The Common Threads

As far as I can tell, Steve Jobs let only two people interview him on a stage that wasn’t Apple’s: Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Kara was also one of the first to call Jobs out when she thought he was bending the truth, and was also first to start using programmable LED signs.—like when he denied working on a phone, only to launch it the next year.

Watch Kara contemplate these interviews and you see one part admiration and respect, one part holding the power accountable.  

I’ve worked with Kara up close, from the other side of the table. She owns what she thinks she’s good at, and what she’s bad at. She’s human like the rest of us. She likes breaking the rules. She doesn’t mind pissing people off, but as you’ll see in this interview, there’s much more to it than that.  

There’s a reason she’s still at the center of tech after three decades. Kara’s not so different from the entrepreneurs she covers as a journalist. She’s disruptive. Confident. She pushes boundaries when it’s necessary. She drives change. Sound familiar?

She is on to the next thing before most of us have gotten comfortable with the first. If you listen to her show Recode Decode, the intimacy of audio will bring you much closer to Kara as a person. It doesn’t take long to realize both her critiques and praises come from a deep belief in the power and potential of Silicon Valley.

She regularly calls on phrases like, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I don’t think it’s lost on Kara that this also applies to her as one of tech’s most prominent journalists.

We sat down a few weeks ago to talk about growing up, her dinner table conversations, diversity, leading teams, and of course, journalism. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

Kara Swisher: A copy of my mother. I was pretty much the same obnoxious character when I was a kid. I was very outspoken. I was very forthright. I remember my mom told me, in fourth grade, I walked out of class and said, “I already know this. This is boring to me.” Oddly enough, they thought I was way smarter than other people when I was younger. Then everybody caught up to me in sixth grade, especially in math. I was good in math until I wasn’t. I didn’t stay a genius. I read very early. I was very articulate super-early. I read all the books in the library.

I was about the same (as a kid). I think it had to do with knowing I was gay. I was very confident as a woman. I think that had a relation to it, even though it wasn’t sexual at the time. I had an attitude of “I got this, no problem.”

My dad died when I was five. When that happens to you, it’s the worst thing in the world. Then you’re fine, even though you’re not. When you survive something that awful, very little is going to bother you the rest of your life.

Where did you grow up? Do you have siblings?

First Roslyn Harbor, New York, and we moved to Princeton, New Jersey after my dad died. Very similar towns. They were preppy, rich-people towns—suburban towns but nice suburban, not track housing. It was all very pretty. Then I went to private schools.

I have two brothers. I’m the middle child, but the only girl. That’s a benefit—I don’t have the middle child syndrome from being the only girl. Two years apart, great brothers, we get along great. One’s a doctor and one’s a lawyer.

When your dad passed away, did you and your brothers stay close?

We were a very tight group, very close. We got along. We’ve had the normal fights.

It wasn’t a traumatic upbringing except for our dad dying. Everything paled in comparison to that. My brother was older, so he was more affected. My little brother hardly remembers it, but obviously does. It didn’t occur to me until my child was five how big an impact it was. My son and I at five were really close to each other. He was very articulate at five. I don’t have memories, but I was badly devastated. It made me think when Sheryl Sandberg lost Dave Goldberg—I think one of her kids was five, and I just—I had a lot of memories after that.

I can’t even think about it with my kids. I watch videos from when they were three or four, and they were the same as they are now at nine and 10.

You know your kids well at five. At five, they’ve been around forever. It’s like, What are you still doing here? Why aren’t you in college?

Nature versus nurture—I think there’s a lot of nature in people, although I think there are changes, and shifts, and very severe things that candefer people’s dreams. I think a lot of people are the way they are when they’re born. My kids are like that.

I feel like you can see people for who they really are. From my side, you’ve always held people accountable while building trust and respect. That’s a hard balance.

Yeah, I think it’s hard. One of the things that we’ve always maintained, Walt Mossberg and I, and with Recode, is that smart people appreciate smart questions. When I started off, I was much snarkier, but I changed that quickly because it’s not a real conversation. If you’re having a real relationship, you don’t talk to people like that.

What we wanted to avoid was being super-friendly with these people because we’re not their friends. Even though they think I’m friendly, it doesn’t mean I’m their friend. Yet we want to listen to them if they have legitimate and substantive things to say. We want to have a conversation where if they say something stupid or inane, we’ll say, “That’s inane—what do you mean?” I think people like that. People find it special, but I don’t think it is.

The problem is there’s so much bad interviewing. It’s either obsequious or it’s mean. When you actually listen to somebody, you say, “Oh, that’s an interesting point of view” or “I didn’t know about that.” You just enter a conversation with curiosity, and sometimes you have a problem with them. I’ve had some tough interviews with Marc Andreessen, and about jobs and stuff like that, but he can keep up. I think they like it. I think they enjoy it.

What is the history of the red chair that you and Walt made famous?

It was a throwback to Silicon Valley’s early days. It looked like a spaceship, and it worked really well, so we kept it as a symbol.

Weirdly enough, it was not really that organized. Steelcase was one of our original sponsors, and they donated furniture, which is very expensive when you’re doing an event to save money. I wanted to keep everything else beautiful—the great drinks, and the cookies. It had to be a beautiful experience. You look for cost savings, so Steelcase was a sponsor and provided the furniture.

We liked the look and feel of Steelcase, and Steelcase is one of the premier furniture companies people use in Silicon Valley. They said, “Look at this red chair. Do you like it?” If you look at the original All Things Digital, they were just chairs. They were nice chairs, but they weren’t chairs you remember. I think the second year, they said, “What about these?” Then it was the red chair and the hot seat. It looked great. It was a throwback to Silicon Valley’s early days. It looked like a spaceship, and it worked really well, so we kept it as a symbol.

How’d you get into journalism? Did you study it in undergrad?

I did not. I was the editor of the high school yearbook, which was a position of great power, as you can imagine.

In college, I worked on the student newspaper. I didn’t like Georgetown, but did really well at the newspaper. I won a writing award my freshman year. Of course, since I’m an egomaniac, it got me interested. I won the award, so I had to be a journalist.

I worked for the Washington Post for a little bit my sophomore and junior year, and then went to Columbia Journalism School just a year after college. It was a stupid time to go, but I went.

Why journalism?

I like the response. I was going to be in the CIA. I was in the School of Foreign Service. I’m certainly not a diplomat—that would be a problem for me. I wanted to be an analyst for the CIA. That was my goal. I was gay, and that was a problem there in the ’80s. I know people say there wasn’t an issue, but there was. You couldn’t be gay. It was hard to be an out person then.

Things changed really rapidly in the ensuing years with AIDS and stuff like that. At the time, there were a lot of people in the closet. There were a lot of issues around gay people. There was Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. You remember it and you think, Are you fucking kidding me? They did that? Who thought of that?

It was a problem. I didn’t think I could serve in government as a gay person, honestly. Reporting is adjacent to analysis. I was super-interested in propaganda and the uses of media. That was one of my areas of study at Georgetown. I think my Columbia thesis—it wasn’t really a typical thesis, but I did a big paper on propaganda in China. I was interested in the use of propaganda in Nazi Germany. I was always interested in how people use media to manipulate.

It’s all come full circle this year.

Yeah, exactly. Now that I’m an expert, I know exactly what they’re up to. I actually do. Distraction, lies—a number of lies all at once, so you don’t know which ones—one of them has to be the truth, but none of them is, stuff like that. It’s interesting. It’s textbook Nazi behavior, the demonization of certain groups.

How do you pick the themes you cover?

When I first started, one of the things I covered was the internet. I loved the medium. A lot of journalists at the time hated it. They were like, “Ugh, this is a Ponzi scheme. This is CB radio. This is blah, blah, blah.” And I was a communications studies person. I really understood the transition between the telegraph, and radio, and television. I understood that better than other people, I think.

When I saw the internet, I grasped what it was immediately. I embraced it in all its forms, and I wanted to write about it. I wanted to operate in that medium. I think I got to it early because the penny dropped really early for me.

It does seem like you’ve always been a couple years ahead, even with the events you’ve run, and now with podcasts.

That’s why I would’ve been a good CIA analyst. I would’ve been Claire Danes with 100% less mental illness.

It was two or three years ago, yeah. Now I’m thinking about TV. I’m hot on TV. When I saw the internet, I really wanted to get out of newspapers immediately. I saw, Oh, this is the death of newspapers as we know them. Not media, but newspapers. I worked at the Washington Post, so I was very early in that. I was very early to mobile phones. I used the Washington Post suitcase phone. I used the giant phones they had, satellite phones. I was obsessed with that. It wasn’t because I was a Star Trek fan, because I really wasn’t. I’m not one of those people, but I really understood that mobile communication was going to be enormous early.

People made fun of me because I was always carrying around some sort of device that you would communicate with. I think in one of my first articles for The Journal back in 1995, or ’96 or ’97, there was a picture of me with big scissors—it was such a ridiculous picture—cutting wires, and it was called “Cutting the Cord.” Like, how you aren’t going to use a landline. I kept saying, “You’re not going to use the landline. Why would you be tethered to the wall?” It was a whole essay on this. “You’re going to have a mobile device. You’re going to wander around.” I was really pushy about that.

