Saturday, June 04, 2016

EP 021 Shava Nerad

Shava Nerad is the former Executive Director of the Tor Project, open source software that helps users protect their online privacy. She is currently CEO of Oddfellow Studios, and a frequent writer through Quora (where I met her) and on her Patreon site.


Today, we talk about her early days as the youngest female Chief Software Engineer at DEC and IT manager at MIT, how to manage and relate to very different people, how she won an argument with Richard Stallman, and how and why Tor came to be one of the most praised and reviled pieces of software in the world (often by the same people).

Extended bio:
Shava Nerad has been working online since 1982, when she was Chief Software Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation on the IVIS Project, the first commercial multimedia authoring system in the world. She has been staff or faculty at UMass/Amherst, MIT, UNC/Chapel Hill, and University of Oregon. She’s done commercial work for DEC, Varian, ComputerVision, her own web consultancy Net Prophets, Inc., and eMarket Group, Ltd.

While at eMarket as VP/Marketing and Business Development, she led her company to 3rd fastest growing private company in Oregon, #285 on the Inc5000, 25 in the Inc Urban 100, and Best Companies to Work for in Oregon. She was nominated for Woman Entrepreneur of the Year by reporting staff of the Portland (OR) Business Journal for her business acumen and service to her community. She has a long history of nonprofit and political activism, including leadership positions at Oregon Public Networking/efn.org, The Tor Project, and Democratic organizations in Oregon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good post.