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Pree Walia has really great nails, and she knows it. Today, one of her digits features a pizza emoji, another has the poop emoji, and a third has a crystal-clear image of Maverick, a fluffy brown sheepdog she considers the office mascot. “At my core, I’m a girly girl,” she said, pushing her waist-length brown curls behind one ear.

We meet in November 2019, inside Star Space, the Silicon Valley coworking center she works from. Walking through the space is like entering a CB2 catalogue: pastel colors, velvet sofas, and a hanging chair swing. “You might recognize this from our videos,” she said—the place is pretty enough to use as a backdrop for her company promotions.

On social media, Pree’s all about the fun times—her feed features beautiful sunsets and international travels, and she’s pictured in cute dresses, hanging with friends and swigging White Girl Rosé. With her love of fashion and beauty, Pree stands out among the tech bros in their Patagonia fleece-lined vests, joggers disguised as jeans, and AllBirds sneakers. The fact that she’s a girl also sets her apart; in Silicon Valley, men hold around 80 percent of all technology jobs.

It’s about the worst possible place to found a beauty startup, even when it’s a technology and beauty company. Working in beauty wasn’t in her life plan, but the beauty space—nails, in particular—has been her world for the last five years.

Pree didn’t pay a manicurist for the cheeky pizza emojis and puppies on her digits, and she didn’t paint them herself. Her tight-looking talons are courtesy of the Nailbot, a portable printer that prints nail art on her fingers. Designs are chosen via her cellphone app. She knows what she likes. Growing up, she had every manicure in the book—French tips, gel manicures, glitter, stripes, geometrics, with talons every color of the rainbow. “I like being a girl—whatever that means, [even if] it’s a socially constructed version of femininity,” she said. “I like getting my hair done. I like getting my nails done. I like getting spa treatments. They make me feel good.”

Making a difference also makes her feel good, which was why she founded her company, Preemadonna, with the Nailbot as her first product.

Sure, great nails won’t get you to the White House (even if they might help, just a little)—but if that’s all you see when you look at the Nailbot, you’re not thinking big enough.

“Our big vision: can you learn how to code nail art?” says Pree. She views the Nailbot as a stepping stone into the larger world of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math). “The nature of this product is that it’s a vehicle for more: artists, hackers, coders, and programmers!” Yeet.

So yes, your nails will look sweet, but that’s just the beginning. Learning to build a touch-screen printer and coding in your nail designs will get you far in life. The idea is to use the Nailbot to get male, female, nonbinary, and trans people interested in technology. Once she has their attention, she introduces them to STEM initiatives and the MakerGirl program, which teaches 3D printing and STEM to girls ages seven through ten.

Here’s Why This Matters

For better or worse, the world runs on code right now; it’s how traffic lights change from red to green, how food gets from the field to our plates, and how medical robots perform a bunch of invasive operations. It’s how stores decide what dresses to restock and how schools evaluate your grades.

But most of this code is written by dudes. In 2018, women made up around 21 percent of the global tech workforce at Google and Facebook, the companies essentially running the world today. In 2014, this stat was worse; women made up 15 percent of tech jobs at Facebook. For women of color, it sucks more; in 2018, 0.8 percent of female tech hires at Google were Black and 1.4 percent were Hispanic. At Facebook, the numbers are so low they didn’t separate them by gender; 1.3 percent of all tech hires were Black, and 3.1 percent were Hispanic.

Working in technology is about more than writing the code that runs the world. Coders also get big salaries, big perks, and big power. They matter in the world order. So the fewer women there are on the payroll, the less it looks like women matter.

Sure, in the olden days, women stayed at home and men went to work. But people also had smallpox and polio!

Today, most schools run coding classes and special programs, so all genders get a shot at learning these skills. In many schools, they’re required subjects; if you fail Java 101, you have to retake it. But—and it’s a big but—while most everyone now learns to code in school, that doesn’t mean they code at home.

One study found that 40 percent of boys who learn to code at school will code at home for fun, compared to 5 percent of girls.

One reason for this is what’s available to code. Not every girl wants to mess around with Star Wars or Batman. Many do, but, for some, they lack any appeal. There are some gateway coding toys such as GoldieBlox (more on this later), but none approach coding from a beauty perspective. That’s where the Nailbot comes in.

