Embedded - 68: Dancing With Hundreds Of Women

Episode Date: September 17, 2014

Angie Chang (@thisgirlangie) joined us to talk about the coding bootcamp Hackbright Academy, their upcoming hardware hackathon, Girl Geek Dinners, and the extreme awkwardness of networking. Sign up to be a hackathon mentor (not gender limited) or to be on the waitlist to attend (women only). Get your team together on Hackathon IO. Sign up to be a Hackbright Academy mentor. Oh look! Elecia signed up to speak on Sunday! Grace Hopper Conference The article on Peter Thiel and women founders by Kate Losse that Chris referenced toward the end of the show.

Welcome to Embedded, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Elysia White, here with co-host Christopher White, and our guest is Angie Chang, Director of Growth at Hackbright Academy. Hi Angie, thanks for being on the show. Thank you for inviting me. Could you tell us a bit about yourself? So my name is Angie Chang, and I'm known primarily as the Director of Growth at Hackbright Academy, an engineering school for women in San Francisco. I'm also the founder of Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners.

And we posted about 70 dinners so far at companies starting at Google and then Facebook. And then we've had a lot of various other dinners in Silicon Valley startups and companies. And in 2006, I was one of the co-founders of Women 2.0, which is a media company that supports women entrepreneurs in high-growth, high-tech startups. It is a pretty interesting resume. You did start out as an engineer, though. Yes. My first job, I was a web producer on the engineering team at You Send It right after the Ray Series A. And that was my first job out of college And I had years of experience making websites and working with technology teams to make that happen. So when I graduated, the jobs I was looking at were mainly as secretaries or like editors. And the job that really attracted me to a startup was at a really early stage company called YouSendIt. So my first

job was as an engineer. And I sat in the engineering team for a little over a year. And I realized how few women there were in engineering. I was the only woman in 12 guys. And that number didn't change. That's not that bad of a ratio, actually. And that number didn't change. But that was very disheartening for someone coming out of college. And I had taken a few classes in college.

And there were a few women here and there in my engineering classes, but I really wanted to see more women, you know, out there. I had gone to the first Silicon Valley New Tech meetup and I realized the ratio of women. And I also went to Y Combinator Startup School in 2006 and realized it was five women and like 200 people in the auditorium. And I was always wondering what would happen if more women were out there going to such events? And what if we got together more often to talk about what we could possibly make? Because I knew I could make websites, but other people had ideas for really great businesses or embedded software or other things. And it would just be a really more potential and more possibilities were going to be available

if women in tech got together more often. So that's actually how I started Women 2.0 was I kept asking everyone that I met for the first year that I was working, where are the other women? I would meet one or two here and there, and I would run over to them and be like, what do you do? And I'd hope that she would say an engineer or something similar to me. So if she did, I eventually got connected to my co-founders of Women 2.0, and we decided to host a Women 2.0 conference in 2006. And what that meant was we just basically took Web 2.0 and asked, where are are also engineers of Mebo to be on stage as well as some other women in tech. And we had 100 people show up. And that was to us mind blowing because we normally don't see that many women together talking about starting companies and in tech. And from there, we didn't expect it, but everyone kept asking us, when's the next event? Where's the mailing list? And we hadn't incorporated. We're like, oh, we should make a website and we should collect email addresses and we should host more events. So I was at the time working in Palo Alto and living there in a shared Eichler. So I started opening up my living room for monthly wine and cheese events. And each time we'd get more and more women coming from all walks of life,

product managers at Google, early stage entrepreneurs, people working at startups who wanted to start their own. And we gave them a place to come together. And it was just wonderful energy and connections being made and from there a lot of people did start companies and continue to connect over the years and it's been really great to see where they've gone and Women 2.0 has grown since then. We incorporated and we started out as a media companies doing one conference a year with this business plan competition of women led companies. And they would pitch at our conference in front of investors seeking capital. And we would also have great speakers teaching women to the different aspects of starting a company.

For example, how to raise money, how to build a product, how to find your first users. And we just saw a huge need for women, a huge amount of interest in what we were doing. And so we did this on the side for years and years until about, I think, 2011 is when we decided to quit our jobs and do it full-time. How do you make enough money to do that full-time? I mean, I understand doing it on your own and maybe even getting sponsorships for the specific events, which started out small.

There was like a one-night thing, and then it got bigger and bigger until it was a day or two. But how do you get them not only to fund drinks and an event space, but also your salary? So in the beginning, we just out of our pockets bought two-buck chuck and a cheese platter and called that an event, and the costs were very low. At conferences, we can charge money for tickets.

And when we looked at what other people were doing, we realized that we were pretty much a legitimate media company so that we could host events and make a lot of money off conferences and events by charging for admission, by charging companies to be sponsors. And that way, that would keep the rest of the business afloat. And the rest of the business actually meant the bloggers and the writers. So for years I was a writer and the editor-in-chief of Women 2.0 and I would share the stories of women starting up

and I would also bring to light women that were angel investors. I would create top lists of women entrepreneurs and exes. So for example, women who are starting food companies, women who have started successful B2B companies. And just by creating these lists, which we actually started as a yearly roundup of women who have done something great, such as in the Silicon Valley, great usually means you raised a round of funding. But that's easy to track. So we'd be like, if you raised Series A, or if you raised Angel, or if you launched your product, let us know.

We will put it on our blog as a yearly roundup. And you have this huge, long list of women's accomplishments. And it was really, it's like circled the internet. Everyone told their friends. Everyone wanted to figure out who they knew that could be added to that list. And it was just watching these efforts really triple was really empowering for a lot of people. Yeah, I imagine so. But you did leave Women 2.0.

