>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the Cube. Covering, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Jarvis Sam, he is the manager of global diversity issues at Snap Inc. Welcome. >> Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here. >> So, I've gotta--first of all, you're wearing a Rosie the Riveter shirt, we've got these tchotchkes here, can you explain to our viewers a little bit about them? We got to, we got to talk about these first. >> Of course, so, the shirt was actually inspired by our Lady Chilla, that's our local women employee resource group at Snap. The idea was take the ghost, a representative mascot of Snap Inc. and parlay that with the idea of Rosie the Riveter, of course powerful in her own right. >> Rebecca: Alright, I love it, and then these spectacles are...? >> Yeah, so spectacles are Snap Inc.'s first ever hardware product released earlier this year. They allow for you to take an in-the-moment Snap, to be featured on your phone, using Bluetooth technology for iPhones and then WiFi technology for Android. They allow individual users to record Snaps on their phone, while of course not distorting the experience of being able to use their hands in the moment. >> Rebecca: So, I love it, these are the recruiting tactics: your own products. >> Exactly >> Want to play with these toys? Come work for us? >> Yes! >> So, tell us a little bit about what you do, Jarvis. Before you were at Snap, you were at Google. You were interested in really engaging in these diversity issues. So what do you at Snap? >> Yeah, so, at Snap, I manage our global diversity effort. What that includes is analyzing the diversity framework across three key verticals; first on the pipeline layer. So, what are we doing by way of K-12 education to ensure communities of color as well as women-- >> Rebecca: K-12? Wow. >> Exactly. >> Have specific opportunities in the space to be impactful. We often create this framework or archetype for what we think is ineffective software engineer for example or account manager. Reframing that by providing access and opportunity is showcase to people that the image that we have is not always the image that we want to portray, is critical. Next then we focus heavily on the idea of the candidate, so candidate experience. Deep diving into understanding key talent acquisition measures as well as key HR practices that will allow for us to create the best experience, moves us forward in that regard. But then finally, and this is where we get to the whole global perspective. Is the idea of the employee. Creating a nurturing community where the idea of psychological safety is not only bolstered but ensuring that your community feels empowered to the idea of inclusion. Making sure inclusion is not just a seat at the table but rather a voice in the conversation that can be actioned upon. >> So I want to dig into that a little bit, this voice in the conversation. Before the cameras were rolling you were talking about these very difficult candid conversations that employees at same have. Tell our viewers a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, so I think one of the greatest challenges across the tech industry and at Snap as well is the idea of referral networks. The tech industry on its own right has grown so greatly out of referral networks. People that you have worked with perviously, people that have the same academic or pedagogical experience as you. The problem with that is, the traditional network analysis would seem to let us know that you often refer people who look like you, or come from a similar internal dimension background as yourself. In a community that's largely rooted in a dominated discourse by white or Asian males. That means that we're continuing to perpetuate that exact same type of rhetoric. >> Rebecca: That's who you're recruiting. >> Exactly. And so then idea of getting more women or communities of color involved in that space can often be distorted. So that remains a challenge that we as a company as well as the tech industry need to overcome is understanding; one, how do we encourage more diverse referrals over time. But then two, creating an ecosystem where this seems natural and not like an artificial standard. >> Okay, so how do you do it? I mean that we've pinpointed the problem and it absolutely is a problem, but what are the kinds of things that Snap is doing to improve the referral process? >> So it's the idea of being innovative by design. One thing that's unique about Snap in particular is that we are an LA-based company. >> So based out of Venice Beach and Santa Monica, California. We don't face a lot of the core challenges that we see in Silicon Valley. And as a result have the opportunity to be more innovative in our approach. As a result when we look to referral networks in particular. One thing that Snap has focused on is the idea of diversity recruiting as a core pillar or tenant of all of our employee research groups. Not only do they join us to attend conferences like Grace Hopper, like the National Society of Black Engineers. But we actually do sourcing jams. Where we sit down with them and mine their networks. Either on LinkedIn-- >> Rebecca: Sourcing jams? >> Yes >> Rebecca: I love it. >> Yes Either on LinkedIn or GitHub or any of the various professional networking sites that they work on. Or technical networking sites to find out who are great talents that they've worked with before. >> Who do you know? Who can join us? >> Exactly. And what's more significant than that, is creating a sense of empowerment where we actually having them reach out to their network as opposed to a recruiter. This creates more of a warm and welcoming environment for the candidate. Where the idea of being a simple passive candidate is further explored by activating them to showcase how your experience has been great. >> And how are you also ensuring that the experience at Snap is great, particularly for women and people of color? >> Yes, so one area is our employee resource group. So we have a couple, so Lady Chilla is of course what I am wearing today. But Snap Noir for the black community. Snap Pride for the LGTBQ plus community and Low Snaps for the Latin X community. >> Rebecca: How big is Snap, we should just-- >> Yeah, about 3,000 people globally. >> Okay, 3,000. Okay, wow. >> And so one of the exciting things that we do is ERG that. So it's where we bring all of our employee resource groups together and they hold massive events every single quarter. To encourage other communities that are either allies or individuals of the sociological out group to understand what they do. But this deploys in so many different ways. In June, for Pride for example, we held drag bingo. Where our LGTBQ plus community participated. In March, we did a whole series of events celebrating women in engineering, women in sales, and women in media that resulted in a large expanse of events allowing for people to come in and learn about, not only the female experience more broadly, but particularly at Snap and some of the great endeavors that they're working on. >> And I know you are also working with other organizations like Girls Who Code, Women Who Code, Made with Code. Can you tell the viewers a little bit more about Snap's involvement. >> 100% Made with Code is one of the most exciting projects that I've had the opportunity to work on. It was for me personally this great combination of working with my previous employer Google, and Snap. So Google's Made with Code project is an idea that started to empower teen girls to code, ages 13 to 18 primarily. What they found is was that's exactly the same demographic that primarily uses our product. And so about three months ago, we decided to come together to launch an imitative where we'd have teen girls make geofilters, one of Snap's core products. The project actually launched one week ago, and teen girls are using Blocky technology to actually go about creating their own geofilters. And then writing a 100 word personal statement defining what their vision for the future of technology is. I'm personally exciting to say after checking the numbers this morning, more than 22,000 girls have already submitted responses to participate. And they will culminate in an event, November 1 through 3. Where we will take the top five finalists to TED Women in New Orleans. To not only showcase women who have done incredible things in the past and present. But also showcase their work at participating in this competition, as the women of technology for the future. >> Rebecca: And the next generation. >> Exactly. >> So we're running out of time here, but I want to just talk finally about the headlines. It's very depressing, you know the Google Manifesto, the sexism that we've seen against women. The racism in the industry. These are are-- we don't want to talk about it at this celebration of computing because we want to focus on the positives. And yet, where do you feel, particularly because you have worked at large tech companies, on these issues for a while now? >> Not facing challenges head on is going to be the greatest threat to the tech industry. The idea of avoiding conversation and avoiding sheer communication of these challenging issues will continue to raise-- >> Rebecca: And ignoring the bad behavior. >> Exactly, and it results in negative rhetoric that inherently put these communities out of wanting to work in this specific industry. But arguably given that technology not only represents the face of the future but how every single product and entity is made for the future, we have to include individuals. Everyone often wants to highlight the McKinsey study from Diversity Matters. Highlighting all of these great ways of diversity impacting business, but we need to look at it in addition from an ethic standpoint. The idea that technology represents how we are building our future. Leaving entire communities out of that primarily focusing on people of color and women, will result in a space where these communities will never have access, opportunity and thus employment to exist in this space. Being able to attack these issues head on, address the bad behavior, highlight what the potential implication is step one. Step two though is being proactive in everything that we're doing, to attempt to ameliorate that from the beginning. You'll notice one thing that's very different about Snap's diversity strategy is we seek to build infrastructure first, then focus on talent acquisition. Once we can ensure that communities of color and women are entering a space that is psychologically safe, open, and inviting. Then we can focus on how we're bringing in talent effectively so that the idea of retention and advancement is not an afterthought but rather top of mind. >> Right, because you can't recruit them if they haven't had the opportunities to begin with. >> Exactly, and that's what Snap often upholds the value of the idea that diversity is our determination, while inclusion is our imperative. >> Jarvis, I love it. >> Thank you so much. >> This has been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from Orlando, Florida at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE media. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Vicki Mealer-Burke, she is the Vice-President and Chief Diversity Officer at Qualcomm. Thanks so much for joining us, Vicki. >> Thank you, Rebecca, it's great to be here. >> So, before we the camera's were rolling, you were describing how you've been at Qualcomm for 20 years, but you've been in this job for one year. And you're the first person to ever hold the position. >> That's right. >> So, tell our viewers how it came about. >> Yeah, I have been at Qualcomm almost 21 years now, and mostly in product development, product management, and then, my last role was as a general manager of one of our wholly-owned subsidiaries and I really thought that my run at Qualcomm was done, because we're consolidating a lot of our businesses. I started working on some women's programs while I was shutting down our last business, and it just so happened, it was the same time the company decided to create a chief diversity officer. My initial reaction was, "That's so great, we're going to "get one of those people, and we really need them." I wanted to be a champion for that person, and then I started getting myself interested and thinking that I could really be a change agent and a leader for the company. And kind of leave a legacy back to the company, a company that's actually been really, really good to me. >> So, when you were thinking about this job, you described it as a business problem that needed to be solved. And as someone who'd been at Qualcomm for two decades, how did you define the business problem? >> The way that my brain works is, I'm a problem solver and that's why I got into product management. And so, I really thought that if the company saw this as compliance or some sort of regulatory issue, I would really have no real interest, but I really knew that we could solve the probably by likely re-engineering some of the processes that had been in place. And, Qualcomm has had a tremendous growth over the years, and we've ramped from, I was employee 5,000 to now well over 30,000, so many of our processes really just had to be re-engineered. And I knew that I could speak that language to our leaders, we understand re-engineering problems. So, I really tried to get down to root cause and focus on a couple of the areas that would really make a big difference, and discuss the business value of why we were doing this. >> So, what are the areas that you are focusing on? Just give our viewers of a sense of the the top two or three areas where you think you can have the most impact? >> There's really two levers that I'm focused on. One is talent acquisition, so continuing to bring the best and brightest minds, the most innovative people in the world now to help us move our wireless technology into the 5G world. The possibilities are endless so we need all kinds of bright minds looking at this from all different kinds of directions. That's the diversity piece of it. The second big lever is, once we get them in, we have to keep 'em. I mean, this show shows how talented women engineers are really at premium, and so the more we're hiring, the more we're losing people on the other side. People call that the leaky pipeline or the leaky bucket. So, I'm working on retention programs to make sure that once we get our diverse talent in the door that we can keep them by really supporting, promoting, progressing them, making sure that they have wide variety of opportunities and that they see a bright future for themselves at Qualcomm. >> So, are you starting new programs? Is this about mentorship, is this about making sure there is flexible work? I mean, what are some of the nitty-gritty things that Qualcomm is doing? >> Yeah, we have started a series of sessions with our senior-most leaders, what we call, like, our directors and above. We have terrific support at the C-level at Qualcomm, terrific support. But at a 30,000 person company, you really need to get into that next couple-down layers. And so, we're doing training about, basically, how to run an inclusive team, how to empower. One of the big things that we're training on is the process of, how do you pick people for that next big project? And, like many managers, they go back to the people that have been successful year after year. What we're trying to do is disrupt that and either create, like, a apprenticeship, product leader positions where someone can tag along and lead and understand how those projects were run so well. But that's what we need to do is really try to expand the project opportunities, that's when people get a lot of visibility, a lot of experience, and that's where their own talents will just then accelerate them through our levels. >> You were talking about the need to make sure that a couple rungs down from the senior brass, really understand that there is a real business case for diverse teams that are collaborative. How receptive are these managers in your experience, and what do you say that really tips them over? >> So, Qualcomm is full of extremely bright people. There's an awareness and the benefit of the doubt that we're giving all of our employees is, "Let's give you the "facts, let's make you aware, let's let you drive the "solution, so that we're all working together." We don't have any kind of quotas, we just want to make managers, give them all the data and have them make good decisions, and empower them to be part of the solution. That empowerment need is where we're building trust with those managers. We're not saying, "Oh, you've been doing it wrong for "a million years." We're saying, "Here's what you can do to get better. "Here's what you can do to have a more engaged team. "Here's what you can do to have a more empowered team." That leads to productivity, productivity goes straight to the bottom line, and it makes sense. So, we're trying to do it more in a partnership, giving them the respect that they've earned with the positions that they're in, and empowering them to be the change. >> So, earlier in your career, you worked on some really exciting projects in terms of wearables, in terms of smart-cities, in terms of home-base technology. Do you miss the tech, I mean, do you see yourself going back and working in that? >> Yeah, it's a great question. When you're in the business, there are daily, weekly, incremental successes. We fixed that bug, we got that contract, this is really more, I call it kind of like forming jello, it's hard to get those feelings everyday like you're making progress on something. I do miss the technology, this is the biggest problem I think I've ever been tasked to solve, so that is extremely inspiring, and luckily, I get to work side-by-side with a lot of our best technology leaders. But, I do miss the technology, for sure. >> And working in the business? >> Sure. >> So, you talked about the, sort of, difficulty with measuring incremental progress, and then really we're at a point in time where the Google manifesto and Travis Kalanick's antics are front-page news. Is this discouraging, or is does it make you more excited by the cause and what you're doing? >> There are aspects to it that are discouraging, but I am really a glass half-full type of person, I think shining the light, really shining this big, bright light on the issue makes 99% of the people in our business really say, "Wow, I can't believe that's really going on." So, I actually think it's good, it's allowing us to have these conversations which are uncomfortable and a lot of leaders want to have the conversations but they don't know what to say. So, all of these things coming out in the press just give us that entry to be able to say, "Let's talk about it." And we've been doing that at Qualcomm, we do it with our employees, I want people to feel free to ask questions and not think that they should know it all. This is actually a fairly new area, so we've got to allow all of our leaders to have a level of comfort, but also know they don't have to be perfect in every single thing they say, just be inquisitive and really start the discussions. >> When you are pitching Qualcomm as a potential employer to young women, what is your value proposition? We heard Fei-Fei Li during the keynote talk about there is a real crisis if women are not actively involved in creating the next generation of artificial intelligence, and we're half of the end users, that there is going to be this real disconnect between the technology and how it's used. >> And as a product leader, I have always been fascinated by these public stories of product failures that no one was trying to make them fail but it was very clear that they didn't have a diverse team, because they just had some really big misses. So, one of the things we talk about at Qualcomm, you know, we're a wireless technology company, we started with 3G and now 4GLTE, that whole wireless technology, that backbone of it, is all Qualcomm tech, and it allows us to go into 5G. 5G is where the thing gets exponentially more interesting, more exciting, a much lighter set of problems to solve can be solved through 5G. So, if we don't have a diverse set of people thinking about all the different use-cases, variables, that we can use 5G technology, we'll miss something big. And I know that our CEO believes that, we've talked about it, we are inventors, we are innovators, and we have to have a wider variety of people that are being inventors of the future. >> So, I just want to wrap up here but finally ask you about this conference, this is not your first Grace Hopper, and it's a very young conference and you're really looked at as a veteran, I mean, me, too. We're the old bags about this place. (laughing) Can you just describe a little bit, I know you said that you were introducing one of the keynote speakers and you got to meet a personal hero of yours, just what it's like to be here? >> It's really amazing, last year was my first year. I was not the Chief Diversity Officer a year ago, yet, and I came here and people like, Telle Whitney, who you read about, I've gotten to meet here, I can hug her. >> Rebecca: You'll never was your hand again. >> I know, it's amazing. The women that have been leading this for years and years and years, and now what this has turned out to be, I was talking to one of my colleagues, and I go to a lot of technical conferences and business conferences like CES, CES is almost where we should be here meeting in the middle, a lot more men here, in years to come, and a lot more women at CES. And I think that's when we'll know that we're actually making progress. >> Well, Vicki, thank you so much for joining us. >> Yes, thank you, thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from theCube's coverage of the Grace Hopper just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We are joined today by Emilia Sherifova, she is the VP of Architecture and Engineering at Northwestern Mutual, thanks so much for joining us Emilia. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I want to start off by talking about how you got to Northwestern Mutual. You came via an acquisition, you were CTO of LearnVest. What is LearnVest? >> LearnVest is a financial planning start up, it's a company that is bringing financial planning to the masses, it's a very mission driven organization. When Northwestern Mutual came as an interest to acquire us, we saw an incredible opportunity to partner with a Fortune 100 company, and tap into its client base of five million people, and bring sort of best in class digital experience and innovation, with best in class financial services products. >> Talk about that problem a little bit, in terms of bringing financial planning to the masses. Why don't the masses have financial planning? What's the disconnect? >> I think it's not easy, often it's a human driven problem. Often humans do not want to deal with their finances, as I know personally for myself, historically when I met with my financial advisor in the past I would get a plan and I wouldn't follow up on that. So building delightful experiences that engage our clients, with the combination of a financial planner that's prodding you, and giving you guidance. >> So there is a human there? >> Absolutely, there's no way to avoid a human. So it was that regional model of LearnVest to have the human help the robot part of it, and we are doing the same thing with Northwestern Mutual, where we're leveraging Northwestern Mutual best in class distribution work force and providing them tools to help them do their work best. >> I love the idea of a delightful experience when dealing with your finances, it seems antithetical. Give me some examples of what you mean by this. >> I think ability to give you a 360 view of your life, and give you a financial wellness score, for instance, after we've gotten a couple of data points about you, but also gathered some of the predictive data points that we know are probably true about you, and give you a score, one score, that gives you an idea what's the probability of you reaching your financial goal, or you retiring, or you going broke. So there is a way to do that in an easy, digestible and kind of delightful way where we're able to leverage technology and predictive capabilities to really push for financial security of our clients. >> And what is the customer response here? >> Customer response, it's been great. Now that we've rolled out a lot of these experiences for the customer base of Northwestern Mutual we have massive engagement with our customers, our traffic has gone dramatically up. >> So people are hungering for this? >> Absolutely, it's a much needed thing, and we're here to help them. >> So you've now been with Northwestern Mutual for a few years now, dividing your time between New York and Milwaukee, you're in both technology and financial services, both male dominated fields, can you describe a little bit about your career path, and how you got into it, and what you've learned along the way. >> Oh, absolutely. I'm originally from Russia, and I come from a family of engineers, so it was a somewhat natural path for me. I got into software engineering in the late 90s. My go to language initially was C programming, and I participated in the Y2K Challenge on Wall Street. >> Which seems so quaint! (laughs) >> And I've spent over a decade on Wall Street, building electronic trading systems, market data feeds. So I feel honored to have been able to pursue and have these possibilities, but I know how not easy it is, given what a male dominated world this is. >> Is it as bad as the headlines make it out to be? I mean, it really does, when you read it, it's sickening. The sexism, the biases, what's your experience been? >> I think I've been lucky enough to work in very supportive places, but I can tell you majority of teams that I've been part of are majority male, and whether my team mates want to be inclusive and engaging, when the majority is someone else that doesn't look like you, act like you, lean on similar defaults as you, it does not make for a very welcome environment. So I recognize that, and a big part of that, I feel, is having proper on boarding practices. Because on boarding often can happen, if you don't have a formal on boarding process, on boarding can happen in informal ways, and when it happens in informal ways, you tend to be attracted to the people who are like you, and you hang out with. So if you look at the technology world, it's dominated by mostly male. If you are in a start up world, it's mostly young males. And so I am determined to bring operational excellence and sustainability and diversity through strong operational practices, like ensuring that there is proper on boarding. Where for instance, a young mother who has a child has the potential to go home at 4 p.m., and cannot hang out with the guys and drink coke or beer at 7 p.m., to really understand the culture of the group that she joined. We want to make sure that she has sustainable, thoughtful on boarding practices, feeling like she's part of the organization. This is just one way of doing it. >> In terms of the on boarding, and I think you're absolutely right in a sense, that we do gravitate towards people who are just like us, look like us, talk like us, think like us, so are you pairing the new people with people who are not like them? >> Absolutely, but also actually I am pairing them with people who also recently just went through on boarding, that just join also fairly recently. That way they can explain the pitfalls that they gone through, and so we're definitely making sure we have these co pilots, but also rigorous processes to get people comfortable, whatever their background is. >> Now how many Grace Hoppers have you been to, Emilia? >> I have to say this is my first one. >> Your first one, you're a newbie! So what is your experience been so far. >> I am incredibly moved by the experience, actually. I have to say I've never seen so much energy before. I am moved by the stories that I have heard, incredibly inspired. I am inspired to keep pushing. I felt I could relate to a lot of presenters' backgrounds, I also came from a small town, that actually is not on the map, because it was a military town in the former Soviet Union, and a lot of stories of overcoming, and persisting, and ending up here, is what I can relate to. So I'm very excited, and very grateful, and I want to be here every year. >> So you'll be back? >> Totally! >> Great! Well, Emilia, thanks so much for joining us, it's been really fun talking to you. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Aysegul Gunduz, she is a professor at the University of Florida-College of Engineering. Thanks so much for joining us. >> No, thank you for having me. >> So, congratulations are in order, because you are a ABIE Award winner, which is awards given out by the Anita Borg Institute, and you have been given the Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award. So, tell us a little about, about your award. >> Well, thank you for asking. We've heard a lot about Grace Hopper and Anita Borg throughout the conference, but Denice Denton, she was actually very close friends with Anita. And she was a leader in her field, her field was development of polymers, and she worked on the first development of RAM. But she was actually the first ever dean of a college of engineering at a major university... >> Rebecca: First ever woman. >> First woman dean, yes, so she became dean at the University of Washington, and then she actually became chancellor at University of California, but just beyond her research she really promoted and lifted the people around her, so she was a big proponent of minority issues. So, she supported females, she supported international students, and she was openly gay, so she really had a big influence on the LGBTQ community, so I just wanted to, you know, just recognize her and say that how honored I am to have my name mentioned alongside hers. This award is given to a junior faculty member that has done significant research and also has had an impact on diversity as well. >> So, let's start talking... >> Denice is a great inspiration. >> Yes! The award given an homage to Denice, so your research is about detecting neurological disorders. So, tell our viewers a little bit more about what you're doing. >> Sure, I'm an electrical engineer by training, who does brain research for a living, so this confuses a lot of people, but I basically tell them that our brains have bioelectric fields that generate biopotential signals that we can record and we're really trying to decipher what these signals are trying to tell us. So, we are really trying to understand and treat neurological disorders as well as psychiatric disorders, so I work with a lot of neurosurgical patient populations that receive electrode implants as part of their therapy, and we are trying to now improve these technologies so that we can record these brain signals and decode them in real time, so that we can adapt things like deep brain stimulation for the current pathology that these patients are having. So, deep brain stimulation, currently, is working like, think of an AC and it's working on fan mode so its current, you know, constantly blowing cold air into the room, even though the room might be just the perfect temperature, so we are basically trying to listen to the brain signals and only deliver electricity when the patient is having a pathology, so this way we are basically turning the AC onto the auto mode, so that once they are actually not having symptoms, unnecessary electrical, it is not delivered into their brains, so pace makers, when they invented were functioning that way, so people realized they could stimulate the heart, and the person would not have a cardiac arrest, but now we know that we can detect the heart pulse very easily, so someone thought about 'OK, so when we don't detect the pulse, heartbeat, let's only stimulate the pace maker then,' so that's what we're trying to adapt to the neuro-technologies. >> And what is the patient response? I mean I imagine that's incredible. So, these are people who suffer from things like Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, I mean, it's a small patient population that you're working with now, but what are you finding? >> So, first of all, our patients are very gracious to volunteer for our studies, we find that, for instance, in Tourette's syndrome we can actually detect when people are having tics, involuntary tics, that is characteristic of Tourette's syndrome. We find that we can differentiate that from voluntary movements, so we can really deliver the stimulation when they are having these symptoms, so this is a paroxysmal disorder, they really don't need continuous stimulation. So, that's one thing that we're developing. We find that in essential tremor, again, when people aren't having tremor we can detect that and stop the stimulation and only deliver it when necessary. We're working on a symptom called freezing of gaits in Parkinson's disease so people define this as the, having the will to walk, but they feel like their feet are glued to the floor so this can cause a lot of falls, and at that, really, age this can be very, very dangerous. So, we can actually tell from the brain when people are walking and then we turn the stimulation in this particular area only during that time so as to prevent any falls that might happen. >> So, it's really changing their life and how they are coping with this disease. >> Yes, true, and it really makes going to work in the morning (laughs) very, very exciting for us. >> So, another element of the ABIE Award is that you are helping improve diversity in your field and in Denice Denton, in the spirit of Denice Denton, helping young women and minorities rise in engineering. >> Yes, so, I'm going to talk about this in my keynote session tomorrow, but I really just realized that all my confidence throughout engineering school was due to the fact that I actually had a female undergraduate advisor, and once I came to that realization, I joined Association for Academic Women at the University of Florida, which was established in 1974, because these pioneering women fought for equal pay for male and female faculty on campus, and this is still honored today, so I'm very honored to be serving the Association as its president today. All of our membership dues go to dissertation awards for female doctoral students that are, you know, emerging scholars in their fields, and I also approached the National Science Foundation and they supported the funding for me to generate a new emerging STEM award for female students in the STEM fields. So, you know, that is my contribution. >> So, you're passing it on... >> I hope so. >> the help and the mentoring that you received as young faculty member. >> I truly hope so. >> I mean, (stammers) right now we're so focused on the technology companies but on campuses, on the undergraduate and graduate school campuses, how big a problem is this, would you say? >> So, I'm a faculty in biomedical engineering, so, in our field we actually have some of the highest female to male ratios compared to other engineering fields. People attribute this to the fact that females like to contribute to the society, so, they like to work on problems, they like to work on problems that have a societal impact and I think working with, basically, you know, disorders in any branch of medicine, it really fires, fires up female students, but yes, when we go to other departments such as electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, the ratio is really, really small. And it still is a problem and therefore we are really trying to mobilize, you know, all female faculty, just to be present, just the fact that you're there, that you're a successful female in this field... >> Rebecca: The role models. >> Yeah, really makes an impact, you know, I think, the most repeated quote at this meeting is that 'You can't be what you can't see." So, we're really trying to support female faculty. So, we're tying to retain female faculty, so that, you know, the younger generation of females can see that they can and the will do it as well. >> You can't be what you can see, I love that. Those are words to live by. >> Right. >> Yeah. Well, thank you so much Aysegul, this is a pleasure, pleasure meeting you, pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much, pleasure's mine. >> We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of women in computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the best name in tech conferences. 18,000 women here in Orlando, filling up the Orange County Conference Center. We're excited to be here for our fourth year, and part of the whole program is getting some of the leadership from AnitaB.org on to give us an update and we're really excited to have Elizabeth Ames. She's the SVP of Marketing and Alliances and Programs but we just think of her as Elizabeth at AnitaB.org. So, Elizabeth, great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Absolutely >> We're thrilled to have you here at the Celebration. >> I can't believe it's been four years. I've been telling so many people. There are still so many people that have never been here. I was amazed at the keynote, the first day, there was the call, the houselights went up, how many people it's their first time, and as big as this conference is, as much the people that know it love it, there's still a lot of people that have not been exposed to this show. >> It's absolutely the case. We have every year it seems like more and more sort of first timers. Which is great because we love to have them come but we'd love to have them come back. I think it's really an expression of how this issue has become a big issue and that the women are really engaged and excited and they want to be a part of it, so it's great. >> The other thing I don't think a lot of people know is there's obviously a lot of recruiting going on, there's a lot of young people here which is really what I think gives it its flavor, but we had Workday on. They said they had 140 people here from Workday. I talked to a guy last night at dinner from Google, I think they had 180 people and I said to her, "Do you have any show "that you bring that many people to "that's not your own show, so the amount of investment" And then I said, it's all young, fresh out of school No, it's all ranges, all ages. So again, I think there's a lot going on here that people are just not that exposed to. >> Yeah, that's absolutely true. So, if you look at our attendance overall, about 70% are industry and a lot of those are companies that are bringing their women and some of them are their younger women who have maybe been in the firm, in the company for a year or two or three or something like that, but the place where a lot of women drop out of the industry is more mid-career and so I think more and more companies are seeing this as a way to help their mid-career women recommit to the field and make those connections with the community at large and get a little bit more reinvigorated so we definitely see companies bringing all kinds of women out of their organization, and they like to bring a mix, so that they have some of their senior women that are sort of mentoring women who are mid-career or women who are more junior and it just gives them a really good mix. And then about 30% of our attendees are academic, we call it academic, but it's primarily students, so undergraduate, graduate, post doc, and research type people, and then some amount of professors and teaching assistants, those types of people. >> Yeah, and I really think it's the youth that give this show its special vibe. I mean there's a lot of great keynotes and some fantastic stories and really great global representation, a ton of African representation. But I do think it's the youth, it's the youngsters that bring a really unique and positive energy that you don't really see at many other conferences. >> Yeah, and I think part