Github Presents • Passion Projects - Live - #6 • the leslie bradshaw realtalk edition

[GITHUB PRESENTS Passion Projects] [Leslie Bradshaw] Hello everyone! Hi, my name is Julie and I'm the creator and organizer of Passion Projects. [cheers and applause from audience] Yeah! Whoo! Yea! Thank you guys for coming out tonight. This is the first event in our new office, I'm glad you guys all found it. That's great, I was a little concerned. I'm really excited to share the space with you but I'm also really excited to introduce Leslie Bradshaw. She's been someone I've looked up to for a really long time and is not only an amazing speaker but an amazing leader in our community and so she's going to give us some real talk tonight and I'm really excited about it so if we could just welcome her to the stage. [Cheers and applause from audience] So, I founded this company when I was 24 years old that specializes in data visualization and if you look up my name on SlideShare, you'll see that I have probably over a million views on all the slide shares that I've ever put up. But tonight I'm going unplugged, I'm going acoustic, I'm going sans slides, which is really kind of scary because the slides are kind of like my security blanket, like, oh yes, that's what I'm going to talk about next. So I'm actually going to totally wing this. I had slides prepared but I decided that I wanted to get more real with you tonight. Because what I could do is I could get up here and talk about what it's like to start a company that was Inc. 500 two years running, that we got Small Agency of the year, Inc. 30 under 30. All that stuff, that's all the good stuff. That's all the recognition, it's not really about what it takes to build a company. What it takes as a human, as a physical entity, what it takes as a team. So that's kind of what I want to talk about tonight. So if you can bear with me, it's what I imagine musicians feel like when they take away all the remixing on their voices and all the- what is the effect that they do, it's like [auto-tune noise] What is it? You know? [audience shouts out answer] Auto-tuning, that's what I'm talking about! When they take all that away, you're really stripped down and raw so go with me on this. So the first thing I want to talk about is as a child I was really very curious and I really loved, I loved nature I loved science and I loved math and I was really actually very good at math and my mother is an accountant and she started teaching me my multiplication tables and she brought out graph paper, she brought out spreadsheets because she was always doing stuff with accounting and then she gave me office supplies and that's how I would keep my time. So I had a little calculator and I had my little spreadsheet and it reminded me a lot of that scene in the Royal Tenebaums when they've got the little kids crunching numbers so that was me and at a very early age, two things became apparent, that I was totally a product of my parents because my father was a general manager and a business man and my mother was a numbers woman and she loved accounting and she loved math and then they both loved nature and they both loved science and they encouraged that curiosity. Now, I don't have any regrets in my life, none whatsoever but if I did have one, it would be that I wish someone would have pulled me aside and said "Hey you nerdy girl who's good at math, this is how you code." Because that's not something I picked up until much later in life and I feel like now we're going through a phase in our economy and our education system and I saw a great campaign the other day out of England called Code is the New Latin. And that really is exciting to me because I'll tell you right after I graduated from college, I had no idea to be, literally no idea. I spent all this time studying, working hard, getting good grades. That's what I had done for years, I was just a product of the system, getting good grades and then I'm out the other side and I thought to myself- how many of you have seen Madagascar? The original? So good, so there's this great scene, Chris Rock playing the zebra, on the treadmill in Central Park, David Schwimmer playing the giraffe and David Schwimmer says "You know it's your 30th birthday, what are you going to do man?" And he's like "I don't know, like maybe go back to Africa, maybe go to law school." And that was kind of what I thought, maybe I'll go to law school because that's what smart people are supposed to do, they're supposed to be lawyers but if you think about the per capita, there's some crazy ratio that 1 out of every 250 people in California are lawyers. I don't know, I'm making that up but something intense and crazy like that and it's a very saturated field and it's also a field that isn't building something right? How many engineers do we have in the room tonight? Hey whoa, look at that. How many designers? Okay, how many operational project manager business side, sales, marketing? Okay, so it's a good blend of all three of those things and I love seeing so many more engineers and designers and hearing GitHub is just an inspiring space but thinking about when you were growing up what kind of opportunities were there? I thought, you know, I could be an astronaut, I could be a teacher, I could be a doctor, talked to some friends from Germany Sebastian and Mark tonight. In Germany they're much more vocationally driven so what they do is they pair industry with actual university so when you graduate you have much more of a sense of what you're going to do when you grow up. So here I was graduating, thought I'd be a lawyer so I went and I worked at a law firm. Now if anybody's ever worked a law firm and a big law firm, they're pretty much soul-crushing, I mean all you're doing all day is making copies, so many copies. There's a great scene in Life is Beautiful with Roberto Benigni, he's carrying the anvil and he says "Why so many anvils? So that's what I was, "Why so many copies?" But I just kept making the copies and while I was there, I had a great thing happen. I learned all about source code. And I learned about source code because there were all these meta-data trademark violations of our clients. So my job was literally to go in and either screenshot the violation or in some cases print all the source code out, put it in a folder then I would go on to the USPTO's website and find the violation, then I would take the violation and put it in a big spreadsheet because my mom taught me all about spreadsheets when I was little and then I would do one of those mail merges. Now, that's kind of old school but how many of you all have done a mail merge? Hey, I like that, I like that. Mail merges are really just a test of your patience and you get one thing wrong and all of a sudden the trademark goes into "Dear USPTO 987521" and you're like "No, that's not who I wanted." So I did that for a while but in that time I realized- and it was 2005, 2006, so it wasn't like the Internet was this new thing but this idea of managing your brand online was new and the idea that brands actually realized that it wasn't just about having your .com but there were people doing phishing scams. They were creating- I was working with the Choice Hotel family so Comfort Inn, Sleep Inn, very generic names like couldn't you have come up with something better? But at any rate, lots of people were jacking the name and then creating websites that looked just like their website and then taking people's credit card numbers. So I was documenting these violations and along the way I met an incredible mentor at that company. And this is where I really kind of want to hit the pause button. It's not really about the law that I was excited or it wasn't really about my first job but it was about this mentor that I had that believed in me and I hope everybody in this room- because I see mostly people in their maybe twenties, thirties, maybe a few people older than that but serve the people around you by being a great mentor. Be that lighthouse. Julie is a great lighthouse for this community right? She's making sure to amplify and bring in more women in the technology industry. But this particular mentor, Dave Grice, I looked to him, not because he was the best lawyer, although he's very good, but I loved the way he treated his team. He treated everyone with such respect that just because you were a paralegal or a first year attorney, you weren't going to be treated like less than a person. And later on in my career I've worked with ***, like I worked with straight-up bona fide, people who are just mean and people who treat others with disrespect and I thought well, they're adults, why are adults acting this way? It turns out, if they're an *** when they're younger, they'll probably grow up and they'll be adult ***. [Laughter from audience] I have a policy, no more working with people like that but this particular person was so far from that and he cultivated such an incredible team that we were a unit and we worked together. So what I took away from Dave was not only that but there was something else that I really loved about the business of law. And that