Podcasts about atlas institute

Where your attention goes, your focus grows - but are you really conscious of where you're spending your most valuable asset? This episode is going to change the way you use social media & spend time online FOREVER. If you, like me, are grappling with your relationship with the internet, the next hour is just for you. I want to help you take back control of where you focus your attention, take back your creativity & learn how to use your most powerful resource to its full potential. Annie Margaret is a teaching professor in the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado and an attention activist. CONNECT WITH US Connect with ⁠That's Helpful on Instagram. Find Annie via her website & on Instagram. OTHER HELPFUL LINKSAnnie's online course Social media addiction survey PODCASTSPreserving Childhood in an Age of Tech-Driven Advertising with Dr Susan Linn This episode discusses: social media, attention economy, mental health, distraction, technology, creativity, algorithms, parenting, media consumption, psychological effects, media consumption, social media detox, agency, identity shift, young people, digital age, attention economy, joy, inspiration, self-awareness.

In this April edition of our Military Family Life podcast - in honour of the Month of the Military Child - we are focusing on Military children. Kayla Lamrock has experience as a military child, a military spouse and working at an MFRC with children and youth.In this episode Kayla talks about her experiences of deployments and postings from the perspective of a military family member.  She also talks about what it is like to support a loved one with an operational stress injury, and the work she does now to support youth navigating the challenges of military family life. Finally, Kayla gives advice to parents on how they can support their children through challenges.Trigger warning:  In this conversation we touch on topics such as PTSI and suicidal thoughts.  Please listen with care.About our guest:Born to an Infantry soldier, the military lifestyle was all Kayla knew. At thirteen, Kayla recalls what it was like to move away from Petawawa, her military community, and into a small town where being from a military family was much different from the experiences of her peers. Now, with a diploma in Early Childhood Education and a degree in Family Studies & Sociology, Kayla advocates for and provides support for military youth navigating the unique challenges of this lifestyle. Most recently, Kayla has been on the advisory board for the development and implementation of Mind Kit, a website for youth and a Suicide Prevention & Intervention Guide for military families. Learn more about Mindkit a space for youth to explore the topic of mental health. It was created by the Atlas Institute with young Family members of Canadian Veterans living with a posttraumatic stress injury (PTSI). https://mindkit.ca 

I get guest suggestions often, very often in fact, and almost all of them are for amazing photographers, but on occasion the suggestion stops me in my tracks. On those very rare occasions, no matter where I am or what I am doing, the photographer is so good that I need to ask them to be on the show right then. This is an example... On April 13th I saw that I had a DM on Instagram from Jaime (@elespaiz) making a suggestion that I do a show about a specific image, a global publicity photo for "Jurassic World Dominion". What was interesting to me is that the link Jaime sent was to a series of behind the scenes images for the shoot, and the description was fascinating. The next post from the photographer showed the end result, and it was amazing. At this point, some browsing was in order. What I found was some of the absolute best photography I have seen. Let me pause for a moment to say something important. If you have listened to the show for any period of time then you know I love looking at great images. I find many of my guest's works to be some of the best you'll find, but this photographer was different. The photographer was Art Streiber, and it seems most every one I know is very familiar with Art. In fact, after being invited to a student exhibit at California Baptist University by the director of the photography program, Christopher Kern, I mentioned to him that I was excited about a new potential guest. He response was that he'd known Art for years. I'm embarrassed to say that I wasn't aware of Art Streiber before Jaime's message. How on earth had I never seen Art's work before? To be more specific, I most likely had seen his work before, and probably had seen it often, but I was completely unaware of Art. I am hoping that with this show I help you avoid that embarrassment. Art is a Los Angeles-based freelance photographer specializing in portrait, reportage, entertainment, and advertising photography, and for the last decade, Streiber's imagery has been selected to appear in American Photography and Communication Arts Photography Annual. To put his talent in perspective, let me list a few of his clients... Starting with Editorial clients we have the likes of Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, Wired, New York, Fortune, ESPN, GQ and The New York Times Magazine. His Entertainment clients include ABC, CBS, NBC, HBO, A&E, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, TBS, TNT, The CW, IFC, MTV, SyFy Channel, Showtime, TVLand, Universal Studios, Columbia-TriStar, Dreamworks, Paramount, STX, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. Studios. For Advertising clients we have Chase Bank, KFC, Kohler, Cadillac, Miller Lite, Heineken, Subway, Farmers Insurance, Oakley and Disneyland. Art Streiber is at the top of the game. As an educator, Art has lectured at the International Center of Photography, The Santa Fe Workshops, Art Center College of Design, PDN's Photo Plus, Savannah College of Art & Design, ATLAS Institute at University of Colorado at Boulder and at The Stanford Publishing Course - his BA in Communications is from Stanford by the way. Having been honored by American Photo Magazine, the Pacific Design Center and the Los Angeles Center of Photography, it seems I am not the only one that is struck by the amazing imagery he creates, and as you hear in this show, he creates his shots... at times with very complex sets, production, and post work. For me, what sums up Art's work best, and perhaps the biggest compliment I can give him, is that I see the clear inspiration he draws from the great portrait, fashion and documentary photographers of the mid 20th Century. Today's image is a perfect example. As we were picking the image for this show, which wasn't easy at all considering there are about 100 of his shots I have questions about, Art described a few images to me as "BIG productions under intense parameters". That's intriguing. He described these shoots as "a window onto productions that perhaps your listeners don't experience / w...

