#740 WP-Tonic This Week in WordPress & SaaS Special Guest Heather Wilde Renze
How to Close the Diversity Gap in WordPress & Tech?
Heather Wilde is the Digital Solutions Lead of theDifference Consulting and is also known as the “Unicorn Whisperer” due to her special focus on entrepreneurs. She is a personal and professional growth expert, executive coach, author, and speaker. She is also the author of the Award-Winning book, “Birth of a Unicorn: Six Basic Steps to Success.”
She was one of the only women to have programmed, designed, produced, and published a game at the company THQ.
Wilde’s writing and speaking span social media, entrepreneurialism, startups, leadership, cybersecurity, customer experience, fundraising, and diversity issues. She writes for Forbes and hosts the “Entrepreneurial Revolution” column for Inc Magazine.
Her annual exploits at San Diego Comic-Con are both legendary and totally embarrassing.
She currently lives in Las Vegas, NV.
Main Questions For Interview
#1 – Heather, can you give some insights on your background and why you are passionate about promoting diversity in tech?
#2 – Do you see some clear “bottom line” benefits for companies connected to encouraging and promoting diversity inside the culture of a company?
#3 – Many tech companies have a “check box” outlook on diversity. Would you agree with this statement, and how can this situation be improved?
#4 – What are a couple of quick things a company can do to improve diversity inside a company in difficult financial times for VC or bootstrap startup companies?
#5 – If you go back to a time machine at the beginning of your career, what advice would you give yourself?
#6 – Are there any books, websites, or online recourses that have helped you in your business development that you like to share with the audience?
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Episode Transcript
(00:00)
Intro: Welcome to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS podcast, where Jonathan Denwood interviews the leading experts in WordPress, e-learning, and online marketing to help WordPress professionals launch their own SaaS.
(00:14)
Jonathan Denwood: Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS. Its episode 740. Got a friend and a returning guest. I have Heather Wilde Ranze with me. We’re going to be talking about diversity, the gap in WordPress and tech, in general. Heather has spoken well and deeply on this subject, and she has some really interesting reflections and thoughts about it. It’s an important discussion. It should be a great show. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of the show, I have a couple of great messages from the major sponsors of the show. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
(01:07)
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(01:39)
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(02:10)
Jonathan Denwood: We’re coming back, folks. Just want to point out, I have some great special deals from some of the sponsors, plus I have a list of inundated recommendations of plugins and SaaS services that we at WP-Tonic use. Where can you go to get all of these great resources? Well, it’s quite simple. Go over to wp-tonic/deals. wp-tonic/deals. So, Heather, let’s go straight into it. Maybe you can give to the listeners and viewers that are new, you used to be a regular panelist on one of my other shows, but we might have a few people that don’t know your background, maybe you can give a quick outline of your history in tech and your specific interest in diversity.
(03:05)
Heather Wilde Renze: So, you may not realize this, but I happen to be a woman, so.
(03:12)
Jonathan Denwood: I would’ve never guessed, Heather.
(03:14)
Heather Wilde Renze: Well, no, that, actually, brings up the point; so some people you can’t tell, necessarily, how they present. So, the gender that they are presenting as may not be the gender that you think they are, so I am a woman and I am in technology and that for some people is maybe a difficult choice throughout their career. I, actually, started how a lot of people start because I was encouraged at an early age by my parents, my father especially, but my entire family encouraged me to be involved in technology. And I was building things from junk parts at a scrapyard, that was my fun thing that my father and I would do on weekends when he was home from his work.
And, yeah, so it was like a whole family involvement to encourage me to be in tech, and so it’s been a lifelong thing for me and when I started my actual career, I didn’t know, necessarily, what I wanted to do after college. So, I went to school for Astronautics, I was going on a NASA track, and then my health turned out to not be good enough to do that, so I had an existential crisis of what was I going to do with my life, but I knew that it was going to have something still to do with technology and I always had that to fall back on. So, I went into game design, helped to build a company for the government.
(05:12)
Jonathan Denwood: Can I?
(05:13)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah.
