>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes, live coverage here at VMware Explorer, 22. We're here on the ground on the floor of Mosco. I'm John for David ante. We're at kit Goldberg, CTO of VMware, the star of the show, the headliner@supercloud.world. The event we had just a few weeks ago, kit. Great to see you super excited to, to chat with you. Thanks for coming on. Oh >>Yeah. Happy to be here, man. It's been a wild week. Tons of excitement. We are jazzed. We're jacked, like to look at things >>For both, of course, jacked up and jazzed. Ready to go. So you got UN stage loved your keynote, you know, very CTO oriented, hit the, all your marks cloud native, the vSphere eight intro. Yep. More performance, more power. Yeah, more efficiency. And now the cloud native over the top, you shipped a white paper a few weeks ago, which we discussed at our super cloud event. Yep. You know, really laying out the narrative of cloud native. This is the priority for you. Is that true? Is that your only priority? What are the things going on right now for you that are your top priorities, >>Top priorities. So absolutely at a high level, it's flushing out this vision that, that we're talking about in terms of what we call cross cloud services. Other people call multi-cloud, you guys have super cloud, but the point is, I think what we see is that there's these different sort of vertical silos, the different public clouds they're on-prem data center edge. And what we're looking at is trying to create a new type of cloud something that's more horizontal in architecture. And I think this is something that we realize we've been doing at VMware for a while, and we gave it a name, we call it cross cloud. But what's important is that while we do bring a lot of value there, we can't possibly do everything. This has to be an industrywide movement. And so I think what we're really excited about is figuring out, okay, how do we actually build an architecture and a framework such that there's clear sort of lines of responsibility. Here's what one company does. Here's what another one does make sure that there's clean sort of APIs between that basically an overall architecture and structure. So that's probably one of the, the high level things that we're doing as an organization right now. >>What's been the feedback here at VMware Explorer, obviously the new name, Explorer rag laid that out in the keynote. Yep. It's about moving forward. Not replacing the community. Yep. Extending the world core and exploring new frontiers multicloud. Obviously one of them key. Yeah. Very clever actually names dig into it. It's nuanced. What's been the reaction. Yep. You're right. Yep. You're crazy. I love it. I need it. It's it's too early. It's perfect timing. No, it's a bit of, what's the feedback always a little >>Bit of everything, you know, I think one of us firstno people didn't really understand it. I think people were confused about what it was, but now that we're here in person, I think generally speaking, I'm hearing a lot of positive things about it. We've been gone or been apart for three years now, right? Since the last in person one, and this is an interesting opportunity for recreation sort of rebirth, right? We've certainly lost some traditions during the COVID pandemic, but also gives us the opportunity to build new ones. And to your point, world was always associated with virtualization. And of course, we're still doing that. We're still doing cloud infrastructure, but we're doing so much more. And given this focus on multi-cloud that I just mentioned and how it is the go forward focus for VMware, we wanted to evolve the conference to have that focus. And so I've been actually really pleased to see how many folks for it's their first time here. Right? They haven't been Tom worlds before and you know, this broader sort of conference that we're creating to, to apply to the support, more disciplines, different focus areas, you know, application development, developers, platform teams, you got cloud management things with aria, public cloud management, networking security, and user computing, all in addition to the core infrastructure bits. >>So John all week's been paying homage to, to Andy Grove talking about, let chaos rain and then rain in the chaos. Right. And so when you talk to customers, that chaos message cloud chaos, how is it resonating? Are they aware of that chaos? Are they saying, yes, we have cloud chaos or some saying, eh, yeah. It's okay. Everything's good. And they just maybe have some blind spots. What do >>You think? Yeah. I'm actually surprised at how strongly it's resonating. I mean, I think we knew that we were onto something, but people even love the specific term. They're like cloud chaos. I never thought about it that way, but you're like, you're absolutely right. It was a movie. It's a great, yeah. I know. Sounds like a thriller, but, but what we sort of, the picture we paint there about these silos across clouds, the duplication of technologies, duplication of teams and training, all this stuff. People realize that's where they're at. And it's one of those things where there's this headlong rush to cloud for good reasons. People wanted to be in the agility, but now they're dealing with some of that complexity that, that gets built up there and it absolutely is chaos. And while speed is great, you