My guest on this episode is Wayne Seltzer who is lifelong fixer himself. He started the U-Fix-It Clinic in Boulder, Colorado to help others learn to fix things. Wayne helped put the "you" in Fixit Clinics, making sure they empowered people to learn to do the repairs themselves rather than having an expert do it for them. Wayne's article in the current issue shares the story of how he started his own repair business one summer in New Jersey. You'll get to know Wayne and his life story from the kid doing repairs in the summer to an MIT student, to a Bell Labs intern to working at Sun Microsystems. Now retired Wayne is a technologist in residence at the "Blow Things Up" lab in the Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We talk about waffle irons, battery powered, lawn mowers, clogged vacuums, overheated hairdryers, transistor radios that his father worked on to digital radios that have become disabled by their manufacturers and all kinds of things that might be thrown into landfills when they could be repaired and reused. https://www.boulderufixitclinic.org/homehttps://makezine.com/2022/03/04/share-the-repair-with-wayne-seltzer/

Throwback! Brands from burger chains to sports teams have been reverting to previous logos, designs, and colors. Shameless nostalgia mining OR trendy reverence for designs of yore? What did our audience decide? Join Aaron, Matt, and professor Danny Rankin, to find out! ATLAS Institute: https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/ Register to vote during the future live recordings at https://www.crowdcast.io/sketchup_official. Website: https://sketchup.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sketchup Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sketchup_official/ Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/sketchup Forum: https://forums.sketchup.com/ SketchUp Campus: https://learn.sketchup.com/ 3D Warehouse: https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/ 

In this week’s episode, LaChaun speaks with Shanel Wu. Shanel is a Taiwanese-American, nonbinary, queer, maker who uses their fiber skills to entangle craft and tech. Shanel works with smart textiles, weaving, computational craft, and hardware hacking all while pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Technology Design, at ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado Boulder. www.gistyarn.com/episode-137

This week on the show Bec and Geraldo sit down with Shaz Zamore (they/them) who currently serves as the STEAM Outreach Coordinator at the ATLAS Institute at UC Boulder. We talk about their graduate and postdoctoral resaearch, why science communication is so important, their experiences as a queer, non-binary POC, and so much more. Follow Shaz on Twitter @TheDoctaZ and us @MFQCPod. Enjoy and we'll see y'all next week! And remember, Black Trans Lives Matter today and everyday!

Alicia Gibb (@pipix) joined Elecia to talk about open source hardware, the OSHW association (@ohsummit), using trademarks for quality control, and light-up LEGO blocks. Alicia is the editor and author of Building Open Source Hardware: DIY Manufacturing for Hackers and Makers. It is a handy resource for any manufacturing. Alicia is the director of the Blow Things Up Lab, part of the Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. Light up LEGO blocks are available at Build Upons. The LilyPad Arduino has many sewable electronics components. You can find more talks and hacks on Alicia’s personal site, aliciagibb.com.

Lucy Sanders is CEO and Co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) and also serves as Executive-in-Residence for the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU). We talk about how NCWIT was started, its goals, and Felicia fangirls just a tad! We also cover topics including unconscious bias and the pipeline problem. In the intro, we discuss our weekends, Felicia's coursework at Georgetown, and be warned-- we talk a little bit about the new season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend! For more She Geeks Out, visit www.shegeeksout.com

ATLAS Institute Today we are joined in the studio with Mark Gross of the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society institute at CU and Alicia Gibb Director of The Blow Things Up Lab, one of the spaces part of the ATLAS department. ATLAS was formed in 1997 as a university wide initiative to integrate information technology into social endeavour. ATLAS events: http://atlas.colorado.edu/wordpress/?page_id=99 BTU Lab: http://www.btulab.com/about Firefighters and Climate Change Snowy frigid weather here in February may put wildfires way on the back burner for many of us here in Colorado. But as fire managers have been telling us, wildfire season has become a year-round phenomenon. In the last decade or so wildfires have been getting more intense, and more dangerous, and more frequent.  No one knows this better than the firefighters themselves. Climate change—making the region hotter and drier—has a lot to do with it. But so does fire management—namely, fire suppression over recent decades. And humans living in houses in the so-called wildland-urban interface is another culprit. A new documentary that will be screened in Boulder this week documents the changes taking place with wildfires and the impact they’re having. The film is called “Unacceptable Risk: Firefighters on the Front Lines of Climate Change.” One of the film’s creators, journalist Dan Glick, joins us in the studio. Dan was also the science editor of the National Climate Assessment that came out last year. Our other guest is Don Whittemore, a long-time firefighter. He was incident commander on the massive Fourmile Canyon Fire of September 2010. More about the film can be found at unacceptableriskfilm.org. Hosts: Kendra Krueger and Susan Moran Executive Producer, Producer and Engineer: Kendra Krueger Additional Contributions: Beth Bennett and Jane Palmer Listen here:

