About Technology – Valley Girls

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Zero gravity, where everything feels natural for Ms Dyson

Esther Dyson has been described as everything from the First Lady of the internet to its court jester.

But, she maintains, she has stumbled into a life that has taken her around the world and, hopefully, into space.

“My life has been complete blind evolution rather than intelligent design,” she told the BBC.

“But I’ve got a good sense of direction and I just keep doing things I think are interesting and not redundant.”

To that end, Ms Dyson has striven to make an impact in Silicon Valley – and on the internet as a whole – through her investments, her position on the boards of non-profit organisations, and on her ability to influence politicians and governments.

Humble start

Ms Dyson started her working life at the bottom of the heap as a fact checker at business magazine Forbes, only because Variety would not hire her. It was not long though before she became a reporter writing about technology.

After a few career moves, she bought the company she worked for and took over a highly influential newsletter called Release 1.0 that covered emerging markets. She also ran PC Forum, the computer industry’s leading annual conference.

“What I did for a long time was make things obvious that people weren’t noticing by explaining what was going on and pointing out stuff like the internet or the impact the internet would have,” said Ms Dyson.

Ms Dyson is regarded as one of the most influential voices online

That was until one day in the mid 1990s when someone called her bluff.

“This guy I knew came to me and said: ‘You talk about investing in Eastern Europe, suppose I give you a million dollars to invest, would you help me to do that?’”

“I said ‘Oh. I can’t. Its a conflict with my newsletter’. Then I said: ‘How much did you say?’ At the time a million dollars was a big chunk. Anyway, I said I would figure it out and ultimately I closed the newsletter.”

Along with $300,000 of her life savings, Ms Dyson traded careers and invested in Eastern Europe and then Russia.

A million dollar advance she later got for a book about the impact of the wired world was also put into start-ups.

“I don’t want to make it sound too easy, but at the same time I wasn’t really focused on it. I have now discovered if you invest wisely you get more money and you can invest again and that’s pretty cool.”

Ms Dyson has taken her money and invested early and often in companies such as Google, Orbtiz, 23andMe, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Dopplr and Powerset to name but a few.

“I try and invest in stuff before other people notice because its cheap and there are not 18 of them doing the same thing.

“At the same time, tempting though it is, you cannot invest in a strategy or a market. You have to invest in individuals.”

Money and work

Ms Dyson said she was not really interested in money and had no idea what she is worth.

“My parents were European. Mum was a mathematician and dad a physicist. We travelled a lot and knew about the world. I actually thought salesmen were the scum of the earth. I have certainly changed my opinion on that,” she said.

Ms Dyson has said technology can help empower individuals

“We grew up in a very academic family. We didn’t have a TV. We read a lot. I was 13 when I went to London to live with another family. When I was 17 I left college and spent the summer hitch-hiking in Europe and then went to live in Morocco with my boyfriend.”

While money might not matter today, the young Ms Dyson certainly knew its value.

“I was a good saver and I got 25 cents an hour babysitting if the kids were awake and 12.5 cents if they were asleep. That was how I made money until I got a job in a library when I was 14.

“I’ve been working for money ever since.”

Zero gravity

Ms Dyson acknowledged that her wealth has bought her freedom and that she probably could not work for anyone else anyway.

In quite a few cases, she takes an active role in the start-ups she invests in. They range from personal genetics to online travel and from photo sharing to a natural language search engine.

“Yes I want to make money so that I can reinvest it and keep doing this. But I’m not thinking how rich I’m going to get, I’m thinking what exciting new things am I going to help make happen?”

So what sectors does this serial investor have her beady eye on at the moment?

Ms Dyson is hoping her ambition of getting to space will soon be a reality

“Where I am excited now is in health care genomics and the internet’s infrastructure. This is going to continue to grow and they are making wonderful new discoveries, scaling up, and finding better security techniques.”

Ms Dyson’s other great love is space, though it’s about more than profit and loss.

