The Woman Behind Your High-Speed Data
Michelle Munson, in her element
12,000 feet above sea level, near the Himalayas on the Tibetan plateau, my brother downloads all seven seasons of 30 Rock from the iTunes store. That evening, fully exhausted from a day of monastery tourism and visits to villages without electricity, we snort at Tracy Morgan’s antics until we wheeze from the thin air caused by high altitudes.
Despite the days it took us to fly and bus to Lhasa with our parents, the video files of 30 Rock reach our computer within minutes. And before they were on our laptop, the files were transported to Apple’s servers by a network provider—a process that can take days using typical file transfer protocols. Instead, the transfer took less than ten minutes.
This accelerated file transfer protocol was born ten years ago in a modern house with large windows atop the Berkeley hills. Two companies rented space in that house: a startup run by two Danish brothers, and Aspera, which grew out of an idea by lead visionary Michelle Munson. The former became Google Maps, and the latter became an Emmy-winning, IBM-owned data transport service serving clients such as Apple, Fox Sports, DirectTV, the Berlin Film Festival, and Netflix.
After selling their startup to IBM, Munson and her husband redirected their efforts towards a new project, Eluvio. With the same goal of facilitating content distribution, Eluvio aims to shrink the bandwidth needed to transfer videos by cutting out the common infrastructures used in file transport.
“I suppose we’re killing our child,” chuckled Michelle Munson, co-founder of Aspera and current CEO of Eluvio, in describing the shift from one digital content problem to another. Her eyebrows, like sharp circumflexes accenting her eyes, are as steadfast as her voice. Every word sits in the back of her throat — lazy, uvular, and uncompromising. There are no shrill lifts or wavers in Munson’s tone; every phrase holds the drawl-like confidence of a decisive truth.
When I first met Michelle Munson, she was hosting a Blockchain workshop at UC Berkeley’s annual hackathon, Cal Hacks. She wore thick-soled sandals and a red dress that draped nicely over her tall and thin frame; her blond hair curled around stylish earrings. The first thing you notice is that Michelle talks — a lot. In a room of her coworkers (all male) present at the workshop, she frequently interrupted her peers to give lengthy technical explanations of Eluvio’s technology. Sitting ten feet to the left of the podium, elbows propped on crossed legs, Munson captured the room with her clear passion for technology; her co-worker stood quietly at the podium.
To Michelle, there’s no question about where her love for learning took root. On the farm where she grew up in Kansas, her highly educated and driven parents live through three primary passions: agriculture, building businesses, and University. Raised by perfectionist and self-critical role models, under high academic and extracurricular expectations, Michelle is clearly a product of her parents.
“When I went to college, it felt like my brain was on fire,” she said. At a time when less than a fifth of people receiving their bachelor’s degrees in engineering were women, Michelle was unfazed by the fact that she was the only female student majoring in physics and one of two in electrical engineering. In her senior year at Kansas State University, she started her first company, which brought the Internet to her rural community. Between being a Goldwater Scholar at Kansas State and a Fulbright scholar later at Cambridge University, Michelle has collected prestigious awards her whole life. Yet she still grapples with a decision she made around one particular award—or, more specifically, the application for that award.
The Rhodes Scholarship, awarded to only thirty-two students annually over fifty states, recognizes not only academic achievement but also a student’s potential to lead society towards the common good. The year that Michelle applied, she made it far into the selection process but then was nixed. One of the judges informed her that she would have absolutely been selected, if only her essay had not exceeded the word-limit by three hundred words.
“It was like I had a compulsion to do this to myself,” Munson said. “Call it fraud syndrome or whatever. I basically decided to do myself in.” She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Staring at the table, she advised me, “You have to be really careful not to sabotage yourself.”
After the hackathon, Eluvio hosted my project team at their office near the Berkeley marina one evening. My team members and I were skeptical when our Lyft driver dropped us off at the given address. It was dark and we found ourselves in a seemingly abandoned neighborhood about a mile west of the UC Berkeley campus; the only indication of an office was a tall yellow building that resembled a warehouse. We traced the perimeter of the building and eventually found a cracked open gate that led to an inner court. We crept around, afraid that we might have accidentally trespassed onto someone else’s private property until we finally found a metal staircase that led up to the office.
