Amidst a funeral and two coast to coast red-eyes, I attended Y Combinator‘s startup school last weekend. Stanford’s
Kresge Auditorium was packed to the brim. Every seat was filled and
the back was full of people sitting on the floor with laptops. I was
originally supposed to attend the previous evening’s event as well
but we had to fly to New York on the red eye on Thursday and flew
back Friday evening and didn’t make it into San Francisco until 9pm,
so when I showed up at Kresge, I didn’t know a soul.
Having worked as a programmer on Wall Street, I imagined the male/
female ratio would be skewed. I attended Carnegie Mellon. I worked at
an Investment Bank and I am a programmer. Being a minority as a woman
isn’t new to me. I had, however, assumed the percentage of women in
the room would be something around 10-12%. I was way off.
It was relatively hard to count because the room was so packed and
because some male hackers have long hair, making them
indistinguishable from women when you can only see them from the
back. My best count was eight. Excluding the speakers and organizers,
I counted eight women in a room of over 400 men. That’s around
2%. I’ve never been a huge women’s rights activist or even a feminist
to be honest, but this depressed me. For the last few weeks, I’ve
been asking many of my entrepreneurial friends if they knew of
technical companies started by women (where the women were the
technical individuals as well as the founder and when I mean
technical, I mean more than HTML or CSS). Some were able to name
maybe one or two and many couldn’t even think of a single one.
There are many cases where established companies are led by women.
When I was at Goldman Sachs, our CIO was a woman. I know some
fantastic women coders. There are also cases of companies started by
women. Women who are in advertising, marketing, design, fashion and
tons of other non-technical fields. But there seem to be very few
cases of technical women entrepreneurs.
Women and men are different. They live differently. They work
differently. They manage differently. They lead companies
differently. This is not to imply that all men are the same but just
to point out that there are fundamental differences in the genders
that makes their styles of starting and running companies varied. One
of the greatest things about America is that we have a lot of choices
here. Anyone can start their own company. Anyone can do anything they
truly want. This means that if I want to be an employee, I have a
large number of companies to choose from. I think having more
technical female entrepreneurs would give me, and others like me,
more options. I feel that not having those options is depressing and
unfortunate.
I don’t know what stops technical women from wanting to start their
own thing. Maybe it’s the kids (I have a lot to say on this and I’ll
save it for my next post) or the fear of instability. Or maybe it’s
the lack of balls. When Chris Sacca from Google gave his speech, he said
he’d take two questions but one had to be from a woman. The woman he
picked asked for suggestions on helping women make more effective/
forceful pitches. Hearing the question made me even more upset. There
is no inherent reason for a woman to be more unsure of herself than a
man. When I believe an idea, I am so forceful and passionate that
it’s scary. That’s how I talked my way into my graduate degree and
that’s how I was able to accomplish most of the biggest achievements
in my life. I just felt like if this is the best question this girl
can come up with, it says a lot about why women don’t do startups.
Here’s a great reason why I love my Mac as much as I do:
I am doing a bunch of data conversion from one MySQL database into another. I execute a long query, copy the results and paste it into an excel window. I go back to execute another query and accidentally paste when I don’t mean to. Since I had the long results of the previous query in the clipboard, my Terminal gets confused and I am greeted with the spinning ball that means nothing other than bad news. I sit there and patiently wait for the ball to stop because force quitting Terminal (which is running several other crucial processes in different windows) is not an option.
After a few seconds, as my panic level increases, I remember that I installed another terminal application a month ago. I start up iTerm, execute a “ps -auxwww | grep mysql” and find the hung window. I “kill -9” the process and my spinning ball goes bye-bye. The Mac dumps the clipboard contents into the shell window and complains about commands that make no sense but my machine is back, my terminals are still running their processes happily and I lost nothing. Not even a tiny bit of work.
How can you not love a machine that lets you save your own ass?
Right now, Jake’s driving down a highway and I’m reading my mail, finding the nearest grocery store and updating the site using my laptop and Ricochet. San Diego is one of the two cities where Ricochet is available in the country and the flexibility it allows is awesome. It doesn’t seem to work in our apartment all that well but it works pretty much all over San Diego and it’s really fast. It’s quite affordable and means I can work at the beach, by the poolside or any other attractive location. When we drove across the country, I was telling Jake that such a service should be available across the country. It would have let us lookup hotels or campsites along our route and made life considerably easier.
