>> From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE. Covering The Conference Board's 6th Annual Innovation Master Class. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Innovation Master Class that's put on by The Conference Board. We're here at Xerox PARC, one of the original innovation centers here in Silicon Valley. Tremendous history, if you don't know the history of Xerox PARC go get a book and do some reading. And we're excited to have our next guest because there's a lot of talk about tech but really not enough talk about people and where the people play in this whole thing. And as we're seeing more and more, especially in downtown San Francisco, an assumption of responsibility by tech companies to use some of the monies that they're making to invest back in the community. And one of the big problems in San Francisco if you've been there lately is homelessness. There's people all over the streets, there's tent cities and it's a problem. And it's great to have our next guest, who's actually doing something about it, small discrete steps, that are really changing people's lives, and I'm excited to have him. He's Kevin Adler, the founder and CEO of Miracle Messages. Kevin, great to meet you. >> Great to meet you too Jeff. >> So, before we did this, doing a little background, you knew I obviously stumbled across your TED Talk and it was a really compelling story so I wonder A, for the people, what is Miracle Messages all about, and then how did it start, how did you start this journey? >> Miracle Messages, we help people experiencing homelessness reconnect to their loved ones and in the process, help us as their neighbors reconnect with them. And we're really tackling what we've come to call the relational poverty on the streets. A lot of people that we walk by every day, Sure, they don't have housing, but their level of disconnection and isolation is mind boggling when you actually find out about it. So, I started it four years ago. I had an uncle who was homeless for about 30 years. Uncle Mark, and I never saw him as a homeless man. He was just a beloved uncle, remembered every birthday, guest of honor at Thanksgiving, Christmas. >> And he was in the neighborhood, he just didn't have a home? >> He was in Santa Cruz, he suffered from schizophrenia. And, when he was on his meds he was good and then he'd do something disruptive and get kicked out of a halfway house. And we wouldn't hear from him for six months or a year. >> Right. So, after he passed away, I was with my dad, and not far from here, visiting his grave site in Santa Cruz. And I was having a conversation with my dad of the significance of having a commemorative plot for Uncle Mark. I said, he meant something to us, this is his legacy. So that's nice, but I'm going to go back in the car, pull out my smartphone, and see status updates from every friend, acquaintance I've ever met, and I'm going to learn more about their stories on Facebook, with a quick scroll, than I will at the grave site of my Uncle Mark. So, I'm actually a Christian. I have a faith background, and I asked this question: "How would Jesus use a smartphone?" "How would Jesus use a GoPro camera?" Cause I didn't think it was going to be surfing pigs on surf boards. And I started a side project where homeless volunteers, like my Uncle Mark, wore GoPro cameras around their chests. And I invited them to narrate those experiences and I was shocked by what I saw. And I won't regale you with stories right now but I heard over and over again, people say "I never realized I was homeless when I lost my housing, "only when I lost my family and friends." >> Right. >> And that led me to say, if that's true, I can just walk down the street and go up to every person I see and say "Do you have any family or friends "you'd like to reconnect with?" And I did that in Market Street, San Francisco four years ago, met a man named Jeffrey, he hadn't seen his family in 22 years. Recorded a video on the spot to his niece and nephew, go home that night, posted the video in a Facebook group connected to his hometown, and within one hour the video was shared hundreds of times, makes the local news that night. Classmates start commenting, "Hey, "I went to high school with this guy, "I work in construction, does he need a job? "I work at the mayor's office does he need healthcare?" His sister gets tagged, we talk the next day. It turns out that Jeffrey had been a missing person for 12 years. And that's when I quit my job and started doing this work full time. >> Right, phenomenal. There's so many great aspects to this story. One of the ones that you talked about in your TED Talk that I found interesting was really just the psychology of people's reaction to homeless people in the streets. And the fact that once they become homeless in our minds that we really see through them. >> Totally. >> Which I guess is a defense mechanism to some point because, when there's just so many. And you brought up that it's not the condition that they don't have a place to sleep at night, but it's really that they become disassociated with everything. >> Yeah, so I mean, you're introduction to me, if you had said hey there's this guy, there's no TED talk, there's nothing else, he's a housed person, let's hear what he has to say. Like, what would I talk... That's what we do every single day with people experiencing