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Carol Realini CEO and Founder, Obopay Date: April 7, 2009 Carol Realini: Obopay [intro] Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO for the National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT, and this is one in a series of interviews with fantastic entrepreneurs, women who have started IT companies. With me is Larry Nelson, w3w3.com. Larry, how are you? Larry Nelson: Absolutely magnificent, kind of jittery a little bit. We just launched our Internet TV show, so things are going good. Lucy: And the name of the Internet TV show is... Larry: "Colorado Rising." Lucy: So everybody, be careful, he's after you for not just audio interviews now but live TV as well. Larry: You bet. Lucy: With us today we have Carol Realini. She's the founder and CEO of Obopay, and before that a very distinguished career in a number of high tech companies including Cordiant. Obopay is the first truly comprehensive mobile payment service in the United States, and it's really cool. You go on the website and you can basically send money to your kids. If you're kids, you can get money. I'm trying to figure out how to get my parents to do this for me even now. Larry: Yeah, I've got five kids. I appreciate that. Lucy: [laughs] And we're really happy to talk to Carol. Welcome, Carol. Carol Realini: Thank you. Happy to talk to you guys. Lucy: Oh, great. Why don't you tell us a bit about Obopay. It's a great company and it has a wonderful value proposition. Carol: Absolutely. First, I just want to say I assume you are all in Colorado today. And I'm a longtime San Francisco-born Californian, born and raised here. But I spent five years living outside of California and that was living in Colorado, and I love Colorado. Lucy: Well any time you want to come visit us. [laughter] Larry: That's a deal. Carol: Absolutely. Lucy: That's a deal. Carol: I love Colorado. So let me just give you a little background on myself, and then I'll talk about the founding of Obopay and what we do and a little bit about the company. I am a four-time entrepreneur, so this is my fourth company from the ground up. Lucy: Wow. Carol: First one, I wasn't the founder but I was a very early employee at Legato, which became a very large storage management software company which was bought by EMC. That company went public and then was bought. The next company, I was the founder of a consulting company that focused in the early '90s on helping people migrate to distributed computing. And this was when big companies around the world were trying to figure out how to leverage the client server and PC technology that was emerging. And then the next company was Cordiant Software, and I founded that and raised the venture capital for that company and was the CEO until just before the company went public. And it went public in 2000 and is still a public company. And then I retired from that and thought I wasn't ever going to work again. I'd had a fantastic career in technology, really started in the mid-'70s when it was really about mainframe. And I retired thinking I would never work again, and actually moved to Colorado and ended up getting involved in some nonprofits which were focused on fostering entrepreneurship in developing countries around the world. As a result of that, I was traveling in places I would have never normally traveled, places in rural Africa, rural Latin America, and was quite taken in 2002 with the number of mobile phones that I would see in very far away places where there was no electricity, no clean water. You would find that there was a growing number of people that had mobile phones. And this is the year 2002 when there was about a billion phones on the planet. And since my last three companies had really focused on financial service software primarily, and I had spent a lot of my time in the financial services industry building software from the biggest financial service companies in the world, I ended up starting to think about, well if there are mobile phones in all these places, maybe we could use those mobile phones to start delivering financial services to everybody with a mobile phone. It was a real simple idea, but it was exciting for me to think about the possibility that someday most people would have mobile phones, and those mobile phones could then bring convenience and access to banking like we've never seen before. So that idea got under my skin and by 2004, late 2004, early 2005, I funded some research where we went around the world and looked at some of the very early implementations of mobile payments and mobile banking. And once the research report was done, the way I think about it and this is the way it happened, when I started the research report, my career was behind me. When I finished the research report, my career was in front of me. Lucy: That's great. Larry: Yeah. Carol: Yeah. And I decided I just had to come back to work and use all my experience as an entrepreneur and technologist to build a company to deliver mobile payments and mobile banking to every mobile phone. So that was 2005, and I've worked almost every day since I made that decision. And I'm sitting in my office in Redwood City where I spend a lot of my time now. And the company is about 150 people now. And we are operating the service in the US and India, and we're in the planning stages to rolling it out in Africa and in Europe. And we get a call almost everyday from different parts of the world saying when can Obopay think about coming to this country or that country. Lucy: How did you choose the name for the company, Carol? Carol: The big idea is everybody with a mobile phone will get access to payment services and banking services through their mobile phone. And if you think about that, it's such a big idea because if you look at traditional banking, it serves let's say a billion and a half people on the planet, whereas already there are over four billion mobile phones. And so you can imagine that the people that have bank accounts and have mobile phones can benefit from it. But there are also a lot of people that don't get access to banking that will now have it because they have a mobile phone and there's a ways for these services to be offered to those people. In addition, people are still using a lot of cash, right, and sometimes checks. And my belief is that mobile payments and mobile banking will eliminate cash from use. And it's such a big idea if you think about it. About $7 trillion of transactions a year are done in cash still today. And I believe that in the future we won't be using cash, we'll be doing electronic transactions between mobile phones. For that reason, when we looked to name the company we said, wow do we relate to this big idea that someday this will replace cash? And we found that obol, O-B-O-L, is a greek coin that has been obsolete maybe a thousand years. And so we took an obsolete coin as a concept that we put in our company name. Lucy: That's fascinating, and the story of the company is interesting as well. And I would love to follow up with you because I think that the people here at the Atlas Institute at the University of Colorado - Boulder, they're starting an ITC4D program here. So they would probably be interested in having you speak. So that's really interesting. And you've been a technologist for a long time and our first question centers around that. How did you first get into technology? And as a technologist, what are the technologies you see as being especially interesting today? Carol: I first got into technology in the mid-'70s. I was a mathematician and I was teaching math at a local university, and found the computer science department and decided