We’re off to Boston tomorrow to arrage our moving. We’re still waiting for info from one mover and otherwise we’re going to use Budget trucks. We figure we might as well get there and get started. I’m also planning to update my resume and order our utilities here in the meantime. In a week or two, we might actually look like we live here.
It appears to be working. I think this means I can finally go to bed.
I am going to be away from my dearly loved computer a lot in the next few months. So I am trying to see if my little perl script allows me to post from my blackberry.
Let’s see.
Some people are turned on by power.
Others, by money.
No matter what people tell you, there’s something non-physical about their partner that turns them on.
I don’t mean to undermine the importance or relevance of physical attraction. Often, it’s the first thing that people notice and at times it can completely nullify your chances of seeing someone more than once.
Physical attraction is extremely important, but for me, it’s not necessarily the outcome of a physical trait. There are certain personality traits about a person that can make me physically attracted to him.
Love is one of those things. With every boyfriend I’ve ever had, I’ve gotten more and more attracted to him as I fell deeper and deeper in love.
Power doesn’t turn me on; neither does money, not even education necessarily. I’ve met some extremely well educated people who make me want to puke as soon as they utter a word.
Kindness turns me on and strong family values. I think I’m not the only woman who likes men who are kind to dogs, babies and the elderly. I am turned on by patience. By someone who’s truly interested in what I think. Someone who makes me laugh and doesn’t have a bitter and cynical look on life.
Yesterday I found something new.
One of my teammates and I went to a meeting with a research person who wrote an application that we’re supposed to use for our client-side applications. This one hour meeting grew to four and a half hours as the guy gave us a full background on why they had built this package and how excited he was about it and some of the problems they were aware of, etc. While I could tell that my teammate was about to pass out from boredom, I was so excited that my neck pain disappeared for some time.
I discovered that geeks turn me on.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. There are several kinds of geeks. One kind thinks he’s better than the rest of the world and looks down at everyone who asks questions. This breed is often bitter and condescending.
The other kind, the one that excites me way more than it should, is the kind who is so thrilled by the work that he wants to share it with the whole world. He comes into your office and says, “Look what I figured out, isn’t it neat?” He’s not showing off, he’s like a little kid who discovered a new toy. He’s giddy.
Maybe that’s what really turns me on. The giddiness. The intoxicating level of fascination with something that is obviously driven by large doses of passion. And that turns me on.
It’s contagious.
It’s not the intelligence or the technology. It’s not the knowledge.
It’s the child-like ability of exercising pure joy.
And this guy had it. I sat there, getting drunk by his love for it. At that moment he was much hotter than Tom Cruise. (Okay, so Tom doesn’t do it for everyone. Put your own hottie here, since that’s not my point anyhow.)
My list of favorite people just got incremented by one.
What turns you on?
Previously? Durable.
I am the queen of multitasking.
It is completely impossible for me to do only one thing at a time. Even during high school, I couldn’t do my homework unless the TV was on. I can do eleven things simultaneously and all of them successfully.
A few weeks ago, I bought a digital recorder that used IBM’s voice recognition software to take the audio file and create text from it. Since I can’t type as fast as I’d like to, I thought that would be an invaluable gadget for me.
Putting aside the severe issues the digital recorder had, I decided to just use the software with a microphone. Well the way this software works is that you have to turn off all the other noise at home. Even our birdie got in the way of the software doing its job.
To top it off, the output was only 85percent accurate. For the entire weekend, I battled with thoughts of whether I should keep the gadget or return it. I liked the concept so much that I didn’t want to return it. I wanted it to work.
After a few days, it hit me: I wasn’t going to keep it. The software completely rules out any possibilities of multitasking. I have to sit there and read out, including punctuation, every single word and speak slowly and distinctly. Not my forte. I speak too fast.
So the software went back and I had no regrets.
It seems the only time I am only doing a single task is when I read. Even then, I do a lot of thinking but I think the reading should count as a single task. For some reason, I never feel restless when I read.
There are many weekends when I sit in the same chair and read from 9am to 5pm, non-stop. So the good news is that I don’t have ADD.
