In the hot seat: Kim Manis (AKA Disco's mom)

1. Name? Kim Manis
2. Where do you live? In Seattle!
3. What’s it like being mother to the Pike13 mascot, Disco? Great! He loves coming to work with me and I think the team loves hanging out with him. The only problem is that our garbage cans are the perfect height for him to pillage for snacks. He’s gotten everything from a pork bun, cupcake wrappers, ranch dressing, half a sandwich and a leftover peanut butter jar.
4. Where’s your hometown? I grew up in Queens, NY—Let’s go Mets! As a result, I have very strong opinions about pizza and bagels.
5. What’s your favorite app (other than Pike13)? Feedly - I use it to aggregate everything I want to read on the internet in one place.
6. What do you do for Pike13? Gimme a glimpse of a day in the life. As a product manager, I work with customers, developers, and the rest of the Pike13 team to figure out what we are going to build next. This includes what new features we’ll add to the product, improvements to existing features we’d like to make and prioritizing bug fixes. To do this, I spent a lot of time talking to customers, using Pike13 and going back and forth with our developers on how something should be implemented.
7. What's your favorite Pike13 memory? For a morale event, the tech team went to an aerial acrobatics gym in Seattle. After trying and failing to hang from the trapeze, I stuck to the activity that kept my feet on the ground—hula hooping.
   
8. Have you ever worked in the services industry? In highschool, I worked as a beach lifeguard and swim instructor during my summers. The schedule for when we needed to come in and what lessons we were teaching was on a piece of paper on a cork board by the pool. Forgot to write down the schedule? You need to get to work and look at the piece of paper to find out if you’re working today!
   
9. What’s the most interesting Pike13 customer you can think of? I wish I had The Coder School growing up! As a kid, I loved computers, teaching myself to code, and tinkering with electronics (I still do). My parents would send me to sports summer camps and I would pretend to be sick so I could play with the computer in the infirmary instead.
   Another awesome Pike13 customer is Stryke—an axe and knife throwing school. I would love to try it!
10. What part of pop culture do you wish would just go away? Selfie sticks are the WORST. I was in Italy this summer and they were everywhere, blocking my view of the sights. Plus, I heard that more people died this year of selfie stick deaths than shark attacks.
11. Tell us something we don’t know. You may know this if you already follow him, but Disco is an internet celebrity. He’s got over 7,000 followers on Tumblr and over 1,700 followers on Instagram. I see people on the street who know Disco and don’t know me. How did Disco amass such a following, you ask? I have no idea. I forgot to set up Google Analytics on his sites so I’ve never been able to track where the spike in followers came from! I set up his social media accounts through IFTTT so when I post to Instagram, the photo automatically posts to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit.
    
12. Describe your ideal pizza. Dani’s Pizza in Queens is my favorite. Their pizza sauce is the best I ever had—legend has it that the secret ingredient is grape jelly.
13. What’s your favorite indoor/outdoor activity? My husband and I got inflatable paddle boards this summer. We live a block away from a lake so it’s really quick to get on the water. I love being able to come home from work on a Tuesday and go for a paddle, especially during the summer when the sunsets in Seattle are really late
14. What was the last gift you gave someone and who was it for? While in Italy on our honeymoon, my husband and I went to the Galileo museum and saw a bunch of his original telescopes (along with his actual fingers). My husband loved the museum so much that I got him a telescope for his birthday this year. We use it to look at the stars and spy on people paddling and kayaking on the lake.
15. What's your favorite movie? Clueless. I can recite the movie in its entirety.
16. What was the first thing you bought with your own money? The Clueless soundtrack
17. What do you usually have for breakfast? I love having soup for breakfast! It’s delicious, quick and easy to take on the go. Butternut squash soup has been my favorite lately.
18. Favorite museum? Museum of Natural History in New York, because dinosaurs!
19. What's your favorite fast food chain? Shake Shack
20. How many pillows do you sleep with? Three. We haven’t bought a headboard yet, so one always falls in the space between the wall and the bed.

Kim and Disco bar hopping

Kim and the hubby

Disco hanging at Pike13 HQ