(05:13)
Jonathan Denwood: Can we pause there just for a second? Because, obviously, you’re a friend, and I’ve watched some of your videos and interviews, so I think this is important that you were part of the gaming industry which has got a bit of a reputation to be some negative connotations toward its attitudes toward women that are game developers or the general community in general. Looking back, what’s your position on what I’ve just outlined?
(05:55)
Heather Wilde Renze: So, yeah, the game industry, it’s a dichotomy because it’s, actually, both one of the most welcoming industries that I’ve ever been in. Gamers, I just think of some of my best experiences in my entire career both as a professional but also as a consumer have been with the community of gamers. But also, it’s not very forgiving to people, so it’s an extremely weird thing. So my being a woman in my particular design studio and also the company that I worked for, which was THQ, was never an issue.
And in fact, one of my closest friends for the last 30 years now is a transgendered person, and we worked together in the same studio. And again, that was never an issue for the studio that we’re in for the people that we worked with. However, their career since that studio has been stalled; has been an issue almost everywhere that they’ve worked. And so, their experience was extremely different from mine and they’ve had a very hard time of it, whereas with me, I’ve never experienced, well, that is to say like, I started out as a booth babe.
Because it was the easy way to get into gaming, because you can; so, a booth babe is somebody at conferences, where if you have the body, you just wear the costume and you get people, you attract them to the booth. And at a game conference, you need to, Olivia Munn is a perfect example of this; you have to have the intelligence to continue to have the conversations with people once they get to the booth. And if you hire the wrong booth babe, then gamers just leave, immediately, because they don’t want just a body, they want a brain.
So, you have to have the right combination of someone, they have to be a gamer, they have to be intelligent, and they also have to look cute in the costume.
(08:30)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, I would fail at all three hurdles, Heather.
(08:34)
Heather Wilde Renze: Well, I know it’s, kind of, a sexist thing, but that’s just how it is. But gamer girls are like, it’s a whole subculture, and if you are willing to do that, then you’re immediately accepted by the gamer community. And that’s why you’ll see it, like Comic-Con for example, there’s the whole cosplay subculture. And the thing is, looking cute in the costume doesn’t, necessarily, mean you have a model-type body. It means you’re confident. And that confidence is what is attractive to the gamers.
(09:21)
Jonathan Denwood: So, I think your outline of the gaming community, being generous, but also can be extremely critical, was very similar to my observation of the WordPress community; is we have a lot of linkage. So, let’s move on. So, you got into the gaming industry, how long did you stay in the gaming industry and what was the next step outside of the gaming industry? What led you to leaving it in your next move?
(09:57)
Heather Wilde Renze: I was involved in gaming from one form or other for about seven years and that overlapped with, I started to, actually, a little bit longer than that, but I started to work on government projects after that. I went over, because what happened was 9/11 was a huge impact on the gaming world, people just stopped playing games. The amount of money people spent on games went down, it was an interesting time and I think it was because there was such a successful recruiting drive at the time for people to sign up for going away to fight, and those were the profile of the gamer at the time.
There’s a whole slew of why that might have been the case, why gaming went down when, usually, it goes up at times of crisis. But for a good 18 months, the whole gaming industry went down. So, yeah, our studio had to close, a bunch of other boutiques ended up going down until Red Dead Redemption and others came along and brought the industry back. But we decided to pivot and our friends started a government company that became a government contractor to help solve problems that were created by 9/11. And we did that for the next five years, and then we started a company called Evernote.
(11:52)
Jonathan Denwood: Yes. Because that’s one of the key areas that you’re noted for, your early involvement with Evernote, isn’t it?
(11:59)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah. Yeah. And that, I’m happy to say is doing, it’s still going strong 20 years later, the company.
(12:11)
Jonathan Denwood: Amazing really, isn’t it? It’s amazing.
(12:13)
Heather Wilde Renze: Being able to build a company that people use every day that helps their lives, that’s always a great thing. But going from having the background of thinking from game design and having that UI and then moving into government and thinking from that enterprise security, kind of, understanding and then building a notetaking platform and productivity tools; taking those two things together to create a beautiful software that is also enterprise security-minded is like, it’s all building on each other.