Yeah, so I was at Women 2.0 for a little over seven years. And by then we had grown to a staff of about six. And we were doing these conferences that were attracting a thousand women at a time. We were doing really well. And I had also started Girl Geek Dinners on the side and I was doing a lot of dinners in my spare time with companies. And one of the companies that reached out to me was a company called Hackbright Academy that had just started out. They were an engineering school for women and they were graduating their first class of a dozen women engineers. And they reached out to me and said,

we would like to do a Hackbright Girl Geek Dinner. And I said, sure, let's talk. And we made that happen. And at that event, my sister came and she was a small business owner and project manager at startups. And she was in the audience and she watched these dozen girls walk across the stage saying things like, I used to be a research scientist, but now I'm a software

engineer. I used to be a mechanical engineer, but now I'm a software engineer through Hackbright. And she turned to me and she said, I want to go to Hackbright. And she applied for Hackbright and got in and attended the next session of Hackbright Academy. So I was very actively involved in Hackbright since then. I became close friends with the co-founder and CEO, David Phillips, and I was helping him out with various initiatives. I was covering what was going on by writing about them on Women 2.0, which got syndicated on Forbes, and it helped them get more visibility for what they were doing. And I realized I was spending a lot of my time helping and advising this company. So eventually I decided to leave Women 2.0 in good hands by hiring other editors and writers and go help this new initiative to get more women in technology, which I thought was

very fulfilling because one of the problems that I saw in Women 2.0 was that our common quip and our common gripe is that women don't get funded because there's not enough women investors. People don't believe that women can create these next Facebook, next Google companies. And with Hackbright, we're creating more women engineers. We've created 150 in the last two years, and we've done it in an incredibly accelerated pace. The program is three months, and women come out and they get jobs as software engineers at companies like Facebook and Pinterest and SurveyMonkey and Eventbrite. And we're just proving that it doesn't take someone programming from age five. It doesn't take a genius that anyone can start and be successful if they just put a lot of work into it. So I really wanted to create this dialogue and narrative and success stories

of women who have been able to really pivot their lives quickly and be successful. And hopefully, eventually, they'll start companies and they'll become CTOs and they'll be directors of engineering. They'll write new programming languages. And that's really the goal that we're doing here. We're really enabling women to see themselves as these creators. What is Hackbright specifically? I mean, we've kind of talked about it, but it's a place in San Francisco.

Yes, we're an engineering school. We're located by Union Square. But you're not an accredited college. No. We, like most quote-unquote coding boot camps, are emerging technologies, emerging educational facilities. I think of us as a post-baccalaureate program because we take mostly women who have graduated college, who've been working for a few years or a decade in a previous career and have decided somewhere along the line that they really didn't want to be doing what they're doing and they wanted to be a software

engineer. So we have women that have come out of golden sacks or consulting or law they were working in law or they were high school teachers and they just along the way they have maybe friends who are developers who are working at great companies making great salaries and like doing really fun things and they're like i want to do that too and we basically gave them a way to do that where they didn't have to say, but I didn't get a CS degree, so I can't do that. We're saying, well, now you can, even though you didn't get a CS degree, quickly pivot your career with a bunch of other really talented women and do it with a great community of alum that we have created in the last two years. And you do have very focused

course sets, front-end web development, back-end web development, things that are learnable in a relatively short amount of time. Yes, so our Cornerstone program is the Engineering Fellowship, which is the three-month full-time intensive program for women. And we've been graduating quarterly classes of 30 women at a time where they come in together to learn full-stack Python web development. And they start pair programming on day one. They have a team of instructors that teach them during the day at Hackbright. And they spend a lot of the day pairing with each other on various exercises. And that goes on for five weeks. And then for the next five weeks, they work on a personal project of their own interest.

And that can be something from writing a web app to writing a compiler to someone wrote a rootkit and is now a security engineer. People have found their way through Hackbright and it's really given them the energy and the resources to succeed. And what I do at Hackbright is a lot of the business development and also managing our mentorship program. And what we do at Hackbright is we pair each student with three industry mentors who are all software engineers or directors or CTOs. And they are connected with the students and help them through the program by explaining to them what it means to work in the Silicon Valley and helping them with code reviews

and helping them with their projects and really guiding them. And I think that that's one of the most important parts of HackBright is giving them the resources in the industry, such as our staff and their mentors, to really make sure that they succeed because it takes a village. And I realize that there's tons of free online resources like Coursera, Code Academy, and it's absolutely possible to learn a code on your own slowly, and I've known plenty of people who've done that,

but we help women do it very quickly. It's tough to do on your own. It's self-motivation that a lot of people don't have, and schools provide that in a different way. Absolutely. We provide a great structure, and once they get in and they are a competitor, this kicks in, and they work together, and they really want to succeed.

And they have this really short timeline of three months. They're going to learn a code, make something awesome, and then go out there and start interviewing. How much contact time per day? I mean, how intense is the program? Is it five hours a day? It is 10 to 6, Monday through Friday. Okay, so that's pretty good.

Yeah. So usually there's an hour of lecture in the morning and then they pair program and then we have an hour of lunch and then they come back for another hour of lectures and they pair program for the rest of the day. And we encourage them to go to events at night to learn more about various technologies, to kind of just get to know people in the industry. So it ends up being a very full day. People talk about this as being the hardest time in their life, but it's also one of the most rewarding and exciting times of their life.

And do most of the people who come, most of the women who come, have any science background? Is this the first time they've programmed? So most of the students have a background in, say, project management at a startup, or maybe they're a high school teacher and they taught math, or they have a very deeply analytical background. And often they've taken at least something on Code Academy, or they've started taking some classes at a local community college, and they're like, yes, this is really what I want to do, but I don't know how to make the next step.

And if they go on Google and they search around, they realize that there's this thing called coding boot camps and HackRite is one of those options. And we are the only all-women option that's been around for a little over two years now. And then they've seen the track record and the blogs of all the alum that have gone through and they see the different success stories and trajectories of women and they're super inspired to come to San Francisco and do that themselves. And it's an application process. Yes. So we have a free application online, and all candidates are put through interviews.

