In Her Words

Tell us about what you’re working on right now.
As a recovering lawyer, I consult on software contracts on a part-time basis. That pays the bills. The rest of the time, I’m working on my startup, Legalese, with my super-evolved computer scientist co-founder. I really believe that the computer science approach to law is a general purpose technology of the near future. In a world where we trust computers to drive our cars, fly our planes, care for our health, trade on our markets, and manage our money, I think it’s absurd to expect that the future world will still rely exclusively on humans to write, interpret, and apply laws and legal contracts!

Best decision ever:
Being a stubborn weirdo—going onto OKcupid to meet tech people one-on-one, and then eventually getting introduced to Meng, my co-founder. Through it, I have met some of the kindest, most brilliant people I know, pushed and stretched myself in both healthy (and less healthy) ways, and I cannot believe how fortunate I am to be able to spend my time working on some really hard and interesting problems! 

People don’t know this, but I…
have been trying out the whole radical honesty thing. They’ve mostly been quite kind and forgiving because they think I’ve had a bad day or am under a lot of pressure. I haven’t actually outrightly told people, “Hey, I’m gonna stop trying to be that charming, confident person all the time, okay?” I’m deliberately letting you see my insecurities, mix ups, ignorance, and all that generally not socially acceptable stuff. It’s lifted such a huge cognitive load off me since I’ve started actively practising it.     

I would tell my younger self…
just enough to take a pleasant shortcut without missing any great views and experiences:

1. Create, play the infinite game, have the freedom to keep playing;

2. Don’t get mad at facts!

3. Having emotions about having emotions is pretty lame;

4. Meditate;

5. Invest in good underwear.

Alexis was last seen here, here, here and here.