need to somehow balance that speed with control things like security compliance. These are sort of enterprise requirements that are sort of getting left out. And I think that's the realization, that's the sort of chaos that we're hitting on. >>It's almost like when in bus, in business school, you had the economic lines when break even hits, you know, cloud had a lot of great goodness to it. Yep. A lot of great value. It still does on the CapEx side, but as distributed computing architectures become reality. Yep. Private cloud instantiation of hybrid cloud operations. Now you've got edge and opening up all these new, new net new applications. Yep. What are you seeing there? And it's a question we've been asked some of the folks in the partner network, what are some of those new next gen apps that are gonna be enabled by, by this next wave edge specifically? Yeah. More performance, more application development, more software. Yeah. More faster, cheaper going on here. Kind of a Moore's law vibe there. What's next. >>Yeah. So, you know, when we look at edge, so, okay. Take today. Today. Edge is oftentimes highly customized software and hardware. It's not general purpose or to cloud technologies. And while edge is certainly gonna be limited. You can't just infinitely scale. Like you can in the cloud and the network bandwidth might be a little bit limited. You still wanna imagine it or manage it as if it were another cloud location, right. That like, I wanna be able to address it. Just like I addressed a certain availabilities done within AWS. I wanna be able to say the specific edge location at, you know, wherever somewhere here in San Francisco, let's say right now there's a few different things though. The first of which is that you got to manage at scale. Cause you don't have with cloud, you got a small number of very large locations with edge. >>You got a large number of very small locations. And so it's the scale is inverted there. So what this means is that you probably can't exactly specify which edge you want to go to. What instead you wanna say is more relational. Like I've got an IOT device out there. I want my app to be in data to be near it. And the system needs to figure out, okay, where do I put that thing? And how do I get it near it? And there may be some different constraints. You have cost security, privacy, it may be your edge or maybe telco edge location, you know, one, one of these sorts of things. Right? And so I think where we're going there is to enable the movement of applications and data to the right place. And this again goes back to the whole cross cloud architecture, right? >>You don't wanna be limited in terms of where you put an app, you wanna have that flexibility. This is the whole, you know, we use the term cloud smart. Right. And that's what it means. It's like put the, the app where it needs to be sort of the right tool for the right job. And so I think the innovation though, it's gonna be huge. You're gonna see new application architectures that the app can be placed near a user near a device near like a, an iPhone or near an IOT device, like a video camera. And the way that you manage that is gonna be much kind of infrastructure is code base. Yeah. So I think there's huge possibilities there. And it's really amazing to see just real quick on the telco side, what's happening there as well. The move to 5g, the move to open ran telco is now starting to adopt these data center and cloud technologies kinda standard building blocks that we use now out at the edge. So I think, you know, the amount of innovation that we're gonna see, >>It's really the first time on telco, they actually have a viable, scalable opportunity to, to put real gear data center, liked capabilities yep. At a location for specific purpose. Yeah. The edge function. >>Yeah. And well, and what we, without >>Building a, a monster >>Facility. Exactly. Yeah. It's like the base of a cell tower or something telephone closet. But what we've been able to do is improve these general purpose technologies. Like you look at vSphere in our hypervisor today. We are great at real time workloads, right? Like as a matter of fact, you look at performance on vSphere versus bare metal. Oftentimes an app runs faster on vSphere now because of all the efficiency and scale and so forth we can bring. So it means that these telecom applications that are very latency sensitive can now run fun on there. But Hey, guess what? Once you have a general purpose server that can run some of the telecom apps, well, Hey, you got extra space to run other apps. Maybe you could sell that space to customers or partners. And you know, then you have this new architecture >>Is the dev skill, a, a barrier for the, for the telcos, where are we at >>With that? It, it, it is. I think the barriers are really, how do you provide, I dunno if it's a skill set. I mean, there's probably some skill set aspects. I think in my mind, it's more about giving them the APIs to get access to that. Like, as I said, you're not gonna have developers knowing, okay, here are the specific geographic locations of all the cell towers in San Francisco and set what you're gonna say again, I need to be near this thing. And so you used geolocation and figure out, just put it some, put it in the right place. I don't really care. Right. So again, I think it's an evolution of management