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just-a-random-person24 · 5 months ago

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hey chat I've been working on redoing my Stark's Mind notes so here's episodes 1-6!

Episode 1

• CINEMATIC INTRO

• internal monolog, not starting immediately on the train

• surprised that Black Mesa still has the tram voice?

• To him, being as late as he is is as bad as high-school. Will hide in bathrooms to not deal with being caught

• knows Gordon's on parol w/ Black Mesa

• still uses ‘we’ when referring to Black Mesa, says he's getting into the ‘Freeman Mentality’

• “ba donk” Shut the fuck up (loving)

• tram shaking *bad*

• has a habit of talking to people who are too far to hear him

• used to get first at the decathlon! says he'll stay back and do it for Gordon to ‘make him look like an athletic superstar’

• wasn't involved in any departments that used lasers/plasma. Also really bad at using past tense when talking abt his time working there

• doesn't want any relatives working at Black Mesa

• “All the gates I've come across so far are playing the waiting game. And so far? I'm winning.”

• Star Wars reference. idk anything abt Star Wars.

• green goop pile! Is very worried about people's safety!

• says he can't do anything about it, but is still worried about it

• his Gordon impression is *very* bad

• forgot Barney worked at Black Mesa but not Felix

• immediately drops the ‘Freeman’ act by asking the guard if his lateness affected anyone else

• Gordon has a ponytail! Stark doesn't though. Plays it off as getting a bet to cut the ponytail

• doesn't know who Gina is :(

Episode 2

• tries to help a guard with his computer to redeem himself for being late

• Stark's socially awkward!

• obligatory bass-head programmers joke

• Stark doesn't know which way the test labs are

• claims Black Mesa now looks ‘structurally sound’

• “Hopefully it's the right way… So that makes this the left way then? I'm sorry, I'll leave now.”

• thinks the guard wanted to kill him over his bad joke

• hasn't eaten breakfast…

• even though Gordon has Stark covering him, Vincent either doesn't know/forgot Gordon's locker combo

• Black Mesa doesn't have mirrors

• the 4.5… the way Stark talks about it sounds like he's more familiar with the Mark 4. (ignore that the HEV suit DID say ‘Mark 4’)

• says he's sure Black Mesa doesn't let people tour around the facilities. Even though he mentioned people touring in the first ep

• only other series to give us a year! Stark says it's 2009 while Arlen says it's 2016

• “I should just stop rambling like a mad man.” has he been talking to himself this whole time??

• Left due to unethical choices that were being made!

• ‘there's no point putting a warning sign on lasers’ You see, there's this thing called ‘OSHA’

• Breen apparently wanted to recreate the Big Bang

• offers a guard to grab a drink with him and Barney after the test

• “I forgot how large this room was.” Was in the test chamber before?

• he likes white noise!

• woe! green apon ye!

Episode 3

• immediately blames himself when seeing the destruction

• “I-I should be dead.. I at least have the chance to help everyone else.”

• ‘this isn't real’ count 1

• still on Black Mesa's database

• thanks the door when it opens :)

• tries to tell a scientist performing cpr that they need to leave

• apologizes to corpses

• already ready to have a breakdown

• Kleiner exclaiming that Stark is alive is met with Stark going ‘unfortunately’

• says Eli is braver than him for wanting to find his family

• says that Black Mesa is Hell and immediately exclaims ‘demons’ when seeing a burning zombie

• more apologizing to corpses

• ‘I did this’ count 12. I'm not gonna actually keep track of any counts here, he just says some of this stuff a *lot*

Episode 4

• says he needs to keep going even though people are dead cause of him

• very fine with curling up and dying in a corner after contacting the surface

• once again with calling the aliens demons. Follows it up with ‘Hell on earth’

• happy to see a guard with a gun

•’cranium’ instead of ‘head’. Nerd.

• realizes the zombies used to be human

• little ditty about guns. Would feel safer if he had the gun instead

• thinks everything going on is more similar to a horror movie than sci-fi

• hopes a lab would have weapons. Realizes it wouldn't and wonders what is wrong with him for thinking it'd have weapons

• has no clue how he's being calm at the moment

• apologizes to the guard for yelling at him

• tries to stay composed in hard situations

• says he's falling into a relapse right now. Mental relapse? \*shrug*

• doesn't feel safe even with the suit on

• “Another person dead because I'm a moron!”

• uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ when blaming someone. “We really fucked up with this didn't we?”

• grabs the crowbar in an attempt to be brave and fight off the zombies, regrets it immediately

• “My crowbar is the perfect companion”

• knows that the resonance cascade is a rift between worlds

Episode 5

• feels sort of reassured his “leaks” were spot on. And finds it ironic he caused the res-cas

• only time he seems genuinely happy is when the eye scanner is still working. :(

• an atheist

• Tells a screaming zombie to shut up

• checks the pulse of an obviously dead scientist

• full-names himself

• sings a little ditty about smashing crates

• obligatory Mind series slur. Only one in the series though

• “Oh yeah. Hand me crates with nothing in them, but direct me to the room laced with blood. No thank you Black Mesa.”

• no upper body strength. twink

• still looking for a gun :(

• “Hey could you stop? I'd appreciate it.” To a zombie trying to attack him

• upon finding out he's made it to Security Clearance is excited to finally get a gun. for protection

• vent sharks!

• calls the Barnacles something out of a BDSM fantasy. Nicknames them Jellyfish Pricks

• yells at the Barnacles to eat the barrels cause he paid of them

• space pup!! gets his eardrums blown out immediately after

• still doesn't fully believe everything going on is real because everything is so surreal

• about to tell a scientist that his name isn't Gordon but doesn't

• thanks the scientist for opening the door

• has never used a gun before

• “I have the responsibility to make sure that everybody gets out of here safely. You know why? Because I did this…”

Episode 6

• Telling the scientist what happened to cause the res-cas

• pretty sure he's trapped in Black Mesa but wants to think optimistically

• Mind characters and their use of ‘friggin’...

