Interview With Donna Kolnes

A law degree may seem out of place in the world of tech, but Donna Kolnes begs to differ. In this conversation with Asmita Puri, she looks back on how her legal expertise allowed her to bring refreshing perspectives to the development of various tech products. She explains how her unique technical skill is vital in the tech industry, which is full of equally technical elements as well. Donna also shares valuable advice for women who are navigating careers in both technology and law, emphasizing how they can showcase their talents while navigating issues on diversity and inclusivity.

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Listen to the podcast here

Interview With Donna Kolnes

From Engineering To Law

Donna, welcome to the show. I'm so glad we are doing this. I'm so glad to have you here. Before we jump into all of my questions and the conversation, can you introduce yourself to the reader?

My name is Donna Kolnes. My pronouns are she, her, and I have known Asmita for a number of years. We both work together at Splunk. We've both worked together on the Splunk Women's ERG which helps and support women in their careers at Splunk. We've had a lot of great fun doing that, but we're both very big supporters of women in technology. Happy to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me and letting me be part of your fun show.

Thank you for doing this. Again, I really appreciate it. The first question is the same every time, but you've had a long and successful career as a lawyer in tech. This is something that people might be familiar with, but might not be familiar with that if you have a law degree, you can end up in tech, and you can pursue a very successful career in tech. Can you share what initially drew you to law and how your career path evolved over the years in tech?

I think mine was probably a little more straightforward year. You're right. Anybody with any degree can end up going to law school and doing law and doing tech. It doesn't really matter. My path was a little bit more straightforward. I have an undergraduate degree in engineering. When I was considering graduate schools, I was thinking about, “Should I go on for more engineering or should I go to business school? What should I do?” When I took law classes in college, it was very interesting to me because engineering is very black and white and law is just all shades of gray.

It's very much a challenge for the engineering brain to start thinking in shades of gray. I got accepted to law school. I went part-time at night. I was working full-time during the day, going to law school at night for four years. It's a four-year program. Takes dedication. I went from working full-time in an engineering firm to working full-time in a law firm in my second year of law school. I completely made the shift over to law in my second year. I was hired by that firm that I was working at after graduation. I moved to another firm after that. I went in-house after that by choice and by in-house in case your readers don't know what that means. In the legal context, it means working for a company rather than a law firm.

Law firm, you've worked for the firm and you have many different clients and in a company, you have one client and it's the company and you work for that company and you practice law at that company. That's how I got into law in a company and then tech. I've got an engineering background. I started off my career as a patent attorney because patent attorneys have to have engineering backgrounds, but I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley and I'm an engineer and so now I'm a lawyer. It was just naturally fell into the opportunities that presented themselves were really all in tech and I love tech together really well.

There are two things that I really want to dig into. One is not clearly planned, but the other ones also actually don't plan. Anyway, there are two things that stand out to me. One is it's interesting that you say that engineering is black and white, whereas law is shades of gray. I find the law to be very black-and-white too. Like here's the law written, and you either follow it or you don't follow it. It's interesting you say it's shades of gray.

We're looking at the same thing from different angles. For me, engineering is black and white. The answer is this, or it's incorrect.

Zero than one.

When we create laws, laws are created for it. It's like the 80/20 rule. It benefits people 80% of the time. There are going to be some people who are to apply. You apply the law and it's not fair. I think I can give you one back in the day. We talk about dissolution of marriages and then who has to pay spousal support and sometimes it works well for somebody because you think in terms of the person that didn't have as big of a career, gets some support. Sometimes that doesn't work as well. The people didn't have as good as a career, but the support's not there because they're in that 20% that it doesn't really work well for.

It's also shades of gray, meaning that it depends on how you argue it. Like if you look at just court cases, you have to sway the jurors and you have to argue it a certain way and you try and convince people of your side. The other person trying to convince people of their side, it's like going to debate. Just to say that very same thing where you're trying to convince people to see it your way, one way or the other way. To me, that's very shades of gray. It depends on who the person who wins is the one who most successfully gets people to sway to their side.

