5 Minute Mentor

Ryan Singel is a journalist and entrepreneur based in San Francisco. As a journalist he has covered tech policy, privacy, social networking, startups, and many other technology topics. He co-founded the award-winning Threat Level blog at Wired. Ryan is the founder of Contextly, a company that makes editorial tools for news sites and other publications.

Rebecca Parsons, a technologist with over 30 years of experience. Throughout her career, she’s made significant contributions to software design patterns, system architectures, distributed systems, and best practices in software. Rebecca is currently the CTO of ThoughtWorks. Rebecca Parsons is one of the authors of "Building Evolutionary Architectures".

Chris Kluwe is a former NFL player for the Minnesota Vikings. In his eight seasons with the Vikings, Chris set eight individual team records. During this period, he was also an outspoken advocate for same sex marriage and gay rights. Chris is the author of Otaku, a novel that combines his love for science fiction, games, and equal rights.

Kara Swisher is a technology journalist and host of Sway, a podcast about power by The New York Times. Kara has been covering technology since the 1990s. She is one of the first reporters on the internet beat in Silicon Valley. She was the co-producer of the technology conference “D: All Things Digital”, where she interviewed major tech figures, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Kara has hosted hundreds of newsmaking interviews with other prominent figures such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Stacey Abrams, Kim Kardashian, and President Barack Obama.

Steve Jobs was the co-founder of Apple Inc. He was a pioneer of personal computers, entrepreneur and designer. He led significant innovations in various areas: music, technology, film, hardware. Steve had a notable impact in changing how people use and interact with technology. This excerpt originally appeared in Steve Jobs: Secrets of Life, a film produced by the Silicon Valley Historical Association. You can find information about the film at siliconvalleyhistorical.org.

Don Clark is a Musician and Journalist. He's been writing about technology since 1980. Don is currently a freelance journalist for The New York Times. Previously, he worked at The Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle. Don also plays music professionally in several bands such as the Irish band Blind Duck and the rock band Off the Record.

Celia Stahr is an author, art historian and professor at the University of San Francisco. Celia specializes in modern American and contemporary art with an emphasis on feminist art and gender studies. She’s the author of the book “Frida in America”, a book that focuses on Frida Kahlo's personal and creative awakening while living in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York during the Great Depression. For more information about the book go to fridakahlojourney.com.

Tal Rabin is Head of Research at the Algorand Foundation. She is a researcher that focuses on cryptography and security. For over 22 years she was the Head of the Cryptographic Research Group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Asya Kamsky started her career in technology in the late 80s. Throughout her career, she’s worked at different companies and held various roles. She’s currently Principal Developer Advocate at MongoDB. This is their advice.

Bill Barnes has been in the tech industry for over 30 years. He also successfully ran the web-based comic Unshelved for 14 years and turned it into a diversified media business. He's currently Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft.

Tracy Stone has over 15 years of experience in high-tech companies in technical and leadership roles. She’s passionate about inspiring and encouraging girls in science, technology, engineering and math. She's Global Head of the Tech Women Program at Intuit.

Fred Lyon is a professional photographer since the early 1940's. His work spans the news, architecture, advertising, wine and food. His picture credits have been everywhere from LIFE to VOGUE and beyond. For seven decades he’s extensively photographed the city of San Francisco. He is the author of several photography books, his latest one is  "Vineyards".

Raji has been working in the technology industry since the early 2000s. Most recently she’s held various executive roles. Raji is passionate about applying technology innovations to create great product experiences. Raji is Senior Vice President at Intuit.

Nimmi Ramanujam is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. As a student, Nimmi was diagnosed with cervical cancer. This experience led her to develop a portable cervical cancer screening device and work on improving women’s health. Nimmi is also a professional musician since a very young age.

Jen Easterly was in the US Army for 20 years. She joined as an intelligence officer and served in command and staff positions around the world. She worked on the Army's first cyber operations unit. Jen then worked as Deputy for Counterterrorism at the National Security Agency. She's currently Managing Director at Morgan Stanley.

Dana Lorberg is Executive Vice President of Operations and Technology at Mastercard. She joined the company in 1987 and was part of the team that programmed and designed some of the early systems at Mastercard.

Heather Winkle has over 20 years of experience in design, product strategy and leadership in Silicon Valley. She led the User Experience Design for products at Apple, Adobe, eBay, Yahoo, Intuit, and Netscape. Currently she is Head of Design at Capital One.

