Podcast appearances and mentions of lucy one

Join co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez in conversation with LitFriends Lucy Corin & Deb Olin Unferth about their travels in the Sahara, ancient chickens, disappointments, true love, and why great books are so necessary. Our next episode will feature Melissa Febos & Donika Kelly, out December 22, 2023.   Links Libsyn Blog www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com https://www.lucycorin.com https://debolinunferth.com LitFriends LinkTree LitFriends Insta LitFriends Facebook   Transcript Annie Lito (00:00.118) Welcome to Lit Friends! Hey Lit Friends!   Lito: Welcome to the show.    Annie: Today we're speaking with Lucy Corin and Deb Olin Unferth, great writers, thinkers, and LitFriend besties.    Lito:  About chickens, the Sahara, and bad reviews.    Annie: So grab your bestie   Annie & Lito: And get ready to get lit!   Lito: You know those like stones that you can get when you're on like a trip to like Tennessee somewhere or something, they're like worry stones? Like people used to like worry them with their thumb or something whenever they had a problem and it would like supposedly calm you down. Well, it's not quite the same thing, but I love how Deb describes her and Lucy's relationship is like, “worry a problem with me.” Like let's, let's cut this gem from all the angles and really like rub it down to its essential context and meaning and understanding. And I think essentially that's what like writers, great writers, offer the world. They've worked through a problem and they have answers. There's not one answer, there's not a resolution to it, but the answers that lead to better, more better questions.    Annie: Yeah, and there's something so special about them because they're, worry tends to be something we do in isolation, almost kind of worrying ourselves into the ground.   Lito: Right. Annie: But they're doing it together in collaboration.    Lito: It's a collaborative worry. Yes, I love that.    Annie: A less lonely worrying.    Lito: It's a less lonely place to think through these things. And the intimacy between them is so special. The way I think they just weave in and out of their lives with each other, even though they're far away from each other.   I think there's a romantic notion that you're tuned into about Lucy and Deb's trip to the desert. Do you want to say something about that? There's a metaphor in it that you really love, right?    Annie: (1:52) Yeah. Well, so I remember when we first talked about doing this podcast and invited them, we were at a bar at AWP, the writer's conference. And they were like, oh, this is perfect. We just went to the Sahara together. And I was like, what? You writers just decided to take a trip together through the desert? And they said, yeah, it was perfect. And they have adorable photos, which we of course are going to share with the world. Um, but it felt like such a, I mean, the fact that they would go on that kind of adventure together and didn't really plan ahead, I think it was just Deb saying, I really want to go to the desert. And Lucy saying, sure, let's go. Which feels very much a kind of metonym of their friendship in some ways.    Lito: Absolutely.    Annie: (2:42) Yeah. That they wandered these spaces together. They come back to art, right? Art is a way for them to recreate themselves and recreate their friendship. And they're doing such different things on the page.    Lito:  Oh yeah, no, they're very different writers but they do share a curiosity that's unique I think in their friendship, then unique to them.    Annie: Yeah and a kind of rigorousness and a love for the word.    Lito: (3:10) Oh and a love for thinking and reading the world in every capacity.    Annie: Tell me about your friendship with Lucy because you're quite close.   Lito: I was at UC Davis before it was an MFA program. It was just a Master's. After undergrad, I went to the master's program because I wasn't sure if I wanted to be an academic or do the studio option and get an MFA. I loved how Lucy and the other professors there, Pam Houston, Yiyun Li, showed us the different ways to be a writer. They couldn't be more different, the three of them. And, I particularly was drawn to Lucy because of her sense of art and play and how those things interact.    Lito: (03:59) And here was someone that was extremely cerebral, extremely intelligent, thinking through every aspect of existence. And yet it was all done through the idea of play and experimentation, but not experimentation in that sort of like negative way that we think of experimentation, which is to say writing that doesn't work, but experimentation in the sense of innovation. And. Lucy brought out my sense of play. I got it right away, what she was going for, that there is an intellectual pleasure to the work of reading and writing that people in the world respond to, but don't often articulate. Lucy's able to articulate it, and I admire her forever for that.    Lito: (4:52) And perhaps I'm not speaking about our friendship, but it comes from a place of deep admiration for the work that she does and the way she approaches life. You have a special relationship with Deb. I would love to hear more about that.    Annie: (5:04) Yeah, I think I've been fangirling over Deb for years. Deb is such a special person. I mean, she's incredibly innovative and has this agility on the page, like almost no other writer I know. Also quite playful, but I love most her humanity. Deb is a vegan who, in Barn 8, brings such life to chickens in a way that we as humans rarely consider. There's an amazing scene which she's like with a chicken 2000 years into the future. Also, I know Deb through my work with Pen City, her writing workshop with incarcerated writers at the Connally Unit, a maximum security penitentiary in Southern Texas.   Lito: How does that work? Is it all by letter or do you go there?    Annie: (5:58) Well, the primary program, you know, the workshop that Deb teaches is on site, and it's certified. So students are getting, the incarcerated writers, are getting now college credit because it's an accredited program. So Deb will be on site and work with them directly. And those of us who volunteer as mentors, the program has evolved a little bit since then, (06:22) but it's kind of a pen pal situation. So I had a chance to work with a number of writers, some who had been there for years and years. And a lot of folks are writing auto-fiction or fiction that's deeply inspired by the places they've lived and their experiences. It's such a special program, it's such a special experience. And what I saw from Deb was just this absolute fierceness. You know, like Deb can appear to be fragile in some ways (06:53.216), and it's her humanity, but actually there's this solid steel core to Deb, and it's about fortitude and a kind of moral alignment that says, we need to do better.    Lito: We have this weird connotation with the word fragile that it's somehow bad, but actually, what it means is that someone's vulnerable. And to me, there is no greater superpower than vulnerability, especially with art, and especially in artwork that is like what she does at the penitentiary. But, can I ask a question?    Annie:  Sure.   Lito: Why is it so special working with incarcerated folks?    Annie: (7:27) Oh, that's a great question. I mean, we need its own podcast to answer it.   Lito: Of course, but just sort of the...    Annie:  I think my personal experience with it is that so many incarcerated writers have been disenfranchised on all levels of identity and experience. Voting rights, decent food, accommodations, mental health, physical, you know, physical well-being. And we can't solve all those problems necessarily, at least all at once, and it's an up, it's a constant battle. But nothing to me offers or recognizes a person's humanity like saying, "tell us your story. Tell us what's on your mind. We are here to hear you and listen."  And those stories and they do come out, you know, there have been other programs that have done this kind of work, they get out in the world and there's, we're bridging this gap of people we have almost entirely forgotten out of absolute choice.  (8:27) And Deb is doing that work, really, I mean she's been doing that work for a long time and finally got some recognition for it, but Deb does it because she's committed.   Lito: That is really powerful. Tell us your story. Tell us your story, Lit Fam. Tell us your story. Find us in all your social media @LitFriendsPodcast or email us at LitFriendsPodcast@gmail.com   Annie: We will read all your stories. We'll be right back with Lucy and   Deb.   Lito: (09:00) And now, our interview with Lucy Corrin and Deb. Lucy Corin is the author of two short story collections, 100 Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses and The Entire Predicament, and two novels, Everyday Psychokillers and The Swank Hotel. In addition to winning the Rome Prize, Lucy was awarded a fellowship in literature from the NEA. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of English in the MFA program at UC Davis.    Annie:  Deb Olin-Unferth is the author of six books, including Barn 8, and her memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Deb is an associate professor in creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. She founded and runs Pen City Writers, a two-year creative writing certificate program at Connally, a maximum security prison in southern Texas. For this work, she was awarded the 2017 Texas Governor's Criminal Justice Service Award.   Lito: (09:58) Annie and I thought this up a year ago, and we were talking about what is special about literary friendships and how writing gets made, not as we all think, totally solitary in our rooms alone, but we have conversations, at least I think this way. They're part of long conversations with our friends, our literary friends and living and dead, and you know, all times, in all times of history.   But the idea here is that we get to talk to our literary friends and people we admire and writers who are close friends with each other and friendships in which literature plays a large role.   Annie: (10:37) Yeah, and I'll just add that when we first floated the idea of this podcast, you know, your names came up immediately. We're so in awe of you as people and practitioners and literary citizens, and we love your literary friendship. I mean, I really hold it dear as one of the best that I know of personally.    Lucy, I think of you as, you know, this craftsperson of invention who's always trying to undo what's been done and who's such an amazing mentor to emerging writers. And Deb, you know, I'm always returning to your work to see the world in a new way, to see something I might have missed. And I just, I'm so moved by your generosity in your work and in your life's work with Penn City and elsewhere, which I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk more about.   Annie: (11:30) But I think I recall the first day I realized how close the two of you were when Deb told me that you all were taking a trip to the Sahara. And I was like, oh, of course, like, of course, they're going to have desert adventures together. Like, this makes so much sense. So I hope we'll, you know, we'll talk more about that too.    Annie (11:53) But we're so grateful to have you here and to have you in our lives. And we're going to ask you some questions to get to know a little bit more about you.    Deb:  Sounds great.    Lucy: Thanks.    Deb: It's great to be here. It's really great to see everybody.    Lito: Thank you so much for being here. Deb, will you tell us about Lucy?   Deb: (12:16) I mean, Lucy's just one of my very favorite people. And I feel like our friendship just started really slowly and just kind of grew over a period of many years. And some of the things that I love about Lucy is she is, well, of course, she's a brilliant genius writer. Like, I mean, no one writes weird like Lucy writes weird and no one writes like more emotionally, and more inventively and some of her books are some of my favorite books that have ever been written. Especially her last two books I think have just been such just major literary accomplishments and I just hold them so dear.    (13:05) And as a friend some things that I really love about her is that she will worry a problem with me that's just bugging me about like literary culture or about writing or about, you know, just it could be anything about aesthetics at all. And then she'll literally talk to me about it for like five or six days straight without stopping. Like we'll just constantly, dinner after dinner, like, you know, if we're on a trip together, just like all day, like I'll wake up in the morning and I'll be like, here's another piece of that pie. And then she'll say, oh, and I was thinking, and then we'll like go off and work and then we'll come back at lunch and be like, "and furthermore," you know? And by the end, I remember at one point we were doing this and she said, this is a very interesting essay you're writing. And of course, like it wasn't an essay at all, but it was just like a way of thinking about the way that we were talking.   (14:06) And then she is hilarious and delightful and just like so warm. I don't know, I just love her to pieces. She's just one of my favorite people in the whole world. I could say more, but I'll stop right there for a minute.    Annie: Lucy, tell us about Deb.    Lucy: (14:24) Yeah, I mean, Deb, I mean, the first thing, I mean, the first thing you'll notice is that Deb is sort of effortlessly enthusiastic about the things that she cares about. And that's at the core of the way that she moves through the world and the way that she encounters people and the way that she encounters books.   (14:44) I'm more reserved, so I'll just preface what I'm going to say by saying that like, my tone might not betray my true enthusiasms, but I'll try to list some of the things that I think are special and extraordinary about my friend Deb.   One is that there's this conversation that never stops between the way that she's thinking about her own work and the way that she's thinking about the state of the world and the way that she's thinking about the very specific encounters that she's having in daily life. And so like moving through a conversation with Deb or moving through a period of time with Deb in the world, those things are always in flux and in conversation. So it's a really wonderful mind space to be in, to be in her presence.   (15:35) The other thing is that she's like the most truly ethical person that I am close to and in the sense that like she thinks really hard about every move she makes.   The comparison I would make is like you know Deb is like at the core like, the first thing you might notice about Deb's work is that she's a stylist, that she works sentence by sentence and that she always does. But then the other thing she does is that she's always thinking hard about the world and the work, that it never stays purely a love of the sentence. The love of the sentence is part of the love of trying to understand the relationship between words and the world.    (16:15) And, and they're both an ethics. I think it's an ethics of aesthetics and an ethics of trying to be alive in as decent way as you can manage. And so those things feed into the friendship where she's one of the people who I know will tell me what she really thinks about something because we can have a baseline of trust where then you can talk about things that are either dangerous or you might have different ideas about things or you may have conflict.    (16:47) But because of my sense of who she is as a person, and also who she is with me, we can have challenging conversations about what's right about how to behave and what's right about how to write. And that also means that when the other parts of friendship, which are just like outside of literature, but always connected, which, you know, about your own, you know, your other friendships, your, the rest of your life, your job, your family, things like that, that you wanna talk about with your friends. Yeah, I don't know anybody better to sort through those things than Deb.    And it's in part because we're writers, and you can't separate out the questions that you're having about the other parts of your life from who you're trying to be as a writer. And that's always built into the conversation.   Annie: (17:40) I knew we asked you here for a reason.   Lito: We'll be right back.    Lito (17:58) Back to the show.    Annie: I'm hearing you, you know, you're both, you're sort of really seeing one another, which is really lovely. You know, you're, Deb, you're talking about Lucy wearing a problem with you, which I think conveys a kind of strength and... Of course, like I'm quite familiar with Deb's like strong moral anchors. I think we all are and truly respect, but I'm just wondering, what do you most admire about your friend? What do you think they give to the world in light of this portrait that you've given us?   Deb: (18:28) Lucy is a very careful thinker, and she's incredibly fair. And I've just seen her act, just behave that way and write that way for so many years and it just the quality of it always surprises me.  Like I mean, there was a writer, most recently there was a writer who's been cancelled, who we have spent an enormous amount of time talking about and trying to figure out just exactly what was going on there. And I felt like Lucy had insights into what had happened and what it was like on his end and what about his culture could have influenced what happened. Just all of these things that were.   (19:36.202) It was so insightful and I felt like there's no way that I could have moved that moved forward that many steps in my understanding of what had happened. And in my own like how I was going to approach what had happened. Like there's no way I could have done that without that just constant just really careful thought and really fair thought. Just like trying to deeply understand. Like Lucy has an emotional intelligence that is just completely unparalleled. That's one thing I really love about her.    