As a two time weightless flyer, Ms Dyson is presently living in Russia’s Starcity training to be a cosmonaut. She is a back-up to Charles Simonyi, who formerly worked at Microsoft and is getting ready to go on his second space mission this spring.

“Zero gravity is just so amazing, but when you are in it it feels completely natural. I think the chances of me going into space are now 50/50 which is better than my chances of getting Alzheimer’s,” she joked.

And how would she like to be remembered?

“I want my tombstone to read: She wasn’t done yet.”

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Mitchell Baker’s goal is to maximise the internet as an open platform

Many people in Silicon Valley claim to be high-flyers but as an amateur trapeze artiste Mitchell Baker has a better claim than many.

In her day job Ms Baker is chair of the Mozilla Foundation that most know as the creator of the open source Firefox web browser.

According to some estimates Firefox now has just over 20% of the browser market. Much of the rest, 70%, belongs to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Firefox has more success to come and Ms Baker is the first to admit she is a woman with her eyes fixed on the road ahead.

“We have been through a period where you protect everything,” she said, “and we have seen a lot of innovation and development of technology in particular with this ‘protect as much as you can’ approach.

“Now we are in an exploration of how much value can we create and how many problems can we solve and how much fun and enjoyment can we have if we actually share more?”

Mozilla’s quest to “ensure the internet is developed in a way that benefits everyone” is driven by “openness, innovation and opportunity”.

The open approach represents a major shift in the way many Silicon Valley companies now operate. Big players from Apple to Google to Microsoft have opened up some of their code to developers.

“I did not foresee the speed at which the open paradigm, this open idea, would transcend so many aspects of society,” said Ms Baker.

But she criticised those companies who pay lip service to the idea of openness and place limits on how far the sharing of knowledge goes. “It’s spreading but there are many degrees of open,” she said.

Browser wars

Ms Baker is a veteran of the browser world being one of Netscape’s first employees in its legal department – this despite being a speaker of Mandarin and getting her undergraduate degree in Asian Studies.

Firefox is now a rival to Microsoft’s market leading Internet Explorer

“It was pretty exciting to be at the dawn of something,” Ms Baker told BBC News.

“One of the exciting things about being there at the time was that you see so much of the fundamental technology and even today people will talk about things and I remember that I saw that over a decade ago,” she said adding. “Netscape was the beginning of the world wide web as we understand it.”

Back in the early 1990s there was a palpable feeling that the world was changing.

“It was explosive,” she said. “Everything came through Netscape for a period so it was thrilling and you knew things were changing dramatically and that you were at the centre of something and this was just explosively different in the way people operate.”

Those highs were countered by some real lows which came during the fight with Microsoft to dominate the browser market.

In 1994, Netscape’s newly launched browser came to dominate a market in its infancy. The company claimed that in 18 months, the Netscape Navigator was the most popular personal computer application of all time with 40 m copies distributed worldwide.

At the same time Microsoft released Windows 95 but its big failure was the lack of a browser to access the world wide web. A quick counter attack resulted in the release of Internet Explorer.

It was given away free but bundled in with Windows 95 beginning what became known as the “browser wars” as each company issued new versions to steal a march on the other.

The figures suggest Microsoft won the battle but it came at a cost. The software giant was found guilty of using anti-competitive means to thwart Netscape.

Netscape developed the original commercial web browser

“Of course you expect your competitor to try and crush you. It’s standard business practice. But when you find someone is engaging in illegal activities, that was surprising,” said Ms Baker.

“This isn’t about something being a better product. This isn’t one of the very effective competitive strategies that we understand. This is something beyond that. Those were pretty dark days,” Ms Baker added.

Microsoft successfully appealed against the judgments in the anti-trust case which overturned the initial remedies imposed by the court and in 2001 an agreement to settle the case with the US government was reached.

Career path

As a former lawyer, Ms Baker might not seem like the obvious choice to champion an open software movement – many of the passionate members of which do not always see eye to eye.

But her lawyerly skills and her father’s maxim to always “look at something and find a positive path out of it and move forward” have proved invaluable.

