The Diary of a CEOHow I Taught Millions Of Women The Most Important Skill: Girls Who Code Founder: Reshma Saujani
CHAPTERS
- 0:00 – 19:40
Immigrant Roots, Racism, and the Birth of a Fighter
Reshma outlines her parents’ escape from Idi Amin’s Uganda and their struggle to rebuild in the U.S., changing their names and accepting daily microaggressions to survive. Growing up Brown in a white working‑class Midwestern town, she faced bullying, racist vandalism, and a brutal beating at 13 that flipped her from wanting to assimilate into embracing her identity and fighting injustice.
- •Parents fled Uganda in 1973, changed names to appear more employable, and focused entirely on their children’s upward mobility.
- •Family endured harassment: mother mocked for her sari, house vandalized with “Go back to your own country.”
- •Seeing her father quietly scrub racist graffiti convinced Reshma she would never be silent or passive.
- •A violent schoolyard attack at the end of eighth grade became a defining trauma; she still hasn’t fully processed it.
- •After that attack, she stopped trying to be ‘white,’ founded PRISM (a student anti‑prejudice group), and saw herself as a warrior.
- 19:40 – 34:00
Chasing Credentials: Yale, Debt, and Losing Herself on Wall Street
Reshma explains her obsession with elite credentials as an immigrant’s daughter and how repeated applications finally got her into Yale Law and Harvard—alongside crippling student debt. That debt pushed her into a high‑paying Wall Street law job, where she felt completely misaligned with her childhood vision of being a changemaker and sank into anxiety and despair.
- •Applied to Yale Law School three times, driven by belief that women of color need top credentials to be taken seriously.
- •Left school with roughly $300,000 in debt, which constrained her career choices and delayed public-interest work.
- •Took a lucrative hedge fund law job, helping her parents financially but feeling far from her dharma of social change.
- •Describes needing to hit ‘rock bottom’ emotionally before she can make major life changes.
- •A friend’s blunt advice to “just quit” and her father’s unexpected support exposed that fear—not parents—was the real barrier.
- 34:00 – 50:50
Running for Congress: Naivety, Smears, and a Spectacular Loss
Reshma recounts her first Congressional run as the first Indian American woman to seek such a seat, challenging a powerful incumbent. She describes naïvely believing merit and hustle would be enough, only to be met with character attacks, casual racism, and media trivialization before losing badly—an experience that nonetheless became her entrepreneurial boot camp.
- •Ran for Congress at 33 against a well‑entrenched, vindictive incumbent without an established political network.
- •Faced resistance even from feminist icons who didn’t want her challenging an ‘insider’ woman candidate.
- •Media reframed her as a Wall Street villain and the New York Times reduced her to a story about her shoes.
- •Learned hard lessons about narrative control, comment sections, and how newcomers of color are caricatured.
- •Lost by a wide margin after assuming she would win; forced to give a brave concession speech while internally devastated.
- •Used the campaign as training in fundraising, hiring, messaging, and public speaking—the same skills later used to build Girls Who Code.
- 50:50 – 1:03:20
From Political Failure to Founding Girls Who Code
After mourning her loss, Reshma channelled her frustration into understanding a problem she’d noticed on the campaign trail: the absence of girls and people of color in computer science classrooms. She researched the gender gap, wrote a business plan, ran another (unsuccessful) campaign, and simultaneously launched Girls Who Code, deciding that if she couldn’t legislate change, she’d build it directly.
- •Allowed herself about a month to grieve, ruminate, and analyze mistakes before deliberately moving on.
- •Noted homogenous, male‑dominated CS classes during her 2010 campaign and asked, “Where are the girls?”
- •Spent a year learning root causes of the gender gap in tech and drafting the Girls Who Code model.
- •Ran for New York Public Advocate under a platform of teaching every kid to code; lost again, but gained more skills and thicker skin.
- •Decided politics wasn’t a meritocracy and committed to teaching every girl to code without waiting for election wins.
- 1:03:20 – 1:15:50
Building a Global Girls Who Code Movement
Reshma outlines how Girls Who Code grew from a single program into 10,000 clubs worldwide and nearly half a million alumnae, focusing on aligning coding with girls’ desire to change the world. She explains the dual strategy of hands‑on programs embedded in tech companies and aggressive cultural change campaigns that made “girl coder” a mainstream, aspirational identity.
- •At launch, only 0.4% of girls expressed interest in coding; stereotypes portrayed coders as white male basement nerds.
- •Summer immersion programs were hosted inside tech companies; projects were tied to social impact issues girls cared about.
- •Graduates were asked to return home and start clubs, seeding exponential grassroots growth to 10,000 clubs in the U.S., UK, India, and beyond.
- •Classrooms were intentionally diverse—race, gender identity, and background—modeling empathy and sisterhood.
- •Cultural campaigns (books, media, a Doja Cat partnership coding her nails) drove 100,000 girls to sign up in a day and normalized cool girl coders on Netflix and TV.
- •Reshma emphasizes she saw herself less as building a nonprofit than building a movement.
- 1:15:50 – 1:26:40
Leadership, Intensity, and the Hidden Cost of Being ‘All In’
Reshma reflects on her leadership style at Girls Who Code—evangelical, intense, and mission‑obsessed—and admits she often undervalued praise, expected religion‑level commitment, and struggled when others treated it as just a job. She also describes stepping down as CEO, confronting how much validation had been tied to her title, and realizing how rarely founders are acknowledged once they leave.