evolution of the APIs that developers use to access. Like today, I'm gonna say, okay, I know my app needs to be on the east coast so I can use us east one. I know the specific AZs at a, at a cloud level. That makes sense at an edge level. It doesn't, you're not gonna know. Okay. Like the specific cross streets or whatever, you gotta let the system figure that >>Out kid. I know you gotta go on. Times's tight, real quick. You got a session here on web three. Yeah. The Cube's got the, you know, the cube versus coming soon. We might be heavy. The cube versus coming powered by arm token, we had all kinds of stuff going on. Yep. You saw the preview a couple years ago. We did with the Cuban. Anyway, you did a session on web three and DM. VMware's rolling real quick. What was that about? Yeah, what's the purpose? >>What's the direction. That was a fascinating conversation. So I was talking about web three. It was talking about why enterprises haven't really started even to scratch the surface of the potential of web three. So part of it was like, okay, what is web three? It's a buzz words. We talked through that. We talked through the use of blockchain, how that sits with the core of a lot of web three. We talked about the use of cryptocurrency and how that makes sense. We talked about the consumerization, continuing consumerization of it. We've seen it with end user devices. We may well see it with some of the web three changes around ownership, individual ownership of data, of assets, et cetera. That's gonna have a downstream impact on enterprises, how they go to market their commercial models. So it was a fascinating discussion that unfortunately it's hard to summarize, but gotten to a lot of the nuances of this and some of the, are >>You bullish on >>It? Very bullish, a hundred percent. Like I think blockchain is a hugely enabling technology and not from a cryptocurrency standpoint, put that aside. All the enterprise use cases, we have customers like broad bridge financial today leveraging VMware blockchain, doing a hundred billion in transactions a day with the sort of repo market >>You think defi is booming >>Defi. So I, I think we're just starting to get there. But what you find is oftentimes these trends start on the consumer side and then all of a sudden they surprise enterprises. >>They call it a tri tried tread five traditional fi finance >>Versus okay. >>Any >>Other way around? No, no, no. But I'm saying is that it's, these consumer trends will start to impact enterprises. But what I'm saying is that enterprises need to be ready now or start preparing now for those comings. >>And what's the preparation for that? Just education learning. Yeah. >>Education learning, looking at blockchain, use cases, looking at what will this enable consumers to do that they couldn't do before there is gonna be a democratization of access to data. You're still gonna wanna have gatekeepers. You're still gonna wanna have enterprises or services that add value on top of that, but it's gonna be a bit more of an open ecosystem now, and that's gonna change some of the market dynamics in subtle ways. >>Okay. So we got one minute left. I want to ask you, what's your impression of the super cloud event we had also, you were headlining and you guys were a big part of bringing the, a large C of great people together. Are you happy with the outcome? What do you think's next for? >>Absolutely. No. I was super excited to see how much reception and engagement it got from across the industry. Right? So many different entry participants, so many different customers, partners, et cetera, viewing it online have had a lot of conversations here at explore already. As you know, you know, VMware, we put out a white paper, our point of view on what is a multi-cloud service. What is the taxonomy of those services? Again, as I mentioned before, we need to get as an industry to a place where we have alignment about this overall architecture to enable interoperability. And I think that's really the key thing. If we're gonna make this industry architectural shift, which is what I see coming, this is what we got. >>And you're gonna be jumping all in with this and helping out if we need you >>Hundred percent. All right. >>All in. I really love your transparency on the, on your white paper. Check out the white paper online on vmware.com. It's the cross cloud cloud native. I, I call the, the mission statement. It's not a Jerry McGuire memo. It's more me than that. It's the, it's the direction of cloud native. Yep. And multi-cloud thanks for coming on and, and thanks for doing that too. >>No, of course. And thanks for having me. Thanks. Love the discussion. >>Okay. More live coverage here at world Explorer, VMware Explorer, after the short break.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE! Covering women transforming technology. >> Hi, welcome to theCube. Lisa Martin on the ground at the 3rd Annual Women Transforming Technology event at VMware in Palo Alto, and I'm joined by an author and a senior VMware engineer, Pratima Rao Gluckman. Welcome to the Cube, Pratima. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here >> It's great to have you here. So you have been an engineer here for about ten years. You knew from when you were a kid, love this, engineer, you knew you wanted to be that. You fell in love with your first programming class. It was like a Jerry McGuire, you complete me kind of moment I'm imagining. Tell me a little bit about your career in engineering and specifically as a female. >> Okay, so I was raised, born and raised, in India, and I grew up in an environment where I was gender blind. You know, my oldest sister played cricket for the country. >> Lisa: Wow! >> And it was a man's game! You know and a lot of people kind of talked about that, but it wasn't like she couldn't do it, right? So, I always grew up with this notion that I could do anything, and I could be whoever I wanted to be. And then I came to the United States, and that whole narrative stayed with me, the meritocracy narrative. Like you work hard, you know, society, the world will take care of you, and good things will happen, but it wasn't until 2016 was when I had this aha moment, and that's when I suddenly felt, suddenly I was aware of my gender, and I was like, okay I'm a female in tech, and there's lots of challenges for women in tech. And I didn't quite realize that. It was just that aha moment, and VMware has been a great company. I've been with VMware for nine years, I started as an engineer, and I moved into engineering management. We had Diane Greene who founded the company, the culture was always meritocratic, but I think something in 2016 kind of made me just thinking about my career and thinking about the careers of the women around me, I felt like we were stuck. But at the same time be focused on the women that were successful, for instance Yanbing Li, who's our senior VP and general manager of our storage business. And we were talking about her, and I said, this is what I said, I said, "There are some women who are successful despite everything "that we're dealing with, and I just want "to know their stories, and I'm going to write this book." The moment I said that it just felt right. I felt like this was something I wanted to do, and the stories in this book are inspiring stories of these women, just listening to Laila Ali this morning, her inspirational story, and this book has around 19 stories of these executive women, and they're just not role models, I mean every story offers strategies of how to thrive in the tech world. >> So interesting that first of all I love the title, Pratima, of this book, "Nevertheless She Persisted." So simple, so articulate, and so inspiring. So interesting, though, that you were working as an engineer for quite a few years before you realized, kind of looked around, like, whoa, this is a challenge that I'm actually living in. Yanbing is a CUBE alumni, I love her Twitter handle. So you said all right, I want to talk to some women who have been persistent and successful in their tech careers, as kind of the genesis of the book. Talk to us about, maybe, of those 19 interviews that range from, what, c-levels to VPs to directors. What are some of the stories that you found, what kind of blew your mind of, wow, I didn't know that you came from that kind of background? >> So when I started off I was very ambitious. I said I'd go interview CEO women, and I did a lot of research, and I found some very disturbing facts. You know, Fortune Magazine lists Fortune 500 companies, and they rank them based on their prior year's fiscal revenues, and from that data there were 24 women CEOs in 2014. That number dropped to 21 in 2015, and it dropped again in 2016, but it went up slightly in 2017 to 32 women, which is promising, but back in 2018 we're down to 24. So we have very very few women CEOs, and when I started off I said I'll talk to the CEO women, and I couldn't find any CEO women, my network, my friends' network, And so I dropped one level and I said let me go talk to SVPs and when I looked at VMware and VMware's network, Yanbing was one of them, so she's in the book, and then I reached out to contacts outside of my network. So I have some women from LinkedIn, I have Google, I have Facebook, I have some women from startups. So I have around four CEOs in the book, I've got, and what's great about this book is it's got a diverse set of women. Right? They have different titles; I've got directors, senior directors, VPs, Senior VPs, GMs, and CEOs. And some of them have PhDs, some of them have a Master's Degree, and some actually don't have formal training in computer science. I thought this would be interesting because a woman with any background can relate to it. Right? And so that was helpful. And so that's kind of how I went off and I started to write this book. And when I interviewed these women, there was a common theme that just kept emerging, and that was persistence. And they persisted against gender bias, stereotype threat, just the negative messages from media and society. I mean like Laila Ali was talking about just even the messages she got from her dad. >> Right. >> Right? Someone who was so close to her who basically said "Women can't box." And that didn't stop her; I mean she persisted. When I was listening to her, she didn't use the word, but, you know, she said she was believing in herself and all that, but she persisted through all those negative messages, right? And she said no one can tell her what to do. (laughs) >> Yeah her confidence is very loud and clear, and I think that you do find women, and I imagine some of them are some of the interviewees in your book, who have that natural confidence, and