***

As a little girl, Pree always thought her career would be in politics. She was born in the South, in New Orleans. Her family moved to Madison, Mississippi, when she was nine years old. No matter where she lived, she’d plunk herself down in front of the TV whenever the debates were on, sitting as close as she could to the screen to take in everything.

One of her earliest memories is of watching the debates with her dad. He’d get so excited watching the various politicians speak. Her dad loved America, loved it with the type of passion that only an immigrant has. He’d emigrated to the US from India, during one of the many wars in the 1960s, to attend university and find a better, safer life.

America was everything he’d hoped for; he was hired as an electrical engineer by a great company, and Pree’s mom ran a bunch of successful franchises—everything from a Baskin-Robbins (Pree’s top tip: try the Gold Medal Ribbon flavor) to jewelry store chains. In this country, you can do anything, be anything, he told Pree. It’s the land of opportunity!

Maybe I’ll be a senator one day, she thought. Or even the president! At school she took speech and debate, working on her diction till all traces of her Southern accent were gone. She signed up for student council and organized the school’s philanthropic drive. Her favorite thing was getting people together, all working toward a bigger purpose. She craved the feeling of a task successfully completed. That feeling of achievement was addictive. In high school, she interned for the Mississippi Secretary of State, helping out on charity enforcement.

“I was fascinated by the political process,” she said. But Pree realized that being in charge wasn’t what drove her. “Whether you’re heading student council, running for president, or being an entrepreneur, it’s about having a vision of the future.”

Pree and her two elder sisters (and sometimes her little bro) helped out with her mom’s businesses; many nights, she’d scoop ice cream for the local kids and listen to their chatter. So many different people, so many different wants. The world was so big, and there were so many things she could do.

After high school, she studied history with a gender studies minor at Northwestern University. College life was awesome; she joined a sorority, made lifelong friends, and enjoyed feeling like an adult.

But Pree found that she couldn’t stay away from politics. In 2003, she volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign (spoiler: he lost), and when she graduated from college in 2004, she was hired by Campaign Corps, a program at Emily’s List that supports women that are running for office. For an entry-level graduate, the program worked a bit like Teach for America; after learning how to operate a campaign, Pree was sent to a congressional race in Arizona. She followed this with a stint in Washington DC, working for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, then headed by Nancy Pelosi. Next, she headed west to work on the California primary for governor. She was twenty-four years old.

Still unsure about what to do with her life, she applied to business school, hoping that would narrow it down. Maybe consulting? That would give her variety and a chance to keep affecting large groups of people. She applied to all the big-name firms…but no one would hire her. “I think that with my crazy energy and my crazy background, I wasn’t the best fit for them,” she said. She confused the companies; a history major with a background in political campaigns and ice cream who wanted to get into consulting? Frustrated, Pree worked on a new plan. She knew that she valued a high-energy workplace that operated at a fast pace. Maybe joining a startup?

In 2009, she was hired part-time by a San Francisco Bay Area startup that specialized in advancing LED light systems; they focused on connected technology and color-changing bulbs. She was the only woman on the team. But the world was changing around her. By the time she left, almost a fifth of the employees were women.

***

The tech landscape was changing in other ways as well. In 2011, Debbie Stirling, a twenty-eight-year-old designer at a San Francisco branding firm, was inspired by a chat she’d had with her friends during brunch. They were reminiscing about the favorite toys they’d played with as kids when one woman complained that she’d had to borrow her brother’s Legos, as they were never bought for her. Debbie knew that feeling well. She’d grown up in Rhode Island with the idea that “engineering” was a nerdy and intimidating word. Her parents wanted her to be an actress. They bought her Barbie dolls, but no Legos. Engineering was just for boys, she thought. “I was so wrong!” Despite having no construction toys as a kid, with a teacher’s guidance, she’d turned to science, and graduated from Stanford University with a degree in engineering and product design. “I became obsessed with the idea of getting girls interested in STEM through toys,” she told reporters.

