WEDNESDAY’S STRANGER – WEEK ONE

Posted on May 17, 2018 by Yann Tromeur

You thought I forgot ? no, sorry, no. Lack of inspiration? Not a bit. No truth is I had like many of you what we call a “busy day at work”. And that is really taming down the idea…

But in this new section, I am not going to talk about myself or any of my work / self-improvement / techno obsession (just a little).

No, today (tonight) I will start a new section of my blog, I will call it “WEDNESDAY’S STRANGER”.

From now on, every Wednesday for the rest of (life) blog I will talk about a personality. Someone you might know, but most of the time no. Because I like surprises, I will try to surprise you every week and treat you with discovering a personality, a character I found interesting, that struck me during the week, the past year, someone I might know personally as well… or not !

So, without further ado…

When you graduated from the university of Iowa in Linguistics in 1999, your degree did not seem sufficient to you. You had other expectations.

A good laugh is always around the corner with you. Now your favorite comedians are Jimmy Fallon or Stephen Colbert, at the time you always enjoyed watching Saturday Night Live. Not alone, always with your friends or sometimes in family.

So you studied hard, you always managed to attract people around with your wit and blond hair /blue eyes as well maybe, or is it your smile? No, definitely you attracted people with your happiness.

After Iowa, you went to Boulder Colorado and the next year was Stanford. Your goal. Linguistics in a prestigious university like Stanford. In the heart of Silicon Valley, there you could enjoy being the true geek you were.

Yes you can be proud Valerie, you are quite successful. It was not that simple at first.

You tried to gather two of your love, books and technology, with your company SoftCopy Publishing. Maybe it was a bit too much for you, you wondered if you really had what it takes to be an entrepreneur. People like to work with you, but is that enough ? maybe not, so you moved on.

SoftCopy was publishing short stories for ipad and Kindle in 2011, merging media and literature. You made than strange and funny video to publish on your company’s FB page, it is creepy, fun, strange. You asking your viewer if they would rather date an iPad or a Kindle… At the time, you were working for Microsoft, so I guess, like me, you needed a side job to express your truly self ? but I digress.

Already there, you are not considering the machine as object, but almost as human. I laughed when you proposed that “ménage à tech”. Man, I’d like to meet you Valérie Nygaard.

Then, at the end of 2011 you took that job at Ebay, helping on machine learning and delivering better services for the users.

After that, well, your greatest job so far ! Entering Google in 2015, this is serious now. You define yourself as an “Innovative Product Manager with Researcher DNA”. You are the Product Lead for Google Duplex.

This week must have been so important for you ! But still, you hailed your team first. And had a good laugh with them enjoying that diner reserved by Duplex.