>> 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)

hi everybody welcome back to the Q we're here live at the Stanford accel partners summit I should say event here at Stanford University I am joined by Satya Nadella who is the president of server and tools baby Scholars Program with the Q I thanks so much for coming on appreciate it I think first time here on the cube we've had of course lots of folks on Microsoft on in the past and always a great to get your your take so tell us a little bit about your your your thoughts on this event in general you know last year was about big data this year it's a little bit more focused a little bit broader focus on the modern enterprise as they say what's your take on kind of this events it's a great event down this is my first time here as well and um having a chance to even see a couple of panels and just participate I think this notion of a modern enterprise is for real I think that it is a reimagining of what does infrastructure mean what do applications mean inside of the enterprise and we're going through this tectonic shift which we participate in and so to have a forum like this to discuss that was just great so let's dig into that a little bit what you know what makes the what makes the modern enterprise it's it's certainly a cloud and virtualization you've got the big data piece kind of the DevOps model of application development how do you kind of define what all bring to bringing together all these different elements what makes a modern enterprise yeah one of the things that I like to sort of make sure we focus on I work on the infrastructure business at Microsoft so you're in the infrastructure business the key thing is to be in touch with the applique and it turns out in our own case today we are building a pretty diverse set of applications both consumer and enterprise so they're building Bane which is an applied machine learning application we learn building office 365 which is an enterprise focused collaboration communication application we're building dynamics and another Enterprise CRM ERP in the cloud application and what have you so that diversity of applications makes you rethink what is the infrastructure needed from storage compute as well as the network and so we are building a new operating system for the modern enterprise to be able to deploy these modern applications so that's kind of how I conceptualize I would say there are four major elements to it the first one is it's inside of the data center you have much more of a software driven data set where you're orchestrating your compute storage and network in support of your applications either at the data center or multi data center scale because there's not a single enterprise that's not using some public cloud provider or another service provider in addition to what they already are virtualizing inside their own private cloud so that is all a software control plane and so we are really thinking about what is the modern operating system that enables you to manage the data center a second dimension would be the what is driven through consumerization of IT I like to describe it as transforming IT to be much more people central so you want end-users to adopt the devices they want and still have access to all their applications and data and yet IT needs to be able to set compliance and policy so how do you really arean that is in another dimension big data is something you referenced there's not going to be a single application that's not a big data application and so those are the major Keane's and the last thing I would say is this DevOps so not only have you built the application but it's even the lifecycle around the application is being reimagined how developers and operations professionals come together in support of an ongoing improvement and continuous integration these four mega trends I think constitute a modern enterprise infrastructure matrix so let's dig into a little bit about what you mentioned about the use of kind of public cloud infrastructure as well as your internal data center so you've got these hybrid environments that are starting to emerge again pretty much software lead a software led infrastructure is what we're calling it a wiki bond how do you go about actually making it possible for for CIOs and their teams and to actually manage those environments in an efficient way as possible you know making decisions about which applications are deployed in the public cloud which are deployed in your data center how they interact potentially applications that are drawing on data from both spots it's obviously can get very complex so you know Microsoft is one of those public cloud providers with Windows Azure so how do you approach that problem so if you sort of take what you just described which is if you you sort of start with the design point that there will be a public cloud there will be a private cloud and a service provider cloud then how you think about the software control is going to be defined by that design so it's not going to be narrowly defined as bring everything into my data center and I'll help you manage it but it is actually distributed so if I think of this is the true fruition of distributed computing and we believe in that so then what are the things that matter first is identity so anything whenever things get distributed the most important thing that brings back things together is actually identity of users and identity for resources so Active Directory was a great resource for many enterprises in terms of how they came the complexity of the previous generation of client server now we've replumbed and we my Active Directory with Azure Active Directory so this consistency in directories helps IT administrators manage this complexity the next one is virtualization so not only will you be able to virtualize on your private cloud you should be able to move the same work cloud workload which is virtualized to any of these other clouds so you need a degree of guarantee that the performance characteristics of a virtualized workload get maintained across all so that's another thing that with our hyper-v investments and our agile investments we are making sure that happens the other one would be management