The Origin of Girls Who Code

I'm like a weird person to have started Girls who Code because I'm not a coder, right? I didn't major in computer science. I was a poli sci and speech communications graduate. I had never built anything before. I mean, I'd started things. Like, I was always like the president of my debate club. You know, I started campaigns, I organized. You know, I organized in politics, but I had never started a non profit before. And I came to Girls you code because in 2010, I was in this job that I hated, like, in a life I didn't want. And, you know, I am a pretty religious person. And I've always known what my dharma is, which was to be a, you know, a leader servant or servant leader. And here I was as a corporate lawyer working in finance, and I kept thinking, like, this is not servant leadership. Like, this is not what I'm meant to be doing in my life. And sometimes when you make these huge pivots in your life, it's almost when you're at the bottom. And I'm certainly that person. I hit rock bottom, and then I make huge shifts, and I was pretty, pretty rock bottom. And I remember calling my father and saying, dad, I gotta quit. And I remember him saying, finally, Beta. My parents were refugees. And so, so many of the professional decisions that I had made up until that point was for them, was to help them and meet their sacrifice and their struggle. But that was most of the time in opposition to what I felt like my destiny was, and my purpose was. And so getting that permission allowed me to quit. And instead of getting another job I was going to hate, I decided to run for United States Congress. And Ravi, I was the first South Asian woman to ever run. I had no idea what I was doing. I remember we raised like $50,000 from Indian aunties who were just so happy the Indian girl was running for office. But we were off to the races. And I thought I could meet every voter, shake every hand, and I'd win. And didn't happen that way. I lost spectacularly. I mean, it wasn't even close. Like, less than 19% of the vote. I was broke. I was humiliated. You know, I pissed off everybody in the Democratic establishment. But when I woke up the next morning, the big aha for me was like, wow, this failure didn't break me. And I know we're going to talk about that later, but the other thing was, it was like, I'm not going back to that life. Like, I'm going to keep making change. And even though I wasn't elected to make change, I'm going to make change. And when I thought about, I kind of said to myself, okay, if all the problems raise money you saw on the campaign trail, what's the one problem that really, that you can't stop thinking about? And the problem that I couldn't stop thinking about was when I would go into classrooms, because when you're running for office, you meet a lot of kids. And I would go into computer science classes and robotics classes. I would just literally see lines and lines and lines of boys who wanted to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, and there wasn't a girl in sight. And because I had never experienced that in college, I was like, what's going on here? I know Silicon Valley was a boys club, but I didn't know that club started in high school. And it pissed me off. And the reason why it pissed me off was because I knew that those jobs paid well. I had a dad who was an engineer who kept telling me to become one so I could go, you know, buy a home. So the fact that women, girls, people of color, were not going into this field, that was incredibly lucrative, that would allow you to march into the middle class didn't make sense to me. And that's why I decided to start Girls who Code and try to start solving that problem.