September 22, 2022

Women in Tech Series: Christine Spang, co-founder and CTO at Nylas, shares how a mindset of curiosity is vital for modern developers.

44 minutes

Welcome to the Women in Tech Series from the Global Tech Leaders Podcast. Today we are speaking to Christine Spang who is the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer at Nylas. She has had an illustrious career in the corporate world and comes from a development background, she attended MIT and grew out from there creating products.

We kick off by asking Christine what drove her to get into becoming a developer, its underserved by women, and what sparked her interest to choose this journey.

Born in Canada and her folks were Norweighen immigrants.

Her grandmother had a mini farm, where they would farm and build things.

She remembers helping her folks build a barn on her grandparent's farm.

She was really good at Math at school and moved up north really young. She was into music at her public school and played the french horn and was in the marching band.

Always loved reading and got lost in books, her Dad would blast oprah music.

Grew up in the suburbs, there wasn't much to do, so games and books allowed her to explore. That led her to online text-based games and story building.

Then she started learning about programming and discovered the world of open-source. Which blew her mind.

Came across a blog, joined this group and became obsessed with open source which led to her attending MIT. That's when she knew she wanted to be a software engineer.

We then ask Christine, why she thinks there is such a gap in developers in today's society with our demands and which subjects would she advise those who feel a fit for this.

Cultivating a mindset of curiosity and questioning things.

People should aspire to create an environment where people can choose to get into something without barriers.

We need the builders of modern software to represent people all over the world.

Try and treat people the same, and support the curiosity of little girls and little boys.

Next, we ask Christine if she has experienced bias in her career and if so, what is the one thing she would change?

She has trained her mind to believe everyone has good intentions.

She has personally been lucky or oblivious to it, if not it drives positive feelings away from herself.

We asked Christine to share a positive experience from her career so far.

Especially when starting a company, the modern world is all about standing out and being memorable.

Over and over again, people remember her because she stood out and was memorable.

As a female technical founder, it's easier to bring more women in.

We asked Christine to tell us more about Nylas and what they do and what is the purpose.

She has been working on this for 9 years and started with 2 people. Now 250 people.

Nylas is an API platform company that is focused on communications data and helps people make use of that data and structure it.

APIs are leveraged. The core concept is, saving people time.

Code literacy is a trend right now.

Building a new code native generation.

Then we ask Christine, what kind of questions does she ask to prioritize tech projects?

Revenue impact is a valid consideration.

Pick a focus and define what success looks like.

Thinking about performance and scalability.

Regarding the 4-degree aspect spoke about earlier, how do we shift the bias and how do you deal with someone who takes a 1-year course?

Focus on interviews that simulate what people will actually be working on.

You have no reputation or/and no money so harder to be convincing.

Lastly, we ask Christine how does she manage her time?

She has an Executive Assistant

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By Ross Lauder & John Quigley

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