Online abuse has upturned my life many times, and completely changed the way I live. Yet despite its terrible reach, it seems no one is even really trying to solve it. It is profoundly infuriating that this problem disproportionately affects women, non-white people, and other marginalized communities, especially when we are trying to give voice to our expertise, opinions, lived experiences, and demands for a better society. In the end, the only thing I can do to try to fix the problem for myself is to build a company to try to fix it for everyone.

As a software engineer from Silicon Valley and a diversity activist in the tech industry, I also have a relatively rare and unusual perspective on how platforms and communities are built, including the ways and reasons they’ve fallen short. On the technical side, I’ve written code from the startup ground floor of three consumer web-scale platforms — Facebook, Pinterest, Quora; designed and built anti-harassment protections and moderation tools, with machine learning and without; as well as feed, search, and recommendation algorithms and features.

Sociologically, with a critical lens on the lack of representation and perspective on the teams building much of the technology underpinning the social web, I’ve seen and studied many failure modes in product development, as well as the lack of ethics and accountability and what the ramifications of that look like. (Ironically, it’s also been in doing this diversity work that I’ve built the online presence and platform that’s attracted so much of the harassment directed my way.)