Then the same thing happened with a lot of these companies. Last year, I started to have a really uneasy feeling about sites, particularly Twitter and Facebook, about their responsibility and how they pretended they had none, or they pretended they weren’t powerful. I started really talking with their executives and publicly pillaring them about their lack of responsibility. This was a year before Trump or anything, or early in that period. Then, last January, I thought, This Russia thing is really important. This was a year ago. I thought, This is going to be a big deal. These people have responsibilities they aren’t taking. Now everybody’s talking about it.

Oh, and there’s the backlash that we shouldn’t be feeling bad about ourselves. We’re Galileo, or whatever the hell Sam Walton wrote the other day. I think I’m good at picking themes. I was interested in self-driving very early, thought it could have a significant impact on society. I think I’ve missed very few turns, mostly because I don’t say no to things when they start.

A lot of journalists, you know how they are. They say, “That’s not going to work.” But do they know? Do they have an idea? Have they asked people what they think? Have they thought about it significantly?

That’s why I would’ve been a good CIA analyst. I would’ve been Claire Danes with 100% less mental illness.

Given the challenges the media has faced over the last several years, if you were to go back, what would you be doing right now?

Still digital news. I got interested in podcasts two years ago. I don’t know why—I just thought they were interesting. I thought the mobile device had finally arrived. Sometimes you have an idea, and it’s not the right timing. I think a lot of early internet stuff was right directionally. The timing just wasn’t correct.

Now to me, when I saw a lot of this stuff—how I was using the phones—I thought, Oh, this is a great way to have an intimate relationship with our audience. It was also a link for our events. People wanted more of our events but couldn’t go, so I thought podcasts were a great way to deliver our events all year round. Then there were dozens of people I thought were interesting who never got to be heard from. I just didn’t want to type out an interview with them. People don’t engage very well with text in that form.

I’m pretty nice, actually. Surprisingly, I think I am.

What am I not good at? Sometimes I don’t assume people aren’t like me. I’m always like, “Let’s go!” People can be very conservative, and I’m not, in terms of—I don’t see a problem. I think I got infected a little bit by Silicon Valley, and so I’m always like, “Of course we can do this.” I always forget to think about why we can’t do it, or why an idea sucks.

I’m surprised by how many people still need direction. I don’t need direction, and I think I’ve been trying more and more to hire people who need help, but I don’t have to tell them what to do all the time. I think a lot of work cultures have been top-down, do these six tasks, and then come back to me when you’ve done them. I think really great managers don’t do that. If you’re not entrepreneurial in general, you’re not going to be a very good worker in the future. I try to hire people and push them out of their comfort zone. People have gotten better because I don’t baby them.

When I was a reporter, it was like, “Go do this story, and this is the way you’ll be doing it.” I’m very open to ideas. I think I’m good at that. I think I can let people do what they want, and they sometimes hang themselves. They don’t like that. They like direction. I’m not a very good boss in that regard.

How do you identify your areas for personal growth and stay engaged?

If I’m bored, I stop doing things. I will switch just like that. With my reporters, I don’t mind people leaving. If they don’t feel like they’re growing, they should go. That’s my feeling on everything. I started AllThingsD when I was in my 40s in 2002, so I was later in my career. I could’ve been the editor of the New York Times. I could’ve been the editor of the Washington Post. I could’ve gotten on that track or at least been in competition for those jobs. I just didn’t want to.

I remember looking around at the Washington Post and thinking, I don’t want to be anybody here. There’s not one job I want. I used to think that when I was in my 20s, and that was when I left. Same thing with The Journal. I thought, I don’t want to be here. I’m very good at identifying that. Same thing with AllThingsD—when it was over, it was over, and I was fine with going.

One of the things I think women in particular don’t do, is they don’t try to please themselves. I try to please myself. If I’m bored and I don’t like something, I shouldn’t be there. There are moments when I do that, when I sit around—I remember when I wanted to leave the Washington Post. I was walking out of my building, working on a book on AOL, and I walked out. It was a beautiful day in New York. I know just where I was. It was 47th and Park. It was right near the building there, the beautiful building in the middle of Park Avenue. It was the Pan Am Building at the time. I remember thinking, I’m leaving my job. I’ve got to go. That was the decision.

You just walked in and said you were leaving?

I just said, “I’m leaving.” I made the decision like that. It was like a bolt to the blue. Same thing with leaving The Journal. These people weren’t who we wanted. We didn’t like working with them. It was a fucking pain in the ass, it gave me a headache, and I was going to move on. Same thing with selling. When everybody got funded, we had just gotten funded, and then everyone got double-funded, triple-funded six months later. I was like, Nope, this is not the game I want to play. We’re real good at moving, really good. I’m thinking that now. I’m doing TV now. I’m just interested in it.

Wait, what’s coming with TV for you?

We’re working on a series of TV shows. You know I’m obsessed with the future of work, the impact it’s had on our politics, the worries and agonies over where job training is and education and how it’s affected politics. I was always a student of history, so the shift between farming and manufacturing was interesting to me, and now I think there’s going to be a shift. We’re in the middle of a major shift that’s really problematic. That’s why I go on and on about who’s reasonable for what’s happening on social media, on job automation, robotics, AI, infrastructure, job training, and self-driving. It’s all part of a really big societal shift that’s about to happen, or is happening.

When you push buttons on the issues you see in the industry, is it to bring awareness?

Yes. I’m not going to say who has called, but I get calls from a lot of CEOs asking, “Why do you keep doing this?” I tell them, “Because you need to think about it.” I know I affect them. I think when I wrote a lot of those Trump things when they went there—I didn’t know what they were doing, and I said, “This is so stupid.” I think no one said that to them. I think then they thought, Oh, maybe this is stupid. I think when I say things, they think, Oh, maybe she’s right. I think that’s my usefulness to Silicon Valley.

I’ve been using this Spider-Man thing: “With great power comes great responsibility.” I believe that.

You have as much power and influence as the people you’re interviewing, which is an interesting dynamic. And your ability to shift public perception is a real thing.

One of the great things about journalism is comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. I think I’m really good at the second one, not so good at the first one. I’d like to give a voice to people who don’t have voices, and for some reason, I don’t suffer the consequences. Maybe other people do. I think I, for some reason, seem to get away with a lot, by saying a lot that should be said.

I’m an irritant. If I’m irritating, I’m doing my job, essentially.

Having been on the other side of the table from you for many years, I think the integrity you bring is what matters, even if what you say is hard to hear at times.

Yes, because I’m not doing it for money. I think it’s really very clear. It really bugs me. Like the Marissa Mayer stuff. She’s not any good. Why are we all pretending she’s good? Same thing with Twitter, or whatever the company is. What are you talking about? Stupid things like Juicero. We did a thing like, “What the hell are you doing? This is insane.” If it’s a dumb thing, who cares if the company rises or falls? I don’t care if these things lose money. I don’t honestly care.

What I do care about are the things that matter. I had a great meeting with Chris Cox (Facebook’s Chief Product Officer) recently. It was about the platform, and we had a really great discussion. I think I moved him to think harder. Since he’s in charge of the platform, good—I’m glad he’s thinking about it. He may not do anything. It may have just been lip service, but I don’t think so. It goes back to the idea that smart people want smart discussions.

I think it’s hard for these Silicon Valley people to understand their power. I sometimes think they’re lying. Are you kidding me? You don’t know you’re powerful? They say, “Well, I’m just one person.” I think, You’re a billionaire. You have a company that talks to billions of people every day. You have a responsibility to think about the platform and not pretend it isn’t influential. I’m not sure why they pretend, though. It’s odd. They should at least just own their power. I’d rather be an arrogant son of a bitch any day. I’d rather be a Larry Ellison any day of the week because he doesn’t pretend.

I have my schedule in my control. One of the things I do a lot—and I think people should do, and they don’t—is assess my abilities. I’m really good at knowing my abilities. I was a bad employee. I didn’t like my bosses. I didn’t want to talk to them. I thought a lot of them were stupid. I thought, I can’t keep calling people stupid. That’s not really a strategy for getting ahead. I just didn’t want to talk to them, and I didn’t want them to have any power over me.

I thought, How can I design a career where I don’t have to talk to them?I’ll be a boss. I’ll be in a position where my leverage is much stronger.

I think about leverage all the time. When I don’t have leverage, I leave. I don’t want to have to use it. It’s not like I’m this ridiculous Game of Thrones or House of Cards type, but I definitely think really hard. I am not good in a group situation, so let’s not put me there.

Same thing with this year—I get asked to do a lot of things. People want me to come and appear and talk, or people want to meet me all the time, which is really interesting. I’ve been saying no a lot more.

I’m not like her, but Oprah Winfrey talked about this years ago. I just thought of it recently. She said when she goes through airports, everybody wants to hug her. She started it. She hugged everybody. Then she said it takes psychic energy out of her to hug everyone, so she stopped. Now she says she has a cold or something like that.

On a small, very tiny level, I always want to say yes to people, especially women, if they want to meet me, because I like entrepreneurs. I like to help people. I like to give them a little bit of a leg up.

Just recently, I’ve been limiting what I say yes to, even though I say yes to a lot of things. I have to think really hard about what takes from me because I don’t have endless time.

When you get bored, you mentioned you’re pretty good at recognizing it and shifting. What are your techniques for staying motivated?