“We are building an open source community that really has deep interactions with commercial players and is relevant to commercial players at the same time as being built on open source DNA.

“That’s a very unusual thing but it so happens I am very good negotiator,” she said.

Ms Baker knows that when she went to work for Mozilla as its chief lizard wrangler, or general manager, she knew many saw it as a bad career choices.

“At that point I knew that the building of the browser was a necessary step to have an internet that was worth living in,” she said. “I also knew [Mozilla] was not the obvious path to build a career but it was the obvious path to do something interesting.”

As someone who likes to confound expectations taking on the Mozilla post was of a piece with her controversial one-sided haircut and her taking up the trapeze.

“The trapeze gives you a feeling you get nowhere else as you fly through the air,” she said. “It’s hard. It’s scary. It’s got a lot of adrenalin and I thought my son is going to do a lot of falling and scraping himself up so it would be good if I did some of the same.”

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Both women say genetics helps us understand what makes us unique

With just over a year under their belt the women behind 23andMe are already notching up awards for their personal genome service.

In October the service, started by Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki, was named 2008′s Invention of the Year by Time.

It is a tribute for a business that is among a handful pioneering a novel approach to healthcare and personal health issues.

“We want to empower people with information and it’s really amazing to have a product that really impacts every single person on the planet,” said Ms Avey.

“The reason we started this company is that we really dramatically wanted to change healthcare,” said Ms Wojcicki.

“Everyone is going to have some kind of disease or illness or event that is going to happen in their family and we feel very strongly that if you know that ahead of time you will be able to take actions to impact that and have a better life.”

Ms Wojcicki understands this only too well. Her husband Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, discovered as a result of a gene test that he is predisposed to Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system.

“In Sergey’s case it has been really empowering for him. He exercises more, he doesn’t drink caffeine. It impacts me because I am pregnant and I know that our child is at a higher risk for that too but there are things that you can do,” said Ms Wojcicki who worked for 10 years in healthcare investment.

Pandora’s box

But is ignorance bliss or knowledge empowering?

Humans have 23 pairs chromosomes and bananas have 11

“I think it is absolutely crazy in this day and age that I have to go through a trial and error method to see if my child is allergic to an antibiotic or peanuts. I should just know,” said Ms Wojcicki.

“So, by getting the genetic information early in life, I am going to be able to create a better atmosphere and healthcare outcome for my child.”

Personal gene testing is not new but before now has been beyond most with a full scan said to cost at least $350,000 (£236,000).

23andMe said it was “democratising” the process by offering genetic test kits for $399 (£269).Rivals such as deCODEme and Navigenics offer tests from $1,000 to $2,500.

All you do is spit into a tube, mail it in and a month later get your results via a web account. The information on over 90 markers include details about ancestry as well as what current research suggests are predilections to certain diseases and other genetic traits.

Man’s nearest relative has an extra set of chromosomes

Personal gene tests have been criticised by medical experts who worry about the quality of the analyses and whether such information could hurt consumers.

But 23andMe emphasise education is at the heart of everything it does and customers are offered counselling and advice on what their results indicate. They can also specify if they do not want information on any specific disease.

“This isn’t for everyone and if you are not comfortable with it, you shouldn’t do it,” said Ms Avey.

Dark ages

Both women predict that in the next 10 years or so, their service will help personalise medicine and ultimately provide a much more tailored healthcare system.

They hope it means an end to a situation in which a drug that can cure one person can injure another.

DNA tests can reveal predisposition to a wide range of diseases

“Our approach to medicine is very 19th century. We are still in the dark ages,” said Ms Wojcicki. “We really need to get to the molecular level so that we are no longer groping about in the dark.”

Already the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared it wants to work with companies such as 23andMe to track adverse drug reactions.

The other added advantage to knowing your genetic information argued both women, is that people may look after themselves better.

“This is something that will put the onus on the individual. It could be used in a way that will help people down a path of wellness,” said Ms Avey.

“They will own their own health care and say I have to take care of myself and can’t fall into the arms of the waiting medical community to try and fix me,” she said.