homelessness. We define them by their lack of one physical need. And, sure, they need it, but it presumes that's all there is to being human. Not the higher order needs of belonging, love, self-actualization. And some of the research has found that the part of the brain that activates when we see a person, compared to an inanimate object, does not respond when we see a person who's experiencing homelessness. And in one experiment in New York, they had members of a person's very own family, mom and dad, dress up to look homeless on the streets. Not a single person recognized their own member of their own family as they walked by 'em. >> Yeah, it's crazy. It's such a big problem, and there's so many kind of little steps that people are trying to do. There's people that walk around with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that we see on social media, and there's a couple guys that walk around with scissors and a comb and just give haircuts. These little tiny bits of humanization is probably the best way to describe it makes such a difference to these people. And I was amazed, your website... 80 percent of the people that get reconnected with their family, it's a positive reconnection. That is phenomenal because I would have imagined it's much less than that. >> Every time we reconnect someone, we're blown away at the lived examples of forgiveness, reconciliation. And every reunion, every message we record from a person experiencing homelessness, we have four, five messages from families reaching out to us saying, "Hey I haven't seen "my relative in 15 years, 20 years." The average time disconnect of our clients is 20 years. >> Right, wow. >> So what I've been doing now is, once you see it like this, you walk down the street, you see someone on the streets, you're like that's someone's son or daughter. That's someone's brother or sister. It's not to say that families sometimes aren't the problem. Half of the youth in San Francisco that are homeless, LGBTQ. But it's to say that everyone's someone's somebody that we shouldn't be this disconnected as people in this age of hyper-connectivity and let's have these courageous conversations to try to bring people back in to the fold. >> Right, so I'm just curious this great talk by Jeff Bezos at Amazon talking about some of the homeless situations in Seattle and he talks, there's a lot-- >> He's a wealthy guy, right? >> He's got a few bucks, yeah, just a few bucks. But he talks about there's different kind of classes of homelessness. We tend to think of them all as the same but he talks about young families that aren't necessarily the same as people that have some serious psychological problems and you talked about the youth. So, there's these sub-segments inside the homeless situations. Where do you find in what you offer you have the most success? What is the homeless sub population that you find reconnecting them with their history, their family, their loved ones, their friends has the most benefit, the most impact? >> That's a great question. Our sweet spot right now, we've done 175 reunions. >> And how many films have you put out? >> Films in terms of recording the messages? >> Yeah, to get the 175. >> 175 reunions, we have recorded just north of about 600 messages. And not all of 'em are video messages. So, we have a hotline, 1-800-MISS-YOU. Calls that number, we gather the information over the phone, we have paper for 'em. So 600 messages recorded, about 300, 350 delivered and then half of them lead to a reunion. The sweet spot, I'd say the average time disconnected of our clients is 20 years. And the average age is 50, and they tend to be individuals isolated by their homelessness. So, these are folks for decades who have had the shame, the embarrassment, might not have the highest level of digital literacy. Maybe outside of any other service provider. Not going to the shelter every night, not working with a case worker or social worker, and we say hey, we're not tryna' push anything on ya' but do you have any family or friends you'd like to reconnect with. That opens up a sense of possibility that was kind of dormant otherwise. But then we also go at the other end of the spectrum where we have folks who are maybe in an SRO, a single room occupancy, getting on their feet through a drug rehab program and now's the point that they're sayin' "Hey, I'm stably housed, I feel good, "I don't need anything from anyone. "Now's the time to rebuild that community "and that trust from loved ones." >> Kevin, it's such a great story. You're speaking here later today. >> I think so, I believe so. >> On site for good, which is good 'cause there's so much... There's a lot of negative tech press these days. So, great for you. How do people get involved if they want to contribute time, they want to contribute money, resources? Definitely get a plug in there. >> Now, or later? Right now, yeah, let 'em know. >> No time like the present. We have 1200 volunteer digital detectives. These are people who use social media for social good. Search for the loved ones online, find them, deliver the messages. So, people can join that, they can join us for a street walk or a dinner, where they go around offering miracle messages and if they're interested they can go to our website miraclemessages.org and then sign up to get involved. And we just released these T-shirts, pretty