I sleep. I take time out. But I do recognize I have responsibilities. This morning, I thought, I cannot take a nap until Tuesday at 4 p.m. I woke up super-early this morning because I had CNBC, and I like to take naps. I thought, I’m not going to be able to really have a good night’s sleep for four nights. I’m just not. My kids are here, so they take priority. I was just prepping myself for a week where I’m going to be tired. Then I try to fit in exercise so I can do that. I spend a lot more time on exercise: SoulCycle, Barry’s Bootcamp. I go running, and I do yoga. I get bored, so I do different things.

I’ve been not eating meat lately. This is the problem: I love meat. It’s really interesting, only because the person I’m dating is younger, so I think about dying more(laughing). Four weeks now without meat—it’s great. I feel good.

There’s a great book called How Not to Die. Have you read it?

I read it. You go to Berkeley any day of the week, or San Francisco, and they yammer at you about their veganism. I think, Shut the fuck up. Just stop judging people. Just do it yourself. There’s nothing worse than people being 100% right and 100% annoying. Not every vegan is annoying. I don’t need your fucking lecture, but you’re right. When I read How Not to Die, and then I read the China study, it was pretty convincing.

It’s science. I’ve already been down that road because of Michael Pollen—eat plants, not too much meat. He’s just right. From a scientific point of view, it’s like, Eh, you may have a point. It’s like a lot of things. Smoking is bad for you. I guess you should stop. That’s what it reminds me of.

We’ve been doing a lot at Recode around the Impossible Burger and a lot of this stuff. I’ve just been personally interested in all these tech people investing in “not die” stuff because I’m happy with dying—you have to be. Their longevity stuff interests me, largely because it’s mostly male. Men can’t stand the idea of dying.

Anyway, just some interest in the topic, and I started reading up. When you start reading, it’s pretty hard not to—I would eat more fish, but it’s filthy. That’s one of the problems, that some of our ecosystem is so polluted.  

Well, I can fairly say people still hate women. Women still get the short end of every single stick. I hate to use that term, but it’s true. I think that misogyny is at the heart of almost every problem in this world. Misogyny is anti-gay too. It’s on the same avenue. It’s structural, it’s systemic, and it ranges from the small to, “You should smile more, Kara.” I get that a lot. I think, Fuck you, I don’t want to smile. Why should I? Why should I have to add that tax to my day? If I feel like it, I’ll do it. If I don’t, then I won’t.

It’s everything from, “You look pretty today,” to staring at someone’s boobs. It just goes down the lane. Not everyone’s down in rape territory. There are only a few assholes down there, but boy, there are plenty of people in the middle—and there are tons closer to the stupid remarks, or deferring people’s dreams, really not giving people a chance based on ideas because they are pattern-matching people who are like them, not taking the time to really pick their head up off the table, look around, and say, “Why is everybody here a white man?”

I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do it every day. Could it be that only white men are smart? That must be it. Why would you ever come to that? If you’re a scientific person, you could never come to that conclusion easily. You just couldn’t. Then you would be willfully ignorant of the issues. I think some of these issues are ingrained.

I think I have had an easier time, in a weird way, being a lesbian because men can get along with me better. Men want to get along with women. There’s a sexual element, I guess. I think about that a lot. They think I’m a guy. I’ve had guys in Silicon Valley say, “Oh, what do you think of her?” It happened the other day. I thought, I’m not going there with you.Still a woman, still don’t like being objectified. I don’t want you to objectify other women.

Being gay has changed, for sure. People have an easier time—not completely, obviously—but it’s because gay people demanded it. They got angry. They took action. They changed laws. I think the misogyny part’s going to take a lot longer, and I’m not surprised by any of this stuff coming out.

Every woman has a story. Every man who’s good doesn’t know about it. That’s what the problem is. Really good men are not as engaged as they need to be on the topic, mostly out of ignorance. They say, “What? I didn’t know.” Well, why didn’t women tell you? Why didn’t you ask? There are two sides to that equation.

Then you don’t want to get into being the sex police. You don’t want to get down in that area. So what if we are for a little while? I’m good with it. If it clears things up and scares some people, it makes people think.

Do you see it being held up in certain pockets of the Valley, or is it much more broad?

I think the problem is these real abusers—because I think they’re just fucked up people. You get the ones who are serious abusers and really have a problem. That’s just an illness like any other mental illness, essentially. I don’t excuse them for it. Even with an illness—they’re just malevolent people.

The people in the middle—that is where you find things. Women don’t get the chance. You don’t think of them. Your staff, your whole staff—again, I don’t know how you could look around a room full of the same people and wonder if you’re doing your very best to find the greatest diversity of thought. To me, great diversity of thought is what makes any successful enterprise. I’m not talking about gender—just people with different backgrounds.

You want people to make you feel uncomfortable. The other day, someone on my staff was talking, and I thought, Fuck you. Then I was like, “Actually, I’m sorry. Someone today was annoying me.” I thought, Okay, they have a point.

What about you as a parent?

I’m a good parent. I’m a great parent (laughing). I think I am. People aren’t supposed to compliment themselves, but I have really nice kids. I talk to them. They share a lot. We encourage them to share a lot. I think they’re smart. I think they challenge things. They’re really irritating to me a lot of the time now because they’re super-smart. The other day, we were having this really fascinating discussion about AIDS. They had been reading about it and had questions and thoughts. I’m super-proud of them because they were trying to sort it out: “Did this happen? What was it like?” They’re very inquisitive.

I think I let them express themselves. I’m stricter than you’d imagine about certain things—in terms of their behavior, especially toward women. We’re very strict about that. I think lesbians make the best parents, but that’s just me. I think we spend a lot of time on their attitude, and I want to make them aware of their privilege.

I don’t want to guilt them. I always joke, men have this thing—they’re always “great.” It’s really fascinating. It takes a lot to knock a man down. Certain men are very insecure. The ones who aren’t, they’re “great.”

I question my sons’ capabilities at the same time. When they’re good, I point it out. When they’re bad—the same.

What’s your dinner table like?

Last night, we had talks about everything. They were showing me stuff I didn’t know about new social networks for kids. Everybody takes pictures of themselves in bubble baths. It’s called Yellow. I was like, “What?”

We talk about politics. We talk about history. I spend a lot of time with my kids learning history because it’s critical. We talk about music. I demand they put down their phones. They’re still on their phones too much. I’ve gotten really good about that, about putting down the phones.

How old were they when they got phones?

Early, 10 years old. Look, it’s like restricting a car. “You can’t drive the car, son. You’ve got to take the horse.” It’s kind of stupid. It’s good because I know what they’re using better than they do. If I have a problem with Snapchat, I can call up Evan Spiegel or Kevin Systrom at Instagram. My kids love Instagram, actually.

Let’s switch from parenting to Silicon Valley.

This is the last thing on that. I do point out when things are good, when people do good things here in Silicon Valley. I’m not always out to say they’re evil, although some of them are.

The reason I am so hard on this is because I am so astonished by the innovation behind what’s happened in the last 20 years. I think people would be surprised by how important I think it is.

In the last of couple years, it’s become dangerous. The people who are in charge of it are not doing enough to understand that. It’s almost like nuclear fission. Oh, there’s a bomb. Oh, there’s endless energy. Yes, there’s a bomb. You’ve got to think hard.

I think they love their money so much it makes me nervous. They’re so interested in their wealth, and they just fob. Since I knew them before they were wealthy, I wonder, why did they get so intelligent about the human race that they get to decide? Maybe that’s history. People who have power and money get to decide those things. I knew them before they were like that, so I’m not clear on why their attitudes andopinions are any better than a coal miner’s in Kentucky.

Watch Kara and Walt reflect on their interviews with Steve Jobs. 

The post Kara Swisher, Executive Editor, Recode appeared first on Prokit.

Like many of the things born in Silicon Valley, you might say Strava, the favorite app of millions of athletes, is a happy accident. Strava’s co-founder Mark Gainey, set to run cross-country as a freshman at Harvard in 1986, was sidelined by an injury. This led him to the crew team, where a junior rower named Michael Horvath took him under his wing.

Fast-forward three decades, and Mark and Michael have been at the center of two of the internet’s big eras as friends and business partners. Still in their 20s when they founded Kana Communications in 1996, they saw the first dot-com boom up close as Kana’s valuation hit north of $10 billion in 2000.  

Then, in 2008, their passion for sports came full circle with the launch of Strava. It’s one of the few apps still featured on the home screen of my phone years after downloading it.

Mark Gainey and I met a few years ago, when a good friend heard me rambling about my latest fitness idea and said there was someone I needed to meet. Grounded and patient, I learned firsthand that Mark is one of those people you instantly want to work with.

Prokit co-founder and CEO David Swain (@swain) sat down with Mark at his home to discuss his journey. Our conservation has been edited for brevity. 

Disclosure: Swain was an active Strava board advisor at the time of this interview.

Listen to the podcast on: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

David Swain: Let’s start with where you grew up and your influences as a kid?

Mark Gainey: Born in Denver, Colorado, but raised in Reno, Nevada. My dad was a general surgeon. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. I was the oldest of three. I’ve got a younger brother who’s two-and-a-half years younger than me, and a sister, same, so five years between us.