Felix Rieseberg is a Tech Lead at Slack and creator and maintainer of various open source projects like Electron, Windows95 and others. He's also author of "Introducing Electron". Prior to Slack he worked at Microsoft and Apfeltalk.

Natalya Bailey is CEO of Accion Systems, a company that provides in-space propulsion engines for satellites and spacecraft. Natalya completed her doctorate degree in space propulsion at MIT, where she helped invent the first working prototype of an ion engine technology for small satellites, this served as the foundation for Accion Systems. She is also an investor and operating partner in XFactor Ventures 2, a female-led venture fund investing in companies with a female founder.

Maria de Alva is a Mexican Novelist. Two of her novels were finalists for the award Fernando Lara de Novela in Spain. Between 1993 and 1995, she worked as a reporter for the newspapers: Reforma and El Norte in Mexico. She graduated from UCLA with a masters degree in Latin American Studies. Maria also has a masters degree in Education from Tecnologico de Monterrey. She has participated in several academic conferences at universities such as UNAM, Brown University, Texas University, among others.

Merrie Williamson is a technology leader with over 20 years of experience building strategic programs, multifaceted organizations, corporate partnerships and delivering revenue. She's currently Vice President of Azure Apps and Infrastructure at Microsoft. Prior to that she worked at Intel Corporation.

Lisa Reeves started her career in technology in the early 90s. She's currently Senior Vice President of Product at Zenefits. For over 14 years she worked at SAP, a company that builds enterprise software since the 1970s. Lisa's interest in emerging technologies and innovation evolved into a career in venture capital, both in corporate Venture Capital and traditional Venture Capital.

Shannon Rugani was a member of the San Francisco Ballet for over 11 years. She has worked with world renowned Choreographers and has danced all over the world including France, Iceland, China, Denmark, England and the United States. Shannon left SFBallet in 2015 to join the original cast of Tony Award winning An American In Paris on Broadway. Shannon is also an accomplished composer on the piano and has written music for a short film called Freefall directed by Luke Willis in 2012 among other projects. She is currently focused on her music career as a singer/songwriter performing under the stage name EMPRESS.

Angela Guzman is a designer and entrepreneur based out of Silicon Valley. She co-designed the original set of Apple's emoji back in 2008. Over the last decade, Angela has worked for Google, Airbnb, and Apple in user experience, interaction, and visual design. She studied Industrial and Graphic Design from 2002–2009 at the Rhode Island School of Design. Angela is currently the founder and CEO of her new startup Tijiko.

Kelsey is a Staff Developer Advocate at Google. Kelsey has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration.

Leslie Lamport is an American computer scientist. Lamport is best known for his seminal work in distributed systems and as the initial developer of the document preparation system LaTeX. Leslie Lamport was the winner of the 2013 Turing Award for imposing clear, well-defined coherence on the seemingly chaotic behavior of distributed computing systems, in which several autonomous computers communicate with each other by passing messages. He devised important algorithms and developed formal modeling and verification protocols that improve the quality of real distributed systems. These contributions have resulted in improved correctness, performance, and reliability of computer systems.

Kelley Rivoire is an Engineering Manager at Stripe, an American technology company valued at 22 billion in 2019. Kelley worked on building the company's first real-time Machine Learning model for evaluation of user risk. Prior to that, Kelley studied Physics at MIT and a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

Brendan Burns is a Co-Founder of the open source Kubernetes project and a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. He works on various technologies like: DevOps, containers, and open source.

Seth Godin, founder of the altMBA, author and entrepreneur, gives advice about habits. In addition to launching one of the most popular blogs in the world, he has written 18 best-selling books, including The Dip, Linchpin, Purple Cow, Tribes, and What To Do When It's Your Turn (And It's Always Your Turn).

Miriam came to the United States when she was very young and spoke very little English. She went on to study Computer Science at MIT and work at various companies. In this episode, she gives advice on getting a job promotion.

Paula Paul, Distinguished Engineer, has been working in technology since the 80s where she worked at IBM where they shipped their first product in magnetic tape! Since then, she's worked in various other areas in technology. Paula is passionate about equal opportunities for technical literacy. In this episode, Paula gives advice on what to do when you feel discouraged.