization question, so you make sure that it’s staffed appropriately with recruiting and with event coordinators and it’s incentivized appropriately with your hiring managers and with recruiting. Then you just do it. Any company that says that they care about this, in particular, if you’re going to write a blog post about it or something where you’re going to say that you care about it and then you report back next year that nothing has changed, you don’t have to make up a crazy story about it. You just didn’t prioritize it sufficiently. Just own that. It’s your decision to make and you can evaluate the pros and cons, but that’s all it is. It was a prioritization decision. Once you have an inclusive culture, it will make for an equitable pipeline and a properly incentivized top of the funnel and that’s all there is to it. So, simple, right? How do people screw this up?

Well, it’s funny hearing just the very first step and making it—even just for tension it’s just starting to be talked about. It’s crazy.

If that sounded depressing, the good news is that I think that it has become something that people have to care about and it will just naturally become a thing that accompanies our better add over time. Enough people are going to be doing this. Kids these days who are going to  graduated from college soon. They’re going to enter into a work force, or they’re not even going to realize that it used to be difficult to get engineering teams to talk about why this was a thing they should care about. It’s a different scene these days. That’s extremely encouraging. We should be vigilant about this stuff. It’s easy to regress, but I’m pretty optimistic.

Do you feel the inclination to apply your knowledge, and what you’ve learned, and your experience, into different specific niches of tech after this? After Python?

That question is, what do I actually care about in life, which is a totally different question, although we could talk about that, if you want.

We can talk about that.

I am not strongly motivated by being in an engineering leadership position at a tech company. I appear to be pretty good at it, which is why I keep doing it, and then keep getting into increasingly large levels of responsibility for it. I really like people. I really like surrounding myself with the types of people that you find  in these organizations. There are other things that I actually care about in life and I would expect that in the arch of my adult life and I will move into a pretty different role over time.

Things that I care about include—they’re going to all sound related. Things that I care about include the democratic machine, like democracy as an institution mostly in the United States. I care about education. I care about journalism. And then I care about the power of media more broadly to educate and influence people. These things are all related. You need an aware and educated population that is able to work together in a democratic society to move each other forward. That’s how it’s all related.

All of these things, one property that’s really nice about being in a software company or being in software, is the scale. You can write software that you continually distribute to everybody, to hundreds of millions of people if you want. That is incredibly powerful and once you have a taste of doing that, it can be difficult to do work that scales less. For example, it is difficult to visualize myself being a teacher in a classroom. Maybe if I’m a teacher in a classroom that is on the  internet and reaches lots and lots of people, maybe that’s appealing. Or if I’m helping to drive policy decisions that impact many, many people, that’s appealing. It’s finding the impact at scale in these fields that I’m pretty passionate about in a way that parallels the opportunities scale that you can have in software. Those are things I actually care about.

Why have you been working in tech companies and for a while if it’s not really what you care about?

I’ve learned that it’s been intentional. I’ve learned a bunch of highly transferable skills building companies and managing increasingly complex organizations.I wouldn’t go back and undo it. I will eventually, over the course of my life, move into something that’s more differently related to one of these four topics that I mentioned. A change from holding a leadership position in a pure tech company.

On that note, I’m curious about your high-level thoughts on the state of tech in 2016, and what excites you, specifically the potential of tech’s applications to those things that you care about.

It’s a good question. I mean some of these things are a little obvious, and if I were better predicting the non-obvious things, like maybe I should be a VC and just cash a bunch of checks, ha!

I’m a pretty avid Twitter user.  When I watch grassroots political movements on Twitter that’s exciting to me. The internet is amazing. It connects people independent of distance. That’s why the internet is the greatest invention of all time, and I’m a little bit obsessed with it. There is also the infrastructure of the internet, we could go off on a whole weird tangent about that. That’s exciting.

To follow up on that, that was a lot of the stuff that I think is the biggest set of issues isn’t going to get solved. Sometimes the solution isn’t technological. There will be technological platforms that will enable the people who are going to cause the change to do it, but at the end of the day the thing that’s going to make a difference. Problems like fulfilling the promise of a equitable  public education in the U.S. is not going to be solved by technology. I don’t think it is—I could be wrong. Sorry to any ed-tech people who end up reading this.

I don’t think like a piece of software is going to solve that problem. It’s going to be the policies and the institutional infrastructure around people that we change that solves it. Which is part of why I probably won’t be building the software for very long. I’m going to be more directly in the sector with the people who are making the change. Probably.

Do you have feelings about technology influencing the rate at which policy can be changed?

You would hope that it makes it faster. If you could vote from your phone, or a computer, that’d be pretty great. The place that I just was before I was here, I was just in Buenos Aires, and they have compulsory voting. Because you have a bunch of people who vote because they have to, and they don’t know what’s going on. There are pros and cons to compulsory voting. It’s too bad that the engagement is so low in the U.S., but if we could make it easier to vote, that’d be pretty sweet. Although in this election, I think that we’re going to have better turnout than ever before. It’s a crazy time.

