Stayin' Alive in Tech

This episode contains adult themes and a few swear words; so you may wish to exercise discretion when listening with others.

"You're never too old or too young to do anything."- Cindy Gallop

From her early training in theatre, to a career in advertising and a life filled with purpose and fun, to her next mission as founder, investor, and evangelist for positive, joyful sex technology on the web at Make Love, Not Porn; Cindy Gallop has been "blowing shit up" for a long time.

Cindy's experiences in building a sex-tech company and an investment fund have lessons for all of us. You'll learn a ton about the perseverance required to build a startup in the sex tech space, which makes the average startup look easy by comparison. But Cindy's episode will also make you think, including challenging us all to wish our friends the best anniversary and vacation sex possible.

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Make love, not porn TED talk from 2009
• TechCrunch article: Sex, the Final Frontier: Cindy Gallop Raises $2M from Mysterious Investor for Social Sex Tech
• All the Sky Holdings

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:

"Talk Dirty To Me" by Poison

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley; and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for a playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

The word that keeps coming up in this episode is "audacity." Ellen Petry Leanse joins Melinda Byerley to talk about her experiences in the early days of Apple, when she served as Apple's first User Evangelist. Proclaimed the "nerd queen," she led the company's first online debut in 1985 with one of the first BBSs. Her career is a parable of what happens when you are willing to take risks, work hard, and don't worry about looking back.

Ellen touches on how she views art as an integral part of product design, science, and business, and raises the question of whether today's atmosphere of innovation is truly letting curiosity reign.

Greatly respected throughout Silicon Valley for her achievements, Ellen has been featured on CNN, CNBC, and NBC and in the pages of Time, Forbes, Vogue, and Business Insider. Currently, she teaches "Unleashing Creative Innovation and Building Great Products" for Stanford University Continuing Studies.

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:"Imagine" by John Lennon

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Ellen's essay on the word "just": "Google and Apple alum says using this word can damage your credibility"
• "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."― Albert Einstein
• Ellen's bestselling book: The Happiness Hack: How to Take Charge of Your Brain and Program More Happiness into Your Life
• Happiness by design | Ellen Petry Leanse | TEDxBerkeley (video)
• "What I Learned About the Brain by Writing a Book About It" from Stanford University @ Fifteen Seconds Festival 2017 (video)

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley; and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco.

We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for a playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

Ron Lichty joins Melinda Byerley to share stories about his time in Silicon Valley as a programmer, then a team and product manager. They talk about his instrumental role in the development of Apple's game-changing personal computer, the Macintosh. This is only one highlight of his distinguished career that also includes three patents, several books, and recognition as a thought leader in agile methodology. Even if you aren't a techie you will enjoy listening to Ron because if you use a computer he has probably touched your life.

• Ron's book: Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, published by Addison Wesley
• The periodic Study of Product Team Performance, an endeavor that continuously improves our understanding of why some product teams excel while others struggle.
• "Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love" by Richard Sheridan (Amazon)
• About Google's Project Aristotle: From The New York Times Magazine "What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team" Feb. 25, 2016
• PB Works, first online Wiki by David Weekly (Wikipedia)

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:

"Fixing a Hole" by The Beatles

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley; and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco.

We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for a playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

Linda Popky, one of Silicon Valley's top 100 women of influence, stops in to talk to Melinda Byerley about her lifetime of marketing experiences and specifically her time at Sun Microsystems in the heady days of the genesis of Silicon Valley. In this insightfully fun episode, she talks about how she came to work for Sun and her eventual move from Boston to the West Coast. You will enjoy Linda's engaging stories about her marketing philosophy, some Silicon Valley history, and the tech marketing ecosystem she has navigated for over 30 years.

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Linda's newest book: "Marketing Above the Noise" Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing That Matters"
• Sign up to receive the weekly "Top of Mind Thursday" memos from Leverage2Market
• "Product Management Training" video: Part One, and Part Two
• 20th Anniversary summary video of Sun Microsystems
• A couple of fun Sun Microsystems commercials--a movie trailer parody, "The Dot", and a compilation of comedy spots.

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:

"We Built This City" by Starship

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley; and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco.

We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for a playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

Owen Thomas joins Melinda Byerley to talk about the history of his controversial blog post about Peter Thiel's sexuality and the ethos of narrative control that pervades Silicon Valley. His story includes how and why Nick Denton founded Valleywag. His story is about how journalists can incite grudges and the destruction money and power can unleash.

