What Stanford CS Women Alumni are Doing Now Series: Vivian Shen

By Kaylee George

This piece features Vivian Shen, Stanford class of 2014. Vivian majored in CS, with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction and a minor in Creative Writing. In 2017, she cofounded Juni Learning, an ed-tech startup that went through Y-Combinator, and has been CEO ever since (they are hiring!!). She, along with her co-founder, was also 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 and is a Bay Area local.

How were you first exposed to Computer Science?

So I did not really study Computer Science in high school. A bunch of my friends in my freshman dorm were going to the CS106A first lecture, kind of like an information session, and I tagged along. I feel like in your first couple weeks, you just want to be doing whatever everybody else is doing so I went to the first lecture and Mehran just made it sound like a lot of fun. At the time, I actually wanted a major in Political Science and so I signed up for a ground-level Poly Sci class and 106A and it was really cool. I just felt like it was very applicable. It’s a blessing and a curse. I mean because you can build everything but then you also have to debug everything versus all the other classes that I was taking it was very theoretical, so I really really enjoyed that. And I ended up deciding to major in CS after freshman fall quarter and struggled a lot during my freshman and sophomore year trying to keep up. But I ended up doing it. So yeah, I don’t regret it at all. It’s awesome. It’s an awesome department and it’s given me a ton of opportunity, I just wish I had started coding a little earlier when I was younger.

Why did you minor in creative writing?

Actually, English was one of my favorite courses in high school. I just had a really amazing English teacher. And honestly, I did not actually want to add another major or minor after freshman year because I was very fully booked out. But by junior year, I felt like I had completed the requirements enough so I took a creative writing class.

After the first one, I kind of just decided that the minor was only six classes so then I just took one creative writing class per quarter junior and senior year to get the minor. And I actually studied abroad at Oxford. It’s definitely exercising a different muscle and it’s something I really enjoy. I think that Stanford’s Creative Writing program is actually one of the best ones, ranked above a number of East Coast schools. I think the CS program gets a lot of the spotlight, but the creative writing and English program is actually really amazing too.

Advice to current Computer Science students?

I think that there are a lot of people who say this but it’s totally fine to say that it’s very difficult and it’s totally fine to find it very challenging. At the end of the day, you have to make it a program that you will find interesting. For example, I refer to this issue of concentration. At the time people were like “Oh systems is much more legit if you’re taking this really seriously.” But I was really interested in how you actually make products that people want to use and HCI was an awesome concentration for me. I think just knowing what you want to do and making the program fit for you is really important.

Also, don’t be afraid to ask for help. I almost wish that I got a tutor when I was there because there was just some stuff where someone who has seen it before can really help you. I think I had some trouble setting up my dev environment or something once, and that was really difficult. So sometimes just getting help when you need it, going to office hours — all of that is just really critical. I also just I kept it light with the quarters where I was taking 107 or 110 or any of the harder classes, I just tried to take three classes to make it manageable and kind of focus. You don’t have to be everything for everyone and do everything, just making sure that you deal with the program in the way that works for you is really important. That’s also why when I was a junior and senior, I knew I really wanted to go abroad so I took a lighter course load and it ended up working out.

Favorite Stanford classes?

So, unfortunately, the professor is not at Stanford anymore and things got clever. CS147, Intro to HCI. That was an awesome class. I think it’s less technical than a number of other classes but I still find myself using a lot of the principles that we learned there, like the product development work that we do in my company now. It’s kind of like how you structure design experiments and things like that. That was a really cool course. I found application-focused courses were much more interesting to me and I really liked the ones where you actually get to build a product and collaborate with other people. So those were definitely my favorites.

What were the most impactful experiences at Stanford for you?

I made a lot of my friends in CS because we worked on psets together and projects together. Finding a good group of others who are interested in what you’re interested in is really important but at the same time, my two best friends in undergrad weren’t in CS — one was studying Premed and the other, English and history. So I think getting both sides, like the core group that you can kind of suffer through things together and also branching out. The idea of having a mixed undergrad where you can share ideas and things like that is really important.

I learned so much from people who weren’t studying CS too and who were. I think my major somewhat defined my freshman and sophomore year, but by junior and senior year, I felt like it was more important for me to be around people that challenged the way I thought about things and pushed me in different ways.

Did you ever consider software engineering? What was your path to an interdisciplinary career?

I had the good fortune of interning at Google after my sophomore year. So actually my freshman year I did Curis, the research Stanford summer program in the CS department. I worked with a guy who was interning at Google the following summer and that got me really interested. They do a really cool program for women and minorities where they still do a rigorous technical interview. It’s more specifically for sophomores or juniors which is normally their internship program. So I happened to do that and kind of just applied, I didn’t really plan it out.

I think my freshman year, I thought I was actually more interested in business. I was part of Stanford Women in Business and I think after I interned at Google as a software engineer, it became apparent to me that I was probably more interested in the product development aspect, like the sales and marketing business side of things.

The following summer, I interviewed for consulting roles and ended up at McKinsey and decided to go back after graduation. That kind of seemed like the best combination of everything to me because I served tech clients, so like large tech companies or even non tech companies, so that I think ended up being a really cool combination because it was an industry that I was interested in but I got to do a lot of different things with different companies like sales and marketing or more operations and just kind of all it. So I think that was a really cool opportunity to see a lot of different options.

I would say right now, software engineering is so in demand that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but I knew that it wasn’t for me but for some people, yes.

Did you know what you wanted your career to be following a major in CS?

