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Recode Radio presents Recode Decode coming to you from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Hi, I'm Cara Swisher, Executive Editor of Recode. You may know me as the star of the new TV show Law and Order Creepy VCs on Sandhill Road,

but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode, a podcast about tech and media's key players, big ideas and how they're changing the world we live in.

You can find more episodes of Recode Decode anywhere you listen to podcasts. We're on Apple Podcast, Google Play Music, Tune In, Stitcher, SoundCloud and more, or just visit recode.net slash podcast for more.

Today in the red chair we have two fantastic guests, Erica Baker and Sarah Coonst.

Erica has been on this show before. She's an engineer and a diversity advocate who spent nine years at Google and two at Slack and recently joined Kickstarter as its director of engineering.

And Sarah is the founder and CEO of Fitness Startup Pro Day as well as a board member, Adventure for America.

For the next hour or so we're going to focus on the recent explosion and the stories of sexual harassment and other issues around diversity in Silicon Valley,

the publicity around which has led many investors and others to step down. Erica and Sarah, welcome to Recode Decode.

Thanks, Cara. Glad to be here.

I'm glad you're here too. Now Erica, I'm going to start with you. You have been on the show before and we talked about a wide range of things when you were here.

And a lot of what you talked about, I listened to it two nights ago, it sort of come to pass.

Talk a little bit about, our discussion was about diversity, lack of diversity, the ecosystem being sort of damaged here in the Valley.

Given all this stuff that's happened since then, largely around gender, but it's the same thing as far as I can tell.

Talk a little bit about how you look at the ecosystem now and what's happening.

Well, I feel like our ecosystem right now is built on the idea of brilliant jerks.

We have this idea in the Valley that money is over everything. And so as long as you're making money, you can behave however you want to behave.

And we see that in the VCs harassing women, we see that in industry leaders, just being cruel and bullies to people in their organizations.

We see Travis and the different people at Uber behaving poorly and treating their staff poorly.

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