Another thing is that she's like up for anything. Like when I asked her to go to the Sahara with me, I mean, she said yes in like, it was like not even 12 seconds. It was like 3 seconds, I think, that she was like, yeah.   Annie: You need a friend who is just gonna go to the Sahara.    Lucy: Deb, I don't even know if you actually invited me. The way I remember it is that you said something like, Lucy, no one will go to the Sahara with me. And I said, I would go to the Sahara with you.   Lito: That is lovely.   Lucy: (20:53) It's in Africa, right?    Lito:  Was there something specific about the Sahara that you need to go over for?   Deb:  Yeah, I mean, there was. It's a book I'm still working on, hopefully finishing soon. But it's mostly it's like...I just always wanted to go to the Sahara. My whole life, I wanted to go to Morocco, I wanted to go to the Sahara, I wanted to be surrounded by just sand and one line. You look in 360 degrees and you just see one line. I just wanted to see what that was like so badly, stripping everything out, coming down to just that one element of blue and beige. I just wanted that so much. And I wanted to know that it just went on and on and on and on.   (21:48) Yeah, and you know, people talk a big talk, but most people would not go. And so at one point I was just kind of rallying, asking everyone. And then Lucy happened to be in town and I just mentioned to her that this is happening. And then she said, yeah, and then we went for like a long time. Like we went to Morocco for like over three weeks. Like we went for like a month.    Lucy:  A month.    Deb: Yeah, crazy. But she's always like that. Like whatever I want to do, she's just up for it. I mean, and she called me up and she's like, hey, we want to come to Austin and like, go to this place that's two hours from Austin where you can see five million bats, right? Five million bats? Or was it more? Was it like 20 million?    Lucy:  That's right.    Deb: It was like 20 million bats and a lot of them are baby bats. It's like mama bats and baby bats.     Lucy: Yeah, like it's more when there's the babies.   Deb: (22:46) And yeah, and you were like, I want to come with them as the babies. Yeah, we like went and she just like came and Andrea came, and it was just absolutely beautiful.    Lucy: Well, you were just right for that adventure. I knew you would want to see some bats.    Lucy: Well, I could I could say a couple of more things about what Deb gives the world.    Annie: Sure. Love it.    Lucy: So some of the things that Deb gives the world and though when I listen to you talking about me, I realized why these things are so important to me, is that you have a very steady sense of who you are and a kind of confidence in your instincts. That I know that some of the ways that I worry things through are really productive and some of them are just an ability to see why I could be wrong all the time, and that can stymie me.    (23:48) And one of the things that I love about you and the model that you provide for me in my life is an ability to understand what your truth is and not be afraid to hold onto it while you're thinking about other people's perspectives, that you're able to really tell the difference between the way that other people think about things and the way that you do.   And it doesn't mean that you don't rethink things, you constantly are, but when you have a conviction, you don't have a problem with having a conviction. And I admire it enormously. And I think it allows you to have a kind of openness to the world and an openness to people who are various and different and will challenge you and will show you new things because you have that sense that you're not gonna lose yourself in the wind.    Deb: Mmm. That's really nice.   Lito: I am in awe of everything you've said about each other. And it makes me think about how you first met each other. Can you tell us that story? And why did you keep coming back? What was the person like when you first met? And why did you keep coming back to each other? Do you want to tell Lucy?     Lucy: Yeah, I'll start and you can add what I'm missing and... (25:06) tell a different origin story if you want. But I think that what we might've come to for our origin story is that it was one of the, one of the early &Now Festivals. And the &Now Festival is really great.   Lito: Could you say what that is? Yeah, say a little bit about what that is.   Luch: Oh, it's a literary conference that was started to focus on small press and more innovative—is the term that they used at the time anyhow—innovative writing as a kind of response to the market-driven culture of AWP and to try to get people who are working more experimentally or more like on the edge of literary culture less mainstream and give them a place to come together and have conversations about writing and share their work.   So it was one of the early ones of those. But I think it was, I think we figured out that there were like, yeah, there were three women. It was me, you, and Shelley Jackson. But it was, there were not that many women at this conference at the time. And we were, and I think we were noting, noting our solidarity. Yeah. And that, that's what. That's like some of the first images.   But I knew we were like aware of each other because in some ways we have tended to be up for the same jobs—Deb gets them—up for the same prizes—Deb gets them first, I'll get them later. And so I see her as somebody who's traveling through the literary world in ways that are... I mean, we're very different writers, but as people... You know what I mean? But I still... We still actually...come from a lot of the same literary roots. And so it makes sense that there's something of each other in the work that makes us appeal to overlapping parts of the literary world.   Deb: Yeah, I definitely think that there was in our origins, not only do we come from the same sort of influences, and just things that we admired and stuff, but I also feel like (27:28.018) a lot of our early work would have appealed more easily to the exact same people. As we've gotten older, our work isn't quite as similar. We're a little more different than we used to be. But there's still enough there that, you know, you can see a lot of the same people admiring or liking it.   But I was remembering that first time that we met, you playing pool. And we were, so we were like at a bar and you were like, and you were playing pool, and you had like just had a book out with FSG, I think, or something. I don't know if I even had—   Lucy: FC2. Very different.   Deb: FC2. That's right. FC2. And the FC2 editor was there. And I don't think I even had a book out. I don't remember what year this was. But I don't think I had any kind of book out. All I had was I had nothing, you know. And I was just so in awe of FC2 and the editor there, and you there, and like you could play pool, and I can't play pool at all. And it was just, it was—   Annie: Lucy's so cool. Yeah, she was cool. She was cool. And Shelly Jackson was cool. And it was like all the cool people were there and I got to be there, and it was great.   And then, yeah, and then I think how it continued, I don't know how it continued, we just kind of kept running into each other and just slowly it built up into a really deep friendship. Like at some point you would come through town and stay with me.   (29:25.782) And we moved, we both moved around a lot. So for a while there, so we kind of kept running into each other in different places. We've never lived in the same place.   Lucy: No, never.   Lito: How have you managed that then? Is it always phone or is it texting, phone calls?   Lucy: Well, we'll go through a spate of  texting.   Deb: Yeah, we do both. I think I like to talk on the phone.   Lucy: Yeah, I will talk on the phone for Deb.   Annie: The mark of a true friendship.   Lito: (30:01) Time for a break.   Annie Lito (30:12.43) We're talking with Lucy Corin and Deb Olin Unferth.   Lito: How has literature shaped your friendship then? Despite being cool. What kind of books, movies, art do you love to discuss? You can name names. What do you love talking about?   Deb: Well, I remember the moment with Donald Barthelme.   Lucy: That was what I was gonna say.   Deb: No, you go ahead.   Lucy: Well, why don't?   Deb: Oh, okay, you can tell it.   Lucy: I mean, I'll tell part and then you can tell part. It's not that elaborate, but we were, one of the things that Deb and I do is find a pretty place, rent a space, and go work together. And one time we were doing that in Mendocino and Deb was in the late stages of drafting Barn 8 and really thinking about the ancient chickens and the chickens in an ancient space. And we went for a walk in one of those very ferny forests, and Deb was thinking about the chickens and among the giant ferns. And I don't know how it happened, but Deb said something with a rhythm. And we both said to each other the exact line from Donald Barthelme's "The School" that has that rhythm.   (31:34) Is that how you remember it though? You have to tell me if that's how you remember it.   Deb: That's exactly how I remember it. Yeah. And then we like said a few more lines. Like we knew even...    Lito: You remember the line now?   Lucy: I mean, I don't... You do. If you said it, I could do it. I'm just... I was thinking before this, I'm like, oh God, I should go look up the line because I'm not going to get it right, like under pressure. It was just in the moment. It came so naturally.   Deb: It was one of those lines that goes... (32:03) Da da da-da da, da da da-da-da. There's a little parenthetical, it's not really in parentheses in the story, but it might be a little dash mark. But it has, it's something like, "I told them that they should not be afraid, although I am often afraid." I think it was that one.   Deb: I am often afraid. Yeah. And then it was like, we just both remembered a whole bunch of lines like from the end, because the ending of that story is so amazing. And it's, so the fact that we had both unconsciously memorized it and could just like.   And it was something about just like walking under those giant trees and having this weekend together. And like we're like marching along, like calling out lines from Donald Barthelme. And it just felt really like pure and deep.   Annie: It's I mean, I can't imagine anything sounding more like true love than spontaneously reciting a line in unison from Barthelme. And, you know, you both are talking about how your work really converged at the start and that there are some new divergences and I think of you both as so distinct you know on and off the page. There's like the ferociousness of the pros and an eye towards cultural criticism and I always think of you as writing ahead of your time. So I'm just wondering how would you describe your lit friends work to someone, and is there something even after all this time that surprises you about their writing or their voice?   Lucy: I mean, what surprised me recently about Deb's voice is its elasticity. I came to love the work through the short stories and the micros. And those have such a distinct, wry kind of distance. They sort of float a little separate from the world, and they float a little separate from the page.   (34:10) And they have a kind of, they have a very distinct attitude and tone, even if the pieces are different from each other, like as a unit. And that's just really different than the voice that you get in a book like Barn 8 that moves through a lot of different narrators, but that also has just a softer relationship with the world. Like it's a little more blends with the world as you know, it doesn't stay as distant. And I didn't know that until later.   Vacation is also really stark and sort of like has that distinctiveness from the world. And so watching Deb move into, you know, in some ways like just more realistic, more realistic writing that's still voice-centered and that still is music centered was a recent surprising thing for me.   But I'm also really excited about what I've read in the book that in the new book because I think that new book is sort of the pieces that the bits that I've read from it are they're marking a territory that's sort of right down the middle of the aesthetic poles that Deb's work has already hit I mean the other thing is that you know Deb does all the genres. All of the prose genres. Every book sort of is taking on it is taking on a genre And the next one is doing that too, but with content in a way that others have been taking on new genres and form. And so...    Lito: I love that. And I like that it's related to the music of the pros and sound. I feel like musicians do that a lot, right? There's some musicians that every album is a new genre or totally different sound. And then there's artists who do the same thing over and over again. We love both those things. Sorry, so Deb...   Deb: So I love how complicated Lucy can get with just an image or an idea. I just feel like no one can do it the way that she can do it. And my like her last in her last book, which I love so much, we're just brought through all these different places and each one is sort of (36:31.29) dragging behind it, everything that came before, so that you can just feel all of this like, pressure of like the past and of the situations and like even like a word will resonate. Like you'll bring like, there's like a word on maybe page like 82 that you encountered on like page 20 that like the word meant so much on page 20 that it like really, you can really feel its power when it comes on page 80.   And you feel the constant like shifting of meaning and just like the way that the prose is bringing so much more and like it's like reinterpreting that word again and again and again, just like the deeper that you go, like whatever the word is be it you know house or home or stair or um you know sex, whatever it is, it's like constantly shifting. (37:40.952) And that's just part of like who Lucy is, is this like worrying of a problem or worrying of a word and like carrying it forward. And so yeah, so like in that last book, it just was such a big accomplishment. And I felt like it was like her best work yet.   Lucy: So I will say, try and say something a little bit more specific, then. (38:09) Like I guess in the sort of 10 stories that I teach as often as possible in part because I get bored so easily that I need to teach stories that I can return to that often and still feel like I'm reading something that is new to me is the title story from Wait Till You See Me Dance and that story is a really amazing combination of methodical in its execution, which sounds really dull.   But what it does is sort of toss one ball in the air and then toss another ball in the air and then toss another ball in the air. And then, you know, the balls move, but you know, the balls are brightly colored and they're handled by a master juggler. So it's methodical, but it's joyful and hilarious. And then, and then, and you don't   And the other thing is that Deb's narrators are wicked and like they're wicked in the way that like… They are, they're willing to do and say the things that you secretly wish somebody would do and say. That's the same way that like, you know, in the great existential novels, you love and also worry about the protagonists, right? They're troubled, but their trouble allows them to speak truthfully because they can't help it. Or they can't help it when they're in the space of the short story. It's that like, you know, the stories are able to access—a story like this one and like many of Deb's—are able to access that really special space of narrator, of narration, where you get to speak, you get to speak in a whisper.   Annie: You get to speak in a whisper. That's beautiful, Lucy. You get to speak in a whisper.   Lito: We'll be right back.   Lito: (40:15) Welcome back.   Annie: I'm wondering about what this means, you know, how this crosses over to your own personal lives, right? Because of course, literary friendships, we're thinking about the work all of the time. But we're also, you know, when I think of my literary friendship with Lito, I think of him as like a compatriot and somebody who's really carrying me through the world sometimes. I'm wondering if there was for either of you, a hard time that you went through personally, professionally, you know, whether it's about publishing or just getting words on the page or something, you know, um, you know, family related or whatever, where you, um, you know, what it meant to have a literary friend nearby at that time.   Lucy: I mean that's the heart of it.   Deb: Yeah, I mean for sure.   Lucy: One happened last week and I'm sort of still in the middle of it where you know my literary mentor is aging and struggling and so that's painful for me and who gets that? Deb gets that.   The other one, the other big one for me was that the release of my last novel was really complicated. And it brought up a lot of, it intersected with a lot of the things going on in my family that are challenging and a lot of things that are going on in the literary world that are challenging. There were parts of that release that were really satisfying and joyful, and there were parts of it that were just devastatingly painful for me.   And, you know, Deb really helped me find my way through that. And it was a lot, like it was a lot of emotional contact and a lot of thinking through things really hard and a lot of being like, "wait, why do we do this? But remember, why do we do this?" And Deb was the person who could say, "no, you're a novelist." Like things that like I was doubting, Deb could tell me. And the other thing is that I would come closer to being able to believe those things because she could tell them to me.   Annie: Lucy, can you talk a little more about that? Like what did that? (42:27.126) What did that look like, right? Like you talked about resistance to phone calls, and you're not in the same place.   Lucy: It was phone. Right, it would be phone or it would be Zoom or it would be texting. And then, you know, when we would see each other that would be, we would reflect on those times in person even though that wasn't those immediate moments of support and coaching and, you know, wisdom.   