So they can go up to two interviews long with staff, And then they're granted admission if they make it through that. And basically they're screening for, and I'm not part of the admissions team, so it's hard for me to talk about this, but I think they're screened for basic skills, whether they have previous success. And that's a big indicator of their future success. So we often screen them for their ability to get a job after the program. Because oftentimes, if we take someone who's been incredibly successful as a lawyer or someone who's been incredibly successful as a lab tech, then if they put their mind to it, they'll easily succeed as a software engineer.

That makes sense. Also, they screen for how much we want to spend all day with them for three months it's also a likeability screening so it's almost like interfering for a job in some sense yes most schools don't it's similar to how startups say we hire no jerks right we screen for people that we want to be with for three months and do people get hired out of the program? I mean, you work with companies as part of the program, is that right? Yes. So right now we are seeing that 90% of our graduates get a job offer in the first three months and their average salary is right now 90K out of the program. Most of them go on to become

software engineers. A few of them go on to become support engineers, customer support engineers, product managers. People have kind of done all sorts of things. We've had people go work as a software engineer for a year after Hackbright and then decide they want to get a master's in computer science and go back to school. I'm still looking forward to the day that one of our graduates starts a company that gets venture funding. But yeah, they really come to us looking for that career pivot to become a software engineer. And you said you're not part of the admissions team. No.

You're director of growth, which means you go out and ask people for money? Yeah, so I work with partner companies. And these are companies that work closely with Hackbright Academy to support our students and our programming. And we invite all partner companies, and that includes companies like Facebook and Google and New Relic, to our quarterly career day, which is the day where all our graduating students are speed interviewed by partner companies for their open jobs. And it's a great day. The last one was held at GitHub, and it was a lot of fun. It was great for the students because they get to talk about what they made.

They get to really shine and meet a lot of people very interested in hiring them. And we work closely with the partner companies to make sure that we're teaching the right skills to these students, that when they graduate, these companies can be ready to hire them. And so what do you do? Do you go out, meet new companies? Yes. So I spend a lot of my time talking with companies and getting them involved with Hack Bright. I'm talking to a lot of the larger companies and trying to find the right person at that company. It's pretty difficult to find the right person in a big company to create a partnership with Hackbright.

But we're working really well with companies like Intuit and Facebook who have been on board with Hackbright. And actually, both of them are sponsoring scholarships for women to attend Hackbright Academy. How much does it normally cost? So the program is $15,000 for three months full-time. And that's pretty average for what coding boot camps are today. The scholarships are to help women. So, for example, Facebook has sponsored a scholarship for diversity candidates to attend Hackbright Academy. And Intuit has sponsored a moms and tech scholarship.

And I'm always talking to companies asking them to sponsor a scholarship for women. I'm looking for, for example, people to support veterans or for companies to provide more scholarships generally for women. So I'm just out there talking to companies, seeing how we can possibly work together. And the sponsorships are quite expensive. I mean, for the companies, they're investing a fair amount in this. Yeah. So we take full scholarships, which are 15K, but we also take partial scholarships. We have a general scholarship fund that people can contribute to.

And also what I do at Hackbright is I do a lot of the programming, so a lot of the tech talks and field trips and working with our partner companies to make sure that our students get to go on their campus and meet the right people and really get a feel for the companies. So for example, we go on field trips to places like Facebook and Intuit. And we had gone to Skybox Imaging earlier this year, which is one of the satellite companies, big data imaging companies. And it's a small startup in Mountain View. And we took the students there and they were kind of a little like, they looked, checked out the website. They knew it was a really cool company, but they didn't really have

a sense for the company besides its website. So it was really interesting for them to be able to go inside the company, hear from the women that work there, get a tour, walk around and meet people. And suddenly everyone was like, I want to work here. And it's been a really great way to get women really excited about companies that they haven't heard of before that don't normally have that wow factor. So everyone knows about like Facebook and Twitter and Google and they want to work there. But there's companies all over Silicon Valley that don't have that same shine. So we're helping our partner companies gain more visibility with our students. And so places like Skybox Imaging, which was actually acquired by Google, and one of our

alumni actually works at Skybox and was there when it was acquired. So we have our first Hackbright alum who's a Googler now by acquisition. And we also go to places like SurveyMonkey, which most students kind of think, oh, it's a survey company. Why would I ever want to work there? But actually SurveyMonkey has a great female CTO, Selena Tobaccoala, and she has brought on four or five Hackbright alum who work at SurveyMonkey now, and they are some of the happiest people I've seen. They really love working there. It's a great place. You really don't know until you get there how great this workplace is. So we take our students to SurveyMonkey to meet the engineers, have lunch, talk to people, and suddenly everyone wants to work at SurveyMonkey, which is what I think is great about field trips. We also hopefully go to places like Intuit, which people kind of think of as boring finance software.

But in fact, it's one of the great, I think, places for women to be at. I've actually went to Intuit for a Girl Geek dinner, and I met a lot of the engineers there, and I thought their campus was great. And the people there are really passionate and really smart, and it seems that I want to provide these opportunities to our engineering fellows. So that's what I do with the field trips, is to get our students to various companies that they normally don't think of but are actually really great places for them to be at. And then I also organize hackathonsons and we have quarterly hackathons and right now i'm working on our hardware hackathon which is happening at the end of september it's september 27th and 28th in san francisco and we are we are going to have 150 to 200 women hacking at stripe and they will be building um whatever they want to we're basically giving them hardware boxes.

They're going to be getting inventors kits and electric impdev kits and random boards that people are bringing. And we're bringing tons of mentors together and tons of women who are really excited to meet other women hackers and build something over the weekend. Well, that was actually next on my list to ask you about. So I'm happy we're headed that direction. So there are going to be women who come and they're hacking on hardware, which is very cool. And Electric Gimp gave them kits. And you said inventor boxes. Are those the SparkFun?

