
Ask HN: Female hacker-founder AMA - dzink
Tired of all the gender banter lately? Me too. Especially when every press outlet says we (female tech founders) are as rare as a mythical creature. So how about getting them answers straight from the source (female tech founders). If you belong to this group do a quick intro about yourself before answering questions. If you don&#x27;t and want to learn more about the HN female tech entrepreneurs, feel free to ask as a reply.<p>My turn:<p>Name: Diana<p>Startup: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;DoerHub.com (dogfooding: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.doerhub.com&#x2F;for&#x2F;doerhub )<p>Role: Founder, wrote every non-open-source line of code (Rails, JS, D3, Neo4j, Node.js, MongoDB) on the site in a grad school dorm room.<p>In tech since: 1998 (Age 13). Haven&#x27;t stopped since.<p>How did you start?: Started in rural Bulgaria and parents couldn&#x27;t afford a computer so I volunteered at internet cafes to learn HTML and JS online after hours, then did graphics in flash, then Action Script, evolved to writing data mashups, custom JS libraries, rich visualizations for CNN during elections, CMS front-end architecture, full-stack web products from there.<p>Why did I start: had a pen-pal girl from Sweden who was a year older than me and had built her own website. Once I realized I can learn for free and the world could see my work I was addicted (lived in a censored country for a while so that mattered).<p>Proof of cred: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;dianazink and http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.cdn.turner.com&#x2F;cnn&#x2F;.element&#x2F;js&#x2F;3.0&#x2F;search&#x2F;SearchProcessor.js and http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.cdn.turner.com&#x2F;cnn&#x2F;.element&#x2F;js&#x2F;3.0&#x2F;search&#x2F;customSrchProcessor.js used by CNN, NBA, and some other sites.<p>Has your gender made any of this hard?: I&#x27;m not muscular, so building online stuff is actually easier on me than the &quot;reputable&quot; jobs my grandfather said I should do instead.<p>Ask away.
======
dzink
These are the selling points for CS that worked really well in my
conversations with 10-18 year-old girls so far (Aggregated so you can use them
for your niece if you find the opportunity) :

\- You can do this really cool thing you wanted to do (ex: build a _cringe_
Justin Bieber _/ cringe_ fan app ) and it's easy, let me show you how.

\- This girl who was just like you is now heading Yahoo/building the top fan
site for XYZ band.

\- You can make something that millions of people are sharing and using
tomorrow and you don't have to ask your parents for money to do it.

\- You can make more money as a teenager building stuff in a day than did the
average worker in my country in a month.

\- You can work from a tropical island if you want, or anywhere on the planet,
really.

\- The quality of your work can be proven immediately and the duration of your
experience shows in the size of your portfolio, so every hour you make things
they can help you in perpetuity (no way to get that as a teacher, nurse, or
model).

\- You can graduate college in the US in one of the worst years for immigrants
('07), with no visas available, and still get multiple job offers at companies
of your choice because of the point above.

\- The jobs are growing, not shrinking in this industry. It is a new form of
literacy you will need to know eventually.

\- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.

~~~
jaseemabid
> \- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.

Amen! Brain power is indeed a beautiful thing.

~~~
namelezz
> \- (When all else fails) Hacker girls get hit on quite frequently.

Not sure about that but "Single" hacker girls get hit on quite

------
axaxs
This would likely be more apt for reddit, which does AMAs. I respect you, but
this sets a rather polluted and boring precedent. Founders not from tech hub
cities, founders over 40 years old, founders who grew up poor, founders who
were born outside USA, etc etc. Everyone is unique in many ways, many more
interesting than race or gender.

~~~
dzink
I posted it here because I enjoy this community and I want to reduce the
awkwardness of the many recent "women and tech" discussions here. I hope other
female founders on HN can chime in as well.

~~~
gaius
TBH I find the "rural Bulgaria" bit to be far more interesting :-) Did you
have any exposure to Soviet computers? Like their clone of the Sinclair
Spectrum say? Did you learn trinary in school? Do you say "reverse Polish
notation" or know it by a different name?

~~~
dzink
I love these questions! Yes, I started on "Pravets" 8 and 16 (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers)
) with BASIC and Pascal. We also had these robot hands you could maneuver with
the Pravets machines. I would travel 250 miles to get the huge sheet-sized
disk with a plumber game on it from my cousin in Sofia to show it off to
classmates in Tutrakan. Karateka was also huge. For reference, my hometown had
no traffic lights or english teachers (I started learning English from Cartoon
Network because I could only study German, French or Russian at school until
8th grade.)

I was 8 years old when I started dabbling with Pravetz in the school lab and
the 16 year old "Informatics TA" pulled me aside one day to show me a picture
of two people kissing to tell me in the most awkward possible way that he
wanted to kiss me. Who does that to an 8-year-old? I just ran back into the
lab.

I think Reverse Polish Notation is called the same in Bulgaria (CS after the
age of the internet is taught mostly in English back there I think).

