After graduation and a short stint as a fashion writer, she started working as an analyst in the male-dominated Silicon Valley tech ecosystem. Now her third novel, May the Best Player Win, is scheduled to come out this fall.

Q: Can you talk about how you came up with the ideas for your most recent book, Valley Verified?

A: A few months after graduation I made the switch from the high fashion industry to the high tech industry. With that came a lot of impostor syndrome and a massive confidence crisis.

I was feeling really down about myself, and I didn’t think I could really confide in anyone, because all my friends seemed so successful and accomplished.

So I kept it all bottled up within myself. But at some point, I just had to get all these feelings out of me, so I started writing this story of this young woman who works in fashion in New York City, but because of circumstance, she’s forced to move across the country to Silicon Valley to take on a new role and a tech startup. And she’s like a fish out of water.

Q: How does the book touch on themes from your own life experience?

A: There’s just so many amazingly smart people here [in Silicon Valley], I think impostor syndrome is a lot more common than we realize.

I expected that only people around my age would relate to my book. But then I realized that people from different ages, from different stages of their careers, saw how much my story resonated with them. That’s honestly the best feeling because I wrote this book by myself, and it’s in some way inspired by my own experience. To know that my experience is something that other people could relate to as well, that’s a really awesome feeling for any writer.

Another theme that’s really important to me in this book is exploring what it means to be a woman in a very male-dominated industry. And especially how women can support one another.

I think growing up, women or girls have been taught to see one another as competition. Only one girl gets to be the homecoming queen, only one girl gets to be the prettiest, only one girl gets to date the most popular guy. And so from a young age, we think of it as a zero sum game. In order for one of us to succeed, it means that another woman cannot succeed.

That’s why in my book, you have this cast of female characters, they are very different on paper, but they learn to accept one another, and they learn to come together to support one another.

Q: Many people will be going on vacation in the next few weeks, and might be looking for something to read while they’re laying on the beach. Why might someone want to pick up Valley Verified?

A: I describe it as Legally Blonde set in Silicon Valley. It’s about a woman who goes from fashion to tech. These are two fascinating industries, and because I have personal experience with both I’m able to craft an authentic portrayal of these two worlds and all the niche references.

A lot of people have told me that my main character is someone who is very relatable. She’s not perfect, she doesn’t always make the right decisions, but she does try her best. And she has a good head on her shoulders.

Because this is set at a tech startup, you have this ensemble cast of characters who are all very quirky in their own ways. Even though people might recognize some stereotypical features of the tech industry in them, they are much more than a caricature of what people imagine tech people to be like.

Tech billionaires are becoming more mainstream celebrities. You see Jeff Bezos rubbing shoulders with the Kardashians, and Elon Musk is just doing what Elon Musk does. People are getting so much more fascinated with the ecosystem, but it can be very opaque sometimes, and my book is just like a really nice entryway into that. You see this ecosystem through the eyes of an outsider who is sometimes just as bewildered by what is going on as the rest of us.

Q: You graduated from Stanford and got a job working in tech, so what made you want to be an author as well?

A: I never saw myself becoming an author, but during the pandemic I was in my third year at Stanford University, then the pandemic broke out, and I wanted to go home to be with my family in Singapore but this was also a time when every country was shutting down borders, so I decided to stay put in California. For most of 2020 I was living alone and I got very homesick, very lonely, and also just kind of depressed.

I just got so tired of seeing Asians like myself be portrayed in such a negative, derogatory manner. I really wanted us to be portrayed in a more vibrant and fun and joyful manner. That’s when I got the motivation to start writing my own story, set in my home country of Singapore, it became my very first novel, The Fraud Squad, published in early 2023.

It’s kind of like Crazy Rich Asians meets The Devil Wears Prada. It’s really fun.

Q: Your next book is coming out soon, what will May the Best Player Win be about?

A: I describe my next book as a family-friendly version of The Queen’s Gambit, without the drugs and everything, so parents can read it with their kids. It is also set in the Bay Area. It’s about a chess player who makes a bet with a sexist rival, that girls can be as good as boys at the game. That is coming out in September.

I actually wrote the first draft over one month in November 2020, the election month. I just felt very jaded and cynical, seeing grown men say such hateful things, so I really wanted to write a book that was from the perspective of someone younger, someone who still has that youthful innocence.

I grew up playing chess, I was on Singapore’s national junior squad, so I think the commonality between this book and Valley Verified is that it explores what it’s like to be a girl, or woman, in a very male-dominated space.

My main character in this next book also has to deal with people doubting her abilities just because of her gender. She has to find a way to prove herself, but as she tries to prove herself and as she tries to win the bet, performance anxiety begins to creep in. I hope that kids in Silicon Valley, or even adults, can relate to some of what my main characters going through.

Kyla Zhao

Age: 26Position: Author, tech workerEducation: Stanford UniversityResidence: San Jose, CaliforniaFamily: Parents in Singapore, brother at UC Berkeley

Five things about Kyla

1. Has to have three drinks when writing: coffee, water, and something special2. Loves cold desserts: if it’s cake, it should be ice cream cake3. Goes to a pilates studio where she is the youngest but least fit4. Writes in size seven font, so she doesn’t get tempted to edit before a full draft is done5. Comfort movie is The Devil Wears Prada

But in her new book Endemic: A Post-Pandemic Playbook, she is combining decades of experience in infectious diseases and HIV particularly, with her unique position on the sharp edge of pandemic policies to present a 10-point plan to prepare for future pandemics.