I think again what’s funny is that my career made no sense to me.

I tried to optimize for certain things like I knew that Kinsey is a really amazing trading ground for people and CEOs would offer me a lot of opportunities because I think it’s a lot harder to major in Econ and then try to be a software engineer than majoring in computer science and then trying to go work on the business side.

And so I try to open as much optionality for myself as possible but at the same time, you don’t actually know how everything’s going to come back together and tie itself up until you’re looking backwards to a certain extent.

How did you end up creating Juni Learning?

I did meet my co-founder at Stanford and she was the class of 2013 technically. So a year ahead of me and we actually met through my now husband. They were at Bases together and he introduced us because he thought that we would be friends and we ended up working on a non-profit together after graduation. She was in the APM program at Google when I was doing consulting and she worked with my husband as well. Then we’re both leaving our previous roles at the same time and had the desire to work together.

As for Juni, I think that we both independently had come to the conclusion that we only wanted to work on something that we felt like was a super impactful but also potentially really big business. So it kind of came together at the time, it was very coincidental. On the side, I had started teaching a couple of kids CS separately and Ruby was working on a software product to help kids apply to college. So we were both in the education space together and got together to build this thing out. That first summer of 2017, we just found a bunch of kids in Palo Alto and started teaching them CS, and then we got accepted to Y Combinator later that fall.

Wow! That’s really cool! How did you get to Y-Combinator?

Yeah! So again, another super random story. Ruby, my co-founder, was the president of Bases when she was a senior and she worked pretty closely with Jessica Livingston at YC. So at that time, Jessica just became one of the founders of YC so we’d always known about YC. We were basically like we might as well try it out and it’s a good way to keep us disciplined schedule-wise. So we applied in the fall of 2017 and yeah, we got it.

At the time, we only had like a few dozen students and it was definitely still mostly an idea. They took a chance on us and I think it’s worked out quite well. So we graduated from YC in March of 2018. And yes, it’s definitely been kind of crazy since then. But it’s really really cool to see what that has enabled us to do in terms of growth. The company is quite a lot bigger now.

Were you scared to go into the startup world?

I think that I’m quite privileged that I worked in a more traditional career track for about a year and a half after graduation so I had enough financial security to basically work at a startup and to not take a salary at all for six months. I don’t think that everybody has that luxury, but it was the case for me and I was really thankful that I got that.

I think that one of the things we always knew was that we didn’t want to build something that would have a two-year time horizon to generate revenue. So we don’t like a business from a place where there was a solid business model. We knew that if things went a little worse than we had planned, for there would always be revenue coming in and we knew that there was a possibility.

So that’s how we set up a company. I think that the hardest thing for both of us is that we were you know raised in families where I think there’s a pretty traditional path to success for both of us — working at Google for the rest of our lives would have been an awesome outcome, really financially secure. And for both of us to kind of take a chance and be like hey now we’re going to work at a place where nobody’s heard of it yet and we’re not taking salary. That was definitely tough but I think that we had the background, she had been an investor and I’d been working at a startup before. We were kind of like this is the only way that we get ownership over what we’re doing. You know, it’s awesome to only report to each other and kind of keep ourselves internally motivated. I would highly recommend it for people but it is very tough. I mean I think you have to be very physically motivated and understand that there is a high probability that no one will know or care about what you’re doing for a long time but you have to work with that. But yeah, it’s very rewarding.

Have you ever encountered sexism in the tech world?

I think what’s interesting is that Ruby and I have very strong personalities and I think that neither of us has experienced outright discrimination in the way that I think that some people have and it’s very unfortunate that that exists.

I think that what’s been interesting for both of us is there is definitely soft connections that end up helping some people out. For instance, we actually were quite privileged in a lot of ways and we got really lucky with certain things like the fact that YC has a female founder and worked with us was a really useful connection. Then we have a lot of our investors as well are women and there are more investors who are women, which wasn’t true at all before, meaning there are more people who can invest in us and help us.

I think it’s like if you just look at the entire network of people that we could’ve worked with, it’s definitely a smaller group. But we ended up finding people who really cared about us and kind of like getting that one yes ended up being a lot more important. So it’s definitely harder I think in those soft power ways.

We did not even experience the worst of it. I think a lot of people do. I think it was more like sometimes we just think about what other opportunities might have been out there. We’ve been really lucky to work with some really amazing folks and they have supported us and rooted for us really early on.

Advice to Stanford undergrads in general?

My advice is that people should do things that are interesting to them that connects them with really amazing people. You know like Ruby and I only met because we were part of organizations. I met my husband in a student group on campus. She met him after Basis and then he connected us.

I think the more connections you can make with like-minded people, the more interesting network effects it creates and the more opportunities that you can find in the areas that you’re interested in. I think that’s really important. I think also real-world work experience. So that’s why I participated in a ton of student groups because I was always really interested in how to work with other people and how to collaborate as a team. I was part of Stanford Consulting as well and you have to do partnerships with companies and that ended up kind of like turning into internships for me during the school year. Before my sophomore year, I was very focused on my academics and I sort of actually wish that I had tried for more student groups and for different things. I think that’s what ended up being a lot more impactful for me later on than my grades and specific classes. Get more involved in the community on campus and outside of campus. There are so many cool companies, so many cool things that you can get involved with. Even cold emailing people, there are always people who want to help you out and they’re all doing really cool things.

So I’d say just getting out there and not being afraid because some people will definitely tell you no, but you just need one yes for something to turn out to be a really cool opportunity.