(12:58)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So, just to quantify this, so you were in the early days, even though I would imagine that not only was your on page salary, you had some element of equity in the business and, obviously, it got bought out, but since then you’ve been involved in a number of startups’ consultancy. So, to say that you have a very diverse and extensive understanding of the tech business would be a slight understatement.
(13:30)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah, yeah, no, I’ve been working as a consultant and investor and as a CTO for many, many years.
(13:41)
Jonathan Denwood: Well, the reason why I’ve drawn this out, your background, is just to give indication to the new listeners and viewers that you know your stuff. And you do know what you’re talking about, because I think in this particular subject that we’re going to be covering, I, personally, think that’s very important, Heather, and I think you agree on that. So, if you don’t mind, let’s move on, because we could talk about your.
(14:08)
Heather Wilde Renze: Of course.
(14:10)
Jonathan Denwood: Background.
(14:10)
Heather Wilde Renze: And I think it is important to say that I know.
(14:11)
Jonathan Denwood: For the next two hours, couldn’t we, really, couldn’t we?
(14:14)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah, I think it’s important to say that I’m a lot older than I look; I know a lot of people are like, oh, she’s only 20 years old. No. I’ve been around the block a bit.
(14:26)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. I’m not going to pass any remark on that. Because I’m in deep enough trouble anyway, Heather, with a certain team in WordPress. So, let’s go on to question two that I have given you. Obviously, intellectually and morally, I think diversity is extremely important, but we live in a capitalist-driven society. That’s just the fact of it for its good parts and its bad parts. And in most companies, the bottom-line is, does something generate more profit, more income for the business?
I feel that diversity does help the bottom-line; it does encourage the company to be more, in pure economical terms, improves the bottom-line. What are your thoughts and reflection about some of the statements I’ve just made?
(15:37)
Heather Wilde Renze: Well, it’s been proven that when you have a diverse board, for example; then you make decisions that are more universal for a company. Because you’re thinking about a broader picture with a larger perspective of users, however, conversely there’s a lot to say about when you’re making decisions strictly without emotion. When you bring in an emotional perspective to a capitalist decision making, then you might make some decisions that are not truly fiduciarily responsible.
So, from a capitalist perspective, having one mind and not a committee is often the best way; from a human perspective, having that committee that has diverse voices is, ethically, more responsible. So, it is that ethical dilemma, you can be a conscious capitalist and the Quakers proved that you can have a successful company and be a conscious capitalist and have diverse thought in building a company and still make money. However, it’s been proven time and time again that if you want to make the most money, then you have to just be ruthless and not think about those diverse things.
So, no matter how many times you try to bring, if you bring capitalism as the argument, then people will always say a diverse board is going to make you less money, and that is extremely controversial to say, but it is. But I think that, ethically, we need to go down the conscious capitalism route and have diverse boards, because we can’t just mine everything for every last cent.
(18:06)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, are you still there, Heather?
(18:08)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah, did you lose me?
(18:09)
Jonathan Denwood: No, I’m sorry. Sorry. I didn’t know if you stopped just to let me say something.
(18:20)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah.
(18:21)
Jonathan Denwood: All right. Do you want me to remark on what you’ve just said.
(18:26)
Heather Wilde Renze: Please do. I know what I said is controversial; I told you this was going to be a controversial, kind of, day.
(18:32)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, by the way, listeners and viewers, if you’re not really into a serious discussion about this topic, this isn’t the podcast for you. And I’m not being disparaging there or flippant, because I am going to get a considerable amount of grief connected to this interview.
(19:01)
Heather Wilde Renze: I’m sorry.
(19:01)
Jonathan Denwood: No, I knew when I asked you to have an interview about this subject, I knew I was laying myself out for those in the WordPress community that are gunning for me, they’re just going to utilize this as another way of attacking me. But I understand. Well, there are a lot, just my own reflection back, what you just said. A lot in the VC and in Silicon Valley would say that you are being extremely naive here. I don’t think that, I’ve just being an advocate here.