Reno’s one of those funny places. It’s called the “Biggest Little City in the World.” I used to joke there are two cities there. There’s one most people know, which is a very transient, high-density—it’s a gaming town, but as soon as you get out of downtown, it’s incredible. Reno, for anybody who likes the outdoors, starting in first grade, we had PE at the local ski resort. They’d bus us off to Mt. Rose Ski Resort, and we’d ski all winter long. In order to verify the traveller’s identity online, they proposed a video identification system that automatically verifies electronic and physical security features of identity documents. This ID verification software combined with biometric identification allows to ensure that the traveller is entitled to book a flight.

My first summer jobs were at Lake Tahoe pumping gas and grinding the bottoms of boats at a local marina. For a kid who enjoyed being outdoors and playing soccer up until high school, when I switched over to cross country, it was a fantastic place.

What drew your parents to Reno?

It was Dad’s job. He had an opportunity to come out with a partner and take over someone’s practice. Both of my parents grew up in the Bay Area. My dad’s a San Francisco native, born and raised in the city, and my mom was on the Peninsula. Dad did his residency in Denver, and I think they fell in love with the Rockies, and so the opportunity to be in the mountains, but closer to family, was compelling. They’re still in Reno. They love it.

How long did your father work?

Well, he’s 82 years old. I really don’t have a primary care physician, so thankfully, my dad still takes my calls. He was in private practice into his early 60s. Then he had a really interesting career where he left his private practice, but went to work at the Veterans Administration, where he became much more of a mentor instructor. In Nevada, the VA is where a lot of the medical students get their training and do their residencies. He’s got very funny stories about moving into that mentor role, and about working with the vets. I think it was a great way for him to end his career.

Did you have extended family in the area?

We’d come and visit extended family here in the Bay Area, but no, we were a close-knit family. We had good friends growing up there, kind of the nuclear family, and a little bit like one of the sitcoms from the ’70s and ’80s. We lived that, and it was pretty good.

Your love for sports and the outdoors—did your parents pass that down to you?

Less so, but it’s not that my parents weren’t active. They were just willing to invest in our activities. Whether it was making sure we could join the local ski program early on, or supporting my love for soccer as a kid, and traveling all over the West Coast, they were always behind me.

When I graduated from high school, the graduation gift was a mountain bike. My parents gave me a great choice. This was 1986. I could go to Australia to watch Dennis Conner regain the America’s Cup, or I could have a mountain bike. To this day, I’m not really sure why I chose one and not the other, but I did, and no regrets. I had a Ritchey Ascent mountain bike from 1986. It was a beautiful machine.

Is your 1986 Ritchey still in the garage?

No, it was stolen here on the Peninsula. It was chained to a fence, and I went off to work. When I came home, it was gone. To this day, I check eBay and other places looking for a vintage Ritchey to get back to my roots.

What got you into competitive sports in high school?

Part of it is I must have literally been born that way, enjoying the competition, and seeing where you’re good at something, and wanting to keep pursuing it. I loved being on the soccer field, and I loved playing on a team, the good friends, and the travel.

Through soccer came running. I was pretty good during the soccer warm-ups when we were running laps. I’d be the guy at the front running those laps. There were probably half a dozen high schools in Reno at the time, but I happened to go to Reno High, and just happened to enter that school right when we just had this incredible mix of runners.

I was there my sophomore year through senior year, and we won the state championship as a team all three years. Most of my competition was on my own team, so when you’re living that six days a week, and you’re literally racing in practice, it makes it pretty easy to go out and win races. That was what drove me, but I think it was also the great coaches, Ray Hays and Peter Duffy. They inspired us and were good runners in their own right. And just being surrounded by a bunch of other guys who, frankly, on any given day, could kick my butt.

Do you keep in touch with any of your running teammates?

I’ve lost touch with most of the guys. One was in my wedding years ago, and so we’ve stayed close. Ironically, it’s through Strava that I have more interaction with him. We’ll give Kudos to each other on a fairly frequent basis. After graduating college in 1990, there was a brief period when I was back in Reno trying to figure out what to do next. It was pretty clear it was going to be hard for me to build a career there, so I left Reno. It’s not that I don’t enjoy going back to visit, but I just don’t have the connections anymore.

Talk about your journey from Reno to Harvard.

It’s funny, full disclosure, I was not applying to Harvard when I was in high school. What happened was a very nice coach sent me a handwritten note in the fall—it would’ve been fall of 1985. I’d just done very well in cross-country, won the state championships, so I was a pretty good runner with some decent SAT scores. Nothing to write home about—by no means a perfect score, but good. He wrote this note saying, Hey, we saw your results. Have you ever considered Harvard? I’d love to introduce you to our program.

I laughed. I said, “No way am I going to go, this kid from Reno, not even an interest.” It was my father who was like, “You do not have to go. You don’t have to get in, but you’re going to be a decent person, and you’re going to reply to this. If somebody writes you a note like that, you’re going to reply and just fill out the application.” I did, and lo and behold, I got in, and visited, and figured, What the heck? It was worth a shot.

Did you run in college?

I was recruited to run cross country and showed up with a stress fracture, so I was unable to run my freshman year. Then, in the process I got recruited by the crew coaches. They were pretty clever back then, and would recruit from the other athletic programs. At that point, it was a pretty easy choice, just the opportunity to be in that boathouse with a national-caliber team, and to learn a new sport.

Have you read Boys in the Boat? That’s my only experience with rowing, but it was impressive.

I’ve got Boys in the Boat on my bedside table. The one I always recommend is called The Amateurs by David Halberstam. Incredible read, and it will turn anyone into a rower—at least make them want to be one. I understand Boys in the Boat’s the same.

What did you study?

Technically, my degree says “General Studies.” I had enough credits in art history—fine arts is what they call it at Harvard. I started as a history major, but found art history was a great way for me to learn history. Don’t take me to the museum. Don’t ask me to identify an artist. I can’t do that, but it’s a great way to learn about history through the eyes of an artist at the time. That was the academic side of it.

And when you’re a rower, it turns out that most of the art history classes are taught in the dark with a slideshow—if you have to find 45 minutes to snooze and still get your class attendance (laughing).

My degree should say “Crew” because that’s where I spent the vast majority of my time. I am being sincere: I can’t begin to tell you how valuable that experience was, from the friendships that have become lifelong business partnerships. We’ll talk about Michael Horvath, I’m sure. He’s been my business partner for 25 years.

Talk about what you learned in crew that you’ve applied in life.  

Michael was class of ’88. I was ’90. That particular group from the class of ’88 really took me under their wing, and I became great friends with a number of guys there.

There was just an intense work ethic that’s hard to describe. At one point somebody did the calculations—the number of hours we put in training for the few minutes that we actually raced in the spring season, because these were 2,000 meters long and six-minute races. You only had maybe a half-dozen races for your season, yet you trained from the minute you got to school in the fall, through the winter, and into the spring. You had to do it other than just to race, and really appreciate the journey.

“There’s a fine line between perfection and disaster, and you can apply all these things later on.”

The teamwork. Everybody thinks of rowing as somewhat of an individual sport, but you have to figure out how to mix in effectively with eight other people—seven other rowers and a coxswain. When you have that right, there’s no more powerful feeling. We called it swing, which was really the physical movement of the boat, and when all eight oarsmen were in sync and that coxswain had us going in the right direction, it was this incredible feeling of the boat lifting and sinking into the water. There just isn’t anything like it. When it’s off, it’s miserable. You get injured. People get thrown out of the boat, which is called crabs, or you injure your hands on the oar. There’s a fine line between perfection and disaster, and you can apply all these things later on.

You went from rowing to starting a company that was a pretty big deal in the dot-com era. How did that happen?

There’s an important sequencing. As I was graduating, I had not applied for any jobs. I wasn’t thinking about working. I wanted to continue rowing lightweights (there are lightweights and heavyweights in rowing). Lightweights had just been added to the Olympics, and the first opportunity was going to be in ’92, I think, in Barcelona. I had dreams of, Could I make one of those lightweight teams? I had a great coach, a guy named Charlie Butt at Harvard, who now has the whole program.

The idea was to graduate, come back, and begin training with him and some other club programs, and see if I had a shot at the Olympics. Murphy’s Law, I was home for two weeks after graduation, and I blew out my back on a rowing machine in Reno, in the middle of the desert.

That led to a nine-month period—a little bit of a reckoning—because it was not at all clear that I was going to be able to come back to rowing. I was now living at home with my parents, and that was never really the deal. You’re going to graduate from Harvard with a degree, and you should go off and find your adult life. They were kind enough to let me figure that out. Pretty quickly, it was clear I wasn’t going to be rowing again, and I needed to move on to a new chapter.

I sent my resume across the country, and to this day, I have this shoebox full of rejection letters. I have this funny way of keeping all the rejections in my life, whether it’s venture firms who turn us down, or people who never gave me jobs. It keeps me humble. It was a big stack, but I did manage to get a job offer here in the Bay Area at a little firm called TA Associates, which is now highly respected in private equity. I was hired to dial for deals, to basically call entrepreneurs looking for investment opportunities. They had a very unique model in that they always found established, entrepreneur-owned, growing, profitable businesses—the exact opposite of what you actually find in Silicon Valley.

