Welcome everyone to episode number 107 of Underserved.

Joining me today is Jason Judge, Vice President of Data at Octa.

Let's get started.

Welcome to this week's edition of Underserved, the podcast for the rest of the tech industry,

where we focus on stories of tech industry leaders, their

insights, and their lessons learned. And now, your host, Andrew Jalina.

Jason, thank you so much for joining us today on Underserved. Thank you, Andrew. It is awesome to be

here and just to be able to be a part of a podcast that is telling the hidden side of our world. I'm so happy to be here. Well, let's delve into the hidden side of yours. So way back when, Southern California grew up tinkering a bit, what was that like? I like to see how things work as a kid. I was an only child for the first 17 years of my life, so I had a lot of time to tinker, whether that was with Legos or taking apart the family electronics, setting VCRs and the like. I had the opportunity to be around a lot of computer technology where we lived growing up, where I had exposure to a computer lab in the first grade,

for instance. It opened my eyes to a whole other world of tinkering where it wasn't just the

physical world that I could play with, but there was software that you could write and interact with,

and it just really captured my interest. Now, you ended up moving to Washington and ended up in

Redmond right around the time

that Win 95 is coming out. This is a watershed moment for Microsoft. What happens next? It was. I mean,

the world's introduction to Chips Challenge and SkiFree. How could we forget that time in our life?

It was sort of a random place to move to. My family wasn't necessarily involved in technology, but one thing or another brought us to Redmond. And going to Redmond High School, we had, again, another computer lab, again, very fortunate that Mrs. Westrup ran. She ran all of our business classes at Redmond. And we had these shiny new computers, courtesy of Microsoft,

and Mrs. Westrup made sure that we were given the opportunity to do our own thing in those

classes. She really leaned into people's strengths, whether it was business communications or

business law. She was making sure that the computer became a central part to what we were doing

and how we were learning. She easily could have glossed over that fact. She could have easily

just taught the old curriculum. She saw that the future was coming and I learned a ton from her.

So you go to state school, University of Washington. Do you end up like kind of carrying this

forward or did you know what you wanted to do when you got there?

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