Leah Culver facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Leah Culver
Speaking in 2008 at The Next Web Conference (Amsterdam)
Born	1982/1983 (age 41–42)
Alma mater	University of Minnesota
Occupation	Engineer
Employer	Twitter, Inc.

Leah Culver (born in 1982 or 1983) is a talented computer programmer. She is also a startup founder and an angel investor, which means she helps new companies get started by investing money.

Education and Early Career

Leah Culver started her college journey studying art at the University of Minnesota. But she soon found her passion in computers! She switched her major and earned a degree in computer science in 2006.

After college, Leah began working at new technology companies called startups. One cool thing she did was etch company logos onto her laptop. This was a creative way to get attention for the companies she worked for!

Building New Online Tools

Leah is known for helping create important internet tools. She co-authored a special computer code library for something called OAuth 1.0. This helps you safely log into websites and apps. She also helped create OEmbed, which makes it easy to embed content (like videos or photos) from one website onto another.

Founding Pownce

In 2007, Leah co-founded a company called Pownce. She started it with Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka, who were also involved with the popular website Digg. Pownce was a unique micro-blogging site, kind of like a mix of Twitter and Napster. Leah programmed the entire site herself as an experiment!

Instead of getting money from big investors, Leah funded Pownce with help from her friends and family. In 2008, a company called Six Apart bought Pownce. Even though the Pownce website closed, Leah used the technology she built for it in other products like TypePad. She left Six Apart in 2010.

Creating Convore and Grove

After Pownce, Leah didn't stop building! She co-founded another company called Convore with Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire. Convore was all about real-time chat. It was inspired by other popular chat services at the time.

Later, Convore changed its focus and became Grove. Grove was a chat service designed for groups of people working together. Leah mentioned that Grove was sold to another company in 2012.

Working at Dropbox and Twitter

Leah then joined Dropbox, a company known for cloud storage. There, she and her team did something really cool: they created a working version of a fictional computer program called Pied Piper. This program was from the popular TV show Silicon Valley and was known for its amazing Image compression abilities!

Later, Leah became the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Breaker. Breaker was a platform that helped people find new podcasts. In 2021, Leah and her team from Breaker joined Twitter. They helped build Twitter Spaces, which is a feature for live audio conversations.

Awards and Recognition

Leah Culver has been recognized for her amazing work in technology many times:

• In 2008, she was on the cover of MIT Technology Review magazine.
• Fast Company magazine named her one of the Most Influential Women in Web 2.0 in 2008.
• She was featured in a documentary film called The Startup Kids in 2012.
• In 2019, she was on the Girl Geek X list of 30 Female CTOs to Watch.

Leah also invests in other technology companies. She has supported a woman-led company that makes canned wine and Gowalla, an augmented reality social app.

Personal Life

Leah Culver grew up in Minnesota. Today, she lives in San Francisco, California, with her famous pug dog, Mr. Wiggles, who has many followers on Instagram.

In 2020, Leah bought a famous pink house in San Francisco known as a Painted Lady. She wanted to fix up the 130-year-old house and make it more environmentally friendly. She even shared the progress on Instagram and Twitter! However, she later realized how much work it would be and decided to sell the house in 2022.