>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today, having ongoing conversations about diversity and really adding more women and also people of color into the corporate environment. And we're really excited to have somebody who's an expert in the field. Joining us for the first time from the East coast. She's Beth Stewart, founder and CEO of Trewstar. Before we get going, tell us a little bit about Trewstar and what you guys are all about. >> Well, we're a search firm and we specialize at the board level, so we don't do executive search. And we further focus on female candidates, and much more recently, I wouldn't want to say we never focused on racial diversity, but let's just say it's getting a lot more attention and that would include men and women. >> Right, right, so that makes a lot of sense. And specifically, what's different about running a search firm that's focused on board members than a search firm that's focused on traditional kind of leadership roles, CEO or other senior executives? >> Well, there are a couple of things. First of all, one of the criteria to be a partner at Trewstar is that you have to have been a board member yourself. And I don't think at other search firms that do the board work as part of their overall practice that that's as important, that's not to say some partners at other firms aren't board members, but it's not as consistent as it is at Trewstar. So one, we feel like we really understand what our clients' issues are. A second thing that differentiates us is that, we spend really all day every day thinking about and sourcing and meeting with and getting referrals from people about diversity candidates. So, I think other firms are focused on people that they can place into leadership positions which aren't necessarily people who are or have been or could be a board member. And going back to that focus on having been in the board room, we have a pretty good sense of who's right and who isn't maybe quite ready or never will be ready to go on a board. >> So I wonder if you could just pull the curtain back a little bit for us, 'cause everyone has worked for a manager or been a manager and had some level of exposure to kind of the senior management in their companies or CEOs. We see him speak at keynotes. That's very different than what happens in the board. So, when you talk about the candidates, and you just mentioned, some people may never be ready for a board position. What are the kind of candidate attributes that you look for that you know is somebody that's good for corporate board? >> Well, so first, it has to start with the skill set that the company has requested, based on their analysis and sometimes we help with this. But their analysis of where there is a gap in the skills on the board. And there are a lot of different people that might fit that skill. Let's just take the audit chair, because it's such an obvious one, there are many, many people who can chair an audit committee. But what we also are going to look for is somebody who you'd like to have dinner with or lunch with. Now I realize when we're in COVID times, everybody's not doing that, but assuming things return to some level of normalcy, you want to have people who are personable, who are easy to get along with, who aren't going to talk too much, who aren't going to talk over each other and who are skilled at the top of their game, if you will. So, for people who might be audit chairs, we're looking for either a CFO or a retired audit partner. And in that case, we might be looking for audit partners who have had leadership positions in their firms that's just an indication of their sort of level of outstandingness. >> Right. >> And when you look for a CFO, you might say, is this a CFO who came up through an investment banking or Treasurer background or is it a CFO who came up through an accounting background? All these depend on the situation, but those are the kinds of considerations for us. >> Right, and one of the things that came up in doing a little research for this interview, is you talked about crafting modern dynamic boards and I think probably a lot of people's perception is that boards just don't turn over that often. And I think even you've said in some of your literature, that the problem's not really a supply side problem, it's a demand side problem. So, I wonder if you can share some insight as to kind of what is happening with boards in terms of turnovers and making seats available for new people, whether that be women or women of color or whomever. Is that changing over time? Are you seeing a dynamic start to change where you're starting to get more fresh blood into corporate boards, where before that was probably a pretty glacial paced activity I would imagine? >> I wouldn't want you to think that anybody's sprinting at this point, we haven't gone from glacial to sprints, but change has happened. And so you talked about a dynamic boardroom, if you can imagine the number of people that are on corporate boards that haven't worked since before the iPhone or before the trade wars with China and other places or before #metoo or before COVID or before dealing with millennials in the workplace. So, there are a lot of people that fall in that category that do offer wisdom and stability on a board, but it's really, I believe, incumbent on them to get that sort of new perspectives and literally new information and skills and have it be a better blend. And you can't do that unless you do create openings, you can always increase the size of the board, but you can't do that unless you take the difficult step of asking some of the longer tenured and older board members to retire. Now, having said that, it's not just an ageist thing. There are often board members that for instance, on a pre-IPO company, who were venture capitalists, and the venture capitalists may not actually know the issues of a public board, they know the issues of smaller companies and growing in a private market. And sometimes you get somebody who's in the middle