Laura butler microsoft

Our mission is to provide quality information and accessible expertise about condo and townhome HOAs for individuals. Carol, my co-founder and CEO, and I knew in we wanted to found a company and we wanted to do it old-school: bootstrapping and starting from square 0 for the learning and experience. I had a house that was too much work to care for, plus had tripled in value, so I sold it and bought a condo.

Condos are supposed to be easy, right? They offer amenities, security, logistical efficiency, and access to opportunity and culture in urban areas. HOA docs are immense and inscrutable, but they are also often incomplete, out of date, or just plain wrong.

It turns out that HOAs are hard. Understanding them requires mastery of arcane finance, governance, and maintenance. The more we dug in, the more convinced we became that there were huge gaps, huge problems, and therefore a huge opportunity to help people and create value.

Our core service today is a Resale Review, scouring the indigestible stack of material a buyer gets about an HOA as part of resale disclosure, analyzing it, extracting what matters, and making it easy to understand. We provide peace of mind. When I joined Microsoft, there were more women in programming, more women engineering managers, and more women in senior positions. There was no engineer cookie cutter stamping out the same shape.

Somehow it got middle-aged, pompous, exclusionary, stratified, and unwelcoming around Insecurity must have been a factor. Maybe getting more removed from real purpose and humans was a factor too. Programming became a priesthood and cult of its own, instead of a toolset. I love how less binary and more quantum programming has become in the past years. Open source, SaaS, and low-code are here to stay. If you have an idea, there are multiple ways you can build it.

Of course there is risk. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. But risk is something you manage with action like support and advice, not just assess with data.

The point of risk is reward. Following the pack and staying safe are not how you win. They are defense not offense. Tech and venture folks should examine Cirque du Soleil, martial arts, ice skating, gymnastics, rock climbing, and skyscraper construction.

Case studies in these areas should be taught in business school. All these areas require failing a lot and are arenas where failing can be catastrophic.

So rationally they invest in safety equipment and practice over and over again handling errors and problems to recover as safely as possible.

Tech and venture ought to do the same and build virtual harnesses, trampolines, mats, ropes, self-arrest techniques, and rope teams. Why does this matter? Because great management and leadership take practice and development. And underrepresented groups have less room to fail.

If the industry truly wants to invest in people, it should invest in the equivalent of safety equipment and padding to minimize the bruising. Then I got paid to sit in front of a computer with air conditioning, play Tetris, and blow things up with dry ice inside of plastic bottles, all while getting unlimited free soda and snacks.

Innovation, discovery, problem solving, and computer science turn out to be such spaces for me. Innovation is a deviation from the normal and the majority. It requires skepticism of the status quo, looking at the world differently, not being afraid to question authority and the rules. To bring other people along with you as collaborators or customers requires understanding and empathy for the human condition.

To be great and successful requires operating in both realms. I worry that STEM sometimes attracts people for the wrong reasons, appearing as an escape from humanity and as a refuge for pure logic and theoretical exercises. I also worry that STEM repels some people for seeming to be this weird thing separate from real life, and that is just plain wrong.

Laura Butler: When I was first able to read. Science, STEM, history, geography, fiction, poetry, painting, optics, adventure travel, inventors, theorems, philosophy, language … all interesting and inter-related.

And to make something new a person has to imagine and dream of it first. I always loved math. I felt like Sherlock Holmes or Veronica Mars with this special toolkit that let me figure out problems other people would bump their heads up against. I love the purity of things like geometry but also the practicality.

You can use it to solve mysteries and win battles. I also loved the stories of the ancient Greek mathematicians, it humanized the subject for me and made it approachable. Math and philosophy schools were the sports teams of their time, with fans and heated debates and merchandise and even lifestyle choices.

The Pythagoreans avoided eating beans! But computer programming came late. My first experience with a computer was freshman year at Harvard, fall of They had a requirement that all students should be able to login and use email. I failed this test. I had to take a class to meet the requirement.

Being a contrarian I signed up for the programming course. It was crazy hard at first, extra difficult to see the people with experience do their homework in minutes when it took me hours. It finally clicked though. I understand things best by getting my hands on them and seeing real world examples. Programming helps you explain approaches and rules and create systems. That is what algorithms are. It forces you to get concrete on how something should work but it also lets you analyze how something is or is not working.

I love that you can have an idea and then turn it into a thing you can show people and play with. Laura Butler: It was my first real job when I was in college. I started as a summer intern after my sophomore year, Memorial Day Weekend Schools were not teaching anything useful at the time for what the emerging software industry needed. It was like getting a color television after only having had a radio. All of the facts and information and seemingly random exercises I did in school turned into real-world projects with meaning, purpose, and more.

No more tests with a right answer and a wrong answer, rigid forms and layouts, problem sets with unclear things to be gained or learned from them. Instead, adventure! Laura Butler: It was great to start with. It sounds glamorous, right? Be a world adventurer and traveler. Well yeah, it is glamorous and fun but only in limited doses. Travel is dessert for me, best enjoyed in contrast to a meal and as part of a balanced diet. I love variety and doing the same thing a lot loses its luster.

Besides giving you broader perspective and experience, it helps with balance. If one is annoying you or frustrating, the other can make up for it. And reading is my comfort blanket. Laura Butler: Microsoft has stayed fresh and new and interesting to me, which is why I am still here.

The world-wide impact and ability to literally touch every person on the planet is as exciting as it is frightening. I would love to say that I knew this Microsoft and Windows thing was going to be a huge success and I planned it all.