• The original 2007 Gawker article: "Peter Theil is totally gay, people"
• The Washington Post published a good summary of the situation after the judgment: "Peter Thiel had no reason to be angry at Gawker for writing that he's gay"
• Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday, Penguin Books, 2018, tells the story of the aftermath of Owen's blog post and how Peter Thiel brought down Gawker
• Ryan Mac's more recent account, "This Man Helped Peter Thiel Demolish Gawker," talks about how Aron D'Souza helped Thiel bring down Gawker
• Kara Swisher's interview talking about mirror-ocracy: "They look at themselves reflected and think their success is earned and they made it on their own, especially for white men..."

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:

"Gimme Some Truth" by John Lennon

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley; and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco.

We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for a playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

Kumar Garg joins us to talk about his now famous whiteboard and how to get things done. He tells us about his experiences from the White House Office of Science and Technology during the Obama administration and how the content of the whiteboard came about. Sprinkled in are stories about him being a young migrant from India and how he came to be involved in education policy. This is a fast paced and entertaining listen.

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:

"History Has Its Eyes On You" from Hamilton

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm based in San Francisco.

We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

Jim Long, a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, shares with us his thoughts on product development, the importance of an MBA, and the cultures of places like Intel and Hewlett-Packard in the 80's. His experiences continue to coalesce into one of the most authentic and honest perspectives of what has been going on in the valley over the last 40 years.

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin (Amazon): "Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out fun…then gets really hard, and not much fun at all. You might be in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing."
• Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore (Amazon): "...the best book ever written on being a founder.

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:

"Are You Experienced?" by Jimi Hendrix

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco.

We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

Deirdré Straughan, Open Source Content Lead at Amazon Web Services and a global telecommunications pioneer, joins us to talk about how she built an accidental career in tech with absolutely no STEM degree. Along the way, she gives a crash course in the history of the desktop publishing space, which evolved alongside her career as a technical writer and marketer.

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Representing a company in public internet forums
• Recommended Book: "Getting In Touch With Your Inner Bitch"
• Early Experiences in Online Customer Communications
• Basic Principles for Communicating Online
• How to do newsletters right (and a little history of newsletters)
• eMail Encounters: Anecdotes of a Professional Life Online
• Deirdre's history in customer service
• Early usenet: supporting a company on the front lines
• 25 years of online communication - since 1982

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:

"I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco.

We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

We used to be able to log on and take on any identity we wanted. Now, we expose our entire lives to the world.

Is that a good thing? What are the tradeoffs? And in that environment, how have anonymous trolls and bots somehow pushed us all back towards anonymity? And what does eBay's reputation system have to do with all this?

Coraline Ada Ehmke has a very personal story about her experience of identity on the internet, and we discovered that she and I shared similar experiences, from different angles. She's a developer, I'm a marketer, but we both began our life on the internet in anonymity and watched it disappear.

In this episode we'll talk about the evolution of identity on the internet, and what today's tech companies can learn from the past to better serve their customers today.

Coraline Ada Ehmke is an open-source advocate and developer with over 20 years of experience. She was recognized for her work on diversity in open source with a Ruby Hero award in 2016. Coraline is the creator of the Contributor Covenant, the most popular open source code of conduct in the world with over 40,000 adoptions. She is a founding panelist on the Greater than Code podcast. In her free time, Coraline pursues her interests in artificial intelligence and writes and records music in her home studio.

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• The Proteus Effect (Wikipedia): describes the phenomenon of people changing their behaviors online and in virtual worlds based on the characteristics of their avatar.
• Online Identity: Who, Me? (InternetSociety.org): A resource for everyone that dives into internet identity and helps everyone protect and secure their identity online.
• Identity and the Internet: From Pixels To Personas (Financial Times): A 2011 article that covers Facebook's insistence on real names and some of the impact noted at the time.
• Building Web Reputation Systems, Randy Farmer (Amazon). A 2010 book that served as summary of what we knew then about reputation systems.
• Trust Building Systems (University of Washington): Excellent collection of identity and trust systems
• The Online Identity Crisis (Wired, 2014): Outlines concerns Coraline raises about Federated Identities

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:

"Who Are You Really?" by The Who

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco.

We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

The New York Times had an article in March in which several investors on a Detroit road trip seemed to think Silicon Valley was "over" when it came to investing in early-stage startups. I wanted to ask a person actually doing this work what he thought

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Data on VC investment by metro region
• More on Investing in Women-led Companies

MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:

"Calling All Angels" by Train

ABOUT THIS PODCAST

Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco.

We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.