of their career, who doesn't have the time to spend, because they are in a full-time role. So really, what it comes down to is, someone appropriately managing the boardroom by saying, "who's really got the skills and the time and the personality that we need." And what I find most interesting, Jeff, is you can speak to anybody on a board and they know who it is that shouldn't be there anymore. It doesn't require a whole process and bringing in outsiders and doing exhaustive studies, everybody knows who it is. It's just whether there's somebody who's willing to have those difficult conversations. >> So, it's interesting 'cause you say someone willing to have those difficult conversations which would imply that there's not kind of a systematic way to make sure that things are refreshed to make sure that there's some turnover to make sure that maybe institutionally everybody knows that there's going to be turns if it's really kind of a one off conversation every time and I think, again, doing some research, you talked about, some really older folks that have been around for a long time, not necessarily because they don't have the qualifications anymore, but it's just time for them to potentially give up that chair. So, you're saying that it's not that institutionalized in terms of making sure that this thing is refreshed at some type of frequency? >> Yes, that's what I'm saying. I just don't know how to say it any differently, but it doesn't happen consistently, but what is consistently true, is the dread with which the senior person on the board, the chair of nominating governance, the chair of the board, maybe it's the CEO, has about having the conversation about asking somebody to not stand for re-election, that's consistent and systematized. And there are some other sort of old fashion ways we can expand the board while expanding the board if you've been in a board room, it's a trivial issue. Somebody makes a motion and the board's expanded by one or we can't ask somebody to retire, because their term's not up. Well, why can't you? You're supposed to be representing the shareholders. If they're not doing as great a job as the next person. Having them stay for another 18 months isn't really in the best interest of the shareholders. So, I feel it's a little bit the dirty little secret in corporate boards. This unwillingness of people to either ask somebody to move on or to move on themselves. >> Well, then there's the whole chairman-CEO thing, which I've never quite understood that how you can be both the chairman of the board as well as the CEO of the company if the board is supposed to be the CEO's boss? But I don't think we're going to solve that problem here today. >> That's a third rail that I'm not going to get into and I would suspect that it really varies by person and by situation. Sometimes I'm sure that works just perfectly well and other times, there is a reason to have a separation. >> Right, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about some positive news. You had an article that you did, it's been a while now, December 18th, saying that you placed more women in boards, the first quarter of Q1 2018, it's an old article, than you had in all 2017 which is kind of a nice interesting indicator of trending in the right direction. And as you just mentioned, before we turned on the cameras, your phones are lighting up with all this stuff going on with the black lives matter movement. So, people do seem to be in a better place than they were. So how do you see it kind of progressing? What are some ways that other people can contribute to help make sure that the momentum is going up in the correct direction? >> Sure, why don't I talk about what I think caused the change? And there's plenty of room for other people to take these actions. Certainly there has been for many years there were not for profit organizations and academic institutions that wrote about the reasons, wrote about, had conferences etcetera, about the reasons there should be diversity on boards. I have to say, parenthetically, this notion of diversity for me it goes a lot back to the idea of the dynamic board. So, it's not just being a woman per se or racially diverse person per se. It could be a person who actually has those needed skills. But anyway, so, for a long time these not for profits were focused on this. But it was March 7th, 2017, when State Street came out with their proclamation that they were not going to support chairs of nominating governance who didn't create diverse boards. And you might remember when they put the statue of the girl with her arms spread out in front of the bull on Wall Street. That was incredible and that led a number of other financial institutions who voted proxies to support that, that was huge. Another movement or another action that mattered, is the state of California, saying that they're setting up quotas. I'm no fan of quotas, but now that I've actually seen what happens in the state of California. And what's happened to the quality, we aren't putting people who aren't high quality on these boards, we're putting outstanding women on the boards, but there's more of an opportunity. And then the third thing that happened and I realized we're now getting into January of 2020, but I mention it because there are many more, so there are many more states that can do what California did. There are many more financial institutions that can do explicitly what State Street did, and many have, but there's still more. And then the last thing happened at Davos in January of 2020, when David Solomon, who's the CEO of Goldman Sachs, said that they will not take any companies public, unless this year there's at least one woman on the board and next year, two women on the board, and this is huge. So, what I would point out to you is that, in the case of State Street and in the case of Goldman Sachs, the senior member of the organization actually stepped in and did something and set a tone and set an expectation and sort of, if you will, created a