Jennifer Arguello
Women in Technology, Edu Tech, STEM, y Latinos
How I started programming
01 month ago
Hearing how people got into tech is fascinating to me, especially women. (Check out http://ilearnedtoprogram.com) Not that men’s stories are not interesting. It’s that women’s stories tend to have a lot of variability to them. From the age to the role model to the reasons. Here’s my story.
I started programming at the ripe old age of 6. In today’s world that sounds somewhat young, although not very unbelievable considering 18 month year olds know how to play with iPhones and download apps. However, my first encounter with computers was in the early 80′s which was probably not very common for that time.
My parents had their hands full with me. I was a very curious child. I had a knack for taking things apart because I either wanted to understand how they worked or I just didn’t like how they were put together. This meant there was a slew of disassembled toys in my house when I was very young. I remember that Radio Shack was one of my favorite toy stores growing up. Now one might say, Radio Shack, a toy store? Huh? Isn’t it an electronics store? Yes! I loved how it had all the cool robots and gadgets, and they sold battery chargers, which was essential since it seemed like everything I liked playing with needed batteries. I do not remember what the occasion was but one day my mother got me this little bitty keyboard and a companion book which said something with “Basic” on it.
This is what came in the box.
The keyboard was tiny. Not like my parent’s manual typewriter. My little fingers fit perfectly on it. I started reading the manual, a habit I have never lost over time, and connected the keyboard to a TV. Next I went into the companion book and liked the animated pictures of a computer character. Picture Sponge Bob Square Pants, but a computer not a sponge. I followed the directions and typed in what looked like sentences which all started with a number. Within a few minutes and a few lines, I was able to get the screen to print something back at me. I can only imagine the A-HA moment I must have had. “Hmm, type a few lines and the computer talks back to me!” I was hooked as I followed my computer buddy in the book and kept doing more and more interactive programs. Soon enough the computer was asking me what my name was and then asking me how I was and addressing me by name. I’d made a new friend! I think my most impressive program was when I got the computer to make different sounds. I think I begged my parents to buy me a special cable to make that happen.
Ok, so let’s dive into the learning environment a bit more. Remember, I’m 6. I do not know how to type well. I read probably 2 grades higher than normal. I was bilingual so I could read and write in two languages. I had a very short attention span. Especially with the pace of my curious mind I got, still get, bored very easily. I did not have anyone helping me because my father was a microbiologist and more of a hippie not a techie. My mother still has no clue what I studied in school or do for a living. She just knows it has to do with computers. The only encouragement I had was from my guy cousins in Costa Rica who would send me note paper lined with numbered lines. I did not know what the programs did so I didn’t pay much attention to what they would send me.
Interesting, why did I pay attention to my book so much then? To answer let’s look at the technology I was working with. You can look at the technical specs of the Tandy TRS-80 MC 10 here, but from my point of view this was a “mess up once and start over again” toy. Basic is an interpretive language meaning, as you write a line it gets processed. There is no compiling as in write it first then process and find mistakes or run. Hence if I was writing and realized I messed up a few lines back there was no editor to go fix it, I had to start over. Moreover, this system only had 4kB of on-board memory and no persistent memory. Every time I turned it off or hit the reset button all my work would be wiped out only to start over again from scratch. Believe me that red reset button got worn from how much it got pressed.
Given these horrible circumstances why would a child get so enamored with this toy? Back to the book. Remember it was “Computer Bob, Rectangle Keyboard” who was leading me through the exercises. He would show me what to type and then show the outcome. It was almost like a comic strip. Exercises were broken down in a way that they built on top of each other. I could skip around the book and find comics… I mean exercises that interested me. I messed up a lot and pressed that red reset button. Impatiently I would wait for the command prompt to come back up and then start furiously typing again. So why did my cousin’s list of numbered lines not interest me? You can figure it out. 
I wish I could say that was the start of a brilliant career where I started my own company by 9 and was on TIME magazine by 10. Ten years later in high school in my computer science class, we were learning to program in a language called Basic. It all seemed so familiar to me and that’s when I realized, “Wait! That book said ‘Basic’ on it and had the same funny lines that started with a number. Was I programming at 6?”
