who did you have to become,
to do what you do?

In terms of big feelings that have changed me over the past three to five years, my first job resulted in me being responsible for the jobs and careers of a bunch of people to some extent. And that is a special kind of stress that I hadn't experienced before. From recruiting through being manager of people to being co-founder who has some input on the direction of the company, I'm considering all the humans that I see every day that are super excited to work on this, that are learning as I'm learning. And my responsibility to them is to facilitate their growth and to give them as much as I can towards that while also making sure that they have a job long term if I can help it, right? Rejections are really hard. Layoffs are really hard. And those are things I hadn't dealt with before. I hope that I always did these things in a way that's empathetic and generally in a way that does minimal harm to the people that I've worked with. I'm fairly confident that that is the case. I think I did pretty good and I'm not perfect. And in general, I think that I've done my best for the people I've worked with. That prepared me to be a leader and a founder again in a way that nothing else could. It caused some of the biggest feelings that I had throughout the startup journey, for sure. It was about people and doing my best for the people I'm working with. — Thank you for sharing that. And I could tell, like, there is a lot that's going on within you, and you're sort of describing it in a pretty factual way. — Yes, this is what I mentioned. I tend to be super even-keel, particularly when talking about things that made me feel big feelings.

So I left New York in 2017 and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was interesting because I left New York and, perhaps, I was having a lot of anxiety. My anxiety was really out of hand. And I thought that being in New Mexico — like being in the desert for the sunsets and the nature — would calm me down. And it did not. You know, I think there's that great expression: wherever you go, there you are. And there I was. So I was just anxious in the desert rather than being anxious in the city. I remember once I was cooking ravioli — because I did get much better at cooking — but I was making homemade ravioli and I got really frustrated and just started throwing the ravioli at the wall. And I was like, what is my life here? I'm like throwing these ravioli against a wall in the middle of the desert. But, you know, I do think it gave me space to do work that I needed to do, but it certainly didn't do that work for me.

Obviously, this is something we've been moving towards for thousands of years. Writing, in a way, was a way of passing knowledge from generation to generation, and we've accelerated that now. AI really is just a continuation of that experiment, that process of passing knowledge, sharing knowledge. Where it goes, I don't know. My husband, for example, has AI in his body. He has a computer. He has a bad back, and he has a computer in his back that has, I think, 42 probes that go up into his spine and attach to, I believe, like, nerves — so that when pain is coming up from his back and from his legs, those probes stop the pain, mess it up, so it can't get to his brain. So what was interesting was that right after he got the AI — and he has to charge his body, he has a charger that he wears once a week or so that has to charge the AI in him, the computer in him — when he first got it, he began to… he felt suddenly very emotional. He would cry on television commercials, things that were very sentimental would really touch him very deeply, to the point of tearing up or just having a different sort of response than I had ever heard from him, where he would say, oh, that's so beautiful. I had never heard that from him. And not that he's not a sensitive person, but he said to me, you know, it's changed me. And maybe it had to do with not being in pain all the time. Maybe it was that simple. But on the other hand, maybe it was changing the way his brain was wired.

You know, my primary motivation back then, like I mentioned, wasn't even thinking about any product, company, whatsoever. Give me a job that does something interesting. Like, I actually want to be a real engineer, writing code, building products. I thought that's my job going to be if you join an engineer. Like I told you, I went to Microsoft just sitting there doing nothing, right? I was just like, can I find something somewhere I can work on something real so I can actually grow as an engineer? And my first startup I joined, it was the only available option for me. But luckily for me, that company didn't work out for a whole bunch of reasons. And I just don't remember it. But that was a company where there's so much freedom to do things because it's solely funded by Paul Allen. So Paul Allen is one of the Microsoft co-founders, right? He has so much money. This is one of his experiment companies. Like, hey, go try out this little social-experiments company and see if we can make it as a company. If we don't, I'll just fund you, you know, for a while. So nobody's there to make money in that company. I realized: if you don't make money-making as a goal for a company, you will be a very weird company. So I learned that pretty early. What does it feel like to be a company that doesn't care about revenue? But it actually helped my growth as an engineer because I was working on real systems end-to-end myself. And it was so very rewarding — you know, it got me real programming skills because I was actually building stuff myself a lot. So anyway, at that time, I wasn't caring about, like, does your company going to grow? And I'm like, how do I know? I'm just an engineer trying to make it. But it's funny, like, how life works, right? You know, we join companies without really thinking a lot of factors. But, like, when I'm looking back, a lot of these places I joined actually helped me quite a bit, even what I'm doing today. — And so what are some points that were sort of imprinted in your head when you were just, like, randomly bouncing and just trying to make it as an engineer? — Ah, I would say, like, randomly bouncing — you know, the reason I put that company shut down at that time, because recruiters ask me why I keep switching jobs, you know. Not all of them is my choice. This one didn't work out, you know, I was kind of following my own interests, plus what I think will be a fun place to work at. And, you know, I'm a gamer. So I went to a game company afterwards. And that's the most fun in my ever had as an engineer, because I was working on games, working on back end of the games. I'm the only engineer working the whole back end and was a pretty popular game back then. So it was a very rewarding thing. But I got to taste the game development culture, right, which is pretty toxic, for sure. So I realized, OK, the culture thing actually matters. You know, I can't just be forever not sleeping and have to be taxied back to the company after sleeping there for two days or something like that. You know, I end up being threatened and all that kind of stuff that happens quite often. — And what do you mean by threatened? — Like, if you don't come in and sleep in the office on an ongoing basis, you're going to have different issues and stuff like that. Weekends are by default thinking that you're going to be working or be in the office by default. So anyway, this is just interesting, like, being in a game environment like this — I can't stay there that long. And my wife is super unhappy, you know, just like, it's just too crazy.