Patent Law And Product Legal

That's a very good point. I was thinking of it. You said it brilliantly. We're looking at it. We're talking about the same thing but looking at it from different angles because I'm thinking of it in terms of following the law. It's very black and white in my head. Implementing it or using the law you're saying it's all shades of gray even writing new laws or using the existing laws to make your case or not make your case. That's interesting. That was tangent number one. I wanted to touch upon the patent law if you can talk more about that. I've worked with patent attorneys and really love them because my brain does not work the way yours does. If you can touch upon what that looks like.

Patent lawyers, there's a second bar. You think about lawyers taking the general bar, everybody takes a general bar. There's a second bar for certain fields within the law. Patent law is one of them. You take an additional bar. Patent lawyers have to not only pass that additional bar to be able to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. They also have to have a technical background to even qualify to take that bar. It's a field for people who like me are nerdy and love tech and then love intellectual property, which is inventions and ideas that are novel, useful, non-obvious, all of the same great buzzwords.

Law Degree: Patent law is the field for nerdy people who love tech, intellectual property, and novel ideas.

The companies are founded upon people, employees, and all the creativity, but also the intellectual property that they can create and own and exploit. I don't mean to exploit in a bad way, I mean, to sell and make into a product and whatnot. Patent lawyers tend to be very techie. I started off my career as a patent lawyer and did that for the law firm. When I want to move in-house, we can talk about why that as well. When I went to move in-house, it's a very small practice in-house. You only usually have a handful of patent lawyers in-house because they're not actually writing patents.

They're mining for the inventions and then they use outside counsel, people in law firms to write those patents. It's a very small group and so there's not a lot of opportunity there. I looked at that and thought, “I could do more of this, or I could do something else.” I found my sweet spot in product legal. Product legal is where we work with engineers, again, my people.

Engineers who are building out new products, who are creating those new products and coding and developing software, and inventing new things. We work with them as they're building out a new software program or the next iteration of an existing software program. We're making sure that they're doing it in all of the legally proper ways. Working with engineers is just natural to me. I am one.

I really found that that was really more to my liking as far as practice goes. In patent law, I was finding that I was getting narrower and narrower. I was focusing on certain parts of the technology only. I'm a product attorney, I see a much bigger picture. I see the whole thing. Like, “That invention created this product, which made this revenue for the company.” I'm just a more bigger-picture person. I like to see it. I like to see what technology benefits can come out of that intellectual property.

Law Degree: You do not need a technical degree to become a product attorney.

Lawyering In Tech

All that answers my in-house versus law firm lawyer question because I wanted to touch upon what it means. I'd heard you mention in-house and law firm lawyers during a call and I wanted to touch upon the experiences and then also what led to in-house pet at an enterprise software company. I hear the drive to keep pushing the engineering side and supplement it with your legal side. It makes sense. My product legal ended up being what you love more. The question is also, why law? Why not an engineer and go down that path? If you don't mind me asking.

When I was deciding on graduate school, I thought about more engineering, thought about just going moving forward with that and getting the next degree there. I think for me, at least what I was doing, what I would have wanted to do, I would have had to have moved outside of the Bay Area to do what I wanted to do. At the time I was married and he didn't want to move. I was like, “What can I do here? How can I advance myself and move to that next level and get that next degree here? What's the best thing I can do here?” Again, sitting here in Silicon Valley surrounded by all this fabulous technology, I made that decision and stuck to it. That's what I did.

What do you find the most compelling about practicing law in this tech sector? I guess it makes sense from engineering combining law, you went into practicing law in the techs. What is compelling and keeping you within the tech sector other than your love for engineering?

Keeping me in the tech sector is really location. Again, we're sitting here surrounded by just the best of the best. Everything exciting and new comes out here. The move from a firm to in-house is really, for me at the time, based on wanting to have a more reliable work-life balance, because law firms can extract a lot of time out of you. You have to have a certain amount of billable hours every year.