What is frustrating to you about tech in its current state, and what would you like to see change?

I think it’s bad that in the US there is a monopoly on this sort of startup ecosystem and culture. Really the only game in town is Silicon Valley, and I’m sort of a walking example of this. I was in Boston, started two tech companies in Boston and even we succumbed to the pull of Silicon Valley.

It’s because money is better out here. The tech companies who are going to acquire you are going to pay bigger premiums out west. The talent’s all out here. The network is out here. And that’s bad. What do we learn in history about monopolies? Like, monopolies are—in the long run they’re bad for innovation.

I would love to see truly competitive alternative to Silicon Valley in the United States. I would love to see competition that it’s a healthier culture, and maybe promotes people being willing to invest in ideas deeply, for a long time. Really bringing expertise in a domain to solving real problems in the world, as opposed to just building apps. That is my fantasy is that 20 years from now.

From all of your experiences, having not worked only in Silicon Valley proper, being a female developer, doing tons of diversity work, I would just be curious to hear your general thoughts right now on the state of diversity in tech. Aside from the system that can fix it, or even the high-level roadblocks you’ve seen.

If you look at the research, the data tells us that there’s a leaky pipeline and that diversity for women in industry as compared to graduation rates is still trailing behind and it’s a much worse story for other demographics. If we wanted to pick on ethnic demographics, the story for African-Americans and Hispanics is much worse. That sucks! I don’t want to be in a different industry though.  

Why do we even care that the tech industry be reflective of the population that it serves? It has such a profound ability to change people’s lives if we do it the right way. I personally wouldn’t want to leave because of the shitty pipeline issues that I’d rather fight, but not everybody has the luxury of being able to do that. I mean, the trends are weird, right? The trends for women in CS were going down for a really long time. My understanding is that they’re back on the upswing, but the peak was decades ago, and we have a lot of ground to recover. I feel like there’s a lot of work to do, but that’s work worth doing.

I keep going back to the story you shared of having such a positive first experience in shipping that patch to the open source project. I wonder how massively important those first experiences are, and whether they’re positive or negative.

Hugely.

—and whether or not that turns a person into a incredibly high contributor vs someone who eventually leaves the industry.

Anyone in data tells us that it’s usually important. It doesn’t even have to be anecdotal, I think we just know from the data.

This is related to some of the things we’ve talked about, but it’s worth saying. I get asked quite a bit why I spend a bunch of time on outreach in Tech, and the real actual reason for this is different from what people would expect. I believe we will build better products if the people who are developing these products are a  reflection of the population that we are serving.

It’s the right thing to do. I want any kids that I have to feel like they can do anything in the world. Those are all the reasons why, and I believe that it is important that people have access to programing.

“Learning how to program allows you to develop the confidence that you can learn how to operate within a system and to deconstruct it and to tear it down to make it better.”

Not everybody has to be a programmer but let them always have the opportunity to try it out. It is the first time that you can become fluent in a system, so that you understand that you can change it and that lesson that everything in the world is a system that can be understood and deconstructed and changed in that way. I think many people probably never have had the luxury to navel gaze about this stuff. Learning how to program allows you to develop the confidence that you can learn how to operate within a system and to deconstruct it and to tear it down to make it better.

Knowing how to do that and have confidence in that as a programmer is already very powerful because when you know how to program you can create all of these amazing things in the world. The more important lesson there is that you have gained—you have had this experience of observing a system and believing that you can change it. And that’s the thing that I actually want everybody on the planet to experience because there are many systems, and some of these systems are software systems, but probably the most important ones are people systems, and it’s not actually any different.

“Everything is a system that you can understand, and you can deconstruct, and you can break down, and you can change.”

Everything is a system that you can understand, and you can deconstruct, and you can break down, and you can change. That is the thing that I actually want everybody to experience. That is why I spend all of my time—or a bunch of time—teaching beginners of diverse backgrounds how to program, because that is maybe the most profound thing that I’ve ever experienced, and maybe one of the more profound things that many, many people in the world can experience if they have a chance to do so.

What advice would you give to folks who hope to get into programming or are just getting started?

I’m a lot more confident now than when I was when I was 18.I don’t know if there’s a way to short circuit that. I don’t know if there’s a world where anybody can tell you like believe in yourself, have the confidence. I don’t know if there’s any way to learn that through experience but it makes such a big difference. Given my experiences in college, feeling like I had to work harder than all of my peers who’d been doing this for a lot longer than me, and later to get to the point where I could prove myself to them and validate that I was as good as everyone else like a big validation.

By having the confidence to dive into that and to totally believe people actually thought I was good wasn’t simple. It was like an imposter syndrome. The side issue I want you to learn about is imposter syndrome. It actually makes material impact in your life. This is one of those beautiful things that you realize that if you put into it you could reflect on it could actually change your behavior. I think that’s how I would summarize it. If I had known about it when I was 16 or 18, that would have been helpful.