Annie:  And that requires a kind of vulnerability, I think, that is hard to do in this industry, right? And I'm just wondering if that was new for you or if that was special to this friendship, right? Or like what allowed for that kind of openness on your part to be able to connect with Deb in that way?   Lucy: I mean, I think I was just really lucky that we've had, like even though we have really, I think, only noticed that we were close since that Morocco trip. Like that was a little bit of a leap of faith. Like, "oh my gosh, how well do I know this person and we're gonna travel together in like circumstances, and do we really know each other this way?" But the combination of the years that we've known each other in more of a warm acquaintance, occasional, great conversation kind of way towards being somebody that you, that you trust and believe and that you have that stuff built in.   And, you know, that over the years you've seen the choices that they've made in the literary world, the choices they've made in their career, when they, you know, everything from, you know, supporting, you know, being a small, being small press identified and championing certain kinds of books over other kinds of books. And like those, just like watching a person make choices for art that you think are in line with the writer that, watching her make choices in art that are in line with the writer that I wanna be in the world makes it so that when you come to something that is frightening, that's the kind of person you wanna talk to because she's done that thinking.   Deb: Yeah, I mean, I feel like there are like so many things that I could say about that. Like one thing is that the kind of time that I spend with Lucy is really different from the kind of time that I spend with most people. Like most people, (44:51) they come to town and I have dinner with them. Or I go to like AWP or whatever and we go out for dinner. Or maybe I spend like one night at their house like with their partner and kid or something, you know. But Lucy and I, we get together and we spend like four days or something all alone, just the two of us, you know, or a month or whatever. And we don't spend a ton of time with other people. And so there's, but then we also do that, but just like not very much.   And so there is something that just creates, like that's a really good mode for me. It's a, that's like the way that I make really deep friendships that are kind of like forever-people in my life. And I've always been like that. And so, but not a lot of people are willing to sort of do that with me. Like, I have so many acquaintances, I've got like a million, I feel like I could have dinner with someone just about any night, as long as it's only like once every few months or something, you know, but I don't have people who are willing to be this close to me, like spend that kind of time with me one-on-one. And the fact is like, they're not that many people that I really feel like doing that with.   And you know, every time Lucy and I do one of these, I just come away feeling like I thought about some really important things and I talked about some really important things and I saw some beautiful things because Lucy always makes sure that we're somewhere where we can see a lot of beauty. And so that just means so much to me. And it's like, and so for me it creates like a space where, Yeah, I can be honest and vulnerable, and I can also tell her, if I can tell her things that I don't tell other people, or I can be really honest with her if I feel like, if I'm giving her advice about something, I can just be honest about it. And so it's really, really nice.   (47:07) I mean, the other thing is like, we're so similar. Like we've made so many similar life choices. And we've talked about that. Lucy and I have talked about that. Like, you know, we both chose not to have kids. We live pretty, like we're both like kind of loners, even though we have partners. Like I think our partners are more like, they just kind of would, they would prefer that we.   I don't know, I shouldn't probably say anything, but I know that Matt would prefer if I was not quite as much of a loner as I am. Yeah, so I look at Lucy and I see the kind of person that I am, the kind of person I wanna be, so if I have a question, I mean, it happens.   Lucy mentioned a couple of things. I have... You know, she's had some pretty major, major things. I have like little things that happen all the time, and they just like bring me to tears.   Like there was this one moment during the pandemic when I was like driving across the country by myself. I was like in Marfa, and I was trying to get to California and I had like a toilet in the back seat. Remember when we were all doing that kind of thing?   Lucy: It was really amazing.   Deb: It was so crazy.   Lucy: But Deb, not everybody had a toilet in their back seat.   Annie: I know. I need that now.   Deb: It still comes in handy.   Annie: I'm sure.   Deb: (48:43) And I was in, and yeah, Lucy is amazing. She'll talk to me on the phone, but Lucy will do because I love to talk on the phone and I love to Zoom. Lucy does not. So she'll tell me in advance, okay, I will talk to you, but it's gonna be for like 20 minutes or I'm gonna have to get off like pretty soon.   But she Zoomed with me and Marfa and I just didn't realize how upset I was about this one rejection that I'd gotten. And it was a really small rejection, I don't know why it bothered me so much, but I just like started crying and like I was like way out in like so many miles from any so many hours from anyone I knew and you know the world was going to shit, and I'd gotten this like tiny rejection from a magazine like a little like I had it was the page was it was like a piece that was like a page long or something, and Lucy just like knew exactly why I I was so upset, and just was able to talk to me about what that meant to me. And just refocus me to like, "look, you don't have to write those. You don't have to be that writer. You don't have to do that." And it was so freeing to know that I didn't always have to be, I don't even know how to describe it, but it was meant a lot. And things like that happen all the time.   Annie: (50:15.265) That's such a wonderful model of mutual support.   Lucy: We'll be right back.   Annie: Hi Lit Fam. We hope you're enjoying our conversation with Lucy Corin and Deb Olin Unferth, and their love for the word, the world, and each other. If you love what we're doing here at LitFriends, please take a moment now  to follow, subscribe, rate, and review our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just a few minutes of your time will help us so much to continue to bring you great conversations like this week after week.  Thank you for listening. Back to a conversation with Lucy Corin and Deb Olin Unferth.     Annie: I'm also aware that we're working in an industry that's a zero-sum construct. And, you know, Lucy, you were sort of joking earlier about... Deb winning all of the awards that you later got. But I am curious, like, what about competition between literary friends when we're living in a world with basically shrinking resources?   Lucy: I feel competition, but I don't really feel it with my literary friends. Does that make sense? Like, I'll feel it with my idea of somebody that I don't really know except for their literary profile, right? But when someone like Deb gets something, it makes the world seem right and true, right? And so that's not hard to bear, right? That's just a sign of a good thing in a world that you're afraid isn't so good.   Deb: I guess I feel like if Lucy gets something, then that raises the chances that I'm gonna get something. I'm gonna get the same thing. Because if we're kind of in the same, like we both published with Grey Wolf, we both have the same editor, so we've multiple times that we've been on these trips, we've both been working on books that were supposed to come out with Graywolf with Ethan. (52:16.3) You know, so I feel like if Lucy gets something, then the chances go up.   Like there was just, something just happened recently where Lucy was telling me that she had a little, like a column coming out with The Believer. And I was like, "oh my God, I didn't even know that they were back." I'm like, "man, I really wanna be in The Believer. Like, I can't believe like, you know, they're back and I'm not in them. I gotta be in it. I said that to Lucy on the phone. And then, like the very next day, Rita wrote me and said, "Hey, do you want to write something?"   And so I wrote to Lucy immediately. I was like, did you write to Rita? And she was like, "no, I really didn't." So it's like, we're in the same— Did you, Lucy?   Lucy: No, I didn't! Rita did that all by herself.   Lito: You put it out into the universe, Deb.   Annie: Lucy did it. Hot cut, Lucy did it!   Deb:  So we're like, we're like in the same, I feel a lot of the time like we're kind of in the same lane and so that really helps because like, I do have writer friends who are not in the same lane as me and maybe. Like I'm not as close, but maybe that would be, but if I was as close, maybe that would cause me more confusion. Like I would be like, you know, "geez, how can I get that too? Or it's hopeless, I'll never get that, you know? So I just don't do that thing," or something. So that's really comforting.   Lito: What are your obsessions?   Lucy: Well, I mean-   Lito: How do they show up on the page?   Lucy: I feel like it's so obvious with Deb that like, you know, Deb got obsessed with chickens, and there was a whole bunch of stuff about chickens. First there was a really smart, brilliant Harper's essay where she learned her stuff. And then there was the novel where she, you know, imagined out the chickens (54:19) to touch on everything, right?   Annie: Then there was a chicken a thousand years in advance.   Lucy: Right, and then there's a beautiful chicken art in the house, and there's, you know. And I'm sure that she's gotten way more chicken gifts than she knows what to do with. But then the Sahara, like, you know, she was obsessed with the Sahara and you'll see it in the next book. It's gonna be— It's not gonna be in a literal way, right? But it'll be like, you'll feel the sand, you'll feel that landscape.   So I don't know, like I feel like the obsessions show up in the books. I mean, are there, I mean, this is a question like, Deb, do you think you have obsessions that don't show up in your work? We both have really cute little black dogs.   Deb: (55:07) Oh, not really. I mean, but I do get obsessed. Like I just get so, so like obsessed in an unhealthy way. And then I just have to wait it out. I just have to like wait until I'm not obsessed anymore. And it's like an ongoing just I'm like, OK, here it comes. It's like sleeping over me. Like how many years of my life is going to be are going to be gone as a result of this?   So I'm always like so relieved when I'm not in that space. Like Lucy's obsession comes down to that, with her language, that she's like exploring one idea, like she'll take an idea and she like worries that over the course of a whole book and that she'll just it's like almost like a cubist approach. She'll be like approaching it from so many different standpoints. And that is like, I mean, Lucy is so smart and the way that she does that is just so genius. And so I feel like that's the thing that really keeps drawing me to her obsessions, that keeps bringing me back to that page to read her work again and again. And yeah, and that's how she is in person too.   Lito: Why do you write? What does it do for the world, if anything?   Lucy: (56:37) I know I had a little tiny throat clear, but I think it was because I'm still trying to figure it out because I feel like the answer is different in this world order than it was in earlier world orders. Like when I first answered those questions for myself when I was deciding to make these big life choices and say, "you know, fuck everything except for writing," like I was answering, I was answering that question a different way than I would now, but I don't quite have it to spit out right now, except that I do think it has something to do with a place where the world can be saved. Like, writing now is a place of respite from the rest of the world where you can still have all of these things that I always assumed were widely valued, that feel more and more narrowly valued. And so I write to be able to have that in my life and to be able to connect with the other people who share those kinds of values that are about careful thinking, that are about the glory of the imagination, that are about the sanctity of people having made things.   Annie: Lucy, I need that on my wall. I just need to hear that every day.   Deb: I mean, I feel like if I can think about it in terms of my reading life, that like art changes my mind all the time. Like that's the thing that teaches me. Like I remember when I was a kid, and I lived right near the Art Institute of Chicago, and I remember going in, and they had the Jacob Lawrence immigration panels, migration panels up there that was like a traveling exhibition. And I had none of that information. I did not know about the Great Migration. I just didn't know any of that. So I just remember walking from panel to panel and reading and studying it, (58:47.952) reading it and studying it and just like getting like just getting just it was like a It was such a revelation and I just learned so much and like changed my mind about so many things just in that moment that it was like I'll never forget that.   And I feel like I, I totally agree with Lucy that the reasons that I write now and the reasons that I read now are very different than they were like before, say 2015, or something. But that, that maybe it has its roots in that sort of Jacob Lawrence moment where, you know, just I read these things and it's, I like, I love sinking deep into books that are really changing my mind and like teaching me about the world in ways that I never could have imagined, and I love that so much and I… I don't know if I have that to offer, but I really try hard, you know. Like I tried that with the chicken book. I'm kind of trying that, I hope, in this book that I'm trying to finish and— ha finish!—that I'm trying to get through. And so I think that that's why I think that art is so important.   I don't know if that's truly why I write though. I feel like why I write is that I've always written, and it's like I love it so much. Like I just, sometimes I hate it, sometimes I hate it for like a whole year or whatever, but it's just, it's so much a core of who I am. (01:00:39) And I just, I can't imagine my life any other way. It's just it's just absolutely urgent to me.   Annie: Yeah, urgent. Yeah. I think we all feel that in some way.   Annie:(01:01:04.374) Thank you both for talking to us a little bit about your friendship and getting to know a little bit more about how you started and where you're at now. We're going to move into the lightning round.   Lito: Ooooo Lightning round.   Annie: (01:01:16) Deb, who were you in seventh grade? Who was I in seventh grade? In one sentence, oh my God, the pressure is on. I was unpopular and looked, my hair was exactly the same as it is now. And I wore very similar clothes.   Lucy: (01:01:44) I was a peer counselor, and so I was like the Don who held everybody's secrets.   Lito: Beautiful. Lucy.   Lucy: It saved me. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had a place in that world.   Annie: Makes so much sense.   Lito: Wow. Who or what broke your heart first, deepest?   Lucy: I mean, I would just say my mom.   Deb: I guess, then I have to say my dad.   Annie: Okay, which book is a good lit friend to you?   Deb: Can I say two? The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein and The Known World by Edward P. Jones.   Annie: Excellent.   Lucy: My go-to is White Noise. Still. Sorry.   Lito: No need to apologize.   Lucy: Yep.   Annie Lito (01:02:27) Who would you want to be lit friends with from any point in history?   Lucy: For me it's Jane Bowles.   Deb: Oh, whoa. Good one. She would be maybe a little difficult. I was gonna say Gertrude Stein, then I was like, actually, she'd be a little difficult.   Lucy: What a jerk!   Deb: I think Zora Neale Hurston would be fun.   Lucy: Well, yeah, of course. For sure.   Annie: We were gonna ask who your lit frenemy from any time might be, but maybe you've already said.   Lucy: Oh, right. I accidentally said my lit frenemy instead of my lit friend.   Annie: Yeah.   Lucy: Mm-hmm.   Deb: (01:03:08) A frenemy from any time?   Annie: Any time. Yeah, it doesn't have to be Jonathan Franzen. I feel like most people will just be like Jonathan Franzen. But it could be any time in history.   Deb: I mean, if you're gonna go that route, then it would probably be, um, like...   Lito: Kierkegaard.   Deb: I don't know, maybe Nietzsche? If you're gonna go that route, if you're gonna go like, like existential philosophers.   Annie: (01:03:34) That's great.   Lito: That could be a podcast too.   Annie: Just like epic frenemy. The most epic frenemy.   Lito: (01:03:35)  Well, that's our show.   Annie & Lito: Thanks for listening.   Annie: We'll be back next week with our guests Melissa Febos and Donika Kelly.    Lito: Find us on all your socials @LitFriendspodcasts   Annie: And tell us about an adventure you've had with your Lit bestie. I'm Annie Liontas.   Lito: And I'm Lito Velazquez.   Annie: Thanks to our production squad. Our show was edited by Justin Hamilton.   Lito: Our logo was designed by Sam Schlenker.   Annie: Lisette Saldaña is our Marketing Director.   Lito: Our theme song was written and produced by Roberto Moresca.   Annie: And special thanks to our show producer Toula Nuñez.   Lito: This was Lit Friends, Episode 2.

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The gang is back and mumbling on. Dane The Racist Bastard. Sam is The Lucy One. Dane is now thin and kinda healthy. Dialects. The Damn Mormons. Sharing is caring. Call the comment line at (337) 366-1606. Thanks for listening.