~~~
muglug
Learning English from Cartoon Network? What sort of vocabulary does that
result in?

~~~
dzink
It develops the ears mostly. I could see so many friends getting the same
basic understanding as well. When I went to an English Language School for
High School I failed my first written test, because I wrote a letter in
Germish (English words, German spelling). I worked for Cartoon Network briefly
a decade afterwards and the CMO told me they hear that story often. I think
few things did more for the spread of English as an international language
than good movies and cartoons. German was my second language because RTL had
the best american movies at the time cable TV came to my hometown (and English
wasn't an option).

------
chacham15
What attracted you to computer science? Put another way, why do you think it
is that when your penpal showed you the website she built your reaction was
"cool" instead of "lame...." (especially in 98 when the web technologies were
much more primitive)?

~~~
WoodenChair
The second thought is not really attached to the first question. Having a
desire to make a website/making a website has little to do with computer
science.

~~~
logn
Telescopes can make people interested in physics, right?

------
scurioni
Name: Silvia

Startup: [http://www.allthecooks.com](http://www.allthecooks.com)

Role: Founder, wrote the iOS app and some server stuff.

How did you start: HTML Blogging when I was 13.

Why did I start: The internet is a really cool thing.

Proof of cred:
[http://www.linkedin.com/in/silviacurioni](http://www.linkedin.com/in/silviacurioni)

Has your gender made any of this hard?: no

~~~
dzink
Hi Silvia, thank you for jumping in! Feel free to add your answers to the AMA
questions. It would be helpful to have multiple perspectives.

------
adrianhoward
Any tips on entry points for coding that you've found worked well or badly?

For example - a few years back I saw several young folk move over into coding
by poking away at their MySpace pages to make them do "cool" things. For those
people it seemed to be the same sort of starting point as the '10 PRINT
"HELLO'; 20 GOTO 10;' type stuff did for mine.

~~~
dzink
I tried to aggregate those as a sub-thread. You make a great point with the
MySpace example. Legos with built in robotics might be fun as well. I never
had a lego (too expensive) and I only saw the $200 robotic kits in college in
the US. In Chicago, a state organization is trying to create a programable
robot with LED lights to get kids interested in coding and putting together
simple hardware hacks. I think that is a great idea. I think a programmable
robot kids can create and control with an iphone app would be great as well
(paint-by-numbers hardware + software hacking).

It is true that the more we lower the threshold, the more people will dabble
with hacking. It may or may not produce more great hackers in the short run,
but in the long run it will create a shared literacy that puts hacking higher
on the priority list for parents and kids 10 years down the line. You don't
just share code, you share a value system when you teach that.

~~~
adrianhoward
Sorry - missed that sub-thread. Good stuff.

I'm interested that some of those seem more social than how I got into coding.
I was the cliche fat-nerdy kid who spent many, many hours with the computer
rather than interacting with humans ;-)

It's one of the things I noticed from the MySpace folk - they were very much
more oriented towards sharing/showing their stuff with others.

~~~
dzink
The checklist I mention comes from conversations I've had with young girls in
the US (seeing what resonates with them). I thing I would attribute the social
stuff to a lesson I got from a KPCB guy at F8: Major startup innovation
happens every 14 or so years because it takes that long for a new generation
to grow up with the existing technology (today that's social) as second
nature. Then (frequently) some tw/teen kid (Jobs/Gates, Zuckerberg) stepping
on that invents the next big thing while tinkering. You can see that process
evolving tech from hardware, to PC, to browser, to web, to social, to mobile.

------
csdreamer7
Nice. One of my first thoughts was do you have any specific communities that
you go to for advice from other women? Some of the ones I know of are Debian
Women and Linuxchix. Have you ever tried enterprise selling? I'm curious how
you deal with mostly male upper management? What about loans or venture
capital? Do banks or VC's treat you differently? Do you have any women in tech
you follow? When I was a boy I would devour any book on Microsoft because I
idolized Bill Gates for taking on the suits at IBM. What's your experience
hiring in the past?

I realize i'm asking about stereotypes that may or may not be in Bulgaria. The
whole point of this post is to confront those stereotypes so I just ask what
everyone may think at one point or another.

