>>Yeah, yeah. >>Welcome back. I'm so excited to introduce our next session empowerment through inclusion, reimagining society and technology. This is a topic that's personally very near and dear to my heart. Did you know that there's only 2% of Latinas in technology as a Latina? I know that there's so much more we could do collectively to improve these gaps and diversity. I thought spot diversity is considered a critical element across all levels of the organization. The data shows countless times. A diverse and inclusive workforce ultimately drives innovation better performance and keeps your employees happier. That's why we're passionate about contributing to this conversation and also partnering with organizations that share our mission of improving diversity across our communities. Last beyond, we hosted the session during a breakfast and we packed the whole room. This year, we're bringing the conversation to the forefront to emphasize the importance of diversity and data and share the positive ramifications that it has for your organization. Joining us for this session are thought spots Chief Data Strategy Officer Cindy Housing and Ruhollah Benjamin, associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Thank you, Paola. So many >>of you have journeyed with me for years now on our efforts to improve diversity and inclusion in the data and analytic space. And >>I would say >>over time we cautiously started commiserating, eventually sharing best practices to make ourselves and our companies better. And I do consider it a milestone. Last year, as Paola mentioned that half the room was filled with our male allies. But I remember one of our Panelists, Natalie Longhurst from Vodafone, suggesting that we move it from a side hallway conversation, early morning breakfast to the main stage. And I >>think it was >>Bill Zang from a I G in Japan. Who said Yes, please. Everyone else agreed, but more than a main stage topic, I want to ask you to think about inclusion beyond your role beyond your company toe. How Data and analytics can be used to impact inclusion and equity for the society as a whole. Are we using data to reveal patterns or to perpetuate problems leading Tobias at scale? You are the experts, the change agents, the leaders that can prevent this. I am thrilled to introduce you to the leading authority on this topic, Rou Ha Benjamin, associate professor of African studies at Princeton University and author of Multiple Books. The Latest Race After Technology. Rou ha Welcome. >>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be in conversation with you today, and I thought I would just kick things off with some opening reflections on this really important session theme. And then we could jump into discussion. So I'd like us to as a starting point, um, wrestle with these buzzwords, empowerment and inclusion so that we can have them be more than kind of big platitudes and really have them reflected in our workplace cultures and the things that we design in the technologies that we put out into the world. And so to do that, I think we have to move beyond techno determinism, and I'll explain what that means in just a minute. Techno determinism comes in two forms. The first, on your left is the idea that technology automation, um, all of these emerging trends are going to harm us, are going to necessarily harm humanity. They're going to take all the jobs they're going to remove human agency. This is what we might call the techno dystopian version of the story and this is what Hollywood loves to sell us in the form of movies like The Matrix or Terminator. The other version on your right is the techno utopian story that technologies automation. The robots as a shorthand, are going to save humanity. They're gonna make everything more efficient, more equitable. And in this case, on the surface, he seemed like opposing narratives right there, telling us different stories. At least they have different endpoints. But when you pull back the screen and look a little bit more closely, you see that they share an underlying logic that technology is in the driver's seat and that human beings that social society can just respond to what's happening. But we don't really have a say in what technologies air designed and so to move beyond techno determinism the notion that technology is in the driver's seat. We have to put the human agents and agencies back into the story, the protagonists, and think carefully about what the human desires worldviews, values, assumptions are that animate the production of technology. And so we have to put the humans behind the screen back into view. And so that's a very first step and when we do that, we see, as was already mentioned, that it's a very homogeneous group right now in terms of who gets the power and the resource is to produce the digital and physical infrastructure that everyone else has to live with. And so, as a first step, we need to think about how to create more participation of those who are working behind the scenes to design technology now to dig a little more a deeper into this, I want to offer a kind of low tech example before we get to the more hi tech ones. So what you see in front of you here is a simple park bench public bench. It's located in Berkeley, California, which is where I went to graduate school and on this particular visit I was living in Boston, and so I was back in California. It was February. It was freezing where I was coming from, and so I wanted to take a few minutes in between meetings to just lay out in the sun and soak in some vitamin D, and I quickly realized, actually, I couldn't lay down on this bench because of the way it had been designed with these arm rests at intermittent intervals. And so here I thought. Okay, the the armrest have, ah functional reason why they're there. I mean, you could literally rest your elbows there or, um, you know, it can create a little bit of privacy of someone sitting there that you don't know. When I was nine months pregnant, it could help me