For the next nine months, after she finished work, she pored over research about how kids’ brains develop, and how the different genders learn. “My aha moment: realizing that combining storytelling with building was a way to get girls interested in STEM,” she said. She’d discovered that young boys have good spatial skills (one reason that they love Legos so much) whereas young girls have great verbal skills; they’re all about the characters and the stories.

Debbie named her company GoldieBlox, targeting five- to nine-year-olds with a book-and-build combo. The kit contained a construction set and a book, starring Goldie, a blond tween inventor who loved purple overalls and taking things apart.

Whenever Goldie had a problem, she built a machine to fix it. The set let kids build that too, unknowingly learning basic engineering principles as they followed her adventures. Debbie’s color palette was light, fresh, and fun—there is pink in there, but it hasn’t been “pinkwashed.” After Goldie, she introduced Ruby Rails, an African American coding whiz.

Excited with her design, she brought her prototype to the New York Toy Fair, the best-known toy fair in America. No one liked it. “I was told that toy patterns were innate—girls liked playing with dolls and boys liked building,” she said. They told her it was a noble cause, but it would never go mainstream. She disagreed. “I knew these were outdated stereotypes that needed to change.”

She wasn’t going to quit now; she believed so much in the project that she’d spent her life savings on it. So she turned to Kickstarter. “GoldieBlox is to inspire girls the way Legos and Erector sets have inspired boys to develop an early interest and skill set in engineering,” she wrote. “It’s time to motivate our girls to help build our future.”

She offered rewards to people who contributed, including a yellow T-shirt that read “more than just a princess,” with the O replaced by a machine cog. Her video went viral, proving what she already knew; kids were crying out for this. In 2014, GoldieBlox’s ad aired during the Super Bowl, and, in 2019, the company was valued at more than forty million dollars. Debbie wasn’t the only female entrepreneur making waves.

In 2014, engineer Sara Chipps and fashion guru Brooke Moreland decided to team up. The longtime friends launched Jewelbots, a plastic friendship bracelet that teaches girls to code. A flower adorned each Jewelbot bracelet, which was fully programmable; you could set it to react to your friends, buzzing when Bryony was near and changing color if it picked up Margie over Bluetooth, for example. It could also send secret messages to pals, and the open-source app allowed users to create their own programs, such as class schedules or texting their parents if they felt unsafe. “Girls are not one-dimensional,” Chipps told reporters. “We want to show them that you can be interested in tech and everything else that’s fun about being a girl.”

Then there’s Roominate, founded by twenty-three-year-old Alice Brooks and twenty-five-year-old Bettina Chen, two engineering undergrads, who’d come up with a novel take on the traditional dollhouse—build it yourself. Kids didn’t just have to construct it, they had to wire it; the kit included circuit boards to power lights, fans, and working elevators. They displayed it on Shark Tank, where Mark Cuban gave them $500,000 for 5 percent of their business.

This is a big deal. There’s a lot of research that shows girls lose interest in science by age eight. By eighth grade, about half as many girls as boys are looking into STEM careers. The numbers suck. 75 percent of girls start out interested in STEM, but that drops to 15 percent by the end of high school. This keeps going; only 12 percent of women complete STEM degrees, and only 25 percent of those work in STEM ten years later. Changing this involves changing the way girls think about STEM, and the culture around it.

***

In 2011, Pree was vaguely aware that these companies had started. They seemed really cool, she thought; why weren’t they around when she was a kid? In 2012, the same year that GoldieBlox launched, Pree graduated from business school. With no commitments, she bought a one-way ticket to London. Then she flew to France. Then Spain. “It was a coming of age [adventure],” she said. She didn’t know what she was searching for. Maybe a fairytale romance with a European? A job at Google? “I wanted to know how I could make a contribution to the world,” she said.

In Spain, one of her classmates was getting married. She had her dress and her shoes, but her nails looked raggedy, all chipped and dull from flying. Time for a manicure, she thought. But she couldn’t find a salon—every place wanted you to book well in advance, and they were really expensive. The nail bars so common in New York and LA and Houston were nowhere to be seen. “That was my aha moment,” she said. “It shouldn’t be so hard to get a simple manicure.”