I, totally, personally agree with you, but I know that there would be a lot of individuals that you, probably, mix with much more than I do that would say, they might not say it in front of you, Heather, but they, probably, would say it behind your back, that you’re being extremely naive there. That all that matters is the green.
(20:13)
Heather Wilde Renze: That’s exactly what I said. I said exactly that. That everyone thinks that capitalism is the most important thing. And that what we should be thinking about is the ethics, but anyone that’s running a business is only thinking about capitalism.
(20:38)
Jonathan Denwood: So, probably, I’m not the brightest tool in the toolbox, though. I’ve only got the only reflection there. So, let’s move on before I make a bigger fool of myself, which is quite easy. So, it’s a bit linked to what we just said, I think there’s a lot of what I classify as checkbox diversity in most companies. Basically, the public face, the PR face, they produce, as I said, what I call checkbox diversity. Would you agree with that statement, and if you do, can you give some insight about what we’re talking about when it comes to checkbox diversity?
(21:29)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah. So, when you have a diversity and equity inclusion program in your company. For most companies that start this, they don’t know exactly what it means and they just want to say we have a DEI program, and then they might put somebody in HR in charge of it and then say; okay, now we have a head of DEI or we have a DEI program. And then they forget all about it because they have checked the box and say like, we can point to the fact that we have a head of DEI or we have this DEI program, and as far as the executives are concerned, that’s good enough.
But, now it falls on whoever they’ve assigned that to, to create a program, and then they don’t have a budget for it, they don’t have any actual oversight, they don’t have any real buy-in from the executives, they just have an empty title. Now, in a lot of companies they, actually, where it’s both bottom-up and top-down, where the employees have asked for it and the leaders are driving it, that person that’s been assigned to it does have a budget, does have a driving force, both the people are asking for it and the board is asking for it, and the leaders are checking in on it; that’s where it isn’t just a checking of the box.
So, what matters, it really comes into are they doing it because they think it looks good? Or are they doing it because there was really a need for it in the company? And some would argue like, okay, every company has a need for it, but I don’t think that’s true, necessarily, either. So, if your company hits certain guideposts, if you have a certain number of employees that are having issues then you, definitely, need to look into having a DEI policy.
If your entire company is male and you’re not Chippendales, then you have a potential need for this. Or if your entire company is female, you really do need to have, there are certain situations where having a good DEI policy and somebody that’s driving that and has the resources to drive it are important, but it’s not necessary for every company.
(24:26)
Jonathan Denwood: Right. But how do you encourage, in a practical way, based on your experience, diversity in a company that feels that it isn’t doing a great job about it?
(24:43)
Heather Wilde Renze: Well.
(24:45)
Jonathan Denwood: That’s only a slight question, but I’m just asking just to muddy.
(24:47)
Heather Wilde Renze: No, no, no, no. If they feel that they’re not doing a great job, then that’s, actually, the first step, they already are asking the question. And with my coach hat on, I think that them already realizing that there’s a problem, they’re already on the path to fixing it. The real issues are when there’s definitely a problem and they don’t realize it. So, in my game company that I was in, we didn’t have a formal DEI program, this was back in 1999, they didn’t exist yet.
But we, obviously, didn’t have a DEI problem because like, my co-worker was trans, I was female; we were in a great environment, the working environment was great, nobody had any issues with anyone, and it was perfect. Whereas, every other company my former co-worker was at after that, there were obvious issues, they tried to report them and there was no recourse for them. So, in those companies, that was where a DEI program or some form would’ve been helpful, but those companies that they were in that still exist, those game companies, still don’t have any recourse for those kinds of employees. And these employees are asking for it, but it’s just never been added.
(26:20)
Jonathan Denwood: I’m surmising that, that is on purpose as well.
(26:27)
Heather Wilde Renze: They would rather lose employees, because it’s one of the larger game companies and they know that there are so many people to replace them.