Sure. I’m from the St. Louis, Missouri area. Technically I’m from southern Illinois, but when I say Illinois, people think Chicago, which is like six hours north of Shiloh, Illinois, where I’m from. I lived there from kindergarten until I graduated from high school.

I was always a shy kid—soft spoken, quiet, very much a bookworm. I was also into video games from an early age thanks to my dad’s influence. I also really liked the internet because it was this new, shiny thing. In Belleville, most people are like-minded—so because the Internet has so many subcultures,  I felt like I could finally find my place. I eventually taught myself how to code, HTML and CSS to start, and how to create graphics. I made random websites based on stuff I was interested in; I think I made my first website in 6th grade. It was on Geocities [laughter]. I kept doing it throughout high school and it morphed into my passion.

After high school, I went to a small school called Maryville University in St. Louis, thinking like, “I’m going to be a web designer for a living, that’s a thing people do I guess?” But my school didn’t actually have much for web design. I told them I wanted to major in web design, but they’re like “uh, we don’t have that, what are you talking about?” They did have very small graphic design program, so I decided to major in that.

“The summer before my sophomore year, my dad got laid off so my parents couldn’t help me with school anymore. I had a decent scholarship based on my strong academics from high school, but my university was so expensive that I couldn’t afford the rest of the tuition. The school wouldn’t let me continue until I paid back what owed from my freshman year, so I left school and got two jobs: first at Build a Bear and the Apple Store, and then Apple and a waitressing job.”

The summer before my sophomore year, my dad got laid off so my parents couldn’t help me with school anymore. I had a decent scholarship based on my strong academics from high school, but my university was so expensive that I couldn’t afford the rest of the tuition. The school wouldn’t let me continue until I paid back what owed from my freshman year, so I left school and got two jobs: first at Build a Bear and the Apple Store, and then Apple and a waitressing job. I was thinking, “well, I’ll work on paying them back and just figure it out as I go.” After about 2 years of working while taking a few community college classes, I finally paid back the freshman year debt. But by then I was so disillusioned with Maryville University and the Midwest in general that I was like, “well, I’m moving to California now.” So I went online and searched for design programs in California.

I found a school in San Francisco and I got interested in their animation program. Suddenly I was like “well now I’m going to be an animator.” So I saved up, transferred Apple stores, and moved to San Francisco to attend the Art Institute of California (AI). Eventually I figured out that animation wasn’t a great fit for me. I love to watch animation, but I didn’t enjoy the process of making it and the school was extremely expensive. But by that point I was already kind of in love with San Francisco. I’d been here about a year, so I was like, well I may not be going to school there anymore, but I have to figure out how I can stay here. So I left AI, then I went on Craigslist and found a second job, working as an office assistant at a startup called Socialcast in SOMA. I  eventually let them know I was into design and that I could code, so they allowed me to take on some small projects for the company while I worked as an office assistant. When my boss went on maternity leave, I quit my job at Apple and went to Socialcast full time, which kind of started me on this tech path.

“Learning how to code was very tedious for me [chuckles]. I had to follow so many tutorials. I also feel like I’m always comparing myself to developers I meet here who are extremely talented. Sometimes I don’t even want to call myself a coder or developer compared to them. I’m a designer who can code. That’s an important distinction to me.”

What was the experience like for you, teaching yourself to design and code?

It partially goes on instinct. I’ve always be attracted to visual endeavors; I’ve been drawing, painting, and things like that since I was in junior high. So I feel like design is very similar to where it really helps if you some natural instinct for things like handling visuals and being empathetic to users, but there are also many things you have to be taught. As for coding, there’s more effort involved for me. I enjoy it, but I sometimes struggle with the logic behind it. Learning how to code was very tedious for me [chuckles]. I had to follow so many tutorials. I also feel like I’m always comparing myself to developers I meet here who are extremely talented. Sometimes I don’t even want to call myself a coder or developer compared to them. I’m a designer who can code. That’s an important distinction to me. Learning how to code was challenging, but learning how to design has been fun because it’s about reading people’s emotions, designing interactions and visuals, and things like that. And I am always learning. I’ve never had a full formal design education. It’s mostly been on the job experience. Since that’s something I’m aware of, I always try to keep reading and learning.

Tell me a little bit more about your work and things that you’re proud of—things that really excite you about your work.

One thing I’m a big advocate for in my work is thinking outside the typical mold that tech people in Silicon valley seem to be designing for. Even in the most subtle ways, so many people are designing for users who are in demographics that are similar to themselves or other people in their “bubble.” By default, they are designing for someone who looks like them. And most designers in San Francisco are white guys, with some white girls mixed in here and there. So I’m often the person chiming in with things like “Wait why do all of the avatars have that kind of hair? Not everyone has that texture. Why are all the hands holding the mobile devices in these photo white” And I know details like that are such a non-issue for some people, but because I notice it I like to challenge other designers on it when I can. Lately I’m reading up on things like how to design for those with disabilities, like design for people with hearing or visual disabilities. So that’s kind of the thing I really get excited about, just thinking about audiences that aren’t as focused on.

