On the trail, we knew each other by nationality and traveling companions: The Malaysian couple. The Brit, solo. The American family. The two Danish friends. In the suspension of our normal identities and lives and the world beyond the trail, we didn’t need names. We breakfasted and supped and overnighted together for four days and everyone was unfailingly friendly and conversational and yet there was no awkwardness about being nameless to each other. At the end, there were some brief belated exchanges of first names by way of simultaneous introduction and farewell, but no exhortations to stay in touch — just well wishes in upcoming travel and pleasant wave offs in appreciation of companionship for the few days we shared.
17 Cutest Corgis in the World
Okay, sorry, no corgis.
Today is my last day at Pinterest. It’s simultaneously bittersweet and terrifyingly exciting to be moving on to a new startup adventure, this time my own.
I still often think back to when we were just three rows of desks at the High Street office in Palo Alto, and marvel at how far the company has come since then. And it’s been such a joy and privilege to come in to the office every day to work with such a talented, creative, inspiring, and also warm, collaborative, and humble team that is so committed to doing good work in the world.
I first encountered Pinterest in 2010 with the passing curiosity of a startup junkie that loves trying any new site and examining the user flows. Upon discovering a typo on the site, I thought to write to the team, sending over an email titled “typo and other thoughts” to hi@pinterest.com. Within an hour a very nice person by the name of Ben Silbermann had replied to me, thanking me for the feedback and signing off with “I hope you keep using the site and keep your thoughts and suggestions coming!”
A year later, we were re-connected through the Palo Alto startup scene, summer BBQs and the like. Although I hadn’t been looking to leave Quora, Ben made me an offer to join Pinterest and I considered. I was immediately compelled by his thoughtfulness around the type of company he wanted to build: the sort of place that in 30 years, people would look back and be proud to have worked at. I was using the site more and intrigued by the product and business potential. And I was excited by the opportunity to help scale not only the engineering but also the engineering team. I crossed my fingers, hoping I wasn’t making a terrible mistake, and took the offer.
The early days were crazy chaotic, but I didn’t know to expect any different. I was only a year and a half into my software career, with just enough experience to be dangerous, but not so much to have lost my fearlessness. I dove right in. We were hurriedly migrating off a Django ORM setup that only had enough id space for a few more weeks of pin creation; the codebase was a tangle of dependencies via careless import *s and magic functions; and we sometimes took down the site on deploys without knowing it for lack of unit tests, deploy validation, or even uptime monitoring (#yolo!). I loved it.
It’s been four and a half years since I joined, and I can’t imagine a better opportunity than being on the Pinterest rocket ship in these intervening years. I’ve had the chance to work all up and down and across the stack and build infrastructure, products, frameworks, and tools; I’ve worked with wickedly talented people across every function, and made friends that I’ll keep for life. The culture that Ben was so deliberate to craft when the company was only eight people has scaled as we’ve grown to 100x the size. I can only hope to be able to recreate that kind of hyper-productive camaraderie I’ve experienced at Pinterest in my future pursuits. (Special shoutouts to the web team of the Denzel Black Hole Sun era, and to my Sterling team omies, thank you for coming to Rusty yoga with me. Love you g̶u̶y̶s̶ all.)
To say nothing of the sheer scale we’ve achieved, reaching over 100 million MAUs across so many platforms and countries, we’ve grown up as a company.
I’m still terribly excited about Pinterest. I’ve personally always been an avid Pinner (17k Pins and counting!) and will continue to be. I believe in the mission of bringing inspiration to people around the world, and the team’s ability to realize that mission.
And though I’ll stay involved as an advisor to the company, I also think it’s time for me to close this chapter of my life and begin a new one. After taking some time to travel and tramp through Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, I’m planning to move to NYC for a much-needed change of scene. I’ve been in the Bay Area my whole life and I can’t wait to experience the bustle and diversity of life and industry and people in the city that never sleeps. I think it’ll be the perfect place for me to be creative in new ways as I start my own company.
