Why I’ve Joined Glimpse Labs

People who were surprised to learn I joined #MadeInNY startup Glimpse Labs fell into one of two camps:

Those who were surprised I joined the team of an ephemeral photo-sharing startup.

Those who were shocked I joined any team that included infamous “brogrammer” Pax Dickinson.

Myself, I was surprised at the surprise.

Something like that. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was.

Let me take the former first, as it’s really quite simple why I was intrigued by Glimpse and decided to say yes after #Ladyboss CEO Elissa Shevinsky asked if I was interested in building community and handling social strategy for the app, which just launched at SXSW.

At first blush, I can understand why some of my friends would have been surprised. I’m not much interested in the ephemeral message space. If I have something to say, I say it. It’ll be there, wide out in the open. Besides, anyone can just screenshot it anyway and that’s really not private. So what’s the point?

This is what a screenshot of a protected Glimpse looks like.

With Glimpse, however, if I do not want the other person to screenshot my message, I add a quick filter and the person I’m sending the message to cannot use his phone’s camera to capture the image. In addition, the photo or video are not saved on my phone’s camera roll (unless I took it with the phone’s camera and then uploaded it to Glimpse). The user has to use two fingers to view the photo or video and if he wants to capture it in a photo, he’ll have to have a camera at the ready to take photo of the phone while still keeping two fingers on it. If someone really wants to go to those lengths to prevent me from taking a photo, well, then maybe he deserves to be able to.

Everything is deleted off the Glimpse servers after the message disappears. My favorite example of utility is if I wanted to send a password to someone – I could take a photo of anything, type a message over it, send it off. The recipient gets 8 seconds to get the password and whammo, it disappears forever. Of course, the same folks who are using other apps to sext could use Glimpse the same way. They can knock themselves out. I just promise you that’s not how I’m using it.

I like that privacy and security are Glimpse’s top two priorities. We’ve spent so many years now with the assumption that we’re giving up all rights to privacy and that nothing is secure – it’s terrific to see someone deciding it is important after all, and maybe we don’t have to give it all up. It’s no surprise that apps in the privacy space are some of the hottest up-and-comers.

So fine. That all makes sense and is great and yay. DOWNLOAD IT HERE. (Shameless plug.)

OK, so on to part two.

Why would I, the woman who has written, “Can We All Just Agree to Stop Hating Sheryl Sandberg Already?” “Gender Roles, or a Tale of Two Facebook Stickers” and “I Don’t Want to Be a Feminist” suddenly cast her lot in with a misogynist, sexist and possibly racist jackass? (I’m not going to link to the articles about why Pax Dickinson is supposedly any of these things, but feel free to use the Google and come back here when you’ve got your fill. I’ll be waiting.)

A few months back, I interviewed Elissa Shevinsky for Women Innovate Mobile, a New York City-based accelerator for which I’m a mentor. She’d recently written “That’s It — I’m Finished Defending Sexism in Tech.” The article resonated with me for a lot of reasons.

I could relate – I’d always gotten along really well with guys and tended to have closer friendships with men than women in high school, college and as a “grown up.” I’m a tomboy. I picked up spiders and made mud pies. I don’t wear makeup, rarely wear jewelry and hate the color pink. I do, however, love shoes and have many more pairs than some would consider reasonable, yet I really want more. I researched Shevinsky to prepare for the interview, we chatted a few times and got along quite well.

When it came time for Shevinsky to announce she was returning to Glimpse Labs, which she’d founded with Dickinson and stepped back from when the proverbial poop hit the fan, she asked me if I wanted to write the article. I pitched it to VentureBeat, where it ran under the headline, “Infamous brogrammer Pax Dickinson changes his tune, apologizes, agrees to work for ‘ladyboss’“. We included an excerpt from his apology in the piece:

With the help of some awesome friends and a lot of personal reflection, I’ve decided to explain and apologize publicly for some of my words. The N-word isn’t appropriate even in a joke or quote, and neither should I have joked about rape. Things I think are funny and that the people who know me understand I don’t mean maliciously are still upsetting to others. They don’t belong on a company executive’s feed. I wasn’t an executive when many of the most egregious tweets were written but that doesn’t excuse it. It was a lapse in judgment and I’m entirely responsible for that. I sincerely and unreservedly apologize to anyone I offended.

I listened to Shevinsky talk about her working relationship with Dickinson. I talked to Business Insider software architect Julie Sommerville, who worked for Dickinson, and learned how he went to bat for her to be able to work from home after giving birth. She found the accusation that he was a brogrammer to be “hilarious.”

“He might parody one occasionally but that is not how I would describe him,” Sommerville told me in an email. “Pax likes to challenge people and sometimes that means challenging popularly held beliefs.”

A month or so ago, Shevinsky asked a friend for a recommendation of someone to help build out Glimpse’s community. That friend suggested me, and due to our interactions, Shevinsky liked that idea and asked if I’d be willing.

As Shevinsky had told me in the interview for the VentureBeat piece, people do deserve second chances. If Dickinson was sincere in his apology – which he appeared to be, and those who knew him best believed that to be the case – why should he be barred from working with strong, feminist women? Wouldn’t working with strong, feminist women be the best way for him to show he was sincere?

One quote in particular, which I used in the VentureBeat article, really struck me: “People should have the opportunity to grow and change and we should give them space to become the people we hope they will be.”

Shevinsky told me just the other day that she was still a bit uncertain about Dickinson after returning to Glimpse. “I was hoping he wouldn’t blow his second chance, because a third chance would be a challenge.” Now he’s co-founder of a company with a strong female CEO and a strong female advisor – J. Kelly Hoey of Women Innovate Mobile, plus other strong women including myself and Raine Dalton, whose LinkedIn headline reads simply, “#LADYBOSS to be.”

He’s not only not blown that chance, but he’s also surpassed her expectations. “He was also going on and on yesterday about how much he loves our whole team,” she told me in an email after reading a draft of this blog post. “His enthusiasm for working with strong, badass women is, at least in my experience, unusual. He certainly isn’t the guy you’d expect based on the tweets.”

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that some people were shocked by my decision. All they knew is what they read. I did find it interesting, though, that some of my closest, most fiercely feminist friends, totally got it and supported me unequivocally. They trusted that I knew what I was doing.

As for those who don’t trust that I know what I’m doing?

That’s not my problem.