The tech sector has the best of the best. Everything exciting and new comes out here.

You have to bring in new clients. It's a lot. I don't knock anybody who wants to be a law firm lawyer and wants to become a partner in a law firm, more power to you. It's a rough life. I was at a point in my life where I wanted to start a family. I wanted to be able to know, I was going to end my day at a certain time. I could be counted on to pick up kids from school or whatever it is or have dinner on the table. I've been at this for a long time.

I want to say that 30 years ago, mostly women went in-house from law firms, mostly women made that transition to go into companies because the work-life balance was there and they weren't getting it in the law firms. A lot of women were just burning out on the partnership path in a law firm and saying, “I cannot do this.” They just leave the law completely leave it. When in-house opportunities came up, it was just a much more sane work style for most women. Soon afterward, men caught on. Male lawyers who said, “Wait a minute. They're getting all the great jobs.”

I've heard this story before.

It used to be, and I'm talking like a long time ago, like 30 years ago, that you did not make as much money going in-house as you could in a law firm anymore, especially here in Silicon Valley again. When you work in a company, you get equity and you get bonuses. I'm sure there's a difference between the top-shelf partner in a firm and working in-house, but that's not as big of a gap as it is anymore. It's more reliable.

It's more work-life balance. It's interesting. It's fascinating. It's great work. What's not to love? I have worked with a number of people who live in other states and they have a very hard time getting a job in tech because, after COVID, everybody can go to a job in tech because everybody's hybrid. Before then, it was much harder. It's just compelling because all the really cool technology tends to come out of here or Seattle, Washington or places around here. It's where it's happening. If you want to go where it's happening, you stay here.

In-House Vs. Law Firm

It's really cool that you're at the forefront of making sure that these things are happening in an ethical way.

Especially with the new AI coming out. That's a big aspect of AI is making sure that it does not include bias in the modeling and that it treats everybody ethically. There's a lot of focus on that at the moment with AI. There's been a focus on that in the past.

10, 12 years.

On all of that in the past, but bias in when we had, when we were doing more of the new digitization of photos and whatnot and recognition in photos and calling things out. Some photos wouldn't recognize darker skin tones. It's been around for many years. I think the legal practice in-house, especially of product attorneys, we have to look at that. We have to spot that, find that, figure it out, and then help our clients or in-house engineering teams do better, do it well.

I'm also getting pulled to, there was another thing you mentioned, understanding the product, shifting toward the product lawyer part of things. You are working with highly technical products and giving you a background in engineering, of course, that helps you. You mentioned that other lawyers within the organization, they come to you with technical questions because of your deep understanding of the product.

If I were to go and start learning about the various laws, it's going to take me a bit. For me to explain the various laws to other engineers, that's a big ask. Trying to draw some parallels there. How do you go about understanding these products? What strategies have helped you effectively bridge the gap between the legal expertise and the technical knowledge of the product?

Let me just start by saying you do not need a technical degree to become a product attorney. There are many people I've worked with, many people on my teams, and many people I've hired who do not have a technical degree and still are very excellent product legal attorneys. I'll say most of them just tend to be really nerdy. You don't have to have a technical degree to be nerdy. They're just really nerdy. They just love it. They just love to dig in, see how products work, and figure it all out. They're just really into this technology or this type of product or this thing or that thing.

They love it and they want to dig in. That's really what it takes to be a good product attorney is digging in to see if you can figure out how this product works. Once you understand how this product works, you then apply your legal training to spot the issues. You say, “That's going to be a legal issue.” You have to really understand how the product works. I've always found that the engineers that I've worked with who can explain it to me, it doesn't have to, preferably not super technical terms, if they can explain it to me in more just regular language, and it's easier to understand and everybody can understand it.

Engineers who can take all of that and boil it down to this is how it works, A is connected to B, connected to C, connected to D. They've been worth their weight in gold in my world. Also using the product helps. It's a little bit tougher like with Splunk products, which are B2B, they're enterprise products, I cannot really use them. When I was working in a consumer product company, I could just pick up the product and use it. I could know what it did. These are just software apps that are meant for consumers. I could just use it, play with it, work around it, and understand how it worked.