The office is a large contiguous space with high open ceilings. My two digital design teammates immediately began to gush at the artsy hipness of the office, with its wall-sized sculpture art and circular couches. My other teammate grinned and commented on the coolness of Eluvio employees when they offered us wine and beer. Meanwhile, I was dazzled by the size and brightness of the modern space, all of which was invisible from the outside.
Our team sat around a dining table with plates of gourmet pizza, while Michelle perched herself on a stool on the nearby counter. She called the other employees over, and they assembled in a vague circle around the dining table, each standing in arbitrary corners of the room like sullen children. At Michelle’s insistence, they all introduced themselves. “Youliang, tell them about your research in machine learning,” she demanded. Then, “Paul, tell them about your last few startups.” Introductions for about ten employees took nearly two hours.
Whether they grew up in Romania, France, China, or a rural community in Kansas, Eluvio’s engineers all had the same story. They all worked for big tech, like Google or IBM, and they all left their high-paying “welfare jobs” (jobs considered so menial that it felt like one was receiving payment for doing nothing) in search of excitement and innovation. They wanted a mission, and Berkeley was their mecca.
Michelle had a backstory that rhymed with theirs: in contrast to her experience in her hometown, Michelle felt that she finally fit in at Berkeley. Here, she found a community of grad students and other peers who didn’t second-guess her and who had deep and unique interests of their own, including Eluvio’s principal engineer Paul, who is a fifty-year-old Cal alumnus on his ninth startup. And so she went to work creating her own niche in Berkeley’s tech scene, which blends San Francisco’s entrepreneurial spirit, Silicon Valley’s glamour, and UC Berkeley’s leading computer science research.
“This is my life,” Michelle said, gesturing to Eluvio’s office space. “My lifestyle: I have two boys, and I am definitely grown up and I still spend every night till at least ten o’clock, from Monday to Friday, in my office, all the time.”
She glanced behind her, where her nine-year-old son was tossing a football to one of her employees. “The only thing I try to do is to not compromise my two boys’ well-being,” she said. “That’s why my son is here, we’re going to do some stuff for school which he has tomorrow because his life matters more than my aspirations. But I try to make them both happen….I cut everything else out.”
Michelle didn’t marry until thirty-six and didn’t buy a house until she sold her first company. She had her first child at thirty-seven, and second child at forty-five. And as a leader with an impeccable track record for reaching group goals, Munson often forgoes the pleasure of being liked by the people she leads.
“I don’t get to do a lot of day-to-day activities with my kids,” she said. “I do all the school stuff and I spend a lot of time making sure they’re in the right activities, but not the fun stuff. And you have to let other people do things that might feel like a part of your identity. I don’t get to create a great house, or do simple things like make dinner for your family.” She paused and pressed her fingers onto her eyelids. “I don’t know if there’s a good answer to what I’ve sacrificed,” she added.
Despite her apparent devotion to technological innovation, Michelle has much wider goals in mind. “I want to facilitate groups of people to do the things they need to do,” she said. “I have to grow a lot as a person — getting things done it not as important as getting people to where they need to be.” Whether it’s getting more sincere people involved in public policy or improving public education, Michelle hopes to lead society somehow. The details remain a bridge to be crossed, yet she sees many opportunities. She added, “Eluvio is my last company.”
As I was about to leave the office, after learning about Eluvio’s projects from her husband, Michelle called me from the couch, where she had her arms wrapped around her son. They were reading a book together.
“Melody, one more thing — I want to tell you that we are passionate about the environment.” She smiled at her son. “We care a lot about environmental sustainability. It means a lot to me.”
Her son nodded at me, and then grinned at his mother, before going back to reading his book.
“Me too,” I said.
I thought about all the people in the office at that moment. The night was completely dark by then — it was 10pm. Yet the office remained lit with warm lights, filled with the sounds of soft tapping on a keyboard. I suddenly had the feeling of being a passerby, observing a peculiar family celebration of some vague vision of the future.
