Engineering Empathy; On Purpose and Progress in Tech
Conversation with Juliette de la Rie, CEO of Colorful Matter
A while ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Juliette De La Rie, a strategic communicator, public affairs expert, and community builder in the Hyperloop and quantum industries—and her story is as extraordinary as the field she’s helping to shape. I’m a bit late publishing this episode, but here it finally is.
Juliette isn’t just working in deep tech—she’s reshaping how it thinks about people, purpose, and inclusion.
I met her in Paris at the opening ceremony of the United Nations International Year of Quantum. It was one of those class reunion types of events where old colleagues and friends meet up, not so much to learn new things but to network and socialize. Juliette stood out as this beautiful woman with a disarming smile, just radiating magical energy. She somehow spontaneously organized a 100-person WhatsApp group for us to meetup after the conference which turned into a delightful night at a nearby bistro.
I wanted to get to know her better so I invited her to Deep Pockets.
Becoming Fearless
Juliette didn’t start out as a bold organizer or a confident speaker. “I was a very shy kid,” she admits. But like many journeys in tech, hers wasn’t linear—it was personal, sometimes painful, and deeply driven by curiosity.
She became a mom at just 20. “I now have a 17-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter,” she says, reflecting on a time when her young age—and her identity as a single mom of mixed-race children—drew quiet judgment from others. When her son began excelling in school, she noticed the surprise on people’s faces. “That really drove me to prove people wrong,” she said, though she also acknowledges that striving from a place of defiance isn’t something she celebrates today.
Still, it sparked something: a hunger to succeed. And succeed she did, moving through roles in marketing, communications, and public affairs across a range of industries. But even as she hit traditional career milestones, something was missing.
“I just didn’t feel like I really belonged,” she says. So she started asking herself bigger questions—the kind she’d wondered about since childhood. What is the universe? Why are we here? What do we really know about reality?
That’s when she stumbled into quantum physics. Not as a career move, at first, but as a fascination. What began as late-night desk research turned into a full-on obsession. “I dedicated all my spare time to exploring it—not even the tech side, just quantum mechanics itself,” she says. That love eventually led to an opportunity at Quantum Delta NL, the Dutch national ecosystem for quantum innovation.
“And for the first time,” Juliette says, “I felt like I belonged.”
A Community Mindset
But belonging, she quickly realized, wasn’t something everyone felt. While she found like-minded thinkers, there were still barriers—unseen and unspoken—that kept the ecosystem from being truly inclusive.
And so Juliette began building bridges. One WhatsApp group at a time. One spontaneous meetup at a time. She calls this her purpose: spreading happiness and helping others see their own beauty.
It might sound poetic, but for Juliette, it’s deeply practical. It’s also the foundation of her company, Colorful Matter, which offers services ranging from strategic communications to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) implementation—and perhaps most importantly, a community-centered approach to innovation.
“I really believe that emerging tech industries like quantum have a duty to think about the global impact of their work,” she explains. That means asking: Who is this technology for? Who gets to build it? Who gets left out?
Inclusion Is Not a Luxury
In the fast-paced world of deep tech, inclusion is often seen as a “nice to have”—something we’ll get to once the prototypes are working and the funding is secured. But Juliette sees it differently.
“If you’re building something that could change the world, then you’re responsible for thinking about the whole world,” she says. “Not just the part you happen to be in.”
Diverse teams don’t just reflect society—they build better tech. And yet, many founders feel they can’t “afford” to slow down and include more voices. “But if you skip that work,” Juliette argues, “you’re actually missing out. On talent. On creativity. On markets.”
Colorful Matter’s approach? Make inclusion tangible. “These concepts—belonging, happiness, fulfillment—sound abstract. But you can actually bake them into organizational processes. Into how you communicate, how you hire, how you build culture.”
Facing My Own Biases
On a personal note, I took one of Juliette’s free online courses—an introductory module on implicit bias. It’s only 30 minutes long, but wow. It was eye-opening... and a little painful.
The course led me to take a Harvard test on implicit associations between gender and career. Despite being a lifelong feminist—and a former chairwoman of the Finnish Women’s Party—I was shocked to see I had a moderate bias linking men with careers and women with family.
I was devastated, I actually got angry at the stupid test and angry at myself for “failing” the stupid test. But I heat that’s a typical reaction, so I guess it’s ok. Because it proves the point: these are unconscious patterns. We don’t choose them.
Juliette had had the same reaction when she first took the test—expecting to score in the bias-free zone, only to find she had implicit assumptions too. “It hurt,” she said. “But it also gave me something to work with. And that’s what matters.”
Bias isn’t a personal failure. It’s a signal. And the only way to change systems is to start by seeing ourselves clearly.
The Work Ahead
Juliette’s mission with Colorful Matter isn’t about shaming anyone—it’s about equipping people to do better. Whether it’s startup founders trying to build ethical tech or engineers looking for a sense of purpose in their work, she meets them where they are.
And through it all, she keeps coming back to something simple: community. The kind that forms when you gather people not just around technology, but around shared humanity.
“Technology doesn’t do anything on its own,” she says. “People do.”
If you’re building in deep tech—or simply curious about the people shaping the future, you can explore her free courses, tools, and resources at colorfulmatter.eu. And you can always find her... probably forming a new WhatsApp group somewhere in the world.
From the Archives
You know what … I don’t have anything in my archives about inclusion, diversity, community building, belonging. Im gonna need to change that.
I do have this, though, How to Make a Change, a chapter from my book.
Government and Innovation from 2023 discusses how local, regional, and national governments can use existing instruments to steer their economies to include more innovative industries that provide higher economic value-add.
Government and Innovation: The Economic Developer's Guide to Our Future
Audiobook narrated by author available at Audible