rule, which is different than saying my head of diversity and inclusion is going to take care of it. Head of talent is responsible for this, it really has to come from the top. So, there are many, many other organizations with people at the top who can put in similar recommendations or basically new ways of working. >> Right, Beth, but we know from real data and real evidence that a diversity of opinion leads to better outcome and it leads to better business results. So it's funny that even with that kind of data, you still need kind of that personal touch to push it over the line, to really make it. The fearless girl statue is an amazing story, I'm happy to say I've tracked her down and got a couple pictures. I've got a few daughters that I shared it with and kind of the rallying cry that that became in fact, I think they've even moved it to a more prominent position from across from the bull, really is interesting that there's these small little symbols that can mark significant progress in kind of this ongoing journey. >> Yes, I agree with you completely, but maybe it goes back to that whole notion of why can't you? Why don't people want to retire from boards? And what's really these various things have done is it's just forced the conversation and it's forced the action. Being on a board is a great thing. You get paid a lot, you're at the top of the hierarchy, it's the pinnacle of somebody's career. So I'm very sympathetic to why nobody wants to move on, but that doesn't mean it's right. We're supposed to be doing what's right for the company and the shareholders. >> Okay, so before we let you go, just a couple of concrete things that you suggest to people that they can do to kind of help this mission along. >> Well, so back to what differentiates us, we present slates of all women. And what we recommend is interview the women first. And if we don't find a candidate who matches what you need, both the specific skills and the personality, we'll open the search to men. And while we have placed men, whenever we started with an all female slate, we've never been asked to open the slate to men. So, what does it mean? That's not us, we're a client service business, it's the client who's never asked us. So it's incumbent upon us not to just have a slate of women, but to have a slate of outstanding women. And that goes back to focusing on this and spending every day and talking to so many women in advance. So that's the first thing I would say, is that you start with an all female slate. The second thing I would say is people say to me, what's the most important thing about to get a woman on a board, and I say it starts with a signed engagement letter. And so what does that imply? What that implies is that we're a for profit organization doing this from soup to nuts. We don't just find the women and send their resumes out, we run the whole process. We understand the company, we give them materials, we organize the interviews, we do the reference checks, we do what I call the last mile logistics, so that in a three to four month period, which is quite fast for the world of boards, somebody goes on the board. We've never had a failed search. So, it's really managing a whole process. And the signed engagement letter means, somebody actually hired us to do that. So, we start in the very beginning with a board who wants the whole process and wants to have a diverse candidate. So it's not like a question at the end or whatever, it's all lined up. And we try to leave no stone unturned and I would say that that's very important when you start thinking about, there are a lot of databases out there. But sometimes when you just go to a database and get a name, it doesn't actually turn into a woman on the board. >> Right, and I'm just curious to get your personal take, since you've been doing this for a while and as you said, your phone's been lighting up looking for more diverse candidates, not just women, but people of color, etcetera. Do you see a change in attitude from the senior people that are hiring you to move beyond? "I need to check a box, I'm getting pressure I need to do this", versus, "wow I see real benefit, I see this as real important. It's important for me, it's important for my company, it's important, really, to our shareholders, our stakeholders and our constituents to actually take maybe an uncomfortable step or a step", maybe uncomfortable is the wrong word, "that I'm not necessarily used to or is new or foreign to me, to take this action and move this thing down the road." >> Yeah, I would say absolutely, but I think that even if they start with, "I know I have to do this, I might not know why I want to do it, but I'm going to do it anyway." Even for the people that are in that, like take an all male board. Truthfully the all male boards aren't really wild about this, they've been forced for one reason or another. But what's amazing is if you come up with a high quality slate of candidates, what we find over and over again is the inability to choose between one candidate and another, and often the decision to add two women. And that to me is a testament to one the openness of those all male boards to recognizing quality, and being able to now see with a live person, if you will, how that new director could really help them. So, that's terrific that that happens. Now, just to mention on the racial diversity, we're doing the exact same thing or basically, if you will, beefing up, expanding all of our connections in those areas. And one of the things that's different is we've had searches that were underway, whoever is leading the search on the side of the company has said, "Stop. It has to be a racially diverse person, stop whatever you're doing." We did a search for a media company and we had 21 African-American women on the slate that met the spec for one reason or another. And then, of the new calls that we've been getting, I'd say 60 or 70% of them we don't want anything other than a racially diverse man or woman. You talked about the phones lighting