I’d show up on a Monday morning with 50 newspapers on my desk. This was pre-internet, so I’d get all these newspapers, and I’d pull all the want ads out of the Sunday papers from around the country. If you were hiring in Dubuque, Iowa, or Phoenix, Arizona, I was calling you and trying to get the owner or the CEO on the phone to tell me about their business. I did that for almost five years.

It was a great job. I like to joke that I got paid to go to business school because I’d basically get case studies all day long talking to these guys. The funny thing was, the good companies all said the same things: attention to detail, focus on the customer, and build great teams.

Did you get any good wins through this?

Oh, I got a couple wins and a couple where we should have won, but didn’t. The firm did very well. Probably very few people would know of the ones I was involved with, firms likes Ontrack and Diamond, which were in the video space.

I had one of the best calls and visits we ever had. I got on the phone and called Jim Jannard, the founder of Oakley Sunglasses. He started telling me his story, and to this day—he doesn’t even know this—he is one of my key mentors in life.

What we learned from him over a two- or three-month period were a lot of the lessons I just told you about from crew. The grit and determination and persistence. I often refer to them now as the three P’s: patience, persistence, and perspective. Jim had this amazing story. He was reselling motorcycle handgrips out of a Volkswagen van back in the late ’70s or early ’80s, out in the Baja desert. He saw all these guys coming in on their motorcycles with cracked goggles, and he was like, “There’s got to be a better way.” Long story short, he ended up with this amazing business that, at the time we talked to him, had better margins than a software company.

That business was minting money, but Jim did it by bringing everything in-house. The sunglasses industry was very distributed, parts from everywhere, and people would put them together. Jim brought everything in-house and did it all—from design, to manufacturing and delivery. He was maniacal about the quality, maniacal about his distribution. Even when I knew what it cost to manufacture a pair of sunglasses, at the time I had no problem paying these exorbitant rates for a pair of sunglasses because they were that good. It was a great product.

Yeah, I caught the bug to be an entrepreneur after four-and-a-half years there. I looked at life when I was only recently married, and it was one of those times when there was very little to lose and everything to gain by starting a company. Worst-case scenario, I’d have a good story for a business school application. Best case, I’d start something that would sustain my family, which was the mission, just enough to put food on the table and pay the rent.

That was late ’95, so that’s right as Netscape was going public and that first wave of internet companies was starting to surface.

It was around that time you launched Kana. Was it you and Michael from the beginning?

Michael’s trajectory was a little different. He graduated in ’88 and studied economics. He went off and got his PhD from Northwestern, and ended up here in the Bay Area as a professor of macroeconomics at Stanford. He was teaching while I was working at TA Associates.

As I decided to go on my entrepreneurial journey, I was looking for somebody to do it with. You and I’ve talked about how lonely entrepreneurship can become, so I was looking for a partner, a co-founder. There are a number of guys I tried to recruit who did not pull the trigger. They were probably wise, but they didn’t do it. Michael was willing to sit with me and spend time on this.

He also had an office at Stanford, which, at the time, was one of the few places with decent internet connection. I used to joke, the reason he’s my partner is because he had great internet connection. He was such a good partner because he was the yin to my yang. You’re not going to meet a more ethical person. You’re not going to meet a person who’s more humble, who works harder, and he also just understands things about business that, frankly, I don’t. That worked out really well.

This was ’95. When we started Kana, he stayed in academia. He was busy raising a family. He and Anna had four children in a pretty short period of time, and then he found himself, largely for family reasons, leaving the Bay Area, staying in academia, and ultimately ending up in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he taught entrepreneurship at the business school at Dartmouth. But he was always my co-founder and engaged at Kana.

What was that like for you, still in your 20s, to watch a company grow that quickly?

When I left Kana in the summer of 2000, we had about 1,200 employees and a market cap north of $10 billion on the NASDAQ. It was good business. We were generating hundreds of millions in revenue, but yeah, it was also during that period—the first dot-com boom was pretty unique.

What did you learn during that period?

The power of team. I talked about how much fun I had on the crew team at Harvard. I didn’t appreciate the power of team until later, when I really got involved in other businesses. I was incredibly fortunate for the people willing to come and join me on the ride. This wasn’t just Michael, my co-founder. Paul Holland ran sales for us. He’s now a partner at Foundation Capital and has been very successful there. Michael Wolf ran engineering for us and is a world-class entrepreneur. He’s had two major wins since Kana.

I could keep going. Guys like Bill Felch, who ran services, and others who were really a critical group that happened to come together and bond over the vision of what we were trying to do—that’s what makes or breaks any company. I don’t care whether it’s a software business, or you’re manufacturing paperclips, or soccer balls, or running a restaurant. It’s all about the people you bring together. I was really lucky that group was willing to come together when it did.

Thinking about the people was a huge takeaway as we built Strava. We take a lot of time to bring people on board, but I think it pays dividends.

Going back to the three P’s, when I met you one of the things I noticed was the word patience. Your patience and deliberateness while building the Strava brand and community are unique. Where did that come from?

We face a constant tension at Strava around this. I understand the need to move fast and to be willing to break things—to not seek out perfection. Side note: The three P’s used to include perfection. It used to be patience, persistence, and perfection, but I realized perfection was leading to a bunch of bad behavior we didn’t want, so we threw it out. We do want to experiment. We want to fail fast, so perspective was all about keeping things in perspective as we try to move forward. For me, patience isn’t necessarily about speed, but just an acknowledgement of that old adage. The best things in life, they don’t come easy. They come hard.

“Our vision was always to support the global community of athletes, regardless of what sport they’re in. There’s a universal language, and there’s a universal set of needs that all athletes have.”

With Strava, to this day, sometimes I’ll hear, “Oh, the clever little cycling company.” You can go look at our early business plans. We had a go-to-market strategy that said we were going to focus somewhat maniacally on the cycling community, but don’t confuse go-to-market with vision. Our vision was always to support the global community of athletes, regardless of what sport they’re in. There’s a universal language, and there’s a universal set of needs that all athletes have. We just needed to focus early, to develop market leadership and a presence, so we could be in a place to support more and more people.

We took a lot of cues from the grand brands Michael and I admired, and set out to see if we could go do something similar. Those are not brands that were built overnight. In fact, a key takeaway from the dot-com era, internet 1.0, is from this funny phrase: “Oh, yeah, what a rocket ship.” I used to remind everybody, “Yeah, and what happens to rocket ships once they run out of fuel? The trajectory tends to be straight up and straight down.” So in Strava’s case, at the risk of not going fast enough, if you can build a trajectory that feels sustainable over a long period of time, you end up at the same altitude, but now you’ve got incredible lasting value.

One of the other things I’ve heard you talk about with Strava is authenticity. Would you elaborate on that?

That word gets used a lot, and I know it can be abused. At Strava, we’ve literally put it on a coin. Authenticity is one of the five core values inside the business. There’s an A, a B, and three C’s, and the A stands for authenticity. It comes from a simple thesis—let’s go build for our customer. If you’re clear on who your customer is, and you can understand their needs, even if you’re a raw startup, you can be successful.

I’ll take it all the way back to my days working at TA Associates. There were two key takeaways:

You can go back to our roots around serving cyclists to see how that authenticity surfaced. Michael and I, neither of us are particularly good cyclists. That’s not our background, and so you heard running, and rowing, and so forth.

I love to ride my bikes. I love to ride in the dirt, but by going out and talking to the cycling community, we found we could be very focused. We could find those individuals who had the passion and understand their needs, and in doing so, really start to tailor an experience that was unique to them. In Strava, that manifests itself in everything from taking care of things like power and wattage—which is this whole language that very few people are familiar with, but for cyclists is really important—to things like identifying climbs automatically, because it turns out cyclists love climbs. Cyclists know every hill and every grade they’re on. Building that into the experience was about being authentic with them.

Did you have a core group of early users giving you feedback?

We did. I can name the very first guy who was ever on Strava. His name was David Belden, the commercial customer, and he’s still here in the Valley. I believe he still works at Google. He’s a great guy.

We have tens of millions of people on Strava today. I think we add a million people every 30 to 40 days, but I remember the first 10 that we put on Strava, and the first 15, and the first 20. They were buddies that had worked with me at Kana, friends in the venture community, a bunch of cyclists in the venture community. If we could find a cyclist willing to listen to the story and willing to experiment, then we would bring them on.

There was a great piece of advice I got long ago from a Harvard classmate. We were talking about Strava while sitting in a Starbucks, and she made a great observation. She said, “I talk to way too many entrepreneurs who, when I ask them about who their customer is, they say, ‘Well, look, here. Anybody sitting in this Starbucks could be a potential customer.’” I mean, the beauty is anybody who would have a need. She called this the Starbucks phenomenon.

I had the exact opposite. When she asked me, “Well, who’s your customer?” I said, “See those four guys sitting over there in Lycra with their bikes parked outside the window? That’s my customer.” And her eyes lit up because she said that kind of focus—now I could go have a conversation with them. Whereas, if you try to have a conversation with every person inside a Starbucks, you’re going to get 75 different responses to something. That authenticity is pretty critical for the early stages.

You’ve been through a couple startups. You’ve got two sons. What do you do to stay grounded?

