Quotes from Kimberly Bryant

I was doing a lot of networking in the Valley, and I found that it was not a very diverse environment, and most of the conferences and meetup events I went to, there weren't many women or people of color in those rooms.

I do believe that most startups who develop applications and digital products design 'towards the middle.' By this, I mean they design their products to reach the broadest consumer base possible, which is a sound strategy in some respects.

For me, if a company is really committed to diversity, that means everything. That means gender diversity, that means sexual orientation for me, that means race, ethnicity.

I had originally wanted to be a lawyer. Even when I went to college and majored in engineering, I still thought I'd get a law degree. Then I started taking electrical engineering classes where I saw some of the innovation happening around computers and solid-state technology in the mid '80s.

For me, as a woman in one of the less diverse fields - electrical engineering, which is what I studied in college - it was hard to persist and really build a career. Some of the things I experienced were really scary, and they weren't experiences that I wanted for my daughter.

I grew up in a close-knit community where I was expected to excel, and it was a different experience when I got to the university. There were very few students of color, and those numbers were extremely low in the school of engineering.

As a little girl growing up in the Deep South, my mother told me that my future lay in my education. And she was right.