The original book
OH: “Geeze right after someone meets Jen she gets invited to their parties.”
01 month ago
I somewhat chuckled when I heard this. I thought it was a bit of an exaggeration. Then I remembered a book I read last year called “Click”by Ori Brafman, which was all about codifying why people click when they meet. I really wanted to understand why with some people it felt like I had known them my whole life and not so much with others.
A lot of the book seemed like common sense to me. I especially remember the chapter about Naturals, a person who can make a new close friend from just meeting a person once. They are called high self-monitors. When I read this chapter I could relate with it a bit, but secretly wished I had that level of clicking power. I seem to be getting there. I might as well tell my version of how I click with people so often.
First, my network is like my family. Maybe it is somewhat cultural. In Latin America, when you do business with someone you usually know all about them. You know how many kids they have, when they have a birthday, etc. That kind of information plus when you greet people you kiss them (on the cheek) creates more intimacy, more of a connection. It’s more than just a cut and dry business relationship it’s a personal relationship. Or maybe it is that I did not grow up with a lot of family around me so when I click with someone I see them as family. Deep down I think I just want to always be surrounded by family since it’s pure bliss when I do get to see my family. Why not have that feeling all the time.
The other trait of mine that may help in my ability to click with people is that I am a bit reserved and humble. I rather listen than talk. I need to warm up to someone before I start to come out of my shell. This gives me the chance to learn a lot about a person right off the bat. People generally like to talk about themselves so this is usually not a problem. However if I do run into someone more introverted than me, then I flip positions and I try to draw them out and make them feel comfortable. Then you can’t get them to shut up.
The third factor I think helps in clicking with people is that I actively listen. This means I do not only hear the words coming out of the person’s mouth, but I pay attention to the tone and pace of their speech. I watch their body language and take special note of what makes them react positively and negatively. The next step is synthesizing these cues and conversing with this person in a way that is complimentary to them. It’s like I’m mirroring them. How do I do it? I cannot explain it. It is as if a conversation is like two musical instruments playing. I am always trying to harmonize and make beautiful music. Or in other words make a connection. I guess once you make a nice song with someone they don’t forget you that easily.
Those are a few things which make it easier for me to click with people. In the end, it’s all about liking people. Well in my case it’s a fascination with people. Everyone has a distinct specialness about them. I just love uncovering it and seeing someone be their best.
Prelude to a startup weekend
06 months ago
I’m on a plane right now on my way home from Central America. Fortunately the long plane rides afford me a lot of time to be pensive and Startup Weekend is on the dome right now.
I’ve been pondering what I wanted to get out of the Women 2.0 Startup Weekend this weekend. It’s my one-year anniversary of starting to go to Startup Weekends. This will be my 3rd. The first one I actually took an iOS programming class the Friday night of the weekend so I could be a developer that weekend for a team. I ended up being the project manager, as I usually tend to be. The last one was an EDU Startup weekend, where I pitched and was the CEO of my own team Pariba. That kicked off a whirlwind 6 weeks (see my previous post). The dust has settled a bit, but I’m still riding that high.
This time I have no clue. I am well versed in product development, especially customer developer. I’ve been advising entrepreneurs this year. Helping them break down their ideas into actual buildable MVPs (or minimal viable products), or high level advising on what type of tech people they might want to look at recruiting, or I just connect people. Make introductions. Go to the introductory meetings. I may only be serving as a connector, but I still like to be at the discussion. Brainstorming is always fun for me. I really like the creative process of not having boundaries. Not having assumptions. Or rather having them, but being open to validating them with actual data. Either way you learn something new. This was a huge jump from the first Startup Weekend were we were so domain specific we did not do a lot of customer development to the last one where we were calling moms and interviewing them.