• Last names himself! I don't remember if he ever refers to himself by just his first name in these early episodes

• Assumes the military would go to the alien homeworld to conquer it or bomb the facility

• “That's a bit chilly.” In a room filled with. Ice? Snow??

• tries to reason with the Vortigaunt. Gets shocked

• gets close to the zombie to shoot it. Blood on him :(

• Water in his mouth :(

• wonders if Black Mesa has alligators

• absolutely just can't see without his glasses

• “I could drown myself. I feel like doing that, I don't feel like *living* anymore.” Already thinking about killing himself. Also doesn't because he has things to deal with

• Likes water as an element. Also Xenon, which is used in flash lamps and arc lamps

• Thinks him laughing while killing aliens is a sign of bad things to come for him. Makes an ‘Maybe I was always insane’ joke before shutting that down quickly

• really doesn't want to be in vents. Vent sharks.

• apologizes to a corpse for landing on it

• “If reality had a face, I'd kick it in the fucking dick.”

#stark's mind #mindverse #Zane's Notes #new tag for my note taking bullshit :)

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un-enfant-immature · 4 years ago

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Omio takes $100M to shuttle through the coronavirus crisis

Multimodal travel platform Omio (formerly GoEuro) has raised $100M in late stage funding to help see its business through the coronavirus crisis. It also says it’s eyeing potential M&A opportunities within the hard-hit sector.

New and existing investors in the Berlin -based startup participated in the late stage convertible note, although omio isn’t disclosing any new names. Among the list of returning investors are: Temasek, Kinnevik, Goldman Sachs, NEA and Kleiner Perkins. Omio’s business has now pulled in around $400M in total since being founded back in 2013 — with the prior raise being a $150M round back in 2018.

In a supporting statement on the latest raise, Georgi Ganev, CEO of Kinnevik, said: “We are very impressed how fast and effective Omio adapted to such an unprecedented crisis for the global travel industry. The management team has delivered quickly and we can see the robustness of the business model which is well diversified across markets and transport modes. We are looking forward to supporting Omio on its way to become the go-to destination for travellers across the world.”

While COVID-19 has thrown up major headwinds to global tourism and travel — with foreign trips discouraged by specific government quarantine requirements, and the overarching requirement for people to maintain social distancing meaning certain types of holidays or activities are less attractive or even feasible, Omio is nonetheless sounding upbeat — reporting a partial recovery in bookings this summer in Europe.

In Germany and France it says bookings are above 50% of the pre-COVID-19 level at this point, despite only “marginal” marketing spend over the crisis period.

Its business is likely better positioned than some in the travel space to adapt to changes in how people are moving around and holidaying, given it caters to multiple modes of transport. The travel aggregator platform spans flights, rail, buses and even ferry routes, allowing users to quickly compare different modes of transport for their planned journey.

More recently Omio has added car sharing and car rentals to its platform, including via a partnership with rentalcars.com. So as travellers in Europe have adapted to living with COVID-19 — perhaps opting to take more local trips and/or avoiding mass transit when they go on holiday — it’s in a strong position to cater to changing demand through its partnerships with ground transportation networks and providers.

“That diversification in terms of not depending on a single mode of transport has really helped the business come back much stronger, because we’re not depending on — for example — air or bus,” CEO and founder Naren Shaam tells TechCrunch. “The diversification has helped us.”

“People will travel a lot more to smaller regions, explore the countryside a little more,” he predicts, suggesting the current dilution of travel focus it’s seeing — away from usual tourist hotspot destinations in favor of a broader, more rural mix of places — augurs a wider shift to more a diversified, more sustainable type of travel being here to stay.

“It’s not longer just airport to airport travel,” he notes. “People are traveling to where they want to go — and it’s a lot more distributed across geographies, where people want to explore. A platform like ours can accelerate this behaviour because we serve, not just flights, but trains, buses, even ferries etc, you can actually reach any destination with us.”

Direct booking via Omio’s platform is possible where it has partner agreements in place (so not universally across all routes, though it may still be able to offer route planning info).

Its multimodal booking mix extends to 37 countries in Europe and North America — where it launched at the start of this year. Last year it acquired Rome2Rio, bulking out its global flight and transport planning inventory. The grand vision is “all transport, end to end, in a single product”, as Shaam puts it — although executing on that means continuing to build out partnerships and integrations across its market footprint.

Asked whether the new funding will give Omio enough headroom to see it through the current coronavirus crisis, Shaam tells TechCrunch: “The unknown unknown is how long the crisis lasts. But as we can see if the crisis lasts a couple of years we will make it through that.”

He says the raise will help the business come out of the crisis “stronger” — by enabling Omio to spend on adapting its product to meet changing consumer demand, such as the shift to ground transportation. “All of those things we can use these capital to shape the future of how the travel industry actually interacts with consumers,” he suggests.

Another shift in the industry that’s been triggered by the coronavirus relates to consumer expectations around information. In short, people expect a lot more travel intel up front.

“We have hypotheses on what comes back [post-crisis]. I think travel will be a lot more information centric, especially coming out of COVID-19. Customers will seek clarity in the near term around basic information around what regions can I travel to, do I need to quarantine, do I need to wear a mask inside the train etc,” he says.

“But that’ll drive a type of consumer behavior where they are seeking more information and companies will need to provide this information to satisfy the consumer needs of the future. Because consumers are getting used to having relevant information at the right point in time. So it’s not a data dump of all information… it’s when I get to the train station, what do I need to do?

