Perspectives Newsletter

This year, America turns 250. It feels like both a long time and a short time in human history, especially when I compare it to the storied civilizations my parents came from, ones that span thousands of years. My parents told me growing up that I was a bicentennial baby since I was born in 1976. I didn’t quite understand it as a kid, but they said it with pride.

A few days ago, I came across a post on Threads that made me pause. I read the title to my kids, and they had a good laugh at how one of the greatest athletes of her generation, maybe of all time, Simone Biles, could be reduced to an “NFL wife.” My girls asked, “Who is her husband?” The backlash against the author was swift and loud. And then the author, McQuade Warnold, did something most people in that situation don’t do. He showed up and owned the mistake.

A few years ago, I wrote about ten things I own that I couldn’t live without, and it’s time for an update! This is the first day of Amazon Prime Day, so I thought I’d share some things I bought that have passed the test of time and use. That’s even more true after a major move. We left our old kitchen intact next door and only brought with us what we really needed. Trip by trip, we discovered what truly deserved a place in our new home.

When Suren Markosian was a kid, he wanted to be a bus driver. Not because he loved buses per se, but because he was fascinated by the doors. Press a button and people walk in. Press it again and they go out. The driver controls the flow. That simple idea became his inspiration for working in technology — the idea that you could build something that moves people, that decides who gets in and where they go. Decades later, he built an app used by more people than live in his parents’ home country.

At a corporate dinner a couple of years ago, I found myself at a table with three people I barely knew. We were all executives, gathered for one of those events where you spend the first twenty minutes exchanging titles and job histories, and the next hour deciding whether you actually like each other. Somewhere in that second hour, as the conversation loosened up, the one single person at the table asked, “How did you meet your partners?” What followed was not what any of us expected.

A few weeks ago, I sat down to dinner with a group of executives, founders, and investors in San Francisco, hosted by my friends at MediaMint. It was the kind of dinner that feels completely ordinary here and utterly surreal everywhere else. We went around the table to introduce ourselves and share how we were using AI. Someone was building an agent to manage their household.

What a thirty-year-old necklace taught me about what you are already saying There is a photo of me from a magazine profile taken a few years ago. When Professor Flynn put it up in his Paths to Power class at Stanford recently, the first thing I noticed was my cross. Not my face. Not what I was wearing. The cross. I have worn it for thirty years. My then-boyfriend, now my husband of more than two decades, gave it to me when I was twenty years old, about six months into our relationship.

You Are Not the Only One in That Club Deb’s Note: From time to time, I bring in guest authors to Perspectives to share their point of view and bring a different take on a topic I want to learn more about. When I first read this piece from Molly, I found myself going back through my own life, thinking about the clubs I am in, the ones I never announced, the ones I carried quietly for a long time before finding someone else who was in them too.

I grew up in a place where almost no one looked like me. People would yell at my family to “go back where you came from” while we walked down the street. I brought steamed buns (bao) to school, handmade with my mother, and my classmates questioned why I would eat something so weird. Every difference felt magnified. The food we ate was strange. The heavy accent my parents had made them stand out. The shape of our eyes was unlike that of others.

Last week, I had three conversations with people who had each been laid off. Though the circumstances were very different, the emotional experience was almost identical. They were grieving the loss, and each of them began to turn that experience inward. These were people who, just days earlier, had been operating at a high level. They were leading teams, making decisions, and talking to customers. They went from full calendars, clear purpose, and key goals to silence.