cool. Says, "Everyone is someone's somebody." I'm not a stylish man, but I wear that shirt and people are like "That's a great shirt." I'm like, wow, and this is a volunteer shirt? Okay cool, I'm in business. >> I hope you're putting one on before your thing later tonight. >> I have maybe an image of it, I should of. >> All right Kevin, again, congratulations to you and doing good work. >> Thanks brother, I appreciate it. >> I'm sure it's super fulfilling every single time you match somebody. >> It's great, yeah, check out our videos. >> All right he's Kevin, I'm Jeff. We're going to get teary if we don't get off the air soon so I'm going to let it go from here. We're at the Palo Alto Xerox PARC. Really the head, the beginning of the innovation in a lot of ways in the computer industry. The Conference Board, thanks for hosting us here at the Innovation Master Class. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (bright ambient music)

(digital clicking noise) >> Hi. Lisa Martin with the CUBE. On the ground at Google for the 6th annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards event. We're very excited to be here. And now to be joined by the founder of CloudNOW, Jocelyn Degance Graham. Welcome back to the CUBE. >> Lisa, we are so happy to have you and the CUBE back for the second year. So our 6th annual event and the second year that you've been broadcasting. We're just really delighted to have your team be able to shine a spotlight on the incredible accomplishments of these women in tech. >> It's always so inspiring, Jocelyn, I was telling you before we went live, that I love reading about the people that you're honoring. But you yourself have been awarded a number of times. So you're quite the women in technology as well. >> (laughs) >> I wanted to talk a little bit about CloudNOW and what you've guys have done. Two really big announcements this year. Tell us about that. >> So the big things we've really been working on for 2017 are the scholarships, Lisa. I have to say of all the professional things this year, I really am the most heartened by the work in the scholarships. It is what is most important to me. As so we start by identifying two exceptional academic partners. We had looked at a number of ... We had read the research, we've been looking at how do you most make impact. And have more women join tech, join technical ranks, right? And so there's been a lot of debate and a lot of research about that. And what we have found is that it's very important for women to have a role model in an organization. It does not necessarily even have to be a mentor. It needs to be a role model. The other piece of the equation is the ambition gap. So it's not just about getting tons of women in the pipeline It's also about getting women that really want to take it the whole way. So this kind of combination factor of that next generation of leader that's really going to be able to get to that upper echelon of office. So the academic partners that we selected, we feel like they've really have done a great job of identifying those future leaders. For us to be able to place our investments with them. To gather corporate partnerships that are willing to be able to fund that next generation of leaders. So we have exceptional partners. We have exceptional academic institutions. If I can, I'd love to tell you just a little bit about the academic partners that we've selected. >> Yes, absolutely, please do. >> Yeah, so the first one is Holberton School. And Holberton is in San Francisco. They have a really unique model. They don't charge students any kind of tuition up front. What they do is once the student has gotten their first full-time job, then they start paying back what they would have paid in tuition. And so, it's a remarkably equitable kind of format for education. >> Lisa: It is. >> It's very different than what most people are seeing for colleges and universities. The problem is in how expensive it is to live in San Francisco. >> Lisa: Right. >> So the scholarships are actually a living wage stipend. Because the school is too intensive for the students to actually be able to work. It's a very compact program. Instead of four year, the students are done in two. So that's our first academic partner. The students are getting jobs at fantastic companies like LinkedIn, and NASA. And they are actually out-competing MIT and Stanford grads for those jobs. >> That's phenomenal. >> It is phenomenal. So we are more than happy to suggest to our corporate funders that they put their money on those bets. >> Lisa: Excellent. >> So we've got Google and we've got Accenture that are funding those Holberton scholarships. And then the second academic partner is in Bangalore, India. And it's Shanti Bhavan. You might have seen this with the Netflix documentary, "Daughters of Destiny." >> Lisa: It was incredible. >> Absolutely incredible and absolutely moving. The Shanti Bhavan school, for your viewers that are unfamiliar with it, they take children from the poorest of the poor background, in rural India. They commit to educating these children from the age of four all the way through the university level. The scholarships we put together with the help of Intel and Apcera and CB Technologies are to fund girls studying STEM at the university level in Bangalore. And this is just the beginning, Lisa. We really hope that