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Anyone close to me who doesn’t already know about why I stopped public speaking in 2018 will find this thread hard to read. Please know that I am safe, and strong, and do not worry about me. Additional content warning for others: Kidnapping, stalking
We live in a world that is complex. Our perceptions are incomplete. Did you know that inputs from different senses reach your brain at different times?
For even something as simple as drinking from a cup, the input from your hand and from your eyes reach the brain at different times.
Most of you getting the cup to your face and the water into your mouth without spilling is reconstructed from memory of every other time you’ve drank from a cup, with a bit of influence from what you are actually seeing and feeling.
Our perceptions are constructed like this. I hesitate to share some of the details from my career that could distort anyone's perception of me. No one really likes a woman CEO.
3% of venture capital goes to women founders. I’m a solo founder and a first time founder, and no one really likes that either.
Only about 3% of our decisions are made by our conscious minds, and only 3% of venture capital goes to women founders.
The work I’m doing is timely and doing it at a small scale is not morally correct for me. I have concerns about the effects of social media on our psyches and our relationships with each other.
I’m doing what I can to scale our model in a way that is careful, ethical, and soon. I believe we have the beginnings of deeply transformative and healing technology.
Engaging with systems that may not know how to fully welcome me as I am will be part of my journey. Transforming these systems as I engage with them is part of my journey too, but there is always a cost-benefit analysis. I don't have infinite time.
In 2015 I confided in a couple very close colleagues what happened to me at E3. They distanced themselves so after that I didn’t tell anyone else. I understood their response. I left Ubisoft.
It took me six months to tell anyone else—two people who I hold very dear and who weren’t vested in my standing in the company. I started to heal, and deepened my understanding of healing, love, and post-traumatic growth.
Last year I heard from those same two friends that they had a coffee with a man I barely know from Ubisoft and he went on a rant about several women who had left Ubisoft and specifically about me.
His rant was full of projection and also included a lot about how I haven’t done anything special in the industry. I don’t really know this little man or why he was still thinking about me so many years later. But this isn’t an unusual story.
People in the games industry seem a little obsessed with women. It’s true that that most of what I’ve been doing since leaving Ubisoft I’ve been doing quietly.
Harassment of women in game development, from colleagues and from fans, has left so many of my friends traumatized. I'm not exaggerating. The industry never really addressed it.
Living through it is what has helped me understand the effects of technology on our psyches, on harassers’ psyches, and what must be changed.
In early 2018 I stopped speaking in public because I was drugged and held captive for several days by a stranger, a maladjusted gamer, who had stalked me for about a year and continued to stalk me afterward. I was being stalked by two people at the time.
I escaped, fled the country where it happened, and lived with friends in Canada for a few months while I pulled myself together.
During that time I took a small investment, and released #SelfCare to test some of our assumptions about a healthy new approach to organic user acquisition and about a different kind of flow state for calm and resilience.
These were the first few pieces in a new form of interactive design and a new ecosystem around it that we've been quietly working with several partners to construct.
At the end of 2018 I tentatively did a talk in Norway and it was okay. My second talk was in Montreal and was gross.
I warned the conference about my stalker, and that he had caused me extreme harm in the past, and they still let him come to the conference—just not to the section of the building I was in.
They notified me afterward that he had been there. Because I know the Montreal games industry well, I hadn’t trusted them to keep me safe and I’d brought two bodyguards.
I am now safe. I won’t go into more details nor any details about what support the police do and do not provide, but know that I am safe.
When I’ve asked for security at event spaces, about half of the organizers I have asked have confided in me that this is a very common request from their marginalized speakers. Many other marginalized developers have stalkers. We deal with more than you know.
Of course speaking out has very real effects on my business. It’s a platitude to say I shouldn't want to work with anyone who wouldn't understand me speaking out.
No matter where someone’s consciousness is about women, we are all full of bias, denial, projection outside of our conscious control. My speaking out will cause people to make biased decisions about me.
As well, there are business realities that if you haven’t run a company you probably don't anticipate (I didn't)--like certain forms of insurance that are more expensive for my business because of my experiences, etc.
Toxic workplaces create toxic content that encourage toxic behaviour among their audiences—and that audience is the recruitment pool for the games industry. And the cycle repeats and intensifies. This is what I saw clearly through my experiences and what I’m working to dismantle.
In the games industry I heard a lot that this was a world problem and not a games industry problem and that it was outside of the responsibilities of the leaders. That is not true.
By contrast, in AI, I’ve not met the level of misogyny and ignorance I had lived in the games industry. My investors are lovely, responsible deep thinkers who have responded humanly to the harassment of women in the games industry when I've mentioned it to them.
And they hold me accountable as I build my company because they understand that leadership is responsible for corporate culture and for impact.
But this doesn't mean that all future partnerships we may need to scale our work will think I'm capable. 3%. Another 3% goes to mixed gender founding teams. The rest goes to all male founding teams. Last I read.