“One thing I’m a big advocate for in my work is thinking outside the typical mold that tech people in Silicon valley seem to be designing for. Even in the most subtle ways, so many people are designing for users who are in demographics that are similar to themselves or other people in their “bubble.” By default, they are designing for someone who looks like them.”

What were your first impressions of Silicon Valley?

I didn’t really have a strong impression of it before moving here. I think I saw a movie when I was in junior high, Pirates of Silicon Valley? I really never saw myself having anything to do with it—I didn’t correlate my nerdy hobbies like web design to be related to tech. And then when I got the job at Socialcast, it was still all so new to me. There were only like 10 to 15 people in the office at the time, and I didn’t even know what a startup was. I was coming in thinking like, “Ok, I need something that’s going to pay my bills—that’s all I care about.” But when I got hired they were starting a round of funding, so I was being thrown into this fast paced startup world. And at the same time, I was still working part time at the Apple Store. So it was very different, being an hourly retail employee going into a startup world. I had no idea of what to expect but what I learned very quickly is there’s a lot of really smart people working really hard on something, and everyone’s really passionate. So that was kind of cool because that’s the kind of work ethic that I personally admire. So I was like, “Okay, so much is happening here.” So I didn’t know what I was witnessing when I first moved here, and in retrospect I’m like, “Man, I should have met more people and networked and all that!” But also, I’m terrible at networking, but it was still cool though to be a part of it.

“I would definitely say a sense of isolation. It’s a little due to my own personal insecurities because I haven’t finished school, but on top of that, it’s hard when no one looks like you or can relate to struggles you may have.”

What have been some of the tougher parts about working in tech for you?

I would definitely say a sense of isolation. It’s a little due to my own personal insecurities because I haven’t finished school, but on top of that, it’s hard when no one looks like you or can relate to struggles you may have. It’s been a challenge for me lately, especially now that I’m getting older and really wanting to explore and embrace my ethnicity. I actually did a 23andme genealogy test like two years ago to learn about my heritage and ethnicity because there’s a lot of holes in my family tree and I just had this feeling of wanting to define who I am, ethnically. Lately I’m feeling much more aware of what it means to be a Black woman than I have been ever before. I’m finally confident in proudly declaring that I’m a Black woman, but I work in an industry where I feel like I can’t let that pride be known because I don’t want to make a lot of people uncomfortable. So it’s kind of like a weird double act where outside of work, I feel very “woke” or aware of social justice and civil rights issues affecting Black Americans and other minority groups, but then at work that side of me never comes out because I’m scared that it’s not appropriate. And then I feel so frustrated that I’m even having this internal struggle where I’m so concerned about making other people uncomfortable.

“Lately I’m feeling much more aware of what it means to be a Black woman than I have been ever before. I’m finally confident in proudly declaring that I’m a Black woman, but I work in an industry where I feel like I can’t let that pride be known because I don’t want to make a lot of people uncomfortable. So it’s kind of like a weird double act where outside of work, I feel very “woke” or aware of social justice and civil rights issues affecting Black Americans and other minority groups, but then at work that side of me never comes out because I’m scared that it’s not appropriate. And then I feel so frustrated that I’m even having this internal struggle where I’m so concerned about making other people uncomfortable.”

It doesn’t help that I have had these awkward conversations where people just don’t know or care that I identify as Black so they feel comfortable saying really ridiculous or ignorant things. Like once I was in Lyft and the driver talking about Ferguson because I mentioned I’m from St. Louis. It was right around the protests that happened after Mike Brown was shot and he was totally ragging on protesters, and just being very insulting and condescending to the community as a whole. I remember thinking “Wow, would he say all of that to me if I had visibly darker skin?” Would he be comfortable saying, “These people are rioting like animals”’ or whatever he said. I think the answer is no, he wouldn’t have.

And so that’s the worry I have—although someone may seem like a great person overall, they’ll have some beliefs may be really different than mine when it comes down to it and I don’t want to cause problems at work or networking as a result. I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable or exclude them from my life due to difference of opinion, but to me there are some ways of thinking that I can’t accept because they actively hurt people. So I end up compromising my beliefs and tolerating things that I know I shouldn’t. In the past, I would just nervously laugh along with jokes and smile when on the inside I don’t agree. Lately, in the last year or so, I’m trying harder to tactfully call people out, but it’s quite hard to do sometimes.

“I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable or exclude them from my life due to difference of opinion, but to me there are some ways of thinking that I can’t accept because they actively hurt people. So I end up compromising my beliefs and tolerating things that I know I shouldn’t. In the past, I would just nervously laugh along with jokes and smile when on the inside I don’t agree. Lately, in the last year or so, I’m trying harder to tactfully call people out, but it’s quite hard to do sometimes.”

