Reshma Saujani

I'm the daughter of refugees. The immigrant mentality is to work hard, be brave, and never give up in your pursuit of achieving the American dream.

In the '80s, society created a caricature of what a hacker or a programmer looked like: a guy wearing a hoodie, drinking energy drinks, sitting in a basement somewhere coding. Today, programmers look like the men we see in the show 'Silicon Valley' on HBO. If you look at the message girls are getting, it's saying, 'This is not for you.'

Computer science is not just for smart 'nerds' in hoodies coding in basements. Coding is extremely creative and is an integral part of almost every industry.

I'm glad I didn't know how much patience entrepreneurship required. It took some time to turn that into a strength of mine, so that would've presented an obstacle when I was younger.

I was full of pride when President Obama talked about coding in his last State of the Union address. I was proud when Chicago recently made computer science mandatory as a requirement for graduation. To see this elevate to the level of a bigger conversation is progress.

Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars, and then just jump off headfirst.

Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life.