in 2018 we can increase the number of scholarships and we really hope that we'll be able to increase the number of corporate partnerships as well. Because these students are doing phenomenal things and we really believe that they're going to be taking their place along side any of what the Ivy League graduates would be doing. >> I love that. And in our last minute, talk to us about Google and Google's involvement with you. Because that's pretty remarkable what you've been able to achieve for CloudNOW with Google. >> Thank you. The Google involvement has definitely been an involving partnership. And the funding for Google actually happened ... It was a happy circumstance that I ran into Vint Serf at a party and got introduced to him. I gave him a quick 30 second overview of what CloudNOW had been doing and he handed me his business card and said, "It sounds really interesting, send me an email." >> Wow, from one of the fathers of the internet. That's pretty amazing. >> I couldn't believe how accessible or easy-going he was. But I went ahead and I emailed him. I said, "What I'm looking for is some money for a scholarship fund. I'm not asking you for it, I just know if you were to endorse this, the money would very easily be found." So I went to sleep. Woke up, the very next morning there was a response from Vint and he had sent me the money. >> Oh my goodness. >> And we were done. The fund was closed, we were on our way. >> Wow. >> And what he said in response, it was so beautiful, Lisa. He said, "One does what one can to be of service." That message, I've been really holding it with me for the last several months. "One does what one can to be of service" Because I think it's just a very inspiring message, especially as we all go into 2018 and think about what we're grateful for. I hope there are people in your audience that feel like they can do what they can and will join us in this very heart-felt mission. >> Wow. You are so inspiring Jocelyn. With what you and your partners have created with CloudNOW. We thank you so much for asking us to be here. Our second year with the CUBE. It's a great event to cover. But be proud of what you've accomplished. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Because it's incredible. >> Thank you for all of your support, it really means a lot to me. >> Excellent. We want to thank you for watching the CUBE, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at Google for the 6th annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud event. Thanks for watching. (digital beat music)

>> Lisa: I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We're on the ground at Google for the 6th Annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards. Very excited to be joined by award winner and CUBE alumni Erica Windisch, founder and CTO of Iopipe. Welcome back to theCUBE, Erica. >> Erica: Thank you. Great to have you here, and congratulations on being one of the top women in Cloud. >> Yeah, of course. >> Tell me, when you heard about that you were being recognized, what did that mean to you and where you are in your career? >> Well, oh gosh, I mean it really meant, it was really big for me. I actually wasn't really expecting it. I think I was nominated and I totally forgot. I think somebody had mentioned to me that they were nominating me and I had no idea about it. I totally forgot about it. But I mean, for me it's just so validating because as much as I've, well one, because I've done a lot of interesting things in Cloud and in tech, but I've never really gotten a lot of recognition for that. And also, just recognition, I mean to be quite honest, I'm transgender. So the fact that I was recognized as a woman, Top Ten Women in Cloud Computing, was extra important and special for me. >> Oh, that's awesome. So tell me about your path to being where you are now. Were you always interested in computers and technology, or is that something that you kind of zigzagged your way to? >> Yeah, well, it was one of these things I guess I had some interest. When I was a child, we had BASIC exercises printed in our math books but our teachers never went over it. So I got kind of interested and I would read through those like those little appendums in my math books, and I would start teaching myself BASIC. And I picked up a Commodore 64 and it didn't work and I taught myself BASIC, more BASIC with those manuals. And I just had these little tiny introductions to technology and just self-taught myself everything. Eventually using a high school job to buy myself books and just teaching myself from those books. Managed to grab Linux on some floppy disks, installed it and tried to figure out how to use it. But I didn't really have lot of mentors or anything that I could really follow. At best there were other kids at school who were into computers and I just wanted to try and do what they were doing or do better than they were doing. >> I love that, self-taught, you knew you liked this and you were not afraid to try, "Hey, let me teach myself." That's really inspiring, Erica. >> Yeah. >> So, speaking of inspiring, tell me about the Iopipes story. So you're a TechSource company, tell us a little bit about TechSource, what that investment in IOpipe means. >> Yeah, so, I started, I guess I first started IOpipe two years ago. And I found the co-founder Adam Johnson, who joined me. And we