Andrea Barrica has never anticipated a sextech career – or even a tech career – for a moment. She grew up in a strict Catholic Philippine household where sex is only spoken about as harmful. Her future vision was limited to a stable , predictable future: marriage, children, and linguistic careers.
However, when she was 20 she was called upon by a friend inDinero and then Barrica 's life was on an entirely different road to join their accounting software startup. When she was a successful business in Dinero, she turned to risk capital and took up a role as a company partner for 500 start-ups.
As founder and foundress, Barrica has deeply understand the inner workings of Silicon Valley and has seen their successes and failures behind the scenes.
But while Barrica's professional life was doing so much, she felt personally stalled, particularly when it came to sex. Her childhood Catholic taught her sex to be dangerous and shameful, something that only her guilt and sorrow could bring, not happiness and pleasure. The internet search for answers about sex often leads to confusion and minimal images of sexuality.
O.School partners with a team of "friendly people," including gynecologists, dating coaches, sex education workers and therapeuters, to make learning videos on a variety of sex-related subjects easy for anybody, anywhere, to access the kind of positive , supportive sex message Barrica sought as she grew up.
But the success of O.School doesn't just concern its message or vision.
Due to its background in risk capital, Barrica could access almost a million dollars in project funding, a tremendously scarce accomplishment in a world where many people with financial resources, including banks and other suppliers of small business loans, as well as angel investors and Venture Capitalists, continue to be profoundly uncomfortable with sex.
Barrica has written a new book — Sextech Revolution: the Future of Sexual Wellness — that she is determined not to take behind her, and hoping to offer sex-driven tech entrepreneurs guidelines, advice and an essential education. Their aim is to take them along.
We spoke about how everyone gets wrong about their pleasure range, reproductive health and wellness companies commonly referred to as sextech, why the founders want to question our thoughts about how the Internet looks, and what our online lives would have looked like if they were not built by white Stanford men, but by queer colored women like Barrica.
