Tracy Chou, a Stanford grad and a 2014 Forbes 30 under 30 inductee, is most known for her Medium post titled “Where Are the Numbers?” calling for Silicon Valley tech companies to release their diversity numbers, a move inspired by a conference she attended that was hosted by Sheryl Sandberg.

Our dive into Chou’s story focuses on a single moment in college when she turned away from a a potential Master of Business Administration and made the decision instead to pursue a technical masters, based primarily on a dare from a friend.

From there, she went on to intern at Facebook where she turned down a full-time job to become the second engineer at Quora. Afterward, Chou moved onto become one of the early engineers at Pinterest where her team worked on several major projects, including taking Pinterest from a desktop-first site to a mobile-first site, helping the company to scale as it became increasingly—and wildly—popular.