Ok so let’s do some idea brainstorming…
Pariba, which is a customized itinerary of local educational activities, was born from seeing many of my single mom friends overwhelmed with their day to day that on weekends they just didn’t have the energy to plan fun and educational activities for their kids. Instead sitting at home watching TV, going to the mall or a park was the default. There’s also the fact that many parents do not know what extra things they can do to enhance their child’s education. I once read in Freakonomics, that parents who have a lot of books in the house will probably have higher educated children than those parents who do not have a lot of books in the house. It’s not to say the kids read these books, it’s to say that a parent’s educational level highly correlates with the education level of their offspring. But that’s bleak! So if you do not have a good education your kid is screwed. I say Nay! My vision is that no matter what language or education level a parent has, she can enable her child to have a better education.
Ok, so I played through with that vision a bit as I iterated on Pariba. One missing piece that somewhat held me back was that I do not have children. As much as I see things that I think I would never do as a parent. Until I walk that walk, I really don’t know. It doesn’t mean I can’t do a whole lot of customer research to understand the problem space, but I think there’s a better way to use my experience and knowledge.
What does that mean? It means zooming out and asking myself what is a different way to express my passion for a more educated youth. A means to an end that is fun and educational. Mentorship has always ranked very high. I get very excited about talking to students about their interests, especially if it’s in computing. If so then you cannot get me to shut up about my experiences and what I think they might want to check out to explore their interests. Most of the time I want to be there playing with them, tinkering and making stuff. There are several programs out there that do this. What do I think should be different or added? The mentorship part. Events and activities, even longer programs are great for one time exposure, but a student needs consistent exposure and I argue one that is tailored to her. Hence the mentoring piece is missing. Again there are mentoring programs out there, like mentor-net. Do they work? I don’t know. I have yet to use them. Mentors have come and gone for me, yet they were huge in forming my achievement path.
Now comes the scaling question. What should my bandwidth be as a mentor to be effective? Do I need to have one on ones with all proteges? Is it really about mentorship or about creating a safe community for perspective mentors and proteges to come together? How do I spread my advice and experience further than a few proteges? What jumps out at me as a take away from my 9 days in Costa Rica is, given a degradation in the usual after-work day hours, how I kept my productivity moving forward. I say after-work day hours because my days are not just your usual 8 -10 hours at the office. I have a slew of other commitments that can easily occupy another 20 hours in my week. However, on this vacation once I shut down my computer from work if I could not easily do it on my iPad it was not happening. This led to twitter being my main way to get any extracurricular work done. 140 character replies or direct messages were easy to shoot off and receive. Which means that perhaps mentoring and tweeting can be combined to be a viable form of mentorship or at least one of the tools that can be used as a low touch mentor program or part of a larger mentor program. I have a hunch that other types of busy people, say parents would have this time slicing issue after work as well. Also, since I had no phone coverage, but I tend to do a lot of tweeting from my phone I would think this is a good mobile app not just for iPads. Yay, I already have some assumptions to test out.
Hmmmm Mentoreet or maybe WeetMentor?
… to be continued after Startup Weekend.
When hacking went from code to product definitions
08 months ago
Often other technical women ask me what was my path from being a coder to a product manager. I’ve recounted the same steps over and over again. I coded for several years. Got a taste of working with clients. Liked the more social aspects of working with non-technical people and then using my technical skills to advise them. Was very good at organizing projects and getting things done. Did not want to keep building customized solutions and wanted to build actual products. Hacking shifted from code to requirements and project plans. Now it’s more about customer development and product definitions. Creativity shifted from the most elegant technical solution to finding a way to make life better for a consumer. From scalable architectures to viable business models, this has been the journey so far and I’m loving where I am.
However, it wasn’t until recently that I started looking at the path from another view and asking different questions. This did not come to mind until I was asked for advice on the career path of another technical woman to see if PM would be a good fit for her. The catalyst for this questioning was that coding was not her strength and maybe another role would be more fitting. Mind you, this was a 3rd person’s evaluation. Without much more thought, I went through my usual story of my journey to P* M. P* because I’ve been a Project manager, Program Manager, and now Product Manager. I guess to be more accurate I should say Pro* M. Anyways, I thought I did a good thing in helping with the guidance of another person’s career.