I would sit with the engineers and say, “You walked me through a little bit more of it and how does this work?” Understanding how the product works is really number one. If it's something like B2B products like we have at Splunk, having somebody be able to map it out on a whiteboard for you is super helpful. I'm a very visual learner, so if you can put it on that whiteboard and walk me through it, I can really understand it. I can ask questions about certain parts of it, and my questions will be legal questions.

It will be like, “How does this work?” I'm looking for something that is either legal regulation or it's legal issue. Digging in is really very important for people in this product legal field, just get really curious, and ask a lot of questions. Think for me, also the engineers, they actually will do a UX walkthrough for me. They will demo the product for me, but they will walk through it, and I will say, “Push this button, push that button. Where does this go? Where does that go? Where does that link go?”

Being able to do that with somebody, that UX review, is super helpful because then I get to see how it works. It's not a video, it's like I get to ask questions and stop and go over here and go over there. That's another way to help understand how the product works. Once you understand how it works, and you understand the legal issues that are really associated with that type of product, be it a cloud product or an on-prem product, or a consumer product on your laptop, then that's called product legal right there.

That's how we do what we do. That's the secret sauce. Also, I think it's really important to understand as a product attorney, all of the aspects of the business, not just the product. We have the product, it's really important to go as deep as you can and understand it as well as you can, but understand all the aspects of that business. How is it sold? Of course, you're going to know the license it's sold on because you probably have to write it, but also how is it sold? What is a go-to-market motion? How do the salespeople sell it? What are they saying when they sell it? There might be some false misrepresentations in that, and that's a legal issue.

It is important to understand all aspects of the business, not just the product.

How do they price it? How do they discount it? When we license inbound license, some third-party technology that we put in that product, how do we pay for that? How does that go into what the cost of the product is? Maybe I'm just weird that way, I like to understand the bigger picture, but I think understanding it end to end is also important to really be able to pick out all the legal issues. The legal issues may not just come in coding the product, legal issues may come in how it's being discounted or how it's being marketed if there's anything false in that marketing, or how it's being sold.

That part is interesting. I think I had not part of the selling part also involving legal. I mean, obviously, because I am so separated from all of it. I'm there developing the feature and now I'm not even developing, just building the environments that people can use to build their features. I never thought that, and I've worked with our legal team on various parts of the marketing, various parts of a new product, and various parts of the patents and things like that but I never thought about the selling aspect and involving legal with that.

I know the third-party libraries, when we have to do licensing, that's when legal gets involved too. That's very interesting. Learn something new every day. I really liked that one point. I like all the points you're making, but the part where you said that an engineer being able to break it down and not use the full flesh-like engineering language and just tell you how things are going from A to B and not getting to, “This is what the data pipeline is doing. This is where the like processor is coming in.” I think that I realized how important that was when I had to work with the legal team on my first patent at my company.

That was the first time because it was great. If I can talk through it, that's great for my engineering lead to understand for them to know that I understand all the details, but working with the patent attorney was the first time I had to explain my product, my feature to someone that was not technical. It's a whole other skill set that had to be worked on. I'm glad you called that out because that's leveling up as an engineer that's building your skill sets to work on a promotion or those patents are important. They're not nothing for an engineer as well as the legal team.

Women In Tech Vs. Women In Law

They're really important for a company. That's what the company's all about. I have to have that IP in order to sell it in order to be in the market. I think it does help for just the skill level and maturity of the engineer as well. They're so entrenched in the nitty-gritty details of what they're doing, but to be able to pop up just a level to say, “This person is focusing on this and I need to answer their question of this.” If you're talking with a patent attorney, they are focusing on what is novel. What is new? What's a novel? I can only patent what's novel.