I’m probably the worst person to answer this question because this is where I’d say I am definitely not successful. I’ve had my own strategies. I think my balance has come in huge chunks. I tend to obsess in some ways in one area. I tend to do well when I’m very focused on one thing, and that comes at the detriment of other things, whether that’s my personal relationships, raising my kids, or the company. So I tend to focus on one thing, but I know I can only do it for x-period of time. That’s been my strategy.

I admire some of the other entrepreneurs I’ve studied who have figured out a way to be much more balanced on a regular basis.

That being said, starting Kana and Strava were two different experiences. When I was with Kana, I was newly married. My wife Lisa came from an entrepreneurial family in her own right, so she felt like she knew what she was getting into. I don’t think either of us expected that Kana was going to do what it did, and it became all-consuming, but it was just the two of us, and there weren’t kids involved. I didn’t have a lot of other obligations then. I wasn’t sitting on seven other boards, so it was manageable.

Fast-forward to Strava, and it’s a very different situation. I was a single parent with two boys who were seven or eight years old at the time we were starting. Theoretically, I was pretty confident I could manage my single-parent duties along with the startup. The problem is with time you forget all the bad, and you only remember the good. I’d forgotten just how hard startups are and how all-consuming they can be. Strava did that. Strava took over again.

The thing I refer to now—the boys will even joke with me, I call it SOB disease. It used to be KOB disease. Now it’s SOB disease. It’s “Strava on the Brain,” and many an evening when I’d be sitting there with the boys at dinner, or trying to have a conversation, and I’m asking them about their day, they tell me how their day has gone, and I can’t hear them. I own that.

One of the things I decided at Strava was, we see a business we think is only scratching the surface, and we want to keep doing it for the next 20 years. Something I needed to personally change was leadership. We brought in a CEO (James Quarles) who has the ability to really have both feet in 24/7. This has afforded me the luxury, frankly, of being present for Jake and Charlie.

What are some of the traditions and habits you’ve brought to your boys?

I got a compliment just yesterday. My boys met somebody else who happened to be associated with Strava. This was a Saturday afternoon, and the gentleman said afterward, “Boy, they each shook my hand like they meant it and looked me in the eye.” That was good, because I can say it came directly from my father.

We spend a lot of time talking about personal passions. I got to be a kid in Reno. I remember spending afternoons on my little BMX bike, or with a soccer ball, with a football, and playing with other kids. Kids don’t get to do that as much anymore. We spend a lot of time at the house talking about, “What are your interests? How can I help support those interests?”

Frankly, as sophomores in high school, my sons are starting to talk about college. We try to get away from the college discussion and more around, “Let’s figure out what you’re interested in, and that’ll lead to whatever the next chapter is.” I think I owe that, again, to my parents. They weren’t necessarily athletes, but they allowed me to pursue that passion. What I saw in my father as a surgeon was somebody who was incredibly dedicated to his patients, to his work. You never saw him complain about having to get up at 3 a.m. and take care of somebody. That was just the job. Hopefully some of that stuff’s rubbing off.

The post Mark Gainey, Strava Co-Founder on Entrepreneurship, Life and Sport appeared first on Prokit.

Julie Lythcott-Haims is vulnerable, bold, empathetic, and strong. She tells it like it is.

That was my reaction when Julie came to my very white and privileged town in Northern California, to talk about race and her new book Real American: A Memoir. In person, her vivid storytelling makes you feel like you’re sitting alongside her during the big moments of her life. She approaches tough topics with a vulnerability that makes them not only understandable, but relatable.

Julie’s book is filled with self-discovery, as she picks apart her childhood memories and goes through life exploring her identity: Is she black, is she white, or is she something else? Does she fit in a box? Should she? Should we?

Julie’s first book, How to Raise an Adult, became a bestseller when it hit the stands in 2015. No surprise there—she was a long-time dean at Stanford University, and people listen when she talks. But you have to back the material up with substance, and Julie does just that.

When we sat down in her Palo Alto home a few weeks ago, I wanted to discuss her books, but also the courage it took to write them. Julie worked in one of Silicon Valley’s big law firms before becoming Dean of Freshmen at Stanford, and then, at 44, going back to school to become an author.

Our conservation has been edited for clarity and brevity.  

Listen to the podcast: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | Spotify

David Swain: Two years after writing your first book, How to Raise an Adult, how have your views evolved?

Julie Lythcott-Haims: I didn’t realize how much of a helicopter parent I was. I was a dean at Stanford thinking, What is going on? Why are these undergraduates still seemingly on a leash? These were the best and brightest, but penned in, hemmed in, and delighted to be told what to do—delighted to have parents showing up. I was so frustrated, and I knew enough about the human psyche to know if I was frustrated about this, that was probably telling me something about myself.

Sure enough, I did some of this at home. I had my aha moment—I was cutting my kid’s meat. He was 10. I could see the leap from his being 10, and I was cutting his meat, and he was going to be 18 and I would still be holding his hand.

I knew that when I wrote the book. I knew that I was on track to raise my kids the way I had criticized other people for doing. Over the two-and-a-half years I’d been touring the book, I dived deeper into my own narrative as a parent. I’ve been able to see the subtleties of my own behaviors—the moments of language, the small movements that encroach upon our kids’ autonomy and individuality. I can feel that because I’m a mindfulness practitioner.

I feel this rising anxiety about if I don’t tell them what to do, they might not do it right. They might not do it well. I’m intrigued to be one of the putative experts on the subject of what not to do, still struggling with my own urge to do what I know we shouldn’t do. I have access to all the information, and yet I still struggle. I think the other learning is greater humility, greater compassion for other people.

You have access to information, and you know the right thing. What enables you to produce the right behavior as a parent?

I remind myself that I will not always be here for this kid. I might be able to achieve something for him in these five minutes. It’s the parable of teaching someone to fish. I will not be here to provide them with whatever solutions I am currently trying to offer.

The greater love is to make them learn to do it themselves. It is more loving to put them through the paces so that they learn the steps, and one day they have competence, so that one day further they have mastery. That’s when I can take the deepest exhale as a parent and say I have raised my children to adulthood.

You talked in How to Raise an Adult about the dangers for kids with the way society is set up now. Have you seen any progress?  

I’m only invited to communities that want to talk about this. In some of ways, I have a big-choir problem. I show up, and I’ve got people willing to talk about this. Among those communities, in that subset of the larger community, I can see shifts taking place. I see less defensiveness around my message.

Again, I don’t know if two years in, people are more receptive or I’m just telling the story in a way that’s more compelling. I’ve gone to much more of a storytelling format where I talk about my own struggles as a parent, and the lessons are sort of deduced rather than me speaking at a lessons level. I don’t know if I’m perceiving an actual shift, or if I’m just showing up with a more effective message.

I will say that more and more communities seem very worried about the poor mental health of their young. When I’m invited to be a part of that dialogue, I am blunt about the fact that our definition of success—our definition of what makes a human worthy of respect, of being listened to, of applause—sends such a narrow message to our kids. In communities like yours and mine, and plenty of others, kids feel a degree of helplessness over their ability to achieve that for themselves—and a hopelessness about their future if they don’t. We are quite literally in some places reducing kids’ worth to their GPA and test scores. They do not feel unconditionally loved.

Nowadays, it seems to me people are attuned to the unwellness of kids because they’ve had a spike in some troubling behaviors. They want to know what to do about it. If it’s acute enough, then they allow themselves to have that big-picture epiphany: Wait a minute. None of this matters. What matters is my kid’s wellness.

It’s like when people get cancer, when there’s a death in the family, when someone loses their job, when my kid has suicidal ideation—I can say, “None of this matters. What matters is that we have a meal together, that we enjoy each other’s company.”

I do sense that this is being experienced in a number of communities. Parents are finally waking up to the consequences of this very rigid, everything-is-high-stakes childhood.

My daughter’s nine. If you watch her building a fort, or choreographing a dance with a friend, or anything that involves original unstructured thought, she’s in her element. At school, it’s not like that. That’s one of the things we think a lot about —how can we let her play to her strengths so when she has to make those bigger decisions, she’s developed that side of her where she’s naturally strong? There must be so many parents facing the same thing where their kids don’t fit naturally into the “school” box.

Part of it is she’s nine. You’re seeing glimpses of what her strengths might be, but her habits as a student are still forming. You want her in an environment where she’s not going to get her sense of self beaten out of her because she doesn’t conform to others’ standards.

Some people study this way, and some people don’t, but we want to provide kids with fort-making opportunities, and opportunities to choreograph dances. You already know she’s going to be this awesome, creative human being, and invite interesting people into her life. She’s already marching to the beat of her own drum, which is pretty amazing.

With everything changing so fast around us, things like meditation have helped me learn to stay grounded through the chaos as a parent and leader. What has your experience been?

My moment was with the executive coach Stanford provided me and my team so we would get along better. I moved from literally thinking my job was to tell her what was wrong with everyone else, because I was so sure I was doing a great job, to a willingness of trust. Being able to hear the feedback I needed in developing a mindfulness practice allowed me to be myself in any context. My purpose became not to prove myself, but simply to be clear about what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling, what’s moving me, what’s concerning me, what interests me, and then how I want to express myself in a way that might be useful.

