Reshma Saujani
speaker
259 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Reshma Saujani’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And he's like, I'll make you a deal. Like, just go at any of those schools. And if you get into the top 10%, I'll let you come to Yale.
So I go to Georgetown. I don't make one friend. I study every single day. I am just super focused, right? Like getting straight A's so I can go to Yale. But it was such a lesson, Megan, in like, I was just so narrowly focused that I had to have that Yale law degree so I could go do the things that I wanted to do, not understanding that I was just letting life and its experiences just pass me by.
What happens then is that Bush v. Gore happens, and I'm thinking I'm going into public interest, right? I'm going to go work at the NLAACP, right? Like, civil rights, that's what I want to do. Bush wins. No one's going to D.C., you know? And I'm like, oh, and I'm $300,000 in student loan debt. I guess I'm going to go work for the man in New York at a law firm, which I hate.
And that's when I run for office. take this crazy chance, right, in running in a primary. I was 33 years old. My name was Reshma Sajjani. There had never been a South Asian woman to ever run before. I run for United States Congress. I lose, like, spectacularly. I mean, it's, like, not even close. But I had, like, convinced John Legend to do, like, two concerts for me, like, Jack Dorsey.
Like, I had, like, hustled. the whole world, right, into thinking that, like, I'm winning this upstart race. And it is not even close. Like, I'm crushed. And the biggest kind of aha for me was I'm sitting there the next day. I'm in my, like, 400 square foot Lower East Side apartment, and I've pissed off everybody in the Democratic establishment because I didn't wake my turn.
I ran against another Democrat. I'm broke because I spent a year running for office instead of working. And no one's calling me. Oh, no. No one's calling me. But the biggest kind of, I think, moment that changes my life is I realized, like, oh, my God, like, this was the thing that I thought that I was supposed to do. Run for office. Be a politician. Be a public servant.
The very thing that I had been driving towards, Yale, all of that was about this destination. It doesn't happen for me. But when I wake up the next morning, I'm like, oh, like— I'm not broken. Yeah, this sucks. But like, I'm not broken. Huh. I think we think as women that when we try something, especially something we want so bad.
And it doesn't work out that it will break us and we won't be able to like wake up the next day. We won't be able to continue on. Forget about like the humiliation and the judgment and all that. I think there's a sense that like failure will cripple you.
Exactly. And so now the thing doesn't happen and I'm like, huh, there's a lot of things that I should maybe fail at and try and learn. And that's the path.
I mean, I always say, like, if I had applied to be the CEO of Girls Who Code, I wouldn't have gotten the job. I didn't code. I'd never coded before. Yeah. Right? Like, I majored in polyscience speech communications. And the only thing I'd ever built was a failed campaign.
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, those coding jobs, they paid a lot, like $120,000 a year. And when I saw that girls and girls of color, poor girls, were not going into these fields, in my mind, like they weren't going into the fields that would help them like march up into the middle class and change their entire trajectory for them and their families. And that's what like drove me crazy.
to coding and technology.
Yeah, and you're working on this now. Also, like the things that they're going to create, like bullying, right? Like what are they doing on these problems that they experience, right? Whether it's bullying, whether it's health, whether it's sexual harassment, right? Like if they know how to code, they can build tools that are going to help solve problems that are faced by women and girls.
So, okay. I thought nonprofits are slow. They don't get anything done. Like nothing happens. Like it's just, it's not for me. Right. Like I want to be where the action is. I want to be where the real change is. So I ran Girls Who Code and now Moms First like a tech company. Oh, interesting.
Big scale, big numbers, hard driving, big change, KPIs, destination where we want to go with like essentially like a nonprofit lens. So it was always kind of like unicorns and rainbows. I'll be honest. Right. Like sometimes you have an idea and the world just changes. collides to make that happen. And so Girls Who Code was a little like that, right?
From the beginning, people like, oh, yeah, this needs to exist.
How do you get funders? So here's the thing. I very early on at Girls Who Code got Jack Dorsey to support it. And back then, everybody was like, oh, Jack's doing it? Great. And I'll say with Moms First, it was you. Like very early on, you were like, oh, paid leave? This movement? Moms? Yes. And I think the thing is for people and entrepreneurs, it does help to get an early adopter. Hmm.
especially one that people admire and that people want to follow and see as a guidepost. And so, yeah, for Girls Who Code, it was really Jack. And for Moms First, it was you and Melinda.
That's a good tip. All right. I'm taking that one to the bank.
So, you know, I... knew it was time to step away from Girls Who Code. One, because I actually don't think anyone should run anything for more than eight years. And then two, this energy I was feeling around motherhood and Moms First and this need to fight for childcare and paid leave, like there was something I knew that I wanted to do.
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