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decode.

I'm Cara Swisher, Executive Editor of Recode. You may know me as the leading cause of heart

attacks along Silicon Valley executives, 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 subscribe to Recode decode at iTunes.com slash

decode and while you're there, leave us a review. Today in the red chair is Vic Gundotra,

the CEO of Mobile Heart Monitor Maker Alive Corps. Vic is a longtime techie spending 15 years

at Microsoft and seven years at Google, where he's best known as the person who led Google's

social networking effort, Google Plus. In November 2015 he joined Alive Corps, which helps consumers

monitor their heart health from their smartphones. Vic, welcome to Recode decode. Thank you very

much Cara. You've had quite a history. Let's talk a little bit about you because I think it's

where you came from is super interesting. Talk like how you got to tech in general and then

to Alive Corps in the end. When I was a kid I was a hardcore nerd at the time when that was in

the ceremony, right outside of Washington DC in Maryland. I loved programming at a very,

very early age, about 11 years old. It was far easier to program than talk to girls. That's

what I did in teenage years. I coded non-stop. And why? What got you to it? What was it? You know,

there were some bad things that were happening in my life and my personal life that I couldn't have,

I had no control over. But when I sat down as a 12, 13 year old in front of a computer,

...