Yes. Do you remember what's in those? There are various sensors in an Arduino. And women are just going to have a blank canvas. They can work on whatever they want. Yes. So we're encouraging people to form teams on Hackathon.io beforehand so they can kind of float ideas about what they want to do and get excited about it. I think one of the things that is problematic about hackathons is there's a high rate of dropout after the first few hours where people, especially women or people who it's their first time at a hackathon, walk in and they see the giant mess of people and they don't

connect with anyone or they don't have something they really want to work on and then they'll leave. So we're trying to discourage that by having women sign up on Hackathon.io and look at the various projects being pitched by their peers. They can pitch their own project, and they can form teams online. And we're also going to let them form teams in the first few hours on Saturday when they can mix over breakfast and coffee and just meet each other and hear about what they're thinking about doing and join a team or start a team. And then they will learn about what's in their kit. I mean, because most of them will not have any hardware experience.

Yes. And we are also hosting a workshop at Hackbrite the Tuesday before the hackathon, which will be an intro to Arduino workshop. That'll be fun. Is that free or is that pay for? It is free. The hackathon is also free. Right. It is.

It's free to all attendees. And any woman can sign up. Is there any requirements about their skill level or their background? So we are beginner friendly and we are very explicit in our, in our verbiage that we're like beginners are welcome because we will have experienced mentors and program and everyone will be very friendly and inclusive. So feel free to come if

you don't know anything about programming you'll probably join a team and learn a lot just by being there and you do have some mentors we have a lot of mentors and we're always looking for more anyone with breadboard experience or hardware software experience can come and be a mentor and we they can mentor for four hours at a time, or they can even come and commit their entire weekend and really be a mentor for one team throughout the weekend. And I know you've got some of the Electric Imp guys coming. Yes, Electric Imp is coming, and they're bringing the dev kit,

so there'll definitely be someone there to help with that. So mentors don't have to be women? No. So our hackers are mostly women. We've been encouraging that. And the mentors can be any gender. Anybody who's willing to encourage people? Yes. Cool. Are you looking for more mentors still? We are looking for mentors. We can always use more mentors. And so it's a four-hour time commitment or the two days? Yes. And the two days isn't, I hear about these hackathons that go all night. This isn't like that.

No, I think we start at 10 and we end at about 8. And we're like, go home, go sleep, go have dinner somewhere. I think there were notes that you could start a little earlier on Sunday getting coffee with your team. But it's still a reasonable number of hours. Yes. Especially at HackBright Academy, we really stress having work and life balance. We really don't want people to be working all the time, and we don't want to burn out. We want people to have a good time and continue building and want to do things like hackathons in the future. And will mentors and attendees walk away with goodies? What about the boxes? What's happening with that?

So the teams that are building, they will be able to take their box home. The teams will have between five to seven people. So unfortunately, it's one box per team and someone will get to take that home with them. Well, maybe two people if you get the Inventor Box and the Arduino. Yes. But you have lots of prizes. Yes, we have various prizes that have been donated. And thank you.

You actually also helped donate some copies of your book. Thank you very much for that. Oh, really? I actually did that. And I donated seven books for a winning team. But winning doesn't... you let me choose. I want it to go to a team that is most likely to do this professionally. Yes. So we have prizes that are like most creative, best use of X. And we were just kind of, we want it to be a fun experience. It's not one of those

hackathons where you come in and you're like, I'm going to win a million dollars and it's going to be very competitive and people are going to cheat. We want people to come and have a good time, and therefore our prizes reflect the attitude of, we're having a good time, so we're going to give some fun prizes out, and hopefully everyone will walk away with a little something. Well, in addition to the books, my company, which I guess sponsors the podcast, please don't ask us to work for you. That's not an ad. But our company is also giving you seven $50 gift certificates to SparkFun to go along with the books. Yes. So that will be fun. And how are you going to choose the winners based on somewhat nebulous criteria? We have a panel of

judges that we're assembling right now. I have Pamela Fox confirmed to come, and I'm working on the rest of the judging panel, but they will help pick, so it will be somewhat of a judicious process. I think that will be fun. And sponsorships. You are looking for more money from big sponsors. Is it $2,500 was the silver level sponsor so actually we actually i think we're doing pretty okay with the fundraising at this point autodesk has stepped in as platinum sponsor salesforce has stepped up as a gold sponsor and we have amazon lab 126 as a silver

sponsor so in terms of like funding the hackathon i think we've met really great partners in the community who have been very supportive of us. And Autodesk and Salesforce and Amazon Lab 126 are frequently sponsoring Hackbright hackathons. So it's been really great to have them on board for this one as well. Oh, good. I'm glad. And so maybe there'll be t-shirts and goodies. Absolutely. We always make fun t-shirts. I was a bit nervous in August.

But after Labor Day, everyone came through and was like, well, yes, of course we're sponsoring your hackathon. So I was like, as a hackathon organizer, I felt very glad. I was like, thank you so much for realizing the value of hundreds of women hacking together. So yeah, they're great supporters. Cool. Are you still looking for speakers? And if so, what are you looking for? So right now, I think we are good on speakers. We have Julia Grace will be speaking about hardware and software, and she's the head of engineering at Tindy.

And we have one of the HackBrain instructors, Nick Avdrinos, who will be explaining what's in the box. So I think in terms of speakers, we'll be set. I'm actually wondering, and this is kind of because it's an ongoing conversation of what's going to happen at this hackathon, if we could do some kind of unconference where we have various speakers sign up to give a talk in a side room so people can elect to maybe learn about something for an hour at the hackathon. But that's kind of an ongoing conversation we're having about how we can possibly make this hackathon more enriching.

