Sheena Vaidyanathan has accomplished a great deal since earning her master’s degree from UAlbany, from pioneering a tech startup in the early days of the internet, to becoming a grade school teacher trailblazing in the area of STEM, to publishing a book on creative coding. And she’s not finished yet.
Every one of her endeavors over the past three decades, she said, has had a similar thread tying them together: “using technology to solve a problem.”
The first problem came in 1994, just four years after she received her master’s in computer science, when she was laid off from Metaphor, a company that pioneered desktop interfaces and icons. At the time, she and her husband, Vijay, who graduated from UAlbany with a master’s in computer science in 1990, were living in Mountain View, California, with their 2-year-old daughter and a son on the way.
“I could apply to another job. I mean, this is Silicon Valley, so there were lots of other companies nearby,” she said. “But I just thought, ‘I don’t want to go interviewing with me being six months pregnant.’”
So, she decided to take a chance.
“I would start my own company,” Vaidyanathan said. And she decided to try something that was revolutionary at the time: to put India’s leading newspaper online.
In the mid-1990s, hardly any newspapers were online. Vaidyanathan saw a problem and found a solution, and through her initiative, The Hindu became first Indian newspaper to go online and was among the first websites in India.
“I manually inserted all the HTML needed,” she said, since her uncle was FedExing her a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk that saved the newspaper “in some weird format.”
“I spent the next six months pushing [the online newspaper],” she said. By the time it was running more efficiently, their son had been born.
The website began to get a lot of traffic, so the Vaidyanathans wanted to add a chatroom. Because chatrooms at the time were not very reliable and would often crash, Vijay built a better one.
The chat client her husband wrote was called ParaChat, which led to a company the two founded and ran called Paralogic. The company grew over the next two years and caught the attention of larger-company, Xoom, which offered them company shares to acquire Paralogic. They took the deal, and once Xoom went public the Vaidyanathans were able to sell their stocks and buy a home to raise their family.
It all stemmed from “a need to solve the problem for this one newspaper,” Vaidyanathan said.
Vaidyanathan’s husband joined Xoom while she ventured off to start another company focused on internet social groups. Xoom was acquired by NBC Internet, and Vaidyanathan’s husband joined NBCI as its chief strategy officer. NBCI also acquired Vaidyanathan’s new company, but she passed up the offer to come on board.
“I decided to quit completely, and it was a very difficult emotional moment because I kind of said goodbye to everything,” Vaidyanathan said. “And I said, ‘What am I going to do?’”
For a little while, she was a stay-at-home mom, but that didn’t last very long, she said. Vaidyanathan wanted to pursue another interest of hers, and her career path forked.
“I took a complete change,” she said. “I ended up joining our local community college, and I got a certification in studio art. I was volunteering in an art program in our public schools, because my kids were going to school there,” she said, which led to her being hired by the Los Altos School District as an art teacher.
“I know that we still continue to have a problem in the U.S. in particular with girls taking on STEM roles or computer science roles,” she said. “Literally in my own classes, I can see that girls are inspired because I am in that role.”
The job only lasted three years before she was laid off because of cuts to the district’s arts budget.
Upon hearing the news of her layoff, an assistant superintendent recalled a computer-based art lesson Vaidyanathan gave to her students, and proposed an idea.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you take those digital art lessons and create a program and teach it to all our schools?’” Vaidyanathan said. So she did, and for the next two years she taught the program in every one of the district’s seven schools.
After two years, however, she received word again that the district was cutting back and slashing funding for her program. Vaidyanathan had another idea, though.
She proposed that instead of eliminating her program, the district should allow her focus the lessons more on coding. The district, which at the time had no Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) program, agreed and even assigned her seven teachers to roll out the program.
“So, from having no job, I turned this into an amazing new program called the STEM program,” Vaidyanathan said. “I created a curriculum for kindergarten to fifth grade, which was teaching kids how to code.”
The lessons, which still contained a lot of art elements, were extremely successful and led to Vaidyanathan speaking about her methods at numerous conferences as well as presenting before the California Department of Education in 2016 on computer science education.
More than 17 years later, Vaidyanathan is still leading this program for the Los Altos School District. She also wrote a book conveying the lessons she developed over the years called Creative Coding in Python, which was published in 2019 by The Quarto Group.
Growing up in northern India, Vaidyanathan notes that she is fortunate her parents embraced her interest in engineering early on and allowed her to go to college and study it. She believes her position in the tech world can be inspiring to young girls.
“I know that we still continue to have a problem in the U.S. in particular with girls taking on STEM roles or computer science roles,” she said. “Literally in my own classes, I can see that girls are inspired because I am in that role.”
Vaidyanathan’s family and friends joke that she can never stop solving problems, and they may not be wrong. During the pandemic, Vaidyanathan saw local farmers around the Bay Area struggling to sell their produce. So, she created a website and a nonprofit that connects people to local farmers and allows them to choose from available produce and create a curated crate of fruits and vegetables that she refers to as a “farm box.”
The new venture is called Tera Farm, and it includes an educational aspect by coordinating visits to participating farms so the public can learn more about agriculture and the work it takes to put fresh produce on the table. Vaidyanathan, who now has her own small apple orchard, is hoping the idea can spread to more regions.
Over an almond milk mocha in New York City during a recent visit, Vaidyanathan ruminated that maybe artificial intelligence can play a role in the future of farming. The thought of AI having more applications in society can be scary to many, she said, but she doesn’t view it that way.
“I think we should not fear it.” Instead, Vaidyanathan said, people should embrace it and ask themselves: “What can I do that’s different?”