in my spare time to get a computer science advanced degree. It was a natural transition for me. I was doing math because I was good at it and I loved it but it wasn't my passion. But once I got involved in computers I got very passionate about computers and specifically software. So that's how I got into technology. And you know in the mid-'70s, Silicon Valley was a very small community, so a lot of my professors worked at IBM or Hewlett Packard. Once I started taking classes from these folks it was just very easy to understand what was going on in the industry and I very quickly opted in. And matter of fact, I ended up leaving my teaching position and starting work six months before I finished my degree. Larry: Oh, good. Well you've had a chance to work for others and the nonprofit experience you had, why are you an entrepreneur and what is it about entrepreneurship that makes you tick? Carol: I started my career as a typical software engineer and ended up starting to get into management. And I was quite successful in management positions. Something happened to me about six years into my career. I thought when I was working for this big company that my aspiration was to be an executive at a company like that, but I got involved in a project almost by accident. It was an entrepreneurial project within a big company, and it changed me. The company I worked for, which was a hardware company - it's called Amdol - decided they wanted to do a commercial product based on UNIX. Because UNIX was just an internal AT&T Bell Labs technology, and I negotiated the first commercial license for UNIX. And we ended up building the operating system and then providing it as a high-end version of UNIX out into the marketplace. And this all happened very quickly, it was very entrepreneurial, they were a handful of people in a big company and we built a whole business around this new operating system that we built. It was amazing. People would tell us "You'll never get this done," that nobody would ever buy it. And so I got involved in that and I saw about 15 people. We moved a mountain just by saying we we're going to do this. And I had that experience and I said, wow, I really love doing this and I'm good at it. I got a taste of it from that and then, once the project got mature and was mainstreamed, I decided that I couldn't go back into the mainstream, I had to go be an entrepreneur. I left and then I went to work at a company that was just about to go public, which was a database company - I think of that as my transition job. And then I got a phone call about 18 months after that, where somebody asked me to do a company from the ground. So that's how I got into it. I think that I had it in my blood, in my desire. I'm not sure if I would have been an entrepreneur if I hadn't had the early experience of how powerful it is. Also, I managed my career even before I left this big company, I had experience in marketing and sales. When you're an entrepreneur, you have to wear a lot of hats. You especially have to wear a sales hat. You have to go out and get the initial customers, you have to go out and get the initial founders or employees to work with you, you have to get the original investors. That is a sales job. And so somehow I've been able to over the years be quite successful at evangelizing new ideas and bringing on employees and customers and venture capital. And that's been something that I'm just good at and I love to do. Lucy: Well you know those are all UNIX projects. I'm from Bell Labs and we were probably one of your Amdol customers. [laughs] Those were fun times for sure, and it does sound like you have entrepreneurship in your blood. In terms of who influenced you, can you look back - you had an experience that influenced you at Amdol, and another experience at the database company - were there particular people or mentors along the way that influenced you? Carol: Yeah, I think there were. I was aware of what some other people were doing, so I think I was inspired by some of these early entrepreneurs. Famous ones, like Bill Gates and Judy Estrin. Or fhe less famous ones, just people I knew in Silicon Valley - I was inspired by those people. So I think, one thing that happened to me when I ended up becoming an entrepreneur -- if you had met me before I took my first CEO job, you would have said "Well, this woman..." Lone Ranger, I used to call myself. I would take on projects and I would do them, and I would have people working for me, but I didn't need any help. That was my attitude. When I started my first company that was venture-backed, for some reason I decided that I needed to change my style. I said, you know, I need help, because I've never done this before. And raising venture capital seems really hard, building a company from the ground up. I've kind of been involved in it in kind of different ways, but this seemed a really big task. So I decided to change my style and ask for help. I'd been around for a long time so I knew a lot of people, but I had actually never asked anyone for help, never in my entire career. And so when I wrote my first business plan for Cordiant, which is where I first raised venture capital, I sent the business plan to 50 people I knew, who had either raised venture capital or would know how to do it. And what was so interesting about that is that I've never asked for help before, and people were so honored that I had reached out to them for help, I got this wave of help from all these really great CEOs or venture capitalists. And that was the reason I'm here today. It was actually because I figured out that it wasn't just about me doing something. Being an entrepreneur and having a big idea, you need a lot of help. So when I reached out to these people, a lot of those folks became mentors to me and became advisers to me. And I remember, when I was raising my first round of funding, I said, look, if I'm successful at this -- and I thought this is the hardest thing I've ever done, If I'm successful, I'm going to help other people do this. You know, over the years, I've turned around and done the same thing for other folks and helped other people who were trying to raise venture capital or start companies. And something I really like to do is give back, because it was so important to me to have those experienced people help me. Larry: Wow. Carol, you know you have a number of happy, successful stories, but I'd like to ask another kind of question. If you were to pick the one, single time - I'm sure you had challenges along the way - but one, single toughest decision that you had to make in your career. Carol: Business decisions? Larry: Yeah, business-related. Carol: I'll tell you, there's a lot of tough decisions you make every day. I mean, when you're an entrepreneur, it's important to figure out what you can't