That's tough because then you have to get more speakers. Yes, we're having about how we can possibly make this hackathon more enriching. That's tough because then you have to get more speakers. Yes, we're adding complication to the hackathon, which is why we're still wondering if that's actually going to happen. It takes a lot of organization to make this happen. And there's the site and the food and the boxes. But what about the other side? What should I expect if I'm coming? I've only been to one hackathon and I was one of the people who left after a few hours because it was impenetrable and pretty boring. Right. So I think one of the things I've learned about organizing a

lot of hackathons, and I've organized Startup Weekends for Women 2.0 and I've organized hackathons at Hack Fright, is that you just have to make sure, especially for these women-focused hackathons and I've organized startup weekends for women 2.0 and I've organized hackathons at hack fright is that you just have to make sure, especially for these women focused hackathons, that our staff is very acutely aware and greets people and make sure that anyone that looks maybe a little lost or a little hesitant is brought into the fold and that they're introduced to a team that they're talked to, that we make sure that they feel like they're part of it because sometimes at the larger hackathons it's too easy to like be at the sidelines and to be ignored and you're like well if I just ghost and no one will realize it and then you do so we work really hard to make everyone feel very comfortable our space that we post to hackathons that has always been very comfortable with the women I think there's something really magical about having an all

women's or mostly women's space is that people are super excited to see each other. Because normally, as an engineer, you don't get to work with all that many women. So when you see like 100 of them together at a time, we're all really excited to be there and to work together and to meet each other. It's just a really great experience. Cool. And that part where you introduce people and connect to them, that's something that's been thematic through your career. You've been somebody who generally is a connector.

Right. I think it's really fun and easy to connect people because I always meet people that I think are really interesting and really great, and I'm like, like oh you should really meet this person and it's really a simple thing to write an email intro to be like hey you two should meet and just like create these connections between people I personally really enjoy and the reason why I started Girl Geek Dinners is because I had met various people and I decided I want I would love to put them on stage. And I had met at the time, Leah Culver, I had met, uh, I had met an entrepreneur. I'd met a VC and I met all these people. And I was like, they really should be on stage. And I think a girl

geek dinner might be a good way to do that by having a company like Google and Google had actually hosted girl geek dinners in London. And they, every time you put a speaker on stage and a lot of times some of these women are not the people you normally see on stage, but when you ask them and you're persistent, then they'll say, sure, I guess I'll speak. So I had actually met the director of user experience at Google at the time, Irene Au. And I asked her and I was like talking to her like, you're so amazing and inspiring I think you should can you would you speak at a girl geek dinner and she's like um yeah I guess so and I went to google and in 2007 I said so would you sponsor a girl geek dinner um you guys sponsored them in London and I have these amazing five women I want to put on stage on a panel can you host that and they

said sure and it turned out to be 400omen event with a large white tent outside, and we took over Charlie's Cafe. And it was like a – I think for anyone that attends that event, it's very memorable to them because it's one of the first times you see, outside of Grace Hopper, that many women together with an amazing assortment of women on stage talking about their experiences. And they're talking about what it's like to be doing what they're doing. They're all completely different but all amazing people. And we didn't really talk

about any work-life issues on the panel. And that question only came in the Q&A afterwards. So we have a couple of terms we haven't defined and I've Girl Geek Dinner is one of them. So that, but Grace Hopper is the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and that's an annual conference put on by the Anita Borg Institute. And it's several hundred women all across computer science, no particular area, but academic students, professionals, and it is more about computer science than you might expect, and less about women and tech issues, work-life balance sorts of things. Although that comes up.

Grace Hopper is very, they do target a lot of computer science undergraduates and graduates. And it is very industry, it's actually, I think, they've reached thousands and thousands of people now. It's very popular. It's a very popular event. It sells out usually. Absolutely.

I know I've heard companies who are sending like 100 people to them because it's a great recruiting event. Well, at One Time Shot Spotter, we sent all but one woman who worked for us that year. And since there were only like six women in the company, it wasn't that many, but it was, somebody noted that we probably sent the highest percentage. And it's amazing. And that time we talked about how ShotSpotter worked.

So it was pretty technical. Yes. As well as being fun. It was a lot of fun. Yes, I remember the parties, like the final day parties are always tons being fun. It was really quite fun. Yes, I remember the parties, like the final day parties are always tons of fun. And not to go too far into the stereotype, I like that many of the menus involve salad and cake.

That seems to be what meals are made out of. That might have been my San Diego perception. That one was one of the last truly wild ones. The last one I went to was in Baltimore, and that was a lot of fun, too. I remember dancing with hundreds of women, all engineers, to some fun songs outside. And more men have been going to that conference, but they talk about how alienating it is, which I find hilarious. I think they're finally seeing what it's like to be a woman in tech. And having to go to bathrooms that are like two miles away

because all the bathrooms are closed to men. That was pretty hilarious. At least the line's probably short. For the men, yeah. It's a bit like the reverse. It's like kind of the opposite of the workforce where usually when I go to August Capitol parties or something, the Silicon Valley, they're like the line for the men's room is so long.

But when you go to Grace Hopper, the line for the women's room is so long. And they close many of the men's bathrooms so they can use those. I think it's Grace Hopper is a great place for male executives in tech to go to, to see really like kind of feel what it's like to be a woman every day and to kind of hear the stories's like to be a woman every day and kind of hear the stories and like meet really talented women and it's i i know a fair amount of like men who do go to grace hopper because their female co-workers say hey you should really go and be like a champion or an advocate for women it's a great opportunity to do that by going yeah i do

and then it's fun to talk to them when they come back but girl geek dinners, and I've been to a few of these they are pretty lavish affairs that involve dinner and a technical talk, although usually dinner and networking is three hours and the talk is one or it's a 25% which girl geek dinners have you been to? I went to one at Microsoft. I went to one that I don't really remember.