She flew back to the states at the end of summer and took a full-time role at the LED startup in California. But her nail idea, still unformed, bugged her. She kept coming back to it, over and over again. What we need is some kind of portable nail salon, she thought. She’d never worked in fashion or beauty. All she knew was politics and connected hardware. Maybe that’s a good thing, a weird advantage, she thought; she knew how to work with people in Silicon Valley, how to raise money, and how to get people interested in what you were saying.

She kept refining her idea. The travel nail salon idea was quickly trashed, but she kept returning to the idea of a printer. She wanted her startup to be more than just nails. Would people want pretty nails enough to learn how to build a printer? But why? She drilled down to the idea of a nail art printer.

But she needed help. Looking through LinkedIn, she kept returning to Casey Schulz’s profile; Casey was a systems engineer with a background in inspiring girls with cool, creative technology. Pree messaged her, and they met up at the coworking space where Casey taught kids how to use Arduino. They clicked. “I want the Nailbot to be the first in a long line of products,” Pree told her. “The point is pretty nails plus learning design software, coding, and more.” Casey was in.

Now Pree needed to decide on a company name. She thought hard about that. What did she want her company to be called? How would it represent her and her mission?

She didn’t want to go childish or stereotypical, no using words like princess nails or fairy prints. The word printing gave her pause. Saying it slowly, out loud, it sounded like her name—Pree-nting. Prima donna. Preema donna! She liked it. “We’re taking it back!” she said. Sure, the term prima donna has connotations of being difficult, but that was entrenched sexism. She’s reclaiming it for herself. “The original prima donnas were these very talented women, the stars of the show,” she said. “People want to consider them difficult, but… Look, if you’re a CEO, that’s ‘visionary’ of course, you’re going to be difficult. I think the best leaders are difficult because they’re always pushing you. You’re going to stand for something.”

Next, the duo turned their attention to money. Casey was working her day job, so it was up to Pree.

But to reach people, they needed some cash. That shouldn’t be too hard, she thought. The Valley invested huge amounts in silly startups every day, such as $118 million for a juicer that wouldn’t juice, and $20 million on a startup that made your emails smell. For real. Plus, the nail market was booming; in 2013, 92 percent of tweens and teens used nail polish. 14 percent used it daily. This would be a breeze.

She approached venture capitalists for funding. She applied at a lot of technology accelerators. But nobody was biting. Most VC firms and tech accelerators were run by (mostly) white men, who didn’t get the point of her company. She’d go to meetings and demonstrate the Nailbot, and they all refused to get their nails done by it. It was demoralizing. Every day, she woke up, moved from her bed to the couch, and waved her roommates—two friends from business school—goodbye as the headed out to their well-paid banking jobs. They were supportive of her, but Pree was losing hope. “My dad was like, is the finger painting over?” she said. Her bills were mounting up. Living in San Francisco was expensive, especially when you had no cash coming in.

She messaged her freshman roommate, Diane Donald, to talk about how tough everything was. “Don’t give up,” Diane said. “I know you can do this.” As a mother of three, Diane really liked Pree’s idea. She was Pree’s first investor. “I’m probably going to lose all my money, but I believe in you,” Diane told her.

Hmm, thought Pree. Silicon Valley didn’t want to fund her, but maybe she was looking in the wrong places. She messaged her old sorority, Tri-Delta. “This is what I’m working on,” she told them. “What do you think?” They loved the idea and sent a check. Little by little, funding trickled in, enough to get her to a working prototype.

She felt exceedingly grateful. “This company exists because of the people who believed in me—my sorority sisters, my friends, my mentors,” she said. Helen Greiner, the creator of the Roomba vacuum, also invested. The difference, Pree realized, was that she’d been trying to get money from old white men. But the women she approached saw the value. Today Preemadonna has an all-female millennial board.

To see how tweens and teens and early twentysomethings felt about the Nailbot, Pree hosted stealth parties. The first few were filled with her friends’ kids and their friends. They went really well—everyone was excited about the Nailbot and curious as to the tech behind it. “Can I intern for you?” asked one. “Can I be an ambassador?” said another. Sure, she said.