(26:37)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. I’m only surmising this before we go for our break. I’m surmising that one of the things that might contribute to a poor diversity and a culture that people from different backgrounds don’t feel welcome, especially around tech, is what I see as really mixing personal and business together in what I consider a hot mess.
What I mean by this, Heather, is the encouragement of the company being seen as a family, literally, you spend all of your social time, all of your friends are part of the company, that the company is an extension of a larger family, that you mix your work colleagues and you see them as your friends, and they’re not really, which you learn very quickly as you mature. Especially in the tech industry, it was encouraged quite a lot, that you could have subsidized meals; you had a gym at the place that you spent all of your hours there; it was all one big, kind of, club.
But the problem with that is, if you’re somebody that feels you’re not a member of the club, what’s your reflection of what I’ve just outlined?
(28:08)
Heather Wilde Renze: I was seduced by that myself for a bit. And it’s really difficult; I try extremely hard with my employees. One, I want to be friends with my employees, but I have to, I’m their CTO, I’m not their friend. And they want to be friends with me, and I have to make sure that there’s that line. And I also want to make sure like, absolutely be friends with these people. It’s great if you have friends, if you’re friendly and really do become friends with these people at work, but remember they’re your work friends and it.
(29:00)
Jonathan Denwood: Well, it comes, sorry to interrupt, and I have to be very careful in this conversation.
(29:05)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah.
(29:05)
Jonathan Denwood: Because of the lag and also a little bit of my neurodiversity, the background. But I don’t want to come across that I’m dominating this conversation, because I’m going to be accused, there are going to be some accusations thrown at me as we get further in this conversation. But I’m just losing my track here. Yeah, I think the power dynamics; I think that’s what you’re talking about. You want a friendly business relationship, but you have to be realistic about the power dynamics.
(29:47)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah.
(29:47)
Jonathan Denwood: You have more power, to some, extent than the people that are working for you. So, it cannot be an equal friendship on an equal friendship basis, am I on the right track?
(30:01)
Heather Wilde Renze: Absolutely. And I think a lot of people make that mistake. And it’s even worse as a woman because there’s so much of a spotlight on me for things that I could do, potentially, wrong and insert minority here, it doesn’t matter what kind of minority I am. I could be a black man or somebody from another country, it doesn’t matter. I could be a 50 year old man from India. As long as I’m some, sort of, minority that power differential is still evident and you have to be extremely careful of that.
But when I was at Evernote, even just as a peer employee with other managers, I still had to be careful because I was friends with these people at work, but I realized because I was so involved in the company, I didn’t have time for friends outside of work. And then when I developed cancer, my entire friend-base was at work and they didn’t have time to support me because they were busy with work.
So, thankfully, I’d started to build a friend-base outside of work, but I’d only just started to build that, and, thankfully, those friends were really, really strong already, and they were able to support me and I realized this was unhealthy, this work-cult scenario that I was in and that’s why I, eventually, left.
(31:48)
Jonathan Denwood: But would you agree, in tech and it was encouraged because it helped the bottom-line, but it also has consequences, it does make the whole thing into a bit of a hot mess, doesn’t it?
(32:00)
Heather Wilde Renze: Absolutely. But it’s accidental, it’s encouraged for you to stay at work, to keep working because, again, it’s that capitalist, drives the bottom-line, keeps you at your desk. But it’s accidental that you don’t have relationships outside of work. Some companies, it may seem that we’re trying to force you to date your coworkers and things like that and in some cases, some companies may have encouraged that like WeWork. But, no, I think it’s just, you don’t have the opportunity because you’re so busy with work, so that’s the only place you find people.
But the same thing happens at college, you end up finding your, because that’s the only place you meet anyone. I realized as I got older that all of these tech companies, they’re just trying to keep recreating what they had at the college dorm, because that was where they felt the most alive. So, those overnighters that they were pulling, those kegers that they were going to, all of those things, that was what they’re trying to keep recreating. And it’s the frat boys, specifically, that are trying to recreate their college years, the best times of their lives and then spread it out to everyone else.
