Interview with Leah Culver – The Social Networker

The Interview

Name: Leah Culver
Location: San Francisco, California
Occupation: Co-founder of Pownce, techie

It’s very difficult to keep a large site running performing well and that is probably my biggest challenge. I really believe in the concept behind Pownce so I’ve never really considered giving up on the project.

The other challenge deals with information overload and management. Lots of email, news to keep up with and so on.

Like this:

I’ve failed at so many things! I never became a supermodel

Actually, my greatest disappointments have probably been not qualifying for National Honor Society in high school and getting extensively interviewed by Google and rejected. It’s funny because instead of National Honor Society, I joined a group for doing weekend volunteer work which was great. And if Google had hired me, Pownce probably wouldn’t exist.

Pownce is definitely the best thing I’ve ever built. I’m very proud that Pownce supports open standards and that so many great people are part of the Pownce community.

If you do anything interesting, you’ll get criticized. If people aren’t saying anything negative about you or your work, that’s actually a bad sign.

I’m very motivated to be a great developer. I’m certainly not very good now, so there’s plenty of room to grow. I’m inspired by a lot of people who are doing cool things on the internet like the Django developers.

http://pythong.org

Ping Pong at work:

Bravery, ambition, and resilience matter more than pride.

I’m very bad at answering email in a timely manner. I’m quite good at crossword puzzles.

Play around with CouchDB, Erlang, GIT, and Beanstalk… those are on my list of odd projects to check out in the near future. In the long term I’d like to play a small part in changing the way people interact online. Certainly it’s a lofty ambition.

I love black licorice.