One star for that driver.

Yeah, but, ugh, that’s one thing I’m so embarrassed about to this day! I didn’t even rate him badly. I just was like, “Oh, he was really nice before we talked about Ferguson, and he obviously has no idea what he was talking about.” I still gave him 5 stars. I basically give everyone a 5 star, but after that, it haunted me for weeks. I feel like Tiffany today would not have been so meek, but back then I was still so mousy about issues of race and politics. I just didn’t want to talk about it, because ignoring microaggressions is what has helped me thrive in college and in my career.

And I don’t want to sound like I think I some perfect person who gets it right each time. Honestly, in the past I used to think most race issues didn’t affect me. But because I have a younger brother, I see him in all of these young black and brown men being targeted by police brutality or the justice system. So that helped wake me up, because my family isn’t totally protected from the effects of institutional racism just because we have lighter skin. It could happen to me too. And at the same time, me finally realizing that social justice issues directly affect me or those I care about shouldn’t have been what made me finally pay attention to systematic inequalities. So now I occasionally feel guilty for judging people who are ignorant about civil rights issues because I was still quite naive seven years ago when I first moved here.

“Honestly, in the past I used to think most race issues didn’t affect me. But because I have a younger brother, I see him in all of these young black and brown men being targeted by police brutality or the justice system. So that helped wake me up, because my family isn’t totally protected from the effects of institutional racism just because we have lighter skin. It could happen to me too.”

But I think most people, even the naive, now know that something is going with the race relations in this country. It’s good. I feel like it all of of this racial tension needs to come up to the surface so people can talk about it. While we may never be able to end racism, we can start acknowledging and addressing the systemic issues and begin to move forward. Because I think when Barack Obama got elected, people were like, “Well, racism is over!” I don’t think that’s been quite the case [chuckles]. It’s been a very weird thing to witness on the activism I’m seeing online and offline elsewhere versus what I’m witnessing in my real life.

Yeah, it’s so interesting. Have you found support networks here yet?

I have, and I haven’t. I follow lots of different social justice accounts on Tumblr and Twitter, where people can share their own personal stories or report on different situations happening across the globe. It’s nice to find a connection through other people’s experiences.

The one support group I have found that is local is online, a Bay Area “Women of Color in Tech” group. It’s nice to have a place where other women of color will listen to my concerns and validate my feelings. So I have found a support group in that sense, but I haven’t actually made any friends in the group.

I have friends in the Bay Area that are designers of course—other women designers and other women of color designers—mostly Asian women. And while I’m sure we could discuss the hardships of being a woman in tech, I don’t think I could approach them about issues concerning race or anti-blackness. I don’t know if they will feel comfortable talking about it, and honestly I also don’t know how much they would care. I don’t think I’d find any support in my professional network. So that’s something I do think is missing, that solidarity.

“The Bay Area is more diverse overall than my hometown, but seeing black and brown faces is so rare in tech. One of my friends from grade school had a work trip here recently, we met to catch up and talk about work and life in general. It was so nice just vibing with her. Because I hadn’t done that ever, really— talking about professional issues as a black woman with another black woman. She isn’t a designer—she works in economics. But it was still nice to have that moment.”

The Bay Area is more diverse overall than my hometown, but seeing black and brown faces is so rare in tech. One of my friends from grade school had a work trip here recently, we met to catch up and talk about work and life in general. It was so nice just vibing with her. Because I hadn’t done that ever, really— talking about professional issues as a black woman with another black woman. She isn’t a designer—she works in economics. But it was still nice to have that moment. I wish I could discuss social justice issues more and talk about these things openly, instead of me being complacent and pretending that race isn’t the issue. Unless I’m on Tumblr, and then I feel okay publicly acknowledging that it’s an issue [chuckles].

Yeah. You mentioned in your pre-interview that you hadn’t met another black woman designer in your six years here in tech?

Yeah. I feel like I’ve met maybe one or two in passing, but I’ve definitely never worked with or had a friendship with another black woman designer. Obviously I don’t want to be friends with someone just because we have a similar ethnic background—that’s shallow. But it does make me sad to knowing I have no black designer friends—male or female. That’s weird to me. I know there’s black women designers out there. There has to be. But where are they? If there are no black women designing the apps and sites that so many people use, then that voice isn’t being presented or considered in the design. Are things being designed with black women in mind? Or Latina or Hispanic women? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

Do you feel like you have role models that you can look up to?

I don’t have any black woman designers, but I do have other female designers as role models, for sure. Actually, one of my personal designer role models is one of my really good friends. She’s an amazing designer and an even better person. She’s also a woman of color too. I used to work with her at my last job. Once she left, I realized how wonderful it is to have a friend and mentor at work. Not only does she mentor me in design, but I’ve learned so much from her about workplace politics. I’ve witnessed people discriminate against her. I don’t know how much of it was race related, perhaps some of it was, but working with her I saw what it looks like when men are threatened by strong women. Confident and smart women taking taking leadership positions threatens some men, and I witnessed that happen. And it was unfortunate, but she handled it with such grace, elegance, and perseverance. I’m glad that I have someone that I can turn to not only for career and design advice, but also for help in navigating the realities of being a minority and a woman in the design world. She’s definitely someone I can go to when I feel like I’m lost.