of that is that the community at large, you know women that are in the field they care about the women coming up and they want them to succeed and they want them to have every single opportunity so everybody's kind of invested in them and interested in nurturing and helping them along. So it does create this really, I don't know, positive environment, right. We always jokingly say there's a reason we call it a celebration. We don't call it a conference, we call it a celebration. >> Everyone's a delegate too. I like that too. It's not attendees. And that's come up on a number of interviews too where when people have reflected back on people that have helped them along the way the payback, it's almost like it's been scripted is, OK, now you need to do this to the next person to really pay it forward and that again is a consistent theme that we have also heard from the keynotes earlier today, that it is about paying it forward, which is funny because sometimes you'll hear kind of a catty women reputation that they're trying to keep each other down, you know that that was kind of a classic, another hurdle that women had to face in the professional world that they weren't necessarily supporting each other, and that is not the case here, at all. It's very much a supportive environment. >> We may have a self selection bias going on here >> Well that's okay >> But I think there's nothing but support for one another in the community and everybody recognizes that we all have to pull together. >> Right. So interesting times at AnitaB.org, the organization that puts on Grace Hopper, change of leadership, we had Brenda on, so kind of a fresh face, fresh energy. Telle. I'm going to see if I can get her a horse tomorrow to ride off into the sunset if the sun breaks out here in Orlando, so it's exciting times. It's a time of transition, always a little kind of mixed feelings, but also tremendous excitement and kind of new chapter, if you will. So tell us a little bit about what's going on at AnitaB.org >> It's an incredibly exciting time. First of all, a nod to Telle. She's been at the helm for 15 years. She's seen an incredible amount of growth. She took this on really as a favor to her dear dear friend and then took on the mantle upon Anita's death. She's done an amazing job. She's certainly an icon within the community overall I'm sure you'll hear more from her in the future. It's been great. Brenda is new fresh face. She has accomplished some pretty amazing things with the Chicago Public Schools. She's really invigorated to step into this space and it's great having her. I think the thing that you really, hopefully you got from her when she was here is that she is just this incredibly genuine person. She's lived the experience. She can relate to what all of these women have gone through. She has this profound commitment to make things different. And just the biggest heart that you could possibly imagine. >> Right, and a little chip on her shoulder. Which she talked about and it's come up time and time again where when people are told they can't do things for a lot of people, there's no greater motivator than being told you can't do this, you shouldn't do this, you're not qualified. She said "I've been in positions "where I've been told I can't be there." So to have that little chip on her shoulder I think is a real driver for many folks. >> It is. We recently did a little written piece it hasn't actually gotten published yet where we kind of went back and looked at a lot of the language that we're hearing today about women are not biologically suited to be programmers or women aren't this or women aren't that. And we did this little let's look back historically, and when did women get certain rights, and one of the things that really stood out for us in looking at that was women weren't admitted to all of the premier colleges, Harvard, Yale, whatever, until the 1960s. Which is kind of shocking when you think about it. >> Yeah, it's like yesterday practically. >> The language that was used at the time was almost identical to the language that we're hearing today. Women weren't biologically suited for this, it's really not in the right makeup for them. And yet today, half the students at those schools are women. And women have earned their way there. I just kind of laughingly say it's like deja vu all over again. We've heard all of that. we've heard people tell us you can't do that, you shouldn't do that, no you're not welcome and I think women they're not going to back down. >> It's interesting times too, because the classic gates, the distribution gate, the financing gate, the investment gate, to build companies, to create companies, they've all been broken down and kudos or serendipitously computing is the vehicle that's broken down a lot of those traditional barriers. You used to be, you couldn't start a new company because you had to get into distribution. You couldn't be a writer, there was only a few newspaper editors that controlled everything. That's all completely changed and now ubiquitous distribution, democratization of software, open source, you don't have to raise a bunch of money and buy a bunch of servers. It's so much easier to go out and affect the world and there's no easier way to affect the world than writing a great piece of software. >> Yeah, I think you're spot on on that. There's so much more leverage out there for people that want to start something. I believe that will accrue to the advantage of women. I always end up saying women are going to do great things and then I have to stop myself and say they are doing great things today. I think we've seen that already with some of the keynotes. Fei-Fei Li, and yet you hear her story as an immigrant and as a mother, as an Asian woman. She's had her challenges and she told her personal story not like with a woe is me but with a clear eye towards the things that she had to overcome to get where she was. >> And a lot of hard work, just a flat out a lot of hard work including working at the dry cleaners while she was going to school. >> Yeah, exactly. And yet there she is, one of the leaders in that space and doing incredible things. So I think you're starting to hear more and more about those women. I think they've always been there. I think that we just don't hear as much about them. So, this venue is such a great opportunity for us to hear more of their stories. >> Right, and we learned a lot about that last year with the whole Hidden Figures thing that we had on here as well as the movie and that was again, in the 60's. So we're in October, it's kind of the end the year. As you look forward to 2018, what are some of your priorities for AnitaB.org? I won't put you on the hook to tell us where Grace Hopper will be next year. You can tell us if you want. >> I saw it posted at Pride someplace. >> Is it posted already? >> I saw that and it was like whoa, I didn't know that was in the wild yet. >> But give us kind of a look. What are your priorities for next year? I know AVI Local has been a thing that's been growing over time. What are you kind of looking at as you're doing your 2018 planning? >> As amazing as it is to have 18,000 people here, which just blows our mind, we hope it continues to grow. We also know that no matter how big this conference gets that not everyone will be able to come here for a variety of reasons and so building out the local communities and making it so that, empowering those local communities to have smaller versions of this type of thing and growing this movement to a bigger scale that really encompasses all the women that are out there because even though people here say "Oh, 18,000 women, holy cow" it's a tip of the iceberg. There are thousands and thousands more women out there, we know there are. We really want to find a way to reach every single one of them and bring support and connection and inspiration to every single one of them so that they stay in the field, can achieve their dreams and their highest potential. That will have an impact on them and on the communities they live in. That's really what our focus is. >> Well, Elizabeth, again. Always great to see you. Congratulations on a phenomenal conference. And thank for inviting us to be here. It's really, honestly, one of our favorite places to be. >> We love having you here. I would just end by saying all you people out there, come join us next year. >> There you go. Are you going to tell them where? >> Houston, Texas. >> In Houston. - Back in Houston. >> Good barbecue. Ask me, I'll tell you where to go. Alright, she's Elizabeth Ames. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2017. Thanks for watching. [Upbeat Techno Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's the CUBE, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Pamela Rice. She is the Head of Technology, Strategy, and Innovation Labs Engineering at Capital One. So, thanks so much for joining us. >> Absolutely, it's good to be here. It's really good. >> So, you're only been at Capital One for nine months. >> That's right. >> You're new to the job, new to the company. Tell our viewers a little bit about why you chose Capital One and what your first experiences were. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm leading technology, strategy, and innovation, and what that means is looking at how we can use emerging technologies to set our course for really creating better and different changing products for our customers. We know that customers' expectations are changing drastically and technology is really rapidly accelerating. So, using things like IOT, machine-learning, streaming data, these are all ways we can connect with our customers better. It's funny, when I first walked in the Capital One doors to interview nine months back, they had been talking to me for some time and I'm like, Okay, I'll talk to you. I didn't have high expectations-- >> Because it's a-- >> It's a bank! >> You thought it was a buttoned up kind of-- >> I had been part of Fintech and startups and I'm like, rapid, let's change the world kind of thing, and I walked into the building in Richmond, and I asked a person, 'cause I could immediately see that teams were working on things together, there was a sense of real purpose and energy. Like you could feel the energy in the walls. They were using buzzwords like machine-learning, and I was like, wait a minute. I must have gone to the wrong place. I went back to the front desk and I'm like, "Is this Capital One?" I really did that, because it felt like a tech company. The walls were bright and shiny and people were running around, and it was a little bit of a hectic pace to it. I just thought immediately, there's something to this place that looks different than my expectations of a bank were. >> What is Capital One doing right in the sense of bringing this technology buzz into a financial institution? >> I think that it's safe to say that, to Capital One, really understands that customer expectations are changing so fast, and technology is changing so fast, that they have to invest heavily in technology to really reach their customers and go where their customers are going to want to go. So, part of my job is looking at strategy. Where do we think technology is going to go and how do we make big bets now so that we can meet our customer needs in the future? I think one of the things that holds true for me is that our internal moral compass, our fiber, our DNA, comes out when we talk about how we get there. We want to get there together with diverse teams, and that's why it's so important for us to be here. Because, the way we build products is the way that we will connect with our customers, and we want our customers, all of our customers, to feel connected to our products, not just one segment of the community. >> So, talk to me a little bit about the process of designing a new product for your customers, with that diverse team behind it. >> It's funny, because in the old waterfall ways, an idea would be born in some boardroom or some shadow room, and then all a sudden, engineers would get a speck on their plate that would say, hey, go build this. Then, oftentimes, they were so disconnected from the customers. We've taken that and pivoted it totally around, so that we have whole teams that are filled with designers, with design thinking, with product, with engineering, and they can connect with the customers in a way that really optimized towards getting a product out to market faster. By the way, that tight life cycle from the time an idea is born to the time you can get something in customers' hands, that needs to shorten as well, so that you can focus on innovation. If your day-to-day activities takes you months, if not years, to get out to market, you have no time for innovation. So, part of my job also is optimizing how we get things out to market faster and in a streamlined way, and empower that team to connect with the customers better. >> And see what the customers like and what they don't like, and then iterate. >> Exactly. >> What are some of the most exciting things you're working on now? >> Well, it's hard to say that there's just one thing. We have so many really big milestones underway. It's no secret that we have a heavy migration to the cloud. We were one of the first financial institutions that really doubled down and said we're all in, we're going there. In fact, I think there's going to be more and more financial institutions that start going there, because it's such a time-saving. If I don't have to worry about all these racks and all this hardware, I spend more time connecting with the customers. Again, operational efficiency in connecting with your customers. We have a high dev-ops mindset, meaning we disconnect that bridge from engineer to throwing something over the wall, and we combine the team that has everything it takes to get something out to the customer, and then fix something if something goes bump in the night. We also have a high culture, that is we have a goal of getting into microservices more. So, instead of these big monolithic applications, really focusing on these small, microelements that have functionality that is enabled to the customer so we get things out the door faster. >> So, when you talk about diverse teams, and you're talking about a lot of cross-functional teams, so you've got teams with engineers and designers on them, working together. But, you're also talking about racial diversity and gender diversity. So, how do you make that happen? >> It's a tough problem. I've been asked a lot of questions about how do you have diversity programs that actually work, and I will say it is not just one program. When you're focusing on diversity, you can't just think about it from a program perspective. You have to think about it at your DNA level. Like every conversation, every way that you think about who should be promoted or who should get an opportunity, or economic parity, all of these things you should be questioning, am I thinking about this through a diversity lens? So, even in conversations I have with my team where somebody should be bring up something as innocuous as man-hours, I correct them. I say, it's not man-hours. These are people-hours. So, even if you can have those small hints, you need a program, absolutely. But, you need diversity included in every conversation you have, whether it is about who's going to get promoted, who's going to get a bonus, or how we talk about people and where they spend their time. >> As a woman engineer- I hate saying a woman eng- You're an engineer! You're a human being engineer. But, you also are a role model to the younger women here at Grace Hopper. What is your best advice for them, if they want to have a career as an engineer? >> It was funny, yesterday I was on a panel. Over 700 people came. I was just so honored to be part of that experience. My role in technology and being an executive now in technology really has shifted quite a bit. I feel like it's my job to give back to the community. There's nothing more empowering for me personally than to see somebody helped by words of advice or being connected to somebody else. I think that my biggest words of advice are really to know that you deserve it, know that you deserve this career, know that you deserve to dream big. You deserve a loud voice. You deserve a seat at the table. You deserve the whole table. You deserve whatever you want to dream and if you have voices in your head or external voices that are telling you you can't have it, quiet those voices and believe in yourself. Because, there's nothing more powerful than believing in yourself. We are all here believing in you, because these engineers deserve it. I would just tell them to believe that. >> That's great advice. >> Thank you. >> Well, Pamela, thanks so much for being on our show. It's been really fun talking to you. >> Thank you so much. >> We will have more from Orlando and the Grace Hopper Conference just after this. (light, electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando Florida, it's the Cube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by LaFawn Davis, she is the global head of culture and inclusion at Twilio. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So let's start by telling our viewers what you do at Twilio. What does the global head of culture and inclusion do? >> That's a great question, it's kind of a newer title, so the culture piece is around our environment, our workspace, how employees feel, and it also incorporates employee experience, so we want to make sure that all the great talent we get in, we actually keep and develop and grow, and then there's the inclusion piece, the D&I piece, and that's the piece that people typically understand, so that is attracting, recruiting, retaining and developing top talent, it's making sure that we're looking at all of the diverse workforce that we want to have in the company, that we're serving our employees in the right way, and so it's nice that it's going to have both sides of that so it's not just purely about recruiting, it's not purely about numbers. It really is about how employees feel and it's whether or not they feel included, but also belong. >> So how do you do that? I mean, that's what every company wants, is to make employees feel happy about coming to work every morning. How do you do it? >> You have to ask. So it's really important that we have values that we can stand upon, every day. So we have what we call Nine Things, and they really are values, things like draw the owl, which is like you have to start somewhere. >> Rebecca: Draw the owl? >> Draw the owl. It's from an old internet meme that's around the way you draw an owl is you start with two circles, and then you draw the rest of the owl. You have to start somewhere. We have another one that's be humble. No shenanigans, that one you hear a lot, like if you're in a meeting and people are kind of ... thinking of doing things a different way? >> There are a few tech companies that maybe could have benefited from those shenanigans, but yeah. >> We'll call each other out, I mean, you'll hear it around the office. >> Rebecca: Do they, though? >> Oh no, absolutely. They absolutely will, they'll say, "That sounds a little shenanigan-y." or, you know, "We're not supposed to be doing "shenanigans here, so let's really "figure out how to do the right thing." And I think when you have values that are that specific, you can stand on them, you can count on them, and you can call each other out. >> Shenanigan-y? I love it, okay. >> (laughs) So it's like, let's be honest, and let's do what's right. >> But at the same time, I mean, it is, I understand how that can become the sort of safe word, and it's almost funny to say, "Hey, what are you doing here?" But how do you make those employees feel empowered enough to be able to call someone out, particularly if that person is a manager or a white guy that just has more bluster. >> Yeah, it starts from the top down. But even before I got to Twilio, I've only been at Twilio for six months but I did in the space for well over a decade, and what Twilio has is a top down and a bottoms up, so they were doing diversity inclusion and had employee resource groups before I got there. Three years before I got there, and the CEO is fantastic, and it really starts from that, messaging, you can tell the CEO he's being shenanigan-y. He expects you to, so we're hiring in people that espouse our values, we're looking for that, we're making sure that people come in with that understanding of, we don't want shenanigans here, we want you to be humble here, we want you to draw the owl, we want you to really acquire knowledge and thirst after it. Those are the things we look for, and so if you keep hiring people like that that already lend to your values, you're going to have, continue to have that culture. And it's not really about, oh I don't want to say this in front of, like, a C-Suite executive or in front of a leader, it's expected of you that you live those values no matter who you are. >> So as you've said, you've been in this space for a while, you worked for PayPal, Google, Yahoo. What have been the biggest changes you've seen over the course of your career? >> Yeah, so it's really a journey, right? I think the diversity journey especially ten years ago started with diversity, numbers, demographics, and it was really just gender globally and ethnicity U.S., and that's it and that's what people talked about, and those were the efforts that people made. It was really about recruiting, and now it's gone into more of the inclusion space and making sure people feel like they have a voice that can be heard, or they have a seat at the table, but honestly right now where we're at is the belonging space, right? Inclusion is really about making sure other people feel included and that you're hearing other perspectives. Belonging is a personal feeling. I feel like I belong here, and I'll tell you a funny story. When I first started Twilio, probably about two weeks in, I sit on the people team, which is next to the legal team, and the legal team's having this discussion and I'm like, wait a minute, oh my gosh, are you all conspiracy theorists? And they're like yeah! And I go, oh! Oh, you're my people! (Rebecca laughs) 'Cause I'm the one with the whiteboard and the red string and the tinfoil hat, and I immediately felt a sense of, you're my people, I feel like I'm supposed to be here. Everyone wants that feeling, and so the belonging space is really where companies are starting to focus, it's not just about having a seat at the table. Do you want to be here, do teams work well together? Are we working on something that's important to you? Do we have a vision that's inspiring to you? And that's more around belonging. I think the next step in this journey is equality, and we are a long way from that. >> And what do you make of that? I mean, you have been in this space for a while now, at some of the biggest, most respected tech names in the industry, and some of their names have been dragged through the mud around these issues, so I mean, are you discouraged, are you hopeful, what's your feeling now? >> I'm hopeful. I don't think I would still be doing it this long if I wasn't hopeful, and yes, I get tired. (laughs) >> Yeah, that we're still talking about it. >> Definitely get fatigued, but I'm very passionate about it, and that's how I ended up in this career. I started off in operations when I was at Google, and I was one of the founding members of the Black Googler Network, which is an employee's resource group, and I just got really passionate about being strategic. It wasn't just about building a sense of community. It was, no, let's figure out how to attract, recruit, retain and develop talent. Let's figure out like what the company needs and how we can plug in, and not just ... I mean, it lit a fire in me, and so I took lots of different roles within the D&I space and every time I think I'm going to step out, I get sucked back in. (they laugh) And so I think there's so much work to do. I think people inherently want to do the right thing. There's some bad apples that have been dragged through the mud lately, absolutely, but I think for the most part, people are coming from a good place. They may not know what to do, I think we have to change the conversation, because if we continue to do the same things over and over again, and they're not working, that should say something, right? >> So these, in terms of your past companies, Yahoo, Google, PayPal, they are much bigger than Twilio, Twilio is ... >> Less than a thousand employees. >> Less than a thousand people. How would you describe the biggest differences in terms of trying to affect change? >> Yeah, so I think the nice thing is, this is the first company where I don't fee like I have to talk about the business case for diversity. >> Rebecca: They already get it. >> They already get it, it's already got. My CEO will tell the story that when he started this company, he's like, I'm trying to build a company, and people were like, diversity, diversity, he's like, I'm trying to build a company. And then he really thought about it, and said, "Well, when is the right time to think about diversity? Is it when I have a thousand white male engineers?" Right, at that point you're fixing a problem as opposed to just starting with it and hiring people around that, and so it's the first company where I feel like that was already there, which is wonderful because now I can focus on the things that make the greatest impact, instead of starting from scratch, and so a smaller company, especially with more of a startup mentality, they just went public last year, I think it's almost easier in a way to make more progress because of that. >> And just in terms of what your CEO said about having to fix the problem, how do you think Twilio's products, how can you, how would a customer be able to tell that this was made by a diverse group of people, and it wasn't just a bunch of white guys in a room wearing hoodies, developing the Twilio suite? >> Platform. >> Rebecca: Yeah. >> The whole goal of the Twilio platform is to power up communication, right? That's the entire goal, and so I think as we're out and about, I mean we have this really cool role and it made this all tour, I just don't know it, and they're called developer evangelists, which I would love to be if I actually coded a little bit more, and they actually are the kind of, the middle of coding and evangelizing kind of what Twilio does, but a little bit of sales too, and so they're actually touching the community. We have community developers, we have, so it's not just people sitting at a desk in a room talking about what's best for people. It's we get out into the community, we understand what developers need, and we're constantly trying to figure out how do we create more doers, that's what we call people who create things. How do we create more doers? We have twilio.org, which is our foundation working with nonprofits, and there are social justice apps built on the platform. There are life-saving apps built on the platform. And we're funding these organizations so they can continue to build more and more on our platforms and change people's lives, and so I think that, and those examples, actually help people understand it's not just 400 white guys sitting in a room creating something for them. We're actually getting out and understanding what people need. >> And the research around diversity shows that diverse teams, it may take them a little slower to get the work done but the work is better, because it has taken in multiple perspectives, it has there's been more sort of fighting, and I don't mean to say fighting in the pejorative sense, but just getting to the ... >> LaFawn: Debating. >> The right answer, yeah, debate, exactly. (LaFawn laughs) To get to the right answer. I mean, would you say that's the experience? And I know you're not on the technical side, but what are you hearing from your ... >> I challenge that. >> Rebecca: Okay, all right. >> Every employee is encouraged to build something on the Twilio platform when they start, no matter what role they're in, and I am not in a technical role, but I know a little bit of coding now. But yes, absolutely, healthy debate is absolutely encouraged. How else are you going to build something for other people? It's really easy to just say, "I think we need to do this feature," right, but if that's not what people need, or you're not getting other perspectives, then you're building an inferior product. And so absolutely, you have to have that healthy debate, it's encouraged, and I see it (laughs) but it's not in a disrespectful way. So I have, being a part of the tech industry for a long time, I have seen some conversations that weren't so great, and people not treating each other well, thinking that that's how you have-- >> A little shenanigan-y. >> That's very shenanigan-y, right? Or calling each other names because they think that's how you get your point across. And I just don't feel that way at Twilio. It's much more respectful. I'm not saying that they don't get into it because I think you have to in order to really innovate. >> Well, LaFawn, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really a lot of fun talking to you. >> Thank you so much, you too. >> We will have more from Grace Hopper just after this. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference, here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Maureen Fan. She is the CEO and co-founder of Baobab Studio, which is the industry's leading VR animation studio, so, welcome Maureen. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> It's excited to talk to you, because you just won an Emmy. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> You just won an Emmy for "Invasion", so, tell us a little bit about invasion. >> It was our first piece ever and it was just an experiment to see if we could even create VR and it's a story about these adorable little bunnies and you are actually a bunny too, you look down, you have a furry, little bunny body and these aliens that come to try to take over the Earth, with their advanced technology and you and your bunny friend end up saving the entire Earth and it's starring Ethan Hawk and it just came out last year. And we're really excited, because it became the number one top downloaded VR experience across all the headsets and it's getting turned into a Hollywood Feature Film. >> Very cool, very cool >> Thank you. >> And you have another film coming out too and this is "Rainbow Crow" >> Yes. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about "Rainbow". >> So, "Rainbow Crow" is based off of a Native American legend about how the crow used to have beautiful rainbow feathers and a beautiful singing voice and it's John Legend, in our piece and how he decides to sacrifice himself, by flying into the sun to bring warmth and fire back to the Earth and in the process, loses all his beautiful feathers, becomes black and burnt and his voice becomes like the crow's voice, but it's about how beauty is within and there's also, huge themes about diversity and how if you learn to accept yourself and your differences, that's when you can accept others and that's why we specifically cast minorities and women, so, we have John Legend, Constance Wu, from "Fresh off the Boat" as a skunk character, Diego Luna, from "Rogue One", for the moth character, as well as Randy Edmunds, as a Native American elder, narrator, and we have a whole bunch of other stars to announce, soon-- >> Well we cannot wait to hear. That's already an amazing line-up. >> Thank you. >> So, when you're thinking about "Rainbow Crow" and particularly, because it's VR, which is relatively new, still experimental, I mean, the messages of diversity, does it lend itself to VR, better than, say, a standard animation film? >> Absolutely, because if you think about stories that you just watch passively, the reason why we need stories and humanity, in general is to experience characters and stories beyond those we can experience in our real lives and we think, "Oh, how would I feel if I was in the "position of that character or what would I do?" but in VR, because you are actually playing a character in a role, you actually have to decide at that point, "what would I do?" so, it's not just a experience that I just see, it's one where I'm actively experiencing it, so, I create a memory and remember afterwards and there's all these research studies at Stanford by Jeremy Bailenson, who is head of the Stanford VR lab, that shows if you are made a homeless person, inside a VR experience and you have to go through a day in the life of a homeless person or you would look in the mirror and see that you are a black woman, that you, when you get out of the headset, you act completely differently. You have so much more empathy for these people than you would normally and so, it gets you to care about these characters, in a way that you don't normally and in VR, because you're doing it in a real-time game engine, these characters can act and react to what you do, so you can turn that empathy into action and actually act upon your caring, which we call compassion, so, it really changes you in a way, that normal, traditional story-telling doesn't, so, I think that having voices and characters that are different, in front of the screen, and also, behind the screen are really important to create role models and different perspectives for all the people out in the world. >> And these are movies that are targeted at kids, children, but do you see a future in which, where there is more targeted at adults, for VR? >> Absolutely. The funny thing is, in the beginning, the VR distributors didn't think that people would want our VR animation, because they're like, "Oh, it's just going to be these hardcore boys "that just love to play games. "Are they going to want this animation?" and VR is targeted towards adults, that's why they were surprised and we were surprised when "Invasion" became the number one downloaded VR experience. It shows that the audience for our content is from little kids to grandmas and everyone in between and that's probably why it became the top downloaded experience, is because it's universally appealing and has themes that are appealing to just, every single generation, so, absolutely, but for VR to become mainstream, there needs to be more universally appealing content. Right now, the content tends to be for games, like parkour games, as well as documentaries, which are two amazing pieces of content for this medium, but for it to become mainstream, we need more universally appealing content and I'm excited about, right now, it's a new industry. This is when minorities and women in particular, can enter the space and help shape the voices and the direction of the industry. >> That is exactly where I wanted to go next. So, let's talk a little bit about Baobab Studio. It's not that old and VR is not that old and so, why are there more opportunities, would you say, for women, and minorities? >> Well, if you look at traditional animation in the traditional entertainment fields that's a very mature industry and to break into that industry, you have to either have lots and lots of money or unfair distribution advantage, but VR, there's technological disruption, which means nobody has an advantage at all, means it's a level playing field and everybody can come in and start something, so, this is a perfect opportunity, when there's low barriers to entry of coming in, for women and minorities, anyone who wants their voice heard, to start companies or to make experiences and we can set the groundwork, because there's no one telling us what we can and can't do, because no one actually knows what we can and can't do yet. >> Right, right, but yet you are still of a female, asian figurehead of a studio, that will hopefully, someday be a major studio. You're working on it, but do you find that people take you as seriously in Hollywood? I mean, what are you coming up against? >> Well, it's really interesting, because I heard for even fundraising is one of the hardest parts of starting a company and there was a Stanford Research Study that showed that if you took a deck, a pitch deck for a company and you had a male voice-over versus a female voice-over the male voice-over was, I don't remember what, it was like 50% more likely to get funded than the woman with the same exact pitch deck, so I knew from that and they also show that if you are married and wear a ring you're taken more seriously, or if you're less attractive, also, you're taken more seriously and my hypothesis and some of the hypotheses out there, is it takes away the whole entire female attraction thing, like what does it mean to be an attractive female, so, I had to go into the meetings, knowing this. I even considered wearing a ring. I considered wearing a paper bag over my head. >> A bag over you head. Exactly, exactly. >> But at the same time I felt that I need to be myself and the best thing to, there's a correlation between the perceived leadership and confidence, that I needed to just go in there and be confident in myself so, I knew that, that could work against me, but I just needed to be myself, but I had to make sure that I was really confident and really believed in what I said and honestly, besides being confident and aggressive, I also, felt comfortable, because a lot of the people I talked to, I knew from my network and I had many of my male friends and female friends who knew these VC's, do the initial introduction, so I felt more comfortable going in, for them already knowing that I had somebody else saying that I was awesome. >> Yeah, and you've had many mentors and sponsors along the way too. >> Absolutely, I would say it's one of the most important things, for my career from the very beginning. When I graduated from business school, I actually emailed my mentors and said, "Here are the things I care about for finding a job." I didn't have to go find any jobs. They actually found all these jobs. for me, set up informational interviews, for me and I just went in and did it, all the informational interviews, got the offers and just choose one of them that I wanted to be in but, even for starting my company, my co-founder, Eric Darnell was a write and director of all four "Madagascar" films and I got introduced to him, through my mentor, Glen Entis who is the co-founder of PDI Dreamworks Animation and he was my mentor through Zynga and then, Gen Entis introduced me to Alvy Ray Smith, who is the co-founder of Pixar, who also became our advisor, Alvy Ray Smith, then introduced us to Glen Keane, who is the animator for "Little Mermaid", "Alaadin". >> The power of networks. >> It was all through the network and through my mentors that I found, a lot of the opportunities that I have and they also helped my through my personal life and how to navigate being entrepreneur and I rely on them so much. >> So, beyond finding the right mentor and sponsor what else would you give, your parting words to the young Maureen fans out there? >> I think there's a tendency for society to pressure you to conform, to money, fame, beauty and you don't need to listen to that and you don't need to be bucketed. I designed my own major at Stanford and with an eBay, I took four different roles. I just kept on creating my own roles and refusing to be bucketed as a creative or a suit and you can be who you are and create a category onto yourself and so, don't feel pressured to listen to what society is telling you. The other thing, is if you are faced with pushed back for being promoted and you feel like it's maybe because you're a woman, we have a tendency as women to start blaming ourselves and thinking there's something wrong with us, versus research shows men are most likely to blame the system, don't let it affect you and bring you down, because you need to actually be confident and believe in yourself in order to rise above. >> Great. Great advice. Maureen, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> And best of luck to you. >> Thank you, so much. >> Hope you win another Emmy. >> Thank you. >> Come back and talk to us again. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from Grace Hopper, just after this. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Celebration in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are here with Brenda Darden Wilkerson. She is the new president and CEO of the Anita Borg institute. Thank you so much for joining us. >> I'm so excited to be here. >> This is a new position for you. >> Absolutely. >> But you've obviously been involved with the Anita Borg Institute for your career. At least been aware of it. So tell us a little bit about what this appointment means to you. >> Oh, it's so exciting. It's like coming full circle back to a tech career that I started. Back to understanding the needs of women having been there. Gone through the various stages of my career and then going into education. Helping encourage women into a career in tech. And now being able to advocate for them to be able to contribute at whatever stage they're in. Whether they are just entering or whether they're one of the women who have been in tech for a long time and are getting promoted into C-suite. Or whether or not they went through traditional education pathway to get in or if they learned on their own. So it's very exciting. >> And it cannot be as hard as the challenge that you just accomplished. I'm so impressed. Getting computer science as a requirement in the Chicago School District. >> Yes, yes. >> I mean that must've been quite a battle. I can only imagine. >> It was. It was, but you know when you want something, and you believe in it, it is amazing how you find other people who believe like you do. And you form a collaborative partnership that's really about caring about people. >> Jeff: Right. >> Many of us had been in tech and we had had the challenges and myself, personally, I came about computer science accidentally. I went to college thinking I was going to go into medicine. So I was pre-med. So I only learned about computer science accidentally. And of course obviously it changed my trajectory. It's been my career path and I was fine with that. Until years later when we were working on making computer science core, I was doing some lobbying on Capital Hill on a panel with a bunch of people. One happened to be a 19 year old girl who had a story similar to mine. And I thought how could this still be happening? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> How can people not have this choice and have this exposure early in life so that they know how to choose to contribute to the thing that's changing the way we live every single day. >> So do you see it changing? I mean we talked about this so many times on theCUBE. You know, that the core curriculum is the core curriculum. It's been there forever. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> And then the funny joke, right? Go back 100 years, nothing looks familiar except if you go to the school. I mean they're still reading the same Mark Twain book, right? >> Brenda: Right, right. >> Do you see it changing 'cause computing is such a big part of everyday life now. And it should be core everywhere. I mean the fact that you got that through, do you see it changing in a broader perspective from, kind of, your point of view? >> I do, I do. Education changes slowly, unfortunately. But actually when you look at, we launched computer science for all in 2013. And now it is an initiative that is national. The Obama White House embraced it and we were so proud. And it made the knowledge of going after computer science as something that all educators should really be thinking about as early as kindergarten for our students. It is making a difference in the lives of women. I've seen girls who many times would have been talked out of getting into a technical field by high school. For the few that could trickle in and get into those one or two classes that used to be available. I'm seeing girls learn that they could be innovators as early as five, six, or seven years old. Okay, so I'm just waiting to see the world that they're going to create for us when all of them. Because now, in Chicago, they're required to have computer science to graduate. So that's everyone so that's the key. It's computer science for all. And it is making a change. Not just for the kids, but the educators. I'm seeing women educators go, I could do this? I could get in and teach computer science? I could create something? That's exciting. >> So the Anita Borg Institute does so much good work around these issues. From getting computers into the hands of kindergartners to helping women on the verge of C-suite jobs in some of the biggest tech companies in the world. Where do you want to focus? As the new president, what are some of your special pet projects that you want to look at in the upcoming years? >> So I really want to think about how we dig into intersectionality. I want to first and foremost make vivid for more women of different backgrounds, who may have traditionally been left out of the equation, that there is an opportunity here for you if you want it. Okay, so that's about listening to them. That's about building additional alliances. That's about figuring out how to partner with organizations that we're all going in the same direction, right? So that more people that bring their unique lenses and experiences can help us create solutions, products, services that serve better just because they're there. So that's the first and most important thing. But then of course to, in order to do that, we have to figure out how to accelerate the work that anitab.org does in helping companies to figure out how to solve any problems that they may be having about diversifying their work force. So that's the other half of the equation. >> Do you see that the message is resonating? And this, I mean, you've been in the tech industry for, you're a veteran of the tech industry. Let's just say it, let's just put it at that. Let's just put it at that. But do you, I mean, just in terms of what we've been saying here too is that it's a lot of the same stuff. A lot of the same biases. And then there's things like to Google Manifesto which was this year, you know? And you just think, are we really still talking about this? I mean, where are you on the spectrum of completely discouraged to hopeful and inspired? >> Oh, I'm hopeful. I mean, look around you. (laughing) Look around you at all these women who are also hopeful. I am hopeful for them. We are hopeful together. And I think many times some of the remarks or things that happen out there are just an indication that maybe we're getting closer to moving that needle, you know? Sometimes that's when you hear from people is when changes are being made. So I'm not discouraged at all. I'm very excited to be on this team. It's a very powerful team. And to create the coalitions that our women are counting on us to do. >> It's pretty interesting with a lot of the negative stuff that happens in the news. And it actually has a really bright silver lining. And that it kind of coalesces people in ways that wouldn't necessarily happen. >> That's right, that's right. >> I thought your comment kind of about overt, or no, I guess the last guest. Overt, kind of, discrimination versus, kind of, less overt. It's harder to fight the less overt. So when somebody shines a big bright light on it, it actually, in a way, is a blessing because then it surfaces this thing. >> The stuff that's kind of, you know, it's lukewarm. It's easy for people to explain away. Even if it's really obvious to most people. But when it is as overt as it's been, it's out there now. It's like now we have something that we all have to deal with. It's not, you know, we can't be lukewarm and mealy mouth about it. Let's go to work and address this because it's so obvious. So in that way it's a silver lining. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> But the culture war that we're dealing with this. With what Melinda Gates was describing as the brogrammers. The hoodie guys, the sea of white dudes. >> Yes. >> Where we think all the great ideas are coming from. >> Brenda: Yeah. >> What is you feeling on how do we combat that? >> So, you know, here's an interesting perspective. I'm going to put a call on the entertainment industry. >> Rebecca: Okay. >> To put more images out there that are representative of what's really happening, right? So, you know, I have a sister that's a lawyer. And she's older than I am. And there was a time when you just didn't see very many images of women lawyers or women doctors. But if you watch television, you watch the movies, there are plenty of those now and the numbers. People can be what they can see. But if the images out there are all about the sea of white men. Then we will fight that struggle because people are impacted by what they see. >> Rebecca: The power of representation. >> The power, absolutely. And so I'm calling on people who have the power to change the images to do so. And to show the truth of what's really going on. >> Okay, so Hollywood, are you listening? (laughing) Do you have any final advice for the young women who are here. And maybe it's their first Grace Hopper Conference. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What do you think they should do to get the most out of their experience here in Orlando this week? >> Well, first of all, I'm so glad that you're here and I want you to be encouraged that there is a sisterhood. There is a community that cares about you that has seen some of the same things, some of the challenges. And maybe you don't even know about yet. But together, we can make a better world. We can be the change agents that we already are but on a such bigger scale. So, you know, go for it. Don't ever let fear stop you. And you will make a success out of whatever you're going after. >> Those are words to live by. >> Yeah, we need to get a bigger boat though. You got 18,000 people. >> I know. >> That's right. >> You can't get that on you IM placard. >> That's right, that's right. That's a new solution for tomorrow. (laughing) >> Great, well, Brenda, thanks so much. We're so excited for you and to be here at Grace Hopper again. >> Thank you so much. I appreciate being here. >> Great event, great event. >> Okay, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from Grace Hopper in a little bit.

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Yasmine Mustafa. She is the founder of ROAR. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So ROAR is a self-defense wearable technology for women. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the technology and also really where you got the idea. >> Sure, I got the idea about four years ago. I decided to do something a little bit crazy. I got rid of all my possessions. I got rid of my apartment. I put a backpack on, and I booked a solo trip to South America for six months, and I did it for two reasons. The first reason is refugee, and when I came here, even though I was brought here when I was 15 applying for colleges, I actually found out I was undocumented, so I spent about 10 years working under the table trying to become legalized, and it was a very long, hard battle. It was very difficult to go to school and get a real job, and once I became a US citizen which happened five years ago, I was also able to sell my first company. I had a software company before ROAR. And after those two events, I said, "You know what, I'm 30 years old. "I deserve a break. "I've had a long journey. "I'm going to go celebrate." >> Jeff: Start another long journey. (laughs) >> Yeah, exactly. (laughing) I wanted to travel for so long and I couldn't 'cause when you're undocumented, it's really-- >> Hard to get back into the country. >> And you don't have the right credentials and even after I got my Green Card, I could. You can travel after getting your Green Card but I was so worried that I wouldn't be able to come back 'cause I've heard stories that I intentionally didn't, and so I booked this six-month trip as a way to reward myself and as a way to kind of make up for everything that had happened beforehand, and it was amazing trip. It was really life-changing. When I talk about it, I talk about my life in relation to before the trip and after the trip because it was so transformational, and I went to Spanish school for three weeks, did full Spanish immersions, stayed with a Spanish family in Ecuador, and then I went to Colombia and Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru. I spent a month in each country but as incredible as it was, it was also incredibly eye-opening because everywhere that I went and visited, I just kept hearing story after story of a time a woman had been attacked or abused or harassed, and it really opened my eyes to the violence women face every day, and a week after I came back to Philadelphia, it was in a downtown, when my neighbor went out to her car. It's a horrible story. She was grabbed from behind. she was dragged into an alley. She was severely assaulted, brutally assaulted. When I saw the news story the next day, that was when the light bulb moment hit, and I called up my cofounder, my formal adviser of my last company and told him about it, Anthony Gold, and we ended together to start ROAR for Good, and the concept initially was completely different. We thought the problem was that existing self-defense tools, pepper sprays, tasers was that you have to pull them out of your pocket or your purse for them to be useful, and it's not like you could just be like, "Excuse me. "One second," (laughing) and dig it out, so we thought let's make it wearable so that it's readily accessible. This is when Fitbit was huge, and the initial idea was actually called the macelet, mace in a bracelet, and (laughs) exactly, and as clever as that name was, we found out through market research that it was actually a terrible idea, that the number one fear that women had of self-defense tools is, "I'm afraid I'm going to be overpowered, and my own self-defense device used as a weapon against me," and another one, "What if I use it against myself accidentally?" And when we did more research, we found that existing self-defense tools are actually made by men for other men, and when the market opportunity for women came about, they shrunk it, they shrinked it and pinked it, and they didn't really account for women's needs, so we went back to the drawing board, and we said, "All right, we need to make something "that's stylish but discreet, "something that can call for help, "something that can ward off an attack, "and something that cannot be used "against the person wearing it", and that's how we came up with Athena. >> So do you have one that you can show are yours, what it looks like? >> I do, I do, yes. >> This is what it looks like. >> How it works, okay. >> So it has a magnetic band. Initially it was actually a bracelet, and when we were doing self-defense classes with prototypes, we actually found out the worst place to wear a safety device is on your wrist, and can you guess why? >> Somebody grabs your wrist, grabs your arm, right? >> Exactly, or now you only have the opposite hand to activate it, so we said, "No, we need to make something "that's more readily accessible "where both hands can be free," so we designed it with this magnetic strip so that you can clip it on any which way you want. The most popular options we've seen are purse, pocket bra strap, or lapel, and the way it works is if you feel nervous, if you want someone to watch over you, you triple press the button, and it sends your coordinates to your family and friends showing exactly where you are, and if there is danger, if you really need help right away, you press and hold it for three seconds, and it will also sound an alarm, and in about seven rings, you'll also be able to call emergency number, the local PSAP, 911 center in your neighborhood. >> Wow. >> It's such a great concept. As are so many great inventions are, it's really assembling a bunch of components that already exist, your cellphone, an app on your phone, your network of your contacts, the GPS in your phone, and assembling it in a slightly different way for a very specific application. >> Everything that's commonplace, it's in the device. There's nothing proprietary about it. It's just the way that we put it together. Again, we took existing technology and put it together in a way and tested it to make sure that it's something that can work, and we worked with police officers and self-defense instructors to put it together, which is really eye-opening as well. >> And the other part, if you can explore, it's a different way to interact with 911 so if it is an emergency, you're not picking up the phone, you're not talking but according to your website, it's faster, in a lot of ways, it's more efficient. There's a lot of benefits to a not phone call connection with what traditionally has been the way you ask for help, and how did getting that through, is that a regulatory thing? How did that whole process work? >> That's a great question. It's something that we probably spent about a year working on, and we actually have a partner that does it for us, so this partner, what's really cool about them is that they have a relationship with all 500 PSAPs, so a PSAP is just your local 911 center in your area, and our service is going to be able to to leverage their partnership to be able to connect with all of them. The way their system works is they can actually better track you through their service than your normal cellphone can, which is also really cool, and if you're my emergency contacts and I press this button 'cause I can't call 911 and you're in Orlando, I'm in Philadelphia, it will actually route you to the PSAP in my neighborhood versus your local PSAP so then it saves the time in terms of calling the Orlando PSAP and then having them call the Philadelphia PSAP and then finding me, so we're really, really excited about this opportunity. >> So apart from the technology, I want to talk to you a little bit about funding. Funding is one of the greatest barriers that really, all technologists but in particular, women founders face. Can you describe a little bit about how you went about finding sources of money? You already sold a company by then so you'd already been successful. >> Yes. >> But what about people without the track record? What would you say? >> Sure. I'd love to touch on the social mission aspect at some point too if you don't mind. For funding, I'm very lucky in the sense that my cofounder, he's also founded several companies in the past and fundraising is his thing, so he's been the one to lead it but what we did initially, so we spent about 18 months in product development, and we did a lot of testing, I mean really awkward, we put ourselves in really awkward situations where we went to parks and coffee shops, and showed people this and said, "Why would you not use this? "Tell me why you don't like this," and then we went back to the drawing board and did it again and again, and then we got to the point where people said, "Yeah, I want this. "I want this for my mom. "I want this for my child. "I want this for my college student." But there is a world of difference between, say, yeah, I want it versus buying it, so what we did initially is we actually launched a crowdfunding campaign. We launched an Indiegogo campaign, and for us, it was really a way to test if we really had, we were onto something. We initially had the goal of $40,000. The results really blew us away. We hit that $40,000 goal within the second day, got to 100 by the 10th day, 100,000, and then we ended the campaign with a little bit over 300,000 funding, and that really allowed us to do our seat stage round, and we were lucky from the sense we have a really interesting story. There is a billionaire couple in the UK that found out about us through the campaign after it took off. We had sales in every state in the country, 50 countries worldwide. Ashton Kutcher tweeted about it. It was amazing. It went viral for a little bit, which was incredible, but they learned about it, and then reached out to Indiegogo and said, "We want to meet this team, the company behind this team," and we connected with them, and they immediately put $2 million into the company. We went and met with them in Chicago after they came over, and within three days, we had the money in our bank account, so we got a little bit lucky but having that crowdfunding campaign, the success as validation really helped us to be able to raise that additional funding, and then we went to Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and they put in $250,000, our local economic resource center that does matching, and that's how we raised our initial seed to growth. >> And you mentioned the social mission piece so I want you to tell our viewers a little bit more. >> Yeah, so I, for a long tIme, lived in fear, so being undocumented, not really knowing what could happen, and I'm actually giving a talk tomorrow about my whole journey, and learning about women living in fear in another different way while traveling throughout South America. I didn't want to build a company that just built products and sold them to women that just put the onus on women 'cause it's too common for us to say were you drinking when something happens or don't do, don't wear this, don't go here, and we wanted to change that narrative, hence, the ROAR for Good aspect, and what we found after talking with psychologists and researchers is that violence against women stems from gender discrimination and inequality, and that there is one trait, if taught to young kids when they're most impressionable, can actually reduce violence against women, and that's empathy, and that empathy has actually decreased 40% over the last 20 years, and there is a controversy on whether or not it's something that's learned or innate but wherever you fall in that category, there is no denying that it is falling regardless, so we invest, we have what we call a ROAR Back program, which is we invest a portion of proceeds of every sale to nonprofits that specifically focus on teaching respect and healthy relationships to young kids when it matters most. >> Yasmine, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It's a really exciting technology. Thank you. >> Hopefully we'll see you at Philly. We got to have a Philly show. >> Come to Philly, please. >> So you got Josh as a buddy so-- >> Yes. >> Come on, Josh. We got to have us some Philly. (laughing) >> I'm Rebecca Knight with Jeff Frick. We will have more from Grace Hopper just after this. (light music)