applied for Techstars, got in, and that was like the first validation that we had from outside of ourselves and maybe one angel investor at that time. And that was a really big deal because it really helped accelerate us, give us validation, allow us to make the first hire, and they also taught us a lot about how to refine our elevator pitch, and how to raise money effectively. And then we ended up raising money, of course. So with the end of Techstars we had a lot of visibility, and that helped us raise two and a half million dollars seed round. >> Wow, so a really good launching pad for you. >> Yes, yeah. >> That's fantastic. So tell us a little bit more about the technology, I know that there's AWS Lambda, we just got back from re:Invent last week, so tell us a little bit more about exactly what you guys do. >> Oh yeah, so what we do is we provide a service that allows developers to get better insights into their application, they get observability into the application running a Lambda, as well as debugging and profiling tools. So you can actually get profiling data out of your Lambda and load that into Google DevTools and get Flame Graphs and dig in deep into which function called which function inside of each function call, so every Lambda invocation you can really dig down and see what's happening. We have things like custom metrics and alerts for that. So you can, for instance, we built this bot. I built it in two days. It's a Slack bot that, if you put an image in a Slack, it will run it through Amazon Rekognition and tell you, describe the objects in it, and describe it. So, for instance, if you have visually impaired members of your team, they can find out what was in the images that people pasted. I built it in only two days, and I could use our tool, let's say to extract how many objects were found in that image, whether or not a specific object was found in that image, and then we can create alerts around those, and do searches based on those, and get statistics out of our product on the data that was extracted from those images. So that was really cool, and we actually announced that feature, the profiling feature, at Midnight Madness at re:Invent so it was like the opening ceremony for re:Invent. It was just us, Andy Jassy and Shaquille O'Neal. >> Lisa: What? >> Yeah, and we launched our product, and we did the demo of this Slack bot, and it was a lot of fun. >> Wow! So you were there last week, then? >> I was there, we were there last week, and we were actually the first, myself, my co-founder and one of our engineers were up there and we were the first non-AWS speakers at the entire arena, it was really amazing. >> Wow, amazing. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> So with all the cool announcements that came out last week on Lambda, Serverless, even new features that were announced for recognition, how does that either change the game or maybe kind of ignite the fire under you guys even a little bit more? >> Well I think one of the biggest announcements relative to us was Cloud9. And we knew that this was going to happen, Amazon acquired them a year ago, a year and a half ago, but they finally launched it. And they really doubled down on providing a much better experience for developers of Lambda to make it easier for developers to really build and ship and run that code on Lambda, which provides a much tighter experience for them so that they can on-board into things like IOpipe more easily. So that was really exciting, because I think that's really going to help with the adoption of Lambda. And some of the other features like Alexa for work is really interesting. It will probably just again, a lot of Alexa apps are built on top of Lambda, so all of these are going to provide value to my own company because we can tell you things like, "Well, how are your users interacting "with those Alexa skills?" But I think it's just generally exciting because there's just so many really cool, I mean, I don't know how many things they announced at this re:Invent that were just really amazing. Another one I really loved was Fargate, because I mean I came from Docker, I used to be a maintainer of the Docker engine and something that I was pushing for at that time in OpenStack and other projects, was the idea of just containers completely as a service without the VM management side of things, because with like ECS, you had to manage virtual machines, and I was like, "Well that is a little, like, "I don't want to manage virtual machines, "I just want Amazon to give me containers." So I was really excited that they finally launched Fargate to offer that. >> So the last question in our last couple of minutes here, tell me about the culture and your team that you lead at IOpipe. You were saying before, you know, when you were a kid you were really self-taught and very inspired by your own desire to learn, but tell me a little bit about the people that work for you and how you help inspire them. >> Oh gosh, well I think first of all, we are, right now we're nine people. I would say about four or five of us are under-represented minorities in tech in one way or another. It's really been fantastic that we've been able to have that level of diversity and inclusion. I think part of that is that we started very diverse. You know, a lot of companies will say, well, one of their problems with not having