My world has changed from seeking external approval, which made me a micromanager in the workplace because I was so insecure and constantly judging other people. Again, not in a self-centered, egotistical sense. I just know all I can be in charge of if I’m lucky is this right here. If I can be confident that I’m showing up in a way that I want to in every conversation, in every team meeting, in every decision-making opportunity, it’s brought me tremendous peace. It’s made me a better leader. It’s brought me a lot of jobs, and I think it’s made me a better parent.

It’s interesting that in the workplace, we talk about learning to be vulnerable and how much more connected your team feels when you bring yourself to work. What are some of the things you’ve learned?

One thing I’ve learned is this is in some ways a function of time. The longer we’re here, the more we know ourselves. The more we know ourselves in our community and our town and our industry or profession, the more time erodes the sharper edges. When young people ask me, particularly in my audiences around Real Americans, I’ll get black, biracial, people of color, queer people, and young folks who are like, “I am hurting, I am struggling to perform. What do I do?”

I will say, “It’s great that you know this—that you’re saying this out loud in a room full of strangers. This is the beginning. Part of this is simply time. Now you know that that’s a concern, how are you going to act on it? How are you going to become brave enough to simply be without regard to the judgment of others?”

Even if we haven’t ascended to great heights, we still have the privilege that comes with age and wisdom. We get the feedback that we’re successful. We know what we’re doing. That gives us a little bit of feedback loop that says we are okay. Part of that is the aging process, the things we learn over time about ourselves and our community.

One of the universal truths I have come to appreciate about us as humans is that we all want to know we matter. We are social beings, and we crave to know we matter to somebody. We don’t have to matter to everybody. Some of us have to matter to everybody, but that’s an ego need.

This sort of “I see you”—one of the things I loved about my Stanford students was when they showed up to do a performance or a debate, their friends would be in the audience. They would shout, “I see you, David! I see you!” People’s faces would light up. I’m not saying it’s a Stanford thing, but I learned it at Stanford, and that concept—well, the offering was, “I am here for you. I’m watching you and what you’re doing. I’m delighted by your expression, your experience, whatever it is. I see you.”

We all need that. I think my work, at a meta level, is about trying to help humans feel seen. The helicopter parent is preventing that young human from actually being seen for who they are. They’re just so encroaching. Racism—what I’ve written about in Real American, that bias, that prejudice that others can have about any of us for any reason—can prevent us from feeling seen. The fact that humans need to matter being universal, how, as a manager, do you make your team feel they matter so that they bring their best selves to work?

When I was merging three disparate offices at Stanford, during the recession in 2008, I was Dean of Freshmen. I had a small team of maybe six. My sister organization was advising. They had about 25. This dean left for Oregon, so the Vice Provost merged the teams and put me in charge. I ran the smaller organization, but now I’m in charge of the merger of, let’s say, 34 people. This big team had been two teams two years before, and they were merged on paper but never culturally. I had this team, and this team that resented my team—they didn’t like each other. Everybody was critical of everybody else.

I was newly working with my coach, newly working on my stuff, newly attuned to the fact of humans needing to know we matter, and that gratitude expression is so valuable—and kindness. I decided we were never going to do a great job for Stanford undergraduates if we didn’t first want to come to work to be with each other. I spent a year merging these groups in team meetings around discovering that we mattered to each other, giving everybody the opportunity to share the work they did. People weren’t coming to work just because it was Stanford undergraduates, but because they enjoyed each other and felt respected, seen, and heard. That team just soared.

Advising was considered this shitty thing at Stanford, and we were supposed to make it better. My goal was, We’re going to put advising on the map of what’s best about Stanford. We’ve got the Hoover. We’ve got the Cantor. We’ve got this and that. We’re going to make advising one of the things that Stanford’s going to brag about. That was our big, audacious goal. I knew we wouldn’t get there if it was about the best way to offer advising to undergraduates. That’s a piece of it, the mechanics of how to academically advise undergrads. But the humans who do the work have to feel that “I love my colleagues! I love being here! This is awesome!” We did it, and it was great.

I recently left a position managing a team as part of a progressive company, Instagram and Facebook, where you take classes on unconscious bias, and focus on everybody being vulnerable and playing to their strengths. It built a level of empathy in me that I am super-grateful for. It also built some fear of saying the wrong thing, whether it was around gender, race, or other sensitive topics. It takes strength to face the fear of being critiqued.

I think we’re in a fiercely-attuned phase, attuned to human speech and meaning. On the right, they lament the political correctness that has tamped down our dialogue. On the left, we delight in the fact that it’s no longer okay to use slurs and language that demeans other people. I think we have arrived at this ironic place in America. I don’t know how long it will last and I don’t know that it’s universally good.

We’re in a place right now, in communities like yours and mine, certainly where the greater the intersectionality you inhabit—you’re black and queer and trans and poor—the greater your voice in the room. In some communities, that person has the right to speak and the right to critique the rest of us about our inability to understand or perceive their experience. In a way, our language is inadequate to fully appreciating or respecting them.

I’m glad that folks who experience those intersectionalities have a voice because they sure as heck haven’t had much to date. I think we’re in a place of extreme sensitivity. It can make folks feel like, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to speak. I’m afraid of being critiqued, or I’m constantly getting critiqued.” That doesn’t feel very productive.

I hope we mature to a place where everybody is different. Everybody does matter. We do well when we listen to one another, and leave our presumptions and assumptions at the door. It’s okay to let folks know they’ve said something that is hard for us to hear, but it’s also important for us not to present as beings waiting to be wounded by everything. I think this gets to the value of a trigger warning. This is the lawyer in me who believes in First Amendment free speech very much, and the university dean in me, who watches what happens on college campuses around free speech and trigger warnings.

To me, a trigger warning is a heads-up: “Hey, we’re going to be talking about this really uncomfortable topic. It might hit some of you in a personal way, and we want you to have a heads-up so you can steel yourself.” This is opposed to a trigger warning being permission to put your finger in your ears and say, “No, I’m not listening because that hurts or offends me.” That, to me, is the wrong direction.

If you Google it, you’ll see it everywhere. On some campuses, every syllabus has trigger warnings. We’re going to be talking about rape. We’re going to use the N-word. Some students will say, “You can’t say this. You didn’t give us a trigger warning.”

Talk about the journey you took to write your new book, Real American. What was your process of self-discovery, and how did the idea for a memoir come to you?

I’m paraphrasing Maya Angelou, who said, “It wasn’t hard to write it; it was harder to keep it inside.” I went back to school in 2012. I enrolled full-time in grad school to get my MFA in Writing at California College of the Arts. I had written an op-ed on overparenting in 2005, and I’d been saying for years, “I ought to write a book.” I’d been giving speeches, but I wanted to write a book. I didn’t think I could write over 300 pages of prose worth reading without some guidance, so I went back to school ostensibly to get the training and mentorship I would need to write, pitch, and sell a book.

When I wasn’t writing about parenting in my classes, race often asked for my attention. When it came time, ultimately, to do my master’s thesis, I wanted my thesis to be something brave and edgy. I went back to school at 44 and thought, I’m in grad school again. This time I have chosen this. No one forces you to become a writer. No one’s like, “You’d better be a writer.” I was going to make the most of this time. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to write had I not come back to grad school.

There were a number of thematics coming up out of my life, but race was the most dominant. Of course, nationally we were seeing the murders of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. All of these things were happening. In my own house, my son was becoming an African American-presenting teenager despite his white daddy and my light skin. He’s unambiguously a man of color. The confluence of parenting, and national events, and me being in writing school, ripened the urgency in my being. Maybe I’m at a place now where I can write well enough about these truths.

The challenges when we write, at least in nonfiction, are if you’re concerned about a topic and you care so passionately about it—the way I like to describe it is if you’re too close, you can’t see the other sides. I’ve always thought I needed to be distant enough from a topic so that I can interrogate it, 360 degrees.

My fear was that I had this son, I had Black Lives Matter happening all around me, and I was too close to race. The stuff I’d worked out about myself was so recent, I didn’t think I could properly interrogate it. I was worried that I didn’t have the intellectual or emotional vulnerability and distance to be a good analyst of my own experience. My faculty basically said, “Yeah, give it up. Just write it.” I had to get my thesis done. They said, “Just try.” I kind of took a deep breath and said, “All right. I will.” I tried to be as unflinching as possible.

Going back to school for writing—do you feel you needed it to write your books?

Yes. I think in part because to be a writer, to accomplish that identity, it’s different than being a lawyer. I went to law school. I passed the California Bar Exam. The state of California said I could practice law. I am a lawyer. Writing doesn’t work that way. We can all write. We’re all capable of writing as humans. The question is when you become a writer worth reading. When do you write in a way where you can garner an audience? What is the imprimatur of worth as a writer? Do you have to be published in The New Yorker, or is your own blog enough?

Within that space of ambiguity, when I left Stanford, what I said to my husband Dan was, “I think I might want to try to do something with my writing.” Okay, I went from that very ambiguous declaration to where I am now, which is that I’m a writer. I’m a published author. I’m a New York Times bestseller. There were all these things that came with it, but somewhere before all that, I had to claim the identity of a writer. Going back to school to be in a community with others who were declaring the same things about themselves, and eager to learn from one another and grow with one another—that was a really valuable element of the experience.

The way you constructed your memoir is unlike other books I’ve read. For people who haven’t read Real American, the narrative is poetic. Some pages are three sentences long, and some chapters are a couple pages. Can you walk through how the narrative builds and what it meant for you to put it together that way?

