HackNY Speakers

1. Chris Wiggins and Evan Korth, HackNY Co-Organizers
- A successful ecosystem is borne when three things coincide: nerds, money and time. Ex: Silicon Valley
- A tight-knit network of talented engineers outlasts the institutions they work for.
- Rutgers is apparently widely known for churning out fantastic and involved hackers.
- Inclusivity above all

2. Dr. Joshua Aronson, NYU Social Psych Professor
- Reminding women about their intelligence and men about their manliness improves performance
- Reminding people about stereotypes subtly lowers performance, but telling them how they overcome improves it.
- 2D learning: worksheets. 3D learning: create something physical. 4D learning: see an impact with what you learned
- Ex: that poor school in utah. internships, research, all of these are designed for you to affect the community

3. Amanda Cox, Senior Editor of the Upshot @ New York Times
- Data visualization, the stories behind writing the stories they've written, like polls
- She studied statistics but now does this. They think of creative ways to convey information
- People look for simplicity and interactivity. She's a fan of conservative, tasteful blocks of text

4. Michael Pryor, CEO of Trello & Co-Founder of Fog Creek Software (Stack Overflow)
- Pick a pricing model that scales in multiple dimensions (companies + individuals), don't confuse ppl waving money at you
- Be careful assuming something other people are doing is working for them. Great ideas are simple ideas.
- Don't ask community for feature requests. it's not about building more features, it's about dealing with user pain.
- Find your metaphor. Naming is hard. Looking out for customers is really hard. Hire a VP of sales before salespeople.
- Target the right size market - copilot came years before team viewer.

5. Julie Samuels, Executive Director of Tech:NYC http://www.technyc.org/
- Used to be a patent lawyer, it was obvious she knew about and was passionate about what she's been doing.
- Has been involved in many organizations that seek to influence policymakers to make policy that helps tech out.
- Important: A conversation with a lawmaker has more influence than you think. Bills were raised and passed through talks.
- They should understand that tech isn't going anywhere. It's in everyone's best interests to improve tech policy
- Cooperation between the startups and policymakers ~ cooperation between students and CS department

6. Amen Ra Mashariki, Chief Analytics Officer of NYC, MODA Director
- Find a needle in the haystack? No, burn down the haystack so smart people can find the needle.
- Need for analytics was apparent when leaders don't know how many buildings or cooling towers there are in the city.
- Team of 4 dedicated people, heavily wanted by city commissioners + mayor. OpenData platform, stitches end-to-end processes.
- Recruitment: Aggressively bring in the top, bust ass for 2 yrs, help scale and impact, drive them for a while, let them move on.
- "This is a... diagram. I made this my third week cuz I gotta have slides and shit"
- "Data only gets clean when people have to use it / it becomes useful"
- "At 55 I seriously plan on going into academics, getting tenure and spreading ignorance."
- Ethics: should we make policy based on who has access to technology? Ex. rat sightings increase in more populated regions.
- "Algorithms is not biased, data is biased." | "Where there is government there is paper"
- "Type your retirement information into a nice web app, print that shit on paper and mail it to FedEx."
- Concept: Load bearing columns vs. decoration columns. Trying to use technology to improve government processes is like editing ugly load bearing columns, you can break everything - although Astonia has the best digital gov't.

7. Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist (big nerd, self-deprecating humor)
- He never sold out to bankers or VCs, always just kept personally improving the site and "plugging away"
- There's a lot of opportunity out there to contribute to philanthropy - reach out to him!
- He was a poor designer, so he hired a designer. Poor manager, hired a manager. Realized he was networking!

8. Julia + Corey, Journalism Gurus from Washington Post (and HuffPost/Mic/etc)
- Journalism has been transforming over time (more digital), but doesn't have a good business model currently.
- They were the first to convince news bureau lords why blogging is important. -> YouTube News -> Twitter
- Lived through the big moments of reaching audiences in realtime via tech disruption
- Experiment: Can we use Twitter as a primary news source? -> Made it work with Google Translate API
- Experiment: Got 50k grant to build "Shazam for Truth" -> app to say how true/false speeches are.
- Video -> Speech to text -> Novel algo to check text against curated DB of truth/falsehood/it's-complicated
- Communities are super niche, people tend to feed themselves same stuff. Can't force them to eat well curated news
- Media theory: We're currently focused on quantity > quality, but they think it's going more toward quality now.
- Experiment: No homepage, instead two articles side by side. UX designers said it's trash, but got +22% engagement

?. Jennifer Lawton, Kickstarter and 20 other things
Jenny Lawton - Kickstarter Talk - [email protected]

10. Don't let anyone tell you what you can and can't do with your life.
9.  There's nothing to fear but fear itself. Worst thing is "no" - right next step is up to you.
8.  Ask for help early and often. You get further, faster and you learn along the way.
7.  Stop, look, listen. Things go fast, take a pause, analyze life data, take your time, make a decision.
6.  Once you climb up a mountain, turn around and help the next person up.
    Sometimes the best success comes from not making to summit. Share your experiences, hopes and dreams.
5.  Everyone has their own path - follow yours, be kind and gentle to yourself, you deserve it.
4.  Network, always network. Connect other people together all the time.
3.  You'll never know the answer if you don't ask the question, worst thing is a no.
2.  If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don't ask what seat.
    If you want to go to the moon, get on the rocket ship, it doesn't matter how nice your seat is.
1.  Make sure you wake up every day looking forward to what's in front of you.
    If you don't, change your direction so you do wake up looking forward to what's in front of you.
0.  There are no easy answers, life is hard work. Work hard to make it what you want.

