A version of this post originally ran on my blog.

People who were surprised to learn I joined #MadeInNY startup Glimpse Labs fell into one of two camps:

Those who were surprised I joined the team of an ephemeral photo-sharing startup.

Those who were shocked I joined any team that included infamous “brogrammer” Pax Dickinson.

Myself, I was surprised at the surprise.

Something like that. Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was.

The former is quite simple. I go into it in greater length on my blog, but suffice it to say that the privacy controls the app has and strives for are greater than you’ve seen. You can read more here.

OK, so on to part two.

Why would I, the woman who has written, “Can We All Just Agree to Stop Hating Sheryl Sandberg Already?” “Gender Roles, or a Tale of Two Facebook Stickers” and “I Don’t Want to Be a Feminist” suddenly cast her lot in with a misogynist, sexist and possibly racist jackass? (I’m not going to link to the articles about why Pax Dickinson is supposedly any of these things, but feel free to use the Google and come back here when you’ve got your fill. I’ll be waiting.)

A few months back, I interviewed Elissa Shevinsky for Women Innovate Mobile, a New York City-based accelerator for which I’m a mentor. She had recently stepped down as CEO of Glimpse Labs and had written “That’s It — I’m Finished Defending Sexism in Tech.” The article resonated with me for a lot of reasons.

I could relate — I’d always gotten along really well with guys and tended to have closer friendships with men than women in high school, college and as a “grown up.” I’m a tomboy. I picked up spiders and made mud pies. I don’t wear makeup, rarely wear jewelry and hate the color pink. I do, however, love shoes and have many more pairs than some would consider reasonable, yet I really want more. I researched Shevinsky to prepare for the interview, we chatted a few times and got along quite well.

When it came time for Shevinsky to announce she was returning to Glimpse Labs, which she’d founded with Dickinson, she asked me if I wanted to write that article. I pitched it to VentureBeat, where it ran under the headline, “Infamous brogrammer Pax Dickinson changes his tune, apologizes, agrees to work for ‘ladyboss’”. We included an excerpt from his apology in the piece:

With the help of some awesome friends and a lot of personal reflection, I’ve decided to explain and apologize publicly for some of my words. The N-word isn’t appropriate even in a joke or quote, and neither should I have joked about rape. Things I think are funny and that the people who know me understand I don’t mean maliciously are still upsetting to others. They don’t belong on a company executive’s feed. I wasn’t an executive when many of the most egregious tweets were written but that doesn’t excuse it. It was a lapse in judgment and I’m entirely responsible for that. I sincerely and unreservedly apologize to anyone I offended.

I listened to Shevinsky talk about her working relationship with Dickinson. I talked to Business Insider software architect Julie Sommerville, who worked for Dickinson, and learned how he went to bat for her to be able to work from home after giving birth. She found the accusation that he was a brogrammer to be “hilarious.”

“He might parody one occasionally but that is not how I would describe him,” Sommerville told me in an email. “Pax likes to challenge people and sometimes that means challenging popularly held beliefs.”

A month or so ago, Shevinsky asked a friend for a recommendation of someone to help build out Glimpse’s community. That friend suggested me, and due to our interactions, Shevinsky liked that idea and asked if I’d be willing.

As Shevinsky had told me in the interview for the VentureBeat piece, people do deserve second chances. If Dickinson was sincere in his apology — which he appeared to be, and those who knew him best believed that to be the case — why should he be barred from working with strong, feminist women? Wouldn’t working with strong, feminist women be the best way for him to show he was sincere?

One quote in particular from Shevinsky, one that I used in the VentureBeat article, really struck me: “People should have the opportunity to grow and change and we should give them space to become the people we hope they will be.”

Shevinsky told me just the other day that she was still a bit uncertain about Dickinson after returning to Glimpse. “I was hoping he wouldn’t blow his second chance, because a third chance would be a challenge.” Now he’s co-founder of a company with a strong female CEO and a strong female advisor — J. Kelly Hoey of Women Innovate Mobile, plus other strong women including myself and Raine Dalton, whose LinkedIn headline reads simply, “#LADYBOSS to be.”

He’s not only not blown that chance, but he’s also surpassed her expectations. “He was also going on and on yesterday about how much he loves our whole team,” she told me in an email after reading a draft of this blog post. “His enthusiasm for working with strong, badass women is, at least in my experience, unusual. He certainly isn’t the guy you’d expect based on the tweets.”

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that some people were shocked by my decision. All they knew is what they read. I did find it interesting, though, that some of my closest, most fiercely feminist friends, totally got it and supported me unequivocally. They trusted that I knew what I was doing.

As for those who don’t trust that I know what I’m doing?

That’s not my problem.