up, it's like a set of fireworks at the fourth of July in terms of what's happened here. And we're completely behind it and we've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people about what's the right way to approach this in terms of having the conversations with those racially diverse people. And anyway, we're doing all sorts of things. And we're bound and determined to be helpful and to be action-oriented in this current situation. >> That's great news, Beth, because when I talked to some of my black friends, specifically, as this has been going on, a lot of them come back and say, "I don't know why this is so different, we've been having these issues for a long period of time." So, it's nice to find some examples where hopefully, there's some step function activity going on here. And I think what you just outlined very much supports that, that this isn't just more of the same, but actually, there are changes slowly being affected kind of across many fronts, all at the same time, which would certainly be supported by what you just said. >> So, I'd love to Jeff, I don't know whether we're running out of time or not, but I had a conversation with a senior African-American male board member. 'Cause one, he's on the board of a company that's our client, I know how terrific everybody thinks he is and he chairs audit committees and he chairs nominating governance committees. And so I asked him about how to handle this. And in any case, one of the things he told me is that he would advise his friends that if anybody was going on a board to figure out the sincerity of the board, he said, "'cause I don't want to go on a board and check the box. I want to go on a board because I'm part of a company trying to make strides in these areas and where I can add value." He said, "I would tell them up front, "that if all you've got is a black woman in diversity and inclusion, that I don't think you're sincere. And if I find that you're not sincere, I'm going to resign. And when I resign, you the board, will then have to explain to everybody why I resigned and that won't be pleasant." (chuckles) So, I thought, wow, that's- >> You're putting your mouth where your money is, that's for sure. That's terrific. >> Yeah. >> Well, Beth, we could go on and on and on. Unfortunately, we have other work to do and I'm sure you do as well. But our paths cross because of some of the fantastic women that we've had on theCUBE who are also clients of yours and getting placed in board seats, which is terrific news. We're happy to highlight some of these terrific individuals, as you said, they're not just women or people of color, they're fantastic people first, and terrific executives and kind of representatives of the company. So, really excited for you and what you're doing to help put some really qualified people in places where they can make a difference. >> Yes, well, it's a wonderful job I created for myself and as I say, I only talk to successful people, because unsuccessful ones aren't available to be interviewed for board roles. >> (chuckles) All right, well, we will leave it at that. So Beth, thanks a lot and have a terrific week. >> Thank you, same to you. Thank you, Jeff. >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Bye-bye. >> All right, she's Beth, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (mellow music)

>> Narrator: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're still on our Palo Alto studios, we're still getting through COVID and we're still doing all of our remotes, all of our interviews via remote and I'm really excited to have a guest we had around a long time ago. I looked it up is 2016, April 2016. She's Coco Brown, the founder and CEO of the Athena Alliance. Coco, it's great to see you. >> It's great to see you as well. We actually formally started in April of 2016. >> I know, I saw, I noticed that on LinkedIn. So we were at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference in Phoenix, I remembers was a really cool conference, met a ton of people, a lot of them have turned out that are on your board. So yeah, and you formally on LinkedIn, it says you started in May. So that was right at the very, very beginning. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So for people that aren't familiar with the at the Athena Alliance give them the quick overview. >> Okay. Well, it's a little different that it was four years ago. So Athena first and foremost is a digital platform. So you literally log in to Athena. And we're a combination of community access to opportunity and learning. And so you can kind of envision it a little bit like a walled garden around the LinkedIn, meets Khan Academy for senior executives, meets Hollywood agency for women trying to get into the boardroom and senior level roles in the c-suite as advisors, et cetera. And then the way that we operate is you can have a self-service experience of Athena, you can have a concierge experience with Athena with real humans in the loop making key connections for you and you can add accelerators where we build brand packages and BIOS and give you executive coaching. So... >> Wow. >> Kind of a... >> You've built out your services portfolio over the last several years. But still the focus >> yes, we have. is boards, right? Still the focus is getting women on public boards, or is that no longer still the focus? >> No, that's a big piece of it for sure. I mean, one of the things that we discovered, that was the very first mission of Athena, was to bring more women into the boardroom. And as we were doing that we discovered that once you get into a senior realm of leadership in general, there's more things that you want to do than just get into the boardroom. Some of it may be wanting to be an investor or an LP in a fund or become a CEO, or certainly join outside boards but also be relevant to your own inside board. And so we started to look at Athena as a more holistic experience for senior leaders who are attempting to make sure that they are the best they can