- … err pump the brakes …
Wait a minute did I just encounter a stereotype of “person can’t code hence must be better suited for a PM role”? Hey now! I took issue with this postulate. I know, I know this could have not been the intention of the person asking me for advice, but what if this stereotype was true? Had people equated this formula to me? I started analyzing. This statement was not true for me. I was a good coder and enjoyed it immensely in my first job. Getting into technical discussions was awesome. I’d geek out, learn a lot, and go back to coding. I didn’t want to see daylight. I was working on the internals of a database engine and could not be happier.
The job where I started to ponder a career shift was the next one, Shady.com. No, that was not the real name, but that’s what it felt like. Everything from sexual harassment to embezzling money was going on there. Needless to say I somewhat hated life there. It was the stereotypical engineering environment of older white men. I was the youngest and one of the two female engineers. My only saving grace was that the professional services manager needed help and asked me to do some work for a client. I was off the technical ladder after that company.
AHA! – Now I see another strong force which contributed to my shift in career path. My environment as a programmer had become hostile and I did not feel comfortable anymore and I sought a more welcoming environment which at that time was professional services. All along, I thought my path to product management was a pull, where I was being pulled by a career that better fitted me. Now I, sadly, realize it was also a push. The technical environment began to push me out.
Now when I read an article like “Women moving up without moving out (of technology)”, I can relate to it more. I can’t believe I was blind to it in my own life for so long. I know now that when I talk to someone who is thinking of shifting from a developer to a Pro* M that I dive deeper into her environment. Let’s face it, coding is tons of fun! Building cool things is exhilarating, but if your environment sucks then maybe it’s time to change environments not careers.
Product of Me – Applying Lean Startup to myself
09 months ago
Two pivots in 6 weeks
This year it is no secret that the entrepreneurial bug has come back to bite me and bite harder this time around. I’m still crazy for education and technology. A decade ago I was right out of school and ready to take on the world. The world of hacking that is since I was a developer back then. Now, I am still ready to take on the world, but a lot wiser and not as financially free as before. This is a story of how in just 6 weeks I had an entrepreneurial rebirth and pivoted twice.
In the start up world “pivoting” is changing the product direction to keep the business afloat and hopefully moving forward. It does not mean changing your vision, just your implementation of it. In this case I am the product, hence Product of Me (POM). My vision is to “Go big or go home”, meaning to have a huge impact by bringing valuable innovation to the masses.
As I got more into the startup scene, I became a quick study of the Lean Startup model. Where building a start up is about validated learning through a build, measure, learn loop (see the figure). You go through this loop to get to product/market fit. If done properly you iterate through the loop quicker each time. What I had not realized is that I pretty much ended up applying the principles to myself, but at a more macro level. I thought my idea was the product, but really I was the product and the market was the best environment for me to express my vision right now.
- Lean Startup: Build Measure Learn
Lean Startup Validation of POM
Here I will go through the steps I went through to find that product/market fit over a very fast-paced 6 weeks.
Hypothesis:
I have the entrepreneurial skills to create an idea, attract a team, and develop an ecosystem for success.
This is where I started out. If this hypothesis was not true then I might as well marry rich (JK!!!) or keep working for someone.
Build:
Develop a pitch around an idea.
I was peddling around a pitch as a way to prove out my assertion. No code or deep research was needed. I just needed enough effort to be able to talk articulately about my idea and see if it resonated with anyone.
Measure:
- Can I build a team? Pariba team at Startup Weekend Education
With just a 1 minute pitch gathered a 6 person team and delivered a great presentation after 54 hours of work. - Can I build a base of potential advisers? – Latino2 conference reinforced support from LATISM, SHPE, and the White House.
Being on a “Latinas in Technology” panel afforded me the opportunity to tell my Startup weekend story and gather a lot of great feedback and new contacts. - Do I really have entrepreneurial potential? – Accepted into Founder Institute, a very competitive incubator program.
- Can I get attention of others at scale? – Social network grew 100+%, Klout score shot up to 55.
Learn:
- I learned that I have the charisma to get people excited even if my idea sucks. Being in leadership positions for so long, I have picked up the skills to deliver a memorable presentation to a crowd. And for one on one interactions, it turns out that I know a thing or two about “Building instant connections.” See Ecorner talk by Ori Brafman. So am I just a good sales person? I need to test that next round.