And then I went to the one last spring at the Santa Clara Convention Center when the hardware conference was there with Karen Fields. Yeah, so Girl Geek dinners are really, it's kind of like a mini Grace Hopper for many companies where they get to really be creative and think about how they can market themselves to women. So for example, Box has hosted a few Girl Geek dinners and they decided they want to make blue nail polish and other things. And Microsoft had hosted a Girl Geek dinner, they brought out cake pops. And when

Yahoo hosts, they decide to bring out chocolate fountains and a cake in the shape of a laptop. So it's really a great time for companies to really have fun in organizing an event and think about all the, you know, here in the Silicon Valley, everyone has some kind of food requirement. So then they have to think about all the vegan options. And then they have to think about all the vegan options, and then they have to think about how can I make this fun, and they really get to, like, for example, at Survey Monkey last week, the organizer had brought out marshmallows and even had a little fire for people to roast marshmallows, as well as vegan-friendly food options.

And you work very hard to get good speakers but that networking time is so fun and personally i have a hard time networking um now that i have the podcast it's a little easier because it's i walk up to people and say i have a podcast and then we can talk about that but if i'm not talking about the podcast it's i i tend to be the person who stands there going ah so many people so many people it's always i think people come to networking events because they have a something a mission in mind oftentimes something to pitch a startup to pitch a job that they want absolutely and that's that's perfectly fine and that's actually great because those are the people who are going out to events and talking to people with an interest. And I think it is

absolutely okay to come with yourself in mind, whether you want a job or you want to meet someone to be in your podcast or whether you want to meet co-founders or whether you want to just meet people in your industry. It is perfectly okay and great to go out and talk to people about that stuff. And I think I'm really happy that people come out. Otherwise, I know there's tons of women working in tech and I never see them. Well, and people do come out. The Girl Geek Dinners used to be you had to sign up and then you had to sign up early. And now it's a lottery system because so many people sign up. Yes. So we've gone a long way. In 2008, when we did the Google Girl Geek Dinner, and that was our first event, we had 400 people sign up in five days. And that was the first event.

And that was by word of mouth. And now we have so many events, and each one has like 800 to 2,000 women that apply for the lottery. And if we didn't use a lottery, we would fill up 100 to 400 seats in a matter of two to 10 minutes. So given that, we have decided to move to a lottery system. So it would be a little more fair about how we give out tickets.

I was glad because I never managed to sign up on anything on time. But it is tough because then you don't really know if you're going. Right. We sent out confirmations. We can do a better job. This is actually something we do on the side as our side project.

So it kind of falls by the wayside sometimes. But we work our hardest to let people come. And if they really email us really interested in coming, we usually let them in. So, for example, sometimes we get emails like the day before, like, I just found out about this. This is perfect for my career. We're like, sure, we'll add you to the list. We really do want to accommodate for people that really want to be there. But it's also easy to sign up for all of them and go to all of them and get bored by them.

So I think the lottery works. You also take volunteers sometimes. Sometimes. We have people that take pictures, take videos, blog about it, which I think is great because an event only hosts a few hundred people. And it would be wonderful to have all the videos from all the talks archived somewhere online, ideally for anyone anywhere to learn about it. Sometimes I'm at a Girl Geek dinner, for example, the recent one with Megan Smith and Denae, the Indiegogo founder. And Megan Smith was at the time the Google ex-VP, and now she's the CTO of the United States.

And they had a fireside chat on stage at Indiegogo. And when I say on stage, they literally stood on a pallet or a crate, and they were like, yes, this is our stage, and we're standing here. We're going to have this conversation and share our thoughts to women in tech. And it was kind of a casual 20-minute conversation. And I was like, this is so great. I wish other people could hear this. And luckily, we had a volunteer who recorded the entire thing.

So things like that, we can always use more volunteers who have the ability to do that to help us with that. So the next Girl Geek Dinner will be at Pandora on September 25th. And then we're going to have some talks from various Girl Geeks there. And I think we'll actually get that recorded as well. And that's Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner. If people Google for that, they'll be able to find it. Yes, bayareagirlgeekdinners.com. And back to the networking thing, I really think there is a lot to be said that still needs to be said about objectives of women when they come out to networking events.

And I also don't really think of them as networking events. I have a tendency to despise networking events. And I like to think of them as really fun events. And I like to reframe events in my head. So, for example, when I look at a cocktail reception with like Sheryl Sandberg, and I was like, oh my God, I don't know what to say to her. But then I had to spend some time thinking about like, what would I want to tell her?

Like what, I can stand in front of her and just babble and be like, I think your book is great and you're amazing. But I wanted to figure out how to add some value to her and like, what would I want to express to her? And I think this type of thoughts might be hard for some women to be able to like, it's so hard to talk about ourselves most of the time that we like to talk about other people. We like to talk about the thing we're doing and how it's like when women lead, how we often don't just talk about ourselves, but we often say, and my teammate did this and my

other person did this. And we're often about bringing others to the front. And I think I do that as well. Like I don't do these events because I'm on stage. I do these events because I want these amazing girl geeks to always be on stage. And the only reason I go on stage at the beginning of girl geek dinners is because my friends, after a while, when I was silently organizing these events and making them happen, they would get mad at me because they would not see me on stage. And like you have to be on stage and you have to say hi. So I learned to like assume the position and be like yes I'm going to give a hello and it's usually literally two sentences long and then I'm going to quickly hand the mic over but I think it's hard for a lot of women and even myself to spend time talking about myself so for example I was I was supposed to go to reception last week with Sheryl Sandberg

there and I was like totally nervous I didn't know I was trying to think of how to queue up my conversation for this networking event but then I thought about all the. I didn't know. I was trying to think of how to queue up my conversation for this networking event. But then I thought about all the things I wanted her to help with. Like what would I want her to do and how can I possibly phrase that? And it took a lot of effort. And then I wound up being in my UberX for half an hour and never made the reception. So all that for not. So I think there is some advice there for people on how to do, well, we're going to have to call it networking because I don't have another.