You touched on this and you mentioned in your pre-interview that you’ve had some really unique experiences as a pale black person.

Sometimes I think that non-black people don’t really know what I am, which used to actually really surprise me. I never thought of myself as being racially ambiguous until I got to college. My school wasn’t diverse and I started getting the “what are you?” questions. Right now I have braids, I think maybe that helps. People are like “oh ok, well, she’s something…” but when I first moved here I used to straighten my hair. A common question I get is if I am part Japanese, which is amusing to me because I have 0% East Asian genetics. I just happen to love studying the language.

But from time to time, I’ll hear comments from people or they do things like casually quote a song and use the n-word, I’m just like “whoa, would you have been as comfortable saying that if I had darker skin?” I don’t think they would. Like you wouldn’t have said that if I had the same skin tone as my dad, who matches the visible spectrum of what non-black people perceive as being black. So I think sometimes people feel like more comfortable saying things that are not appropriate around me, but on the flip side I think that it’s kind of up to me to say something. But that’s also much pressure! I’m naturally not a combative or antagonistic person, but even when I’ve spoken up in the past, people are like “Oh, what are you mixed with?” So it’s always really awkward. But I’ve always felt like I have had to prove my blackness. So even today, I find myself being like “Stereotypes are gross but of course I can dance, of course I can cook soul food.”

As an adult, I have wondered how many other black people think about this stuff, but I don’t have a network of people talk about it with in the Bay Area. Growing up, I really never talked about race like this. The St. Louis area is very segregated. It’s like you’re black or you’re white—even non-black people of color seemed to “pick a side,” if you will. And I liked things that black people weren’t supposed to like, like computers, video games, and anime. I took advanced classes in junior high and high school where there were only a handful of black kids, in a school that was like 50% black. And then I had this super light skin, eyes, and hair that somehow made me a target for some black kid bullies, saying I stuff like I wasn’t even an Oreo (an insult saying someone is black on the outside, white on the inside), that I was just an other.

So, by the time I started college, I was perfectly happy being like “fine, they don’t think I’m black, whatever. I’m just my own thing.” Which was so weird, because my dad is Black, and my mom is technically mixed with White but identifies as Black. So at home, I was Black but at school I felt too intimidated to say I was Black. So that’s why I think I’ve had this epiphany in the last few years where I’m like, no I am Black too. The 23andme test was like the final bit of ammo I needed. I’m 68% African. I may be mixed with other things, but that is my proof. It’s what made feel like I can claim my blackness, even though I’m on the lighter side of the spectrum of American Blackness.

“I feel like I’ve met maybe one or two in passing, but I’ve definitely never worked with or had a friendship with another black woman designer. Obviously I don’t want to be friends with someone just because we have a similar ethnic background—that’s shallow. But it does make me sad to knowing I have no black designer friends—male or female. That’s weird to me. I know there’s black women designers out there. There has to be. But where are they? If there are no black women designing the apps and sites that so many people use, then that voice isn’t being presented or considered in the design. Are things being designed with black women in mind? Or Latina or Hispanic women? I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

I know my friends and even family aren’t aware of these internal identity struggles I have. So, I know sometimes I’m more sensitive about making people accept that I am a valid form of Blackness. Which sounds really weird because at the same time if you talked to me ten years ago I would be like, “No, I’m not black. Black people don’t accept me and so I don’t accept them.”

And I know I don’t face the same level of discrimination that comes with darker skin. I also know that light skin privilege exists. I feel like I’m in a very interesting place today and definitely this is like—I’ve never even talked about this with anybody like before. I feel so comfortable discussing this with you [chuckles], but now that you asked that question, all of the feelings that I had before about how I never really felt like I could proudly say that I’m a black person. But now, I do feel like that and sometimes I’m almost like beating that fact over people’s heads because I’m finally like comfortable saying that. But, that’s only around friends. When it comes to work, I don’t really like to talk about race because like I said, I’m always worried about the reaction I’ll get.

I’ve talked a lot with people about how like the way that they grew up and how it impacts like how they are in work environments and stuff like that. For some people, it manifests in now wanting to like minimize conflict and that sort of thing. So I’m curious how like you’re upbringing you think affects like how you deal with stuff in the workplace.

