All posts by

Ruth Mesfun

What made you decide to work in tech? Problem-solving. Specifically, problem-solving with little costs for exploration. I was really attracted to solving problems with code. I loved that code could be changed to explore new ideas and improve on existing ones with the only real costs being my time and energy. What was an obstacle you faced and how did you overcome that obstacle?   Transitioning to management, though I saw and see that as a challenge more than an obstacle. At the time I was a peer of the teammates

What made you decide to work in tech?  My two older brothers introduced me to engineering. They’re both engineers and I grew up watching, and eventually joining, them take apart household appliances. When I got to high school, I had a series of amazing teachers who helped a group of us start a FIRST Robotics Competition team and who introduced me to programming. I decided to go into the tech industry because I love putting things together and this was a place where it was possible to create something tangible

Congratulations on getting into YC and being the first non-profit. Yeah. We’re about one of 15 non-profits, so I think USA Today called us out as the first diversity non-profit. It’s still a very early program for non-profits in there, they’re still adjusting to it. Why did you start  /dev/color? And what has it been like thus far? I started it just seeing my friends and people that I had been connected to, as I discovered tips and secrets that were novel to me, I would share them with people

    Senior Frontend Engineer at Eventbrite   Why don’t you go ahead and tell me about yourself? I got excited about computers at an early age. Probably early elementary school. My mom had a 286 computer that only ran DOS (pre-Windows). When she’d come home from the store, I would take the receipts and type them up in the word processor. I loved it! I learned basic DOS commands; enough to games like Math Blaster, Word Muncher, and Typing Tutor. I owe so much of my trajectory to those early moments. I went

Michael [POCIT co-founder] introduced me to you and your fantastic site, tell us a bit about Her Agenda? ‘Her Agenda’ is a digital media platform that works to bridge the gap between ambition and achievement for millennial women. Its focused on women empowerment by showing examples and providing solutions. We know that the number of female CEO’s is disproportionally small. And so, we’re working to change that by highlighting women that are already leading in their industries, and also providing access to the resources to help you to become a leader

Tell me your story of how you got into tech. Yeah, sure. When I graduated from undergrad, I got a double degree in English and Psychology. My first job out was working on NPR on the show called ‘Tell Me More’ with Michel Martin. From there, I came to New York City to work at Discover Magazine. In that time, I was pretty set on being a journalist but I happened to read the book ‘Steve Jobs,’ which came out a little while ago, or it came out around then.

What made you choose to work in tech? I wanted to be in tech because I want to revive the Black family, by making dating fun again with Bae.  Tech is the fastest way to get a product in consumers’ hands and helped Bae become the fastest growing app for people of color to meet, chat and date. What was an obstacle you faced and how did you overcome that obstacle? An obstacle I faced was changing my mindset not to rely on traditional methods of attaining knowledge.  Simply put, there

Amanda is the co-founder and marketing director of tiphub Africa . She has been honored as one of Business Insider’s 30 Most Important Women In Tech Under 30, as one of BET’s Blacks on the Brink of Greatness, one of 2016 Walker’s Legacy Power 50 and as one of 5 future leaders in technology by Black Enterprise Magazine. Talk about your company and why you decided to create it! Alchemy is a drink discovery community for sharing, saving, and recommending adult beverages. Curated by your taste and location, we help

Founder & CEO of Blendoor continued from the article on Essence.com Would those be great ideas for pitching for anything then? The secret sauce to the pitch competition is telling a compelling story and doing so in a way that it resonates with your audience. For me, it was showing my personal story about how I grew up. I started in very humble beginnings, and I learned to code early, and I did AP computer science in high school, Stanford engineering undergrad, Microsoft, MIT. I interviewed for Google for an

Copywriter at Digital Ocean Cofounder at #WOCinTechChat I saw that you worked right now at Digital Ocean. What do you do there and what was your position before that? Sure. I am a copywriter at Digital Ocean. so what that means is I’m responsible for a lot of the marketing copy, website copy, emails, blog posts, and increasingly now micro-copy within the platform. Whenever users go onto their dashboards or spin up a few servers, a lot of that small copy that says, “Choose your droplet, choose this, choose that”,

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