“Each of those is almost hyperlocal in terms of information and that’s going to drive a change in consumer behaviour.”

Omio’s initial response to this need for more information up front was the launch of a hub — called the Open Travel Index — where users can look up information on restrictions related to specific destinations to help them plan their journey.

However he admits it’s a struggle to keep up with requirements that can switch over night (in one recent example, the UK added France to a list of countries from which returning travellers must self quarantine for two weeks — leading to a mad dash by scores of holidaymakers trying to beat a 4am deadline to get back on UK soil).

“This is a product we launched about a month and a half ago that tells you, if you’re based in the UK, where you can go in Europe,” he says. “We need to update it faster because information’s changing very, very quickly — so it’s on us now to figure out how to keep up with the constant changes of information.”

Discussing other COVID-19 changes, Shaam points to the shift to apps that’s being accelerated by the public health crisis — a trend that’s being replicated in multiple industries of course, not just travel.

“More than half of the ground transport industry was booked at a kiosk at a station [before COVID-19]. So this will drive a clear change with people uncomfortable touching a kiosk button,” he adds, arguing that that shift will help create better consumer products in the sector.

“If you imagine the kind of consumer products that the app/web world has created you can imagine that should come to the consumer experiences in travel,” he suggests. “So these are the things, I think, that will come in terms of consumer behavior and it’s up to us to make sure that we lead that change as a company.”

“We’re investing quite heavily in some of the other shifts that we’re seeing — in terms of days to departure, flexibility of fares, more insurance type products so you can cancel,” he adds. “We’re also trying to help customers in terms of whether they can go.

“We’re investing heavily in routing so you can connect modes of transport, not just flights, so you can travel longer distances with just trains. And we’re also in talks with all our suppliers to say hey, how can we help you come back — because not all suppliers are state monopolies. There’s a lot of small, medium suppliers on our product and we want to bring them back as well so we’re investing there as well.”

On M&A, Shaam says growth via acquisition is “definitely on the radar for us”. Though he also says it’s not top of the priority list right now.

“We’ve actively got our ears out. More so now, going forward, than looking back — because the last four months, imagine what we went through as a travel company, I just wanted to stablize that situation and bring us to a stable position,” he says.

“We are still in COVID-19. The situation’s not yet over, so our primary goal coming out of this is very much investing in the shifts in consumer behavior in our core product… Any M&A acquisitions we’ll do is more opportunistic, based on [factors like] pricing and what’s happening in the industry.

“But more of our capital and my time and everything will go a lot more to build the future of transport. Because that’s going to change so much more for so many millions of consumers that use our product today.”

There is still plenty of work that can be done on Omio’s core proposition — aka, linking up natural travel search for consumers by knitting together a diverse mix and range of service providers in a way that shrinks the strain of travel planning, and building out support for even more multifaceted trips people might wish to take in future.

“No one brings the natural search for consumers. Consumers just want to go London to Portsmouth. They don’t say ‘London Portsmouth train’. They do that today because that’s what the industry forces them to do — so by enabling this core product to work where you can search any modes of transport, anywhere in Europe, one click to buy, everything is a simple, mobile ticket, and you use the whole product on the app — that’s the big driver for the industry,” Shaam adds.

“On top of that you’ve got shifts towards ground transport, shifts towards app, shifts towards sustainability, which is a big topic — even pre-COVID-19 — that we can actually help drive even more change coming out of this. These are the bigger opportunities for us.”

Uncertainty clearly remains a constant for the travel sector now that COVID-19 has become a terrible ‘new normal’. So even with an unexpected summer travel bump in Europe it remains to be seen what will happen in the coming months as the region moves from summer to winter.

“In general the overall business outlook we’re taking is purely something of more caution,” says Shaam. “We just don’t know. Anything at all with respect to COVID-19, no one knows, basically. I’ve seen a number of reports in the industry but no one really knows. So in general our outlook is one of caution. And that’s why we were surprised in our uptick already through the summer. We didn’t even expect that kind of growth with near zero marketing spend levels.”

“We’ll adapt,” he adds. “The business is high variable costs so we can scale up and down fairly easily, so it’s asset light and these things help us adapt. And let’s see what happens in the winter.”

Over in the US — where Omio happened to launch slightly ahead of the COVID-19 crisis — he says it’s been a very different story, with no bookings bump. “No surprise, given the situation there,” he says, emphasizing the importance of government interventions to help control the spread of the virus.

“Governments play a very important role here. Europe has done a superior job compared to a lot of other regions in the world… But entire economies [in the region] depend on tourism,” he says. “Hopefully entire [European] countries shouldn’t go into shutdowns again because the systems are strong enough to identify local spike in cases and they ring fence it very quickly and can act on it. It’s the same as us as a company. If there’s a second wave we know how to react because we’ve gone through this horrible phrase one… So using those learnings and applying them quickly I think will help stabilize the industry as a whole.”

#TechCrunch

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deztinywarriors · 7 years ago

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ES Spectre 2.0 Chapter 5-1

#Playchoices #endless summer #ES #fanfic #Jake x MC

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endenogatai · 4 years ago

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Omio takes $100M to shuttle through the coronavirus crisis

In Germany and France it says bookings are above 50% of the pre-COVID-19 level at this point, despite only “marginal” marketing spend over the crisis period.

Direct booking via Omio’s platform is possible where it has partner agreements in place (so not universally across all routes, though it may still be able to offer route planning info).

Another shift in the industry that’s been triggered by the coronavirus relates to consumer expectations around information. In short, people expect a lot more travel intel up front.