was business development, I loved coming up with these ideas of how we were going to win these big clients, so it meant slides, so again, keep talking about "look all these slides I've done", I've no slides tonight. But I love the slides and I loved coming up with that narrative of how we were going to help that company, some of the things that we saw as challenges, some of the ideas we had as a result. So what I took away from that job- yes, it was some Internet stuff, yes, it was looking at source code for the first time but it was really about how to treat people and then how to cultivate a narrative and convince and persuade an audience. So I ended up moving jobs after that, deciding I don't want to be a lawyer but now what do I want to be so I tapped into my alumni network because I thought, hopefully there will be people there that might want to give me a job and I found this company and I kid you not, they quoted Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Marx, which are all people that I'd read growing up and in college and they were a crisis communication company. And most crisis people, if you hear spin masters, they'll say "This is an opportunity." "Crisis is an opportunity." And these people were really pragmatic. They said, "A crisis is something we're going to try to make less bad." Like, yes! I like the way you think! And I like that they embraced human nature. So that's another theme I want to emphasize is that whatever you're building, whatever you're thinking, whatever you're trying to convince audiences of or even just your coworkers trying to rally around, align it to human nature. Trying to have people do something outside of their comfort zone, yes it's good, yes, you can educate people but all in all, I've always been the most successful because when I figured out what motivates you or what motivates you and then align it with the overall business objective that I have. Sometimes it's money but often times, it's not, it's spaces like this. It's being treated with respect. It's about having flexible work hours. It's about being able to do cool stuff with other smart cool people. And that's something as an entrepreneur, you're trying to figure out not only what your product market fit is and making sure you have enough funds in the bank to do payroll but you're also trying to think how can I motivate the people at my company, on my team to do their best work and create an environment to do that? So I work in crisis communications and they have me on the Internet Watch Team and by team, it's just me. And most companies are built like a pyramid, with all the worker bees and then the middle managers and then the VPs and then the head of the company. Well this company inverted that model and they built it with a bunch of senior people who are very connected, I was in Washington D.C. so a lot of people that were former press secretaries and people that had worked on the Hill and done cool stuff and at the very fulcrum of that funnel that was me. And I was there working on my spreadsheets, back in the good old days before Radian 6 we hand collected data from the Internet so I would go out online, I would do my searches and I would pull back my data and analyze it. Then I would tell clients like Splenda and Purdue who has Oxycontin, I would analyze all the conversations or as many as I could get my hands on, a good sample set, what was being said about them and when I was working there I realized that gosh the Internet, there's a lot of chatter out there, a lot of conversations being had, across a lot of different demographics. So I went to my boss, I said there's a lot more that we could be doing here. We could actually create a whole service line, a whole product, a whole- frankly a technology that could automate what I'm doing- now again I'm not giving myself credit for the Radian 6 and the online brand management tools but I saw early on that it was something important. So my boss, very smart man, at the top of this inverted pyramid thing. He said to me, the Internet is something that we like to watch for our clients but it's just a bunch of bloggers in their pajamas in their parents' basement. And he drew a picture, here's what matters and he showed cable news and print and all of that and he said and here's the blogosphere. It just, it doesn't really matter and he almost metaphorically patted me on the head and sent me on my way and within two months something radical happened on the blogosphere that summer and if anybody remembers that summer of 2006? 2006? Macaca. And that was a moment where George Allen, Senator at the time of Virginia, would be Republican nominee for President decided that it would be a good idea to use a racial slur at a gentleman who was tracking him- so there are trackers that follow candidates from the opposing team, opposing side- and a good friend of mine, Ben Tribbett on his blog, not Larry Sabato broke the story. Washington Post had their hands on it but they decided not to run with it but Ben decided to run with it and at that moment it completely shifted the narrative around George Allen, it ruined his political career and also the blogosphere went from being this thing in the basement with your parents over there to being something that drove the mainstream. And that would become what we know now today as something that's just intertwined. I was watching CNN Tonight and they kept quoting BuzzFeed, I was like really? But of course, Ben Smith is there and he's doing some really great reporting, he's building a great team. So looking at that moment, I'm sure we've all had that, when a boss or someone doesn't believe in us, like pat us on our head and send us on our way. And I knew better, I knew better. I knew I need to break through that and it wasn't because I was a woman but it was my age, I mean there was definitely "hey you're 23 years old, what do you know about crisis communications?" "We've been doing this for 25 years." So I decided I had to keep moving and that's something else you'll find in your career, that if you do hit walls, it's good to try to break them down but if you do find that you're stagnating, all of you in this room, everyone in freaking San Francisco is so talented and so skilled that it does make sense that being able to move forward and move on is okay, I'll talk about when to stick it out and persevere in my Chapter 2 in just a second. So here I am looking for a new job, going back to my alumni network because it worked the last time. This time, I end up getting introduced to a very difficult personality that I'm glad I worked with, a very curmudgeon gentleman named John McLaughlin. If anybody has seen the McLaughlin Group with Pat Buchanan, Clarence Page, Eleanor Clift, it's a classic political show where they sit in a circle and yell at each other, two Repubicans, two Democrats. He in fact invented that format. He's like older than time and it was great working for him because he was independent. He did not have NewsCorp or Hearst or anybody over him. He bought his own time on NBC in New York and in Washington D.C. and then he syndicated it out through PBS. So on the one hand, I loved the independence and the idea of pursuing ideas for the sake of ideas and not because we had some sort of agenda. On the other hand, he was crazy. I'm talking bona fide, crazy. We would have a loudspeaker. Imagine my voice booming throughout the day, saying Natasha bring it down. And you're like "Bring what down?" And you're all of a sudden grabbing everything at your desk and you trot down to his office and he required us to call him Dr. McLaughlin because he has his PhD in Philosophy from Columbia. "Yes Dr. McLaughlin", and you put all of your papers out and paper, paper, give me paper. So we'd give him paper and we'd go through the paper and you know "Ugh..." And he'd draw it out and then this is good, no this isn't good and he would tear it up and go on just like that for a long time and it was chaotic because it was his personality and it was a daily, it felt like a daily show but it was a weekly show. It was only 22 minutes and we're like "Dr. McLaughlin, we shouldn't really start the show until Thursday because all the news, the news cycle just keeps moving. It was great to work with him, I lasted ten months. I worked with over a hundred people in that ten months. He would turn over as many as five people a day. We would call- we had Randstad on triple speed dial and we would just send more bodies down to help right? And I learned from that. There's such a huge cost in turnover. And this is a theme that will come over into my next job that I haven't brought up yet but that was going on in the background and that is there's all sorts of figures, 20 thousand, 50 thousand, 100 thousand dollars that you invest in someone and when you lose them, you lose that money. As an entrepreneur, you have to- if there's somebody that isn't a good fit, that's fine, but in general you need to find those good fit and you need to take good care of them because turning people over, it creates chaos in so many ways. In workflow, in process, in culture, and I just couldn't stay any