On that matter: I’ve never been attracted to the notion of starting a company for the sake of starting a company — I even once wrote a post venting some frustration over that Silicon Valley meme — but over the course of the last year I’ve found myself drawn to a particular problem space that has substantial social impact, particularly along gender lines, and is currently underserved by technology. With some gentle nudges from new friends I’ve made at this career crossroads, I’m excited to try to build a business around solutions for this problem space.
#squadgoals
What a treat to be able to work with this amazing (and diverse!) group of women on launching Project Include. I also thoroughly enjoyed getting to code on the website with a few fun co-conspirators.
Miscellaneous nice press coverage:
- New York Times: Women in Tech Band Together to Track Diversity, After Hours
(纽约时报: 硅谷夠不夠多元，讓數據說話) - Wall Street Journal: Silicon Valley Female Leaders Launch Tool to Measure and Improve Diversity
- Huffington Post: Can These Women Save Silicon Valley?
- USA Today: Project Include to tackle diversity in tech
- Vanity Fair: Ellen Pao’s Next Venture Takes Aim at Silicon Valley’s Old Boys’ Club
- TechCrunch: Ellen Pao, Freada Kapor Klein and others form tech diversity and inclusion war room
- Fortune: Female Tech Leaders Create New Group To Fix Silicon Valley’s Diversity Problem
- Wired: Ellen Pao Has A New Site to Push Greater Diversity in Tech
- Mashable: Top women in tech join forces to push startups to tackle diversity earlier
- Bloomberg: Ex-Kleiner VC Ellen Pao Introduces Diversity Initiative
- CNET: Ellen Pao among female leaders joining forces to help diversify tech
- The Mercury News: Doubling down on diversity even in a downturn
- Silicon Beat: Ellen Pao, Tracy Chou and others pressure Silicon Valley on its diversity efforts
My favorite:
Smoke stains
Ten days and seven thousand miles around the world later, there’s still a smokiness clinging to my peacoat. We were at a winery in the Golan Heights, and we stood too long by the post-dinner bonfire; it was late and dark and cold, we were caught up in conversation, and the woody smoke drenched us. But I don’t mind the reminder of an incredible whirlwind trip all up and down Israel, disputed territories and all.
Frühjahrsmüdigkeit
Per Wikipedia, “as a translation of the German term ‘Frühjahrsmüdigkeit’ (lit. ‘Spring tiredness’), Spring Fever is the name for a temporary mood typically characterized by a state of low energy and weariness experienced by many people in springtime.”
But then they win
My emotional balance has been precarious recently. I’m mostly okay, if only a resigned kind of okay, but then there are the moments where I’ll feel a sudden tightness in my chest, a shallowness of breath, angry warm tears welling up.
It happened again today when I came across this reflection from a female sports journalist on Twitter, who’d received a nasty and obscene anonymous email attacking her, her work, and even her parents. She wrote, “Emails, tweets, comments like this, they take a toll on my psyche and significantly impact my ability and motivation to do my job. I don’t think it’s ‘tough’ or admirable to pretend that someone calling me a ‘disgusting and miserable bitch’ doesn’t make me upset for a couple days.”
It hit me hard. The reason I’ve been teetering on an emotional edge for the last week is likewise a cruel, baseless, anonymous takedown on the Internet, one that impugns my character and my motivation for doing the work I do for diversity in tech. It’s bullshit, but it still hurts. It makes me wonder what I’m doing and why I even bother. Maybe I should just quit. Stop talking about diversity, just shut up about it. Go back to coding. I like building products better than being a broken record about diversity anyways.
But then they win. And the horrible anonymous bigots and bullies can’t win.
The mystery of “when women stopped coding”
NPR did a Planet Money podcast in 2014 posing the mystery of “When Women Stopped Coding”. The writeup online includes a striking graph of the percentages of women in different fields of study, plotted out over the last few decades. Female representation in medical school, law school, physical sciences, and computer science squiggles upwards steadily from the 70s through the 80s, and for everything besides CS, onwards to today; but the percentage of women in CS peaks at 37% in 1984 and slumps downwards to the right.
NPR’s investigation turned up this correlation: “The share of women in computer science started falling at roughly the same moment when personal computers started showing up in U.S. homes in significant numbers.”