enough diversity is that they hire within their networks, well we hire within our networks, but we started very diverse in the first place. So that organic growth was very natural and very diverse for us, whereas that organic pairing growth can be problematic if you don't start in a very diverse place. So I think that's been really great, and I think that the fact that we have that level of diversity and inclusion with our employees is kind of inspiring, because a lot of workplaces just aren't like that in tech. It's really hard to find, and granted we're only nine right now. I would really hope that we can keep that up and I would like to actually make our workforce even more diverse than it is today. But yeah, I don't know, I just think it's fantastic and I want what we're doing to be a role model and an inspiration to other companies and say, "Yes, you can do this." And also the work people in the workforce, yes, you can be a woman in tech, yes, you can be trans in tech, yes, you can be non-binary in tech. I am binary, but we have non-binary people in staff. And, I don't know, I hope that's inspiring to people and also myself being a transgender founder, I maybe know one or two other people who are transgender founders, it's very uncommon. And I hope that also is an inspiration for people. >> Well I think so, speaking for myself I find you very inspiring. You seem to be someone that's really known for thinking, "I'm not afraid of anything. "I'm just going to try it. "Starting a company, I'm going to try it." And it sounds like you guys are very purposefully building a culture that's very inclusive, and so I think that, as well as your recognition as one of the Top Women in Cloud, be proud of that, Erica. That's awesome. >> Thank you. >> And you got to meet Shaquille O'Neal? >> I got to meet Shaquille O'Neal, yeah. >> I've got to see the photo. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> Well thank you so much Erica for joining us back on theCUBE. Congratulations on the award, and we look forward to seeing exciting things that you do in the future. >> Okay great, thank you. >> I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE at Google for the CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards. Thanks for watching, bye for now.

you hi I'm Lisa Martin with the cube on the ground at Google for the 6th annual cloud now top women and cloud awards event and we're very excited to be joined by our next guest jennifer clora the executive producer of the chasing Grace Project welcome to the cube thank you this project is so interesting I was telling you before we went on that I watched the trailer for it and tell us a little bit about the chasing Grace Project what your plans are for this dunkey series being being released and really the the inspiration sure so it's a documentary series of six episodes about women in tech it really talks about the culture of tech the adversities that women face doesn't shy away from those but moves pretty quickly to inspirational stories of women who have navigated a successful path in tech so that other women can learn from those experiences and join us in tech and for those women thinking about leaving maybe inspire them to stay and give them the tools they need to navigate their own paths forward I love that I was very impressed with some of the women that are featured even in the trailer of how honest they were being did you find that they felt either intimidated to share or maybe liberated to say this is what's going on there needs to be voices and faces to it yeah I think there I think women are feeling empowered right now to talk and when they share their stories they're even more empowered by the community of men and women that come around them and give them support so the women that are on camera volunteered to be so I put out a call for stories in a number of places Irish I was inundated with responses I spent four months the beginning of the year interviewing over a hundred women and trying to understand what the collective experience is for women in tech and so these women are not intimidated they're they're powerful amazing women who I am in awe of their courage what were some of the common maybe that the top two or three kind of common challenges that you heard over and over again that women in tech regardless of if they're in marketing like one you and I are or in engineering that they're facing access to opportunity they seem to feel like they hit a wall you know there's the talk about the ceiling but a lot of them talk about they hit a wall that others don't see but all of a sudden they can't go any further a lot of microaggressions that we've all heard and read about dismissiveness being overlooked in medians and for promotions our first episode is on the pay gap we've heard stories about women who have found out their male counterparts are making more than them and the differences and when they confront their bosses and when they don't so a lot of different examples we have some very explicit stories about online harassment there's some of that in the trailer one of the women Cassady shares a really amazing story about that so they vary but certainly it's happening right and we don't want to shy away from that because I think once you acknowledge what's happening and tell those stories you can start to chart the course forward I agree