longer. It was fun, it was interesting but all in all, it was just too toxic. Now, I've now listed off the law firm, the communications firm, the tv place and then the next job I went to was an agency. And at that agency, I'd gone there because I kept reading about them in the Inc. 500, and they were local and I thought I want to go work at a company that's been successful, they've been purchased and I could learn from those entrepreneurs. And during those four jobs, I was building my own company on the side. So starting at the age of 24 years old, I started working 100 hours a week. Sometimes I wouldn't go to bed, I would just go to work, do my job, go home, shower, rally, eat dinner and then work all through the night, sometimes into the morning. And I did that for about three years. So all through the age of 27, I was doing my full-time job in the day, because I didn't know anything. I was just learning the world. And that's something I want to caution entrepreneurs who have never had a full-time job, starting a company takes so much just to stand the gosh-darned thing up. You need infrastructure, you need payroll, you need health insurance, you need to pay taxes, those are all things that you have no clue of how to handle. And also by the way, you're supposed to create some great amazing product that's going to compete in the marketplace with Google? So, I'm working this full-time job in the day, trying to learn, trying to learn. And then at night I go home, and I start building this company that I had a vision for through my partner. And my partner, he's amazing, right. He's brilliant, he's a designer, he's creative. But he doesn't know exactly how to execute that vision. And there are probably people in your team, your organization, maybe you are that visionary. But some of you in this room might have the vision to get the vision done. And that's a cool job to have too. Think about someone like Sheryl Sandberg. She was brought in to help Mark Zuckerberg scale his vision and monetize it. She's doing a damn good job of it, if I don't mind saying so myself. And that is an exciting role for women in particular because oftentimes up to the point of the 80s, women served this paraprofessional role. We could be secretaries, we could be teachers, we could be paralegals. But we could never be the full-on professional. And in this day and age, you could take that same organized, on-point skill-set that my mom had as an accountant and you can take it all the way to the C-Suite. And I think that's pretty damn cool. So here I am, nights and weekends, working with my partner, who by the way, was also my boyfriend. Now, if anybody wants to start a company with their significant other, shoot me a note, we can talk about the pluses and minuses. And I'll tell you right now, it's worth a chuckle, but you have these amazing highs. You're winning Agency of Record for Nike ID's Social Media Business against RGA and AKQA. You're doing all of the visualization work for Google in the 2012 Election. Woah, you're here. But on the other hand, a client is three days late with a 95 thousand dollar cheque and you're about to miss payroll. You're promising to deliver six websites to MTV for this new awards show that they're rolling out and there's been so much scope creep that your engineers have changed the logics so many times that it's so twisted in the back, in the front, everything. And something breaks and something doesn't go right and you've got MTV up your ***. So you're going to ride high highs and you're going to ride low lows. And make sure whatever partner you pick to take that journey, it's someone that you get along with and you have a shared- Jesse and I had a great shared vision for excellence. My own way, I was this overachiever and for him, although school was not his thing, he did have this precision and this pixel perfect- we called him eagle eyed Jesse because he could just see if anything was off by any amount. But at the same time, he wasn't someone who shared the vision of how to build a team. He thought that it was okay if something didn't go right to work with someone or when something wasn't going right to call them out in a way, in a very public way. And I read something great the other day that if you disagree with someone, support them publicly but privately, that's when you have that conversation. This is kind of hard for me to talk about. Specially if you want to Google any of it, Gawker and Valleywag have done a great job covering this. So, What I will say is in that six years, I gave everything. I stopped brushing my hair, I stopped working out. I stopped sleeping. I stopped talking to my family. I gained 50 pounds. I literally put it all out there. And there are a lot of entrepreneurs who would give similar stories. Some people don't have that story, but I woke up, I was thirty years old. I just turned thirty last year. And I said, I don't wan't to live like this. And my sister specifically, she came to me and she said, I think you're going to get cancer because you're so stressed up and you're so tightly wound, you're always multi-tasking when I call you, you're never sleeping, you look terrible. And I said you're right. I actually hate my life. And I'm not one who's suicidal. I've been a bright cheery person my whole life. But I literally, there were times where I wanted to turn the lights out, go to bed and just not wake up. Because it just got so hard, not just the entrepreneurial side of making payroll and delivering on products but it got hard to watch such turnover at a company that I was trying to build. We would get a bunch of kick-*** engineers and designers in the door, one or two things would go wrong, dragon would come through the town, skewer everybody and then I'd have to rebuild it. And I did that for six *** years and it was so hard. But I will say, every time it happened, I said, you know what? I was built for this. I want to make this work. And I read all the books about all the perseverance and all the stick it out, stick it through. And I said okay. And then people would say, you know Leslie, you're a fool for trying to make this work. This is just not going to work. You picked the wrong partner, you should move on. And I said, okay. The best thing you can ever do is underestimate me and tell me I can't do something. In which case I'm really stubborn, I'm a Taurus and I want to do it even more. So I kept persevering and I kept persevering. And I kept trying. And I brought in outside people to help me try to figure out how could we work with this incredibly talented person who is this Chief Creative Officer type and get the best out of him and put him in the best light but without it impacting the company. So starting two years ago- actually starting at the time, it was in 2011, I brought in an executive mentor who had worked on a big team at Price Waterhouse Coopers. And she and I started looking at how could we go through, how could we look at the company, how could we restructure it, do we bring in a board of directors, do we bring in a CEO? And we tried everything. I mean I literally, I'm a scientist so I love controlling experiments. So I'm like okay, here's my control, my experiment, I'm going to change this variable. I'm going to try working this differently. I'm going to try a new Technical Director. I'm going to try a man. I'm going to try a woman. I'm going to try someone older, someone younger. And after finally going through all of those variables, all of those tests, I finally had to accept one of the hardest things to ever accept which is I had to walk away from the company that I built. And I did that a year ago. Exactly a year ago. And in that time, in that year, leading up to that point, has anybody ever seen- it's a really campy movie with JLo called Enough. It's from in the 90s. So she- so here's the just general plot premise, IMDB it. She is in this abusive relationship, so much so that she has to go in Witness Protection Program kind of level stuff and the guy keeps finding her and keeps coming after her. Now that's not what I'm saying that I was in although it was a difficult, challenging situation there was never that. But she goes on offence right. And this is another thing, a theme that I want to emphasize. You can either live your life on your heels or on your toes. And sometimes being on defense, it allows you to see the world and kind of take things in. But I was tired of being on defense. And I decided to go on offense and offense looked like the following. One, I started interviewing around and started to see what opportunities were out there. Two, I decided that it wasn't going to be about the brand name or about the money, but it was going to be about the founder. Because I knew I was going to help a company build itself from the ground up and I needed to pick the right partner this time. And three, I was going to put- I was going to re-prioritize my life and put two things at the center of my universe. Health and family. It sounds kind of cheesy. It's one of those things, "kumbayah Lifestyle Section of the New York Times", but by putting those two things back at the center of