“Each of those is almost hyperlocal in terms of information and that’s going to drive a change in consumer behaviour.”

On M&A, Shaam says growth via acquisition is “definitely on the radar for us”. Though he also says it’s not top of the priority list right now.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://ift.tt/3iZxcEV via IFTTT

#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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I'VE BEEN PONDERING THING

If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the insiders. All the most successful people I know. And yet he seems pretty commanding, doesn't he? Venture funding works like gears. Inefficient software isn't gross. Organic growth seems to yield better technology and richer founders than the big bang method. That is certainly a good goal, but in general this is not an irrational fear: it really is hard to do on demand, or b use them only to fill up a larger round led by someone else. Many investors will ask how much you're planning to raise a large round and risk losing the investors you already have if you can't raise the full amount. This is a safe technique so long as there is no try. You notice a door that's ajar, and you just have to fill it in.

The exciting thing about the Internet is that it's such a risky environment. And since the danger of responsibilities is not just a negotiating trick; it's how you both should be operating. And yet I think the worst danger of committees is that they haven't tried to generate them. When I say there may only be a few languages, I'm not including domain-specific little languages. Which means that even if we're generous to ourselves and assume that YC can on average triple a startup's expected value, and it's true for software too. What happened? The eminent generally respond to the shortage of time by turning into managers.

You just have to realize in time that you're near death. We're taking on some consulting projects, but we're going to keep working on the company to do it all yourself. Startups almost never get it right the first time someone asks him. In Apple's case the garage story is a bit of an urban legend. Hygienic macros are intended to protect me from variable capture, among other things, because some offset their schedules to prevent this. He meant the Mac and its documentation and even packaging—such is the nature of obsession should be insanely well designed and manufactured. Even if you're designing something for the most part, is that you have to design what the user needs, who is this for and what do they need in order to seem rich. It was a theoretical exercise, an attempt to create a successful company? Angels are better at appreciating novel ideas, because you can represent them as lists: the integer n could be represented as a list of n things, this work is done by the people who want them.

What's gross is a language in which the best work is done by the people who discover them are looked down on by everyone, including themselves. For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? Instead of sitting in your grubby apartment listening to users complain about bugs in your software, but are your software. Sometimes we advise founders of B2B startups to take over-engagement to an extreme, and to be good for writing throwaway programs, which are mostly big ones. Seeing the system in use by real users—people they don't know—gives them lots of new ideas. One recently told me that his copy of CLTL falls open to the section format. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the hardest questions founders face. I don't mean to imply that good design has to be modified to: stay upwind for as long as you can, then when some act the rest have to. Even if all you care about is what happens in the next ten feet, this is a lowly sort of thing should have been online. And if you just ask that question, and the de facto censorship imposed by publishers is a useful if imperfect filter. It's like the sort of pork-barrel project where a town gets money from the state government to renovate a vacant building as a high-tech incubator, as if it were merely lack of the right sort of office space that had till now prevented the town from becoming a startup hub.

How long do they expect it to continue. Partly because the most important thing is not to make them. A rounds still work that way, even if this causes some breakage. Languages are notation. If you rehearse a prewritten speech enough, you can choose when you raise money from them on an uncapped convertible note with an MFN clause. But in retrospect that was the optimal path to dominating a big market. You just have to fill it in. For example, if an investor seems interested, don't just let them sit. This focus on the grooves in the chocolate bar—the places where tasks are divided when they're split between several people. As I was doing it I tried to imagine what a transcript of the other kind of difficulty can be eliminated. When an investment scores spectacularly, as Google did for Kleiner and Sequoia, it generates a lot of people, and since they're the customer you can take your time. Whereas an obscure angel who won't invest much, but will be easy to ignore; a few might even snicker at it.

The electronic parts distributors are trying to squash them to keep their monopoly pricing. Lexical closures provide a way to finesse our way out of the gate that you want to do dangerous and unsavory things. Founders overestimate their chances of raising more money. It's this fact that makes programing languages a good idea, and what to do. If I already have momentum on some project, I can work in plain sight and they don't realize how much deeper bloggers can dig than journalists, how much more interesting a democratic news site can be than a front page controlled by editors, and how much funnier a bunch of declarations. And then they panic. In a hundred years. He tried to sound indignant, but he wouldn't have returned at all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to increase productivity dramatically. The latest hot language, Python, and Ruby. There is one case where the two strategies give conflicting advice is when you have a lot. If 98% of the time but occasionally cut someone up and bury them in your backyard, you're a bad guy.

They know their audience. So some or all of the employees to take less salary is a weak solution that will only work when the problem isn't too bad. During the railroad boom, but the most successful startups it's a necessary part of the compensation is in the same position; he doesn't have majority control of Microsoft; in principle he also has to convince instead of commanding. Even VCs do it. Dating sites are a prime example. Design is not just the mechanics of it, but at every point till you're profitable. To make something good, you have to be on the way out. These ideas didn't just seem small. You're thinking out loud. The reason I didn't take money from investors is harder than that.

They're not impressed by one's job title, for example. It does not, for example. He Won't Tell You about Sex, or something like that. The electronic parts distributors are trying to squash them to keep their monopoly pricing. But even if what you're building really is great, getting users will always be pushing you toward the bottom. It feels that way for everyone. The organic growth method is exemplified by the VC-backed, heavily marketed startup. After 15 cycles of preparing startups for investors and then watching how they do, I can now look at a program and ask, is there any overall theme? Their format is convenient, especially when you're generating code, to have operators that take any number of arguments.

Thanks to Sangam Pant, Shiro Kawai, Emmett Shear, and Eric Raymond for sharing their expertise on this topic.