If you're going down a rat hole with some procedure that you learned in college, it's not novel because you learned it way back then. It's existing and everybody uses it. That's not going to be helpful. Knowing, “This attorney is looking for what's novel. Let me just ignore the parts that are not novel and talk about the things that I think might be novel.” I don't know if they're going to ferret that out but that's maturity on your part. That is far more efficient. It just gets to what that is a person is looking for. 

The engineers I work with, and there are some engineers, not at Splunk, but in my prior employment that I worked with for many years. We train each other on that. Like they end up knowing what I'm looking for when I'm asking them questions and they don't go down paths that they know I'm not interested in. They know generally what I'm interested in and they bring it to me.

The beauty of that is then when an engineer is more sensitive to, “Here's what my product attorney wants to know from me.” The beauty is that there comes a point when they bring it to me rather than me having to go get it from them. That's for my world, that's the best. Like they have been sensitized to go, “Something doesn't feel right about this. I think Donna would be concerned with this. Let me go bring it to her.” That's just gold right there. Absolute gold.

Burnout And Women In Tech

I think the talking between various parts of the organization and various careers. My sister said, “This is the procedure. She's a doctor.” She'll talk about, “This is the procedure I performed.” I'm like, “Speak human. English to me.” That's what's coming up for me but I remember the question that I lost before circling back to you had mentioned a lot of women burning out or even underrepresented people burning out at law firms and leaving the law. I think when you were in tech and you see that happening with people in tech with women in tech.

I don't know if I have a question there, but you saw that happening 30 years ago at law firms and in law in general, and it's happening in tech, not at the same level, I would say, or at the same pace, but we talk about the “leaky bucket.” It's not on women to fix the leaky bucket. It is a systemic problem like we're aligned on that part of things. It's just a systemic level of burnout and the “leaky bucket” problem. As someone who's been working and in the industry and adjacent to law and the NINTEC too, how do you deal or how do you make peace with that of corporate America?

I reached my decade in tech and I was like, “I'm so exhausted.” This show is a product of that where I had to have these conversations with other women because in my own world, I was getting burned out. I was feeling not seen, not heard. I started connecting with other women, learning about their stories and their struggles. It just made me feel seen and heard. I don't know if I'll be able to do that for another decade or two decades. How do you do it? I'm asking.

I feel like I come from a different era completely. I think when women were burning out in law firms, because everybody was on a partnership track and there were no opportunities to go off track, or you would just lose too much if you did. Initially, there were no opportunities to go off track. You were either on this track or you had to leave. That was an easy answer. It's like, “I cannot do both. I cannot have this and do what I want to do with the other parts of my life, whatever that be. Certainly not with families and aging parents and all of that.”

Women didn't have a choice to burn out. It became important for everyone to say, “Look, it's important to have representation by all types, everyone, all genders, all races, all everything.” What makes for the best types of companies, law firms, let's start with the law firms, is that they do have a DEIB initiative. They are trying to make sure that there's representation from across the board at the firm. If the firms aren't going to do that themselves, then what happens is the companies do it. If you are at a company and you are hiring a law firm, you have the power to say, “Show me your DEIB strategy.”

When I was at a prior company and we were calling BD contests, a horrible word, but that's what they were called. Got to get over that. You were interviewing multiple law firms to see who you wanted to give the work to. One of the questions would be, what's your affirmative action? What's your DEIB? What is it?

Making sure to go even another click deeper to say, “When you do interview them and they bring three men and three women, and they've got people of color, underrepresented minorities and whatnot, you always have to ask, are these the people who will be working on my work because that might be just there for show, and there's nothing really there.” Companies will require law firms to do better. That's been happening, that law firms have now ever since many years ago, done better because they know that their clients and companies are insisting on it or insisting on that.

Corporate America, we've got far more initiatives now around diversity and equity inclusion. It gets better and better every year. I'm going to take an exception to the last year, but for the past maybe 10, 15 years, it's definitely gotten better and better as companies do better and want to move the needle and want to show and publish their numbers, how many women do we have in tech? How many underrepresented minorities do we have? They're embarrassed by those numbers, then they try and do better. They influence whoever they hire, like law firms or vendors, to do better as well.