She discussed the book and her thoughts on what went right or wrong during COVID-19. Her answers have been edited for brevity and clarity:

Q: What does the title of your book, Endemic, mean, and why did you want to write this book now?

A: In the concept of infectious disease epidemiology, there are pathogens that we hope to get rid of in the world, and there are pathogens that we’re never going to get rid of. A pathogen that we’re never going to get rid of, unfortunately, is called endemic, meaning it gets to a stage where we live with it.

It starts out in a pandemic form, causing a lot of severe disease and mortality, and then it settles.

At the beginning of COVID I felt like there was a surprising lack of understanding infectious disease epidemiology, in how public health was responding to it.

It just seemed like there was this idea that we by human behavior can rid a region of a virus. But, I was just surprised because it just didn’t make sense that we could eliminate or eradicate it. It just didn’t make sense in terms of the biology of the virus.

Q: What about the COVID pandemic has been similar to previous pandemics and what’s been different this time around?

A: It was actually most similar, in a way, to the influenza pandemic of 1918, and actually not very similar to its counterparts SARS and MERS. Those two human coronaviruses in this century were really limited in terms of their impact. They had a very high fatality rate, but they didn’t spread very quickly, and we could shut them down quick.

This coronavirus acted much more like influenza, which has a very high mutation rate.

During the influenza pandemic absolutely there were lockdowns, but they were very short. What they were trying to do during that lockdown was get the hospitals ready, figure everything out, figure out how it spread, and tell the population to do other things like wear masks and stay away from each other and stay outside.

It was the most progressive cities that kept the schools open in 1918, and that was really different than this pandemic where the blue state closed their schools for longer than the red states.

Q: In the book you say “public health is a service industry, not a police force.” Can you explain what you mean?

A: Since I am in the field of HIV, I manage a lot of addiction, and I manage a lot of STDs, and in those fields the idea of harm reduction is that people have human needs and society has needs, and you don’t make it just about the pathogen. You deal with the holistic needs of the individual in society, and you incorporate pathogen control into societal and individual needs.

In addiction, if you tell someone to just stop, they’re going to secretly go and use and maybe use with needles that are shared. But if you acknowledge that there’s a true addiction, and addiction is a physiologic state, then if you give them clean needles you can minimize the harm. It’s essentially just acknowledging that addiction is real, acknowledging, for example, that sexual needs are real. Don’t tell people to just stay away from each other.

So what would be acknowledging that with COVID? That school for kids is really needed, or that people get lonely and socially isolated when you’re telling them that they have to stay away from other people. And that can cause other effects, like mental health effects. It’s just kind of putting the problem into the context of other needs.

Using the police and using coercion, I don’t think it is a good way to do public health. Instead, just tell people how to stay safe.

Q: One of your principles for how to deal with future pandemics is “resources before restrictions,” why is that important?

A: The idea is that instead of restricting the entire population, like with mask mandates, capacity limits, closing down businesses, you give resources to those who need it the most. It’s providing resources to do the things that make sense.

If you have COVID, you need to stay home and isolate, so give people a resource or a way to stay home.

We don’t have a universal health care system, so when they shut down the city people were losing their insurance left and right. All these people who had HIV were trying to come to our clinic because they just suddenly lost all their insurance.

You had to provide resources to people when you shut down businesses. Instead you could provide resources for people to test and to stay home when they’re positive, and then eventually get vaccinated, which in my mind is the key to unlock a pandemic.

Q: You identify as “left of left” and you argue for universal health care in the U.S., but a lot of people associate your views on mask mandates and school closings more with conservatives. Can you explain how that happened?

A: I still have a Bernie Sanders sticker on my car from 2016, but I’m even ‘lefter’ than that, and what I mean by that is I’m actually really interested in global poverty. That’s what’s driven me into infectious disease.

I felt really bad that I was part of the elite the public health response favored. I used to think about the left as favoring the working class, but the left did not favor the working class in terms of the COVID response.

It just completely confused me. My positions were more consistent with red state governors, and that led to a lot of unease. I felt really uncomfortable in my own skin. I looked towards all my patients, and they’re so lonely. they’re so miserable. They are working and their  8-year-old is at home alone online. Do they see what we we are doing to the poor?

Monica Gandhi, MD

Age: 54

Title: professor of medicine and associate division chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at UCSF/ San Francisco General Hospital.

Residence: San Francisco

Education: University of Utah, Harvard Medical School

Family: two sons, 13 and 15 years old

Five things about Monica Gandhi

• Really likes Russian novels, reading Dostoyevsky’s “Devils” right now.
• Enjoys dark movies, like Danish films called “Celebration,” except it’s definitely not one.
• Connected to Indian Hinduism, after grieving processes for husband involved a lot of spirituality.
• Got two bonded cats during the pandemic, but one ran away so she got new buddy for her lonely cat, and then the second cat came back, so now she has three cats.
• Just loves being an HIV doctor.