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: Interview with Clara Shih                     [intro music]   Lucy Sanders:     Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT. Over the last few years, we've been interviewing women who have started technology companies and have just had the greatest time talking to them about the fabulous things they're doing, getting all kinds of wonderful advice for entrepreneurs. With me is Larry Nelson, w3w3.com. Hi, Larry.   Larry Nelson: I'm happy to be here. This is a great series. We know it's had a great impact on a number of young women. Bosses, parents and the like.   Lucy: Wow. We've got a great interview today. It's a really fascinating interview with a woman who's not only started a technology company, but also is a best-selling author. Clara Shih, who is the founder and CEO of Hearsay Social. Her book, "The Facebook Era." We all know we're living in the Facebook era. In fact, my mother-in-law follows all the status of the family, all the time, on her grandkids' Facebook accounts. Hearsay Social is in this really interesting space in social media. I know Clara will set us straight when we're talking to her, but here is my sense of what it was. When I was working in corporate, we would have customer relationship management systems, where individual sales people, marketing people, could keep track of customers. The system itself, the platform itself, would actually do a lot of the heavy lifting of that in sort of a systematized way, so that the company's brand was well represented by those sales people andmarketing people. In this age of social networking, we have a lot of big franchise kinds of businesses that are busy developing local relationships through social media with individuals. Yet at the same time, doing it in an ad hoc way is not really particularly always supportive of that company's brand. So Hearsay Social is a company that is really trying to take that on by building a platform. So Clara, I hope I didn't get that too wrong, but we're really happy to have you here. Why don't you give us a sense of what's going on at Hearsay Social today?   Clara Shih: Thank you so much for having me. Hearsay Social is the fastest-growing social media start-up right now. We're based in Silicon Valley. We just opened an office in New York. We have 60 employees and growing every day. We were cash-flow positive last year. We've recently raised $21 million in venture capital from Sequoia and New Enterprise Associates. Things have never been better for us. We're thrilled to be part of helping to lead the social media revolution that's sweeping business.   Lucy: Give us an example. What would a Starbucks or a company like Starbucks do with a platform like Hearsay Social?   Clara: We focus at Hearsay Social on corporate-to-local companies that are brands that have a corporate presence combined with location. Whether it's State Farm, or 24-Hour Fitness, or McDonald's, you've got all these local employees and agents out there representing your brand. Increasingly, in a highly-decentralized that we're seeing from Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Foursquare and now Google Plus, we're seeing the local representatives and employees actually create their own pages, either to interact directly with customers, or because customers are checking in to specific locations using their iPhone or Android location-enabled device to kind of manage all of these local profiles and activity that are going on. Hearsay Social is all about, first, helping the chief marketing officer get a handle on who all in their organization is even engaging in these customer conversations at the local level, and then from there being able to push out corporate-approved marketing campaigns, viral videos, other content that goes out to each of these locations. Then the locations can tailor these materials for their audience, and retain a unique and authentic voice. Then finally, being able to measure all of that, and slice and dice by region or store or employee.   Lucy: I think that's just fascinating.   Larry: Yeah.   Lucy: Very much needed. It sounds like it's a really heavy, heavy technology platform. It kind of gets us to our first question about you and technology. How did you first get into technology? Then looking across the landscape, what technologies do you think will really be important in the future?   Clara: I've always been interested in math and science. I think growing up, having a father who was an engineer, I was always very curious about how the world worked. I was fascinated by how technology makes life better. I think that was how I initially got into this space. Going to Stanford, studying computer science there, being exposed to Silicon Valley and the tremendous innovation that takes place here, was incredibly inspiring for me.   Lucy: Obviously, social media is an important technology, both now and in the future. Do you see anything else that you think is really going to change the landscape?   Clara: If you look at technology, about once a decade you have a disruptive technology innovation that changes how we live and work. In the '70s, this was mainframe computing. In the '80s, it was the PC, the idea that every person could have their own machine, and today we have several machines per person. In the '90s, in the last decade, it was very much about the Internet. Social media is the key disruptor for this current era, that I call the Facebook era. I think along with social comes a couple of other trends. One is the real-time nature of communication. Two is that increasingly, people are mobile. It's not just about accessing the Internet from your PC, but actually concurrently with your iPad, your iPhone, a host of mobile devices.   Larry: I tell you what, Clara, I know there's many entrepreneurs that would like to be cash-flow positive their first year.   Lucy: [laughs] No kidding!   Larry: Besides that, why are you an entrepreneur? Then, what is it about the entrepreneurship thing that makes you tick?   Clara: Good question. I never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur per se, but I've always been very action-oriented. The world is changing so quickly. I think it's in large part to consumer technologies like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. The opportunity that I saw for Hearsay Social was, "OK. Facebook has fundamentally transformed how people interact with each other. How can businesses keep up?" I started imagining what the world could look like for companies. That became the foundation for becoming an entrepreneur.   Larry: Mm-hm. Wow.   Lucy: I even think writing a book is entrepreneurial. That's hard work, and a very original work. Along your career path, you mentioned your parents as influencers. Who else influenced you in terms of being a mentor, or giving you advice, or...? Who are your role models?   Clara: I would say that I've had the fortune of having many role models and mentors. I couldn't have arrived to this point without them. I'll just name a few. Mark Bennioff at Sales Force, the ultimate technology entrepreneur, who not only created a new company, but an entirely new way of delivering software through the cloud. More recently, I tremendously admire Sheryl Sandberg, who is the chief operating officer at Facebook, not only for what she's done there, but for how she's balanced that with her family, and with being a very outspoken advocate for women in the workplace.   Lucy: She's given several tremendous talks over the last few months. She's really stepping out in support of exactly what you're talking about. It's very heartening to see that.   Larry: Yeah. Clara, being an entrepreneur, there's the ups and downs and challenges and everything else. What is the toughest thing that you've had to do in your career?   Clara: That's a good question. I would say the toughest thing I've had to do was decide to leave a perfectly fine career path to start something new and start from scratch, and accept all the uncertainty that comes with being an entrepreneur. In the early days, there was no $21 million dollars and 60 employees and all of these. Just a blank slate. My co-founder Steven and I, sitting in my apartment. We didn't even know what the company would do or what the name would be. And that's really scary.   Lucy: How did you make that decision? Share about your thought processes there.   Clara: I think the decision to start a company happened pretty organically. I studied computer science and econ at Stanford, and then spent some time at Oxford, and then really grew up in the Silicon Valley companies. I worked at Microsoft, I worked at Google, I worked at Salesforce.com. I just happened to have been tinkering with the new Facebook APIs when they came out in early 2007, and developed what became the first business application on Facebook. Word got out, just because of the viral nature of Facebook. My friends added the application, their friends added it. Pretty soon, it made its way to the desk of a very influential analyst at Forrester, who blogged about it, and credited me with kick-starting the social business application movement. Before I knew it, I had offers to write a book, to keynote major technology conferences. Given the experience of researching and writing "The Facebook Era," where I realized that there was huge unmet need in the market, not only for knowledge and education in social media, but actual technologies to automate and bring governance best practices and effectiveness to these technologies.   Lucy: I just love this story.   Larry: Yeah, I do too.   Lucy: I mean, I just love this story, and I think it shows yet again in your life, you look backwards and you can the dots, but looking forward, it's like, "I don't know how people have career plans." You don't even know.   Clara: I couldn't agree more. I wish I could say that I had this master plan when I developed Faceforce, but really it just happened serendipitously, and I was opportunistic when opportunities came my way.   Lucy: That's an incredibly important piece of advice, which gets me to the next question, around giving young people advice about entrepreneurship. Or heck, even not so young people. If you were giving a young person advice about entrepreneurship, what would you tell them? I think I'll start. Be opportunistic, right? Be mindful that there are opportunities in front of you, and take them. But what else would you say?   Clara: I would say, expose yourself to as many new ideas and opportunities as soon as possible, because we don't know what we don't know. Sometimes, it takes a while to find what we're passionate about, but we can accelerate that process by learning new things and exposing ourselves to as many new things as possible.   Lucy: Yep.   Larry: Excellent advice.   Lucy: One of my favorite phrases now is, "Who knew?" [laughter]   Lucy: Who knew?   Clara: For me, when I was in college, it just so happened that I had to put myself through Stanford. There wasn't an option for me exceptto work both during the school year, as well as during the summer. In retrospect, that worked out really nicely, because I got an exposure to a variety of different industries and companies, and had plenty of work experience by the time I graduated.   Larry: That's great. You didn't plan on being an entrepreneur. You worked with a number of the big technology companies. What are the personal characteristics do you think that you have that give the advantage of being an entrepreneur?   Clara: I think one characteristic is that I don't take no for an answer. When you're starting out, a lot of people will tell you no, or they'll cast doubt. I remember my mom was pretty upset when she heard I quit my job at a secure company. It takes a lot of courage, and it just takes extreme confidence in yourself, and optimism that things will work out in the end. I think that that's certainly the most important one. The other characteristic of most entrepreneurs that I've met, and I hope it's true of me, is that we see the world in a different way. I remember working at bigger companies like Google and Salesforce.com that this rubbed people the wrong way a lot. My advice would be, stick to your guns, and if you believe, sometimes the best thing to do is to leave the company and start your own. And that's exactly what I did.   Lucy: I think that courage to leave a secure job... My son is starting his own company, and as a parent, I have to remind myself of that all the time, that it takes a lot of courage and confidence for him.   Larry: But Lucy, you left a job too. [crosstalk]   Clara: It might take more courage by the parents than by the individual. [laughter]   Lucy: Yeah, maybe that's the case. You mentioned Cheryl Sandberg and her speaking out about work-life issues. Do you have anything to add in terms of what you do, or any words of wisdom in that area?   Clara: I would just echo what Cheryl always says, which is, "The most important career decision you make is the partner you choose." I'm recently married. I got married two months ago.   Lucy: Congratulations.   Clara: Thank you. But there's no way I could do what I do without the love and support of my husband Dan. He's incredible. He inspires me, he teaches me, and he gives me balance in my life. He reminds me when I'm working too much.   Lucy: Can you call me too? [laughter]   Lucy: You're working too much.   Larry: [laughs] That is excellent. My wife and I, we've been married for 40 years. I was nine years old when we got married. [laughs] Well, I was close to it. We've worked together all this time, and it's just absolutely fabulous. I just love it. All right. Now you've already achieved a great deal. Not only the best-selling book and a company profitable in your first year, and all the other things that are happening. What do you think is next for you?   Clara: I guess just continuing to be open to the unknown, and to be opportunistic. I don't know what opportunities will come my way, personally, professionally, or for Hearsay Social as a company. I want to make sure that I myself, as well as my organization, we're always open to taking risks, and to continually challenge ourselves and grow.   Lucy: I just think that's so well said.   Larry: Yes, excellent.   Lucy: I think being open to the unknown is so important. As organizations grow, I think a certain amount of rigidity sets in. Being mindful of that may cause it not to happen. Clara, thank you so much for talking to us. I know our listeners will really enjoy this interview. I want to remind people that it's online at w3w3.com, and also ncwit.org. Thank you so much.   Clara: You're very welcome. Thank you for having me   Larry: Clara, this was really terrific information.   Lucy: Yeah, it's wonderful. Just wonderful. We really appreciate it. These interviews are really capturing the attention of women in technology. [music] Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Clara ShihInterview Summary: Clara Shih, founder and CEO of Hearsay Social and author of The Facebook Era, gives the following advice to young entrepreneurs: “Expose yourself to as many new ideas and opportunities as soon as possible. We don’t know what we don’t know, and sometimes it takes a while to find what we’re passionate about. But we can accelerate that process by learning new things and exposing ourselves to as many new things as possible.” Release Date: December 1, 2011Interview Subject: Clara ShihInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 15:55

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Helen Greiner Co-founder and Chairman of the Board, iRobot Corp. Date: June 11, 2007 NCWIT Interview with Helen Greiner BIO: In the early days of iRobot Corp. (Nasdaq:IRBT), co-founder and Chairman of the Board Helen Greiner envisioned robots as the basis for an entirely new class of products that would improve life by taking on dangerous and undesirable tasks. Greiner's vision has been brought to life by products such as the iRobot Roomba® Vacuuming Robot, which has sold more than 2 million units to consumers throughout the world, and the iRobot PackBot® Tactical Mobile Robot, which is helping to save soldiers' lives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Greiner's nearly 20 years in robot innovation and commercialization includes work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, where she met iRobot co-founders Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks. Before founding iRobot in 1990, Greiner founded California Cybernetics, a company focused on commercializing NASA Jet Propulsion Lab technology and performing government-sponsored research in robotics. Greiner holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in computer science, both from MIT. In 2005, she led iRobot through its initial public offering. She also guided iRobot's early strategic corporate growth initiatives by securing $35 million in venture funding to finance iRobot's expansion in the consumer and military categories. In addition, Greiner created iRobot's Government & Industrial Robots division - starting with government research funding leading to the first deployment of robots in combat in Operation Enduring Freedom. Currently, the division is shipping iRobot PackBot robots for improvised explosive device (IED) disposal in Iraq. In part because of the success of these initiatives, Greiner has helped enhance public acceptance of robots as one of today's most important emerging technology categories. Greiner was named by the Kennedy School at Harvard in conjunction with US News and World Report as one of America's Best Leaders and was recently honored with the Pioneer Award from the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) in appreciation for her work in military robotics. Greiner has been honored by the World Economic Forum as both a Global Leader for Tomorrow and a Young Global Leader. In 2005 Good Housekeeping Magazine named her "Entrepreneur of the Year," and Accenture honored her as "Small Business Icon" in its Government Women Leadership Awards. In 2003, Greiner was recognized by Fortune Magazine as one of its "Top 10 Innovators of 2003" and named the Ernst and Young New England "Entrepreneur of the Year" with cofounder Colin Angle. Greiner won the prestigious "DEMO God" award at the DEMO 2000 Conference. In 1999, she was named an "Innovator for the Next Century" by Technology Review Magazine. Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I am the CEO of the National Center for Women and Information Technology or NCWIT. This is part of a series of interviews that we are having with fabulous IT entrepreneurs, women who have started IT companies in a variety of different sectors, all of whom have absolutely fabulous stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs. With me doing these interviews is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. How are you? Larry Nelson: Well, hello. Boy, am I happy to be here. Lucy: Why don't you tell us a little bit about w3w3 because these will be podcasts on w3w3 as well as on the NCWIT website. Larry: Well, just briefly, we started in 1998 before anybody knew what radio on the Internet was all about. And finally we learned a number of interesting lessons. We started doing podcasting a little over a year ago, so that's a big leap since then. We have been very fortunate to have a number of interviews with top‑notch heavy hitters, but after I saw the list that Lucy put together I was just absolutely stunned. Lucy: To really just get right to it, the person we are interviewing today is Helen Greiner. She is the co‑founder and chairwoman of iRobot. I have to admit up front that I am an iRobot stockholder, and Helen knows I am one of her best salespeople ‑‑ maybe not her best sales person but certainly one of her salespeople. Helen Greiner: I hope you are not just a stockholder, but I hope you are also a Roomba owner. Lucy: I am a Roomba owner. It's getting double duty now because we're doing a kitchen renovation, and we set it loose in the house at night to pick up all the dust and stuff so it's getting a workout, Helen. Helen: You'll be needing the Dirt Dog model for wash ups and construction areas. Lucy: Absolutely. Larry: We're going to have to have a link to all of these on the website. Lucy: Absolutely. We are really happy to have you here, Helen. We are really looking forward to talking to you about entrepreneurship. Larry: You know, I can't help but wonder: we have four daughters, and how did you, Helen, get really involved and interested in technology? Helen: Well, I think this is a common story in technology, but I was inspired by science fiction. I went to see "Star Wars" when I was 11 on the big screen, and I was enthralled by R2‑D2 because he was a character. He had a personality and a gender, and he was more than a machine. I was inspired to start thinking about, can you build something like that? As I was hacking on my little TSR 80 personal computer, obviously I had no idea just how complex it would be. Lucy: What are you thinking about those new mailboxes that are R2‑D2 mailboxes, Helen? Helen: I think they're pretty damn cool. Lucy: I think it's pretty cool. As a technologist you obviously look at a lot of different technologies. I am sure you have some on your radar screen that you think are particularly cool and compelling. Maybe you could share some of those with us. Helen: Well, of course, the coolest is robots because they are just on the cusp of adoption today. Other than the robots and ones that very well might feed into the robot, are large scale memories, multiple core processors, cameras on cell phones. Technologies as they go to mass market are getting cheaper and cheaper which enables them to be bringing them into other applications, like on the robots. Larry: I just want to make sure that the listeners do understand that you are talking about robots everywhere from the kitchen to Iraq. Helen: Yes. We have over two million Roombas out there in people's homes doing the floor sweeping and vacuuming. We have a floor washing robot, the Scooba, that you just leave on your floor and when you come back it's clean. We have a robot for the work shop called the Dirt Dog, and what most people don't realize is we also sell a line of robots for the military. Our Packbot model was used for the first time in cave clearing in Afghanistan and now is being used for bomb disposal over in Iraq. One of the neat new developments we have is we just put out a version of this with a bomb sniffing payload, so it can actually go out and find improvised explosive devices. Lucy: Well, I've heard you speak about the robots over in Iraq, and it's very compelling to know that we can use technology like this to really go on these types of missions instead of our young men and our young women. Helen: The robots allow a soldier to stay at a safe, standoff distance. He doesn't have to go into unnecessary danger. Lucy: Right. Helen: Our servicemen and women, you know, are exposed to a lot of danger when you send them to roadside bombs when a robot could do the job instead. We think that's really something that should be changed quickly, and it has changed very rapidly. Just two years ago they would suit up a soldier in a bomb suit and send them down range, and now you have to get permission to do that. The common operating procedure is to send a robot into the danger. Larry: That sounds like iRobot is doing everything from saving backs in kitchens to saving lives in dangerous situations. Let me see if I can migrate to the entrepreneur part of you. What is it that made you become, or why are you an entrepreneur? Helen: I was deeply interested in making robots into an industry. People have been talking about robots. They have been in science fiction for decades and decades. Yet, when I started in this field I looked around and there were very few robots that people could actually purchase and could actually use. When I was at the university at MIT the people worked on wonderful robot projects. It was really, really cool technology, but when the PhD got done or when the project ended, all of it would kind of stop and then somebody would start a new project potentially building on some of the results. But the actual robot that was built. many times progress stopped on it. Just like the computer industry, I believe it takes a company that can reinvest some of the profits back into the next generation and the next improvements on the products that really has started the industry to take off. Lucy: Well next the definition that I carry in my head of true innovation is taking research and the types of projects you are talking about, Helen, and driving them out into the consumer space and into the mass market. That is what innovation is all about. Larry: You bet. By the way, what is it about being an entrepreneur, what is it that makes you tick and turns you on as an entrepreneur? Helen: Being an entrepreneur is creating something out of nothing. You know, when you start it, it's all consuming. It takes your whole focus. It is very compelling to me. I tend to be someone who when they jump into something they jump into it with absolutely full force, and it allowed me to learn so much along the way. Everything from how to hire people, how to apply for and win a military research contract, how to raise venture capital, how to set up a management structure and, very recently, how to take a company public. Lucy: Helen, tell us, obviously, entrepreneurship makes you tick. You love to create things from nothing, and along the way as you chose this career path, who influenced you? What kind of mentors did you have? Helen: I have had a lot of advisors who I could talk to about the different stages of the business, and that's been an incredible gift. That is one of the most valuable things you can give: the benefit of your own experience. Early on I was influenced by my dad having founded a company, so entrepreneurship was part of my culture growing up. Larry: So, it's not genetic. It's part of the culture, right? Helen: I believe that. Larry: You, I'm sure, like all of us entrepreneurs ‑‑ you know, Pat and I, we have been in business together and entrepreneurs for over 30 years. There are a lot of bumps and things along the road. What would be some of the most challenging things that you have experienced? Helen: Well, iRobot has been in business for 17 years, and it's a lot different company today than when we founded it. Early on, this was a bootstrap company, credit cards filled to the max. Larry: So you made money right away? Helen: Yeah. Larry: You were profitable right away? Yeah. Lucy: Like many of us. Helen: No, we really had a bumpy beginning because in part the technology wasn't ready yet upon time. So we came up with a method to develop the technology and to develop business plans so when the opportunity was right we could capitalize on it. Lucy: So, as we shift a little bit now toward the future entrepreneurs, if you were giving advise to people about entrepreneurship, young people, about the career path you have chosen being an entrepreneur, what would you tell them? What advice would you give them? Helen: I would say, definitely do it, because it's probably one of the most rewarding career paths you can take. One of the most challenging, but one of the most rewarding. I would say very strongly, don't do it like we did it at iRobot. IRobot, we didn't do it with a business plan. We didn't start a real crisp idea of what these robots would used for. We basically started with the future of the technology and it happens to have worked for us, but it was a long haul in the early years. I think if I had it to do over again, it would be done a lot more efficiently. Larry: When did you finally get the real management team put together? Helen: In 1998 we decided to take venture capital for the first time. And that was a big decision because that's what took it from being more of a lifestyle company, somewhat of a research lab. Folks were building any kind of robot, because they were passionate about it. Some of them are quite frankly cool to a real business concern. You could almost consider the company a re‑start in 1998. It only took the first venture capital, which allowed us to invest in the management team and take it to the next level. Also to invest in our own product lines, rather than relying on government contracts coming in or strategic relationships with larger companies. Larry: Well, you have been very passionate about iRobots and you've also been very humble in terms of what you have done, what you have been through. What are some of the characteristics that maybe have been a benefit to you in becoming a successful entrepreneur? Helen: I'd say the biggest one is persistence. There will always be speed bumps along the way. And generally being able to say, OK, I might not have the solution to this problem right now, but I know that there's a way. And either by talking to people, getting advice, by brainstorming with people, by being creative, by thinking out of the box. There is always a way to get through any problem that presents itself. It's takes persistence to do that because you will get knocked quite a few times along the road. Being able to pick yourself up, dust off and say, I learned from that experience, I won't do it again. We don't look at anything at iRobot as failed. This got us to the next step and the next step was different, but they were all stepping‑stones to where we are today. And many of them were necessary. Larry: I have heard that persistence is omnipotence. Lucy: Sometime we refer to it as relentlessness. Larry: Oh, is that what that is. Lucy: Yes. I also have to say something about Helen how and just as a sidebar: Helen gives one of the best talks on robotics I have ever seen. Helen, your talk at the Grace Harper Conference was outrageously good. Helen: Oh, well I appreciate that. One of the things that I would like for folks listening to know that it is important to be able to grab the microphone and get your message across. My personal background is: I was extremely shy, terribly afraid of public speaking. You know, reports that people who would rather do anything else sometimes than get up in front of a group of people and speak. I was one of those people. It doesn't come naturally to me. But I recognized that it was important in getting the message of the company across. I really worked on how to improve and just by taking speaking opportunities I got better and better at it. Which doesn't mean I will ever be a natural just really, really want to jump out and do it. If I can do it, anybody can learn to be a better public speaker. So they can take advantage of the opportunities to get their message out that it provides. Larry: It might not be natural but you certainly are unique and passionate. Lucy: The best talk I've heard, a mix of computer science and business and humor, it's wonderful. Helen: That is very nice of you. It means a lot because I did have to work harder than people who are naturals, "Yes, I want the mike!" Lucy: One of the things that our listeners will be interested in. The entrepreneurial life is a tough life. It is a lot of work and yet it is important to bring balance between our personal lives and our professional lives. So what kinds of hints do you have to pass along? Helen: I don't think I'm a shining example of balance in my life, but I can say the philosophy I've always had is: work hard, play hard. So, when I do take off from iRobot, being able to go out snowboarding, being able to tight‑board, being able to go scuba diving. I'm just learning how to tight‑board. I have a goal to learn one new sport each year, because it's good to take up something new and to me I like doing it in the athletic arena. Lucy: Well, it sounds like fun to me. Larry: Lucy likes to go out there and jog every day after... Lucy: Well, you're right I'm not that good at it either, but I still get out there. Larry: I can't help but ask this. You know, you have had a very exciting and challenging ‑‑ and obviously with the persistence and the talent ‑‑ you really accomplished a great deal. I know you want to accomplish a great deal more with iRobot. What's next for you? Helen: Well, the challenges that iRobot faces today are different than when we were a start up company. Now we have over 350 people. In 2006 we did just about $189 million in revenues and now it's about making the organization click, to function as a team, and making sure that things work like clockwork at the organization, while still keeping that innovative flair, so you can get the next generation of products into the pipeline. Lucy: So, I have to ask, just because I love iRobot so much, what's the next great product? Can you spill the beans? Helen: I can't tell you what the next consumer robot products are, but on the military side, we have a hugely exciting robot that can run over 12 miles an hour, that can carry a soldier's pack. It's got a manipulator on it that can pick up a Howitzer shell. That thing picked me up the other day. Lucy: Oh. Larry: Wow. Helen: We're very excited to get that type of capability also into hands of our soldiers. Lucy: Wow, that's pretty exciting. Larry: Nothing like getting picked up. Boy, that's for sure. Lucy: I don't know what I would do if a robot picked me up, but I guess one of these days maybe we'll experience ‑‑ we'll get you to bring that to one of our meetings, Helen. That would be very cool. Larry: I'd love a picture of that for the website. Lucy: Yeah, thank you. OK. Larry: Helen, I want to thank you so much for joining us. We are so excited about this program. When we get to talk to people like you with your background and your experience, it makes it just that much more exciting and motivating to a number of young people. Helen: Well, I appreciate it. Lucy: Well, and we want everybody to know where they can find these podcasts. They are accessible on the NCWIT website at ww.NCWIT.org And along with the podcast, his information about entrepreneurism and how people can be more involved as entrepreneurs and also get resources on the web and also from other organizations, should they be interested. Larry: Yes, and thank you for all of the great hints and probably more than that, some really golden nuggets in there. One that's sticking out in my mind right now is the mass‑market adoption. I guess that is what we all want to charge for. Helen: It's not where we started out, but it is where we're fully focused at. Lucy: Well, thank you very much. Helen: OK, thank you. Have a good one. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Helen GreinerInterview Summary: Helen Greiner is co-founder and Chairman of the Board of iRobot Corp., maker of the Roomba® Vacuuming Robot (over 2M units sold) and the iRobot PackBot® Tactical Mobile Robot, which deactivates mines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Release Date: June 11, 2007Interview Subject: Helen GrenierInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 15:30

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Rashmi Sinha CEO & Co-founder, SlideShare Date: April 27, 2009 Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders, the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, or NCWIT. This is another of our interviews with women who have started IT companies. I'm very excited today to be interviewing Rashmi Sinha. With me today is Larry Nelson, as usual, from w3w3.com. Larry Nelson: Hello, and it's my pleasure to be here. This is going to be an exciting interview. We'll have this, of course, on w3w3.com also, and it's been a spectacular, popular series. Lucy: Absolutely. And you're doing something else interesting at w3w3 these days, aren't you? Larry: We just launched our own TV show "IPTV." Lucy: You'll have to watch out, Rashmi, he's going to be coming after you for a TV show next. Larry: You betcha. Lucy: Well, Larry, I'm pretty sure all of our listeners know that Facebook, Twitter, blogging, are really part of social media and powerful communication tools, but I'll bet if they're like me they didn't stop to think so much about the fact that PowerPoint is also social media. People don't create PowerPoint presentations to share with themselves, and so they really do create them for communication, and really to reach out to others. So that's really why I'm very excited, being a heavy PowerPointer myself, to be interviewing Rashmi Sinha. She is the cofounder and CEO of SlideShare. It's, I believe, the word's largest community for sharing presentations. Rashmi, you'll have to tell us how many, but the stat I grabbed off the Web was 3,000 PowerPoints created per day? Larry: Per day! Wow. Lucy: Wow. So it's really a great way to get your slides out, and share, and reuse, and really form community around PowerPoint. Welcome, Rashmi! Rashmi Sinha: Thank you, thank you. Glad to be here and sharing a few stories. Lucy: One of the stories I thought we'd start with, before we get to our usual set of questions, is: what kinds of topics are you seeing these days put up on SlideShare? Rashmi: Anything, and everything. conversation, and debate is what this is about. Last year in November, we saw a lot of focus on the credit crisis. Recently we've seen a bunch of Obama presentations. Whatever is the current topic, that definitely shows up, and then there are more stable topics. We always have some things about the latest technologies or whatever people are excited about such as Telescope, or Ruby, or Python. You also have a different, more creative type of presentation, which are basically photographs with some music in the background. So there's a whole range of types of things that show up on SlideShare. Lucy: That's a great transition into our first question. You have a Ph.D. in cognitive neuropsychology. That is just so fascinating, and I know that you really did fall in love with the Web, and Web 2.0, and you really have looked at some of these issues around Web technologies from a perspective of human psychology. It would be very interesting to know how you see the cool technology today. What do you think is hot, especially in Web 2.0? Rashmi: I'm coming up from a little bit of a biased perspective, since I've spend the day kind of behind SlideShare, looking out at what people are doing. What I find really interesting is that so many of what are the more businessy, supposedly boring topics, are kind of the hot topics of conversation that people are participating in. It's not necessarily diluting the level of the conversation. For example, before SlideShare you couldn't really imagine people bonding over these very technical presentations. But you had this mission that people are interested in, and the Web really enables them to find each other, and to bond over these objects. Whether it's on Twitter, or it's on FaceBook, or it's on LinkedIn, or it's on peoples' own websites and broadcasts you really see this ability to have these topic-based conversations, which I find very interesting. I think one of the things that really strikes me is, what's happened with social networking is that the world is much more deeply linked than it used to be. Earlier it was all about just the hyperlinks, how you point to each other, and now you have all these social connections and all these different social spaces that they participate in. Overall I think that the interlinking of people and the web has become much more complex and much realistic in reflecting real world relationships in some way. I find that very interesting overall. Larry: Mm-hmm. Lucy Sanders: I think the idea of communities around PowerPoint presentations is fascinating. What kinds of communities do you see forming? What kind of topic areas seem to be the most popular? Rashmi: A lot of conversation around social media. I think all the social media junkies of the world come to SlideShare and put up presentations and find the other ones. So you see a lot of conversation about that. You see a lot of conversation about marketing, about the web itself, about technology, and about I would say pretty much any topic that people do their presentations around, you see communities forming. The interesting aspect about the community and was something that we had noticed time and again is that it doesn't happen only on SlideShare. It happens outside SlideShare often. It often happens on Twitter or on FaceBook, where people take back the objects and then bond over them. We have tried to embrace that in a natural and fluid manner and let the community formation be anywhere that people are. They can take these presentations, or documents which we also support, back with them. Larry: Wow, you're doing a wonderful job. Now one of the things, Rashmi, I'd