What I'm hearing is, if you take a step back and look at all these years, and it's not that every year its progress bis eing made and it's improving, but if you look at what the industry looked like 10 years ago and today, there is a significant amount of improvement. It's not enough by any means but it is moving slowly and so you got to keep going.

You have to keep pushing the elephant down the thing. We look along and see we're not even at pay parity yet, but we've come a long way. I wouldn't say I would never give up just because we've not gotten to it yet, because it's a constant push. I will constantly push to make it better for the next generation, the next generation. I'm not going to give up.

Would I love it if it was all resolved tomorrow? Heck yes, but it's not going to happen. It's taken this long, it'll take longer, and every year brings its new challenges. We all just collectively need to keep pushing. I think that's why you and I do work in companies on women's ERGs, because that's where we're pushing there. We're pushing at the company. We're making sure the company's doing it right.

We're making sure when the company puts on a conference that they have equal representation. We're making sure that companies, when they mine for patents are asking women and doing better and showing us their data. We work at a data company. Show us your data. Show us your data, what you're doing, what strides you're making and how it's getting better. That causes them to focus on that and at least pay attention to it and never give up.

I honestly appreciate it. Appreciate you saying that and appreciate you pushing the elephant, even though people like me get tired and easily give up at times. I appreciate you continuing to do that for my generation and the generation coming. I really appreciate it. You should know that I really look up to you. It's really appreciated and it's motivating and it's inspiring.

It matters, thank you. Touching on the women in tech and law, there's often a perception that women in tech, it refers primarily to women engineers or developers or people in technical roles. Given your role and long career in tech, have you ever encountered resistance or felt excluded from the definition? Do you think there's a gap in how we view the contributions of women in non-technical roles within tech companies?

I have not felt resistance in my career to being included as a tech woman, but I have definitely felt exclusion. I think that's what you were leaning towards, yes, I have felt excluded because, in tech companies, there are women who are in roles like you are where you're actually doing the product development, the coding, technical engineering roles. There are plenty of women in other roles who may have tech backgrounds and may not. I'm sitting here in legal and I think some people will just think, “No, she's not a tech woman.”

I actually do have a technical background. It's not apparent. It's not written on my forehead but also I just think women working in technology have much more technical knowledge than women who are working in art, let's say. To count us out as not technical women, I think does us a disservice and does everyone at the company a disservice because we have to have some level of technical chops just to understand the product, to understand the company, and to understand all of that.

I think everyone in a tech company that's a woman should be considered a technical woman. I've had a long history of doing women's ERGs at companies and collating them at companies because there are so many women at a company, it's hard just to have a group that's just because we're women, we're part of this group. It's really more beneficial when that large group of women at a company break down into cohorts.

In a cohort, you will have women who code versus women in finance versus women in marketing, but that doesn't mean they're not technical. I think the exclusion I've felt, but then I think when they explained it to somebody, it's short-lived. They go, “I never just never thought about it that way. I just never thought about it that way.” They realized, “No, you're right. You're all technical women too, because you're in the tech company and you have to understand this technology.”

I think I'll be honest here, earlier in my career, I was resistant to calling everyone at the company as women in tech because I felt I was struggling to be heard. I was struggling to be seen. I would present in meetings and then all the questions would go to my white male manager. There's an idea, or I had this notion that there's only room for one. There's only room for so many. When there were other people coming in and going like, “I'm a woman in tech.” I'm like, “Are you kidding?”

I am dealing with these engineers on a daily basis. I am dealing with the women in tech problem. You have no idea. I think it took accepting there's room for all just because there's someone else on the table does not take away my right to be heard. My right to be seen. Another woman can only amplify my voice. There's magic, there's power in numbers. It was fighting my own misogyny and patriarchy to accept me as a woman, fighting another woman doesn't make sense. It's dumb. It took a while to accept. It took a lot of learning.