get up and down or for the elderly, the same thing. So it has a lot of functional reasons, but I also thought about the fact that it prevents people who are homeless from sleeping on the bench. And this is the Bay area that we were talking about where, in fact, the tech boom has gone hand in hand with a housing crisis. Those things have grown in tandem. So innovation has grown within equity because we haven't thought carefully about how to address the social context in which technology grows and blossoms. And so I thought, Okay, this crisis is growing in this area, and so perhaps this is a deliberate attempt to make sure that people don't sleep on the benches by the way that they're designed and where the where they're implemented and So this is what we might call structural inequity. By the way something is designed. It has certain effects that exclude or harm different people. And so it may not necessarily be the intense, but that's the effect. And I did a little digging, and I found, in fact, it's a global phenomenon, this thing that architects called hostile architecture. Er, I found single occupancy benches in Helsinki, so only one booty at a time no laying down there. I found caged benches in France. And in this particular town. What's interesting here is that the mayor put these benches out in this little shopping plaza, and within 24 hours the people in the town rallied together and had them removed. So we see here that just because we have, uh, discriminatory design in our public space doesn't mean we have to live with it. We can actually work together to ensure that our public space reflects our better values. But I think my favorite example of all is the meter bench. In this case, this bench is designed with spikes in them, and to get the spikes to retreat into the bench, you have to feed the meter you have to put some coins in, and I think it buys you about 15 or 20 minutes. Then the spikes come back up. And so you'll be happy to know that in this case, this was designed by a German artists to get people to think critically about issues of design, not just the design of physical space but the design of all kinds of things, public policies. And so we can think about how our public life in general is metered, that it serves those that can pay the price and others are excluded or harm, whether we're talking about education or health care. And the meter bench also presents something interesting. For those of us who care about technology, it creates a technical fix for a social problem. In fact, it started out his art. But some municipalities in different parts of the world have actually adopted this in their public spaces in their parks in order to deter so called lawyers from using that space. And so, by a technical fix, we mean something that creates a short term effect, right. It gets people who may want to sleep on it out of sight. They're unable to use it, but it doesn't address the underlying problems that create that need to sleep outside in the first place. And so, in addition to techno determinism, we have to think critically about technical fixes that don't address the underlying issues that technology is meant to solve. And so this is part of a broader issue of discriminatory design, and we can apply the bench metaphor to all kinds of things that we work with or that we create. And the question we really have to continuously ask ourselves is, What values are we building in to the physical and digital infrastructures around us? What are the spikes that we may unwittingly put into place? Or perhaps we didn't create the spikes. Perhaps we started a new job or a new position, and someone hands us something. This is the way things have always been done. So we inherit the spike bench. What is our responsibility when we noticed that it's creating these kinds of harms or exclusions or technical fixes that are bypassing the underlying problem? What is our responsibility? All of this came to a head in the context of financial technologies. I don't know how many of you remember these high profile cases of tech insiders and CEOs who applied for Apple, the Apple card and, in one case, a husband and wife applied and the husband, the husband received a much higher limit almost 20 times the limit as his wife, even though they shared bank accounts, they lived in Common Law State. And so the question. There was not only the fact that the husband was receiving a much better interest rate and the limit, but also that there was no mechanism for the individuals involved to dispute what was happening. They didn't even know what the factors were that they were being judged that was creating this form of discrimination. So in terms of financial technologies, it's not simply the outcome that's the issue. Or that could be discriminatory, but the process that black boxes, all of the decision making that makes it so that consumers and the general public have no way to question it. No way to understand how they're being judged adversely, and so it's the process not only the product that we have to care a lot about. And so the case of the apple cart is part of a much broader phenomenon of, um, racist and sexist robots. This is how the headlines framed it a few years ago, and I was so interested in this framing because there was a first wave of stories that seemed to be shocked at the prospect that technology is not neutral. Then there was a second wave of stories that seemed less surprised. Well, of course, technology inherits its creator's biases. And now I think we've entered a phase of attempts to override and address the default settings of so called racist and sexist robots, for better or worse. And here robots is just a kind of shorthand, that the way people are talking about automation and emerging technologies more broadly. And so as I was encountering these headlines, I was thinking about how these air, not problems simply brought on by machine learning or AI. They're not all brand new, and so I wanted to contribute to the conversation, a kind of larger