Laura I. Gómez

About Laura I.

• Her family immigrated to America when she was eight years old and settled in the Silicon Valley area.
• She was an undocumented resident until she was 17, when she got her work permit; shortly afterwards, she got an internship with Hewlett Packard.
• No one at her internship looked like her, and she hated it; it made her want to stray away from tech.
• However, her mother—who’d come to the U.S. to make a better life for her children—saw that tech would be an incredible opportunity and pushed her daughter to continue.
• Determined not to let the industry make her into a victim, she decided she’d work in tech, “whether the industry embraced her or not.”
• Believes she made the right choice going forward with tech; now, years later, diversity is dominating the conversation in the industry.
• Since then, she’s worked at huge companies like Twitter and YouTube, helping them translate and localize their applications for a global audience.
• Her latest endeavor, Atipica, helps tech companies find and hire diverse candidates; says she’d rather fail trying to solve the problem of diversity in tech than to never tackle it.