How to go to parties and not hide in the corner. I think it helps to have a goal in mind, whether it's your personal career advancement or the career advancement of your peers. I often know people that are looking for something, like my sister is looking for a job, or my friend is looking for a developer, or another person I met last week is looking for angel investment. So there's all these wants that are happening that you know about. So if you go into a situation, you can kind of assess what other people have and kind of see if you can make a connection. And maybe that's my personality. I think a lot of people have that as well, the ability to connect people. And then just go to events with that in mind, or go to an event. And even though you feel terribly awkward, swear to yourself like, well, I've already made the trek out here. I'm going to stick it out

for an hour and learn something. And that's actually what I did. I went to a hardware hack night. That was held by TESL, a technical machine. And I had never hacked on hardware before. And my three female friends were supposed to go all flaked. And I was by myself in a room full of people that looked like they knew what they were doing. And I had this idea of like turning around and leaving. And I stood there and

I was like, no, I don't, I shouldn't do that. Like, and I said, and I struggled for a few minutes and I finally said, okay, I'm going to stay here for an hour. I'm going to sit down. I'm going to talk to one of the people that work here and I'm going to have them help me make something, even as a beginner. So I did that. I actually sat down. I found a co-founder. She's really great. And I sat next to her and I talked to her and I was like, hi, are you a co-founder? And I'd asked her about herself and I talked about myself and I said, so can you help me make something tonight? And she's like, yeah. And so we sat down for an hour and she helped me install everything and get something running. And I got lights blinking on the little chip and it was great.

And then I was really glad I stayed. And I tweeted a picture of us that I had taken with her camera that we had plugged into the little chip, and it was a success. But there was actually first five minutes I was standing there, I was like, I need to leave, I need to leave. But I actually fought against it. I was like, I actually came out here. I'm going to stay here for an hour, and then I can leave and learn something.

That's great advice for anybody, yeah. Yeah, setting goals. Asking for help. Asking for help is a surprisingly good way to meet people. It was so hard. Like, I didn't know who to ask, but I saw one of the co-founders sitting in a corner on a couch by herself. And I was like, oh, I'm going to go sit next to her.

You might have felt exactly the same. Yeah, you forget that everyone, a lot of people in this industry, and women especially, often feel isolated, even whatever position they're in. Yes, if she wasn't sitting by herself, I would be like, how do I enter this circle? There were groups working together quietly, and I was like, how do I enter that?

And finding another solo person or or another pair you can often break into a pair that's easier yes and then I when I was hanging out there my um my girl geek dinner's uh managing director her husband walked up to me I was like oh it's my first hardware hackathon too I was like oh cool we're both newbies and to me he was like a reputable data scientist but he was it was also his first time he was completely new at it so i felt like we were all in the same boat together well that's i mean there's there's asking for help there's having a goal and making sure you kind of understand your goal and and i find something you do naturally but i do it consciously and that's the connections the have you met my friend even if i have only met this person a second ago

and and i have heard their you know their little elevator blip of i'm so and so from here doing this i liked kittens whatever now i can turn over to this other person who looks lost and and alone and say have you met my friend do you like like kittens? And suddenly this connection, now they're connected and they both like me more because I did something, but I didn't really. So that have you met thing, it's better if you find people who are likely to connect and really want to connect.

But, you know, that first awkward 10 minutes, the way you build a group around yourself is to connect them to each other. And then you quietly duck away and go and sit on the couch. Yes. I'm not much of a talker, so I usually like to connect people. I'm like, good, you guys are talking, then I can escape. Then he can escape. I've done my job.

Where do you see Hackbright in five years? I hope that we'll be something like the most reputable engineering school for women in the country. So if we can become the next Harvard for women's engineering, or Barnard, or one of those women's colleges that has a distinguished reputation. And I'm not sure where the future lies in accreditation for these programs, but I do think there'll be some way to give coding schools more legitimacy in the government's eyes. Maybe then the GI Bill can apply to us, which I feel like it should. I think we will hopefully expand and be able to boast really distinguished alum. So sometimes I look at the alum lists of various great women's colleges. I'm like, oh, that person went there, that person went there.

I want us to one day be able to say, oh, the CTO of this company came from Hackbright, and she's giving back. And I want us to be known as the best and most powerful alumni network there is and all the women that are you know out there are somehow like in the Hackbright network or have mentored at Hackbright or work with Hackbright so I we have tons of mentors and we're going to be looking for tons more who are men and women who really mentor other students. And I think being part of the Hackbright network is really saying that we want to change the ratio of women in engineering.

And that's a prevalent problem in engineering and many other industries. But I like to think that we're part of the solution, that we are like the next generation and that we're going to be the change that we want to see in the world. And if people want to be a mentor at Hackbright, what should they do? So they should go to our website. It's hackbrightacademy.com. And if they go to hackbrightacademy.com slash mentor, they can fill out the form there. And basically, we just ask that you are a software engineer that wants to give back.

It's an hour a week commitment for a few months and to meet your mentee, to come to Hackbright, to learn about what it takes to be a mentor. And it's mostly like just basic guidelines of how, if you've ever mentored, it's something that's really hard to do until you've actually done it. Like you can think objectively, like I'm going to give wisdom to this person, but it's a lot of actually just listening and meeting people where they are and making them feel comfortable and being encouraging. And then slowly bringing in your knowledge and your resources when possible. Do you have any advice for men who want to support women in tech

in general? Not through Hackabrite, maybe they're not local or that's not the right venue for them, but what advice do you have? We have a lot of people that reach out to us that offer their expertise. So whether they want to give a workshop in how to whiteboard, people have also done really great things so for example i was blown away a few days ago when i saw that someone had submitted a pull request on github to change the gendered pronouns in documentation and open source and a very popular open source project and i was like wow i really love to see know, people really advocating for change in the community. And that was a great example of someone that I would love to give kudos to

for being supportive of making technology and this space more inclusive to everyone. There are a fair amount of men that work with women that are able to be their sponsors. So for example, after someone mentors a woman at Hackbright, we often have these CTOs and directors who then know about how talented and how quickly someone can become a software engineer. And they go and they turn around and they talk to their company, they talk to their peers, and they actively recruit from our graduates and they actively search for more female talent to join their companies. And sometimes these companies are maybe like five guys, maybe there are 20 guys, but then they really want to include women in their engineering team. So they come to us or they come to someone or they actually talk to women when they go to meetups and they come to us or they come to someone or they actually talk