It took a lot of educating myself, making mistakes, and then people calling me in and telling me, “Listen, cheers, go do the study.” Thinking from that perspective, I can see people who think that like we're fighting with each other to get to the top. There can only be one woman CEO and one woman on the C-suite. If it's not me, then like I cannot let anybody else in the room. No.

Two women can be there, three can be there. The entire C-suite can be women. I don't need to be fighting another woman or including their issues or their women in tech struggles. I do think the struggles are different. Your struggle as a woman in the law of the part of the company is different than mine. There is an overlap for sure because you're dealing with engineers too but every woman walking inside a tech company is a woman in tech, no matter what part of that company.

I don't care. You are a woman in tech. You are dealing with all of the isms, like sexism, racism, all of the things you're dealing with, the same things that I'm dealing with, and we can support each other. Like exclusion today, standing here does not make sense to me. There's a level of learning that needs to happen to create space for all.

I agree. I let them all in because we're stronger in numbers. Our struggles at this company are very similar to struggles at all other Silicon Valley technical companies and all of those women. Think of that bench of women who we could also connect with and share with and fight with. I don't mean against each other, but together against the patriarchy, against how it is in these companies. I fully agree with you that within companies, the different departments have different issues. You take a department like coders or strong engineers, product development, and then you take the issues that the women in sales have and then very different, similar in some ways, different in some ways.

You look also, there are departments that are historically, there are more women in that department like HR. HR is more women than men, generally speaking, and historically speaking. Legal tends to be 50/50 or better or worse, marketing. Another one that has a lot of women in it as well. Each department has a different makeup. We will have little different issues, but overall there's a big overlap in those issues. I think that's where we need to all pull together and support each other where those issues overlap.

Rapid-Fire Questions

I'd internalize misogyny and that light note shifting into rapid fire. What's your go-to way to unwind after a busy day?

I am a bath girl. I love a nice soak in the tub, a nice big deep tub in a soak. Bubbles or no, I don't care. Just a nice big deep soak in a tub.

I discovered the magic that is bubble baths two years ago. My ADHD brain would lose it in a bathtub. I'd be like, “What am I supposed to do? Just lay here?” Great idea. I might need to do that. That's a good idea. Thank you so much. A piece of advice you would give to women starting out in tech law.

I would say be very curious, ask a lot of questions, and learn that business end to end, not just your little chunk of it in the middle. Learn it end to end because I think it will make you stronger and better skilled at whatever it is you do if the bigger picture.

Learn a business end-to-end, not just your little chunk in the middle. You can become stronger and more skilled if you know the bigger picture.

I'm going to add, if you weren't a lawyer or an engineer, what career do you think you would pursue?

If I wasn't a lawyer, what career would I pursue? I've always been mechanically oriented and technical, so it would be really hard to do something different from that. One of my other loves and passions is cooking. I would probably do something with that and I'd probably end up being a head chef at a restaurant or maybe even owning a restaurant.

That's so cool. What type of a cuisine?

I have an Italian nonna, so it's going to be Italian all the way.

I love that. Is there a book or podcast or resource that's been a game changer for your career and something that you would recommend?

Yes. Many books, and many podcasts, but I think the game changer for me was when I joined about 7, or 8 years ago now, a local women's networking organization. It's called The Club SV for Silicon Valley. It is an organization of women, all different types of professional women, accountants, finance people, lawyers, doctors, you name it. We're there to support each other. Also there to help each other get to the next level. It's a women's assistance into executive programs and executive work. It provides programming, it provides events, it provides mentoring, everything that you would possibly need it provides.

I've really gotten a lot out of this group. One of the things that they started many years ago was called Incubator. It was a small cohort of women who, for a year, we would meet once a month and work on an issue, something that you need to do to advance your career. If you had to do it on your own, you just wouldn't find the time. You just get too busy to do it. Here it was like, you had to be accountable once a month for this next bit that was going to help you. For example, one of the things we worked on was, you have to have your elevator pitch.