She developed those parties into a mini-TED talk about building and developing a product, which she presented in high schools. The kids were sharp, she said; in the Q and A, they asked her what language she’d coded the app in and how hard it was to get investors. She ended her session with free manicures for everyone! She gave the same talk in many venues, including Kode with Klossy camps, Maker Girl events, and the Girl Scout convention. “It’s not where a traditional beauty company would go,” she laughed, “but it resonated with me as a founder.” Her ambassador network grew.

In 2015, her hard work paid off and she was accepted into the Hax hardware accelerator, which provides companies with $100,000 and easy access to experts and mentors. They’re famous for launching the world’s first connected tampon and the Dispatch delivery robot (which was bought by Amazon). At Hax, Pree and Casey learned how to use the iPhone’s front-facing camera on the inkjet. Then they teased their product at TechCrunch Disrupt, a San Francisco startup showcase that launched Everlywell’s home lab testing kit and fertility startup, Future Family.

Excited by all the positive feedback, Pree ran an Indiegogo campaign in 2016. She did everything wrong. She priced the Nailbot at $199, but the product wasn’t ready to ship, and she had no ETA for buyers. She didn’t set up a waitlist. “By all measures, that Indiegogo campaign was a failure,” she said—with one upside. Her campaign went viral and was featured on most news sites in America. “We got our word out, and we paid no money for marketing!”

She kept iterating, based on feedback from her ambassadors. Now, when you print on your nails, your phone automatically captures a picture of them and lets you share them straight to social media. She designed a bunch of skins for the printer itself; girls told her that they wanted to personalize the machine’s color.

The process is super quick. First you paint your nails with their primer, followed by any white nail varnish (she supplies these with the kit), then select a picture from the app, and use the front camera on your phone to visualize the design over your digit. Press a button, and whoosh—five seconds later your nail is printed, and dry. “The only limitation is the canvas of your nails,” Pree said.

There are thousands of emoji-style images in the Nailbot library, with more added every day. She’s collaborated with nail influencers and artists to create unique designs for the app, and users can choose to learn Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop (she has online how-to videos), then upload their own designs as well. “Just like you can share a Spotify playlist, you can share a nail art playlist!” Future iterations, teased on her Instagram, show more complex designs printed on blue and purple nails; version two, perhaps? She smiled but wouldn’t confirm. But augmented reality (AR) is the works, she said. “You can print any emoji or any photo from your camera onto your fingernail,” she said. “But it’s not a toy. It is a beauty tool, but for girls, it’s also a learning tool.”

Nailbot Machine Illustration Courtesy of: Pree Walia

When “Preemadonnas” really dig the tech, she links them with Maker Girl Mentors, where she’s on the board. They encourage girls to get into tech and leadership roles in STE(A)M with mentoring and career help.

Pree beta-tested her build-it-yourself Nailbot maker kit with a number of her ambassadors. Making it involves soldering and playing with circuit boards. The kids have taken anywhere from ninety minutes to five hours to make it, she said. Her long-term vision is that Preemadonna girls can build applications on top of the Nailbot, but she also wants the program open to designers, makers, hackers—the full STEAM gamut.

***

Today, everything changes so quickly. The good and the bad. People are more accepting, more comfortable, more open. But then there’s the growth of online trolls, the dark side of the internet, and people using tech for bad.

We need to look back to learn how far we’ve come. Take the 1992 Talking Barbie doll, dressed in a rainbow rockabilly skirt, with crimped hair and a tie-dyed denim jacket. The user pressed a button on her back and she chirped out her lines. “Math class is tough! Party dresses are fun. Do you have a crush on anyone? Math class is tough!” Even in those dark ages, this was not okay, and she was quickly recalled. But it took Barbie a long time to get with it—over the years, her careers have included working as a model, a ballerina, a McDonald’s server (fo’ real), and Miss America.

She joined the twenty-first century in 2012 with the release of computer engineer Barbie, complete with pink glasses and a pink laptop, and in 2017 the Barbie drone was a Christmas sellout with kids. Today, there are Barbie-branded online coding classes, AI interfaces in Barbie’s Dreamhouse, and a Barbie coding curriculum for schools. Their message: it’s okay to code and be cute, if that’s what you want.

Caring about how things look used to be considered a vain, “girly” trait. But smart scientists have proved there’s value in this. It’s more than vanity; it’s about enjoying the world around us and learning from each experience.