context and a longer history for us to think carefully about the social dimensions of technology. And so I developed a concept called the New Jim Code, which plays on the phrase Jim Crow, which is the way that the regime of white supremacy and inequality in this country was defined in a previous era, and I wanted us to think about how that legacy continues to haunt the present, how we might be coding bias into emerging technologies and the danger being that we imagine those technologies to be objective. And so this gives us a language to be able to name this phenomenon so that we can address it and change it under this larger umbrella of the new Jim Code are four distinct ways that this phenomenon takes shape from the more obvious engineered inequity. Those were the kinds of inequalities tech mediated inequalities that we can generally see coming. They're kind of obvious. But then we go down the line and we see it becomes harder to detect. It's happening in our own backyards. It's happening around us, and we don't really have a view into the black box, and so it becomes more insidious. And so in the remaining couple minutes, I'm just just going to give you a taste of the last three of these, and then a move towards conclusion that we can start chatting. So when it comes to default discrimination. This is the way that social inequalities become embedded in emerging technologies because designers of these technologies aren't thinking carefully about history and sociology. Ah, great example of this came Thio headlines last fall when it was found that widely used healthcare algorithm affecting millions of patients, um, was discriminating against black patients. And so what's especially important to note here is that this algorithm healthcare algorithm does not explicitly take note of race. That is to say, it is race neutral by using cost to predict healthcare needs. This digital triaging system unwittingly reproduces health disparities because, on average, black people have incurred fewer costs for a variety of reasons, including structural inequality. So in my review of this study by Obermeyer and colleagues, I want to draw attention to how indifference to social reality can be even more harmful than malicious intent. It doesn't have to be the intent of the designers to create this effect, and so we have to look carefully at how indifference is operating and how race neutrality can be a deadly force. When we move on to the next iteration of the new Jim code coded exposure, there's attention because on the one hand, you see this image where the darker skin individual is not being detected by the facial recognition system, right on the camera or on the computer. And so coated exposure names this tension between wanting to be seen and included and recognized, whether it's in facial recognition or in recommendation systems or in tailored advertising. But the opposite of that, the tension is with when you're over included. When you're surveiled when you're to centered. And so we should note that it's not simply in being left out, that's the problem. But it's in being included in harmful ways. And so I want us to think carefully about the rhetoric of inclusion and understand that inclusion is not simply an end point. It's a process, and it is possible to include people in harmful processes. And so we want to ensure that the process is not harmful for it to really be effective. The last iteration of the new Jim Code. That means the the most insidious, let's say, is technologies that are touted as helping US address bias, so they're not simply including people, but they're actively working to address bias. And so in this case, There are a lot of different companies that are using AI to hire, create hiring software and hiring algorithms, including this one higher view. And the idea is that there there's a lot that AI can keep track of that human beings might miss. And so so the software can make data driven talent decisions. After all, the problem of employment discrimination is widespread and well documented. So the logic goes, Wouldn't this be even more reason to outsource decisions to AI? Well, let's think about this carefully. And this is the look of the idea of techno benevolence trying to do good without fully reckoning with what? How technology can reproduce inequalities. So some colleagues of mine at Princeton, um, tested a natural learning processing algorithm and was looking to see whether it exhibited the same, um, tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. E. And what they found was that in fact, the algorithm associating black names with negative words and white names with pleasant sounding words. And so this particular audit builds on a classic study done around 2003, before all of the emerging technologies were on the scene where two University of Chicago economists sent out thousands of resumes to employers in Boston and Chicago, and all they did was change the names on those resumes. All of the other work history education were the same, and then they waited to see who would get called back. And the applicants, the fictional applicants with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks than the black applicants. So if you're presented with that study, you might be tempted to say, Well, let's let technology handle it since humans are so biased. But my colleagues here in computer science found that this natural language processing algorithm actually reproduced those same associations with black and white names. So, too, with gender coded words and names Amazon learned a couple years ago when its own hiring algorithm was found discriminating against women. Nevertheless, it should be clear by now why technical fixes that claim to bypass human biases are so desirable. If Onley there was a way to slay centuries of racist and sexist demons with a social justice box beyond desirable, more like magical, magical for employers, perhaps looking to streamline the grueling work of recruitment but a curse from any jobseekers, as this