- Gaining momentum is not that hard, but keeping it is harder than you could ever imagine
- Am I still fitting “Go Big or Go Home”? Thanks to the Founder Institute, I could really get a feel for the amount of work it takes to be an entrepreneur. Full-time job + start-up + solo founder == too much work for one and I can go bigger by joining forces with someone else.
Pivot 1
Put original idea on hold and join another project. Be the technical and product person.
Time to pivot: 4 weeks
Build:
- Started coding again. Doing technical analysis of potential architecture
- Did customer development through several interviews on the new project
- Refine the pitch
Measure:
- Am I more productive by being on a team? Not really. Average sleep time ~4 hours a night
- Am I just a good sales person? No, because I was using canned interviews to get user feedback not pitches that could bias a user.
- Go big or go home fit? Inconclusive, since I was still in the middle of market research for new project
Learn:
- Idea good enough to keep moving forward and building out an MVP and creating a pilot program
- I really like doing the customer development by talking with potential customers
- I really enjoy helping folks brainstorm, refine ideas, put together product development plans
- Even with a new idea I can still deliver a good pitch, as warranted by some serial entrepreneur mentors.
- As it is, I cannot function at a high enough level to “Go Big” I need to make more time or decrease scope.
Mozilla Open Web Apps
Pivot 2
100% dedication to start-up like work project that has high risk, but very high impact potential.
Time to pivot: 11 days
Conclusion
What a journey so far. In just 6 weeks, I was able to iterate a few times and find my Product of Me market fit. All the while working the Lean Startup model and getting faster at each iteration. However, that was just the end of one pivoting cycle. I am still living the startup life. I’m back to listing out assumptions, building out the methods to test and validate them, and then iterating as fast as we can go. What are Open Web Apps? That narrative is what I am helping define. I’m in full customer development mode and loving it.
Stay tuned for more adventures…
P.S.
For those wondering where the love for education went, now that I’m more in a technology play. Please don’t fret. I’m still on the national board of directors for the largest organization of technical Hispanics in the US and on the alumni advisory board for the computer science department of my alma mater among other involvement in educational outreach events. Education is still very much a part of my life.
Herding Kittens
010 months ago
Being a part of the Founder Institute has essentially turned me into a 24/7 thinker, where I’m to the point that I have to have my phone always near me to take a note or record anything that comes to mind on my idea. Basically, I want to capture all I can on my assignment this week, which is to use my Vision and Values to refine my start up idea. My last post went into mind numbing detail about my plan to do this. Can you tell I’m a PM? I know. Everything I do in the day has to be in a calendar. Even bathroom breaks! Oooops, TMI. Well by Friday night after doing more reading on “good start up ideas”, I was starting to doubt the magnitude of my idea. My vision of making a difference in education is huge, but I needed something more worthy to manifest that vision, especially if I’m embarking on this hard journey of an entrepreneur. I knew at this point I had 3 choices: 1) Ride out my current idea and see what came out in market fit research 2) Brainstorm on other ideas and go down the same path 3) Actually I did not think there was a 3rd option at this point.
Commence more ideation. I used the process of looking for problems that I encounter. That I wish someone would fix already. In my list I came out with some ideas, which I already knew folks are working on. Some of which were part of the Startup Weekend Education. I thought about people at Startup Weekend who I would have loved to work with if my pitch did not pan out. Strangely enough the two I could think of either referred me to FI or are in FI with me…. Wait they are in FI with me?!?! AHA!
Saturday rolls around and the Founder Institute had a BBQ for the participants to get to know each other. The FI founder, Adeo, was there along with some mentors and FI graduates. This was to be a great forum to chat with folks about my idea and vet it out some more. All the while, I knew there was one founder in particular I wanted to speak with about his idea.