- •Early board was built from family and friends who believed in and protected her while she figured things out.
- •Self‑describes as “intense,” with big vision and relentless pace; expects high passion from hires and uses a ‘passion filter.’
- •Recognizes that not everyone can or should treat their job as a calling; organizations need A, B, and some C players.
- •Admits she got the praise–criticism balance wrong, focusing on pushing rather than affirming staff.
- •Deliberately hired people smarter than herself and relied on trusted aides who could ‘speak Reshma.’
- •When she stepped down as CEO, she expected an outpouring of thanks and got almost none, revealing how praise is tied to positional power.
- 1:26:40 – 1:38:20
Miscarriages, Motherhood, and Hitting Rock Bottom Again
In one of the most vulnerable sections, Reshma reveals a seven‑year stretch of repeated miscarriages that coincided with the peak growth of Girls Who Code. She describes repeatedly going from doctors telling her there was no heartbeat directly to high‑stakes speeches and events, realizing later how deeply unhealthy and self‑erasing that pattern was.
- •While launching Girls Who Code and running campaigns, she experienced more miscarriages than she can count.
- •Multiple times, she heard “We don’t hear a heartbeat,” cried briefly, then went straight to events—introducing President Obama, speaking to 1,000 girls—without canceling.
- •She felt disturbed by her own ability to compartmentalize and perform while carrying profound grief and loss.
- •The pattern culminated during a trip to Utah when, after another bad call from her doctor, she still flew on and then emotionally collapsed.
- •She finally gathered her team, disclosed years of hidden miscarriages, and took time off, recognizing she’d modeled an unsustainable, martyr‑like standard.
- •She is explicit that she ‘got that really wrong’ and doesn’t want younger women to believe that is the price of leadership.
- 1:38:20 – 1:48:20
Redefining Strength: Mental Health, Boundaries, and Wanting Less
Pressed about how to avoid future rock bottoms, Reshma argues for a different model of strength: prioritizing wellness consistently, not just after breakdowns. She candidly rates her mental health at a six, describes new habits like sleep tracking and exercise, and explains how studying the Bhagavad Gita has helped her detach from external validation and focus on her dharma.
- •Critiques girlboss and CEO culture for glorifying exhaustion and sacrifice as badges of honor.
- •Encourages early recognition of stress signs and proactive rest—naps, breaks, time off—rather than waiting to crash.
- •During the pandemic, she allowed herself to cry in front of her team while laying people off, reframing tears as leadership, not weakness.
- •Uses a Whoop to guard eight hours of sleep, plays tennis, does date nights and girls’ trips, and significantly cut back on flights.
- •Actively practices “not wanting things,” noticing when she starts to chase awards or status and pulling back.
- •Receiving an unsolicited Yale commencement invitation symbolized a shift from chasing validation to having it arrive when she no longer needed it.
- 1:48:20 – 2:10:00
From ‘Fix the Woman’ to Fix the System: Pay Up
Reshma explains why she pivoted from teaching women bravery to demanding systemic change in her book *Pay Up*. Catalyzed by COVID’s disproportionate impact on working mothers, she argues that motherhood is treated as a personal choice, not a social infrastructure issue, and that true equality requires childcare, paid leave, flexible work, cultural rebranding of motherhood, and collective advocacy.
- •Pandemic forced her to juggle a newborn via surrogate, homeschooling a six‑year‑old, and saving Girls Who Code; 11 million U.S. women left the workforce.
- •Hybrid schooling was designed without consulting mothers, assuming they would absorb unpaid labor; this terrified her about how easily others could upend her life.
- •Her ‘Marshall Plan for Moms’ op‑ed drew backlash from both left (“what about dads?”) and right (“motherhood is a choice”), revealing how controversial motherhood is.
- •She now rejects corporate feminism that focuses on confidence, leaning in, and power poses without addressing structural injustice.
- •Proposes four levers: empower women with real boundaries; educate and pressure employers to subsidize childcare and mandate paternity leave; revise culture by parenting out loud and telling the truth about motherhood; and advocate for policy like paid leave and childcare funding.
- •Warns that girls’ futures can’t be changed unless women’s working conditions and caregiving burdens are transformed.
- 2:10:00
Vision of Equality and Calling Out Imposter Propaganda
In closing, Reshma articulates her long‑term vision: a world where girls and mothers can choose any path without structural penalties or internalized shame. She argues that imposter syndrome is often misdiagnosed—that many women and people of color are actually over‑qualified but made to feel like they snuck in—and calls for rejecting self‑help narratives that insist the problem is individual rather than systemic.
- •Wants little girls to be able to become presidents, founders, scientists or stay‑at‑home moms without regret or social penalty.
- •Hopes mothers don’t watch their biggest dreams “die on the vine” because of unpaid care burdens or rigid work norms.
- •Critiques the avalanche of books and programs telling women to fix their confidence or mindset instead of fixing environments.
- •Reframes imposter syndrome: if you’re in the room, you likely out‑earned it compared to many privileged incumbents.
- •Having met most “powerful” people, she believes many are less capable than the women and girls she works with.
- •Defines resistance as refusing to buy more self‑fixing courses and instead asserting, “I’m here, and I can lead too.”