~~~
dzink
I look up to Reid Hoffman, Jobs, Drew Houston, Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer -
founder/product people who put so much love into their products that you can
feel it. In order to build like that you have to be so immersed into the
problem and so painfully aware of its every nook and cranny it hurts. Those
guys translated real-life human processes into frictionless online experiences
so good, they save lifetimes worth of hours for society daily. That is what I
want to do when I grow up (but do it for the execution process). The process
of taking a pursuit from an idea to a fulfilled or fundable project with the
right team, mentors, and exposure anywhere on the planet in the matter of
hours or just a few days.

I haven't tried to raise VC money yet. Self-funding for now. I want to build a
product so good its numbers cannot be ignored. Currently trying to get access
to advisors who have been there before me with similar problems.

And I genuinely hope this doesn't prove true: (
[http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/11/02/how-female-
en...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/11/02/how-female-
entrepreneurs-can-get-venture-capital-game/Ahn0XfhG3WABm8Q4uoAq6O/story.html)
)

------
adrianhoward
I noticed that, by default, you don't make the doerhub.com profiles public.
Somebody has to explicitly choose to do so.

I'd be interested in understanding what pushed you in that direction. It would
seem like it might slow down growth?

~~~
dzink
I want to make it a go to place for people to establish and grow their
identity as doers - to nurture their pursuits and benefit when they help
others (If you are great at something you can mentor and invest/contribute
open source in that field. The social capital you generate from doing that
should come back to you as help in areas you are trying to grow in). Not
everyone is comfortable putting that out there (especially non-hackers) and if
they do, having real relationships with the other users on the site first
helps. I would rather sacrifice short-term growth to build a product that
really rocks and is spread by users in the mid-to-long term.

~~~
adrianhoward
Cool. Did you get that feedback from users in some way (interviews?) - or is
it something that you're testing now with the site?

I'm interested coz I'm involved with a new community site and think about
different ways to grow the audience.

~~~
dzink
I got feedback from interviews with non-technical users and a couple of top
universities.

------
minimaxir
This might be more successful on Reddit in the startups/entrepreneurship
subreddits.

------
tmsh
Curious background and I admire you for just going for it. Just some curious
questions..

a) who are some of your inspirations?

b) describe an ideal society without gender disparities. what would that look
like?

~~~
dzink
Role models really help. Seeing other women around who have been successful
really helps. I think if one female tech founder produces a unicorn startup
that exits above 1B, the dialog will get a lot easier. It's a matter of time.

I don't think anyone consciously hinders women (or other groups) from doing
well in tech. Many cultural (advertising driven) perceptions made the "gateway
drugs" to CS unfashionable for girls for many years (likely inadvertently).

In the startup world finding advisors may be a bottleneck, but hacking is the
ultimate meritocracy and nobody can stop you from doing well (it is you vs the
machine and you vs the problem). The numbers don't lie - if you build products
that sell themselves most self-respecting investors will not say no to a solid
company (whether you are purple, transgender, or from Mars).

If you know what you are doing, the challenging part may be getting into the
close-knit SV networks when you are an outsider.

------
wildgift
What's the situation like for women in tech in Bulgaria?

~~~
dzink
Bulgaria is a very patriarchal country, but education up-to-and-including
high-school was/is fitting for CS (math is required every year and it is a
frequently chosen concentration). The same applies to many eastern european
countries, I assume. There is a lot of "sand in the opportunities engine"
after that stage, so many smart young people prefer to get their undergraduate
and graduate degrees elsewhere (Germany, US, etc). One of the teen girls I
mentored just started working in Germany as a Software Engineer. Most of my
classmates are abroad. For CS, a good math middle-school and high-school
education and a fun component (competitions) seemed enough for the peers I
know.

------
kelvin0
I Respect all entrepreneurs, and it seems to me the 'attention' the 'mythical'
female hackers gets perpetuates the stereotypes we are trying to break. It is
fairly obvious it draws attention on the fact that generally we don't 'expect'
this type of person? Please explain why this fine young person is getting any
attention besides her gender?