Herding Kittens
To backup a bit, Brian and I met at Startup Weekend and immediately hit it off. Brian’s idea was a tool to help college students stay on track and graduate. It is not just one huge mistake that derails a person from completing college. It is the accumulation of many small mistakes that puts a student at a point of no possible recovery and they drop out. There are several reasons why a student can get off track. As Brian put it succinctly, keeping a student on track is like “Herding Kittens”. I was sold on the idea the moment I heard it at Startup Weekend, but after speaking with Brian at the BBQ I knew we had to collaborate. We decided to be co-founders! Adeo was right. You can find a co-founder in the Founder Institute. I’m keeping my vision, values, and passions in tact but working on a larger idea. Plus, my role fits like a glove. I get to be the product gal and the engineer. Watch out Stack Overflow , engijen is back!
Pa’riba y no pa’bajo, I hope!
010 months ago
My company, Pariba, is developing a website that provides customized itineraries of local educational activities to help busy parents plan fun and educational family outings in a personalized and timely manner. This is the idea. An idea that went from a 1 minute pitch to a 5 minute presentation with some customer validation, a business model, and an execution road map in just 54 hours. I’m done right?
Uh, no way!
I have so many assumptions, which are not validated. The market size still needs to be defined better. As a product manager who knows how to get a product out the door, this one still has way too much risk to call it a winner. Now as founder at the Founder Institute, I have a better knowledge of what needs to be done. There is a lot of work ahead and here’s how I plan to attack it.
- Utilize everything I learn in the FI sessions
- Leverage the mentors in the program and outside the program.
- Consult my user research friends on customer development prep
- Vary my idea into 3 forms and do field interviews to get feedback. Do this with real landing pages
- Work with my marketing and finance contacts to really define the market opportunity
- Put landing pages on the web and publicize through social media to gather wider feedback and a possible user base.
- Perfect the pitch in all forms: 1 minute, 5 minute, 10 words or less.
- Lean on my FI working group to give me feedback
In terms of a timeline, the idea needs to be ready for prime time by July 25th or I will have to leave the program. Let me break it down a bit more.
7/2 – All idea pre-work done.
7/12 – Field work done
7/14 – Check point with working group and various mentors
7/19 – Refine and another check point
7/22 – Final run. All tests are validated for a viable idea.
7/25 – Mentor Review of Idea
This is my plan of action to make sure my ideas keeping moving pa’riba, which is short for para arriba which means upward in Spanish.
Why you crying?
010 months ago
“Why you crying?” is a comedy routine done by George Lopez. He goes into his childhood and how he did not have much so they had to make the most of what they had. His grandmother raised him and she had a mean way of doing it and would make him cry as a little boy. She’d say, “Why you crying?” In reality, she was teaching him to be resilient, because she wanted him to be prepared for a tough life. Of course, being a child he just thought she was mean and liked to make him cry. In the end, Lopez’s perseverance paid off and he’s a super star now.
What does this have to do with this new program I have had the privilege of being accepted into? Let me explain.
A month ago I gave a little 1-minute pitch on a company idea at a Startup Weekend for Education. A month later I found myself in the Founder Institute Silicon Valley. The top program of it’s kind in the world! A seasoned entrepreneur, Adeo Ressi, started it. The program takes entrepreneurs and molds them into real founders with a viable business. All in just 4 months. How is that possible you might ask? With pure blood, sweat, and tears, but with a structure and a whole lot of resources to help the founders.
From day one, Adeo has set expectations very well. He has a very high drop out rate because he has no problem letting people go who are not ready. If you listen, learn, and execute you will graduate and be successful. FI is one of the toughest programs I’ve been in since college. The last time I jammed like on an assignment based on due date and time, I was on a bicycle heading to a professor’s office. The experience so far has been great. I’ve learned a lot in only 2 sessions. I now have an awareness that even though my idea seems to resonate with many, if I cannot make a dime it’s just a hobby. My team happens to be really awesome as well! We lost a few members along the way, but we gained a great one and we’re really strong. It’s amazing how much has happened in just a few days. The 1-minute pitch hot seat is pretty crazy, but I crave it because you want that feedback. How else are you going to get better? You need it. The assignments…. although they may be a lot of work, are extremely valuable. You end up getting way further down the path of getting towards that great idea than you would on your own. Being a former engineer, I like the way the program is data driven and measured at each step. I’m not much of an individual player so having a team is turning out to be one of the best parts so far.
