SOMA Magazine Spring Fashion : Page 39
Salesforce.com. Retaining a well-founded infatuation with social networking, the integration of customer relationship manage-ment and Facebook was, for her, a necessity. While at Salesforce, Shih created Faceconnector, which retrieves pertinent business information to help create a more complete picture of business relationships and instantly provides an all-encompassing view of prospective and current clients. After conceptualizing the revolutionary idea, Shih had a tough time relating it to colleagues and finally took matters into her own hands. “I asked other people to build it because by then I hadn’t been a software programmer for many years and frankly I was pretty rusty, but people just didn’t get it or they didn’t want to do it and so I had to do it myself,” said Shih. “I said okay, I’m going to do this. I didn’t have an agenda, I didn’t even tell anybody about it, but because Facebook is so inherently social, all of my friends could see in their news feeds that I had built this application.” It’s exactly this kind of self-sufficiency that has brought Clara enormous success in every challenge she has taken on. “Nothing motivates me more than realizing something ought to be a certain way, or that something should exist but doesn’t,” Shih passionately remarked. “It’s cheesy saying, ‘If you aim for the stars, at least you’ll get to the moon,’ but that’s kind of the story of my life.” Her parents immigrated from Hong Kong and, typical of many Asian parents, gave her the choice of being a doctor or a lawyer at the impressionable age of 12. “I had no idea what I wanted to do,” says Clara. “But I was very good at math and science so I ended up going the engineering route and majoring in computer science for both my undergradu-ate and graduate degrees. It happened to be during a very special time in Silicon Valley during the early 2000s.” Having your life path dictated to you at a young age instills the habit of planning very far ahead—even when you know things are going to change, Shih says. “My first week of college I mapped out exactly what courses I was going to take over the next four years,” Shih laughs. “Of course it didn’t work out, but because of that planning ahead I was able to take some classes that other classmates didn’t even know existed.” Always looking to the future has helped shape Clara’s career organically, leading her from writing code to writing The Facebook Era , a New York Times bestseller. “If I had never studied computer science I would have never had the skills to create Faceconnector, which led to my book deal, which led to Hearsay Social,” said Shih. “I’ve always been intellectually curious and so I’ll explore things even if they don’t make immediate sense just because I find them interesting. For that, I thank my mom.” 39
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