I think that awareness is incredibly important you are also in technology tell me a little bit about your career path in technology did you always aspire to be in tech were you interested in engineering in software or was this sort of a zigzaggy path to where you are now it wasn't a zigzaggy path I went to journalism school and studied communications and my first job out of college was during the dot-com bubble if you will and so I went into tech it was a lucrative you know career path and I fell in love with it at first it was very intimidating because I didn't speak the language but I learned the language and I learned to work with entrepreneurs I've worked with a lot of startups and translating really amazing vision into stories that anyone can understand and so that's been my pathway through tech and I'm grateful to be here and like I said I think one of the one the the mission of the chasing Grace project is to recruit and retain female talent because we as an industry needs you know a diverse workforce but also women need opportunities to these types of careers they're the most lucrative careers in the world and so that economic opportunity for women as individuals and the need that we have in the industry just put underscores the need for these types of stories to be told definitely so we're at the cloud now six annual top women and cloud awards event how did you come to be involved with cloud now and what are some what if some of your perspectives of now being involved with it yeah so I met Jocelyn the founder of cloud now just a few months ago we were introduced through mutual colleagues and she watched the trailer of the chasing Grace project and said you have to come to the event I want to share your project with our community which was so amazing to hear and so I'm super grateful to be here and to be sharing the trailer a little bit later at the event as well as exhibiting for the first time our photo exhibit called persistence that accompanies the documentary so we will host a photo exhibit at every screening of each episode and that will grow over time as more and more women are photographed for the project but the very first showing is here at the event so we were really excited to be able to do that exciting yeah so uses a six-part series correct when can people expect to start seeing episodes so the first episode is is expected around the end of February 18 2018 exactly we're in post-production now on Episode one we shot it a couple weeks ago and we're already planning episode 2 and when our shoot will be in early probably the first two three months of the year so we expect to release episodes every eight to twelve weeks so that people kind of stay connected and and we can bridge episode to episode for example the first episodes on the pay gap the second episode we think may be on female founders and there's a bridge between women who feel like they aren't being paid fairly to wanting to become the owners of their own companies so they can determine their own worth so so we want to make sure there's continuity in the episodes so as you've gone through and and you said interviewed 100 plus women in the last year what are some of the things that inspire you with the chasing grace project that you feel like we're gonna make a difference here yeah I'm inspired by the courage of these women you know there's so much more awareness about women in tech now among both men and women but a lot of times when women speak up they become that women in the office you know that woman who you know is talking and causing trouble and complaining and that's not the case these women are sharing stories that are important for all of us to understand to build a better future through technology so I'm inspired by their courage because it's no small thing to go on camera and talk about your personal story in hopes that it can help other women and help men also be a part of that conversation so I'm inspired by the courage of the women and that's you know I get notes now you know back from women who are part of the project when they see something go live the trailer the photo exhibit today that are just like I'm so excited to be a part of this and I feel empowered and I found my voice I didn't even know I had a story most the time they tell me and they do so I mean I'm inspired by that I love that and it's so great that that they're not intimidated that they are feeling empowered that they have a voice mm-hmm they matter and what they're doing should be valued there should be no differences would be great if we actually get to a world where there aren't it right we're headed there being more attention and eyes to it thank you I'll get there Thank You Jennifer thank you so much for joining my pleasure where can people find once that the episodes go live where can they find the chasing grace episode they can find them at chasing grace film calm we will have an exclusive media partnership or they will also be distributed online but they can always find them on our website excellent well I'm looking forward to watching it I thank you for sharing your story and for inspiring I'll say inspiring me and probably many of our viewers thanks so much thank you for having me I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with the Cuba Google for the cloud now top lemon and clouds award event stick around we'll be right back