do, or what you shouldn't do right now. I think one thing is, at big companies you might have the luxury to do most of the things you think are the right things to do. But in a small company, an emerging company, a new company, you have to choose every day what is it I have to do now, and what is it I can afford to do right now? And you have to make that decision every day, and people come to you and they lobby, or customers come to you. And you just have to be good at prioritizing and saying no. And that is a tough decision, but I can't point out one time I said no. It's just that every day, you have to learn to say no. Larry: OK. Carol: Hire this person, go after this opportunity. So that's sort of the tougher part, the tough decisions I make. Probably some of the more challenging business decisions were really around timing of expansion. Larry: Ah. Carol: So if you think about it, Cordiant wouldn't be where it is today if it hadn't made a decision to, very early on in the company's evolution, to expand into Europe. So they made a decision while they were in the US market for six months, they decided to go to Europe. And that was a tough decision to make because it was an expensive decision. But it turned out to be a very good decision. Hard to execute on, but a really important strategic move. Obopay has made that same decision. From the beginning, we decided that, to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish, which is deliver financial services to every mobile phone, we had to be willing to build a service that could work in places like the US, as well as India. And the only way to really know that is to build it from the beginning with that in mind, and then go to those markets and prove that it worked in both markets. That was a very tough decision to make because it's a very expensive decision, and it requires the ability to execute on two different markets. Lucy: You've given us a lot of pointers that would be helpful to people who are considering being entrepreneurs. For example, you said it became important to you to ask for help. I think you said, "Get to like sales," you know, and, "Learn how to prioritize and learn to say no." And I think the story about expansion into Europe is an indicator as well of taking educated risks and getting out there and really growing the company. What other advice would you give a young person who's considering being an entrepreneur? Carol: I think you can't learn to be an entrepreneur in a classroom. So I think you have to be willing to take jobs that help you build skills and experience so that you're able to be an entrepreneur and be good at it. You know, some people come out of school, like I was reading about the founder of Facebook, I mean, phenomenal story. He's 24 years old and he founded Facebook. I mean, that's incredible, but a lot of entrepreneurs don't get there that way. They end up having jobs that give them good skills and experience that prepare them to be an entrepreneur. So unless you're like the Facebook founder, I suggest you think about, "OK. What's the next job I could take in the company I'm at or in a different company that will help me get skills and experience I need to be an entrepreneur." So for example, let's say you're not good at strategic stuff, which is like what you need to be good at to raise venture capital, what you need to be good at to go out and get your first set of business partners in your business. If that's true and you're not good at it, you should get a job in an opportunity where you figure out how to be good at that, where you're tested, where you're trained, where you have to do it, because that's going to help you build the competency that you need and better prepare you to be an entrepreneur. I want to say one other thing about that. I knew in my heart I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I remember one time I tried to get a sales job at a company. I won't mention which company, but I tried to get a job being a sales person, because I kind of knew I needed to be better at this. And I remember the person I went to who liked me a lot, said, "Oh, well, you're a girl. Nobody's going to buy a million dollar product from you." [laughter] Lucy: I'm sorry. Larry: Yeah. Carol: But, you know, at the time that was their point of view. But I remember thinking, "You know what, that is not going to stop me. That's this person." Lucy: Absolutely. Carol: And, you know, it may have been conventional wisdom that a girl couldn't do this job, but it didn't faze me at all, and I said, "Oh, OK. That's your opinion. I better go find my sales opportunity someplace else." And I think you have to have that in your DNA to be an entrepreneur. You have to be the kind of person that has the kind of vision and direction and drive that when some obstacle gets in front of you, it's not that it's not real, but you figure out how to manage beyond that obstacle. Lucy: Absolutely, being relentless. Larry: Relentless. Lucy: We've heard that a lot, relentless, persistent. Carol: Yeah. Larry: Yeah. Lucy: Yeah, resourceful. Carol: The other thing I was going to say about building the expertise to be an entrepreneur, I have two other things to say about that. You can never be everything. You can't be all things to all people. There's some things that maybe the perfect entrepreneur would do that I'm not good at. So you also need to understand where your limitations are and surround yourself with a team that collectively has the skills to pull off the business. So you're not going to ever be all things to all people. There are some things you have to be able to do, like raise venture capital, but there are some other things your team may be able to do for you, and you don't have to do it yourself. The other thing that I would say, and one thing I like to say to the people who want to be entrepreneurs and go out and raise money, especially raising money. I said, "If you think about being entrepreneurs, don't think about success being raising money." Because let's imagine you're going to be successful raising money. Success is when you get the money and you've got the company, that you're successful with the company. You have to think less about sort of the, "Oh, I can get a VC to fund me," and more, "I can get the capital I need to build the company I need to build, " and it's a different mindset. And you have to have the mindset of, I not only have to be able to raise the venture capital, I have to be the kind of leader that once I have it I can build the company. So you kind of raise the bar for yourself and what you think you have to be able to do to build the company. You have to raise capital, and you have to make that capital turn it into a successful business. Larry: Carol, with all the things that you're doing and you're at the office right now, how