The Scripps Translational Science Institute is joining forces with Navigenics, Affymetrix and Microsoft to conduct a 20-year study to see whether knowledge about certain genomic details motivates individuals to make lifestyle changes or seek medical care.

Discrimination

While the FDA is warming to personal gene services, an ongoing hurdle for the company is that of a sceptical public concerned as to how companies will use genomic information to discriminate or refuse health coverage.

14% of us have perfect pitch

Protection is provided under the US Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act but that may well change if, as 23and Me envision, genetic testing becomes the norm from birth.

“As a society we are going to have to come together and say how do we figure out how to tackle this in a positive way that empowers the individual,” said Ms Wojcicki.

“We hope that as the model moves more towards prevention rather than just treating illnesses companies will actually look more favourably upon you having your genetic data.

“And if you are following a specific plan to help you avoid disease, that’s really a great outcome for the insurance providers,” she added.

Diversity debate

23andMe has grabbed headlines through endorsements from Oprah Winfrey and Ivanka Trump. More controversially the company held a “spit party” during New York fashion week earlier in the year where volunteers spit into a test tube.

Both women admit this might seem gimmicky, but they hope it will help spark a national conversation.

“We actually keep spit tests in our house,” confessed Ms Wojcicki.

“But it’s these little things that get people talking about genetics. Things like why some people can curl their tongue, why some people excel at swimming or maths.

“It’s the long tail of human diversity,” she said.

88% of us have wet earwax

It was not just a love of genetics that brought these two women together but a chance to change people’s lives.

“I really like people and I really like sick people,” said Ms Wojcicki.

“It’s a really acute moment in someone’s life and you want to help them. I have always been interested in health care and doing something that is dramatic.”

Ms Avey is similarly motivated and was inspired to do good by her parents.

“I grew up in South Dakota where my dad was a Lutheran minister and my mom was a nurse,” she said.

“Between them the worked at a micro scale and helped people in their own community and that’s what is so great about the web that we can do it in a much bigger way where we are not limited by our geography.”

Ms Wojcicki’s inspiration comes from her husband, her father who is a particle physicist and a mother who is a journalism professor.

“My husband is incredibly driven to change the world and has stayed true to that. You don’t focus on the money.

“I was always raised to be cheap and it’s a joke in this company because I found an office space that didn’t have any windows but was really cheap but people vetoed me on that.

“So, I just don’t require that much money to survive and I was taught that you focus on doing something that is good and contributes to society.

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Nancy Smith said she never expected to stay at EA as long as she has

Nancy Smith, who got her career break as the “token woman,” is now riding high in a world dominated by men.

For Ms Smith it has mostly always been so as she worked her way up the ladder from selling spreadsheets and word processing packages to becoming one of the most influential women in video gaming.

She has a track record going back nearly a quarter of a century with Electronic Arts (EA), one of the most dominant players in the gaming space.

Her time with the company has included executive roles in publishing, sales, and distribution as well as that of vice president and president of the The Sims Label, the best selling PC franchise of all time with over 100 million sales.

Just last month she embarked on a new, as yet undefined, path within the company. While that is being fleshed out she will look after special projects for The Sims, which lets users create and control the lives of simulated people.

“I was in the business application area when Electronic Arts launched. It was then I became interested in the idea of entertainment and games and frankly it wasn’t a hard decision to make: games or spreadsheets?”

Lunchtime play

The decision was made even easier by her upbringing. “I grew up in a family that played a lot of games, but it was board games and card games,” she said.

But in those early days selling spreadsheets, she found herself involved in very different games – a community that was almost illicit in its nature.

The Sims is the biggest selling franchise in the world

“In the 70′s in San Francisco I had several good friends who were in the tech business and they were selling mainframe computers. At lunch we would go over when the mainframes where shut down from all the accounting processes and we’d bring our lunch and play games.

“It was the same programmers and analysts who were running payroll for Wells Fargo bank that were creating these games we would play.”

Today she can hardly believe how far the industry has progressed since 1984, when she started at EA as Western Regional sales manager.