Still, though, I wonder what it is about reading that doesn’t make me seek eleven other things to be going on simultaneously.
Previously? Work.
I won a TiVo, too. Ordinarily, I’d think this is an amazing thing, but it seems the competition is really a giveaway disguised as a competition. I would link my entry but I don’t even think I saved a copy, it was that lame. Oh well, I own one now. If you wanna read the essays of others, here’s a bunch.
Having spent most of the day fixing my damn PetriNet, I’m glad that I finally got the “syntax check successful” message. I don’t even wanna think of all the problems it will give me once I try loading it into the database. I guess the steam ran out of my Thursday. I might be bored or tired. I think I’m ready for the weekend. What about you?
I know there are a lot of flash haters out there, but I must tell you, it’s a thousand times more annoying to go to a page and have a javascript error pop up on your screen. Since I have Visual C++, my explorer always asks me if I wanna debug or not and if I accidentally hit ‘Yes,’ there goes IE. Pain in my ass!
Jake’s birthday is coming up in less than a week and I still haven’t found any presents. I’m getting desperate. As of now, the most feasible option is TiVo, but I don’t have enough info on it. It sounds like a neat idea, I’m just not sure whether it actually is or not.
I just finished David Bennahum’s awesome book called Extra Life: Coming of Age in the Cyberspace. The book is a great read for people interested in computers. It tells the story of how David, as the first generation of kids who grew up with computers, bought his first computer and started living his life through the keystrokes of a machine.
There are many excellent point made in the book that made me think. As a person who grew up in Istanbul, computers didn’t enter into my life until I was in fifth grade. My Commodore 64, floppy drive and dot matrix printer from those days is still sitting in storage in my parent’s house. The interesting thing is, I never had the community that David had at school. In my high school there were no computer classes until after I graduated. Maybe this was because I went to an all-girls school or maybe the whole country was behind, I’m not exactly sure. Either way, I never saw a Macintosh, let alone a UNIX machine, till I stepped into the clusters of Carnegie Mellon. Filled with kids who’d had a computer since they could walk and ones who had already programmed in several languages before they made it to college, it was no wonder that I felt intimidated in my computer science classes. I was thinking, as I read this book, that it’s amazing how much I’ve learned in the almost eight years I’ve been in this country. Then again, in some ways I’ll probably never catch up to those kids who, like David, grew up hacking with 1,200 baud modems.
While reading the part about Zork and how he and his roommate stayed up until late hours, playing the game for several weeks straight, I was reminded of my college years when sleep wasn’t really an issue. I remember when my friends and I spent endless hours playing the LucasArts game Full Throttle. College is a time when you do fun things just cause they’re fun. You listen to the same song over and over again or you yell out an inside joke (“I’ll never find that secret passage”) and laugh till you pee. You stay up all night, making the most of your T-3 line. I’m not sure what happens once you graduate; maybe because you have to get up and go to work in the morning, or because you no longer live in a building where the average age is 19, you just don’t pull all-nighters anymore. You don’t spend several weeks playing Doom across the network, boding with strangers as you try to sneak up on them and blow their brains out. I really think college is magical and unfortunately, as it is with all good things, you never appreciate it till it’s over.
I laughed as I read Harvard’s lack of foresight on computers and what they represented for our future. Then again, Harvard has never been famous for their innovative technology. The interviews with Microsoft also made me chuckle out loud. As I read that he was excited about Microsoft, I felt terrified cause I’m a firm hater of the company, the further I read, the more I enjoyed what happened. Microsoft has never been and will never be about innovation.
Finally, the issues of sharing code and not keeping secrets intrigued me. It’s interesting that, in the beginning, people shared code and promoted the idea of building on top of their programs to make it more custom to your wants or to perfect it further. As companies like Microsoft and others emerged, the programs became close boxes that didn’t dare share the details or ‘secrets’ of how they functioned. With the Open Source Movement we’re returning back to the time when programmers can see the magic behind a program and tweak it and learn from it. I think that’s the true power of computing. The idea of sharing and learning through the wisdom of others is what will bring programming to another level.
Here‘s more of David’s work. If you couldn’t figure it out from my long passages above, I highly recommend this book.
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projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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