do you bring balance to your life, both personally and professionally? Carol: I don't think I have a balanced life. [laughter] Lucy: Yeah, we're heard that before too. Yeah. Carol: But I don't know, you know, I think about that I have three children, and I love them and they're all successful. They're grown. They're in their twenties. I love them. I don't see them as much as I want to, don't spend as much time with them as I would like. I have a husband who I've been married to for almost 30 years. I love the outdoors. I'm very athletic. But the fact is when I'm doing this I would say that I don't have the kind of balance that would be the perfect balance, and I just accept that. That's the job. The job is to have a little bit of struggle with balance, because the job is going to be really, really demanding, and I've accepted that. I had five years off, six years off where I was able to spend as much time as I wanted with my kids and my husband. And I biked and hiked and skied 60 days a year. That was fabulous too, but, you know, there's nothing like building a company from the ground up. Lucy: And that's the case, and we've heard that from some of our other interviewees as well, that it's more of an integrative thing. You know, that you have all these interests and you integrate them, but it's not like every day is balanced. Larry: Right. Lucy: That's really interesting. So, Carol, you've done so much. You're a global visionary. You give back. I wanted to mention to listeners as well that Carol was on the board at the Anita Borg Institute, which is one of the co-founding organizations of NCWIT, really focused on women and innovation and computing. And you mentioned earlier that it's important for you to give back. So across the board you've done some pretty phenomenal things. What's next for you? Carol: No, I am very passionate about entrepreneurship, so wherever possible I support entrepreneurs, either through my own time or through donating to organizations that support entrepreneurs. I'm passionate about education. There are places in the world where children don't get access to free education, places like Uganda or a lot of places I go in the world. And so my husband and I both donate a lot to programs that get the kids that are left out of the education system access to education. So we do that and that's something we do on an ongoing basis. You know, I'm kind of doing Obopay full-time. It's interesting. I was on boards when I started Obopay, and I got off all of them. And I did that because I just felt like for an early stage company I didn't have the luxury of having time to be a good board member for them, but I think for the next couple years, I'm pretty much full-time doing this. But I don't have a lot of bandwidth to do other things right now. When this period is over for me, I don't know what's next for me and I'm not worried about it, because I love so many things. I have so many hobbies, so many interests, I'm not worried about what comes next. I'm not a worrier anyway. I'm just dedicated to doing this now, and I know when I'm doing this that they'll be something else great for me to do. Larry: Well, I couldn't agree more, yeah. Carol: Oh, that's another word for entrepreneurship, fearless. Larry: There we go. Carol: There you go. Larry: Well, Carol, I want to thank you for joining us today. Carol: Oh, you're welcome. Larry: And we'll put your link up in the website. That's Obopay.com, but we'll put it up on NCWIT's website. That's ncwit.org, and also at w3w3.com. And by the way, I want to say this to the listeners. Pass this interview along to others that you know would learn from it and would enjoy an interview on this kind of a topic. Thank you much, Carol. Lucy: Thanks, Carol. Carol: Thanks, bye. Lucy: All right. Thanks everybody. [music] Transcription by CastingWords Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Carol RealiniInterview Summary: Carol Realini is an imaginative pioneer whose foresight and business acumen have changed the landscape of technology, and whose global vision is providing hope and a future for people in developing countries. Release Date: April 7, 2009Interview Subject: Carol RealiniInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 24:49

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Lucy Sanders CEO and Co-founder, NCWIT Date: June 4, 2007 NCWIT Interview with Lucy Sanders BIO: Lucy Sanders is CEO and Co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and also serves as Executive-in-Residence for the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has an extensive industry background, having worked in R&D and executive positions at AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs for over 20 years, where she specialized in systems-level software and solutions (multi-media communication and customer relationship management.) In 1996, Lucy was awarded the Bell Labs Fellow Award, the highest technical accomplishment bestowed at the company, and she has six patents in the communications technology area. Lucy serves on several boards, including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) Board of Trustees at the University of California at Berkeley; the Engineering Advisory Council at the University of Colorado at Boulder; the Denver Public Schools Computer Magnet Advisory Board; the Advisory Board for the Women's College Applied Computing Program at the University of Denver; and several corporate boards. In 2004 Lucy was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Department of Engineering at CU. Lucy also is Conference Chair for the 2007 Grace Hopper Conference, having served as Program Chair for the conference in 2006. She is currently serving on the Information Technology Research and Development Ecosystem Commission for the National Academies. Lucy received her B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Louisiana State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder, respectively. Larry: This is Larry Nelson, and I am so pleased that I'm a part of helping get this new campaign kicked off. We have with us today Lucinda Sanders. Lucinda is the CEO and co‑founder of NCWIT, here at the University of Colorado. Welcome to the show, Lucinda. Lucy: Thank you Larry. You can just call me Lucy if you'd like. Larry: Oh, I'd love the more comfortable. All right. Lucy: All right. Larry: Now this is the real kick‑off for the NCWIT Entrepreneurial Interview series. So we are just getting this kicked off. And Lucinda, you have such an interesting background. We'll get into some of that. We are going to take a closer look at what this series is really all about. I'm very excited. Let me ask this question. It's a basic, but a very important question. How did you first get involved with technology? Lucy: I first got involved in technology by learning