I would agree with that for sure. I think people from the Midwest tend to like be really nice up front, because that’s just how you’re supposed to be—neighborly and super accommodating. And so I definitely have that quality, but even in my own home growing up, I was always the very quiet one. But that said, I feel like as I’m getting older, finding my voice, and becoming more comfortable in myself, I definitely am getting better at speaking out when I don’t like something. But I do sometimes catch people off guard when I don’t like something because I usually am so easygoing. I naturally want people to get along and want there to be harmony and balance. But when I do have to confront someone over something I have to psyche myself into it. Like I said about the Lyft driver guy, like I could have passively given him a bad review, but I still felt bad doing that. I was thinking “Oh but he has a hard job too and maybe he had a bad day.”

I have a very similar temperament. I’m just now learning to stand up for myself too—not letting everything slide.

That’s my biggest thing. I’ve always struggled with microaggressions, even before I knew what they were called. They have happened to me my whole life and I have typically just let them slide. I felt like at some point, I’d eventually reach a breaking point over it so that’s why I felt I had to get better at not letting them go. But standing up for myself—even if it’s not confronting someone in the moment—that’s my personal goal is to be able to do that.

I honestly still can’t.

It’s hard. One of my current goals is to, especially with someone I care about, is to call them out on it if they say something that isn’t cool. For all scenarios, even when it’s not something that directly relates to me. Especially in work situations, where I’m like, “I’m cool with you and we’re friends, but you can’t say that kind of stuff about women or make jokes about someone’s body or sexuality or anything like that.” Being in the Bay Area, sometimes I feel like I’m working with a lot of immature man children. Like a designer I worked with compared an Asian interview subject, specifically her voice and laugh, to a yellowface character from a sketch tv show. This was during an interview round table session, in front of other senior people and the recruiter. No one said anything. Like, he was a senior team member and he was openly making jokes like that. I wish I had said something, you know? When I think back to stuff like that I always feel a kind of pang of regret, like “I should have said something.”

Based on all of your experiences, what would you look for in a future job?

That’s something I’m thinking about a lot now. I have separate buckets of criteria for what I’m looking for in future roles. Like is it a job where the product is  making a difference in people’s lives, helping somehow? Is it a job where I am being fulfilled personally? Is the team diverse? So far, the jobs I’ve had have been really good for personal growth and career growth, but they haven’t matched the other criteria as much. And for the second criteria bucket, for a future job I definitely would love to do something related to like my hobbies or interests. Like I have been studying Japanese for almost a decade now. So I would love to do something with Japanese in my career so it feels like it’s not just a hobby and something that I’m actually using everyday.

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

I think what’s really exciting is that the things we work on in tech are so normal for everyone, even those outside of the tech world now. Actually, I just got back from Bahrain last week. My friend is from there and I went for her wedding. In Bahrain, Instagram was everywhere. And it was so crazy think that this product that was originally created by a small team in the same city where I live is touching so many people’s lives across the world. Like storefronts had their Instagram names on the sign below the store’s name, like that’s how big it is there.

But what scares or frustrates me is like stuff like bullying, or how tech can give hatred such a prominent platform.

“Diversity and inclusion just isn’t a concern for most people in tech. For example, if you’re happy and comfortable with your design team being homogenous, then you’re probably not going to feel challenged to make it diverse unless somebody points out, ‘Hey, this is a problem.'”

Also, it seems that now people are getting so hung up on online relationships that they don’t know how to have offline relationships anymore. I just watched Master of None and all those things he’s talking about are things that I am witnessing friends go through. Like people don’t know how to have relationships. They’re so worried because there’s like 5,000 people they can date via an app. They don’t want to settle and things like that. So that kind of scares me… And I’m a technology optimist.

A lot of people are scared of the Big Brotherness Google a lot, but I’m the person who’s like, “Google, take my data. You help me get to meetings on time; you help me not get lost. You can have all my data.” But I’m always a little worried that the era of optimism and innocence with the Internet is gone. People are more nefarious and don’t have the best intentions with your data out there. So that’s another thing I think is really big for tech right now is security. Now that the internet is more mature, we’re starting to really see more standards now. From a product development standpoint, maybe you can’t move fast and break things—to quote Facebook—but now users are more aware about their data. So you have to spend more time making sure your product is safe and compliant. So I think it’s nice that we are self-regulating things, but I don’t want tech to get too regulated. The Internet has always been a special place with unlimited creativity. Overall, tech is very exciting right now. So that’s kind of the cool part, witnessing it all.

How do you think tech can be more accommodating to diverse perspectives in design?

That’s something that I think about a lot. I really think it goes down to getting people involved early. I’ve met people here who have a lot of privilege, but they don’t realize it. And it’s very much a buddy system in tech where one person gets into a company, and then they only refer their friends and others in the social bubble. And because they don’t have a diverse friend group, the company’s demographics become very uniformed. Many people seem threatened by the idea of forcing diversity, but I think it is good to have someone at an executive level who is tasked with increasing diversity and making workplaces inclusive to all kinds of people.

