ON CHILDHOOD: I am the antithesis of my upbringing, in many ways. My father is English, and my mother is Chinese. They met in Singapore, and I was born in the U.K. When I was six we moved to Brunei, where my father got a job, and my mother subsequently taught and then started her own school. It’s a very small, orthodox Muslim country, and we never talked about sex at all. My parents are very old-fashioned. My mother was a “Tiger Mother” par excellence, and my childhood was characterized by extreme academic pressure.

I’m the eldest of four sisters. We’re close now, although we’re all very different. As the oldest child, I was expected to conform to my parents’ vision for my future. My father didn’t take a typical career path; he cut sugarcane in the fields of Australia, traveled with a carnival, motor-biked across America, and worked on a farm. When he found himself back in the U.K. with a wife and two small children—me and my sister Annabel—and no way of getting a decent job because he had no university degree, he drove a van delivering groceries and studied for an English literature degree. As a result, from the moment I was born, I was told that I was going to Oxford—taking the traditional path. I had no choice whatsoever; it didn’t matter what I wanted to do. It was, “Get to the top of the class or don’t come home.”

That being said, I did get into Oxford, and the moment I set foot there, I was so grateful to my parents. To spend three years at Oxford studying English literature was a privilege, and it’s opened doors for me ever since. Oxford is where I fell madly in love with theater. I wrote, acted, directed, stage-managed, and was president of the Somerville Drama Society, and from there, I became a publicist and marketing officer for a number of theaters around the U.K. However, after several years of doing that, I was fed up with working 24/7 and earning chicken feed. Part of my job involved giving talks about the theater I worked for, and after one of those talks, a woman came up to me and said, “Young lady, you could sell a fridge to an Eskimo.” So I thought, okay, that’s the universe telling me something: Time to go into advertising. So, at 25, I did.

ON AGE AND SEX: I tell everybody my age, which is 57, as often as possible. I consider myself a proudly visible member of the most invisible segment of our society, which is older women. I want to help redefine, in the way that I live my life, what society thinks an older woman should look like, be like, talk like, work like, and fuck like.

I date younger men, and about ten years ago, I realized that I was encountering the convergence of what happens when today’s access to hardcore porn online meets our society’s reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. These two factors result in porn becoming, by default, sex education—and not in a good way. So I put up a tiny clunky website, MakeLoveNotPorn.com, that balances the myths of hardcore porn with reality—the porn world versus the real world. When we launched at TED in 2009, the talk went viral. I realized I’d uncovered a huge global social issue, and saw an opportunity to do good and make money simultaneously. I turned MakeLoveNotPorn into a business, into MakeLoveNotPorn.tv. We are pro-sex, pro-porn, and pro-knowing the difference. We’re building a whole new category on the internet that has never existed before—social sex. MakeLoveNotPorn is about socializing sex, and capturing what goes on in the real world, as it happens spontaneously, in all its funny, messy, glorious, silly, wonderful, beautiful, ridiculous humanness.

Our key mission is to help make it easier for the world to talk about sex. It’s an area of rampant insecurity for every single one of us, no exceptions, all around the world. We all get very vulnerable when we get naked, and the sexual ego is very fragile. Therefore, people find it difficult to talk about sex while they’re actually having it. They are terrified that if they say anything, they will potentially hurt the other person’s feelings, put them off, derail the encounter, or ruin the entire relationship. But at the same time, everybody wants to be good in bed, and will seize upon cues for how to do that in any way they can. If the only cues you’ve ever seen are in porn, then those are the cues you’re going to take, to not very good effect.

ON WOMEN AND INNOVATION: I say to every woman, “You just set out to make as much money as possible, because we don’t get taken seriously until we get taken seriously financially.” Also, when you’re a woman and you make an absolute goddamn fucking shit ton of money, you can then fund other women. You can donate to other women. You can support other women. In a tech landscape where female founders get 5% of all venture capital and 95% goes to men, we need to create our own financial ecosystem to lift women up.

Diversity drives innovation. At the top of every industry today, you have a closed loop of white guys talking to white guys about other white guys, and the product you get from that closed loop is Batman versus Superman. When you invite women and people of color into “The Room Where It Happens,” what you get is “Hamilton,” which has not only exploded every creative convention of the Broadway musical, but—and this is not coincidental—is also currently making billions of dollars. There is a huge amount of money to be made out of taking women and people of color more seriously.