like to ask you is, with your background, your education and everything else, why did you become an entrepreneur and what is it about being an entrepreneur that makes you tick? Rashmi: Well I never planned to be an entrepreneur, and it was entirely an accident, maybe a little bit of an accident stemming from what the thing that I wanted to do in life. But I did not, when I was doing my Ph.D., if anybody had asked me "are you going to be an entrepreneur?" I would not have thought that for a moment. I guess I just embrace whatever is in front of me and kind of go with it. And that just led to one thing after the other. So I'd like to share the story of how it happened. I did my Ph.D. and then I came UC Berkeley for a post doc. I was doing psychology, not at all interested in technology. As I said, the Bay Area water, there's something in the water here that gets you interested in technology. So I started just focusing more on technology, found the topics very interesting, and one day walked into the UC Berkeley School of Information which does a lot of human computer direction work, and just said, "I find these topics interesting. I'd like to work on them." And they said, "Great. Why don't you start?" So I switched topics within UC Berkeley, did that for a year, then decided I wanted to do consulting. So I changed to consulting, formed a company, we built our first product, that was MindCanvas. And I formed the company, by the way, with my husband who is a software engineer and who was getting done with his job that he was working in for Commerce One. So we formed the first company, we built our first product, and then he came up with the idea of SlideShare. We launched SlideShare in October 2006 and it just took off, and we kind of followed it. I'm definitely an accidental entrepreneur. Lucy: I like this notion of embracing what you see in front of you, and just moving with it and taking advantage. It's very opportunistic and I think we see that a lot in entrepreneurs. So along that path, I'm sure people influenced you. You had mentors, or maybe not. But we're really interested in understanding who influenced you. Rashmi: Lots of people along the way. So in academia, my teacher was very influential. In terms of the way he taught me to work rather than the specific things that we worked on, I've moved away from them. But the way he was efficient in his working, that really taught me a lot. At UC Berkeley I work with Marti Hearst and Hal Varian they were doing academic admissions and how the end is now economists at guru, and just kind of watching the way the talk about the Web. That's how I was really introduced to technology working with them. That has been very influential in the way I approach things in SlideShare. So, those are just some of the people who've influenced me, but there are lots and lots of people along the way who've helped me figure out things. Larry: Very interesting. Now, I really admire the progress you've made. Somewhere along the line since you've started your company, SlideShare, what was maybe the toughest thing that you had to do. Rashmi: The toughest thing was moving down at a product. I had to do that, it was called MindCanvas, it was a service platform. It was doing well, we were making money off it, it was a profitable business. But SlideShare had more promise, SlideShare had already touched the life of millions of people, and we realized that we could touch the life of millions more. So, we were definitely all in love with SlideShare, and we loved MindCanvas as well, but there was really a moment in time where we realized we could not do both. SlideShare especially was a very demanding application so we had to put all our energies into that. So I remember the day that we realized that we needed to make a decision, it was a very tough day. Lucy: That is tough, you really do get very close to products and companies, I mean they're parts of the family. I had to shut down a few things at Bell Labs and I hated it every time it happened. In fact, I think I just either saw in your Blog, or maybe it was a Tweet. That you had had to tell somebody once again what had happened to MindCanvas, and it is, it's very emotional. Rashmi: I have to do that pretty much every two or three days. We still get a lot of emails about it, and what we really need to do is say so on the Website that we are no longer offering this. But I think somehow or the other that it is hard to, kind of, make that. But we still get a lot of inquiries and we need to make that final. It's a very tough thing, actually. Lucy: Well, I think it is though. It is the flip side to the coin of having great passion and loving what you do as an entrepreneur, that sometimes in the life cycle you have to shut it down. So, if you were sitting here with a young person and telling them about entrepreneurship and giving them advice, what would you tell them? Rashmi: It said so very often but it really is true, is that: have the confidence that if you believe in something and if you think you can do it then you can do it. Maybe there are aspects of it you'll realize that your skills and personality are not suited, but there are other aspects that you will grow into. You know, when I decided to do technology I knew a little bit of computer science, I had taken a few courses but I was definitely not a very technical person. I kind of just went ahead, and forged ahead with it and have learned along the way and have picked things up. I have figured out what my strengths are. I would say that's a very important thing to decide what interests you because you can't do anything as well as the things that truly make you come alive. Larry: When you said, "if you think you can, you can" it reminds me of some things I've read in some books about, "working the mind". Is there any book in particular that has been important to you? Rashmi: I can't think of any particular book. I used to read a lot as a child, and it's kind of like a whole range of books. I always feel that about half my life was in my imagination in these books, and I read very fast. I read in this frenzied manner. So, it's more like I read a lot of books, rather then any particular books. But I will say there is something, one thing, that has been very influential to me as an entrepreneur is my mother. My mother has been a housewife and she hasn't had a career, but she made sure that her daughters would have a career, and in some ways, I have lived her ambitions. What she didn't get an opportunity to, maybe both my parents gave me that opportunity. That's been a very big influence on me. Larry: Kind of following up on that, then, what do you feel are the personal characteristics that make you an entrepreneur like you are, that'd given you that advantage? Rashmi: Well I think these entrepreneurs have to have this optimism, this ability to see the bright. To see that you can do it and what the next thing is. You always have to be able to imagine what's going to happen next and then to make it a reality. So the ability to imagine, to see the positive, and pull ahead and not really care. When we first went out and talked about SlideShare, and this was early on before we had barely a few million visitors, even at that point, I remember some VCs, et cetera, would be like, "how can you have so much traffic?" We just believed that presentation are used every day. There's millions of people sharing it, and we were going to build this site where they would all share it. So, we had this believe no matter how many people doubted us, we just kind of went on with it. That's one very important ability for entrepreneurs. But it's really hard. And there are days you seem really feel down and something has to carry you through that day. Lucy: Well if you'd come and talk to me, I would have told you that probably half of that traffic would have been me. I can give so many power point presentations that, I think it's a fabulous idea. Good for you for sticking with it. You mentioned that it is hard work and sometimes you're down, and you have to keep going, and look at the bright side. What other things besides thinking that way, what other things do you do to bring balance between your personal and professional life? Rashmi: That's the hardest part. We are still trying and it's hard to figure that out. I keep on making resolutions and breaking them. I keep on thinking, I'll go home at a certain point in time. But then I go home and start working again. One thing that we have been trying very hard, and, by the way, it also reflects the fact that my husband, John and I, are both of part of SlideShare. We are the cofounders. So it it's hard for us to leave SlideShare behind. I would say I lead an unbalanced life and I'm probably not the right person to give any advice about leading a balanced life. Larry: Rashmi, I really needed some of that advice because my wife, Pat and I, we work together. And we have this... you talked about our scenario. Rashmi: You can leave the place but you can't leave the, yeah. Lucy: And we've heard the answer before about being rather unbalanced. But we've also heard that sometimes you have years of unbalance and then years of some amount of balance. So it sort of integrates out over decades. So you've achieved a lot. And, I should mention to our listeners as well, that Rashmi was named one of the most influential women in Web 2.0 by "Fast Company." So congratulations for that... Rashmi: Thank you. Lucy: Awesome achievement. And so what's next for you? As SlideShare is up and going and making great progress. I am sure there is more work to do there, but have you looked down the road just a bit to see what you might want to do after SlideShare? Rashmi: Well, I mean, I want to make SlideShare a big independent company. And I'd like to do things along with SlideShare. One day I think I would like to write a book. And I'd like to get more involved in social entrepreneurship. Interesting companies that are doing something in that space. But that's definitely something I would love to do. But right now SlideShare is such a young company, it's just two and a half years old, and it's just starting. So there is a long way to go with that. Larry: Yes, actually just finished the final editing of my latest book. And it's really worth it. It took just about three years to write it and get it edited. So don't forget that, you keep it up. Lucy: It's very good. Well thank you very much, Rashmi. It's been great talking to you. I want to remind listeners that they can find these podcasts at ncwitt.org and w3w3.com and pass them along to your friends. Thank you Larry. Larry: Yeah thank you. And Rashmi, it was a pleasure. Rashmi: Thank you both you. This is a pleasure too. Lucy: Thank you, that's great. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Rashmi SinhaInterview Summary: "It was entirely an accident" that Rashmi Sinha became an entrepreneur, she says. After backing into technology and entrepreneurship, however, she advises that it's important to decide what interests you, and then follow your interests. Release Date: April 29, 2009Interview Subject: Rashmi SinhaInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 18:21

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Ping Fu Chair, Ping Fu is the Executive Chairman of Gelsight and a board member of the Long Now Foundation and Burning Man Project. Date: August 24, 2007 Lucy Sanders: Hi, this is Lucy Sanders. I'm the CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, or NCWIT. And with me today is Larry Nelson from w3w3.com. This is one in a series of podcasts with fabulous women who have started IT companies, and today we are interviewing Ping Fu. Ping, welcome. Ping Fu: Thank you. Good meeting you all. Lucy: Ping is the President and CEO of Geomagic. Ping, we're hoping before we get into the interview questions that you could tell us a little bit about Geomagic, and in particular, the DSSP technology that you base it on. Ping: Sure. Geomagic started using DSSP technology for manufacturing and our mission is to bring all design end-products into the 21st century as personalized products, in what we call “mass customization”. Lucy: It's a really interesting technology. When I was reading your site, it almost does the same thing for 3‑D as scanners would do for 2‑D. You've done some pretty interesting applications around modeling the Statue of Liberty... Ping: Yes, our software has been used in many applications like reconstruction of the Statue of Liberty. We've also been used on NASA's Discovery shuttle to guarantee the safe return of the shuttle. And it's also been used for Olympic sports to design custom‑made bikes for the Olympic teams, so that they will win championships. Design toys…you name it, anything in 3‑D, we do it. Lucy: You have a Ph.D. in computer science, and you're also on the Duke faculty, as well as being the CEO of a high-tech company. What technologies do you see out there, in addition to DSSP, that strike you as being really innovative? Ping: I think space travel is very innovative. I think in a couple of years, you could go from New York to Tokyo in two hours. In fact, the flying time is only maybe 20 minutes and the rest of the time is getting up and getting down. Just in general, I think transportation is very interesting because it alters our relationship in terms of space and time. So whenever you have a new form of transportation or a new form of communication, it always has a huge increase in productivity, just by shrinking space and time between people. Other technologies that I think are really interesting are medical health care and bioscience. The next level of understanding of bioscience is not just for health care, but also that the human being is a natural computer. Currently if you look at today's computer, it's 0's and 1's and that's pretty dumb. But if you use human genetic code as a base for computing, it's going to be much smarter. Lucy: Well Ping, you have such a phenomenal background, you could have done so many things. What is it about being an entrepreneur that really makes you tick? Ping: Well I actually call myself a reluctant entrepreneur. I didn't think that would ever be my career. It wasn't something I thought I was going to do, but I was in the middle of this Internet craziness. And since I was the person originally initiated in the browser that become Mosaic and eventually Netscape, I just got pushed into it in some way. But after I took that road to become an entrepreneur, I found it very interesting. It's tremendous personal growth and it's the best way to make a difference, and that's what makes me tick. Larry: Ping, we've now had an opportunity to talk to a few business people who also happen to be parents. Who has, in your life, influenced and supported what you've done? Did you have a mentor or mentors? Ping: I would say I have lots of mentors in my career: it could be my peers, it could be my boss, and it could be someone I just talked to on the roadside. I don't really have one person that I look up to. But generally, I have a natural curiosity; I like to find out how things are being made. If there's something I don't understand, I don't take the surface answer to it. I like to dig deeper into why and how. And I think that curiosity really is what makes me want to learn from others about things that I don't know, or talk to people who can give me some insight. I generally don't look up to someone well‑known or someone who is well‑respected as a mentor. In Chinese there is an old saying, if you walk with two other people, one of them can be your teacher. Lucy: One of the things about mentors is that they can give you a lot of advice, get you through some of the rough times in your career, as well as celebrate your success, which gets us to our next question around the toughest thing that you've ever had to do in your career. Ping: I'm sure it's ahead of me, not behind me...if I think about what's the toughest thing I would have to do, it is probably retirement. I don't know how to quit. I think ups-and-downs just don't seem to me to be that tough. Growing your company is tougher than survival in some ways. In survival mode it's very easy to motivate people. And fear is one of the biggest motivations. When you're doing well, it's actually harder to do. It's all comparative in terms of what's tough and what's easy. My way of looking at it is just, if it's tough today, tomorrow when I look back it's probably the biggest lesson that I could learn, and that's about it. Lucy: Well, you really have insightful answers. If you were sitting here talking with a young person (because our hope is that a lot of young people will listen to these interviews and gain insight from them), what advice would you give about entrepreneurship and their journey in that direction? Ping: The advice I want to give them would be that if they want to do something and they have passion to do something, go ahead, do that. But before you do that you should understand what you have to offer. It's not necessarily whether or not I can do it or I cannot do it; would I fail, would I succeed? Everybody will fail in their lives. If you don't fall you can never learn how to walk, right? So falling down is not necessarily a failure. I think what I found talking to a lot of young people is that they fear failure. And I'm telling them that failure is not something you should fear – what you should fear for is that you don't know what you have to offer. Lucy: So true, because if you find what you really have to offer, you're going to love doing it. And if you fail you'll just keep trying and trying again. Ping: Right. A lot of times they say, "I want to start a company." I say, "OK, what do you have to offer? Are you going to be a product company or a service company?" “Well, I don't know." I say, "Well, you need to know that. Are you going to have a company that sells product or sells service?" If you don't know, you can't start a company. Larry: Ping, let me ask this question. You've been through a great deal in your life. You've accomplished a great deal, everything from your beginnings in China to Bell Labs and building a company from scratch. What personal characteristics do you think you either have or you've cultivated to help you become a successful entrepreneur? Ping: Good question. I think that learning on-the-fly is very important. Other people would call it street smarts or book smarts. I think most people have book‑smarts. Learning on-the-fly is more the street‑smarts thing. You can figure out all things very quickly by yourself. Creativity is important because every day as an entrepreneur you have to find creative solutions for problems. Because there's lot of issues that will come up. And endurance – don't give up because something is difficult or you think you are going to fail or someone else tells you're going to fail. I think tenacity leads to greatness. Lucy: Ping, the last question I have for you is, with all that you have going on in your life, how do you bring balance to your personal and your professional life? Ping: That's actually pretty easy: I don't. It's a really hard act, if you think about it. I just blend them into one. And then I'll decide which one is my priority today. I don't see them as separate or opposing forces. And I don't try to balance them. Lucy: So you just look at what the priority of the day is. Ping: Yeah. Exactly. And whatever that is I will just do it. Especially as an entrepreneur. You're pretty much in control of your own time and what you do. So, if you have something personal that’s more important, nobody's going to tell you not to do it. Lucy: That's great advice. I think that the key is blending them as opposed to separating them. You've really achieved a lot, as Larry mentioned, in your career. I have no doubt that you probably never will retire. Give us a sense of what's next for you personally and for your company. Ping: For the company, I always wanted to create a place where people love what they do and people like who they work with. I don't really look at success and what big things I need to do. I look at contributions. And this is what I tell my daughter too. I said, "Everyday you ask yourself, ‘What did you contribute today to yourself, to your family, to the environment in which you live, to the organization in which you work?’" It doesn't have to be all; it doesn't have to be big. You should be happy. If you have contributed nothing, you ask yourself why. And that's what I do every day. I think about what I contributed. It makes tomorrow better than today. So, what's next? Always try to make tomorrow better than today. Lucy: Thank you very much, Ping. It was really great talking to you. And we appreciate your time away from your busy schedule for the interview. I want to remind listeners where they can find the podcasts: www.ncwit.org and at www.w3w3.com. And Ping, where can people find out more information about your company? Ping: At www.geomagic.com. Lucy: Very good. Well, thank you very much! Ping: Thank you. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Ping FuInterview Summary: With clients that include prosthetic limb manufacturers, NASCAR teams, the Cleveland Clinic, and even the Statue of Liberty, Ping Fu and Geomagic are poised to change the way we process the world -- not to mention the way our shoes fit. Release Date: August 24, 2007Interview Subject: Ping FuInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 15:40

