This was around the same time Bryant enrolled her daughter in the Stanford summer camp.

“It was starkly bare in terms of black women in these spaces,” Bryant says. She saw very few women of African-American and Hispanic descent. Not only did she see very few women at these Silicon Valley mixers. Bryant was immediately struck by what she saw at these industry events, especially because the culture she had been a part of at Genentech was very diverse. She had no clue what type of startup she wanted to launch, so she dipped her toes in the water by attending networking events in the Bay Area of California, where she lives. “I was ready to leave corporate America, with hopes of creating some type of startup of my own,” Bryant says. Genentech was experiencing a merger, and she had the opportunity to take a buyout. In 2010, Bryant had just left her job as an engineering manager at Genentech, a biotechnology company. Related: 3 Steps to Go From Idea to Entrepreneur A Realization And now, seven years later, thousands of young girls like Kai, interested in computer science and coding, have been able to find community, purpose and drive through Bryant’s national nonprofit organization Black Girls Code. “My daughter was the only student of color.”īryant had an idea. “It was a room full of mostly Caucasian boys and just a few girls here and there,” Bryant says. But Bryant was startled when she picked Kai up at the end of the week.

To encourage this passion, Bryant enrolled her daughter in a one-week, overnight game development and design summer camp at Stanford University. She could regularly be found with her head glued to her Game Boy or immersed in World of Warcraft. “But my daughter’s a geeky kid,” she says, laughing.īryant noticed that around age 10, Kai began spending all of her free time playing video games. But she was never interested in video games, comic books or animation, all activities she deems geeky. Growing up, she read books voraciously, took advanced science courses and was on the math team. “I was never the geeky kid,” Bryant says. For Bryant, there’s a subtle yet important distinction between the two words. Her 19-year-old daughter, Kai, is a geek.

Girl Code by Jess Bryant