“It was all independent dealers. The first year we started shipping games, there were 5,000 independent mom and pop dealers. No one even owned two stores at that time.

“Then retailers like Babbages started to grow with multiple store locations. In that retail climate, our customers were those store managers and store owners who played our games and sold to the converted.”

Hard sell

Slowly the industry evolved and bigger retailers started to spring up. That then presented other hurdles.

“When it got really challenging was six or seven years into it. It was when the industry started moving into mass merchants and different types of retail record stores where you were dealing with traditional retail buyers who were looking for specific business metrics.

Electronic Arts is one of the world’s largest third-party publishers of games

“The problem was they really didn’t have a sense of who the customer was. They had to believe that we as an industry would drive consumers to their stores.”

Of course, Ms Smith noted that today the business of selling games is a lot easier, with third quarter sales up 60% on last year.

“For many years now it has been one of the fastest growing aisles in Wal-Mart, in Target, in Best Buy. So those retailers understand how valuable game entertainment is to driving footsteps and driving growth and profit for them.”

‘Token woman’

While the sales figures have changed much, the demographics haven’t. The face of the industry today remains largely male with just 20% of females making up the workforce and only 3% employed as game programmers according to Game Developer Magazine.

When Ms Smith first started out, that figure was a lot less.

“I spent the first 15 years of my career being the only woman in every meeting I ever attended whether it was with external partners, art, retail, licensing groups, design meetings outside of EA. There were just not a lot of women in the business.”

That turned out to be a boon for getting her first job, in the American Express card division.

“They were given a mandate that they had to hire one woman and one minority,” she said. “I was the woman they hired and I joined with a black man who was the minority candidate for them.”

Far from being insulted, Ms Smith used the situation as an ice-breaker.

The Sims “broke the code that brought women into gaming” said Ms Smith

“It was a wonderful jumpstart for my career. I would embrace the opportunity and I would introduce myself as “I’m Nancy Smith, the token woman in the Western Region of American Express card division.”

Community spirit

So what of the future?

For Ms Smith it’s a new executive position within Electronic Arts as it downplays talk of a takeover following a dismal share price amid a gloomy economy.

For The Sims label, it is a new version of the game which is expected next year along with a Hollywood movie. For the industry as a whole, Ms Smith sees a major shift that was started by The Sims.

“It’s about connecting consumers. It’s not just creativity, but its the community element that has always been there with The Sims.

“Now people want that in all their entertainment. They want to be connected. They want to play with other people. They want to share. And I think that is really transforming the gaming business and the entertainment business.”

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“If you are not having fun, it’s not worth doing ” said Padma Warrior

In the first of a regular series of features profiling influential women in Silicon Valley, Maggie Shiels talks to Padmasree Warrior – technology boss at networking giant Cisco.

As a self confessed geek, Padmasree Warrior defies the stereotype of the badly dressed bumbling nerd.

Dressed in killer heels and a sharp suit, she is eloquent, confident and at the top of her profession.

As the chief technology officer for networking giant Cisco, she commands a position in the industry more usually held by a man.

Her gender is a matter of fact much like her geekiness. Nothing else.

A pink mug inscribed: “Women make the best businessmen” sums up the dichotomy of her situation.

“Someone gave it to me who thought this was something I should have because it spoke a lot of who I am.

“I am a woman and I am a business person.”

She makes no excuses for either. And as a woman with influence, she said she is prepared to use it if it encourages other females to enter a world she loves.

“I would like to see a lot more women in the technology industry, especially at the top.

“I have come to accept that if in getting noticed I can provide the role of being a mentor and a role model to other women, to other people that are of ethnic minorities, I would love to do that.”

‘Global opportunities’

Ms Warrior’s climb to the top has been a slow and steady one, though she admitted there was no grand plan.

“I came to the US (from India) with $100 and a one-way ticket. I was coming to do my PhD at Cornell.

“I never finished it because I got a job and started working and decided to stay in the US because I felt the US was really a platform to have access to multiple global opportunities.”

