Ada Lovelace, Lake Dai, and Women Who Tech

If you’re ever invited to dinner at 10 Downing Street in London, the Prime Minister may encourage you to wander the halls and admire pieces from the UK’s Government Art Collection. And if you do, you may happen upon a portrait of Ada Lovelace. And you might think, at least by outward appearances, that Ada is no different than her distinguished female contemporaries. But appearances are where commonalities end, because, beneath her countess’s expression and her grand Victorian dresses, an unparalleled mind was at constant work. 

From an early age, Ada immersed herself in mathematics and science. By age 12, she was designing blueprints for complex flying machines. At 17, she sought out Charles Babbage, the father of the computer, as a mentor. Through Babbage’s tutelage and Ada’s near-obsessive study, she expanded upon his theoretical analytical engine. Ada envisioned and shared a world where special programmed codes governed devices to compute more than equations, visions that ultimately ushered in her concept of algorithms. 

On this day -- and every day -- we honor Ada Lovelace, not only for her accomplishments but also for the preternatural way in which she subverted norms, for challenging us to look beneath the surface, to not discount others on appearances alone. As a visionary who paved a path for women in STEM, Ada exemplifies Workera’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion -- a commitment that reveals itself in the diversity of our leadership team, 4 out of 6 of whom are powerful and innovative women, including Alizée Acenova, Head of Customer Success; Erin Cooney, Head of Operations and Finance; Lauren Deters, PhD, Director of Learning and Assessment; and Jennifer Gardner, Head of Enterprise Marketing.

To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, we recently sat down with another powerful and innovative woman, Lake Dai. Lake is Partner at LDV Partners, a deep tech Silicon Valley venture capital firm that invests primarily in big data, computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) startups like Workera. She also teaches Applied AI as an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. We wanted to get her perspectives on the unquestionable importance of “women who tech.”

But as it turns out, surprisingly, her journey didn’t start in technology.

“My undergrad was Economics, so after graduation, I worked for Apple in product marketing.” At the time, Lake thought she’d stay on a marketing path, but it was the late 90s -- when the Internet was in its infancy. Email, chat rooms, and search engines abounded. She found herself consumed with tech curiosity. 

Her eyes glimmer when she thinks back on those fledgling days. Though we wouldn’t think twice about it today, in the late 1990’s the fact that you could find information without asking someone, without reading a book, or going to do research at a library, was revolutionary. And one could share information, too, with people across the world -- in an instant. “You could talk to and build meaningful relationships with people you’d never met.” Lake saw the Internet as an inclusive technology because people began putting aside how others looked, where they lived, how much money they made -- all these labels that had previously been so important in the physical world. People actually started getting to know one another based on their words, actions and interactions. 

“I thought it was fascinating.”

“This is going to be something bigger than just chat rooms or blogs. This is going to change how people interact with each other, and it's going to change how business is done.”

She was so inspired by these newfound technologies that she sought tech-forward opportunities wherever possible. Then, while in the midst of establishing China’s top-ranked chat rooms, she came to a sudden realization: “This is going to be something bigger than just chat rooms or blogs. This is going to change how people interact with each other, and it's going to change how business is done.” 

Lake’s fascination with the Internet continued. She would go on to work at a number of tech giants over the next years, absorbing whatever she could learn in a variety of roles, including head of Alibaba’s product team and head of Yahoo Search. “Yahoo was a great incubator back then. It was really an Internet pioneer and the most techy product I’d ever managed. It involved a lot of data on a large platform with tons of crawling, indexing, relevance ranking algorithms -- you name it. So I beefed up my learning.”

When asked how exactly she managed to upskill from a marketer to someone who could teach Applied AI to undergrads, Lake smiles. She says it all begins with one word, a word that surfaces again and again in our conversation with her, a word that she feels any woman seeking a career in technology must have: curiosity.  “But it’s also important to never put a label on yourself. If you see yourself solely as a narrowly specialized person, you may limit yourself to what you can and cannot do.” She encourages women to be boundless.

And if you think you’re behind in your learning, Lake says don’t worry. 

“The beauty of the technology landscape is that it’s always changing so fast. Concerned you didn't catch Web 1.0? No big deal! A few years later, there’s Web 2.0. Then, Web 3.0. There are always new things. AI, Blockchain, etc.” 

She describes the tech space as a sort of entity with near-infinite points of entry. But if you’re waiting for technology to stop so you can get on, you’ll stay at the depot. She asserts that we should not only put emphasis on traditional training. “That advantage is not as significant as you might think.” The important thing, she says, is to be curious, to work hard and to seek out opportunities for continued learning.

With upskilling organizations like Workera, those opportunities are easier to access. You learn fast and in bite-sized chunks. You can get all the information you need. You can train yourself. You can test yourself. You can gain confidence, charting the trajectory of where you began, where you are, and where you’re going. 

When considering the exponential growth of technologies such as machine learning and AI, the imperative is clear: Diverse perspectives are needed in the sector like never before. Ethnic perspectives. Geographic perspectives. And especially the perspectives of women. Because when men develop these innovations, these innovations are unintentionally imbued with male biases. 

“And code should have no gender,” Lake says. 

She and Ada have proven that to be so.