my life, I can think again. There was a whole period of time, where there's a section of my brain, "file not found, file not found." And my vocab and everything, it just went offline. Because my body was starving, mentally and emotionally and I didn't realize. I thought I was being so tough and strong pulling all-nighters, I was like "Yeah I haven't slept" and they're like "Yeah we can tell", we can smell you, it's kind of a problem. And I realize now that to be the best leader, you have to be healthy and you have to set that tone. And it seems like GitHub, they all got it figured out, I want to work here because it's so amazing. And I hope that the work life balance thing that everybody always talks about you're the only one who can really be the arbiter of work life balance. And I finally had to decide, no more multi-tasking when I talk to my family. No more screens an hour before bed. Exercising every day. Eating five small meals a day like everybody says you should. Drinking lots of water. No more coffee or Red Bull just to wake myself up. And these were all things that I did for a year and in that time, not only did the files go back online, I lost the weight, I got healthy but now I'm even more productive. I feel like it's some superhuman thing that I just discovered and I'm like, I have all these movie references tonight. But City Slickers, Curly, he's like "That one thing, this is the secret to life." And then he croaks. I feel like I figured out that one thing. And that's taking care of yourself and it's also taking care of your family. My sister lives in the Middle East, she lives in Dubai. We talk more now than when she literally lived miles away from me. And we have that relationship- and my parents as well. And that's how I start my day, that's how I end my day. And that physical health and combined, it's like wind, water, air, ching ching. And all those things together allow me to take it on. So what am I doing now? I'm running a start-up out in Miami, I'm the Chief Operating Officer of Guide. I am an Equity Based Adviser in three more start-ups. I do business development for six agencies. I'm writing a book. I get between eight to ten hours of sleep most nights. I lift weights six times a week. And I still have time for my friends, family, I do some life-coaching and some mentoring and that's all because of two things, I put my family and my health back in the center of my world. And two, I got real about the kind of people that I was working with and that I was aligning myself with. Because I realized that I spent so much time cleaning up other people's *** messes. That I didn't have time to take care of me. To pursue the things that I was passionate about. And I didn't have time to take care of the people that mattered in my world. So that's kind of my real talk. I don't know Julie, how much time do we have, if we have any time left? [Julie] Five minutes. [Leslie] Five minutes left, okay. So, a couple of things to draw out of all of this. One, I think it's incredibly important to master your craft. I think there are a lot of people out there that are so busy looking at the next thing that they want to get to and how they're going to get on this list and get on that last list. That was never my goal. I happened to get on some of those lists but it was only I worked my *** off, in the industry and prove myself and delivered real value. At Jess3 I generated 13 million dollars in revenue with zero venture capital. I know GitHub is probably like zeros and zeros after that with no venture capital before you guys took the big money but I feel like that's something that we all need to kind of return to, is our craft. And the people here tonight, I feel the energy, we've got a lot of artisan craft masters and people that are working towards that. So stick after that, master the craft. The next thing is really look to the left and the right of the people that are doing the core building as it relates to design and development and really appreciate what they're adding and I was talking to Julie about the first operational hire was, hire #1, was this gal named Melissa. And without Melissa, she operationalized things, she made sure that there was infrastructure so that bills were paid, that paychecks came, so that everybody else could run fast and break things. So if there are ops people, both in this room as well as back at your organizations, they're unsung heroes and I really hope that you can sing their songs a little bit more, give them the spotlight and have them talk about their craft. Because they're mastering and they're working hard just as you are on the front end as developers or back-end developers or anywhere in between. The third thing, treat people with dignity, respect and civility, no matter what level of the organization they are. One thing about the law firm that I didn't bring up, there was a class system. There were para- either you went to law school or you didn't. And if you didn't go to law school you were treated differently. You weren't thought of as intelligent, even though some of those paralegals had been there 20 years and knew the law better than those first year associates. So I feel like San Francisco especially is a bit of a bubble when it comes to this egalitarian kumbayah. I was seeing even on this commercial where they'll send you a phone if you're an elderly person based on the disability that you might have. The State of California provides phones that have big buttons, phones with bright things. So California, y'all live in a bubble. I used to live here, I grew up in Lake Tahoe. But the rest of the world, it's not so. And I think the more that we can bring the spirity of egalitarian meritocracy and equality and we should be treating each other no matter what, with dignity and respect. And the last thing I want to hit on, you heard a little bit of my robot voice earlier but I brought a little something that demonstrates this, but be weird and be crafty and be quirky and it's cool to do that but this is a little pouch my mother made me, she used to make all of our clothes growing up and it's got pigs on it. And I want to bring this up for three reasons, one, my mom's crafty and she made about three hundred of these. I'm trying to get her [inaudible]. Two, she made it so that the pigs' eyes are just kind of poking over so it keeps an eye on me- thanks mom. And three, if I wasn't going into technology, when I was little, I actually thought I wanted to be a cartoon voice, so I have a pig voice and I've never done this publicly so, kind of nervous. [cheers from audience] When I get nervous, I go like this and I go like this, remember? What is it? Molly Shannon from Saturday Night Live. So I just want to thank you all very much for coming out tonight and I'm looking forward to the fireside chat with Julie later and thank you for letting me keep it real without my slides. [cheers and applause from audience] [GITHUB PRESENTS Passion Projects] [Leslie Bradshaw] [music playing in the background] Thanks for sticking around for the fireside chat with Leslie Bradshaw. She just gave an amazing, real talk about her career and her work life balance and what led her into doing the thing that she does now and that's normally what I ask people, it's normally the first question so we get to skip ahead. You mentioned a few times that you started Jess3, which is a database agency and a lot of the focus is around storytelling. Did you ever have an aha moment and did you ever know that like, "I want to tell stories, I want to help tell stories with the things I'm interested in as far as data goes and that kind of thing." Well here's your opportunity for Jess3, I give a lot of credit to the Co-founder, the CEO, Jesse. He saw early on that there was going to be massive amounts of data being created by social and to story-tell with those data sets. So in particular, we went to the APIs of Delicious and Flickr before Twitter was even out and we were doing these sick mashups with metadata off of Delicious and images off of Flickr to story tell around mostly conferences and events for brands. And eventually we started looking at storytelling that had more of a business intelligence component to it. So back to some of those early days of hand-collecting those conversations online and trying to inform brands of what people were saying about them. So we really were on to something with this idea that there are social APIs with interesting data around conferences, topics, you know, whether it be a sporting event like the Superbowl or a big event like CES or South by, we were constantly being hired by these brands to aggregate that information and then put it out in a meaningful way. So the aha moment was definitely that and secondarily we had this big hit with this infographic that we did called The Conversation Prism. And it was done with Brian Solis, the social media strategist, inspired by Robert Scoble's social media starfish, which I think y'all would probably like with your "octocat". And that info graphic- I mean, you want to talk about viral? That thing was translated into 12 languages, it was used- It was one of