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dorothydelgadillo · 7 years ago

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Hit Refresh: The NEW Tech World

We’re back with episode two of our podcast Hit Refresh. You can listen on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, Overcast, our site, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Silicon Valley has some serious issues, and here at Skillcrush we don’t think it should be your goal. To get a handle on those problems—and creative solutions—we talk to two major players in tech: Ellen Pao and Natalia Oberti Noguera.

Ellen Pao’s story is riveting—she famously sued VC firm Kleiner Perkins for gender discrimination after a truly remarkable amount of sexism and backlash she faced for speaking up. She’s inspired scores of women to come forward and take on big name companies to change the face of tech.

Next, Natalia Oberti Noguera tells us about the future of tech outside of Silicon Valley, and the incredible work she’s done to make tech a welcoming, supportive industry for all of us.

And please let us know what you think of the podcast! We’d LOVE it if you could write us a review on iTunes. We’ll read every single one!

*****

The NEW Tech World Transcript

Aleia: I’ve been on the hiring side for years. It would be nice to have women, but you cannot find applicants. Lauren: In just the last 48 hours, I’ve spoken to a female tech executive who was grabbed by a male C.E.O. at a large event. . . Aleia: No eyebrows are going to rise if a woman heads up fashion. Lauren: . . .and another female executive who was asked to interview at a venture fund because they “feel like they need to hire a woman.” Aleia: This is where things started getting weird. Lauren: My new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him. Aleia: Women on average are more cooperative. Lauren: Women, on average, have more openness directed toward feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Aleia: Sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others. Lauren: Neuroticism. Higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance. Also, higher agreeableness! Oh my gosh, what an asshole. . . Aleia: Even though this was clearly sexual harassment. . . Lauren: LGBT tech workers were the most likely to experience bullying and hostility. A majority of queer employees said bullying contributed to their decision to leave. Aleia: . . .They wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking to. Lauren: Women of color in particular reported high rates of facing discrimination. Aleia: They both admitted that this was illegal but none of them did anything! Lauren: The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that I was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem.

Instrumental theme music.

Act 1: The Myth of the Empty Pipeline

Adda Birnir: This is Hit Refresh, a podcast for anyone who’s stuck and needs a fresh start. I’m Adda Birnir, a self-taught coder, educator, and CEO & Founder of Skillcrush—an interactive learning community that teaches total beginners the tech skills that they need to get into better, higher paying careers with real mobility.

When we talk about working in tech, we aren’t talking about moving to Silicon Valley, or getting a computer science degree, or magically transforming into a white guy wearing a hoodie and coding all night. Because at Skillcrush, we know that tech is for EVERYONE.

*****

What you just heard was taken directly from writing that’s come out of Silicon Valley—a former Uber employee’s experience with sexual harassment, articles exposing the predatory culture of venture capitalism, and that infamous sexist and racist Google Memo. If you haven’t read it….Google it.

Right about now you’re probably saying to yourself: Working in tech sounds awful! Why would I want to do that? And you know what I’d say to you? You’re absolutely right. Working in a traditional tech job in Silicon Valley is a mixed bag at best.

Yes, there are high salaries, and free meals and dry cleaning, and massages and bike storage and beer on tap and ping pong tables and yoga. But there are also long work hours, lack of diversity, hostile work environments, systemic wage discrimination, and my personal favorite, rampant sexual harassment!

Here at Skillcrush, one of the things we think about A LOT is the lack of diversity in tech. In fact, the lack of women in tech is actually what inspired me to found the company.

When this topic of diversity—or the lack thereof—comes up you’ll often hear experts and tech insiders talk about the “pipeline problem” meaning that there isn’t diversity in tech because women and men of color are just not interested in the field, so they’re not applying.

To which I say: Bullshit.

The reason there is a pipeline problem—if there even is one—is because we’re not idiots and we can tell when we’re not wanted. And frankly, when people ask me whether I think more women should go work for tech companies, my answer is. . . it’s complicated.

Should women learn tech skills and use them to kick ass? Yes, of course! Should women go work at these big tech companies? Well. . .

Why would you want to go work somewhere where you’re the only woman, the only black person, or the only person with a disability? Why would you want to work somewhere with well-documented wage discrimination? Making change from the inside is important work, but at what cost?

The people who venture into these companies are heroes, but there’s good reason to be wary. And the data bears this out. For example, the few women who enter these companies don’t stay: Women leave STEM jobs at twice the rate of their male colleagues.

Given all of this crap, what are we marginalized people who love tech to do? For the whole story, I went to a woman who has seen it all—and lived to tell the tale: Ellen Pao, who famously sued the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins for gender discrimination. I’ll talk to her after the break.

Instrumental theme music.

Scott: Imagine waking up and starting your day in a career that excites and challenges you, with the flexibility and freedom to build work into your schedule—instead of the other way around. That feeling sounds great… and it’s also completely possible. At Skillcrush, the path to a career you love begins right now. In honor of today’s episode—we’re giving away a free ebook that will walk you through why tech’s big payoff is worth it—and how you can work outside this awful system we’re describing. Just head over to skillcrush.com/payoff (all one word) to download your copy. That’s skillcrush.com/payoff.

Act 2: Ellen Pao’s Fight for a Seat at the Table

Ellen Pao: So I hear a little bit of static, if you can hear it that’s fine. . .

Adda: Ellen Pao has one of those resumes that appears to be designed to make the rest of us mortals feel badly about ourselves. Not only did she graduate from Princeton with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, she went on to get a Business and Law degree from Harvard, she worked as a corporate attorney at one of the biggest law firms in New York City and then transitioned into a career in business and management consulting. And oh, did I mention she’s fluent in Mandarin?

