DataRepublican never spoke in a meeting. A million people are listening now.
By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice
Jennica Pounds was in the corner, as usual.
It was a meeting at Snap, and the way it worked was simple: her communication partner, Brent Mills, typed notes to her on a laptop. She typed back. Mills translated her shorthand for the room. Most meetings, nobody looked at her screen. That was fine. It had worked for years.
Then Evan Spiegel stopped mid-sentence.
“Wait,” the CEO said. “I want to know what Jennica is saying.”
Forty years. That was the first time anyone in a meeting had done that.
Jennica Pounds—known online as DataRepublican, small r—is deaf and nonspeaking. She spent more than fifteen years inside some of the biggest technology companies in the world: Amazon, eBay, Snap, Upstart, where she was a senior distinguished m...


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