Before I tell you how I answered, you need to understand something about me:

I grew up in what was a small town back then, Westerly, Rhode Island, in same small town where my father was raised, where his father was raised.

I don’t exactly come from adventurous stock.

Lucky for me, Brown was only 47 miles away.

To this day, I’m grateful I was accepted to come here.

With that acceptance letter in hand, I started thinking about my major.

My dad told me, “Karen, you’re a maker. You’re always knitting, sewing and crafting, & you’re good at math, Maybe you’ll like making software.”

So, I decided to study Computer Science. But get this: I had never touched a computer.

It was 1981; we didn’t have computers at home, not many high schools had computers then (mine certainly didn’t). So, it’s not surprising that I didn’t have any computer experience. But to decide to major in it without even writing my first Hello World application? What was I thinking?

Even though I’m smiling in this picture with my good friends Liz and Janine, this class was hard for me. There were a lot of tears. I didn’t have any experience to draw on, coding didn’t come naturally to me. I doubted whether I belonged in that class. I was so outside of my comfort zone.

But I stuck with it because my dad said I would be good at it.

And I’m proud to say I got a B in that class.

Now, the reason I got a B and not anything worse was because of the Undergraduate Teaching Assistants. The Brown CS department has always had a strong culture of UTAs. Not only did they help me learn the material, they helped me find the confidence I needed to stick with the class.

Those UTAs were amazing, and I wanted to help others just like they helped me.

So, I applied to be a TA for that intro CS class the next year.

Right. That lousy B.

I’m sure my heart started pounding and my face turned bright red. And somehow I managed to say just the right words. I said something like “Since I struggled so much in your class to get that B, I’ll know how to help students who are struggling this coming semester. You need someone like me.”

And guess what…. I became a head TA for the class the following year.

This is an important theme for this weekend.

Hack@Brown is all about trying new things. Your goal is not to just build a cool new app, but to learn something new.

Maybe that means writing your first lines of code. Or learning a new framework or programming language, or a new operating system.

Get this – each time you step outside of your comfort zone, chances are you will be more likely to do it again.

This has been true throughout my career, and I have four lessons I learned along the way that I’ll share today.

We like to think those technologies were based on our research.

It was a fun time, and I met my husband Tim.

But I was excited to try something new.

We sold most of our stuff, said goodbye to our friends and family, moved to the UK, and both got jobs in tech. Everything was going according to plan!

But then we developed a serious case of “Fear of missing out.” A fear of missing out of the tech advances happening back in the US. Remember, we had been doing cutting edge research back at Brown, and in our current jobs, not so much.

So, after just a year, we moved back to US.

With all due respects to Governor Raimaondo, Rhode Island just didn’t have the opportunities it has today.

Yes, that’s an actual handset on the top of the tablet that you used to make and receive calls.

I have a confession to make that I haven’t shared before. I was so intimidated by the myth of Silicon Valley software engineers that I didn’t apply for a job on the core engineering team. Instead, I took a role writing sample code for their developer documentation. It felt safe; just like being a TA again.

That was a mistake, and I wish I had pushed myself to apply for a role writing code for the actual OS.

Since then, I’ve let my coding skills atrophy, which I regret.

I took on roles I had never done before, leading teams doing international engineering, usability testers, product security engineering, and typeface design

Thank goodness for my husband and so many people I worked with who believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself.

They helped me ignore the voice inside my head that was telling me I didn’t know how to do that new job responsibility.

They helped me be successful, moving from an individual contributor to the vice president level working across all of these products.

I couldn’t have done it without them.

This is a big problem. The bottom line is that diverse teams create more innovative solutions; we need more for women and people of all cultures, backgrounds and life experiences to help create the best solutions for people around the world.

As a woman, I’m especially interested in improving gender diversity

And I have some numbers to show you.

As you can see, gender diversity is getting worse in tech. Yup, worse.

So I decided to take action, and I stepped outside of my comfort zone once again. I left Adobe about 4 years ago….

I coach women on leadership skills, & I coach men to be better allies for the women.

I do some of public speaking.

But public speaking was not always in my comfort zone, and I was pretty nervous leading up to this talk.

Fortunately I heard about power posing.

I power posed in my hotel room the morning of my TEDx talk, and again backstage just beforehand. And guess what? I wasn’t nervous at all. In fact, I had a great time giving my talk.

Now, I power pose before every talk I give. I even did it this morning before this talk.

We want to see more diverse role models throughout the tech industry. We want more women and underrepresented minorities to be visible, to be presenting at hackathons, at conferences, and at all hands meetings inside of tech companies.

We hope our book will help inspire all kinds of people to speak.

And we’re pleased to announce that we’re making our ebook available for free to everyone here at Hack@Brown. Sharon and Atty will send the link to you.