You have to have your resume. You have to have your this and they would focus on it and everybody would help you. You would focus on it and you would just get that nailed. The next one was if you were interested in becoming on the board of a nonprofit, how do you get board-ready? Here's all the work you need to do to be board-ready. Like I said, just twelve different subject matters of things you wanted to work on and knew you needed to do to advance your career, but you just never found the time to do.

That group of women, and we do everything from just hiking on the weekends to events where you learn something or networking and events. It's just been a fabulous group. It also, like you were saying, as a meter board, you just needed to talk to other women and sympathize with other women. Also, there's an aspect of that. I do think women coming together are very powerful and women coming together in a group to support each other can really raise each other up. If we are focusing on that and you have like a program that you go to or this group of women who are there to say, “I'm here to get you to the next level of your career.” It's so powerful when we come together like that. It really is.

If women come together in a group to support each other, they can raise each other up.

I got goosebumps listening to this. I have to check this out. That's so cool. I really got goosebumps everywhere.

I'll bring you to the next event. Count on that.

Why Still Tech?

I would love that. Thank you. This one you touched upon, but in one sentence. After all these years, why still tech?

It's just, I'm so comfortable in it. Like I said, growing up when I was a kid, it was always very mechanical, always very technical. When you had those high school aptitude exams, I was always the techie. I was always a mechanical person. I was always on that end of the spectrum. Like art, no, not you, Donna. Like, stick to the tech. It's just part of who I am and it's what I love. You always love the things that you are good at naturally. This has always been my bent. I find it fascinating. I just find it interesting every day. I learn every day too, which is so important.

Never be stagnant, always be learning, always be stretching. I think this technology area just gives me so much to do. I've done this for a long time, but then I came to Splunk and now I'm looking at security products and cybersecurity, which I'd never seen before. I get to take what I already do and I'm skilled at and apply it to this new field, which is feeding me because it's making me stretch and grow and learn new things. It's never a dull moment here in technology. Love it.

Law Degree: There is never a dull moment here in technology.

I can genuinely hear your love for technology. I know we've worked on things we've been on calls before, but just this almost hour with you, I can feel, I can hear your love for technology. She's beautiful.

I feel really fortunate and blessed to be here in the hotbed of technology, being able to do what I love to do in a place where there's tons of it around me so I can always make a move. If one job goes away, there's always another one to get. I feel really fortunate that I found the thing that I do and I love to do in the area where I live.

Episode Wrap-up

I think whenever women are like lucky me or any underrepresented folks are like lucky me. I feel the push to be like, “No, but you also do amazing things and you worked hard to get here.” I hear you. I cannot help myself. I have to remind you that you're amazing and it's not easy to have this long and successful career in tech and it really speaks to your love for tech. Yes, there can be an element of privilege and just the luck aspect of it, but cannot discount your work and what you do on a daily basis for tech and for women in tech too. Thank you. Finally, where can people find you if they want to learn about being at a law firm, doing law at tech? Where can people find you?

I'm happy to chat with anybody about it, especially younger people who are interested in maybe getting into law or if they're in law school and they want to think about a career in tech. They can get to me through LinkedIn. You can send me a message through LinkedIn and I will respond.

Lovely. Thank you. I will include all this in the description. This has been absolutely lovely. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I was so flattered when you asked me. This has been awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for doing this show. It's a very important subject matter for everybody. Everybody reading this blog, it's good information. Read all the blogs that Asmita puts out. If you mention the podcast in your DM on LinkedIn to me, I will respond.

How nice. Thank you.

Important Link

• Donna Kolnes - LinkedIn

About Donna Kolnes

Legal generalist with broad experience across all aspects of law affecting the product development, marketing and sale of online services, enterprise offerings, and consumer software products. Provides actionable, business-oriented advice to cross-functional teams at all levels of management (including engineering, design, finance, product, and marketing) on issues related to new and existing products and features throughout the entire product development lifecycle. Experienced managing legal teams responsible for privacy, product security, IP issues, licensing matters, product development support, and marketing support.