so with if you can be sitting on the system center management console and the orchestrator and looking at a workload which could be in fact in one one of these clouds or in fact the tears of a single application could be split which is the front end is on Azure the back end is back in on-premise and so that's also very very important to have a management tier which is the control plane that allows you to manage this complexity and lastly it's the consistency of the application platform itself so if you're building a development you never want to be in the state where you build a great app but you can never check out so you if you build it in the public cloud in the case of azure you should be able to take it and run it on a private cloud or on a service provider cloud so these four things are on identity management virtualization and application platform I think is the core investment you've got to make to help enterprises truly adopt the cloud while you know it's complex but you gotta tame the complexity and then of course what you're talking about it really is a lot of data being generated companies of course want to want to start taking advantage of that data they want to analyze it they want to actually take those insights and turn them into either applications or perhaps convey them to executives and others in terms of visualization and of course one of those underlying platforms is to do talk about Microsoft's approach to Hadoop I know you're working with Hortonworks you actually kind of discontinued working on your own big data technology when you as I think that you know Hadoop was given is going to become the de facto standard so talk about how you're making it possible to bring the dupe into this environment where more and more companies are looking to bring that in maybe as a big data hub kind of store a lot of data and then feeds out to applications different workloads what is your approach actually making that I guess Enterprise ready yeah and making it easy to get and get started and then turn you know maybe science projects into really production whether the point is right I mean this notion of being able to take data and convert it into insights in support of enterprise goals is sort of the holy grail of this moment and so one of the things that we are actively doing is to bring a lot of the traditional value we've always had if you think about the momentum we have with our self-service bi capabilities on the edge of data which is Excel sharepoint sequel analysis services is where all data goes to in order to be able to drive insights within and you know with it with end users because at the end of the day humans will be involved to be able to drive inside out of all of this data so now the question is how do we take that edge loop and connected with the information production which is upstream and that is where we are completing the story with having HD inside having even a relational interface on top of HD insight for in-memory ad hoc query analysis like a data warehouse on top of it which I think the Hadoop community itself is adopting which is a sequel interface on Hadoop is probably one of the more talked about things nowadays and so this notion of having a complete data platform everything from MapReduce to stream processing to sequel like query interactively and then empowering end-users and workflows with data around end users which share or in Excel where we've invested in things like a power pivot and Power View which are actually powerful in-memory databases in fact I would say the most powerful in-memory database now is Power View inside of Excel from where you can issue a sequel I mean basically a hive query to HD inside and populate millions of in a tabular column form that you're very familiar with we think that that democratization of big data is going to be very very important to acceptance of it as you said it from science projects or just being in the data science department to bring ubiquitous so we've only got time for one more question so just love to get your kind of future outlook what are some of the key priorities for you and your group over the next say six to twelve months I mean the key thing for us is really bootstrapping our cloud business we've got some fantastic traction with office 365 it's really doing very well in the q3 earnings we talked about how we have a moving on a run rate basis of billion dollars a revenue going to office 365 and many customers who are coming to office 365 never bought an exchange server from so we're even it's not even 0 some really in the short run at least and so we're very glad with that and there is a j''r is just a natural complement to any customer who's already got office 365 SharePoint extensions the end user bi Active Directory administration all of these are sort of very natural extensions but Azure itself now has got very very significant momentum yesterday we talked about how Azure and Azure services with all of our service provider partners has also got a billion dollars of revenue so that means when it comes to the core of the enterprise and their move to the cloud which is going to be complementing a lot of what they're already doing in on-premise is something that we're a pretty major player on and if anything we want to be solving the here and now practical problems with a forward-looking vision around identity around consistency of the management plane around virtualization compatibility around the application platforms and I think that that's what we are up to in the immediate future alright yeah I think you really hit on something there with these gonna be hybrid deployments they're going to you know just much like in big data you know doop isn't going to come in and replace your database your relational database and neither is the cloud going to replace your internal data center they've got to work together it sounds like you guys are working hard to kind of make that as seamless of the proposal as possible for your clients so Satya Nadella for Microsoft we appreciate you coming on the queue thanks very much well hope you come back and join us about three thank you so much we'll be right back from the Excel Stanford symposium with our next guests ready for this