Communication Art's 10 Most Influential Graphics of 2008 or 9. And at that point, infographics hadn't really jumped the shark as they've done now with everybody and their mother putting out infographics. But at the time, it was a really novel way to do marketing and one the one hand, we had this very expensive investment to do the interactive stuff, which took a lot of kind of bespoke, artisanal, curation of content through this beautiful interface. Unfortunately we didn't ever build a replicatable reusable software, but it was always something cool and looked beautiful. And on the other hand, we had this low investment, low dollar infographic thing that had no coding, no animation. And then somewhere in the middle, eventually we did motion graphics. And that's another aha moment kind of attached to this whole storytelling piece is we had never done a video. And in 2010, Jesse decided, we're going to do video now. I said, okay great. And he said, I've got this talk, I'm giving this talk about, design but I want to talk about how design is really being propelled forward by the growth of social and it's data. I said okay cool and so all of a sudden, he starts taking some time from a strategist and an animator-I'm getting these bills and I'm like six thousand? Four thousand dollars? And I'm like, this is getting a little out of control. It's one thing to invest in your deck but this is like ten grand. So I'm a little pissed as Operations person. We have no budget for this but he keeps going, sometimes you need to have that balance, that yin and yang. So he keeps going and puts out this video and we call it The History of Social Media. And we pull from all these disparate sources and it's about a four minute, maybe even six minute video with all sorts of data. And people start picking it up, and they're like, the state of the internet, the state of the internet. So we quickly, thank God, Vimeo lets you change the titles, unlike YouTube. So we went and we changed the title real quickly and we changed the title on our blog post and next thing you know, we literally got a tech call from TechCrunch saying could you please upload this to YouTube because we're about to put it on the homepage of YouTube because we're curating Youtube for the day. So then once it hit there, then it blew up and next thing we know, we're getting a call from Google, saying, we want you to do our GMail stop motion animation piece for our Google Mobile advertisement. Little did Google know that was the only video that we had ever done and it almost didn't happen because of the budget. So there was kind of an aha moment with static, motion and interactive. And that became our offering. We were going to be data driven storytellers across those three mediums. [Julie] How do you think- there's such a low barrier to learning on the Internet, and kind of becoming an expert in so many different mediums, how do you think that's played into your career, not just Jess3, but everywhere else as well? [Leslie] I think it's pretty distracting. I think there are so many things that come across my radar like oh, knitting and coding and there are all these things that you love to pick up and there are some people that are really good at it, you know my friend Natasha sitting here in the front row. You went to this bootcamp and you started coding and next thing you know you're an IOS developer and you're kicking major ***. So some people I think it does make sense and it helps in a career trajectory. But I've found that- this is one of the themes I actually didn't bring up and I wish I would have, but I'll bring it up now is focus. It's not the lack of opportunity that's going to be the killer in your career or your start-up, it's actually chasing all of the opportunities. And it was Jess3, we decided to do data visualization, we were going to be the best *** data visualization agency in the world. And we were. And we got the phone calls from all of the big agencies saying come in and do a workshop for us on data vis. We won awards and just amazing accolades and opportunities because we focused. Now, if we were just a creative agency that did branding, web design, you know, app development, we would have been one in a sea of thousands. If you want to be a data visualization agency, it's you, it's Stamen, it's FFFound, it's Amy from Slash7, it's literally like five people you can list and you know all their projects. Erin Koblan at Google Creative Labs, Jonathan Harris with We Feel Fine. So pick a focus and ideally a focus that isn't a crowded landscape. And my focus has been operations and strategy and from that, I have a fierce passion for team and leadership and activating and finding people's passion areas. But if I start adding like, I also want to be the best at marketing and be the best at this and then also learn how to code. Before you know it, there are just so many hours in the day, you've got to focus, so. [Julie] You talked a little bit about your mentors, do you mentor anybody and if so, how has that helped you, I don't know like mature or you know grow into the type of professional that you want to be or the leader that you are? [Leslie] The first thing I love thinking about is mentorship across three axes. The first is going to be a role model. And a role model is somebody that's going to be your rockstar, like Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg, if there was a poster of them, I'd have them on up on my wall. They're my rockstars. I've met Sheryl, I haven't met Marissa yet. We've been on some lists together, which I'm kind of cool, like yay. But, role models are people that you can look at their life and say that's what I want to be when I grow up and as a woman, having more role models at the C-Suite and at the highest levels of design, development, operations and business is incredibly important. I think the other thing across that axis, so you have role models and you have mentors. Mentors are people that are in your industry and have at least I would say ten to twenty years of experience above what you do, and bring perspective and help you think about things in a way that you're not currently thinking about. Now there's reverse mentorship. A lot of people that I've worked with were twenty, thirty years older than me and in return, I'd teach them things like Skype, Cloud computing, Google Docs, texting, Emoji, you know? Seriously, that was what I would do and then their kids are like, Mom you're so cool, you use Emoji. And the third kind of mentorship and this is the one that Dave Grice was for me at that law firm, is a sponsor. Get yourself a sponsor, first thing to do tomorrow is figure out who is your sponsor. Your sponsor is going to have two levels above you in the organization. If you're a start-up, then it has to be someone as senior as you possibly can get, if it's a small team and that sponsor is someone that you're going to say, hey, I need your help politically blocking and tackling- the bigger the organization, the more politics plays into your advancement more than your actual qualifications, as much as we hate to admit it. It's about seeing the opportunities and knowing when those emerge. Because oftentimes those are discussed in closed-door meetings that those sponsor people are in and sponsoring them also means advocating for them. Sitting down, saying I want to- Julie has what it takes, Leslie has what it takes to take on this role. Well you know she doesn't yet have this area. Well, I'll help her through that. And I would want to make sure that she gets this new position. So role model, mentor, sponsor. Figure out who yours are. And then for me, I had a lot of mentors and I was really careful about picking people that had skills that I was weak in or that they had experienced success in a way that I wanted to emulate and in the case of the gal who I brought in to help me navigate leaving Jess3, she had brought her team from 2 to 1500 globally and at the time Jess3 was running a very global, almost like a supply-chain company because we had so many contractors in so many countries and it was really great to have her operational heft and insight. I brought in successful entrepreneurs like Pete Snyder and Michael Bloom both of whom had sold companies. What was the M&A process like? What was due diligence like? I talk to people now that are on boards of publicly traded companies and privately held companies because I'd like to be on a board some day and I want to know how the hell one goes about doing something like that. By the way, three tips on getting on a board I've been learning. One, it really comes down to who you know, so make sure you're networking within that world. Two, it comes down also to, when money changes hands, that's when boards either get built or get added to so as people are raising rounds and looking at that, know that piece of it. And three, making sure that you're letting people know you're interested in that position. In the next couple of years, I'm going to call it my letter writing campaign, but I will go on a letter writing campaign. I serve as a fellow at the US Chamber of Commerce and it's strategic, not only