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Heidi Roizen Managing Director, Mobius Venture Capital Date: August 15, 2007 NCWIT Interview with Heidi Roizen BIO: Heidi Roizen has spent her entire life in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Silicon Valley, first as an entrepreneur and ultimately as a venture capitalist helping other entrepreneurs build the great companies of tomorrow. She is currently a Managing Director of Mobius Venture Capital, a venture fund with over $2 billion under management. In that capacity, Heidi serves on the Boards of Directors of Reactrix, Ecast, Perpetual Entertainment and AuctionDrop. Heidi began her career in 1983 by co-founding T/Maker Company, a software publisher and developer for early personal computers including the IBM PC and the original Macintosh. As CEO, Heidi led the company for over a decade, raised two rounds of venture capital and ultimately consummated a successful acquisition of T/Maker by Deluxe Corporation. In 1996, she joined Apple Computer as VP of Worldwide Developer Relations. After one year at Apple, Heidi decided to return to her entrepreneurial roots, this time as a Mentor Capitalist and ultimately a Venture Capitalist. Heidi has also been actively involved in the trade associations critical to the Valley. She is a past president of the Software Publishers Association and served on its board from 1987 to 1994. She also represented the venture industry as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Venture Capital Association from 2003 to 2007. She also served on the board of Great Plains Software from 1997 until its acquisition by Microsoft in 2001, and is a past Public Governor of the Pacific Exchange. She is also a frequent guest lecturer at Stanford as well as a speaker at conferences for technologists, entrepreneurs, or women executives. Heidi holds a BA and an MBA from Stanford University. She is married to orthopedic surgeon David Mohler and has two daughters. Lee Kennedy: Hi. This is Lee Kennedy, board member of the National Center for Women and Information Technology, or NCWIT. And this is part of a series of interviews that we're having with fabulous entrepreneurs, women who have started IT companies in a variety of sectors, all of whom had insightful stories to tell us about being entrepreneurs. With me, I have Larry Nelson, from w3w3.com. Hi, Larry. How are you doing? Larry Nelson: Oh, great. It's wonderful to be here again. And one of the things that is so exciting for us at w3w3.com is that we are helping support, I think, the most fabulous program that we've experienced since we got in the radio business in '98, and the idea that we're helping inspire young women, girls, getting into IT, looking into that, as well as being an entrepreneur. But now, we're also getting phone calls from business leaders, people in schools, who say, "This is such a great program. We'd like to help promote it, too." Lee: Well, that's wonderful. Larry: One of the interesting things that we have here that's a little bit of a twist is that we're interviewing an entrepreneur who became a venture capitalist, and also, of course, then, therefore works and helps support entrepreneurs. And we're very pleased that we're interviewing Heidi Roizen, who is a managing director of Mobius Venture Capital. And we've got a little bit of a twist here. Lee and I are here in Colorado, and Lucy Sanders, the CEO and founder of NCWIT, is in California, at Heidi's home base. So, Lucy, let's get started. Lucy Sanders: All right. Hi, everyone. I'm sitting here with Heidi in her beautiful home in Atherton. I've been here a few times, and I just think it's so much fun to be here and interview you here in your office. Heidi Roizen: Well, thank you. I hope the dogs don't participate. Lucy: Or they might. They might have something profound to say. Heidi: They often do. Lucy: One of the things that makes it so exciting to interview you is that when I think, about Silicon Valley, I think, about you. And I think that you're synonymous with Silicon Valley. You've done a lot, as Larry mentioned. You've started companies. You're in venture capital. You were educated here at Stanford. You're a part of the community... Heidi: I was actually born at the Stanford Hospital, which I think, I'm probably the only one in Silicon Valley... Lucy: And why don't you spend a minute or two bringing us up to speed about what you've been doing lately? Heidi: Well, I am currently serving on four boards. They keep me very busy. They are all companies that are definitely not in their "two guys and a dog and a laptop" stage any longer, but they're all still companies that aren't through to the end of the road yet. So, lots of interesting challenges in terms of recruiting, customer acquisition, strategic business development, and all the normal things one goes through in startup land. So, I'm working on those companies, and then I'm working on a few entrepreneurial ventures on the side, helping out some friends. I always love having my fingers in the very, very early stages, and so I like having a few of those to work on as well. Lucy: Well, and I happen to know you're very generous with your time for nonprofits and for Stanford students. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: The last time I was here, we had a great dinner, where you brought them back to your home. And I think, you're going to have some great advice for us, so why don't we just get right to the interview? Heidi: OK. Lee: Well, Heidi, I'll jump in and ask our first question, and that's: how did you first get into technology? Was it when you were a child or in college? And then, what technologies do you think are really cool today? Heidi: OK. Well, the first question is one that I think, if you're born and raised in Silicon Valley, at this time ‑ born in 1958, graduated from Stanford, undergrad in 1980 ‑ you couldn't help but apply for a job and end up at a tech company. So, even though I was not a technologist ‑ in fact, my undergraduate degree is in creative writing ‑ I ended up as the editor of the company newsletter for a little startup called Tandem Computers. Lee: Wow. Heidi: And that's really where I got my first inkling that there was something really exciting about the computer industry. What I realized, at that time, was I kind of looked around, and everybody getting ahead either had an engineering degree or an MBA. And it was a little late for me to go get an engineering degree, I thought, but I figured the MBA thing looked like a pretty good idea. So, I went back to Stanford and got that, and really fell in love with personal computing at the time. It's hard for people... I mean, I sound like such an old geezer when I say this. But, I was the class of 1983, and there were only three people ‑ I was one of them ‑ who owned their own personal computer at school. And now, can you imagine being a graduate student and not having a personal computer? You'd be hopeless. So, started my company right out of school and just never looked back. I had the good fortune to have a brilliant programmer as a brother, who really didn't like the business side, and I loved the business side. And the thing I like to tell people, often, who are non‑technologists, who wonder about being in the technology field, I tell them, "You know, need a mix of people." I don't have to know how to build a car to drive one. And in fact, I'd say, particularly in my early times working with my brother, who was the genius programmer, sometimes he'd build features that were so genius that only he could use them, and they weren't very practical. So, I think, sometimes it's good to be the petunia in the onion patch, as I used to call it in the development hall. Lucy: Tell us a little bit about the technology that you're thinking about as being the next wave of technical, cool gadgets. Heidi: I think, gadgets is always a slippery slope, because there are gadgets that I just love. I mean, we're investors in Sidekick and Sling, so we definitely have some gadgets companies out there. If any of you have seen a Reatrix system in the malls and in the theaters, and the Reactive television systems, or an Ecast jukebox ‑ we've got tons of portfolio companies I can tell you about that all have exciting gadgets and technologies. To me, where I'm focused right now is I've been thinking a lot about the demographic that is me ‑ the woman who still wants to look good and feel good, who has more free time, who has more money, who, however, still has family obligations, has a career. We're hitting 50, and when our parents hit 50, we thought they were pretty much close to death... Heidi: Now, we are shocked to find that we are 50. And I think, what's interesting is that the Silicon Valley ‑ and it's a little bit like Hollywood ‑ get so focused on youth and the youth culture and the spending money that youths have and advertising to youths. And while I've got nothing against young people, I think that the people my age and women my age have been an underserved demographic, when it comes to utilizing the web as a medium for exchange, as a community, as an outlet for all sorts of things and a place to go learn about things. And I'm seeing more and more activities around that, and I can't tell you how many times... this is probably hitting all of my same‑age brethren entrepreneurs, but we're all sort of getting up and saying, "I don't really want to start the next teen cell phone. I really want to start something that my friends and I could use." And so I'm seeing a lot of really interesting companies come about, a lot that combine community with some of the really innovative things that can be done online. Lucy: Give it some time. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: Give it some time. Larry: Yeah, you bet. I'm not that old yet. But, anyhow... Lee: That's right, Larry. Larry: They're laughing... Heidi: Somebody once asked me to predict the future of venture investing, and I said, "Just about the time we finally invest in the ultimate weight‑loss pill and the instant‑tan pill, culture will change so that it's not cool to be thin and it's not cool to be tan, and we'll lose again." Larry: Oh, boy. My personal friend, Mark Twain, said, "Youth is wasted on the young." Heidi: That's right. Larry: Anyhow. I can't help but ask this, Heidi. Many people don't look at venture capitalists as entrepreneurs, but anybody who is a managing director, believe me, they are entrepreneur. But, of course, Heidi has the background and experience of being an entrepreneur. She's now continuing to support and work with entrepreneurs. What is it about you that makes this all happen? And what makes it tick, in terms of an entrepreneur? Heidi: Well, there are so many answers. And I've had the pleasure to listen to many of your wonderful speakers on this series before myself, and I think, a lot of things have been mentioned about tenacity and creativity and mission and a passion about what you're doing. There are so many things that I can think of. And of course, if you look me up on LinkedIn, I refer to myself as a "recovering entrepreneur," which is a little bit of an inside joke at Mobius. We're recovering entrepreneurs. Heidi: I think, what I had to learn, going from being an entrepreneur to being a venture capitalist, is it's like being the quarterback and then being the coach. When you're a venture capitalist, you do work behind the scene, you do help a lot. But, they're sort of not your losses, and they're not your victories. And if you're doing your job right, the entrepreneur is on the cover of "Time" magazine, not you. When you're an entrepreneur, the buck stops here. It's funny. I just went on a walk with a fellow entrepreneur of mine, and he was talking about a friend who used to be a vice president of a big company and is now the CEO of a small company, and one of the things he was saying to her is, "Now you understand how the buck really stops here." Heidi: And I think, for me, what really defines an entrepreneur is something that somebody said to me once. When I was running T/Maker, we had this product line called ClickArt, which is still around today, and it's basically electronic clip art. But, you have to remember, when we did that product in 1984, there were no scanners; there was no PostScript; there was no anything. We were literally sitting artists down, at 128K max. We didn't even have a stylus. They were drawing with the mouse in 72 DPI to create electronic clip art. I mean, that's as basic as it was. And when we shipped that product, I remember staying at a trade show, and I can't remember how many people came up to me and said, "Wow! You know, I thought of that, too." Right? And in the back of my mind, I thought, "Yeah, you thought of it. But, we did it." Heidi: And I think, for most of these things, it's that "one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration." There are so many ideas that just die on the vine because a person doesn't go out and try to actually do them. They think they're a cool idea, but other things get in the way and they don't really work hard at it. And not only do they not work hard at the creative process, but the process I'll loosely call is the destructive process. With entrepreneurs, one of the things I respect the most is, when you come up with an idea, that instead of working on it for the first five days about how you're going to accomplish it, you spend five days trying to prove that it's already been done or it's not doable ‑ not because you're being pessimistic, but before you engage in the creative process, sometimes you have to go and say, "What else is already out there?" And one of my pet peeves as a venture capitalist is when somebody comes and pitches me an idea, and I say, "Have you ever heard about blahblah.com?" And they go, "What's that?" And I get on and I show them, and it's the exact company they were talking about building, but it already exists. My feeling is, today, particularly with Google and other search engines and the Internet, you can find a lot of this stuff out there, and you need to go out and look. But, I do think, ultimately, a long and winding answer, but the short answer is it's like Nike, man. It's "just do it." If you just do it, that's the only way to be an entrepreneur. If you're not willing to just do it, you're never going to be an entrepreneur. Lee: That is such great advice, Heidi, because so many people, even when they just go out and do it, it's not that first idea that they even end up doing sometimes. It's just having the guts to get out there and start the business and get in that industry and figure out what it is. Heidi: That's right. And ask a lot of questions and meet a lot of people and kiss a lot of frogs. Larry: Yeah. Heidi: It's always easy, in retrospect, to say, "Why did I take that meeting with that person?" But you don't know because, just as likely, you could take a meeting with another person. And I just had something happen this weekend, where I was helping someone on a music project. And we were talking to someone who was totally unrelated, and they just said, "Oh, what are you up to?" Totally unrelated to the music industry. And we told him what we were doing, and he said, "Hey, I'm good friends with..." And I won't name the names because it's all proprietary, but let's just say one of the most Grammy‑winning artists in the world. And he said, "I'll give him a call tomorrow and see if he's interested in helping you with this." So, it's like one of those random, like that's not what we were even there to talk about. But, that's how the conversation ended up going, and it could take us in a really exciting direction. You just never know when that kind of serendipitous stuff is going to occur. Lucy: Your remark about 1984, when you were doing T/Maker and you had to have the ClickArt, I just have to go back to that for a moment and say, in 1984, we were trying to draw things in P‑Roth inside... Lucy: That's not revolutionary. Heidi: Yeah, yeah. I remember the first time I showed my husband QuickTime, whenever it came out ‑ 1989, whatever. And I'd bring home my file, because we were under nondisclosure with Apple. And I'd show him this postage‑sized, grainy thing, and he goes, "Wow. I am really underwhelmed." Heidi: For me, as a computer geek, it was so exciting to see television on a computer. And for him, he was like, "Uh, honey? Have you looked at our TV set? It's like a lot better than this." Lucy: Because I know you, I think that one of the things that makes you a great entrepreneur is, in fact, you see potential, and you're willing to take the risk to develop the potential. Heidi: Yeah. It does make one quite dangerous. It's that joke about the person who buys houses because they see the good in every house. And I tend to be a person who sees the upside in things. Which I think, again, in order to be an entrepreneur, you have to be an optimist. You have to believe things are going to work out your way. But, you have to be realistic. And that's where I, again, for lack of a better word, call it the destructive process ‑ testing your idea, going out and thinking about the boundary cases: "What's the worse that could happen here? What's the worse that could happen here? How am I going to prepare for it?" And also going out and really combing the markets to make sure that what you're doing is unique, or, if not unique, that you're going to be the best somehow. Lucy: Well, along the way ‑ you've been here in Silicon Valley. You were born here. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: And you've got a great network. And we are really curious to also understand who helped you the most. Who would you look to as being your mentor? Heidi: I was very fortunate to be born into a family where entrepreneurship was not a bad thing. I think, it's one of the things that makes California such a great place and will play a continuing role in the world economy is because we are just a culture, for 150‑plus years, of people striking out and doing something on their own, and failure not meaning social failure. You can be a business failure and still hold your head up and go to your kids' school and not be embarrassed about it. Lucy: "I failed today." Heidi: "I failed today." It's part of the process. I think that, for me, my father was a great role model for me because he was an entrepreneur. He was always thinking. He would say things to me like, "Today is the best day of my life because I have every day before today that I can draw on what I learned to apply to today." So, he was just that kind of person. And he wasn't like Mr. Rogers. I mean, he was just a great role model about how one could look for the opportunity in everything. And he was a very poor immigrant. I think, he graduated from high school. I'm not really sure. His dad died when he was 12, and he had to make money for the family to make ends meet. I mean, he had one of those really hard upbringings that made him very grateful and thankful, and very creative and resourceful. And he treated me like one of the boys. He never said to me, "Oh, you're a girl. You shouldn't do this," or "You can't go to graduate school," or "You can't do anything." In fact, if I said I couldn't do something because of being a woman, he would scoff at me. And my brothers joke that I'm the most like him... Heidi: So, he actually made me in his image, not my brothers. But, I was very lucky about that. I was very lucky, also, just to be in the computer industry in the late '70s and early '80s, because I really did get to grow up with the people who are the leaders in the industry. And so somebody said to me, "Wow! How did you get to be friends with Bill Gates?" And it's like, "Well, started 25 years ago." [laughs] Heidi: He was easier to get to then. But, it's things like that, that I think, I just had the great fortune to have a front‑row seat and be a participant in an industry that I really believe has changed the world. So, it gave me a lot of opportunities to learn from other people and have mentors and role models. Lee: So, Heidi, when you think about all you've done in your career ‑ building your own companies, being an investor ‑ what has been the toughest thing you've had to do in your career? Heidi: You know, you face so many tough challenges when you are the CEO and "the buck stops here." Someone once said to me, "Gosh, you're so lucky. You're the CEO. You have so much freedom." And I laughed, and I said, "You don't understand that when you're the CEO, you have the least freedom, because you can't just quit." I raised that money. I hired every one of these people. I gave those venture capitalists my commitment that I was going to bring it home for them. I'm not just going to walk out the door. I remember walking into my company every day. We had about 100 employees. And I would count the cars in the parking lot, and I would think about the car payments and the mortgage payments... Heidi: Everything that was dependent on this company. And so I would say, still, to this day, that the hardest thing you have to do is lay people off. I mean, the hardest thing you have to do is downsize your firm. It's not as hard to fire someone. This is an interesting thing. I would much rather terminate somebody for cause than lay people off because we can't afford it. When you terminate someone for cause ‑ and "for cause" is a real legal term. I don't want to use the legal definition of that. But, what I really mean is, when somebody's not a good fit for the job they're in, I find that it's really in their best interest to tell them and get them to move on to something else. And while that is sometimes hard, I think, it's the right thing to do, and I think, it's the right thing to do for the person. And I've often found that you check in with them a couple years later, they're better off where they are, even though this can be very difficult. I do think, going through the dot‑com bust and having to lay people off, knowing that there wasn't going to be another job they could just waltz into, was a really, really hard thing to do. To me, those were the hardest things I ever had to do. In fact, my T/Maker employees still joke about this time where we had our first loss ever and we had to lay off some people, and it was Christmas. I was about four‑months pregnant. I said to my husband, "I've got to do it myself. I hired all these people. I'm going to do it myself. I'm going to give each one of them the news." So I'm in my office, and they're coming in, or I'm going to their offices. And I'm pregnant, and so the hormones coursing through my veins. So, I am sobbing through these terminations, and they are comforting me. Heidi: They feel sorry for me. But, I have to lay them off. Sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. And I say to my husband, "This is the worst business day of my life, where I'm terminating some people who've been with me five, six years, and I just feel terrible. And it's Christmas, and I had to tell them, 'No bonuses for you guys, and you're getting laid off.'" I said, "Please go to Blockbuster and rent a funny movie so that when I get home, I can take my mind off of it." So, I come home, and what had he rented, but Chevy Chase's "Christmas Vacation." Heidi: And I don't know if you guys have seen this, but of course, the whole story is about a guy who believes he's getting a Christmas bonus and builds a swimming pool or something, and then he doesn't get the bonus, and he ends up kidnapping his boss. Heidi: It was just one of those moments: I just didn't know whether to laugh. I'll never forget that moment. I still cry when I see that show. It was on TV last Christmas, and I'm like crying through it. My kids are looking at me. They're like, "Mom, it's a comedy." Not for me. Lucy: Not for me. In fact, my answer to this question is the same. I think that laying people off is clearly one of the hardest things that I've ever had to do. Heidi: Absolutely. Lucy: We've heard a lot of great advice so far in this interview from you about entrepreneurship, and the Nike "just do it," and who cares if you've thought about it? Just get it done. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: And other types of advice around doing your homework and seeing the potential. If you were sitting right here with a young person and you were giving them advice about entrepreneurship, what else would you tell them? And one of the things that comes to mind is a conversation we had sometime about networking. Heidi: Yeah. Lucy: And I thought you had some of the best advice about networking that I've ever heard. Heidi: Well, I have a ton of advice about networking. I'm a little typecast as a networking speaker because Harvard did a case on me a number of years ago that really is about my philosophy of networking. And when they approached me to do the case, I said, "Why would anyone want a case on this? It's all just common sense." It's kind of like that book: "Everything I needed to know about networking, I learned in the second grade." But, it's just commonsense and practical and courtesy. And so, they did do this case, and I do speak on the case a lot. And my fundamental belief is that it's very rare that anything happens as a singular effort. Yeah, you can go climb ‑ well, even climbing Mount Everest, it's a team, right? And entrepreneurship is a team sport with very many lonely moments. So, you have to be the one. I'm working on this project with someone. I got up at four o'clock in the morning a couple of days ago because I thought of something, and I knew if I waited till morning, it wasn't going to be the same. So, I had to get up and come down here and sit at the computer for an hour and write up my thoughts while they were fresh. I think, there are a lot of times when you're just singularly approaching something, but I think, you have to know how to ask for help, and how to give help. Students say this to me all the time, they say, "Well, I don't have anything to give." You always have something to give, everyone has something to give. Good lord, you can come and talk to me and baby‑sit my children while you're talking me. I had one guy who traded me, I would talk to him about his business and he was a personal trainer, so he would train me while I was talking to him about his business. Heidi: And I think that one of the errors that people make in networking is they try to hard to gather business cards, and they don't think about "What is my connection with this other person, and what do I have to give them? What in return am I going to ask them for?" Again, I will bring it back to this other comment, a lot of times you don't know how the other person is going to help you, and you're not quite sure always how you're going to help them. Sometimes, it's quite surprising, but if you put yourself open to that, and you use some of the modern tools ‑ like I've become a real LinkedIn convert, because I love being able to get on LinkedIn and see who my friends know that I might want to talk to about industries completely foreign to me and vice versa. If somebody has a good friend from college who now wants to do something in the out of home advertising market and sees I'm on the board of Aventure and would like to talk to me. I don't mind doing that stuff because I sort of feel like there's this great, you know, we all help each other in this community and I'm a little bit of a believer in that kind of pay it forward. It's interesting right now because in Aventure I'm working closely on, I have to reach out and ask for a lot of favors, and I've been very aware that for a lot of my current roles in life I'm the one that asks for the favors than asked. Now that I'm doing the asking it's interesting, I'm uncomfortable. I'd much rather do a favor for someone else than ask somebody for a favor. It's my nature, and it's the nature of many people. But, I think that you have to get good at understanding "What am I asking for? Is it appropriate for me to ask it? Is the person capable of delivering it? Is it an appropriate amount of time for them to send and do something for me? And what could I possibly do for them?" I always try to make sure that people know I'm quite open to doing something for you in exchange, and by the way, no is a perfectly good answer, too. If I ask you a favor and the answer is no, just tell me no. I'm very comfortable with that. Lucy: That's great advice because so many people they really are either afraid to network, or don't know how to network, and that just makes it really clear. Heidi: Networking is also very awkward; somebody from Stanford called me up once and said, "Can I network with you?" What is that is that like my pen pal or something? Lucy: Just network. Heidi: Let's say you want to meet someone, and I guess, with the powers of Google and the Internet and all that, you might want to meet some important person. If you have no context, it's going to be a very fruitless conversation. But, every one of them, their kids go to school, they are on a charitable board, they may enjoy a certain kind of athletic activity. I'm not saying become a stalker, but generally, for example, if you want to get to know a person and they happen to be on the board of a charitable organization go find out what the annual fundraiser is on that charitable organization and volunteer to work at it. Chances are you're going to be able to meet that person over time if you get involved in something like that. And, by the way, you're doing something good too. That's again, one of the powers of Silicon Valley ‑ both good and bad ‑ you've got to be careful, you've got to find out if other moms and dads on the soccer sidelines have MBAs because everybody's kind of in this business. Heidi: It is interesting that you have so many different places where you meet and run into people, and so many people I do business with are friends of mine in other context. Lucy: So Heidi, you had talked earlier in the interview about different characteristics that you thought were really important to help entrepreneurs grow and build companies, but when you think about yourself, what are some of your personal characteristics that you have that have helped you to be successful as an entrepreneur? Heidi: Certainly tenacity. I mean, I'm very tenacious about... you put me on something I'm on a mission and I'm not going to let it go. I like to learn new things, so I like to push myself and try to learn something new. I think, when you're constantly learning it helps you get a better job, [laughs] and in so many areas. I'm definitely a people person, I love talking with people, I love meeting people. I'm very comfortable asking people for their opinions and I think, I'm a pretty good listener. So, I think that that also helps me be an entrepreneur, because you learn from other people, you gather opinions, you mold what you're doing. Frankly, it helps you in terms of going back to asking for favors, giving favors, recruiting people. People generally want to work with people they like and people they respect, which is another thing. My belief is that I'm going to be in this world for, I hope, a pretty long time. One thing I've learned being almost 50 and being in the Valley all this time is that you run into the same people over and over and over again. So, don't burn a bridge unless you've decided that's the best course of action. I like to sleep at night. I don't like to do bad deals, and I don't like to squeeze the last nickel out of somebody just because I have the upper hand. I like to live that way. While there's always different opinions about anything you do, I try to test everything. Does this match my ethics? Can I sleep at night? If my husband or my kids knew I did this, would they think less of me as a person? I like to live that way. I think, an entrepreneurship is not a zero sum game. Your gain doesn't have to come out of somebody else's loss. Larry: Boy, I'll say. You know, Heidi, one thing I've learned to do is that I'm going to call you "Coach" from now on. I just want to clarify one little thing. You said something earlier about kissing the frogs, or was it kissing your dogs? Heidi: Yeah, kissing frogs. Although frogs wish it was kissing dogs. Larry: Yeah. And you also just mentioned that you should ask for help. Do you want to introduce me to Bill Gates? Heidi: No. Larry: No. OK. Heidi: That's a good one you bring up, because it is one of those, how do you manage a relationship towards a person who's very important or famous? One thing I had to decide early on is, I just set certain rules. And I've gotten very comfortable saying "No" to people. So, people will say to me, "Can you introduce me to Bill Gates?" And the answer is, "No, I can't," because if I did that for everybody, they would.... And the hardest part is people thinking, "I have the best charity in the world. I have something that would be so interesting to the Foundation. Please help me get to the right person. Can you please send this to Bill and Melinda?" And I say no. One of the things that gives me comfort in saying no is that I say, "Look my own husband runs a charitable organization called Refugee Relief that does medical assistance in countries under conflict. He'd be a perfect candidate, and he hasn't even asked Bill and Melinda for money." One of the things I try to do is live by my own rules. The other thing I try to do is, for example, when I sold a company from my portfolio to Microsoft I didn't even talk to Bill about it. I'm not going to mention, "Hey, I'm selling one of my portfolio companies" to him. It's not relevant. I really try to respect that, particularly people who are in positions like Bill where everyone's approaching you all of the time, you need to be respectful of the pressures on that person's time. I think, that's one of the reasons why Bill and Melinda and I have a good and long‑standing relationship. They know that I respect that there needs to be boundaries there, because they don't have the luxury of living normal lives. Larry: Yeah, that's fact. By the way, of course, you know I was just saying that to.... Heidi: Oh, I know. Larry: However, last week we interviewed Brad Feld and he did say, "Hi to Heidi." Heidi: Oh, that's so sweet. I adore Brad. Larry: All right. Let me ask you this question. In your approach to your professional life, you do so many things. How do you bring about balance? Heidi: That's an excellent question. If you'd like I can bring my 12 and 14 year olds in here right now to continue the counterpoint to that. Larry: oh. Heidi: I do try to set limits. In my house, although we have wireless access, I'm not the person who walks around with my laptop and uses it everywhere. We certainly have a "no laptop in the bedroom" rule. I don't tend to watch TV and do email at the same time. I have a home office that I come in to do my work and then I try to leave it. I also try to have a commitment with my kids. If I say, "I'm going to stop working at seven," then I'm going to stop working at seven. I mix business and pleasure a lot. I have a lot of social engagements with people. I have a lot of people over for dinner. I try to engage my kids in some of that, because luckily at their ages they find some of that very interesting. In one of the projects I'm working on right now, I ask them for advice a lot. I've been able to pick their brains a lot about it. And they've been really great. I tell them, you know, if I'm having a bad day, you know I had a bad day about a legal contract I was working on. And because it didn't get done I missed a window of production for something. And I said to them, they said you know, "Why are you in such a bad mood?" And instead of saying something like, "Well, I had a bad day at work." I said, "Well, let me explain to you. This company needs a piece of paperwork before we can contract this production facility. We didn't get the piece of paperwork. Now because this production facility can only do things in, you know, they have another client the next three weeks that pushed me out a month. So, here's a one day delay on a contract that's going to cost me a three week delay on the production. And that's why I'm so mad about this today." And so that what is the thing? A teachable moment right? You know, I try to bring them in to the things that I'm doing. But, it is important sometimes to just close the door and say, "I'm sorry I'm not going to do this." I try very hard not to schedule meetings on the weekends. I try very hard not to schedule meetings at night. I try to really limit my travel because it is very disruptive to my family when I travel. And so, I try to make accommodations. Lucy: Well, and your daughters are wonderful. And having seen them at a couple of dinners. I mean the integration works really well. Heidi: They're pretty cute. Yeah. Lucy: They're pretty cute. It works really well because they get to see a lot of different people over here. Heidi: Yes they do. Lucy: That they wouldn't ordinarily see. They lead unusual lives. Heidi: We had a nice conversation about Norwegian and other things this morning. So, it was very good. Lucy: They were very funny. Heidi: And they do provide very funny moments. One time actually, Bill and Melinda were coming over for dinner. And Nicky was playing on her Xbox. And she knew Bill was coming over and said like "Can I have him sign my Xbox?" "Oh, I guess, you can ask him to sign your Xbox." Which she didn't ultimately do when he came over because she was too embarrassed. But, she said to me, "Microsoft, yeah, they make the Xbox. Do they make any other products?" And I just had to laugh. Heidi: You know, the eyes of a thirteen year old is like all they make is the Xbox. Lucy: Well you really have achieved a lot. And you have front row seats to a lot. And I have no doubt, fifty or not, that you are going to be on the front row for many, many years. Heidi: Not done yet. Lucy: Not done yet. So, tell us what's next for you. Heidi: Oh, I'm so excited about what I'm doing. But, I can't tell you. Sorry. Lucy: I'm going to jump across the desk and strangle her. Heidi: I know. I know. I am. You know I'm continuing to do my work with Mobee and then a company that we work on. And Brad and Jake my partners there. I mean, you know, we have a great relationship and I'm enjoying that. But, I am definitely an entrepreneur at heart. In fact I've been thinking, at some point on my link and profile. Right now, it says venture capitalist and recovering entrepreneur. And someday soon it's going to say "Relapsed entrepreneur and venture capitalist" because I just can't help myself. Heidi: So, I just started a little company. I actually funded it yesterday. I'm fortunate enough to have provided my own seed capital. I joke to my husband. I said, "It's very important tonight because we're having cocktails with my lead investor," which of course was me. [laughter] So, we laughed about that. So, I have a little start up that I'm working on, which I will hope to tell you all about really soon. But, it's not quite baked enough yet. So, you'll just have to wait. Lucy: I just hope it's about fifty year old women. Heidi: You will, you will buy one of these products. Well, I'm going to give you one. And Lucy. Larry Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Heidi RoizenInterview Summary: Born and raised in Silicon Valley, Heidi spent the first part of her career founding and growing tech companies. Now she enjoys helping entrepreneurs build companies as a coach instead of a player. Release Date: August 15, 2007Interview Subject: Heidi RoizenInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson, Lee KennedyDuration: 34:33