to women when they go to meetups and they try to bring them into their communities and into their companies. And I think that's one way people can help is by recognizing that what they have could be better if they included more women and diversity into their company and into their teams. And if they have the ability to go to a meetup and talk to the woman there and bring them in I often find that they can actually start changing the ratio within their own companies and like my friend who is a self-taught engineer in LA she went to some dev meetups and was learning on the side and she would become friends with some of the people in her meetup and they eventually invited her to their office for lunch and that turned into a job interview and then she got the

offer as a web developer and i think that the for all those men out there who have gone to meetups and seen women there and try to talk to them and be inclusive and try to get them help or get them an interview those are like kind of like the silent champions. Do you do any follow-up or have plans to follow graduates over time to see, okay, they stuck with it? They're still in tech, you know, two years, five years, 10 years down the line. Yes. So right now we're still really early. We're two years in. So right now people who are working or have been working for about a year and a half now. So some people have risen and have gone on to more engineering management positions. And some people have started small companies that are looking for funding. And people are working at companies like Facebook and in their engineering teams and doing really well.

So I think time will show where they go. I'm going to have to wait a few more years to be able to talk more definitively on that. But you are tracking. Yes. I reckon we do track all our people. There's not that many. So it's easy still. Yes.

I can still recognize everyone by face and I know other names. That'll change soon. So I think we're about out of time. Do you have any more questions, Christopher? I just, I did have one question regarding kind of the focus of Hackbright. You mentioned that trying to encourage more women founders, which I think is one axis of changing the scenario.

And then there's the other axis of encouraging existing founders of big companies to hire more women. I just read an article from Peter Thiel, who was on the first side. He says, well, to solve this problem, we need more women founders. And then I saw a follow-up article by somebody else, and I'll have to put the link in. I don't remember her name exactly because I just read it. But that said, well, that kind of lets men off the hook,

the existing executives and men. And so it's kind of a two-pronged problem. You have to generate more interest from women and get them into higher positions and get them to form more companies, but also get the existing infrastructure too. So how do you kind of strike that balance? You've done both. Yeah. So I think with all that I do with Women 2.0, which I have left, but I trust that they're doing a really good job of educating women entrepreneurs and helping them get funding. There's like Girl Geek Dinners, which is, I think, a retention mechanism in a way because people often feel burned out on their job and people might not recognize it. Their company might not recognize it. So when they come to a Girlgate dinner,

they feel refreshed and they feel energized and they get to make friends and they get to make friends to go with them to the big idea brunch that they're going to have together the weekend. And they're going to hopefully start companies or like help each other out, be moral support for that everyday grind. And then with Hackbright, what we're doing is creating more women engineers that will hopefully give women-led companies more clout when they look for funding. So one of the problems with women raising venture capital was that supposedly women are not technical enough and that most companies that get funding have technical founders, which is true or not true. It's arguable, but that's often one of the lines that is given to many Silicon Valley startups is you're not technical enough. This product is not technical

enough. And if we educate more women to become technical, my hope is that they'll create more companies and then we'll be able to create change in all these new companies that will go on to be the next Google and Facebook. And hopefully those companies will be great. And at the same time, there needs to be room made at the top by people in power for women to rise. And that's another entire issue that I think companies like Google are working on. And they're not perfect yet, but they're definitely aware of and working on that. How to get more women up the ladder once they're already in the organization. How do we ensure that they don't drop out, that we notice when they do?

I think one of the best practices I've heard was to track internally at large companies, which managers successfully promote women. And if you're a manager that promotes women, that you should be given more women and you should be given some kind of bonus or reward for that because you're doing something right. And for those people who don't promote women or don't do a good job with the women in their team, don't get them as many women because obviously something's wrong there and try to check in on that. So there's many best practices and things we can do that we can learn from bigger companies. But right now with Hackbright, we're hoping to be the change for the future. And as a very small startup, we do what we can to talk to these

big companies and see what they're doing and try to help them. Do you think the VC community needs more education and to change too? Because you mentioned that there's a perception that women founders and women in general are not technical enough, or the companies they found are not technical enough. The people making that decision must be the VC community. We do have some women VCs like Aileen Lee who are doing a great job of kind of making this known amongst their venture investor counterparts. But definitely I think VC is arguably broken at this point.

And now it's a matter of all the different ways to fund things and innovations. Doing an end run around when you can. Okay. Well, any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with, Angie? We're always looking for people to get involved with Hackbright and for Girl Geek Dinner. So if anyone has any ideas, feel free to email me. I'm pretty easy to find online.

I'm angiechang at gmail.com. And just send me your ideas or how you want to get involved and we can go from there. I actually think one of the things that I do is I respond to most emails, which people often like, how do you do that? How do you actually accommodate most things? I'm like, you can make time for things. And when you say yes to things, more opportunities come up for you. So I would encourage people to reach out if they have any thoughts and if they

want to mentor or have any questions at all, just to send me a note. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Angie. Thank you. My guest has been Angie Chang, Director of Growth at Hackbright Academy and founder of Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner. A link for the sign-up for the hackathon

is in the show notes or search Silicon Chef Hackathon in Google, and you'll find it. You can also find the Girl Geek Dinners the same way. They are a lot of fun. As always, thank you also to Christopher for producing and for co-hosting. Finally, thank you for listening. If you've got comments, suggestions, questions, email us, show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. If you didn't catch Angie's email or you can't find it in Google,

which makes me question your skills, go ahead and email us and we will forward it along. A final thought for this week. There's a lot of stuff, and I really liked what Angie just said, but I think this time Albert Einstein has the winner, and I did check that this is something he really said, not just a quote attributed to him. Einstein said, we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.