because I'm there and I'm doing some really interesting things in Washington, but I'm also sitting in with a lot of the senior leaders at the Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 5000 companies I eventually want to work with, so positioning yourself, if that's something you do want to go after and if anybody does want to talk about that because that's something I feel that especially women, there's just not enough talk about it and we don't get the insights and information because it's a network problem. There's a sociological term called Homophily. Homofilio, like of the same kind. And there's a "homofilis" thing that goes on with boards because it's men who are sitting on them and when they're thinking about replacing when they leave, what do they do? They go to their network which is a bunch of men so we have to create bridges into these other areas with more diversity and with more women and that's happening. Nilofer Merchant is doing a great job, she's on some boards and really advocating for that but it's also an asymmetry of information. You may want to do that someday but you just don't know how to get out that information. So whether it's boards or other things, I think there are network issues that can be addressed through sharing of knowledge and once you figure it out, getting that playbook out to others. (Julie) That's awesome. Speaking of bridges, what was the transition like going from an employee, or a consultant at a company to someone in the C-Suite? (Julie) - Becoming a leader. (Lesie) - Pattie Sellers at Fortune has this great line that your career is not a ladder, it's actually a jungle gym. And once I thought of my life that way, then all of a sudden, I took the pressure off myself because every move that I made professionally didn't advance my salary or my title or even what I was doing as much as I thought it should have been doing, like it would step down or go off to the left or the right. So I think in that situation, it's really about, it's looking at it like a jungle gym and embracing that. Once you go from being- because I was still an employee during the day and it was kind of hard, because I would come back like I owned the show back during my day job and you're like woah woah woah there sport like you're just a project manager still. What are you doing telling everybody what to do? But it also helped me bring, I would incubate innovative ideas at night, bring it to my day job and then at my day job, I would incubate having my *** together and having infrastructure and then bring that into my night job. And so those two kind of fed off each other and I made a lot of mistakes. I got too close to my employees early on. Here we are, all a bunch of twenty somethings, crazy kids, loving the Internet, trying to fight the man, visualize data and we bonded right? You're doing these trade show activations, you're up at 4 in the morning waiting for a file to get delivered and you open up and you get close to people. And I have hard time, I'm very you know, very personable, I just like people. And looking back at it, eventually, year 4, year 5 of Jess3, I had to step back from that and create that level, that layer, were we're still friendly but you can't- I'll sum it up by this, if you've got something you need to talk about that's a difficult subject, or something you shouldn't be talking about with employees. If it goes down, it turns into gossip, if it goes up, it turns into a solution. So oftentimes, if I took something that I was dealing with with my partner and took it down, it can get turned into gossip but you know, those same people, if they came to me and we tried to fix something, it became more of an HR function and it became a solution. (Julie) So what would you say was the hardest part about transitioning into someone that was responsible for people, you talked a lot about building teams and having, being responsible for those people, what was the hardest part? (Leslie) The hardest part was knowing that you were responsible for them in a way that felt maternal, felt paternal, felt like their children were now your children. Because your payroll was their livelihood. There was a group of engineers that I hired out of Orlando, Florida in 2011 and they wanted to interview me and they also had me meet their wives and it was this whole big conversation and I had to look them in the eye and say, There are some- this is what we've heard about your company, this is what other engineers have told us and I said, those things are all true and you are going to find some very big challenges here but I promise that I will be your advocate and I will look out for you in whatever capacity, whether it be dealing directly with my partner or dealing with clients. You are my number 1 priority, so once those people became your children, it was so stressful. I used to joke that small men would stand on my lungs because I just couldn't breathe, it was just crushing. That level and it was all cash flow management, so if a client missed a payment, I was so angry with them. I wanted to scream and yell at them because- we only missed payroll one time, September 2010 because that 95 thousand dollar cheque was three days late. And I remember sitting there. It was at Tahoe Ted Talks, Gary Vaynerchuck, Chris Sacca, all those cool, interesting people downstairs talking. And I was up in my hotel room, paralyzed because it was about to hit. And I saw the tsunami and it's coming like this and I called my parents, I borrowed money, I cashed out my own savings account, Jesse kicked in money. We did whatever we could and it was like that scene in It's a Beautiful Life with Jimmy Stewart and everybody's trying to get their money out of the bank. And I'm Jimmy Stewart and everybody wants all of it and I'm saying, I can't give you all of it but how much do you need to make rent, how much do you need for this? And yeah, see 12 dollars and your 12 dollars are in her house. So I was moving every bit of money around that I could and it was the worst feeling in the world so it's once you have people's real lives on the line and because you're so close to them and because everyone's starting out their lives, they're living paycheck to paycheck, they're starting families. We had people getting married, getting engaged and with those moments become even bigger pressure. (Julie) It's about setting those boundaries again so you can keep your sanity a little bit too. (Leslie) Maybe taking outside capital, that cash flow management in general. It's good to be- my mother taught me some really great techniques and we had an incredible CPA that I brought in as a very early employee- another piece of advice, don't do your own books, because you're focused on 800 other things, you're trying to sell the clients, keep people happy, do execution. There are people out there, their craft is actually accounting, people like my mother hire them to do it. It seems like, well we don't have the money. What you don't have the money for is missing payroll. What you don't have the money for is not filing your taxes properly. So hiring eight players who are craftmasters in their own area, especially around legal and finance, like don't *** around with that. That's hire 1 and 2 for us, I immediately got an accountant and a lawyer because Jesse was just freelancing and doing his own thing as a web designer and I'm the one who came in and incorporated and turned it into a business. (Julie) What do you look for in your dream co-founders or your dream teammates? Who's on your team? (Leslie) So, I like to look for two things. A player- so I talk about a player like someone who gets straight As, A+s, like that type of thing in whatever they do and they have an A player attitude. Because I've hired people that have A player skill sets and talents, literally off the charts, Mensa crazy intelligent. But aren't A player attitudes and as a result, friction and toxicity occurs. Looking at the pure economics of it creates additional expenses that as a start-up you're going to be dead in the water if you have any additional energy going out that isn't focused fiercely on your product and competing in the market. And you're wasting money on trying to back those roles and it's not worth it. So A player in talent, A player in attitude. Now specifically outside of that, I'm looking for people who are doers. There are a lot of people who are talkers, but I like to call myself an "entrepredoer" because I do. I get *** done, I pull things across the finish line and I look for people who can- I mean never are you going to have all the variables and all the things set up the way you want it to be set up, ever. Even with all the money in the world, you're still going to have only so many hours in a day, clients are going to change their minds at the last minute, stuff's just going to happen. But I like people who can be problem-solvers, who can adjust to the scenario and who can pull it across the finish line and have a good attitude. And those things are important. And I guess the last thing I look for is just a great sense of humour. I find that people who make fun of other