(33:41)
Jonathan Denwood: Right. I think we’re going to go for our break. We’ll be back with this really, we’re going to go down all sorts of, well, I knew it was going to be and Heather was up for it. I knew it was going to be a very diverse conversation, Heather knows me anyway, so she was up for it. We will be back in a few moments, folks.
(34:03)
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(34:35)
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(35:13)
Jonathan Denwood: We’re coming back. We’re having a real discussion about diversity, how to implement it in a practical way and some of the things that influence it. But before we go into the second half of this fascinating discussion, I just want to point out that if you’re looking for a great hosting partner around e-learning membership websites as a WordPress developer, look at WP-Tonic. We have a great affiliate program, where if a client signs up for a year’s hosting, you can earn 40% upfront.
And also, we provide all of the plugins and all of the other things that you require so you don’t have to ask the customer to buy this plugin, that plugin, that service; it makes everything really smooth and available in one place. If that sounds interesting, go over to wp-tonic/affiliates and have a look at that. So, on to the next part of the conversation, Heather.
So, can you give some quick things that you’ve seen a company do? Let’s say they’ve identified that they’re not doing fantastic when it comes to diversity, are there any one or two things based on your extensive experiences that they can do that in, let’s give it three months, six months, a year, where that there could be some measurable, tangible improvement in the situation? Or is it just too complicated, all you can do is just apply best practices and monitor them by the higher management, are we dealing with that type of scenario.
(37:09)
Heather Wilde Renze: Well, one of the things is if you have any new positions that you’re hiring for, make sure that your job descriptions are diversely written, so use non-gendered language so that you’re not hiring for a; it’s a delicate balance to make sure that you’re not hiring for one gender or another in your job description. Also, make sure that you’re only asking for specific skills that you, actually, need and not for requirements on things that aren’t necessary.
So, in my postings, I don’t ask for any number of years of experience in anything, I don’t ask for certain degrees unless they’re absolutely required for something, but I will ask for certifications in something if they’re relevant. But I’m looking for a candidate, I’m not looking for; I recognize that candidates don’t all have the same privileged backgrounds to be able to go to a Harvard or even a state school, state schools are expensive and you might not have the same background to get there.
But if you’re not in the phase to hire somebody new, then take a look at who are in your management positions and how did they get there? Because your managers are, generally, the ones that are making decisions on who gets assignments for work, what types of roles are being assigned to people, in general? So, if all of the managers in your company are men, then they’re, generally, going to be biased toward assigning things to other men or assigning certain types of tasks to women to do.
If all of your managers are women, they’re going to be biased in the same way, but toward women. And even if they say they’re not biased, that’s just how it is; people have those unconscious biases. So, making sure that people take the IAT, Implicit Association Tests so that they can understand their own biases and where they might be; don’t have them share the results with you, just make them available so that people can start to understand and overcome their own implicit biases is a good start.
There are also some diversity toolkits that you can implement as a company. But it’s really just start by taking a look at what your company make-up is now and thinking about where those biases can be in your existing company and then maybe shake it up a little bit.
(40:16)
Jonathan Denwood: That was fantastic. Thank you for that, Heather. But also, what does, in my opinion, the actual culture; genetics and culture are the two, well, genetics, your parents, and your culture are the dominant factors of how you see the world, in my opinion. How does this whole scenario that we’ve outlined, is it driven by the founders and the CEO and the chief financial officer of a company when it comes to this?
(41:02)
Heather Wilde Renze: It depends on the company. As the CTO, I always feel like I’m the guardian of culture in the company because I’m developing products and I have to build the ethics of the company into the products that we deliver. And so, I’m always having conversations with our CEO, and then arguing with the COO, who happens to be our, I’m on board with our CFO, the CFO is behind me 100% on all of our security decisions and our ethics decisions.
But we still have to talk to the COO and CEO about these things too, but I’m lucky that I have a CFO that backs me up on all of our decisions, and I don’t have to argue with them, but it’s not the same in every company. The CFO is, usually, like, I don’t care about security because we can just pay the insurance fine later and it’s, usually, cheaper than whatever it’s going to cost. And I don’t care about building insecurity and any CTO that’s listening to this has heard the exact same thing.
