the best part of being on the @TIME women of the year list is making my mom proud 💖

the next best is the incredible honor of being in the company of these amazing women, all working towards a more equal world

they are all heroes to me 👇🏻

time.com/collection/wom… amal clooney for tirelessly, fearlessly waging justice for victims of human rights abuses. what an incredible profile by @mariaressa.

time.com/collection/wom…

we launched a big update to streamline the signup process for @blockpartyapp_ today 🎉

https://twitter.com/blockpartyapp_/status/1419696758649593856

i want to talk a little bit here about our product development process & what rejecting the "growth at all costs" mentality that silicon valley espouses entails 🧵👇🏻1/ normally, for a consumer product like @blockpartyapp_, silicon valley says, our job is to grow as fast as possible. remove any barriers to signup, smooth out any friction, optimize the shit out of growth 2/

a founder friend reminded me that there’s nothing unreasonable in startup world about someone copying an idea. kinda yes BUT imo what is significant and abhorrent here is that i’m building something to solve an intensely personal pain that the copycats don’t get or empathize with

https://twitter.com/triketora/status/1360009700612468737

the amount of hate, abuse, harassment, stalking i’ve had to deal with, and still live with to this day, is horrible, angering, traumatic, despicable, and life-changing in a terrible way. @blockpartyapp_ is built with the insights i’ve acquired from suffering through this pain

happy chinese new year! in case you missed it and want a little twitter drama🍿to inspire you to support and uplift women, poc, and marginalized folks this year, may i refer you to these threads! 🧵of🧵s here is @karlitaliliana talking about segregated funding and coverage impacts equity and inclusion, calling out @sentropy's launch compared to @blockpartyapp_'s

https://twitter.com/karlitaliliana/status/1359953607609647111

just to spell it out btw
- i am a woc
- i experience harassment
- i have built moderation and anti-harassment tools in the past
- including w/ machine learning, and i have a master’s in ai
- i am a senior staff level engineer who has had to tech lead and build my own product and somehow non-technical white men who don’t experience harassment and haven’t worked in the space are going to build machine learning tools to solve harassment. right. got it.

hi investors, FUND THE WOMEN AND BIPOC WORKING ON THESE PROBLEM instead of throwing the money at white men who don't get it and either keep hitting us up for free advice which they ignore, or just try to copy what we're building with 10x the resources fastcompany.com/90539655/dear-… PROBLEMS* lol so angry i'm typo'ing

i’m mentally preparing for another year in lockdown and wondering how i will want to feel a year from now looking back on 2021 if it’s another year of minimal social contact, mostly in my flat, alone. can i find ways to thrive instead of just survive? i’m feeling a little anxious about setting goals, knowing how fragile mental health can be in circumstances like we are now living through. but i also don’t want to give up before starting...

I wrote an op-ed for @theinformation on being a solo female founder & why investor dogma around co-founders is yet another reason the industry is so awful at funding women. Can you believe only 2.1% of VC dollars this year have gone to women?! thein.fo/1a7650c8647efd… People told me repeatedly I needed a co-founder so I kept trying and trying. (I literally even moved to London to try Entrepreneur First, a co-founder matching program!) In the end, all of it was a huge waste of time, energy, and money. And mental health, honestly.

still mad sometimes when i think about asian american cliques who tell me i’m “not that asian” or “not asian enough”. when did you get to decide who’s “asian” enough? what does that even mean? some have cited the fact that i don’t exclusively date asian. and SO WHAT? how is that a criteria? if it’s about culture, half of y’all don’t even speak an asian language, definitely can’t read, don’t know the history or culture. how are you judging?

ok i'm losing track of this story so going to thread this amazingness

https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1326292689625739273?s=20

https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1326266748727943169

icymi tl;dr i did an ama on reddit last week and it turned into a complete cesspit of toxicity with 4k+ comments from the troll brigade demonstrating perfectly why i'm working on @blockpartyapp_ and also why silicon valley culture is so fucked blockparty.substack.com/p/ask-me-anyth… 1/ [thread content warning: violence, trauma, harassment]

obviously the great irony is that i got harassed by these thousands of reddit trolls because i am working on anti-harassment software with @blockpartyapp_. it was horrific and traumatizing blockparty.substack.com/p/ask-me-anyth… 2/