as you were saying when Muhammad Ali was trying to talk her out of it, and trying to, as she said, "He tried to get me think it was my idea," but she just knew, well no, this is what I want to do. And she had that confidence. Did you find that a lot of the women leaders in this book had that natural confidence? Like you grew up in an environment where you just believed "I can do this, my sister's playing cricket." Did you find that was a common thread, or did you find some great examples of women who wanted to do something, but just thought "Can I do this?" And "How do I do that?" What was the kind of confidence level that you saw? >> I was surprised because I had a question on imposter syndrome, and I asked these women, Telle Whiteney, who's the CEO, she was the CEO, ex-CEO >> Lisa: Grace Hopper >> Yes. The founder of Grace Hopper. I asked her about imposter syndrome and this is what she told me, she said "I feel like I'm not good enough" and that actually gave me goosebumps. I remember I was sitting in front of greatness and this is what she was telling me. And then I asked her "How do you overcome it?" and she said "I just show up the next day." And that actually helped me with this book because I am not an author. >> That's persistence. >> I mean I am an author now but 2 years ago when I started to write this, writing is not my forte. I'm a technologist, I build teams, I manage teams, I ship products, I ship technical products, but everyday I woke up and I said, "I'm feeling like an imposter." It was just her voice right? Yanbing also feels the same way, I mean she does feel times where she feels like, "I'm lacking confidence here." Majority of the people actually, pretty much all the women, this one woman, Patty Hatter, didn't feel like she had imposter syndrome but the rest of them face it everyday. Talia Malachi who's a principal engineer at VMWare, it's very hard to be a PE, she said that she fights it every day, and that was surprising to me, right? Because I was sitting in front of all these women, they were confident, they've achieved so much, but they struggle with that every day. But all they do is they persist, they show up the next day. They take those little steps and they have these goals and they're very intentional and purposeful, I mean just like what Layla said, right? She said, "Everything that I've done in the last 20 years "has been intentional and purposeful." And that's what these women did. And I learned so much from them because 20 years ago I was a drifter (laughs) you know I just kind drifted and I didn't realize that I could set a goal and I could reach it and I could do all these amazing things, and I didn't think any of this was possible for me. But I'm hoping that some girl somewhere can read this book and say "You know what this is possible", right? This is possible and you know role models, I think we need lots of these role models. >> We do I think, you know imposter syndrome I've suffered for it for so long before I even knew what it was and I'll be honest with you even finding out that it was a legitimate issue was (exhales) okay I'm not the only one. So I think it's important that you, that these women and youth are your voice, in your book, identified it. This is something I face everyday even though you may look at me on the outside and think, "She's so successful, she's got everything." And we're human. And Laila Ali talked about of having to revisit that inner lawyer, that sometimes she goes silent, sometimes the pilot light goes out and needs to be reignited or turned back up. I think that is just giving people permission, especially women, and I've felt that in the keynote, giving us permission to go, "Ah, you're not going to feel that everyday, "you're not going to feel it everyday." Get up the next day to your point, keep persisting and pursuing your purpose is in and of itself so incredibly empowering. >> Right but also imposter syndrome is good for you and I talk about that a little bit in the book. And you know why it's good for you? It's you getting out of your comfort zone, you're trying something different, and it's natural to feel that way, but once you get over it, you've mastered that, and Laila talked about it too today she said, "You get uncomfortable to the point "where you get comfortable." >> Lisa: Yes. >> So every time that you find that you have this imposter syndrome, just remember that greatness is right around the corner. >> Yep. I always say "Get uncomfortably uncomfortable". >> Pratima: Yes. >> And I loved how she said that today. So one of the big news of the day is VMWare with Stanford announcing that they are investing $15,000,000 in a new Women's Leadership Innovation Lab at Stanford. Phenomenal. >> Pratima: Yes. >> And they're really going to start studying diversity and there's so many different gaps that we face, wage gap, age gap, gender gap, you know mothers vs motherless gap, and one of the things that was really interesting that, I've heard this before, that the press release actually cited a McKinsey report that says, "Companies with diversity "on their executive staff are 21% more profitable." >> Yes. >> And that just seems like a, no duh, Kind of thing to me for organizations like VMWare and your other partners in this consortium of Wt Squared to get on board to say, "Well of course." Thought diversity is so important and it