~~~
dzink
Hi Kelvin0,

I respect your opinion and I think those who want attention usually go to the
press with some sobbing story about the tech world's insensitivities towards
them. They don't expose themselves and their work to the full scrutiny of one
of the best hacker groups in the world (its gut-wrenching enough to do that
just to your startup). If this thread is any good the people who read it
should go from debating stereotypes about women to spending 30 minutes to
teach a teen girl they know the love of hacking by showing them something cool
they can do on their own.

------
jheriko
> Tired of all the gender banter lately? Me too.

I'm curious what exactly you find tiresome about it.

Is it the sexism that often spawns these discussions? the implication that
women need extra help? the bad attitudes often displayed in comments? etc.

~~~
dzink
I think it is more productive to focus on fixing things going forward, than
trying to place blame by resurfacing or redefining stereotypes. I'd rather us
spread "gateway drugs to hacking" for everyone to use regardless of gender,
race, or location. (plus I want us to surface more of the dormant role models
we have on HN and elsewhere instead of letting journalists put dramatic spins
on a plot that claims female tech founders are on the brink of extinction)

For example, I have a 5 year old niece. Every single gift I have sent her for
holidays and birthdays is a way to trigger and express creativity (a drawing
board, a guitar, a music box, a basketball hoop, a stomp rocket) and none of
them is pink. If her father (who is an SE) doesn't teach her how to play with
code in the next 2 years, I will.

~~~
jheriko
As a follow up I'd be curious if you have any ideas on how to fix things....

Its probably supposed to be obvious too, but what exactly do we need to fix?

Although I don't think female tech founders are going extinct or something I
do believe based on data that they are a minority and that is not being blown
out of proportion particularly - although I base that on the overall data that
women are a minority in STEM fields in general. The idea that they are a
minority is imo valid - but I don't think that itself is a problem - we are we
not conversely worried about the minority of men in the care, fashion or sex
industries for instance.

------
bigsassy
What are your plans for DoerHub this year?

~~~
dzink
Keep building it up. Add github and linkedin logins, build up the
collaboration and contribution metrics features, grow at places where people
and projects are really interesting, add to the team, maybe apply to an
accelerator. This is my life moving forward. I love crafting every peace of it
and I want to build it in a way that energizes the community within to do
more, generate more, and amplify its amplifiers.

------
dimitar
Wait.. you started working _professionally_ in IT when you were 13? Very
impressive! Especially since in that time and place the most computers at
homes were Apple II clones and most people didn't have them.

Do you feel your location matters for your start-up and for you as a founder?

~~~
dzink
I started building websites and getting paid to code at 13. In 1998 building
web sites was only possible if you were self-taught via the web, so market in
Bulgaria and Europe (UK, Belgium) was quite lucrative. Not sure if that
qualifies as _professional_.

------
wsc981
What books (if any) did you read that you find particularly inspiring? Why?

~~~
dzink
In the first few years this is the stuff that helped:

\- W3Schools + A List Apart + CSSZenGarden (on WebDev)

\- Code Complete (on Software Engineering best practices)

\- JavaScript: The Definitive Guide

\- A Bulgarian niche forum and community on flash/web development called
FlashBG (Similar to HN in some ways)

\- Flash to the Core by Joshua Davis (he was taking regular photographs,
breaking them down by color fragments in ActionScript then reassembling them
to form abstract designs) [http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Core-Joshua-
Davis/dp/0735712883](http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Core-Joshua-
Davis/dp/0735712883)

------
frozenport
If we assume that the male female ratio should be 50/50 how bad are racial
ratios?

------
spiderPig
What was your greatest hack and what did you enjoy most about going it?

~~~
dzink
On the code side, I love what I'm doing right now with Neo4J and the DoerHub
badges and topics. I am trying to use graph database searches to surface
people who are strong in areas you are weak in and weak in areas you are
strong in when you do a search for a topic. Also trying to apply NLP to ensure
the system recognizes related topics (cancer and healthcare for example). My
latest work is usually my favorite.

On the non-code product side I hypnotized NBA.com users with the Social
Spotlight product you can see on its homepage now. It used to generate higher
duration of stay than any page on the site including video. I did it by re-
created the "Monument to Change" Stanford GSB flipping tiles effect with an
unending river of the most interesting images and tweets from the NBA
conversation on social media. There was some FOMO mixed with good content,
mixed with a mesmerizing effect.

On the brick and mortar side I created a forge-detecting technique for
printing coupons for a bakery in Bulgaria by mixing Inks with different
reactions to water. Had to do it because competitors were trying to forge the
coupons and put the bakery out of business. In the end though, the hack ended
up getting an employee of 10 years arrested, because, as it turned out, he was
swapping cash for his own home-printed version of the coupons.