headline puts it, your next interview could be with a racist spot, bringing us back to that problem space we started with just a few minutes ago. So it's worth noting that job seekers are already developing ways to subvert the system by trading answers to employers test and creating fake applications as informal audits of their own. In terms of a more collective response, there's a federation of European Trade unions call you and I Global that's developed a charter of digital rights for work, others that touches on automated and a I based decisions to be included in bargaining agreements. And so this is one of many efforts to change their ecosystem to change the context in which technology is being deployed to ensure more protections and more rights for everyday people in the US There's the algorithmic accountability bill that's been presented, and it's one effort to create some more protections around this ubiquity of automated decisions, and I think we should all be calling from more public accountability when it comes to the widespread use of automated decisions. Another development that keeps me somewhat hopeful is that tech workers themselves are increasingly speaking out against the most egregious forms of corporate collusion with state sanctioned racism. And to get a taste of that, I encourage you to check out the hashtag Tech won't build it. Among other statements that they have made and walking out and petitioning their companies. Who one group said, as the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit in terms of education, which is my own ground zero. Um, it's a place where we can we can grow a more historically and socially literate approach to tech design. And this is just one, um, resource that you all can download, Um, by developed by some wonderful colleagues at the Data and Society Research Institute in New York and the goal of this interventionist threefold to develop an intellectual understanding of how structural racism operates and algorithms, social media platforms and technologies, not yet developed and emotional intelligence concerning how to resolve racially stressful situations within organizations, and a commitment to take action to reduce harms to communities of color. And so as a final way to think about why these things are so important, I want to offer a couple last provocations. The first is for us to think a new about what actually is deep learning when it comes to computation. I want to suggest that computational depth when it comes to a I systems without historical or social depth, is actually superficial learning. And so we need to have a much more interdisciplinary, integrated approach to knowledge production and to observing and understanding patterns that don't simply rely on one discipline in order to map reality. The last provocation is this. If, as I suggested at the start, inequity is woven into the very fabric of our society, it's built into the design of our. Our policies are physical infrastructures and now even our digital infrastructures. That means that each twist, coil and code is a chance for us toe. We've new patterns, practices and politics. The vastness of the problems that we're up against will be their undoing. Once we accept that we're pattern makers. So what does that look like? It looks like refusing color blindness as an anecdote to tech media discrimination rather than refusing to see difference. Let's take stock of how the training data and the models that we're creating have these built in decisions from the past that have often been discriminatory. It means actually thinking about the underside of inclusion, which can be targeting. And how do we create a more participatory rather than predatory form of inclusion? And ultimately, it also means owning our own power in these systems so that we can change the patterns of the past. If we're if we inherit a spiked bench, that doesn't mean that we need to continue using it. We can work together to design more just and equitable technologies. So with that, I look forward to our conversation. >>Thank you, Ruth. Ha. That was I expected it to be amazing, as I have been devouring your book in the last few weeks. So I knew that would be impactful. I know we will never think about park benches again. How it's art. And you laid down the gauntlet. Oh, my goodness. That tech won't build it. Well, I would say if the thoughts about team has any saying that we absolutely will build it and will continue toe educate ourselves. So you made a few points that it doesn't matter if it was intentional or not. So unintentional has as big an impact. Um, how do we address that does it just start with awareness building or how do we address that? >>Yeah, so it's important. I mean, it's important. I have good intentions. And so, by saying that intentions are not the end, all be all. It doesn't mean that we're throwing intentions out. But it is saying that there's so many things that happened in the world, happened unwittingly without someone sitting down to to make it good or bad. And so this goes on both ends. The analogy that I often use is if I'm parked outside and I see someone, you know breaking into my car, I don't run out there and say Now, do you feel Do you feel in your heart that you're a thief? Do you intend to be a thief? I don't go and grill their identity or their intention. Thio harm me, but I look at the effect of their actions, and so in terms of art, the teams that we work on, I think one of the things that we can do again is to have a range of perspectives around the table that can think ahead like chess, about how things might play out, but also once we've sort of created something and it's, you know, it's entered into, you know, the world. We need to have, ah, regular audits and check ins to see when it's going off track just because we intended to do good and set it out when it goes sideways, we need mechanisms, formal mechanisms that actually are built into the process that can get it back on track or even remove it entirely if we find