Graduated w/ Applied Math, it was hard looking for a job.
Got a job as an assistant to a secretary (doesn't matter what seat you're on).
They found out she could write, so she wrote for the newsletter, later revived CAD usage.
So she left 2 years later as the head of the CAD department. Went to Network Mgmt job, decided to quit cuz crazy boss.
Called her CS friend at MIT research lab, went to run a Unix lab at MIT. Didn't know how to code.
She didn't know anything, but it took a year to get a security clearance, so they paid for a year of unix classes.
Project: Worked on radar system. Decided to get a MSE in DSP, realized she didn't wanna work for military and left.
Decided to make her own Network Mgmt company, consulting. Bought by an amalgam of companies, helped integrate other ones.
Went to work at a Venture Capital firm using the connections she earned for 6 months - then 9/11 happened. Many friends died :(
Got off the merry go round and bought a bookstore. Then another bookstore, then a coffee shop in Greenwich - for 7 years.
Met a lot of awesome authors (Stephen King, Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters...), saw a lot of kids grow up and taught a lot.
Sold the businesses and went back into the workforce through her connections.
COO at RAM Scientific, brought order to chaos, made herself unnecessary, left. Same at Mercury Solar Systems.
Talked to her friend at Maker Bot - wanted to work for them - "we don't need you".
Kept spamming her friend, eventually he's like eh fine, and hired her but couldn't pay her much as Head of People, HR++.
Stayed for 2.5 years (45->650 ppl), branded company, grew it out, sold it to Stratasys -> became CEO.
Left and become COO of LittleBits through connections. Left recently, taking summer off, looking for cool things to do.

Gotta be aggressive sometimes - "can I help with <this aspect> or take charge of it?".
Has had a lot of mentors over the years, it's important to have them and know who they are.
Played a lot of sports over the years (skiing, rugby, tennis, rowing, etc) went for the ankles.
Super important to take care of yourself - 3-yo kid said "can I make an appointment to talk to you"

Note: Ask her to give a talk about being a woman in tech at Rutgers. Spoke at Grace Hopper - very interesting person."
Being able to compartmentalize your own head is very important, how does co-dependency work, etc.
Exercise: 4 Quadrants on a piece of paper to balance yourself.
1. What you're good at and like doing
2. What you're good at and don't like doing
3. What you're bad at and like doing
4. What you're bad at and don't like doing

- Most important aspect of being a good mentor? If you were managing a widely scaled university mentorship program, what would be your main principles/foci?
Good mentors are people who can be really honest with you, but also supportive. Who can share openly and keep the peer relationship open, less professional.
Important: understand the alignment between why people want mentors and what people are looking to get out of program. Mentor must be able to learn from mentee.
- What aspect of your career enabled you to do whatever the heck you want and describe it?
Always made sure she was in a position to do what she liked. Loves to learn, the perspective is what enables you to do w/e you want.
- How'd you make millions of safety then so that you were physically enabled to do w/e you want?
Started a networking consulting company with $900, grew it, asked my lawyer/accounting friends how to do things, grew it, sold it.
- Why'd you think it was a good idea to start a company with $900?
"That was really dumb, I had no idea why I did that. Worst thing that could happen - I was gonna fail and work for someone else."
Understand your risk profile. Multiple people asked her to do networking for them, "why don't I just do it for all of you?" demand existed.
- What made you decide not to get an MSE?
"I'm a really bad student. I like learning but I don't like book learning." Accelerated development program was perfect, learned a lot fast.
"I make a spreadsheet, left side are characteristics that are important to me, helps her decide what to do."
"List 1 - Intrinsic: visit my mom. List 2 - Extrinsic: improving my own life, List 3 - Career: I wanna be on the board of X"
"Two weighting systems - importance to me and value to me. Literally amounts to a number that decides her how to do things.

It sounds like you care more about what's important to you than what the next big thing is to chase.
"Going for big wins all the time is exhausting."
Whats your driving force? Helping people? Self improvement? Philanthropy? Are they driven by a degree of pride?
"Giving back to people is super important to me - I do that however I want. Not too much into philanthropy."
"I have pride but it's about giving back to what I believe is important, like connecting people to resources they wouldn't get otherwise."