Curiously, they didn’t study another very relevant data series, the raw enrollment numbers. But without those, from sheer percentages alone, it’s impossible to make the case that “women stopped coding”. Another mathematically plausible explanation for the graph above, though not necessarily a likely one, would be that women in fact kept coding, but increasingly more men flooded the field, bringing the percentage of women down.
So I went trawling through data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
The first thing that stood out to me when I drew out the stacked bar graphs was that the raw numbers of women in computer science have risen and fallen, and risen and fallen again, carried by the tides of overall enrollment and excitement about the tech industry; it’s not a clearly monotonic decrease. On further inspection, I found another interesting feature in the graphs: a correlation between the bursts in total enrollment numbers and the steeper drops in percentage, shortly after.
A series of Google searches led me to two ACM papers, a 1999 piece titled “Conserving the Seed Corn: Reflections on the Academic Hiring Crisis” and 2002 piece titled “Encouraging Women in Computer Science“, both authored by Stanford CS professor Eric Roberts. He wrote matter-of-factly to explain the attrition of women from the field:
[The] decline in the number of computer science degrees was largely the result of explicit steps taken by academic institutions to reduce computer science enrollments when it became impossible to hire sufficient faculty to meet the demand. These steps included, for example, imposing more stringent requirements for admission to the major, adding new required courses in mathematics, and transforming introductory courses into filters designed to limit entry into the field. Such strategies have a disproportionately negative effect on enrollment by women and minorities.
Although it is nothing inherent to computer science and no longer necessary for the practicalities of university instruction, that culture of exclusivity, laced in alpha nerd competitiveness, geek mythology, and implicit sexism, has persisted. To draw women back into the field, we have to fix that culture and popular perception of what it means to be a CS major, to be a coder, to be a software engineer.
Tory Burch Foundation Q&A
This Q&A originally appeared on the Tory Burch Foundation blog.
MY PASSION FOR ALL THINGS TECH BEGAN WHEN…
I realized that being a software engineer was about ushering products and services into existence and how powerful software could be used for making people’s lives better. Although I had studied electrical engineering and computer science in school and done internships throughout the Valley, that realization hit late. It was only when I took my first job out of school and started working full-time as a software engineer at Quora, then just a tiny startup, all of us crammed into a room that could barely fit eight desks, all of us heads-down in building Quora from the ground up, that I finally understood our role in a process of creation, that we were living a creation story.
THE “WHERE ARE THE NUMBERS?” INITIATIVE IS…
A call to action to the tech industry to acknowledge its problematic lack of diversity. The irony was that in an insistently, obsessively data-driven industry, there was no data at all on diversity. For a long time, no one was willing to admit to the numbers and by consequence to the severity of the issue. We had no way of knowing, either, how the situation was trending, if anything we were doing in service of diversity was working.
The initiative, if it could be called such, was at first just a Medium post that I penned in a moment of frustrated rumination. When I shared it and people started tweeting their company data to me, I realized the data needed somewhere to live and set up a GitHub repository to collect it all. The project gained momentum from there, with almost 250 companies contributing their data, but even more significantly, big tech companies like Google and Facebook took note and in selfsame spirit released their own holistic diversity data reports.
MOST SURPRISING THING I HAVE LEARNED SINCE STARTING THE INITIATIVE…
There are a lot of people that are sympathetic to the cause of diversity in tech but don’t know how to help. (Understandable, as there isn’t anyone that has a sure playbook for progress.) Given the right resources and prompts, these allies can be mobilized to great effect. For example, I originally expected only a meager response to the call to action that I posted, but as soon as people knew that they could help by contributing data, they were eager to do so.
DIVERSITY IN THE TECH INDUSTRY IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE…
We need all perspectives and viewpoints represented as we build the future of the world that we live in. From a very utilitarian business perspective, it also means that we’re more effectively utilizing the talent that exists in the economy and that we’re assembling smarter, more innovative teams.
KEY STEPS THAT NEED TO BE TAKEN TO TACKLE TECH’S DIVERSITY PROBLEM…
- Acknowledge the problem.
- Understand the problem (this is the hard part).
- Commit to solving the problem.