Diversity and inclusion just isn’t a concern for most people in tech. For example, if you’re happy and comfortable with your design team being homogenous, then you’re probably not going to feel challenged to make it diverse unless somebody points out, “Hey, this is a problem.” I do feel lucky that at my current job we do have some diversity in the sense that there we have people of color on the team, and it’s mostly women. But we’re just a small company, and no one’s looking to us as a design leader in the industry compared to places like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google. And from what I’ve seen, those teams aren’t diverse.

“Black Twitter, a lot of the young people on there, they’re hilarious and amazing and I love it, but how many of the young kids participating are going to think, “I want to get a job doing something related to this?” I don’t think many are because it’s not being presented as something that they can be apart of. These platforms need to reach out early because that’s their audience right there.”

InVision just had a documentary they did I think last year or a couple of months ago, and it was like the top designers disrupters in the industry. Not one person of color was in there, I think. Maybe there one woman on the list. Stuff like that. People aren’t doing it on purpose. I think most of the people in these companies just don’t have very diverse professional and personal groups, so they likely couldn’t seek out diverse voices even if they wanted to. But if no one’s calling it out, it’s not going to change.

We also need to go into primary and high schools and get kids involved earlier. And not just coding—I think that introducing design as career options for underrepresented groups is important too. Because the kids—Twitter, for example. Black Twitter, a lot of the young people on there, they’re hilarious and amazing and I love it, but how many of the young kids participating are going to think, “I want to get a job doing something related to this?” I don’t think many are because it’s not being presented as something that they can be apart of. These platforms need to reach out early because that’s their audience right there. If you have a diverse user base, but the people creating the product aren’t, then you’re going to have some problems eventually. Tumblr had a problem, actually, awhile ago where they censored some popular tag, flagging it as not safe for work or something? I don’t remember, but it impacted a huge chunk of Tumblr’s user base. A lot of marginalized groups that feel like they can find their place or community on Tumblr, but suddenly they’re being treated different by the app developers. So now they don’t trust the app, and it’s perceived value for the user goes down. If only there had been one person, one voice on the team that could have been like, “Hey, this isn’t such a good idea.” That could have been avoided.

That’s why you need diverse teams. My hope is that as the internet generation grows up, we start seeing more diversity. I hope that tech becomes less of a “bro club.”

“I would love to stay in San Francisco for the next five years but realistically, I can’t. And I know I am speaking of a place of total privilege, as a tech worker in San Francisco. I can’t imagine how hard it was if I was still working retail or if I was working as an artist. I worry that life in San Francisco is not sustainable, so I really don’t know where I’ll be in five years.”

Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?

Oh gosh. Well as much as I love San Francisco, it’s really different now compared to when I moved here. I moved from Lower Haight to live in the Outer Sunset by the by the beach in 2014. I love living by the beach, but we truly only moved there because it was the cheapest place to find a bigger apartment at the time. But now getting downtown for work is such a hassle. I would love the ability to live closer to downtown, but I am not comfortable with how high rents are here. I would love to stay in San Francisco for the next five years but realistically, I can’t. And I know I am speaking of a place of total privilege, as a tech worker in San Francisco. I can’t imagine how hard it was if I was still working retail or if I was working as an artist. I worry that life in San Francisco is not sustainable, so I really don’t know where I’ll be in five years. I hope I’m still working as a designer, but likely it’ll be in a different area. I’ve heard that L.A. has a “Silicon Beach,” and I know there is a “Silicon Prairie” somewhere in the Midwest, although I see myself on a coast. I just hope that wherever I am in five years, I am making user experiences that are helpful to someone.

“You really have to be very self-driven because there are times where it seems that no one’s going to help you. You really do have to be self-driven, which I know can be hard, especially when you’re young. But when you’re competing with very privileged people for highly desired jobs, you can’t afford to wait around—you have to create opportunities by showing others your talents and interests.”

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

You really have to be very self-driven because there are times where it seems that no one’s going to help you. You really do have to be self-driven, which I know can be hard, especially when you’re young. But when you’re competing with very privileged people for highly desired jobs, you can’t afford to wait around—you have to create opportunities by showing others your talents and interests. When I got that job at my first startup, if I had waited for someone to ask me, “Well what do you want want to do besides admin work?” I don’t think that day would have come. Instead, I was like, “I know how to code. You guys need someone to make these internal pages. Do you want me to do?”

Another piece of advice is, as a person of color, people may look down on you sometimes or have lowered expectations. It hurts, but you have to say, “You know what, I don’t care about you. I’m going to give it 110% and prove you wrong.”

And finally, if you’re feeling alone, go online for support! Learn very early how to efficiently use Google. Search engines are your best friend. You can learn the basics by getting on free sites like Codecademy for code or UXPin for design. There are also tons of design and code communities out there, from Twitter to StackExchange to Quora to Reddit. It can be lonely and frustrating to work in tech, and it can be a lot of hard work, but overall it’s such an interesting and exciting place to be.

“It can be lonely and frustrating to work in tech, and it can be a lot of hard work, but overall it’s such an interesting and exciting place to be.”

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