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How Randi Zuckerberg's cartoon aims to change parenting and Silicon Valley


This entrepreneur is getting animated.

The early Facebook employee and sister of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pursuing a number of ventures since she left Facebook five years ago, including writing a children’s book called “Dot,” that’s now being turned into a cartoon for the Sprout network, premiering this weekend.

“I was writing a business book called ‘Dot.complicated’ and I felt very torn writing a book as a tech expert, and then I’d go home to my two-year-old son and I felt very much like an amateur parenting a kid in the digital world,” she says. “So I told my publisher, you have to also let me write a book about the reality of modern childhood.”

And that became “Dot,” which was published in 2013, the protagonist being “a super spunky tech savvy little girl—important for me that she’s a little girl because we need to encourage more girls and women in tech—and she’s navigating when to be plugged in and when to be unplugged,” says R’Zuck.

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“It’s funny, when I watch Dot [the cartoon] I am both Dot and her parents,” Zuckerberg says. “When we think about tech and kids we think of a kid on a sofa glued to an iPad, [but in Dot] there’s a whole wide range of tech she play with [including] robots, drones and 3D printers.”

dot complicated
Dot. Complicated

I ask Zuckerberg about the lack of diversity in tech and Silicon Valley. It certainly is an issue, she acknowledges, one that is addressed a bit in Dot. “The characters don’t look like typical entrepreneurs,” she notes. (Meaning they aren’t all little white boys!)

“We have a system that is so entrenched she says. “All the key schools are primarily men studying CS and STEM and the investors are all men and that tends to perpetuate the cycle. Men invest in what they know and that’s mostly companies founded by other men.” Change starts in schools and at home she says, encouraging the next generation of girls.

“People at companies have to put effort into diversity,” she says. “I know, diversity takes a lot of effort. It’s hard. It’s easy to reach for the candidate you know, but it’s worth the effort.”

I also ask Zuckerberg about the huge role Facebook and social media now have in the election.

“This is a very personal question for me,” she says. “I felt like Facebook went from a college site to a global site right around the 2008 election, when I was very involved in politics at Facebook. I remember calling up politicians in the 2008 campaign and telling them they needed to set up a social media presence and them hanging up on me or saying ‘sorry we’re too busy.’ Fast forward two years to the 2010 midterm elections and I knew who was running before the media did because the first thing [the campaigns] did was have their Facebook profile set up on the backend, ready to click publish when they announced their candidacy.

“Now to see eight years later that most of what we’re seeing in this election is playing out on social media, it’s emotional and exciting.” It’s also complicated she says. “On the one hand we’ve created a platform that’s given a voice to everyone. Amazing! We’re giving a voice to the voiceless! On the other hand we’ve created a platform that’s given a voice to everyone,” she says, meaning that all of those voices add to the debate yes, but also clutter it in a way that it is still evolving.

Dot.complicated indeed.