Once upon a time, I was a non-tech parent living just within the boundaries of the ‘Tech Empire’ of Silicon Valley. Before I was introduced to the world of computer science and coding, I was raising my child with the recipe that has been used for generations. This well-known formula is to supply our children with a fabulous primary and secondary education, adding a blitz of extracurricular activities both inside and outside of school. As parents, our hope is that between school and their sports, music, arts, and languages, our
I first came across Ruben on Twitter via a series of fantastic articles on medium on breaking into startups. I highly recommend you all check out [if you haven’t already]. You’ve got an incredible backstory, which includes being a cellist. How has learning and playing an instrument influenced you? I used to tell my cello students, the ability to learn an instrument well is a by-product of the life skills you are learning Essentially you are setting a goal to push yourself every week; you learn how to perform. For
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
written by: Daphne Stanford Paradigm Shift I: Tech & Sustainability In a recent article for The Conversation, Samuel Alexander argues that many of the technological conveniences we take for granted in the first world are potentially damaging, on a massive scale—that globalizing “Western-style affluence to the world’s expanding population would be catastrophic.” That is if each person on the planet had access to a personal computer and a smartphone, etc.—basically, the amount of energy consumed by the average person in the Western world—the planet would be doomed and headed for
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”,
CEO & Founder of 23VIVI What made you decide to work in tech? There wasn’t any particular moment in my life that I decided that I was going to work in tech, I just started creating, and it’s where I ended up; but who knows in 20 years from now I could be in the health care “game” lol. What was an obstacle you faced and how did you overcome that obstacle? I struggled with covering my ideas initially. Then I realized that the more ideas I kept to myself, the
I started programming 10 years ago this fall, and in many ways it’s shaped who I am today. But my future could have been totally different: I almost quit before I even started. My introduction to programming was a large “Intro to engineering” class of 200 undergrads at the University of Michigan. For the longest time, I thought I was the only one in my class who didn’t fully get it. I was so close to concluding that coding just wasn’t right for me. I’m so glad my 19-year-old self
Chief Technology Officer at Jopwell How did you get into technology? My interest in making things started when I was young. My mom’s an art teacher, so my brother and I were always working on different projects around the house. I played with an astounding amount of LEGOs and got super into origami at some point during middle school. It wasn’t until college that I learned about programming as a craft, where you can create stuff that is in itself an intellectually stimulating discipline and could also be a