people and have a sense a humour at other people's expense, not funny to me. People who are just kind of those like goofy, quirky odd people that maybe played magic at lunchtime, you know. Maybe had like- yeah? Hey what? Had that crystal with that talon off their necklace, like that's- I look for those kind of people. I interviewed in the Valley at some venture capital firms and could I wear a suit every day and wear pearls and do that whole thing? Sure, I could play that part and in D.C. I certainly can blend in, do the whole pantsuit thing, but I like the odd people. We have this guy on our team right now, he's in a- it's not death metal, it's black metal. A black metal band, really long crazy hair and he's such a good developer. And this other guy, we have these other musicians but this other guy has big curly hair and he used to be a drummer for the Bee Gees for ten years. And he played in front of the queen, he's so cool. So I look for these people who are just different and interesting and just embracing life, being weird, the pig voice that I did is actually for the stuffed pig that I still sleep with at 31 years old like that's how I feel about quirky weirdness and I look for that in my team members. I don't look for uptight people that are conforming just because they feel that they need to. (Julie) That's awesome. (Leslie) Yeah. (Julie) So my last question for you, we'll take a couple from the audience, but my last question is, What's your advice for working in a male dominated industry? (Leslie) Know your ***, number 1. Don't put up with ***, number 2. My background is not in computer science but I do have a quantitative economics background from the University of Chicago. So when people see that, they tend to be like cool, respect but at the same time if people try to push on me, I'd even find that I took really great notes during a meeting and people would automatically think that I was the secretary and I was going to type it up and send it out to everyone in the room. I said no, no, no. You can take your own notes and sometimes I would stop taking notes altogether because I wanted to be one of the guys. I also give a really firm handshake. I grew up on a farm. I lift weights. So I have calluses and this guy the other day, I was at an investor meeting and we were pitching. And I gave him really, like almost a death grip and he goes- and I had a dress on and I had heels and everything and he said, "Wow that's a really firm handshake." And I'd rather my handshake be too firm, than not firm enough because it starts a conversation, it allows me to talk about my background and you just go on your toes, not on your heels. You've got to be on your toes, firm handshake, know your stuff and don't put up with it and it may be something where you see it publicly and it may not be something you can call out right then and there but there should be channels within your industry, within your friend group, or within your company where you can find a way to help course correct. Because I don't think most people with good intentions and they don't know sometimes that they're creating an environment that's sexist or uncomfortable and when called out publicly, it can be uncomfortable but if you find a way to work with them- because ultimately the goal is aligning- back to some of the things I didn't mention. Aligning what motivates that individual with what your business objectives are and what your business objectives are is creating a safe place where people can do their best work. I mean here at GitHub, I'm ready to do some work right now, I'm so freaking inspired with this hard wood and all this happiness. So you want to create this great space and oftentimes that also comes down to how people are being treated, what languages are being used, what kind of jokes are being told and something to watch for, in start-ups and in any gender dense population. So if it's all women or if it's all male, certain things are going to occur and you have to, look out for that. But the more that you can cross-pollinate I think the more it kind of normalizes in a good way, yeah. (Julie) Do we have any questions from the audience? Natasha? (Natasha) Hi, you spoke about how you hauled *** and gave everything you had in your twenties and maybe around thirty had a realization, hey let's focus on family, health and work number 3. If you're looking back on your own life or talking with someone else in their twenties or early career, would you recommend a similar path? Like, yeah, haul *** when you're getting out there or would you start with where you are now? (Leslie) Yeah, I mean it's easy for me to say, oh but now just focus on your family, your health and do yoga and work out because I've achieved certain things. It's natural momentum now for a lot of the opportunities that come to me. I would say, the wasted energy, again, like the flapping of the arms that was occurring that I didn't need, that I would recommend avoiding at all costs, one don't take jobs for title or money during your twenties. Because during your twenties, it's all about experience and network and mastering your craft. So spend your twenties getting really really good at something- You'll want to spend your whole life getting good at it but especially your twenties because then- and not only become good at it but be known for it. Because then people are going to pick up the phone and say I want you for this job or this opportunity came up. And if you spend your time doing too much "jungle-gymming" in your twenties, you may come out the other end with just a bunch of wheat pennies and you're like ah, nobody takes wheat pennies. So focusing is good and having a craft. And the other thing is just make sure you're aligning- I spent my twenties working with two different people that were very difficult and treated me not well and those around me not well and that took a toll on me. Took a toll on my soul, my heart, my physical body and that didn't need to be there. So as soon as you find that you're working with difficult people at the top that you can't work around and you try everything, control experiment, control experiment, you realize ain't no amount of controls and experiments and prototyping that we're going to do to get out of this, get out. And that's probably the- again I don't live with regrets but leaving sooner than I did- I mean I tried for six years to make it work and it worked in some ways but it worked at the cost of my happiness, literally to the point where I was wanting not to wake up sort of happiness so be careful with that. (Julie) Do we have any other questions? Rachel? Where in your job do you get to be creative? (Leslie) So where in my job do I get to be creative? As a Chief Operating Officer, I was just talking to Katherine Krug in the audience, she's the COO of Everest and you do have a very procedural, back of house rule that may not feel creative and sometimes you don't want it to be creative. You don't want to get creative with accounting, that's eccentric stuff or whatever, Anderson, what is it, no Enron, that's what it was. Sorry, I'm shouting all these names out. So that you don't want to get creative with but early on in a company being- I'm the head of marketing right now, so I get to be creative with our content strategy. PR, HR, getting creative with how you, how you activate and encourage and inspire employees are all things that I love doing. And the job that I had before at Jess3, I was creative in every ounce of what we did. We would hire, street artists from France to help us with an infographic or a tattoo artist from Russia to help us with the typgraphy font that we wanted and we would just go Behance and Dribbble and Flickr and find all of these amazing people and everybody's got a rate. We worked with a guy who did Ren and Stimpy, everybody's got a rate and everybody- I'd rather spend five hours with the guy from Ren and Stimpy than 40 hours with some B player average graphic designer out there so I still bring that out in me. So that's my full-time job. But outside of my full-time job, I'm doing all of these things right now. One I'm working on a book about data-driven storytelling so I get to work with all of my favorite artists. So it's almost like a cookbook style, I'm inviting master chefs in. So there'll be different storytellers coming in to share their recipes. So I feel like that's a really creative expression and then when I'm advising start-ups, it's nice to not have to be actually doing the execution sometimes. I feel like I get real creative with them, you can do this, you can do that. Working with a really awesome start-up called Dormify and they're taking on the matchy-matchy Bed Bath and Beyond, Target, solution for decals and comforters and all of that and it's this awesome woman entrepreneur and her daughter who went to the store and were like, this is it? [Dog barks in background] Woah that was dramatic and cool. I was like, this is it? But Dormify is super creative and I'm looking to find start-ups that are doing more visual storyteling. Some in the textile, because I love fashion, I love big earrings, as you can see from my