This more-than-impressive background is how she ended up as one of only a handful of women working at Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers, arguably one of the most famous and reputable venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Of course, this is also where her story gets weird.

In Ellen’s new book, Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, she chronicles her experience working at Kleiner and suing them for gender discrimination. It’s shocking to read about what she had to endure. When she was first hired, her boss told he’d specifically requested an Asian woman because he liked the idea of a “Tiger-Mom-raised woman.” She frequently had to listen to all kinds of inappropriate discussions at work about topics like strippers and porn. Her investment deals were routinely stolen, sunk, or sabotaged. And she, and other female staff, were systematically passed over for promotions.

After an independent investigation found no evidence of problems at Kleiner, Ellen decided to go ahead and sue the firm for gender discrimination. Five months into the suit, Ellen was fired. And in the end, she lost the case.

But others won’t. And since Ellen’s lawsuit, a number of women have stepped forward and brought cases against major tech companies including Tesla and Facebook, while Google and Oracle are both facing federal allegations of gender pay inequity. Uber just fired 20 employees over the culture of harassment and discrimination.

I spoke to Ellen about her experience and her perspective on the culture of the tech industry.

Ellen: I think for most people, I don’t know about the new generation of the workforce which seems much more aware, but for me—when I started—when things happened to me I would either blame myself like, “Oh, I just need to try harder,” or “I do need to be more loud” or ”I am too loud” or “I need to just fine tune my interactions for each individual instead of using the same one for everybody.“

And then it became, “Well, actually, I think that person is wrong,” but that one person became a problem instead of me and I still thought of it as this meritocratic industry where I would be successful if I just worked hard enough and did a good enough job and then it wasn’t really until I got to Kleiner and saw all the women around me getting different types of feedback that were really inconsistent and not a clear set of actions that needed to happen in order to be promoted. And I realized none of us are going to get promoted. And it all of the sudden dawned on me that this was a much bigger problem than me or one individual partner.

Adda: All of this negative feedback and lack of promotions—it wasn’t personal. It was systemic. In many ways the rules for women and men in the workforce are different. For example, when it comes to negotiation…

Ellen: If you look at women, like the reason that they’re uncomfortable negotiating is because they get penalized for negotiating. People don’t want them to negotiate and there’s research that shows that women are penalized when they negotiate and so of course they don’t negotiate. It’s not that women are milder or meeker, it’s that they’ve been trained not to. And I think that’s important to realize, that it’s not that I’m not doing a good enough job, it’s people don’t want me to do that job. I’m not sitting at the table because people don’t want me at the table.

Adda: In other words, it’s not your fault. The system is literally rigged. But while sexism certainly isn’t unique to the tech industry, tech is experiencing a major crisis. I asked Ellen why discrimination is so rampant in the tech world.

Ellen: Two things, I think it is this pattern of behavior and this traditional establishment that protects it’s own and sees whats going on in other industries and copies it. Even though it says it doesn’t.

But there’s also this small group of people who started venture, they left a semi-conductor firm and they started investing in startups and I think it was eight white men and they invested in a friend and they invested in people they knew and they all look like them and then those people became successful, made a bunch of money started investing their own money and looked at the pattern that worked: investing in friends and people who look like them. And that just became a whole industry. And in tech it was very fast; the success was very fast, the success came very fast. And with Facebook, I think people started looking at white men who dropped out of Stanford or Harvard and studied computer science and that became the model to look for. This really young person who was a man, and who wasn’t of color and people invested only in them or mostly in them and lo and behold that type of person was successful because they were the only people being invested in.

Adda: So Ellen was in this world, trying to change things from the inside.

Adda: You were actually working at Kleiner Perkins while you were suing them. Can you change things from the inside and I guess more importantly in your case what does that feel like? Ellen: Oh, you’re going to take me back to the dark days! Adda: I know! I’m sorry, but just like the fortitude that you must have had to undertake that is unbelievable to me. Ellen: I was so lucky that I was able to talk to women that had done the same thing. They were super supportive, but they let me know what I had ahead of me. One woman that I write about in the book, Renee Amacha, warned me that people will turn on you. And she told me about the strain and the things that happened so I was aware of it. To feel it, to go to work everyday where nobody talks to you and people are embarrassed to be seen with you and they pick up their things and move to another seat if you sit down next to them. It’s hard to describe the feeling. It’s just demotivating. It’s depressing.

Adda: I couldn’t imagine going through that and writing about it but that’s what Ellen did. And it played a huge role in bringing this issue to the forefront, and no doubt, paved the way for untold numbers of women to come forward.

Ellen: I had had so many frustrations throughout the trial of not being able to share my story to be able to give the right context of having so many things I said twisted and so much of this huge negative PR campaigns smearing me. I really felt it was important to tell the story clearly, in my own words, and in a medium where the whole story could come out clearly and without all of the baggage of the attacks from others. So for me this was a passion project. And also for me to help educate other people on what really goes on behind these closed doors, where the decision makers, the billionaires sit and make huge decisions. Adda: I think you’ve sacrificed so much and really put yourself on the line like what has what makes it all worth it for you? Ellen: I’m an extreme introvert so doing these podcasts and doing these interviews is not natural to me. But when I hear someone come up to me and say, “Oh I heard you on that podcast or I read your piece in New York Magazine and this is the part that’s really meaningful to me or allows me to do this other thing that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do or it’s changed my life or perspective in some way.” I mean that makes it all worthwhile for me.

Adda: Today, after a stint as interim CEO of the site Reddit, Ellen is now a partner of Kapor Capital, a venture capital firm also based in Silicon Valley famous for their commitment to supporting diverse founders and socially minded businesses. She is also heading up Project Include, an initiative to help companies create more inclusive practices.