(upbeat synthesizer pop music) >> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by siliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Ilit Raz. She is the CEO of Joonko, an AI-powered diversity and inclusion coach for companies. >> Ilit: That's right. >> Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for inviting me. So, I'd love it for you to just start talking about how you came up with the idea for Joonko. >> Sure, so I grew up in Israel, originally from Israel, spent about 14 years in the tech industry. Before that, doing computer science in high school, I was almost the only woman all along the way, for like 15 years, and I think the weird thing, I never thought it's a weird thing. This is how I grew up. I was one out of two doing computer science in high school, spent a few years in the Intelligence Unit, was the only woman around and this is how I grew up. And then, like 2 1/2 years ago, I joined a group of Women in Product Management in Israel. We, like, I went to their first Meetup. It was 250 women there. Israeli people have this perception of everyone knows everyone and I went into the room and literally know, like knew no one and I was like, "That's weird." And, then I think I realized, like, "We have a problem." I went back to two other friends, we worked on another venture before, and said, "Hey, what do you about changing what we're doing "to doing something for women in the workplace?" And, they were like, "Actually, that sounds awesome," and we started thinking about what is already outside in the market, what are companies doing now? And, I come from a lot of cybersecurity background and I'm like, "What do you think about doing anti-virus for biases?" >> Ooh. >> And, this is how we started this AI stuff and everything like this and as we moved forward, I'm starting to talk with a lot of companies. We realized the biggest barrier for a company was like understand what's happening on a day-to-day stuff for employees all around the world. Like, if they're head of HR or head of Diversity sitting in San Francisco or whatever in their headquarters, how do you know what's happening with your employees like at a really low level in offices around the world? And, we realized, like-- >> So, it's not just for the recruitment. It's also in terms of who's getting promotions, who's getting the choice assignments, who's-- >> That's right. What kind of language are you using when you talk on Slack? What type of code review do give to your female engineers versus a male engineer? Who gets promoted? What type of language are you using on peer-to-peer evaluations and all this type of stuff. >> That stuff is so hard and it sort of seems, >> Yeah. >> the code review assignments, it seems like a minor thing, but, in fact... >> It's really important. Like, if you get like, "You need to fix this," exclamation mark, and you're like, that's not really nice and it doesn't make you feel like, okay, I want to go ahead and fix it and probably you don't give this same thing to a male developer. You're like, "Maybe there is another way to do it," and you use different phrases and different tone. And, also, we see like on Slack messages, when there is a development channel, usually you're not going to see women and people of color are as active as men, just because they're usually a small portion of the team, even one person on the team. So, I think this is like the main stuff that's happening on day-to-day stuff that are not like trying to get the most important role in the company, but actually do I get a spot, generally speaking, in the company. Do I feel comfortable? Like, if someone making a joke is like, "You look so gay," as a joke, and you as a gay person, whether you are outspoken gay or not, like probably if you've spoken about it or not, then you don't feel very comfortable, even if it's a joke. >> Right. >> Like, it's not really funny. >> Right, right, right. >> So, how does your technology work? So, it detects these biases. >> Right. >> It understands when there are, is aggressive or hostile language to women or other minority groups and then what? >> So, basically we connect to these everyday SaaS platforms companies are using, so you had mentioned recruiting is one of them, Slack, Salesforce, Atlassian, basically all the companies around here, and then once we connect with these platforms, we peel out the data in real time, all the time. We analyze the data, we look for patterns and when we get this metric, okay, there is a pattern here that was probably based on biases, we reach out to the most relevant person, like the person who has the most effect on the current situation. Whether it's you as a female developer that needs to be more active or you as a recruiter that was just keeping these 10 diverse candidate CV reviews, you as an individual who can make the most impact on the current situation, we're going to reach out to you, whether via email or Slack message, and say, "Hey, this is the situation, "and here is how you can fix it." So, we have another engine that like matched a problem with a solution. >> With an action? >> Yeah, with an action that you can do in like less than two minutes, so it should be like a really quick thing that you can do on the go. You don't need to like, "Okay, I need to set time for this Joonko thing." No. >> Right. >> It's like super-quick thing >> Right, right. >> that you can do or you need to do and it basically should help you either really improve the situation or basically overcome it before it gets to like what we call, we call it like micro-events of unconscious biases before it gets like really big thing. >> So, are people, so it really is putting the onus on the individual to act. >> That's right. And, are, do people do it? Is there follow through? >> Yes. >> What are you seeing? >> I think that the numbers that we have on even open rates for the insights that we send and follow-up rates, I think every marketing company in the US would love to have these numbers; like they are really, really high. I think it's just people, like for the first two times, they give it a try and when they see that it's really helping, they just keep doing it. Like, we have one company that reached out to us and say, "We know you have a limit of three engagements a week, "because you don't want to bother us, can you take it off? "We want to get all of them. "We really find them helpful on our day-to-day stuff. "Can you give us more of these insights?" So, I think people are like really into giving it a try and then see that it's helpful and keep using it. Like, we really see high improvement, so I think that's another good reason for people to kind of keep engaging. So, yeah, people are super happy about it. >> So, what are you finding? What do your clients tell you is the return on investment, here? >> I think the first main stuff that we see, one, because we have a lot of capabilities, of like, let's take recruiting, for example, when you look at recruiting and a company say, like, "We want to improve our recruiting numbers," they don't really know beside the fact that someone voluntarily gives their ethnicity, age, gender, whatever, they don't know who is the applicant unless they manually take like one person by one. We know how to analyze gender and race automatically by email addresses for like 90% of the candidates, so it actually gives a really clear picture for a company. Like, okay, what is happening in our recruiting efforts and where we, where are the pitfalls and where do we fail? And, it's basically like turning the light in place they like, they had no clue what's-- >> Showing them their blind spots, yeah. >> Yeah, that they had no idea what's going on. In other places, like what's going on on Slack channels, I don't think anyone here knows what's happening on their Slack channels. It's really, really hard to follow. So, I think it's the smaller spots and the like little places that we can turn, basically, turn on the light for a lot of companies. >> And, so who are your companies? Are they already the forward-thinking companies or are you seeing-- >> You have, I think at this point, you have to be a forward-thinking company to go ahead, give a third-party access to all this stuff, really want to make a change. Honestly, I think you need to be like a few hundreds, maybe lower few thousands, to actually being able to make a quick change. Like, for our companies that have a few hundred employees, they see, in less than three months, 5% to 8% improvement on your recruiting efforts, like actually hiring more diverse candidates. I think when you get to a size of like 100,000, and 200,000 employees, making a 1% change-- >> Rebecca: It's a lot harder. >> It's much harder. >> So what is your message to those companies? >> Wow, I think, A, start with business units. Don't make this huge announcement with like you're going to be 50/50 by 2020. To get to 50/50 by 2020, you need to fire half of your team and then hire half diverse candidates, like half diverse. >> So, start small. Start small. >> Start small, start where pains really are. Don't say you have 50/50 when all the 50 are in marketing and sales and like assistants or whatever and then on your R and D teams, you have like 10/90, which is what most companies have. So, start small and, I guess, lead by example by putting money into internal work and not marketing out or like go ahead and be like, volunteer work, come here to Grace Hopper. This is nice, but this is more customer-facing marketing versus actually doing something internally to change the numbers, so. >> Great, great. Well, Ilit Raz, thank you so much for joining us. >> You're welcome. Thank you for having me. >> It was a pleasure, yes. >> Thank you very much. >> We will have more from theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference in a little bit. (upbeat synthesizer pop music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconAngle Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference, here in Orlando Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Jeff Frick. We're joined by Sarah Clatterback. She's the Senior Director of Engineering at LinkedIn, and Erica Lockheimer, the head of Growth Engineering at LinkedIn. Thanks so much for coming on the show, again. >> Yes, thank you. >> Thanks for having us again. >> We're getting the band back together. >> Absolutely. >> So before the cameras were rolling you were talking about the exciting initiatives and programs you have at LinkedIn. One of them that definitely caught Jeff's imagination was Reach. It's sort of a cross-fit for engineers. So tell us more about Reach. >> Yeah, so Reach is a program where we wanted to really look at how we're hiring talent in a different way. So one of the things, actually it was an inspiration of a candidate that we had at Grace Hopper last year, where she had come and she gave us her resume. >> Yep. >> Abby, and she said "I can't get an engineering job. I did a boot camp but no one will hire me. I don't have enough experience." And she really was the catalyst that really created the program. We said, we need to look at talent in a very different way. So we decided, it stemmed also from her and also from Whit where if there's working mothers, how do they get back into the workforce? So these two ideas started coming together, and we said, why not create a program where we can maybe have them come to LinkedIn, get their skills back up, teach them how to code, and eventually work at LinkedIn. So we kicked off the program, and we did very little media, and we had over 700 people apply, and we went through 500 applications, and had 30 candidates at LinkedIn. So they just finished the end of the group session, but they are converting. They're learning how to code. They're checking code live to the site, and these are people from different backgrounds. As a veteran, returning back to work, even some people that have been in a bad situation of being homeless. I mean, this is talking about, not only about career transformation, but transforming their lives. And it's such a special program that has just changed the way that we're thinking about hiring. I don't know if you want to add anything. >> Yeah, I mean, I think that it's had a great impact on our company. I think, the way we think about hiring, but also how the whole team has interacted and really come together to support these apprentices, in being successful as engineers. So I've seen it actually transform the entire culture of our engineering team through this whole program. >> It's interesting, you use the word apprenticeship . And I think of that too, 'cause there's always the talk, right, about technology taking jobs. On the other hand, we hear over and over, there's all these open tech jobs. There's nobody to fill them. >> Yes. >> And then you got the transition with the truck drivers that are all going to be displaced by autonomous trucks, in the not distant future. So it's interesting as you point out, to kind of rethink, kind of the classic, go to school do your time, come in at the bottom and work your way up. Because there needs to be a much more variant to be able to get people to retrain, to take people through various backgrounds. And are you seeing that reflected, 'cause you guys, obviously, represent a bunch of companies that are looking for people. Are you seeing a broader adoption of this kind of non-traditional approach to getting talent? >> Well, it's a program that we started off as a pilot. >> Okay. >> We are definitely going to do a second round. So we would love to share and open source how we're doing it and we'd love to have other companies thinking this way. But it's truly, back to Sarah's point, it's really not only transformed our culture, but it's even thinking about how we're hiring. We're in hiring committee every single week, and we start looking at these candidates, like oh, it looks like a Reach candidate. Before you would've maybe bypassed them and said oh they're not ready. This is now a different way to invest. But I definitely want more companies to do this, and we'll pilot, we'll share it, we'll open source it, and it will be fantastic. >> So talk about some of the other programs including Invest, and how you're helping, making sure that employees are happy where they are. >> So Invest is a program that came out of the Women and Tech Initiative between Sarah and I, and we thought about some of the personal experiences that we had, is how did we get to where we're at? And you want to design a program about your own experiences. You're like, hey I know that works. Let me just create a playbook around it. So we met, and we said we have executive coaching. We had basically a community of people, we could talk to about some challenges and we had managers invest in us. So why not create a program about that. So we have, this is our third session that we're doing it, and we have 50 women in the program. But the program consists of two day executive coaching, one-on-one with your manager, continuant of bringing the community of women together, and going through this. And what we've found in the success results is there's zero in the last 10 months of them being part of this program, and 40 percent promotions which is fantastic. And then what also happens is they go into this program, and they want to be mentored, and they graduate really literally from the program. Now we want them to pay it forward. >> Pay it forward to the next cohort that's going to come through this program. And I think we have several things we can measure. I mean, you talked about the promotion rate, but we can also talk about, did they have, sort of, a career moment in the year following their trip through the program. Were they able to step up and take a bigger assignment, more responsibility. There are other ways to measure the success of the program, as well, and we're seeing that across the board. >> Yeah, and just to add on to it, it really is a community that we're starting to build within the company, and it just feels fantastic. People feel great. We're walking around through the hallways like, I'm part of Invest when can I sign up. Everybody wants to be a part of it. So we need to figure out, and we can scale it faster. >> Well measurement is also so important too, because so many companies want to know what the return on investment. So how do you think about the data collection and then measuring progress? >> Yeah, so basically for all these initiatives before we start them we say what are going to be the things that we're going to measure? What are the metrics of success. And I think in this particular case, Erika mentioned attrition rate. That's what's in it for the company is retaining top talented women. But then on the other side, are they achieving their career goals? Are they getting promoted? Are they able to step up? So those were, kind of, the two metrics that we had set for the program before we even started. And then we can basically check and see, are we achieving those results, or do we need to pivot something about the program, or reshape the program. So we do this at least yearly, if not quarterly, to see if we're tracking towards our goals. >> And just to add on to measurement, like she mentioned, it's hard to mention, how do you feel? You went through this program, how do you feel? They are feeling better. They are feeling more empowered. They want to actually be part of Whitmore and then help pay it forward. So that's also an amazing measurement of success too. >> I went to an interesting pitch night a little while ago. Stanford, I think MIT, Babson, and Cal, and there was a start up there. They were looking at external data sources, social media, et cetera to try and quickly identify high-risk leaves inside the company. So to basically would be the drive your candidate's election to say this person looks like, they're doing behaviors that might indicate they might be boogieing. >> Right, right? >> So maybe they should invested in to keep it going. 