be in this very senior realm of overarching stewardship of business. >> Awesome. and have you seen, so obviously your your focus shifted 'cause you needed to add more services based on the demand from the customers. But have you seen the receptiveness to women board members change over the last four years? How have you seen kind of the marketplace change? >> Yeah, it's changed a lot, I would say. First of all I think laws like the California law and Goldman Sachs coming out saying they won't take companies public unless they have diverse board data. The statements by big entities that people are paying attention to made the boardroom dynamics a conversation around the dinner table in general. So it became more of a common conversation and common interest as opposed to just the interest of a few people who are trying to get in there. And so that's created a lot of momentum as well as sort of thoughtfulness from leaders and from employees and from larger stakeholders to say the diversity at the top business has to mimic the demographics of society as a whole. And that's become a little bit more accepted as opposed to grudgingly sort of taken in. >> Right. So one of the big problems always it's like the VC problem, right? Is the whole matchmaking problem. How do you, how do qualified people find qualified opportunities? And I wonder if you can speak a little bit as to how that process has evolved, how are you really helping because there's always people that are looking for quality candidates, and there's great quality candidates out there that just don't know where to go. How are you helping bridge kind of that kind of basic matchmaking function? >> Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of different ways to go about it. One is certainly to understand and have real connections into the parts of the leadership ecosystem that influences or makes the decision as to who sits around that table. So that would be communities of CEOs, it's communities of existing board directors, it's venture capital firms, its private equity firms, and as you get really entrenched in those organizations and those ecosystems, you become part of that ecosystem and you become what they turn to to say, "Hey, do you know somebody?" Because it still is a "who do yo know" approach at the senior most levels. So that's one way. The other mechanism is really for individuals who are looking for board seats who want to be on boards to actually be thinking about how they proactively navigate their way to the kinds of boards that they would fit to. I like in a very much to the way our children go after the schools that they might want to when it's time for university. You'll figure out who your safeties, your matches, your reaches are, and figure out how you're going to take six degrees of separation and turn them into one through connections. So those are that's another way to go about it. >> You know, it's interesting, I talked to Beth Stewart from True Star, they also help place women on boards. And one of the issues is just the turnover. And I asked that just straight up, are there formal mechanisms to make sure that people who've been doing business from way before there were things like email and the internet eventually get swapped out. And she said, that's actually a big part of the problem is there isn't really a formal way to keep things fresh and to kind of rotate the incumbents out to enable somebody who's new and maybe has a different point of view to come in. So I'm curious when someone is targeting their A-list and B-list and C-lists, how do they factor in kind of the age of the board composition of the existing board, to really look for where there's these opportunities where a spot opens up, 'cause if there's not a spot open up clearly, there's really not much opportunity there. >> Yeah, I mean, you have to look at the whole ecosystem, right? I mean, there's anything from let's say series A, venture backed private companies all the way up to the mega cap companies, right? And there's this continuum. And it's not, there's not one universal answer to what you're talking about. So for example, if you're talking about smaller private companies, you're competing against, not somebody giving up their seat, but whether or not the company feels real motivation to fill that particular independent director seat. So the biggest competition is often that that seat goes unfilled. When you're talking about public companies, the biggest competition is really the fact that as my friend Adam Epstein of the small cap Institute will tell you, that 80% of public companies are actually small cap companies. And they don't have the same kinds of pressures that large caps do to have turnover. But yeah, it takes a big piece of the challenge is really boards having the disposition collectively to see the board as a competitive advantage for the business as a very necessary and productive piece of the business and when they see that then they take more proactive measures to make sure they have a evolving and strong board that does turnover as it needs to. >> Right. So I'm curious when you're talking to the high power women, right, who are in operational roles probably most of the time, how do you help coach them, how should they be thinking, what do they have to do different when they want to kind of add board seats to their portfolio? Very different kind of a role than an operational role, very different kind of concerns and day to day tasks. So, and clearly, you've added a whole bunch of extra things to your portfolio. So how do you help people, what do you tell women who say, "Okay, I've been successful, "I'm like successful executive, "but now I want to do this other thing, "I want to take this next step in my career"? What usually the gaps and what are the things that they need to do to prepare for that? >> Well, I'm going to circle in then land a little bit. Autodesk was actually a really great partner to us back when you and I first met. They had a couple of women at the top of the