Ellen: I love talking about Project Include. Our mission is to give everyone a fair chance to succeed in tech. So we focus on helping companies come up with real inclusion solutions. So not these tepid diversity solutions, but real inclusion solutions and to us that means making sure that it’s truly inclusive of everyone.

It means having a comprehensive plan that’s not just targeted at hiring but also at promoting people, how do you pay people, how do you give opportunities to people, how do you mentor people. As you plan everything that your company does you put some thought to inclusion as part of it so that everybody can have that same opportunity.

And then the last value that we really promote is metrics. And that can hold people accountable and make sure that they’re actually doing the hard work of making sure that inclusion is part of everything they do and that inclusion includes everyone.

Adda: Where are we? What’s next?

Ellen: I think we’re at the tip of the iceberg like, I think that people now recognize and admit that there is a problem and the next big step is going to be doing the hard work, having the hard conversations, making the hard decisions that get us to a place that we reset tech instead of having these diversity initiatives that are oriented more around PR more than change.

Instrumental music.

Kelli: Thinking about a career in tech but not sure where to start? With The Break Into Tech Career Blueprint, you’ll work with a career counselor to design a custom learning program to prepare you for an amazing and rewarding career—whether that’s launching your own freelance business, working full-time for a busy tech company, or buzzing in from the beach as a digital nomad. Visit skillcrush.com today to chat with a career counselor and see why learning tech with Skillcrush is the answer for your next career move. And remember, we’re giving away a free ebook that will walk you through the major payoff of a tech life outside of Silicon Valley— and you can download your copy at skillcrush.com/payoff (all one word). That’s skillcrush.com/payoff.

Act 3: Natali Oberti Noguera and the Way Forward

Adda: Unfortunately, as it turns out, tech companies aren’t the only places where women and minorities have a tough time. Going your own way also has its challenges. Now, I will say here that this is a topic that I have a lot of feelings about.

To begin, I was very much inspired to start Skillcrush because of everything you just heard about women and tech. And when I was starting Skillcrush, I faced plenty of obstacles in terms of how to fund my venture. Let me tell you, no one was excited to fund an online tech education company whose goal was to teach women to code.

And in the end, I decided not to try to follow the so-called traditional path for tech companies of raising venture capital. Instead, I bootstrapped my company, which meant that for the first two years, I only made about $5,000 a year from Skillcrush, and otherwise lived on money I made freelancing. In 2013, I declared $22,000 as my income.

But listen, I was able to do that because I was young, childless, dating a wonderful guy who helped me make rent, and had about $10,000 in a Roth IRA that I could use. And let’s be real, this is also about privilege: I’m white, I went to Yale, I have a family who could support me if things got really desperate. In other words, I had a safety net that allowed me to take the risk.

Many people aren’t in this situation—they’re not even close. So what’s the solution?

Natalia Oberti Noguera: Hey everyone, my name is Natalia Oberti Noguera.

Adda: Natalia is the founder and CEO of Pipeline Angels, a company whose mission is to change the face of angel investing and invest in women and non-binary femmes who are founding social enterprises. I wanted to talk to her about how, as anything other than a young white dude, it can feel like there’s no way into tech.

Natalia: You know, you often hear about, “Oh, these white guys got funding over like a paper napkin idea” and particularly when it comes to the corporate world we often talk about how—and this is very binary—they talk about that women get promoted in terms of their performance and men get promoted in terms of their potential and I’d say that that’s a huge parallel that we see in startup world in terms of who, with a paper napkin idea, that’s “potential” right? Like, in terms of hey, that person is getting funded and by person I mean guy, right? And by guy I mean white guy. There’s a very well-known white guy investor that was getting interviewed at a tech conference and he was asked, “What do you look for when you invest?” And he very nonchalantly said, “Someone like me.”

Adda: So marginalized groups aren’t getting hired, and they’re not getting funding. Fortunately, for all of us, Natalia is working on some solutions.

Natalia: I often talk about how entrepreneurs, they are faced with “bootstrapping,” then “friends and family” round, then “angel” round, then “venture capital” round. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who don’t have friends and family for the friends and family round. So that’s really where our members fit in in the funding continuum. They serve as the friends and family for entrepreneurs who don’t have the friends and family round and I’ve started quoting Rihanna, I’ve started saying, “If we really want to see more voices as entrepreneurs ‘shine bright like a diamond,’ we need to invest in diamonds in the rough.”

Adda: Here’s the thing. Obviously it’s absurd and deeply problematic that women and minorities are funded at such a lower rate. And frankly, we’re all losing because of that. But, it’s also important to remember that bootstrapping your company is nothing new. People have been doing it for literally thousands of years. We might exoticize bootstrapping in the VC era, but really it’s just about getting by—it’s how most people start their businesses. And more importantly, I think it’s crucial that we don’t give those VCs more power than they deserve. Yes, they have access to a pile of money. But that’s it. They’re just one way to get started.

That said, everyone should get an equal shot at getting support starting their business. So, what has to change?

Natalia: How awesome would it be if straight people took care of all like the homophobia? How awesome it would be if white people took care of racism? How awesome would it be if all the guys took care of sexism? And so in that sense if I can at least you know, help even start this conversation, have this conversation I hope that it’s a way that I can show my support.

Adda: Natalia’s right—racism is a white problem, sexism is a male problem, and so, given this, how do I as a white woman do my part to fix things? This is something we talk about at Skillcrush a ton: How we can be as intersectional as possible, serve as many people as possible, and be truly inclusive. We’ll be assessing how we’re doing—and where we’re failing—in our season finale.

So, back to the question: How can we make tech as welcoming as possible? Especially since—despite everything you’ve heard in this episode—working in tech can be really spectacular.