to program computers when I was in college. From there, once you learn how computers worked and I got a computer science degree and out into industry and started to see how you could use technology and computing to solve real world problems for people. And so I would say I really came at it from a very traditional way, through the education path, and on through getting a graduate degree in computer science as well. Larry: Let me take a quick leap here. What technology today do you think is really cool? Lucy: Well, I really like radio tags. You know RFIDs? I think that technology ‑ first of all, it's very difficult, not the radio tag itself, but dealing with all the data that radio tags can potentially send when they pass readers. And so, the use of those and not just basic inventory systems, but for example, you could use such a radio tag on frozen food and then it has a recipe on it that can talk to your microwave oven and then cook the food automatically when you put the food in the microwave oven. Your radio tags can be used for lots and lots of things ‑ and fairly creative things as well. Larry: That really is cool. Now, Lucy, in this series we are going to be interviewing a number of entrepreneurs. But also, we want to take a look at the entrepreneurial aspect, because you are a Bell Labs Fellow. Let's see if we can take a look at that. How do you operate as an entrepreneur as well as what got you involved with that? Lucy: Well, inside Bell labs, I was always working on the leading edge projects and in fact, inside big companies like Bell labs or AT&T or Lucent, its often the case that small teams form that are a lot like entrepreneurial companies. Now they don't have to go out and raise capital. You don't necessarily have venture capitalists, but they do have to attract budget within the company to move the product ahead. And they frequently have small teams, really too small teams to get the product done. And they really are in many ways, entrepreneurial in nature. So, I always had those kinds of projects. For example, working on the very first risk‑based processing PBX system and operating system; all the way though Internet commerce and working on voice over IP and multimedia collaboration systems. I always gravitated toward those types of projects. I've loved them. I love them still and in fact, NCWIT is almost like that kind of a start up project. Larry: Yes, it is. Lucy: Its entrepreneurial, its socially entrepreneurial, but those kinds of projects where you don't know the answers, where it's not routine operational or maintenance, where you really are creating something from nothing and using the creative talent of people, I think, is what really excites me about that. Larry: That's one of the interesting aspects. Many people who are hearing about NCWIT for the first time, could you give us just a little overview about what it is? Lucy: Sure. NCWIT stands for the National Center for Women and Information Technology. We are really focused on getting more girls and women into information technology in its broadest sense ‑ into use of computing for all types of applications. We really work across the whole pipeline, K‑12 through entrepreneurial careers, which is one reason why we're so excited to be sponsoring this interview series with really fabulous women and IT entrepreneurs. Larry: Yes, we are really looking forward to it. I've seen the list and it's fantastic. Let me see if I could just dig a little bit deeper here, Lucy. What is one of the toughest things that you have had to face in your career? Lucy: Well, probably one of the saddest, I would say tough times was downsizing the team or shutting a location. We went through periods of time where we would buy companies and integrate them, integrate the technology, and integrate the teams. Sometimes you had to make the tough choices about which locations needed to be shut down and people had to be laid off or let go. That's always tough. You lose a lot of sleep over that kind of a decision. It's in the best interest for the business and yet from an individual's perspective, it's certainly quite difficult. Whenever I face that, I really try hard to do the right thing, find people jobs, make sure they could transfer other places or that in the local economy there were places that could take them as well. So, when we did have to face that kind of decision, we did it with as much grace and humanity as we could. But that's easily one of the toughest things that I've ever had to do. Larry: You know, one of the things that if you talk to any really IT pro or an IT one of those people who are really out there, the word mentor or role model comes up all the time. Who are some of the people in your career that influenced you? Lucy: Well, one person who influenced me that I've never met, but I modeled myself after him to some degree because he was the very first chief technology officer I have ever seen, ever heard about using that title and that was Eric Schmidt when he was at Sun. Of course, we all know he has gone on to Google, but I really liked what he did in terms of getting out there and explaining technology and how he was expansive in his thinking about technical solutions and he really was somebody who I looked at and thought, I'd really like to be a chief technology officer. In fact, I did become one and I love that role. So, in one way, I think he influenced me quite a bit although he wouldn't know me from the man on the moon. Larry: That is interesting, indeed. Lucy: He totally influenced me and I had a number of mentors inside Bell Labs that I thought were just outstanding. I think I've talked to you before how the culture at Bell Labs really supported mentoring and women and I had a number of mentors who really taught me a lot. Larry: It might not be looked at from the outside so much, but your position here with NCWIT is really just like an entrepreneur. So let's imagine you were sitting down right now talking to a young girl, a young woman who is thinking about maybe getting into a field and being an entrepreneur. What kind of advice would you share with them? Lucy: Well, so often when you are just starting something out, it's very ill‑formed because in fact is doesn't exist. And so, I guess my advice would be to just live with that. Know what you know and try to test it with everybody. Go test the heck out of it. So if you have an idea for a company or you have a way to explain what you want your nonprofit to be doing, you do your best story and then go tell it, and tell it over and over and over again, get input. And think expansively about it, because quite likely it'll be very different in a month or two months or six months as you go out and do that, but don't be afraid of not knowing the answer. I think so many people stop themselves because they can't see clearly