actually is demonstrated to impact a companies' profitability. >> Right, yeah. And that's true, I just hope that more people listen to it and internalize it, and organizations internalize that, and what VMWare's doing is fantastic. I mean I'm so proud to be part of this company that's doing this. And you Shelly talked about change right? She said, "I think, right now the way I feel "about this whole thing, is we need to stop talking about "diversity and inclusion, we just need to say "enough is enough, this is important, let's just do it." >> Lisa: We should make this a part of our DNA. >> Exactly. Just make it, why do we have to fight for all this, right? It's just pointless and you know, men have wives and daughters and mothers and you know, It impacts societies as a whole and organizations, and we have so much research on this and what I like about what the Stanford Research Lab is doing is, they're actually working with woman all the way from middle-school to high-school to the executive suite, and that's amazing because research has now shown, there was a report in March 2014 by a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, for Judith Warner, and so she documented, just with the rate of change, like I talked with all the percentages and the number of women CEOs, just with that rate of change, the equality of men and women at the top will not occur until 2085. >> Lisa: Oh my goodness. >> That's 63 years from now. That means all our daughters would be retired by then. My daughters was born on 2013 and so she won't live in a world of female leaders that's representative of the population. And so that realization actually really, really, really broke my heart and that made me want to write this book, to create these role models. And what Stanford is doing, is they're going to work on this and I'm hoping that they can make that transition sooner. Like we don't have to wait 'till 2085. I want this for my daughter. >> It has to be accelerated, yes. >> It has to be accelerated and I think all of us need to do that, our daughters should be in the 20s, 30s when this happens, not when they're in their 70s. >> Lisa: And retired. >> And retired, I mean we don't want that. And we don't know how that number's going to get pushed further, right? Like if we don't do anything now... It. (exhales) >> Lisa: Right. 2085 becomes, what? >> I know! It's insane. >> In the spirit of being persistent, with the theme of this 3rd annual Wt Squared being Inclusion in Action, you're a manager and in a people or hiring role, tell me about the culture on your team and how your awareness and your passion for creating change here, lasting change. How are you actually creating that inclusion through action in your role at VMWare? >> So what I do is when I have to hire engineers on my team, I talk to my recruiter, have a conversation, I'm like, "I need more diversity." It's just not women, I want diversity with the men too. I want different races, different cultures because I believe that if I have a diverse team I'm going to be successful. So it's almost like I'm being selfish but that is very important. So I have that conversation with my recruiters, so I kind have an expectation set. And then we go through their hiring process and I'm very aware of just the hiring panel, like who I put on the panel, I make sure to have at least a women on the panel and have some diversity. My team right now is not really that diverse and I'm working hard to make that because it is hard, you know the pipeline has to get built at a certain point, and then start getting those resumes, but I try to have at least one female on the panel, and during the selection process the first thing I'll tell them is, let's get the elephant out of the room, age, gender, whatever, like let's take that out, let's just talk about skills and how well this person has done in an interview. And that's how I conducted and you know I've had fairly good success of hiring women on the team. But I've also seen that it's hard to retain women because they tend to drop-out faster than the men and so it's constant, it's just constant work to make that happen. >> Yeah. I wish we had more time to talk about retention because it is a huge issue. So the book is Nevertheless, She Persisted. Where can people get a copy of the book? >> So you can get it on Amazon, that's, I think, the best place to get it. You can also get it from my publisher's site which is FriesenPress. >> Excellent well Pratima thank you so much for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> And sharing your passion, how your persisting, and how you're also helping more of us learn how to find that voice and pursue our passions, thank you. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching. We are TheCUBE on the ground at VMWare for the Third Annual Women Transforming Technology Event. I'm Lisa Martin thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(rhythmic music) >> From Phoenix, Arizona, The Cube. At Catalyst Conference, here's your host, Jeff Frick. (rhythmic music) >> Hey, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona at the Girls Who Code Catalyst Conference It's a great show, about 400 people; they're fourth year. It's going back to the Bay Area next year, so I wanted to come down, talk to some of the key notes, some of the speakers. And really give you a taste if you weren't able to make the trip to Phoenix this year of what's going on. So we're really excited to be joined by our next guest, Fran Maier, she co-founded Match, she co-founded TRUSTe. Serial entrepreneur, the start-up veteran. Fran, welcome. >> Thank you so much Jeff, It's great to be here. >> Absolutely. So you were giving a presentation on really what it is to be a woman entrepreneur. >> Yes, so I've been a internet entrepreneur for now more than twenty years going back to when we started Match.com. And I joined that in late 1994. We really launched around 1995, about 21 years ago, this month, April of 1995. >> Time flies >> And many of the things that were still very much, I think, in the early years of the impact of the internet and mobile and cloud and connectivity on our lives, but Match.com has proven to be what they call a unicorn, a very successful new business model, but more than that many, many people have found their life partner or at least a few good dates on Match.com. So I am always very happy about that. >> And you're way ahead of the curve. Now, I think, I don't know, I've been married for over twenty years, but I think a lot of people that's kind of the first way >> Yeah. to meet people. >> Not the second way. Where when you guys first made Match.com, that was a pretty novel idea. >> Well, well now they call dating where like we used to do it, where you met people at parties and bars, now that's called dating in the wild. >> In the wild (laughing) >> So the more natural thing is using Match.com. But from an entrepreneurial support, I was one of the only women who was involved in starting company in the mid-1990's, still women are less than 10% of TechFounders or venture-backed founders. Women raise a lot less money. And so one of my passions and why I am here at Girls in Tech is to try and impart some of the wisdom gleamed over twenty plus years. >> So what are some of the ways that you see that barrier starting to break down? Is it just, you just got to keep banging on it and slowly and slowly it will move and >> (murmers) >> So I think there's been some difference, I think it's a lot easier to be an entrepreneur of any kind now >> Well that's true. >> than it was twenty years ago. I mean, now having meals delivered to you and the sort of support like Girls in Tech, there was very little of that guidance or certainly there were very few role models, >> Right. >> Twenty years ago. So that certainly has changed. I think another big change, and this is probably over the last two or three years, is that now women feel they can speak out loud about some of the issues. And that there is some, men are willing to listen, >> Right >> Right >> at least some are. >> We still see things like TechCrunch a couple of years ago had a team present a new mobile app called Titstare. We still hear about things like that. We still, there was a survey called The Elephant in Silicon Valley that itemized stories and stats about women and sexual abuse, other kinds of harassment, exclusion, not being invited to sit at the table. So a lot of that stuff is still going on. But I feel like we can call it out a little bit easier. >> Right, right. And it's ... >> Without retribution potentially. >> Is there, is there, kind of a tipping point event, action, that you see potentially as to kind of accelerating ... accelerating it? >> Well I think the media, since lead-in has really kind of picked up on this and discovering it. And the Ellen Pao trial, last year; I spoke a little bit about that, where she brought suit to Kleiner Perkins. She lost the suit, but it started the dialogue. >> Right. >> So I think a lot of this is, is happening and my approach is to try and ... I see, I advise so many start ups. And I see business plans. And almost invariably the business plans from women aren't big enough. They don't say "Hey we're going to be a hundred million dollar company in five years. And we need to raise five million dollars to get there." >> Right. >> Women play it more safe, and, I don't think that, I'm trying to encourage them to take more risk, to figure out how to do it, to play to win. >> Right. Play big to win, right? Playing big. >> Play big to win, yes, swing big. >> It's interesting, on the Lean In, you know Sheryl Sandberg's, I don't know if ground breaking is the right word, but certainly ground breaking. >> Surely, yeah. >> But the Golden State Warriors right now, probably the most popular professional sports team in the country, at the zenith of their success, they have a Lean In commercial. I don't know if you've seen it in the Bay Area, >> I havent seen it! >> where all of the players talk about leaning in. And it just so happens that Steph Curry, their number one superstar, >> Sure. is very close to his wife. She has a cooking show. They're very family orientated. Green ... >> But I thought you were going to ... >> Draymond Green has his mom, who he just constantly just gushes about his mom. And so they, as a male sports team, have a whole commercial they run quite frequently on specifically Lean In. >> Well I, I appreciate that. I also, though, read the article that, that team is owned by bunch of venture capitalists. They all get together and play basketball and it reminded me of a little bit of another place where women have been excluded. And so I was talking to a venture capital friend of mine