organization that were part of Athena, specifically because they wanted to join boards. They are on boards now, Lisa Campbell, Amy Bunszel, Debbie Clifford. And what they told us is they were experiencing everything that we were offering in terms of developing them, helping them to position themselves, understand themselves, navigate their way, was that they simply became better leaders as a result of focusing on themselves as that next level up, irrespective of the fact that it took them two to three years to land that seat. They became stronger in their executive role in general and better able to communicate and engage with their own boards. So I think, now I'm landing, the thing that I would say about that is don't wait until you're thinking oh, I want to join a board, to do the work to get yourself into that ecosystem, into that atmosphere and into that mindset, because the sooner you do that as an executive, the better you will be in that atmosphere, the more prepared you will be. And you also have to recognize that it will take time. >> Right. And the how has COVID impacted it, I mean, on one hand, meeting somebody for coffee and having a face to face is a really important part of getting to know someone and a big part of I'm sure, what was the recruitment process, and do you know someone, yeah, let's go meet for a cup of coffee or dinner or whatever. Can't do that anymore, but we can all meet this way, we can all get on virtually and so in some ways, it's probably an enabler, which before you could grab an hour or you didn't have to fly cross-country or somebody didn't have to fly cross-country. So I'm kind of curious in this new reality, which is going to continue for some time. How has that impacted kind of people's ability to discover and get to know and build trust for these very very senior positions. >> HBR just came out with a really great article about the virtual board meeting. I don't know if you saw it but I can send you a link. I think that what I'm learning from board directors in general and leaders in general is that yes, there's things that make it difficult to engage remotely, but there's also a lot of benefit to being able to get comfortable with the virtual world. So it's certainly, particularly with COVID, with racial equity issues, with the uncertain economy, boards are having to meet more often and they're having, some are having weekly stand ups and those are facilitated by getting more and more comfortable with being virtual. And I think they're realizing that you don't have to press flesh, as they say, to actually build intimacy and real connection. And that's been a hold up, but I think as the top leadership gets to understand that and feel that for themselves, it becomes easier for them to adopt it throughout the organization that the virtual world is one we can really embrace, not just for a period of time. >> It's funny we had John Chambers on early on in this whole process, really talking about leadership and leading through transition. And he used the example, I think had been that day or maybe a couple days off from our interview where they had a board meeting, I think they were talking about some hamburger restaurant, and so they just delivered hamburgers to everybody's office and they had the board meeting. But that's really progressive for a board to actually be doing weekly stand ups. That really shows a pretty transformative way to manage the business and kind of what we think is the stodgy old traditional get together now and then, fly and then get some minutes and fly out, that's super progressive. >> Yeah. I mean, I was on three different board meetings this week with a company I'm on the board of in Minnesota. And we haven't seen each other in person in, I guess since January. (woman laughs) >> So final tips for women that want to make this this move, who, they've got some breathing space, they're not homeschooling the kids all day while they're trying to get their job done and trying to save their own business, but have some cycles and the capabilities. What do you tell them, where should they begin, how should they start thinking about, kind of taking on this additional responsibility and really professional growth in their life? >> Well, I mean, I think something very important for all of us to think about with regard to board service and in general as we get into a very senior level point in our careers at a managing and impact portfolio. People get into a senior point and they don't just want to be an executive for one company, they want to have a variety of ways that they're delivering impact, whether it's as an investor or as a board member or as other things as well as being an operator. And I think the misnomer is that people believe that you have to add them up and they, one plus one plus one equals three, and it's just not true. The truth is that when you add a board seat, when you add that other thing that you're doing it makes you better as a leader in general. Every board meeting I have with [Indistinct] gives me more than I bring back to Athena as an example. And so I think we tend to think of not being able to take on one more thing and I say that we all have a little more space than we think we have to take on the things we want to do. >> Right? That's a good message to me. It is often said if you want to get something done, give it to the busiest person in the room. It's more likely to get it done 'cause you got to be efficient and you just have that kind of get it done attitude. >> That's right. >> All right, Coco. Well, thank you for sharing your thoughts. >> Congratulations, so I guess it's your four year anniversary, five year anniversary [Indistinct] about right? >> Yes, four. >> That's terrific. And we look forward to continuing to watch the growth and hopefully checking in face to face at some point in the not too distant future. >> I would like that. >> All right. Thanks a lot Coco. >> Great talking to you. >> Already. >> She's Coco, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)