All in all, my first few days of FI have been intense. When I find myself feeling dejected, like the world is against me, I think “Why you crying? This sucks now, but will make you better later.” I’m so excited that if I can survive this, I know my chances of having my own company are way better than if I wouldn’t have been able to go to FI. So I’m thankful for the program, the mentors, and for my team because this is all helping me make my dreams come true.
The path so far
010 months ago
I started this year out with a pretty hefty New Year’s Resolution. It was to be as ambitious as possible in my career, community service, and love. As of yet with about half the year gone, I got a new job, got elected to the national board of directors for the largest organization of Hispanic engineers. If that’s not enough, now I’ve embarked on the road to being a real entrepreneur. Life is grand!
Let me go back in time to describe how I’ve come to this point. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area to immigrant parents from Costa Rica. My father came to the US in the mid-60′s during the hippie times. Needless to say he’s got quite an eclectic personality and arsenal of stories. My mother followed 10 years later to get married. She was as Costa Rican as Gallo Pinto and pretty much remains the same, but now she speaks Spanglish. Education was always the highest priority in the house. Since my mother was a stay at home mom, she started us off pretty young on learning activities. I did not see my father that much because he worked two jobs, but when we did see him he loved to take us out in nature and teach us about how the animals live. I was allergic to everything so I could not be out in nature for too long. As life would have it, my mother got me a little Tandy keyboard from Radio Shack, which was one of my favorite toy stores. This was one of the first toys I did not demolish. Instead I would just type in some words and the screen would have conversations with me. I did not realize until 10 years later in computer science class, that I wasn’t just playing I was programming!
My curiosity kept going when I finally went to school. Fortunately, I was able to go to a private Catholic school, where the nuns stayed on us. Bad behavior and poor academic performance landed you in detention. It was a very competitive school. The better you did the more popular you were. The last year, the teachers told me that the top girl in the class was going to get a horse when she got valedictorian. My parents were putting my graduation present on layaway! Needless to say that imbalance in reward lit a fire in me and I tied her in the end. Then I had enough of private school and went to a public high school where I was a mathlete. I had 3 goals to achieve as a Senior: To be Homecoming Queen, Varsity Softball Team Captain, and Senior Class president. I was 3 for 3! College was at the furthest UC from my home. I majored in Computer Science at UC San Diego and graduated on Father’s Day. What a present!
After university, I headed right back to the Silicon Valley. It was the tail end of the Dot Com boom and I wanted to get a piece of it so I joined a start up and quickly learned how fragile start ups are. Every 2 years, like clockwork I was looking for a new job because my company went under. Then finally the 4th start up, Tellme, was bought by Microsoft. A place I swore I would never work for since I was a Linux Chick. However, I ended up there almost 5 years because my projects were really interesting and I had a lot of love for my fellow Tellmes. 5 years is a long time and I moved on to Mozilla. Through those 10 years I went from being a software engineer, to professional services consultant, to product manager. I’ve gone from my employee number being number 6 to having a 6 digit employee number. From products that never saw the light of day to products like the Kinect, it’s been quite a trip so far and I know I have great things ahead of me.
Speaking of which, it is a time for new adventures, the entrepreneurial adventure. The signs of an entrepreneur started young where my first job was training my father’s birds to be pets so I could get some commission when they got sold. In college, I had the opportunity to go the Harvard Business School for a week as part of an exclusive program. There I got to learn the business side of things. I came back that summer determined to be a CEO one day and I started a mock-company with my internship program friends. I had to put into practice what I had just learned. In the end, InWeb, built a website for our internship program affiliate, INROADS. It debuted at a national banquet for the organization and all of a sudden all 50+ affiliates wanted us to build them websites. This was the late 90′s and jobs were abundant. The temptation was high, but I was only a Junior in college and I needed to finish. Some of my other friends did not resist and left school. Now after more than a decade of working for some body the desire to be a CEO is still alive and ready to go, especially when I see so many opportunities to help people. This is now my mission. I will finally reach that goal. Hopefully, over and over again. We’ll see!