saying "Buy into the Warriors, or let's buy into a women's soccer team." And you know sports being what they are, it's almost a different thing, but the news about the women's soccer players being paid much less than the men, even though they generate more income. It's just another example, profession by profession where women are paid less or have less opportunity to advance. >> But to your point, I think people understand it, it's not right, but I think everyone pretty much knows that women aren't paid the same as men. But that was interesting about the soccer story, to your point is it was brought up. >> Yeah we could talk about it. >> It wasn't a retribution, right? It's like hey, you know, we're not getting paid and they listed the numbers in Sports Illustrated. They were dramatically different. And, in fact, you know, one of the knocks in the WNBA is that you can't make a living as a player in the WNBA. You just can't. They pay them like, I don't know >> So they should have been. Yeah. >> $60,000. Whatever it is. You know they have to go play in other places, foreign countries to make enough money to live. So I do think its interesting, your point that, you know, the exposure of the problem, the kind of acceptance that we need to do something about it, does seem to be in a much better place than it used to be. >> The other thing that I think that these things illustrate is one of the messages I try and get across, is women tend to settle for too little. You know, they don't necessarily negotiate for themselves. Out of college they don't do as well. They, I've talked to many women who they felt that when they were raising capital, or negotiating deals, that the men on the other side of the table, mostly, not always of course, it sort of said, "Hey this is great, you should be happy to get this. How many women get this?" And that's not really the issue. The issue should be, you should be getting what you deserve. I learned that the hard way, we talked about it a little bit, awhile ago, where Match.com was sold in 1998 for less than $10,000,000. And I was the general manager, I had grown it, we were number one, we were cash flow positive, although probably shouldn't have been. And I walked away with a hundred thousand dollars. And, at the time, sure that's a lot of money, but nobody seemed to encourage me that I probably could have raised the money and led the investment and had an equity round. A year later Match.com was sold from Send It to ISC for $70,000,000. And of course I didn't get anything. >> Yeah. >> So that's my big lesson. The good news is, ten years later, I took TRUSTe, which was a nonprofit, switched it to a for-profit, I raised the capital, and got my ownership in equity position. But tough lesson. >> Yeah, expensive one. >> Yeah. >> But those are the ones you learn though. (laughter) >> I could go through a few of those too. So Fran, we're running low on time. I wanted to give you the last word and get your perspective on, kind of, mentorship and sponsorship. We hear those words tossed around a lot. And that there's a significant difference between just being a mentor and actually being a sponsor, taking an active role in someone else's career. Pushing them to maybe uncomfortable places. Giving them, you know, kind of, the oomph, if you will, that, "Yes you can do this, you do belong." What are you seeing kind of the development of that as people try to help more women ascend, kind of up the line? >> Well, you know, I tend to think of mentorship as something that happens within a company and sponsorship can happen within a company, but advising, sponsoring, promoting, championing, are things that we certainly need to do within the entrepreneurial community of women. So, mentoring is, I see that as a little bit more passive, and I don't know why. But, it's important to have people to look up to and for you, role models are really important. But I think the active thing of championing or sponsoring or even being a more active coach or advisor, is a little bit more hands-on and willing to challenge, you know, you're not just a role model, you're really saying, "Tell me what you're dealing with, and let me see how I can help." I just got off a phone call from one of my advisees, she just raised the money, great news, you know, now she's freaking out about how to spend it. (laughing) >> Maybe with your next problem. >> Yeah. (laughter) >> Been there, done that. >> Right, right. >> You know. >> Well, it's good, good for helpin' them out, and Fran, thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Sure. Lot of fun. >> Absolutely. Track Fran down if you're a budding entrepreneur. She's been there, she's got the scars and the wounds from the early days, and learned from it on the success with TRUSTe. >> Thank you. >> And, some great videos on the web, by the way. I was watching them, the whole story on the Match thing was pretty funny. You'll enjoy it, so take the time ... >> There's one of them where I start to cry, I hate that, but what can you do? >> I didn't get to the crying part, but that's okay. >> Yeah, yeah, that's all right. >> That's what happens in Jerry McGuire all the time. All right, well thanks a lot Fran. >> Thanks so much. >> I'm Jeff Frick, you are watching The Cube. We are in Phoenix, Arizona, at the Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. (rhythmic music)