Episode 2 - Maia Bittner

More Than Code

Ben is joined by Maia Bittner to discuss her personal life and career. Delving in to how her anxiety has driven her so far and how she's working to recalibrate for what's next.

Maia is an entrepreneur and investor. She founded Pinch (which was acquired by Chime) and Rocksbox. She is on the board of trustees for Olin College.

Transcript -
Ben Edmunds:
Thanks for joining me today, Maia. Appreciate your time.

Maia Bittner:
Thanks so much for having me here.

Ben Edmunds:
Let's start from the beginning. Where did you grow up?

Maia Bittner:
I grew up in rural Washington State, so just south of the Canadian border and quite near the coast.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. I've been up to Forks, and I've been down to, I guess like Vancouver. Right? Where were you in relation to those?

Maia Bittner:
Yeah. Well, I was outside of Bellingham. It's about 90 miles north of Seattle.

Ben Edmunds:
Yeah. Cool. Nice. Where are you now?

Maia Bittner:
Very close. At the moment, I'm actually spending COVID times in Skagit County, which is just south of Bellingham. It's a little bit closer to Seattle, and close to all my family.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. I saw you were recently in New York. Do you still have an apartment there?

Maia Bittner:
Yes, I do still have an apartment there. Yes, I was in San Francisco for 10 years, and just moved to New York when the whole world came crashing down. Since I've been working from home all day, I came here just to shelter out the COVID time because there's a lot more space. I'm in this beautiful apartment. I spend all day, every day at home. Now, I don't know what the future looks like. It's hard to plan.

Ben Edmunds:
Understandable. You have your own place there or you're staying with family, or what's the situation?

Maia Bittner:
It's kind of a perfect situation, actually. My sister has an apartment that she normally rents out on Airbnb. I'm staying in that apartment, right? It's kind of a win-win scenario because fewer people are traveling on Airbnb, and I needed someplace that I can move in. It's all furnished and all decorated, and stuff like that. I just showed up with my suitcase.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. That's a pretty great setup. What took you from San Fran to New York?

Maia Bittner:
I needed a change of scenery. I had always wanted to live in New York. There was always something keeping me in San Francisco, mostly running companies there. For the first time, I realized that I didn't need to be in San Francisco, and so I wanted to take the chance to live in New York, and I love so much about New York. I love cities. I'm a real city person. New York is the best city. It's this hyper functional city in comparison to San Francisco, and I love public transportation, and I love walking and I love coffee shops and restaurants, and things like that. Yeah, I just wanted to live there.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. I lived in New York for three years, and moved away two years ago. Nothing compares to New York anymore. I'm in Boston now and I'm constantly comparing Boston to New York, and it's not nice to Boston.

Maia Bittner:
Totally, right? Boston, I lived in Cambridge. It's fine, right? It's just, like you're saying, you just can't compare it to New York.

Ben Edmunds:
Yeah. I miss it. Let's see, your family, you said is near there in Washington?

Maia Bittner:
Yeah. My whole family lives in Washington State. My dad is in Bellingham, my sister's out on Spanish Island, which is beautiful a island. My mom is east in the woods, and then my brother lives south in a suburb of Seattle. I'm sort of surrounded by everyone in my family right now. I've never lived here forever. They were like, "Maia's lives in California. We don't know why. We don't know what she's doing there." I was always the strange one that lives outside the state.

Ben Edmunds:
How did you end up in San Fran? Was it for school or for companies?

Maia Bittner:
The internet, right? I grew up even on the internet and enmeshed in internet startups. I love startups. I love new projects. I love trying ... I remember trying all the new browsers that existed, right, in the browser wars, and I was big on eBay, and I used [inaudible 00:03:56] never ending, and I was one of the first users of Flickr. I was really in that world. I actually ... I went to college in Boston, as many people do. After my freshman year, I had an internship in San Francisco, which makes sense. That's where all the things that I like were located. Then once I got there, I was like, this is amazing, This is exactly what I want to do with my life, and I didn't go back to school for a while after, I kind of I took some time off to stay out there.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. It has a very specific energy there. That's the great thing about New York and San Fran, to me, is they have they're own vibe.

Maia Bittner:
Definitely.

Ben Edmunds:
College, where'd you go? How'd you like it? I believe you're still involved. Tell us a little bit about that.

Maia Bittner:
Yeah. I went to ... it's a very unique school, so called the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. It is only engineering. They only do engineering degrees. It's very small. There's only 75 students per year, so 300 students in the whole school, and it's very new. The first class graduated in 2006, so it's a whole bunch of crazy all at once. I liked it okay, but I also think it was the best possible school for me to go to, if that makes sense. I think that I am not a great fit with school. I've always struggled with school. I didn't want to go to college because I hated school. I didn't really believe in formal education. I thought I would learn more on my own, and I thought that it was also super expensive to go to school and not just the cost of going to school, but it's four years of lost earnings.

Maia Bittner:
You could be making money, and instead you're spending money, and so I wasn't going to go to school, but then I found Olin. At the time, they don't do this anymore, but they offered full tuition scholarships, so it was very affordable. Every accepted student got a full tuition scholarship. They thought that formalized education was broken as well. They were like, it doesn't make sense for the modern era. The world has changed and we're still teaching people the same way. Engineers are still thinking inside the box and coming up with the same solutions to the same problems. We want to innovate and do things differently. They have a different grading system. A lot of the coursework is different.

Maia Bittner:
There's no concept. There's no calculus class at Olin. Calculus is not taught separate from Physics. It's just one course, where physics is just applied calculus. Calculus is just an obstruction of physics, and they're just related to each other. Very cool school. It really looped me in and very recently, I actually joined the board. The reason I did that is, I'm very excited, so Olin, the impact it has had, honestly, has been so amazing. It doesn't really get credit for that, which is okay, but it has changed the way that engineering education is taught at MIT, at Caltech, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as in schools around the world, right? More schools are doing the Olin way of having people try things first, and then learning the theory behind it...