'Cause obviously it's so much better to keep your good people than to have to hire, retrain. >> Definitely. >> Et cetera. The huge ROI. And of course, the last thing, and I joke with you guys every time I see you. 'Cause I see you so often on LinkedIn usually, in a classroom. >> Good, keep on using LinkedIn >> With a bunch of little girls, teaching them, taking your weekends to teach coding and tech. It's just fantastic. But really interesting that you're expanding that program as well. So that Sarah can get some of her Saturdays back which I'm happy for. And really taking something successful. >> Yeah. >> And as you said, open sourcing. Open source continues to be such a great innovation engine. One of you can tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So our high school trainee program, we've been running it for three years now. We just finished our third cohort, and I think the results sort of speak for themselves. We've got a 96 percent rate of students going on to pursue stem degrees, and 89 percent studying computer science in particular. So I think we're actually seeing the result that we want out of the program, and we've even gone and reached a lot of girls who might be first generation college attendees, and we're even having the same success with them. So we really wanted to expand this program, horizontally scale it so to speak. So what we've done is we've put our program outline, as well as our curriculum that we do during the summer, online on GitHub, and we're encouraging other companies to pick this up, to adapt it to their own needs, and to provide additional opportunity for students around Silicone Valley and beyond. >> What's the biggest, consistent, it's not a surprise if it's consistent, and you've been doing it for three years. But as you run these programs, when you get the girls in for the first time, what's the thing that most people would never expect that you see over, and over, and over? >> I think for me, it's really seeing the identity transformation of the students. They come in. They're not sure if they belong. They feel intimidated, and by the end of the summer, they're confident, they're certain that they're going to be engineers. They see a future for themselves in Silicon Valley, and that's reflected not only at the end of the program, but also as they follow up with us in the subsequent years. So, for example, one of our first cohort has already finished her undergrad at Berkeley >> Yay! >> Wow! >> in two years, in computer Science. >> She finished in two years? >> She finished her undergrad >> She's a very motivated lady. >> She's so excited. >> She's amazing. >> Wow. >> And she's in a third year master's program right now. I get updates periodically from all the students. How they're doing, how their programs are going. One of the women from our first cohort, Vanessa, is also here at Grace Hopper. So we're going to meet up for dinner tomorrow night. It's really great to follow them as they become confident technologists into their career. >> Great story. >> So I want to ask you, being here at Grace Hopper, it's easy to feel that companies really get it in the sense of the importance of recruiting and retaining women, making sure that there's opportunities for them. But in terms of the state of the industry, and I'm asking LinkedIn which really epitomizes professional career management. >> Yes. >> Do companies get it? Where are we? >> So I think there's several companies that want to do something, I think we're all still trying to figure it out. As sad as that may be at times, but it's a hard problem to solve. When you're at a conference like this and you're like, there's not enough women in tech. There's tons of women in tech. If you have to think about how you're hiring in and if you want different results, you have to do something different. So what are you doing? Your old ways of doing things is not the way to do it, clearly. So how can you pivot and change? So I think they need to continually try different things. But I feel good. I feel we're going to get in that right trajectory, but it's going to take some time. >> Yeah, I think this is algorithm optimization, right? >> Yes, good analogy, good analogy. >> The inputs and the outputs. Are we getting the result that we want? And we're all iterating our algorithms to figure out what's working, and how we can do better. >> New inputs, new inputs. >> Excellent. Well Erika, Sarah, thank you so much. It's always so much fun having you on the show. >> Well thank you for having us, it's fantastic. >> Absolutely >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Jeff Frick who will be back tomorrow with more from Grace Hopper. See you then. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Morgan Berman. She is the founder and CEO of MilkCrate, a platform that measures and grows social and environmental impact. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I want to, start off by telling us a little bit about MilkCrate. >> Sure. So we're a tech company. We got our start about four years ago. We've grown and changed a lot in that time, but what we really focus on doing is helping big organizations either for- or non-profit, engage people in social and environmental impact in a game app. And we build custom versions of this app based on the goals of each client. So whether it's a big company that wants to engage employees in volunteering and riding a bike to work, or a nonprofit that has kids that they're trying to get to go to art museums, and encourage them to go more often, we can gamify both of those behaviors in unique apps and then those clients have their own engagement experience for hitting those goals. >> Well, that's a really neat idea. Tell me how you came up with it. >> Well, like I said, it's changed and grown over time. Originally it was my own personal desire to grow my impact in the world. I grew up in this kind of crunchy, kind of wonderful bubble, I guess, where my mom would only buy food from the farmer's market, she was actually a farm-to-table chef, one of the first female chefs in Philly. She wrote books rating and reviewing thrift shopping, so I grew up with like fresh local food, thrift shopping, there was a community garden behind us. >> She was a hipster before her time. >> Exactly, my mom's like the original hipster. And my dad was also an entrepreneur. So when I moved to West Philadelphia, which is like the crunchiest part of the city by far, I was trying to figure out how to ride a bike in the city for the first time, and how do you compost with worms when you live in an apartment and you don't have a backyard. Where's my nearest food co-op so I can start feeding myself this way? And my interest grew and grew as I started learning about things like climate change. And I went to a Bill McKibben talk about fossil fuel divestment, and there were these children in Haiti holding a sign that said Connect The Dots Your Actions Affect Me. And it really hit home how my privilege as this western world person with this degree and all of these things that most people don't have that every choice I made about my life was having a direct impact on someone on the other side of the world, or often not even that far from me. And so I wanted to figure out how to live my life in a way that my values weren't conflicting with my actions. So I applied for graduate school in sustainable design to originally, the idea was to help design sustainable buildings but I quickly learned that even though I had this degree, architects weren't going to take me seriously. And so I pivoted and took all my extra-curriculars in Industrial Design and Interactive Media. And I had the head of the department for Interactive Media actually helping me with the first mock-ups of MilkCrate, which was all about designing an app to help people live their values, particularly around sustainability. And then, after a few years of learning and growing, we actually, Forbes picked us to be one of the five companies on the Forbes Under 30 stage and that catapulted us onto this path of suddenly going from a school project to a startup company that needed to raise money and have a business model. And I was like, what's a business model? So after about two years of learning and growing, we realized that there's this opportunity with big corporations to engage employees in sustainability and that there was a pain point on this enterprise level that we could solve, and yeah. >> And what was this pain point? I mean, I think that's the thing is we can all say it's great for companies to get their employees to ride more bikes and to start a recycling program-- >> But why do they care? >> Yeah! >> And that's what investors would always ask, and I'd be like, ugh! And I had to learn the answer! And the answer is 75% of the S&P 500 issues a CSR Sustainability Report every year, and that has grown exponentially over the last few years. And the reason they do that is because employees want to work for a company that's making a difference. 45% of millennials would take a 15% cut or more in their salary to work for a company that makes a difference in the world. The reason that B Corps are growing exponentially around the world, all of these things, of business is a force for good in the world, it's the norm now. Whether you realize it or not, that's what's driving people to work for a company, to stay for a company, for customers to buy a product from a company. That's how people are starting to make their important life choices. And so now companies invest in having a Corporate Social Responsibility, not only a director, but a whole department. And they're, what we learned when we were researching how to figure out this whole business model was that CSR directors, their top three pain points are engaging employees, tracking and analytics, and having a scalable, cost-effective program across the whole company. So we realized our product could do all three of those things, and I was like, oh, I think that's a business model, when you solve the major pain points for an important corporate role in the world. So that's how we started moving in that direction and we started getting validation, and then we realized we also could work with nonprofits when they started reaching out. And so now we're kind of filling both of those needs that are a little bit different. >> So you're gamifying, making it into a game, making it fun for employees, or clients or customers or whoever the target audience is. So what kind of rewards are they getting for this? How do you light up their bulbs? >> I'm actually giving a lecture on this at Warden on Monday, so it's top of mind. You've got intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, right? There are the things that you do because they make you feel like you're being your authentic self, where you're expressing your values and that lights up your brain in a way that nothing else ever will. Then you have your external, extrinsic motivations, things like prizes, but also social acknowledgement. Seeing that you are functioning the way your peers are, that sense of I am not alone, or I am normal, that's a really important validation as a human. So seeing that you're in the top 10 or that you're above average, that feels good. So we have things like your rank and how you're doing on your team and how your team's doing in comparison to other teams in your MilkCrate community. And then there's the actual rewards. So university clients of ours have given tickets to sporting events, or credit to the bookstore. Corporate clients, gift certificates to local, sustainable restaurants and coffee shops near the headquarters. We're actually now partnering with an amazing B Corp company, United By Blue, that has ethically made and environmentally thoughtful products like mugs and candles and things like that. So, it depends on the client what their goals are, what their budget is, what motivates those people. But it really, the beginning part, when you first download the app, the first couple of challenges are things like answer this question about how important is to you to live your values? So you get them thinking in that mindset about why they're using this app. >> Priming them to-- >> Priming them, exactly! Getting them in that headspace. That's the most important thing you can do in the beginning is just to help them understand why they're using this, and then the rewards are almost, they're a distant second. >> Okay, okay. So you've also, you are a B Corp, and are there many other B Corps here at Grace Hopper? I mean, what's your experience there? As you said, it is now the norm that the business is functioning this way. But B Corps are still a minority, relatively speaking. >> Right, there's a lot of room for growth there, yeah. I think having the CSR report is the norm, but doing everything you possibly can, there's still a lot of room in that department. One thing I saw that I loved was that instead of giving out swag, Facebook was actually donating money to nonprofits that help women code. I was like, that's great! So I haven't seen any B Corps here that I've, yeah, I don't think I've seen other than ROAR For Good-- >> Which we had on the show earlier. >> Yes, so Yasmine and I are definitely two Philly B Corps. I would love to see more tech companies go in that direction but yeah, there's a lot more growth that needs to happen. There are about, I think, I actually just got to meet one of the other founders of B Lab that does B Corp certification. He gave a great presentation answering in more detail why do companies do this? It was amazing how many stats he had. It was like yes! But 2,300 for B Corps and I think something like 16,000 benefit corporations. So they're slightly different things, but it's a growing movement for sure. >> So talk a little bit about your experience at this Grace Hopper Conference. It's day one, we're near the end of day one. How would you describe the energy, the atmosphere, what's your feeling about being here in Orlando? >> So I've heard over and over again people saying it's just so good to be in a room full of women who are all doing awesome things. And it keeps reminding me of when I went and saw Wonder Woman with my parents. And I remember sitting in the theater and going like this and being like oh, my cheeks are wet. Oh, I think I'm crying. Oh, I think I'm having feelings. I think it's because I've literally never seen on a screen several dozen, or hundreds of women just being powerful, physical beings with like, aggression and skill, and it having nothing to do with sexuality or being attractive. And it was just the first time I'd seen that in my 32 years of existence. And to just, there's something so powerful about having that icon, that image reflected back at you to see, oh, if you can do that, I can do that. And actually, over the last 13 months, I've been training in Brazilian jujitsu and competing, and to see women being physical, strong warriors, and only women, and it not being sexualized, it was like oh, that's the feeling I get when I compete, and when I'm with my teammates, my female teammates. Anyways, I think that's kind of what's happening here is that sense of like, these are my people, and we are doing amazing things, and to just see each other when historically, you never got to see a room like this. I think it's an unfortunately necessary experience to be reminded that we are out there, we are doing this, and it's growing. >> And there is a sisterhood and the belonging that we talked about earlier, too. >> I mean, you see men who don't seem particularly uncomfortable here. They can kind of, they're like okay with this. And they get to kind of know what it's like to be in the minority. And I kind of want to ask them, how are you feeling? What's this like for you? But like, to see everyone flipping the ratio and we're all good, so that means if we could get somewhere more like parity I think that could be pretty magical. >> So as a female founder, a female technologist, what is your advice for the younger versions of you who maybe are just graduating from college, or maybe even younger than that and sort of wondering, can I even do that? Can I aspire to be that? >> You absolutely can. And I gave some advice at the end of my session earlier. And my two bits of advice were detach yourself from any negative association with the word Failure. Try and come up with a new word for yourself if you need to because learning and growing is what you're going to do your whole life, and so taking risks, that's what you need to be doing every single day. And so pushing against those things that scare you. And the second thing was to find a mentor, because no one piece of advice I can give is ever going to fill the role that having a mentor can give you over the course of a career, or even just for a few years. The amount that I've grown in just the last four years of building my company with some of my mentors, it's incredible. So, find someone who reminds you of who you want to be, and then latch on to them and get them to help kind of carry you along. >> Great. Well, Morgan, it's been so fun talking to you. >> Thank you, this has been great. >> Thanks for joining us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from the Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando just after this. (rippling music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome to day one of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. Welcome back to theCUBE, I should say. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We have just seen some really great keynote addresses. We had Faith Ilee from Stanford University. Melinda Gates, obviously the co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We also had Diane Green, the founder of VMware. Jeff, what are your first impressions? >> You know, I love comin' to this show. It's great to be workin' with you again, Rebecca. I thought the keynotes were really good. I've seen Diane Green speak a lot and she's a super smart lady, super qualified, changed the world of VMware. She's not always the greatest public speaker, but she was so comfortable up there. She so felt in her element. It was actually the best I'd ever seen. For me, I'm not a woman, but I'm a dad of two daughters. It was really fun to hear the lessons that some of these ladies learned from their father that they took forward. So, I was really hap-- I admit, I'm feelin' the pressure to make sure I do a good job on my daughters. >> Make sure those formative experiences are the right ones, yes. >> It's just interesting though how people's early foundation sets the stage for where they go. I thought Dr. Sue Black, who talked about the morning she woke up and her husband threatened to kill her. So, she just got out of the house with her two kids and started her journey then. Not in her teens, not in her twenties, not in college. Obviously well after that, to get into computer science and to start her tech journey and become what she's done now. Now she's saving the estate where the codebreakers were in World War II, so phenomenal story. Melinda Gates, I've never seen her speak. Then Megan Smith, always just a ton of energy. Before she was a CTO for the United States, that was with the Obama administration. I don't think she hung around as part of the Trump Administration. She brings such energy, and now, kind of released from the shackles of her public service and her own thing. Great to see her up there. It's just a terrific event. The energy that comes from, I think, a third of the people here are young women. Really young, either still in college or just out of college. Really makes for an atmosphere that I think is unique in all the tech shows that we cover. >> I completely agree. I think the energy really is what sets the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing apart from all the other conferences. First of all, there's just many more women who come to this. The age, as you noted, it's a lot lower than your typical tech conference. But, I also just think what is so exciting about this conference is that it is this incredible mix of positivity. let's get more women in here, let's figure out ways to get more women interested in computer science and really working on their journey as tech leaders. But, also really understanding what we're up against in this industry. Understanding the bro-grammar culture, the biases that are really creating barriers for women to get ahead, and actually to even enter into the industry itself. Then, also there's the tech itself, so we have these women who are talking about these cool products that they're making and different pathways into artificial intelligence and machine-learning, and what they're doing. So, it's a really incredible conference that has a lot of different layers to it. >> It's interesting, Dr. Fei-Fei Li was talking a lot about artificial intelligence, and the programming that goes into artificial intelligence, and kind of the classic Google story where you use crowdsourcing and run a bunch of photographs through an algorithm to teach it. But, she made a really interesting point in all this discussion about, is it the dark future of AI, where they take over the world and kill us all? Or, is it a positive future, where it frees us up to do more important things and more enlightened things. She really made a good point that it's, how do you write the algorithms? How are we training the computers to do what we do? Women bring a different perspective. Diversity brings a different perspective. To bake that into the algorithms up front is so, so important to shape the way the AI shapes the evolution of our world. So, I found that to be a really interesting point that she brought up that I don't think is talked about enough. People have to write the algorithms. People have to write the stuff that trains the machines, so it's really important to have a broad perspective. You are absolutely right, and I think she actually made the point even broader than that in the sense of is if AI is going to shape our life and our economy going forward-- >> Which it will, right? >> Which it will. Then, the fact that there are so few women in technology, this is a crisis. Because, if the people who are the end-users and who are going to either benefit or be disadvantaged by AI aren't showing up and aren't helping create it, then yes, it is a crisis. >> Right. And I think the other point that came up was to bake more computer science into other fields, whether it's biology, whether it's law, education. The application of AI, the application of computer science in all those fields, it's much more powerful than just computing for the sake of computing. I think that's another way hopefully to keep more women engaged. 'Cause a big part of the issue is, not only the pipeline at the lead, but there's a lot of droppage as they go through the process. So, how do you keep more of 'em involved? Obviously, if you open it up across a broader set of academic disciplines, by rule you should get more retention. The other thing that's interesting here, Rebecca. This is our fourth year theCUBE's been at Grace Hopper's since way back in Phoenix in 2014, ironically, when there was also a big Microsoft moment at that show that we won't delve back into. But, it's a time of change. We have Brenda Darden Wilkerson, the brand new president of the Anita Borg organization. Telle Whitney's stepping down and she's passing the baton. We'll have them both on. So, again, Telle's done a great job. Look what she's created in the team. But, always fun to have fresh blood. Always fun to bring in new energy, new point of view, and I'm really excited to meet Brenda. She's done some amazing things in the Chicago Public School System, and if you've ever worked in a public school district, not a really easy place to innovate and bring change. >> Right, no, of course. Yeah, so our lineup of guests is incredible this week. We've got Sarah Clatterbuck, who is a CUBE alum. We have a woman who is the founder of Roar, which is a self-defense wearable technology. We're going to be looking at a broad array of the women technologists who are leading change in the industry, but then also leading it from a recruitment and retention point of-- >> So, should be a great three days, looking forward to it. >> I am as well. Excellent. Okay, so please keep joining us. Keep your channel tuned in here to theCUBE"s coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We will see you back here shortly. (light, electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. (bright music) >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Ayanna Howard. She is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and also Chief Technology Officer at Zyrobotics. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> So start to tell our viewers a little bit about Zyrobotics. I know it was a spin-off of your research that you were doing at Georgia Tech. >> Yeah, so interesting enough Zyrobotics, so at Georgia Tech I focus on working in technologies, robotics for children with special needs. Primarily children with motor disabilities, cerebral palsy for example, children with autism. And so one of the things as we had developed was the ability to access computing technology because I was running robot programming camp. So I was running camps for all children, so an inclusive camp and I had typical children and children with special needs, and what happened was people kept asking me, "Oh, can we take this home?" It was like, "Yeah, no, (laughing) "that's got to stay in the lab, sorry. "But you can bring your kid back." And so the company really came out of trying to commercialize that special technology that allows inclusiveness for kids in this kind of STEM education. So that's how Zyrobotics came about. >> So talk a little bit about the technology. What does it do? How does it help kids with these different learning needs? >> So imagine you have a child who has motor limitation, and if you look now, so much is on tablets. Tablets, smartphones, even education. And if I have a motor disability, have you ever tried swiping with your fist? Right, or even if you're an older adult, and taking your finger, and if you have a tremor, like moving things around, so this is very difficult. And yet that is the way the technology is made, which isn't a service. It's just not made for everyone. And so what we've done is we've created these devices, very fun, think of it as a stuffed animal, that allows you to, if you want to stomp, if you want to do your finger, if your access point is in your foot, and you just tap your foot, it allows you to interact with the different educational apps. But what we found is that typical kids also like (laughing) playing with the toys. >> Rebecca: Right, right, right. >> So it's like, oh what is this? This is interesting. And so that's why it provided this nice blend of kids of any ability the ability to access these educational apps. So but you also are a full-time professor at Georgia Tech, and you run a traineeship in healthcare robotics. Tell our viewers a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, so I run a program called ARMS, so it's funded by the National Science Foundation. And what I've found is, a long time ago, the way that we were training our computer science students, our engineering students in robotics was typically I would say ad hoc. So I'd have a student, and they were like, "I'm interested in healthcare robotics." And I would call up my clinician friend and say, "hey, can we do an observation?" And my student would go there and basically shadow a therapist or a doctor for the day. And then they go back. And so this is what I was doing. And I found out that most professors who had students in healthcare-related activities were doing the same thing. And I was like, wait, hold it. This sounds like it's more than just me. Maybe we can formalize this a little bit more. And so the trainee-ship program actually takes roboticist students and immerses them in the medical side. And so for example this past summer, they spent the entire summer over in the clinic and the hospital watching surgeries, I mean actually scrubbing up, following patients, understanding what is Parkinson's and how do you do assessments. And so they were fully immersed as if they were medical resident students, or resident person in the clinic. And what happens is, then, and this is all in their first year, they come back into their studies, and now they understand, "okay, if I'm designing "this technology, what does it mean "if I'm designing for someone who's recovering from stroke? "What does that really mean?" And they have a vision of the patients, not just their own, I mean, they have a real vision of Mister Joe, that they've worked with and how he might have struggled with some concept and what they're doing can actually enable. And so it gives engineers, scientists, roboticists that power. >> And the empathy to really understand how it will be used. >> Yes, and understand that and not build or design in a box, which is really unfortunate that sometimes we do that. We design based on our own beliefs, not taking into account that there are other users and you are not the user, necessarily, of your own technology. >> So I want talk a little bit about this conference. This is your third Grace Hopper Conference. What does it mean to you to be here, and what do you get out of it? Are you here for Zyrobotics? Are you here for Georgia Tech? >> I am here for women in computing. And so it's actually not linked to a specific company or an organization. It's the fact that I feel a responsibility, they call me a role model, but- >> Rebecca: We're going to go with it, we're going to go with it. >> We're going to go with it. (laughing) I mean, I had a lot of mentors growing up. Not many were women. It's only at my later age that I've actually met some great, great women mentors. And so I feel a responsibility to come to Grace Hopper and just talk, share my experiences, sometimes be vulnerable and open to the trials and tribulations, but then the pure joy you get from staying in the field and the pure joy you get from actually impacting the world with your mind, with your technology, with your stuff. And I think it's amazing how, to be here and see all these young ladies, both students and older, well-established women leaders, and say, "yeah, we got this. "We can change the world with our power." >> So we're really at this inflection point in technology where problems, the biases, the barriers that have kept women from progressing, from first of all getting into the field and also progressing, are really front-page news. And sort of the problems that women have faced in the industry, the sexism, is really being talked about. But is that a good thing in the sense, I mean, yes, it's one thing to get these problems out there, but are we also discouraging women because it's showing women how tough it is to be in this industry and this bro-grammer culture? >> I think it's a two-edged sword. So in one instance, these things were happening anyway. And if you actually look at retention, which is surprising, retention of women who've been in the computing field for a longer period of time, a lot of them were dropping out. It's like, wait, hold it. You got through the pipeline, what happened? And so we all knew a lot of this stuff was going on. We have first-hand experience with it. And so the conversation now is letting everyone know about it. And I think that's how anything happens. It's that others are like, "I didn't realize." others start empathizing. "I didn't realize that this is what you were "going through. "What can I do to help?" Even if they are not necessarily a woman or a minority. And so I think what happens is by having that conversation, it makes everyone aware of it so that things can start changing. It's a negative, the fact that maybe young women are like, "oh, I don't want to go through that." I think by having role models that are like, "hey, yeah, that's what it's like, "but guess what, I'm running the company. "I'm the CEO, and so imagine what it'd be like "if you come in now that the conversation is open "versus what I was going through "when nobody was talking about it." We didn't have anyone to say, "hey, can you help me? "I just need some assistance, just to talk about something." Now you can, you can be open about it. >> So what is your advice? I mean, we know that the numbers are bleak. Tech is comprised of 25% women, 15% in leadership positions. For black and Latina, it's abysmal. What do you tell your students about this industry? >> So I tell my students, one is, if you want to change the world, and usually students that take my course and work with me are ones that want to have an impact with their minds and their technology, and so my thing is if you want to change the world, computer science, engineering is the only way that you can because the world is based on you and your technology. And in fact, if you don't, I put in the guilt, if you don't get involved in this, then the world is not going to change. And your kids' kids will have to live in this world that you have. So it's really your responsibility (laughing) to get into this space. >> The guilt is good, that's good, yeah. >> It is, for women, guilt is really good. >> I know, it's powerful, so powerful. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I want to talk a little bit about funding because I know that your trainee program, it's partly funded by the National Science Foundation. So funding is such a hot topic here, and whether you're a female entrepreneur who's trying to get money for your idea or you're a scientist trying to fund your research, tell us a little bit about the landscape, what you're seeing, what you're feeling. >> I would say that government funding, so the National Science Foundation, I would say NIH, there is more equality in the representation. >> Rebecca: There is more equality. >> It's not 50-50. But you have a fighting chance, right? I would argue, though, that in the startup world, you need to go for government funding and non-profits that may be angels because honey, VCs are not going to look at you. I truly believe that, and being a startup company, I talked to a lot of women entrepreneurs who have broke in the VC field, and they tell me basically how many frogs they had to kiss, you know? And so I think that landscape has not changed as much. But I think funding as a scientist for government grants, I think it's more, it's not fair, but it's more equal because in government, it's okay for you to say, as a program manager, "hey, something's wrong here." Because the government represents the population. So it's okay as a program manager to say that. I don't know that it's as safe to say that as a VC, like, "hey, our company portfolio doesn't look "like the rest of America." >> Right, right. So your advice there for female entrepreneurs or female researchers trying to get money is to go first to either angels or the government. >> I say that will help you keep your company alive. But you still have to kiss a lot of frogs. You still do. And eventually you will find a frog that turns into a princess and will fund you. But if you think about, how do you survive through this company and how do you keep it to the next levels, you go through any type of funding resource that you can. And so if the angel funding world in terms of government, it's not a guarantee, but it's easier, grab that, non-diluted, by the way, typically, until you go the VC direction. >> Now, in terms of the funding environment, though, NIH and NSF, do you feel they're giving as much money right now? We have an administration that is... >> Yeah, no, so overall the budgets themselves are, so NSF and NIH, this last cycle they kind of weathered a cut. But if you look overall over the last umpteen years, you see that the rate of acceptance has dropped because there's a lot more researchers going for funding, the budget doesn't keep up, necessarily, with the cost of living expenses kind of thing, cost for tuition, cost for grad students. And so overall the funding has declined. But that is not a gender issue. That is a issue just about the value of basic research in general. And the US, a lot of us understand but a lot of us do not. And so we feel that in terms of the funding process. >> So as a professor but then also as someone who's working in industry, how do you make sure that women can see themselves and see potentially rich and rewarding careers? >> So I do a couple of activities. For example, I'm going to talk about one, which CRWA grad cohort. And so what that focuses on is graduate students, women, either PhD, Master's wanting to be a PhD, and what we do is we provide those mechanisms for them to interact with community members. So we bring in these- >> Rebecca: So this is not just at Georgia Tech. This is nationwide. >> This is nationwide. Young women, they come in, like, "oh, what is this?" First off, they get to see other of their peers at other schools. Second is we bring in senior women that are doing exceptionally well, and they do things like one on one mentorship. They share. So we select these women who are open to sharing their experiences, both the good and the bad, and so it provides that network of, "okay, look, it might be hard in grad school, "but we have a peer network, take advantage. "And there are senior women you can take advantage, "to talk to and kind of ping them on different issues "that you have." So I think programs like that, and we're not the only one, but programs like CRWA grad cohort, CRAW URM, undergraduate cohort, are ways to ensure that you don't get discouraged at a younger age. >> So Zyrobotics, it's founded in 2013. What is the future of it? I mean, it's such an exciting technology and one that I think really has a lot of uses because as you said, it's not only for children but it could be for stroke victims, for aging people who are sort of losing some of their mobility. >> So my goal, I always say five years, right? So when I started it was like, five year goal cause that's like the holy grail, you make it for five years. So we're at year four, we just crossed. So we're in that five years. But what I see more as the vision, what I would say the secret magic of Zyrobotics is to make sure that accessibility is an integral part of the conversation. It's not an afterthought, it's not a someone designed technology, oh, let's think about accessibility and inclusiveness after the fact. And so I'm hoping that one, the product of course takes off, but also that it starts changing the conversation a little bit. So for example, I go out, I talk about how do you design technology that is really, really cool, is cutting edge, that's accessible at its core. It's accessible to the different learning ways, different access ways that people have of interacting with technology. How do you get that message across that, "hey, you can so this and you can still make money." So it's not like oh, accessibility, we can't make any money. Like, no, you can actually still make money even if it's a core value. So that's my vision is to have basically, have Zyrobotics lead that but then have other companies adopt it as, "oh, yeah, why haven't we done this? "Yeah, this makes total, total sense." >> Great, Ayanna Howard, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. >> Thank you, this was fun. Thank you for the invite. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, here in Orlando, Florida at Grace Hopper. We will have more just after this. (bright music)