between where they are and where they want to go. And in fact, I would maintain that that's exactly the kind of job you want, where you sit with what you have, and you make the best possible case, and you just keep improving it as you go. I think with NCWIT we have had people, not so much anymore because we are really tight on our story, we know exactly what we're doing and we can explain it in 10 minutes, you know, the famous elevator pitch, but we had a few people when we first got started who just wouldn't come along because they couldn't see clearly what it was going to be or where it was going to go. They couldn't get with the vision. So I think entrepreneurs need to be exceptional at this. Larry: I couldn't agree more. Here you are, I mean, you are busy, you travel around the country, you meet with all kinds of groups and individuals from entrepreneurs to larger organizations. How do you bring balance to your personal and to your professional lives? Lucy: Flexibility, a flexible schedule, being able to schedule things when you pretty much want to do them. So it's not uncommon to see me working until midnight; it's also not uncommon to see me taking off in the middle of the day and going to see my kids play soccer or doing what they're going to do. Was it Best Buy that had a story on the un-tethered workplace? It's not so important when you do your job and work, or where you do it, but that you do it. Now, obviously that can't get taken to the total extreme. Often you need to have schedules and meet with people and be attentive to that, but I think having that kind of flexibility in my day is what makes it all work out. Larry: Don't you go out there and jog every now and then too? Lucy: I jog all the time. I run every day, although I'm a little slower than I used to be, but I can still get out there and go a good four or five miles. Larry: Excellent. Lucy: And running's great. Gardening's great. My husband and I like to ‑ my husband's a great cook ‑ and so we like to eat. I guess that doesn't bring balance, it might bring a few pounds. Well, you know, hey. Larry: You know, I think it was just a week or so ago, I think Brad Feld said, "I think that Lucy Sanders just passed me." Lucy: He did not. Larry: Oh, didn't he say that? Oh, Okay. I thought he... Lucy: The day I pass Brad Feld is a day to celebrate. Larry: Yeah, you bet. Woman 1: I have a question. You have two boys. Lucy: Yes. Woman: So how do they look at you in the broader scope of women? Lucy: Interestingly enough, I think that kids of their age still aren't at the place where they see that there is any difference in the way people act and they don't want to admit it. The way they look at me is, I think, I'm just Mom. So we don't really talk about any under‑representation issues or anything else. Now, I would say that they are, I think they're proud of me. I think they have seen my career and what I've done, and I think that it motivates them. I could be wrong, you could interview them. Larry: Lucy, let me ask you this question. What do you feel gave you the advantage to get in the position that you're in today as well as all the way through your IT experience? Lucy: Well, I really am very relentless, not relentless in a bad way, but I go at it over and over and over until I find what I want. So I don't want to say I'm patient, because I'm really very impatient, but I'm very... Larry: Persistent? Lucy: I'm persistent. I'm very, no, my husband says I'm very relentless. Larry: Oh, really? OK. Lucy: And I am relentless in business. So I really do look at every no I get as just the first step to a yes, that they didn't mean it. Larry: Wow. You sound like Thomas Edison. Lucy: I think that that's important, I think, it has been important to me. The other thing that I think has been important to me is that I work incredibly hard. I put in a lot of hours and I have extremely high standards. And I have high standards for myself first, and I have high standards for others later. And at the same time, I have incredibly high forgiveness, so if the bar is high, then there should be a safety net and people should not be made to feel bad if they can't quite climb over that high bar. It's just that if you set it really high, then there's always going to be learning. So I think some of those perspectives have helped me in giving me a bit of an advantage. Larry: Wow. I like that. That is usable, powerful, motivating; that's really good. You know, by any standards, you have already accomplished a great deal in your life. And I know you've got a lot of things probably down the road that you'd like to do, but give me a little piece of near‑term, what do you see for yourself in the near‑term, and then maybe longer down the road? Lucy: Well, near‑term, I think, speaking about NCWIT, we have spent about two and a half years really building the foundational infrastructure for NCWIT. By that I mean we've got about 100 organizations, corporations, universities, nonprofits that are part of our alliances. We've built a technical infrastructure to support them; we've built a best practices infrastructure to support them; and project management meetings and workshops to support them. And now it's time to really start to drive the utilization of that infrastructure and to create series like this interview, series to really work on reform within our organizations. So that's in the short‑term for NCWIT. I mean, you can imagine building out a national infrastructure takes a little time. And I do think that people will commit to reform within their organizations once they see the infrastructure's there to support that. So we're at that point right now; it's an exciting time for us. The longer‑term, I don't yet know. I'm still really in the startup of NCWIT, so I'm pretty blind to everything else and I can't see that far out. Although I do know this: I really love technology. I don't think I'm through inventing technology yet, but I don't know what that looks like. Larry: We're going to follow up on that and find out. Lucy: Okay. Larry: Wow, Lucy, this was a fantastic piece of information. We're really looking forward to the series, the entrepreneurs interview series for IT and women. This is going to be just great. And what's the website that they can go to check out other stories? Lucy: It'll be hosted from the NCWIT website, www.ncwit.org. Larry: Sounds perfect. Lucy, thank you so much. Lucy: Thank you. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Lucy SandersInterview Summary: Lucy Sanders is start-up CEO and Co-founder of the National Center for Women & Information Technology. She is a former VP at AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Bell Labs, and Avaya Labs, and holds six patents. Release Date: June 4, 2007Interview Subject: Lucy SandersInterviewer(s): Larry Nelson Duration: 13:35