Most of her working life has been spent at Motorola. Ms Warrior joined in 1984 as one of a handful of women at its Arizona facility and finished as its technology boss leading a team of 4,600 technologists.

While under her leadership the company won the US National Medal of Technology which recognised its years of innovation in radio and wireless.

Precursors

Less than a year ago the diminutive Ms Warrior moved to Silicon Valley and Cisco, a company synonymous with network hardware and the internet.

Unsexy as it sounds, she is trying to shift that focus to what she calls “precursors”.

“If you look at trends that means someone else is already doing that. We need to be a trend setter not a follower in the industry.”

She illustrated her approach with a couple of examples.

“One of the things we are looking at as a precursor is what happens when you combine some aspects of social networking with video. It leads to a more collaborative way of doing things and we are just beginning to see that.”

Cisco makes phones and switches that direct internet traffic

This has led Cisco to work on unified communications that combine a virtual meeting place via TV, web conferencing and instant messaging. This unified communications sector is said to be worth $34bn (£19bn) and a key strategy for Cisco’s future.

“The other thing we see is the computerisation of enterprise,” said Ms Warrior.

“The internet started as a business tool but it has now flipped the other way.”

One demonstration of this was evident at a recent company meeting where she asked how many people were using Macs instead of company PCs.

While the number was not overwhelming, Ms Warrior said it underlined the demand by workers to use their own devices and to be able to plug into a network with the minimum of fuss.

Globalisation was also likely to throw up more precursors, she said.

“We are looking at new verticals that can get created out of India and the Middle East which we call connected real estate.”

Smart buildings of the future will not just be connected with broadband and wi-fi or wimax but can also monitor the use of utilities, greenhouse gas emissions and energy use.

It has been estimated that real estate contributes 10% to the worldwide GDP and employs more than 100m people.

‘Eyes in the sky’

A career in engineering for Padma Warrior seemed almost inevitable given that her father was a scientist, her mum a maths major and her brother and sister a physics major and chemistry major respectively.

Despite this her mother worried about her decision at the age of 17 to attend the highly regarded Indian Institute of Technology far from home in New Delhi.

The virtual meeting place is all about keeping in touch the high tech way

“There were only five women students in a class of 300 or so. It was a rare sight if you saw a female student.

“I think that was a little bit hard for my mom to accept. Not necessarily because I was pursuing engineering but she felt I was going into a very hostile environment where there were not very many female students.”

But she went armed with some sage advice from her father, which she said still holds true today.

“He always taught me to look at the big picture and encouraged me to be who I am.

“He always used to say ‘Have your eyes in the sky and your feet on the ground’. Basically, have really high goals but always know who you are and be realistic about the world around you.”

Ms Warrior said her dad also taught her to enjoy what she did or the effort was wasted.

“I push my team and myself very hard and I also have fun on the way. I play practical jokes on my staff and kid around. Ultimately you have got to enjoy life.”

Changing the world

Ms Warrior’s lifelong passion for technology has led to a conviction that it is capable of changing the world.

“To me technology in its abstract is not interesting,” she said. “To me, what is interesting is what can you do with that technology and how can you change what we as human beings are interested in.

“Cisco has an opportunity with the technology that we develop to not just connect people but to enable collaboration between groups. And to me collaboration is what we as human beings instinctively want to do.

“I feel a responsibility to drive the industry to innovate on a global basis.”

“Oftentimes we lack the means to do it and especially as the world becomes more global and ideas get more quickly distributed, we need technology to bring us all back together. That is what excites me.”

She said watching her teenage son’s outlook on technology inspires her vision.

“I have a 15-year-old son and if you ask him what is central to his internet experience he will say it is communities.

“The future is really about communities we create on the internet and that requires the network to play a strong role and obviously mobile devices.”

One community Ms Warrior would like to help out is that of the much maligned geek.

“I aim to change the myth around what is a geek and what isn’t.

“I think to me a geek is someone who is passionate about technology, who really cares about innovation and how to drive innovation and refine society,” she said. “That’s how I define myself as a geek.”