photo. What I'm wearing now. So yeah, those are some places I can be creative but sometimes not being creative is good too, it's good discipline. (Julie) Jenny. (Jenny) You mentioned Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg as role models, kind of the two classic names that are always brought up when it comes to women in politics, sorry, women in technology and leadership, do you have other suggestions for ways we can amplify stories of women working in technology that aren't just Marissa and Sheryl? (Leslie) Yes, that's so good. I love that. So other than Marissa and Sheryl, who else is out there? How do we amplify their stories? One, I've been writing a blog at Forbes called More Power Seats and it's a playbook to get more women, more power seats at the table. And I have a whole series called The Rise of the Female COO and I've just been on the hunt for female COOs and that's how Katherine and I got connected. Turns out the Obama 2012 Campaign, she was a COO, COO of Huge, the interactive agency. Just a lot of really interesting women. So I'm trying to do my amplification around the operational side. I'm also looking at doing an article rounding up all of the successful female acquisitions. The ones that we all know, you know, Katerina Faye with Flickr. We know Rashmi with SlideShare. We know Victoria Ransom with Wildfire. And then? And there have been other ones right? But I don't know them. So I was going to challenge myself and my team to do some research. So I think part of it is, it's always good with the listicals and doing the roundups and the articles and amplifying people's stories through passing down. I mean think about how myths and seminal works like the bible, these were stories that were passed down and passed across geographies and codified and written down so following the same kind of techniques as our forefathers and mothers, anthropologically we need to be documenting these things, amplifying them, and putting visuals and text behind them and trying to do it at high profile places. So I'm writing at Forbes, I just go an opportunity to start writing at MPR. So I'm just trying to get out there at these and be a strong signal. I was saying also to Julie and using the example earlier, we all need to be a lighthouse and I love that there are so many strong women in the audience but I also love that there are men tonight and I think both of us are called to be responsible for helping amplify those unsung heroes. [dog barks in background] (audience member asks question) (Leslie) So how do you get started or how did I get started in data visualization? Back to earlier and giving Jesse the credit for coming up with the ideas that- he had the idea and then I had the idea of how we could execute it and monetize it. Similar to the Sherly Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg relationship. I've always loved numbers and I've always loved data and math and science have always been something I've thematically loved as a kid and so when Jesse was showing me- we'd go to the [inaudible] Festival and Jonathan Harris was there and Erin Koblan and Khoi Vinh and just seeing all these amazing designers doing interesting things with interfaces and data and they were doing it as individuals. And I was like, there's a business in this at scale so what I kind of did, at Jess3 was built a team of in the end 30 full-time and a few dozen contractors supporting us, is trying to create visualizations at scale. And there are a lot of companies out there doing interesting things that are taking data sets and allowing you to create automated infographics and that type of thing. It's still hard because infographics take a lot of insight and context and copyrighting and you can't necessarily have a computer spit that out just yet. But getting started, it was Jesse seeing the opportunity, being a big fan and early user of Flickr and Delicious and seeing just a massive amount of stuff people are creating and you're like wow, there are trends in this stuff. And storytelling with it and realizing that as people became- and then when Twitter hit that was just, data visualization payload. And we did two projects for the 2008 election. That I was really proud of and I loved. One was for, randomly, Tropicana. They kind of had a me too moment, because Starbucks was doing something and Wrigley's was doing something. Everybody wanted in on this election because it was so epic. And they came to us with 76 hours before the election and they said what can we do? Ahhh... So we went and we pulled somebody's master thesis on Relationships Between Words and we worked with this amazing designer Brian Walter. Look up his stuff he's awesome. And so we worked with Brian. I'm convincing the client. Blocking and tackling, not sleeping and we end up showing the most popular words- ten most popular words at any given time on Twitter as related to Obama and McCain. And it just looked beautiful, it just cascaded like this, you could do it full screen, you could make it embeddable. And it was, we're not red, we're not blue, we're a hundred percent orange. That was my copyrighting, thank you. And that just blew up and it was a successful project. The other one was with C-Span which I was even more proud of because they have such an amazing political product which is agnostic pundit-free content about what's going including even people pulling into the parking lot and the chairs getting unfolded at the debate. They're gabble to gabble coverage as they like to say. And we visualized #aren'tC08 and #dandC08, which at the time, hashtags were just coming out, Chris Messina started the whole movement, but I was the one who suggested those two. They were going to naturally catch on but July 27th 2008, I suggest those and had a lot of political friends and I pitched them out to the left and to the right blogosphere and it caught fire and then we ended up visualizing all of those tweets so anyway. Data vis, it just kind of grew up from there. (Julie) Awesome. (Julie) Any more questions? Okay. Oh, one more. [question from audience inaudible] That's a tough one, I wish my sister was here so you could meet both of us but my mom says that I was born with too much self-confidence and she was born with not enough self-confidence because she's a little more shy. But she's really good at a few things but she won't talk it up that much. Whereas me, I'm like hello world! Like ah! So, some of it is just a personality trait and although I am crazy on stage tonight I'm an introvert at heart, I love reading my books, staying at home- when BuzzFeed came out with that 27 things about introverts, I was like yup, yup, yup. But I think we need to challenge ourselves to feel comfortable in public speaking and speaking up for ourselves and that comes through everything from having maybe a small user group and maybe one every other time you rotate and have someone present. Or I've taken acting classes, I've worked with speech coaches, there are things that you can do if you know your ***, you just need something to amplify it and that's first and foremost your own voice verbally but also written. Being able to not just blog on your own site but I've found, just pitch other sites and a lot of the expert, technical design blogs everyone's looking for content, just say hey I have a guest column idea and sometimes I would write up the entire piece and just say I'm shopping this around a few people. Venture bee, you can just hit submit and it'll just take your article and an editorial team will review it and if you know your stuff and you're a woman and you're talking about technical or design oriented stuff they're totally going to be interested in that, I would say. Women are- if anybody- I highly recommend both men and women read Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, it's a quick read, it's got some great data and stats in it around the fact that women, unless they have all ten qualifications for the job they aren't going to apply for it whereas for men as long as they had three out of the ten, they would apply for it. And I think we can learn something from our brothers across the aisle. Like we don't need to necessarily have, like you said, perfectionism in all those categories and also know our limitations, you know, I will all the time say, hey listen, here are my core skills and crafts, I'm not sitting here telling you how to code or what to code but I do know this is what our deadline is, this is what our budget is. This is what our goals are. How can we achieve that given those constraints and given what you, you're looking at the interface like what do we need to change about it to make it work and, instead of coming in and dictating. If you don't have that skill. (Julie) Cool. (Julie) Thank you guys so much. Thank you Leslie for being here tonight and for being the first speaker in our new office. I hope you guys stick around, grab another drink, there's plenty of *** left. And I'll be around too if anybody wants to talk shop or talk ***, I'll be here. (Julie) Awesome, thank you guys so much. (Leslie) Thank you. [GITHUB PRESENTS Passion Projects] [Leslie Bradshaw]