Perspectives Newsletter

I have always loved to quantify things. For years, I asked my teams to rate things on a scale of 1 to 10, whether it was a temperature check on how a meeting went, how strongly they felt about a decision, or how excited they were about an opportunity. The engineer in me craved quantification. And these ratings helped me create data where none previously existed. This desire came to a head when I was diagnosed with cancer last year. I read voraciously once I had the mammogram and saw the images.

Last year, I shared that I had been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer and posted Drawing the Cancer Card, sharing my experience. I have become a fervent advocate for screening and early detection. I never thought I would be here saying this a year and a half later, but I may be drawing the cancer card again. It feels surreal to even type that out. I did a routine colonoscopy a few weeks ago. I had one a decade ago and an upper endoscopy five years ago.

I recently joined Meghan French Dunbar for her Unbehaved podcast. Our episode dropped today, and I am excited to share it with you. A week after stepping down from Ancestry, I hosted a Women In Product party at my house.

Every few days, I leave something on my front porch in my designated Buy Nothing box. An extra water bottle I got at a conference. A skirt that didn’t quite work for me. Some snacks my kids thought they liked at the store, but changed their minds about. I have given away over a thousand items, from an extra gallon of milk before heading out on vacation to a spare TV we didn’t want to take with us on the move. Within a day or two, the item is off to a new home somewhere in my neighborhood.

Here we are at the fifth edition. I keep a running note on my phone of charts that stop me mid-scroll, and when I get to about a dozen, I know it’s time to write another one of these posts. These are visuals I encounter in news articles, social media, or books. Many are counterintuitive or surprising in some way. Sometimes they challenge what I thought I knew. Sometimes they confirm something I’d felt but hadn’t seen in the data. Great visualizations make the invisible visible.

Last year, when the family went to Taiwan, I took over the column from mom to write about the ten most important things I’ve learned from her. This past week, we returned from a trip to the Netherlands and Belgium, and it felt like the right time to write again. For those who don’t know me, I’m Bethany. I just graduated from high school and am heading to Duke University in a few weeks.

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.