I kind of see genre classifications as cages, as boxes that folks have created to make sense of writing. Perhaps because I am biracial, and I’m also bisexual—I’ve kind of lived my life outside society’s boxes. These are the boxes humans fit in, and there’s Julie kind of in between these two boxes or over here on the edge. For the same reason, I don’t approach my writing as, What genre am I writing? I approach it as, What am I trying to tell? What placement on the page and sentence structure, or non-sentence structure, supports the words? That’s the kind of big picture.

I knew that chronology was fairly important in memoir, and so the book for the most part goes in the direction from my early childhood to my present moment, with some important jumps backward and a few jumps ahead. For pacing, I tried to be with the reader by my side, so those jumps are ways of me saying, “Okay, now I need to tell you something before.” Or, “Now you need to know this isn’t as bad as it seems.”

Do people spill their soul when they meet you? That was my reaction after reading your book—I think you uncovered that we all have a feeling of being “the other” in some way, even if it’s not as profound as what you wrote about.

Yes. That’s right, we all have that. I think to your point about the beauty of vulnerability, we should give Brené Brown a shout-out here for her work. This is universal. We all have this heart that just aches to be held and fears being pierced. When we dare to share those vulnerable pieces with one another and have that reciprocated, it’s what makes being a human exquisite.

As a writer, how have you stayed motivated to meet your deadlines? How was that shift from a more traditional career?

I am terrified and exhilarated pretty regularly. I experience both. I am my own boss. It is up to me. I have a team of people around me who help me do stuff. I have a social media manager. I have a publicist. I have people whose work is my work. Their work is about getting my work out there. Yet, none of them are going to fire me. I mean, they could fire me, but it doesn’t change. I’m still a writer. Their decisions don’t impact my progress the way it happens in a traditional workplace.

I have had to self-motivate and it has not been hard. I’m so new to the identity of a writer. I’m 50 now. I’m so new to this, and I’ve got stuff bubbling up out of me just wanting to be told. Now, I know the more I say that—I’m looking for wood to knock, like, Don’t jinx yourself. I’ve never had writer’s block, but I know I will. Right now, I’m in this hungry phase of creation. This urgent phase, and so the motivation is there.

Now, here’s the rub. I signed a two-book deal, which is great in terms of my financial forecasting and all of that, but they want me to write that third book. That third book did not come up and out of my being the way the first two did, and I’m on deadline for that. My deadline is Labor Day. I’m already feeling the pressure. Now that I’ve written two books, I have a sense of how I am with book writing, so I know the discipline that’s going to be required in order to deliver that on time, which I will.

What is your third book about?

It’s a sequel to the first, so it’s how to be an adult. It’s #adulting.

It’s hard to be a good parent if you haven’t learned how to be an adult.

Yeah. It’s trying to respond to that critique, whether self-imposed or imposed by family—or by society, or by your employer—that many 20-somethings and even 30-somethings have failed to launch or don’t know how to #adult. I’m trying to provide some guidance. The dedication page currently reads: To Y and Z from X, meaning to Generations Y and Z from Gen X. That’s the thing. It’s like, “Here’s what I know. Here’s what I know and what I want to offer you.” I mean, how humbling! How audacious is it to write a book for a generation of people? But I’m going to try.

You mentioned your experience with Facebook – can you talk about that?

I was one of the earliest adopters of Facebook of people my age. Stanford was the second node. It jumped from Harvard to Stanford in a month. March 2004, I think it was founded at Harvard in February 2004—I joined in March 2004 because my students were talking about this thing, which we thought was an infringement of our printed “facebook.” I had to join, create an account, and look at it because my office produced the printed “facebook.” In a nanosecond, it was like, Oh, this is not our “facebook.” We don’t own the term Facebook.

Then I started getting friend requests. I didn’t use it for about a year, but pretty quickly came to realize this was a thing. It was going to be a thing. Our students were dwelling there and hanging out. If we were going to remain credible, and visible, and relevant to them, we had to start using this thing. My older colleagues just poo-pooed me. I was the youngest dean, and it was like, “Oh, Julie. We don’t advise students online.”

Who’s had the last laugh? The slow adopters are just so behind. I’m proud of that—I, as an older person in 2004, was able to say, “You know what? This matters to the students, and it needs to matter to us.” What was weird for me was when my own friends and family and classmates from law school and undergrad started joining. The world started joining. I had to contend with who I was online: a dean, versus a person or a mother. I’ve valued Facebook.

For parents who haven’t read your first book, and they’ve got their finger on the big-name schools, what’s your message?

We have almost literally been duped about what the “right college” for our kid is. We have let a company like U.S. News & World Report come up with an algorithm, or just a set of metrics that they gather, and analyze, and spit out as a measure of a college’s worth. It’s all simply data about the incoming class.

Things like SAT scores can be perfected over time with GAD Capital money. Everybody knows that. The fact that the median SAT score of the class is, I think, 22.5% of a school’s rating, is just the narcissism of small differences. I think it’s Professor Barry Schwartz who uses that phrase in his research. We’ve gotten so enamored of the false truth of the best colleges lists. It has become the community standard.

I heard you say in one of your talks that the college bumper sticker is for the parent to brag to their friends—it’s not about the kid.

Right, and so it’s simply false that those are the best places. There are plenty of other fantastic places that for all kind of reasons are better than those places according to different measures. Parents don’t have access to the right information, so they rely on shorthands, and lists, and things. When you can come to the truth of that, look at your kid, and try to figure out where they would thrive. Are they a St. Lawrence kind of kid, or a Syracuse kind of kid? Do they need sports, or do they need an artistic community? Do they need rural or urban?

We do higher education very well in this country. We offer so much. There are better lists. When we’re willing to move our ego to the side, we can actually delight in our kids’ learning and growing in an environment that best suits them. Then we can take a deep exhale and say, “Gee whiz, it’s not about getting our kids into those places.”

You touched on this in your TED Talk.

My greatest learning came as I was finishing How to Raise an Adult. I was in revisions in the fall of 2014. My son, Sawyer, was a sophomore at Gunn High School in Palo Alto taking all the right classes. We bought this house here so he could do that, all of that. I gave birth to him at Stanford Hospital because I thought, It couldn’t hurt (laugh). He went to Bing Nursery School. I met Dan at Stanford. I probably never said it out loud, but I hoped my kid would gain admission to places like Stanford that really require a perfect-to-flawless childhood stacked with stuff.

Sawyer is a kid who reads for pleasure, doesn’t do sports or activities. He thinks, he reads—he reads mythology, he reads science, he reads current events. He’s a thinker. He’s the kind of kid who gloms toward interesting conversations with adults. He will leave a group of children and come to join us if we’re talking about something that interests him, and many topics do. This kid was struggling with the workload at school. Five hours of homework a night, sophomore year, only fall semester sophomore year.

I was thinking, We have the rest of fall, all of spring, all of junior year into senior year. We can’t survive this. It was crushing him. It was too much, and I could see him trying to keep his head above water, and going through the motions, and doing the work. Then not even doing the work. I realized he was letting Google Translate tell him the answers to his Spanish—so cheating, just not learning.

We finally decided to ask him if he needed to drop a class. This was after weeks of watching him endure five hours of homework a day, and homework on the weekends, and no pleasure reading. He had stopped being the kid who brought a book to every meal. I’m telling you a very condensed version of this story, but the long and short of it is, I went up to him at midnight one night in his bedroom. I said, “Dad and I are so proud of you, you’re working so hard. You’re doing well, but we wonder if it might be too much, honey. You don’t even have time to read books anymore, and that’s who you are. Do you think you might need to drop a class?”

My kid looked up at me from his bed, and he said, “Can I? Don’t I have to do all of this, Mom? Don’t you want me to? Isn’t that what’ll make you proud?” In my head I was thinking, We bought this house here so you could take those classes and do exceptionally well. I didn’t say that to my son. I looked at him and said, “In some theoretical universe, we wanted you to have access to all of this opportunity. What matters more than any of that is you. You’re struggling, and you might even be suffering.” He brightened a little bit—eyes that I had not seen twinkle for weeks. He said, “I’ll think about it.” He came down for breakfast the next day with a book under his arm. He said, “Mom, I think I might need to drop a class.”

We began talking through what that would be. That night, my husband and I accepted the fact that our kid might not be able to weather these storms. Some kids can handle all of that. Our kid can’t. We had to care more about what was right for him. Too many kids are being forced down that path. They’re not sleeping. They’re not eating meals with family. They don’t have time for friendship. It’s crushing the life out of them.

I don’t know how I got to that answer, but it was, for people who haven’t read my first book, the college thing. I widened my own blinders that night to the truth that I was already writing about in my book—that there are plenty of great colleges. I went from talking the talk quite well; that night, I began walking the walk. My son is at Reed College, which is a school for thinkers. They don’t have many sports. They don’t have any Greek life. They don’t have any classes taught by TAs. It’s faculty mentoring undergraduates. Many of them go on to get PhDs. That’s what Reed is known for. They don’t participate in U.S. News, so most people don’t know they exist. That’s my kid’s story.

If you haven’t read Julie’s first book, this talk will give you a feel for her message.  

The post Julie Lythcott-Haims, author, “Real American” appeared first on Prokit.