------
stefantalpalaru
Got any open source projects?

~~~
dzink
I've been thinking about open sourcing this:
[http://www.doerhub.com/for/whichvc](http://www.doerhub.com/for/whichvc) but
as the primary hacker on DoerHub I haven't found the time to clean up the
code.

Technically, most of the code I wrote before my startup is source-visible,
since my former employer doesn't obfuscate JS. If you dig into the CNN js
files you will see the SearchProcessor, CSI Manager, ads js, custom local
storage libraries, and other stuff I wrote or contributed to that also repeats
on NBA.com, CNN Money, etc (I was a part of the front-end core-developer team
and wrote library-agnostic custom js libraries). However, I founded my company
and started writing code on it the day after I quit my employer, because it
had very tight IP ownership of everything generated while employed (we asked
for an opportunity to open-source some of our stuff, but it wasn't approved by
the time I left).

If DoerHub is successful I believe it will help worthwhile open-source
projects get a lot more support and exposure. I think I can add more value by
amplifying the amplifiers in the short run.

~~~
lmm
Unless you mean in the sense of removing passwords and similar, you don't need
to clean up code for it to be worth open-sourcing.

~~~
SkyMarshal
You don't strictly need to, but most people want to make sure the code the
open source is at least commented and free of embarrassing mistakes,
shortcuts, antipatterns and whatnot.

~~~
lmm
That impulse is exactly what I was trying to counter. It's far better to put
"bad" code out there (and you may even find someone improves those things for
you) than wait to tidy it (which often never actually happens).

------
dmn757
I'll go first.. Why in the world would you feel a need to make this post?

~~~
WoodenChair
I think she pretty clearly explained why she felt a need to make the post -
she feels underrepresented and also wants to prove a stereotype wrong.

I'll go second... why in the world did you feel it necessary to mock her post?

~~~
rjzzleep
go into a cpu design or fpga lectures at most universities. she doesn't just
feel underrepresented. she is.

nonetheless this post imho is in the same category as i'm 15 and made a
gazillion apps.

ok, you care about women? and their future in tech? go to educate parents in
school for gods sake, not the people that already know that if you raise your
kids to be pretty princesses, they will become pretty princesses instead of
hackers.

~~~
dzink
I have presented in front of teen girls at events and mentored girls
individually. The tech bug catches on best anywhere between age 8 and 14 when
you see a role model for something fun you can enjoy doing that is an "gateway
drug to CS". At that age parents don't matter but peers do.

When I was that age, just one of my classmates mocked me for trying, but a few
other fellow tinkerers and I started competing in high-school tech
competitions and that brought us together. Having other doers around made it
even more fun and addictive. As a teen girl I was a minority in local hacker
clubs/cafes at the time, but that actually meant I was getting hit on by the
boys (mildly and jokingly, and I always brushed it off to keep tinkering), not
really hindered.

~~~
rjzzleep
there is no tech bug. there is a thing that you enjoy what you get good at(the
dilbert author wrote about it too), no matter what it is.

also, as a person who caught on very early, i wouldn't advise people to study
cs. for people that are really good at the stuff we're talking about here. cs
without the right peers is one of the most disappointing experiences there is.
imagine a professional heart surgeon having to go through basic medical exams
for 4 years, that's why comparably few doctors are interested in migrating to
the us.

but on a sidenote i don't really get the latter tbh. to me it seems like it
would be great to share common interests as is the case for most other
professions. yet, when it comes to hackers, being sexually interested in one
another seems to be put down as douchebaggery. no wonder most of us stay
alone, while douchebags like lawyers flourish.

~~~
muglug
I think you're entirely wrong. First off, lots of people don't enjoy things
they're good at, and enjoy things they're not good at. Having sung in choirs,
I've seen ample examples of both.

And "catching the tech bug" just relates (IMO) to the moment where you see
computers as a source of almost limitless inquisition. And I agree with OP
that that most often happens between the ages of 8 and 14.

Also, having studied CS in university and really enjoyed it, I don't share
your pessimism about the degree.

Finally, lawyers date each other, as do other sorts of geeks (included CS
geeks), but there isn't the extreme gender disparity in college that one sees
in CS courses, so one woman is unlikely to be the target of so much
unwarranted male attention. And also, lots of lawyers are nice people, just as
lots of CS people (men and women) are douchebags.

