I am a
fighter.
I built Altura because nothing else could help me in the moment that mattered. This is the story of why — and who I keep building it for.
I am a fighter. I don't give up. I'm an overachiever — in my dictionary, the only words are “try hard, always try to do better.”
But that day, I froze. For the first time ever, I was ready to give up. I was in tears.
I had just read a transcript of my own voice from a job interview. The speaker on the page was a stranger — an idiotic one.
I'm Sheryl. Over thirty years in tech. Executive at unicorn startups. In college, I led a debate team to a championship. I've won best-presenter awards at conferences with thousands in the audience. For my entire career, despite the language challenge as a foreigner, communication was the thing I was praised for.
The voice on that transcript wasn't mine. Dense clusters of filler words at the exact moments I most needed to be sharp. I had zero conscious awarenessof saying any of them. Nobody — not my husband, not my closest colleagues — had ever noticed me do it.
The setup was extreme.
I had spent hundreds of hours preparing for that single hour-long interview. I knew the subject cold. I was completely capable of answering every question.
The filler clusters only surfaced under extreme cognitive load — the harder I worked to be good, the heavier the load became.
I had prepared more than anyone I knew. I had still been undone by something I couldn't even hear myself doing.
The first interview didn't cost me the job. The next ones did.
The filler awareness turned into a downward spiral. I went into the next round hyper-conscious of every word. Watching myself. Trying to catch the fillers as they happened.
I lost the ability to speak.
I couldn't focus on the questions. I couldn't find the conviction in my own answers. The confident executive I had been for years — the one I'd always relied on to walk into a room and own it — was gone. I didn't recognize the person speaking. I didn't know how to be her anymore.
I lost the opportunity. After all that preparation. After all that effort.
The depression wasn't about losing the job. It was knowing nothing could help me improve fast enough.
People say depression after a setback is about losing the thing. Mine wasn't.
This wasn't my first communication challenge — just the first time fillers had been the issue. As I had climbed — director, VP, executive — the bar had kept rising. The higher you go, the higher the expectation. For the first time in my career, I'd been getting feedback to improve: I went too deep with C-level leaders, unconsciously covering every angle because that was how I thought. I lost rooms by burying my point. I had tried so many things. Books. Videos. Hyper-conscious attention in every important meeting.
Progress was painfully slow. Not the kind of change you can rely on when a job is on the line in two weeks.
So when this new problem appeared — invisible to me, with no way to catch it in myself, with the next interview already on the calendar — I already knew from years of evidence that effort wasn't going to save me. The traditional remedies take years. I didn't have years.
And every “be more aware”piece of advice was making it worse: the harder I tried to monitor my own speech, the worse my speech got, because monitoring added cognitive load — and load was the original cause.
There wasn't a single thing on earth that could help me. That was the depression.
Then the frame broke open.
It hit me like a metaphor I couldn't unsee. Every communication tool I'd ever used — every book, every video, every coach — was like learning to swim by reading instructions in a chair. The moment you're dropped in water alone, every instruction is useless. You fight for your life and forget everything on paper.
What I needed wasn't another book. I needed a lifeguard in the water. Present in the actual conversation. Watching for the patterns I couldn't catch. Signaling gently when a correction was still possible. Letting me focus on the conversation itself.
The whole industry was selling chair-learning to people drowning. Including me.
So I built what I needed.
I used Altura in my next real conversation. My filler clusters dropped by 80% — the first day. Not after years of practice. The first day.
The confident me came back. The fighter came back. The person who walks into a room knowing she belongs — she was the one speaking again.
I built it for me. I keep building it for everyone stuck where I was.
I built Altura for myself. I needed it. Nothing else was going to reach me in time.
Then I realized: this gap isn't mine alone. The industry has been excellent at teaching people whatto do. None of it has solved the other half — converting that knowing into doing in the moments that matter, fast enough to actually help. That's the structural failure repeated across every book, every video, every course.
There are a lot of fighters out there, stuck where I was. Knowing what to say. Knowing how to say it. Still unable to say it when it counts.
And a lot of overachievers — people whose only answer has always been try harder. Sometimes try harder isn't the answer. Sometimes we need a new way altogether to move the needle.
For everyone who climbed and found the bar had moved with them. For every fighter who can't say what they came to say. For every overachiever who has run out of room to try harder. For the swimmer in the water who deserves a lifeguard.
You don't need years. You need a partner in the moment.
Sheryl Zhang
Former VP of Product at Docker and ThoughtSpot. Nearly 30 years building products in tech — including Cisco, Juniper (HPE), the Linux Foundation, and a previous co-founding role at Firewalla.
Your next conversation is coming.
Altura will be there.
You've done the preparation. Now let it show up when it counts.