(42:16)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah.
(42:16)
Heather Wilde Renze: But me talking about cyber liability insurance to a room full of CTOs, you’ll hear a lot of them groan because they hear this.
(42:28)
Jonathan Denwood: Well, I’m sorry to interrupt, but wouldn’t you also hear that conversation when it comes to diversity, we have insurance, we can cover ourselves to a certain degree?
(42:39)
Heather Wilde Renze: I’ve heard that same thing. Yeah. Yeah. But it all comes down to, there’s an app that is hitting the waves today that goes both to diversity and cyber liability is, I can’t remember the name of it but it’s the big new meme generator, kind of, where you can upload your picture and it uses AI to generate a new version of yourself and we’ll find it and put it in the links.
(43:14)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, I definitely need that, Heather.
(43:16)
Heather Wilde Renze: Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is, because of the ethics involved in who programmed it; it’s biased toward an anglicized white version of what is beauty. So, if you upload a black face, a black person to it, it’s going to whiten their face to make them more beautiful. If you upload a child’s face to it, it’s going to add breasts and things to it, because it’s going to make them like, so the ethics involved in designing this app, it wasn’t thought through.
All they were thinking about was like, how much money are we going to make? And are people going to pay for it? And the thing is, they absolutely are making a lot of money and it doesn’t matter how many lawsuits they get because they have insurance for that.
(44:08)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. You touched some subjects there. Well, let’s move on. So, let’s wrap it up and then we can, let’s go through a couple of quick questions I like to end with a guest and then, maybe, we can have some bonus content, where we talk about some other topics around this. How does that sound, Heather? So, I always like this question. If you had a time machine and you could go back to your early years of your involvement in tech and you could coach yourself or mentor yourself, would there be one or two things that you wish you knew now that you knew back then?
(44:58)
Heather Wilde Renze: I always say the same thing, buy Google. But, no, other than that.
(45:09)
Jonathan Denwood: [Inaudible – 45:09].
(45:10)
Heather Wilde Renze: Both of them. Both of them. But other than that, it’s just stay the course, don’t change anything because I like who I am now and I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t gone through all of the things that I’ve been through. So, no matter how hard it gets, no matter what you’ve been through, you’ve made the right decisions every step of the way.
(45:36)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, I think that’s the interesting thing about it because, obviously, those experiences, if you didn’t have those experiences, you won’t be the person you are now, would you? So, that is the problem with the time machine, isn’t it? So, are there any, kind of, books, websites, online resources, people that you follow that you think have some great ideas and knowledge that you would like to share with the audience? Apart from, maybe you should mention your own great book because it’s quite a good reader, isn’t it?
(46:10)
Heather Wilde Renze: So, yeah, I wrote my own book it’s called, ‘Birth of a Unicorn’ and it’s a real fun book. It puts you in the seat of what would you do if you were in this, kind of, position. A book that has always been very helpful is called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. It’s about agreements you should make with yourself to live your best life. That one’s always good. Another one is Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. And I like, also, Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki. `So, those, they should be good.
(47:02)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, that’s a great one. Thank you so much, Heather. What’s the best way for people to find out more about you and some of your ideas, Heather?
(47:11)
Heather Wilde Renze: You can reach me at Heath Riel on all the socials and heathriel.com.
(47:19)
Jonathan Denwood: We’re going to end the podcast part of the show, folks. We’re going to continue this discussion for another 10, 15 minutes. We’re going to talk about diversity. Also, maybe, if Heather’s up to it, talk about race in tech as well. You’ll be able to watch the whole interview on the YouTube channel, the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. So, go over there and also subscribe, it does really support the show, interviews like this, which I think are quite unique, actually. You won’t find them anywhere else in the WordPress airspace, hopefully. And we’ll be back next week with another great guest. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
(47:57)
Outro: Hey, thanks for listening, we really do appreciate it. Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group and also to keep up with the latest news, click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.
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