Leave it to Laura

This post first appeared on Femtech World We are seeing a societal sea change in recognising the importance of and attitudes towards the menopause experience, says Laura Yecies. Long in the backwater and ignored, we increasingly recognise the significant impact menopausal symptoms have on women’s quality of life and the considerable health consequences the sudden loss of oestrogen has on…

Bringing the Promise of Precision Medicine to Rare Disease

My latest post as part of my work at Fabric Genomics. Precision medicine is a form of medicine that uses information about a person’s own genes or proteins to prevent, diagnose, or treat disease.1 When we think of precision medicine, we often focus on cancer and the recent efforts to specifically target treatment based on the genetic composition of a tumor (somatic) or the person’s germline.…

Enabling NGS Testing and Precision Medicine with Fabric AI Technologies

I was invited to write about NGS on Xifin’s blog…

Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) testing is experiencing tremendous growth driven at a high level by the promise of precision medicine and the life-changing power of applications in preventive genetic screening, somatic testing, and rare disease diagnosis. In all of these use cases, we see important clinical advances. Preventive genetic…

Accuracy is the New Speed

Second post as part of my work at Fabric Genomics

By Martin Reese & Laura Yecies

When caring for a critically ill child, two simultaneous thoughts are competing – the urgent need for a diagnosis to optimize treatment and the need for thoroughness – to carefully review all the possibilities.  Don’t jump to a conclusion but don’t get lost in the weeds keeping the patient, and…

Women’s History Month Podcast

Melinda Byerly and her team at “Stayin’ Alive in Tech” have put together a cool compendium from their various podcast interviews in honor of Women’s History Month and I’m thrilled to be included – you can see the post here

Stayin Alive in Tech Podcast – “Good Life”

I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by my former employee and colleague and dear friend Melinda Byerly on her podcast Stayin Alive in Tech – you can listen here.  It’s a bit of a career and experience retrospective – I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed the conversation.

A Different Kind of Sync

I have had the good fortune to enjoy over 25 years of building a range of software businesses – enterprise and consumer – big companies and startups.   I loved the challenge and am proud of the positive impact of these products which have touched millions (SugarSync, Catch) and in some cases hundreds of millions (Netscape, Yahoo) of people.  As I looked toward my professional goals for the next…

The Technology That Time Forgot

Humans are social beings. We thrive in social groups and get work done more effectively when we team up with others. Good communication is key to the success of any group, and therefore it’s no wonder that tremendous technology investment and innovation has risen around fostering good communication. On the business side, team communication (aka Slack, Yammer, FaceBook for Work, Microsoft Teams)…

I’ve had the good fortune of being able to spend the majority of my career helping to build and market products with a core mission of helping people improve their productivity as it relates to communication. Netscape Communicator, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo! Mail, SugarSync and Catch – these products served slightly different purposes at different points in our internet and mobile journey but our goal was…

We often associate learning new skills with youth.  In fact, it is commonly assumed that if you don’t learn certain skills such as playing a musical instrument, a sport, or to speak a foreign language as a child, it’s “too late.”  As a culture we admire those who achieve excellence at a young age for instance a musical child prodigy or a business prodigy such as Mark Zuckerberg.  While their…

What’s different about Computer Science

Among the most vexing issues on the topic of lack of women in tech is why is it different from other fields that have gone from being male dominated to gender balanced. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that virtually all doctors and lawyers were men. This disturbing chart in this story on NPR makes the point quite dramatically.

Starting in the early ‘70’s, simultaneous with the rise of the…

One of the most important things you can do to optimize the chance of getting a positive or successful outcome is to align incentives at the beginning. We think of this often at a micro level when designing compensation such as commission plans or bonus plans but it is true at a macro level in general organizational design and even for marketing and business strategy. The aligned incentives need…

Privacy has always been an important topic but has taken on increased attention in the last year. But first – what do we mean by privacy?  I think a good definition is that privacy is the ability to be free from being observed or bothered and to determine whether, if, and how information isto be revealed.  Privacy is a broad concept and ranges from the physical to information about us to our…

The video from my speech was posted on the Georgetown site here.  My part starts at about 18.5 minutes in.

Speech at Georgetown Masters in Foreign Service Commencement

I was honored to be invited to speak at the graduation for the Georgetown MSFS, the program where I received my degree in 1986.  The text of my speech is below.  This photo was from the dinner with other speakers and dignitaries before the ceremony.  Pictured is the other speaker Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi UN and Arab League Special Representative for Syria, MSFS Dean Antony Arend, Secretary of…

First Experiment with Quantified Self

As someone who works in technology it’s no surprise that I am typically an “early adopter” of technology. I bought my first PC in 1984, became hooked on my first PalmPilot in 1997 and followed similarly with Blackberries, iPhones etc. Cameras and music players are no different. I also love trying new “apps” and truly delight when they improve my life in ways both small (PaybyphoneParking in SF)…