You can make a full time income freelancing relatively easily. You can work at so many awesome companies, inside, and outside of technology. You can start your own company. You can work remotely. Really, there are so many options and opportunities, and I think it’s so important that people who don’t currently see tech as a welcoming place know that there is a place for them here.

So. Solutions.

One thing to keep in mind is that so much unconscious bias is borne out in what we say, or more importantly don’t say. Being neutral and avoiding talking about issues like race and gender and sex and economic privilege is the worst thing to do.

Natalia: “If you want to be inclusive, be explicit.” And so in that sense the vaguer that something is, the harder that it one has a sense that one is welcomed or belongs in some way. So for me, I really view it as by being explicit, we’re showcasing who we were welcoming into the room. I think it was Maya Angelou, she said: “I didn’t do any better, because I didn’t know any better, and now that I know better, I do better.” So having that, like…knowing that making it explicit would also make someone doubting whether or not that they’re welcome was really important for me.

Adda: Yes to all of this. Now what about those companies—the ones we mentioned in the opening of this episode—are they able to redeem themselves? As the head of a company that helps fund non-white, queer startups—startups ignored by the mainstream tech world—Natalia is in a unique position to comment on this. And you wanna know what she says?

Natalia: I don’t care, Adda! That’s my answer. I don’t care about them. I don’t care about them. Obviously there’s still a lot of work to be done. And its that, by creating communities whether its Pipeline Angels and other groups of more voices that we are helping entrepreneurs find investors who respect them and who will support them and will say to them “We believe you.” No matter anyone else who might say like, “I had a great positive experience!” It’s still about not invalidating the stories of people who have had negative experiences and saying guess what? I see you, I believe you, I support you. Adda: Yeah, like I’ve said…there are real problems here. I get why people are wary of the tech world, and this is why we’re working to make it better. Natalia: Well, I was going to say breaking news, Adda, Skillcrush is part of the tech world and how awesome is that, right? The other thing that you reminded of because we were talking about the is earlier behind the scenes in the green room, was about how the answer is not just, “Oh, everyone go out and join a tech team in a big company” so like the other thing I see from the other end is that the answer is not everyone become an entrepreneur. And that’s part of why I launched Pipeline Angels because some people might actually love their corporate job. I know! It’s surprising, but some people do! Or they might not have yet come up with their own idea and one of the things that I share is a way for them to keep to kind of be connected with the entrepreneurship ecosystem without having to launch a startup is by investing in one. And so that’s a way that we can support more voices is by actually finding different roles that we can have in the ecosystem. So we’re actually seeing more voices investing in more voices.

It’s like the learning the “rules of the game” and sometimes there are no rules so that’s why it’s not merit right, not merit-based. At least learning how to work within the system and it’s also disrupting the system. It’s going to take more than just one “strategy” or tactic to continue to make things better and so that’s why I. . .It’s a world where it makes sense to have Skillcrush, it makes sense to have Girls Who Code, it makes sense to have Black Girls code, it makes sense to have these different ways to change the world because the status quo is not cutting it. Adda: Yeah, I think you bring such a good point up which is, it’s just figuring out how to strike the balance of critiquing the problem but also creating alternatives. Natalia: And I’m very…people are always like don’t complain, just do, and I’m like you know what? It’s okay to do both.

Adda: My conversation with Natalia gave me a lot to think about, and I especially loved what she said about the need for us to both be loud about what’s happening, and also to create solutions outside the system.

We try to create solutions by helping our students transition into technical careers and show them how to make money in tech outside of Silicon Valley. But it’s just as critical that we walk the walk: that we’re a company that hires women, men of color, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, people living outside of urban centers. And that every day, we prove that it doesn’t make us weak, it makes us awesome.

I have a good friend who was telling me what she liked so much about her boyfriend: She said that he has the BIGGEST tent and everyone is welcome in it. Whenever I think about that analogy, I envision one of those huge party tents, and I imagine that the tent is the whole tech industry. And then I imagine people like Ellen or Natalia or my team at Skillcrush, all working to make that tent bigger and more welcoming to everyone. Because everyone is welcome at our party.

Haele: We’re produced by me—Haele Wolfe—and Julia Sonenshein. We’re edited and our music is composed by Arlen Ginsburg. Our art is by Monalisa Kabos. Kelli Smith and Scott Morris read our ads. Huge thanks to our heroes Ellen Pao and Natalia Oberti Noguera. Run, don’t walk to buy Ellen’s book: Reset, My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change and to subscribe to Natalia’s podcast, Pitch Makeover.

Shoutout to our whole crew at Skillcrush—especially to Lauren and Aleia for reading the drivel you heard at the top of this episode with so much power. We love you.

You can find us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and please leave us a review. We read every single one. We also want to let you know that we make so much more content that can help you move forward in your career—whether you’re a total tech newbie or navigating your new skills on the job market. Come hang out with us at skillcrush.com/blog for articles, worksheets, guides, and even comics. Our newsletter is awesome, so be sure to sign up. See you in two weeks.

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Scott: When you’re juggling a busy life on top of a 9-to-5, how do you make a career change fast? Skillcrush teaches you everything you need to launch an exciting, creative career in web design or web development. We’ll show you the secret to making money WHILE you learn tech skills, all in just about an hour a day. Today is all about working in tech outside of Silicon Valley, so we’re giving away a free ebook that will walk you through the big payoff of working in tech—when your goal isn’t Google. You can download your copy at skillcrush.com/payoff (all one word). That’s skillcrush.com/payoff.

from Web Developers World https://skillcrush.com/2017/11/15/hit-refresh-podcast-ellen-pao-interview/

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