- Experiment with different solutions; learn; iterate.
Most crucially, though, we need to effect a mindset shift in how we think about diversity, so that we treat it as we would any other pressing business problem, with the same sort of rigor and creativity and commitment to results.
MY BEST ADVICE FOR TECH ENTREPRENEURS…
Aim to make the most leveraged impact that you can on the world.
ENTREPRENEURS CAN LEVERAGE PINTEREST BY…
Finding inspiration and motivation. Assembling mood boards and project boards. Understanding trends in the market and with their customers. Building their brand and following. Acquiring traffic both organically and with Promoted Pins.
3 TIPS FOR CONNECTING WITH INFLUENCERS IN YOUR SPACE…
- Use Twitter (to tune into the conversation).
- Use Twitter (to publish your own thoughts).
- Use Twitter (to open up conversations with influencers).
THE BIGGEST MISTAKES I SEE TECH COMPANIES MAKING…
Not investing in and doing right by their employees, in a way that engenders loyalty and incentives for employees to stay and grow in their careers at those companies. Tech companies have extremely high rates of attrition and churn, which is not only expensive but also a big drag on productivity and their ability to execute.
Trying to re-invent everything from first principles, even things like HR and management, which often means ignoring well-established best practices and unnecessarily re-learning lessons already hard-learned. To be sure, tech companies are in the business of innovation, but sometimes it’s worth examining which things they should be “innovating” on.
ENTREPRENEURS LEARNING BASIC CODE SHOULD…
Try to understand the big picture of software engineering first. Code is powerful because it’s a set of instructions written for computers, which are extremely good at executing those instructions repeatedly and quickly. Computers are everywhere now—from data centers that handle massive amounts of data and data processing, to the laptops on everyone’s desks and the phones in everyone’s pockets. For websites and apps, backend software engineers are writing the code that runs on those servers in the data centers; frontend (aka client) software engineers are writing the code that runs in browsers and on phones.
When you try your hand at writing some code yourself, it’s easiest and most gratifying to work on projects that have a frontend component. There are plenty of great online resources to teach computer science; look for the ones paired with fun tutorials or assignments where you’ll end up building websites or apps that you can play with.
BOOKS THAT EVERY ENTREPRENEUR SHOULD READ…
This is not at all a comprehensive list, but here are a few good reads:
Founders at Work
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
The Score Takes Care of Itself
Creative Confidence
The Innovator’s Dilemma
A TYPICAL DAY AT PINTEREST…
A morning email from the Workplace team detailing the day’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus, and of course then the materialization of aforementioned food; scattered 1:1s and meetings in conference rooms arranged alphabetically by name; blocks of time allocated for work, whether it’s writing code or email or design docs or interviews; work and unrelated chatter on assorted Slack channels and mailing lists.
MY DAILY MUST-READ TECH WEBSITES…
I don’t have any daily must-read sites, but I check Twitter religiously and usually catch my tech industry updates from TechCrunch, Re/code, WIRED, FastCompany, and whatever is trending on Medium.
3 TECHNOLOGY TRENDS THAT WILL SHAPE THE NEXT 5 YEARS…
- The ubiquity of mobile and constant connectivity. This one is a bit clichéd to point out as an emergent trend, but it’s unshakeable and many companies are still figuring out how to build effectively for a mobile-first, mobile-dominant world.
- More efficient marketplaces that are better for consumers but questionable for (and potentially exploitative) of the workers providing services. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the future of work here, although the next 5 years will certainly bring some answers.
- Software applied to unsexy industries. There will always be fun consumer apps, but increasingly entrepreneurs are using technology to overhaul very unglamorous, old-school, paper-based businesses.
AND WHICH ONE I AM MOST EXCITED ABOUT…
As a consumer and someone who is addicted to my phone, I love how much is and will be possible with mobile and constant connectivity.
MY PROUDEST ACCOMPLISHMENT…
Helping to elevate the conversation about diversity in tech to not just industry-wide but national awareness, galvanizing tech companies to action. It’s a big deal not just for the people who are participating or might someday participate in the tech industry, but also for everyone who uses the products that the tech sector outputs.