And we see that with different products, right that get re called. And so we need that to be formalized rather than putting the burden on the people that are using these things toe have to raise the awareness or have to come to us like with the apple card, Right? To say this thing is not fair. Why don't we have that built into the process to begin with? >>Yeah, so a couple things. So my dad used to say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so that's >>yes on. In fact, in the book, I say the road to hell is paved with technical fixes. So they're me and your dad are on the same page, >>and I I love your point about bringing different perspectives. And I often say this is why diversity is not just about business benefits. It's your best recipe for for identifying the early biases in the data sets in the way we build things. And yet it's such a thorny problem to address bringing new people in from tech. So in the absence of that, what do we do? Is it the outside review boards? Or do you think regulation is the best bet as you mentioned a >>few? Yeah, yeah, we need really need a combination of things. I mean, we need So on the one hand, we need something like a do no harm, um, ethos. So with that we see in medicine so that it becomes part of the fabric and the culture of organizations that that those values, the social values, have equal or more weight than the other kinds of economic imperatives. Right. So we have toe have a reckoning in house, but we can't leave it to people who are designing and have a vested interest in getting things to market to regulate themselves. We also need independent accountability. So we need a combination of this and going back just to your point about just thinking about like, the diversity on teams. One really cautionary example comes to mind from last fall, when Google's New Pixel four phone was about to come out and it had a kind of facial recognition component to it that you could open the phone and they had been following this research that shows that facial recognition systems don't work as well on darker skin individuals, right? And so they wanted Thio get a head start. They wanted to prevent that, right? So they had good intentions. They didn't want their phone toe block out darker skin, you know, users from from using it. And so what they did was they were trying to diversify their training data so that the system would work better and they hired contract workers, and they told these contract workers to engage black people, tell them to use the phone play with, you know, some kind of app, take a selfie so that their faces would populate that the training set, But they didn't. They did not tell the people what their faces were gonna be used for, so they withheld some information. They didn't tell them. It was being used for the spatial recognition system, and the contract workers went to the media and said Something's not right. Why are we being told? Withhold information? And in fact, they told them, going back to the park bench example. To give people who are homeless $5 gift cards to play with the phone and get their images in this. And so this all came to light and Google withdrew this research and this process because it was so in line with a long history of using marginalized, most vulnerable people and populations to make technologies better when those technologies are likely going toe, harm them in terms of surveillance and other things. And so I think I bring this up here to go back to our question of how the composition of teams might help address this. I think often about who is in that room making that decision about sending, creating this process of the contract workers and who the selfies and so on. Perhaps it was a racially homogeneous group where people didn't want really sensitive to how this could be experienced or seen, but maybe it was a diverse, racially diverse group and perhaps the history of harm when it comes to science and technology. Maybe they didn't have that disciplinary knowledge. And so it could also be a function of what people knew in the room, how they could do that chest in their head and think how this is gonna play out. It's not gonna play out very well. And the last thing is that maybe there was disciplinary diversity. Maybe there was racial ethnic diversity, but maybe the workplace culture made it to those people. Didn't feel like they could speak up right so you could have all the diversity in the world. But if you don't create a context in which people who have those insights feel like they can speak up and be respected and heard, then you're basically sitting on a reservoir of resource is and you're not tapping into it to ensure T to do right by your company. And so it's one of those cautionary tales I think that we can all learn from to try to create an environment where we can elicit those insights from our team and our and our coworkers, >>your point about the culture. This is really inclusion very different from just diversity and thought. Eso I like to end on a hopeful note. A prescriptive note. You have some of the most influential data and analytics leaders and experts attending virtually here. So if you imagine the way we use data and housing is a great example, mortgage lending has not been equitable for African Americans in particular. But if you imagine the right way to use data, what is the future hold when we've gotten better at this? More aware >>of this? Thank you for that question on DSO. You know, there's a few things that come to mind for me one. And I think mortgage environment is really the perfect sort of context in which to think through the the both. The problem where the solutions may lie. One of the most powerful ways I see data being used by different organizations and groups is to shine a light on the past and ongoing inequities. And so oftentimes, when people see the bias, let's say when it came to like the the hiring algorithm or the language out, they see the names associated with negative or positive words that tends toe have, ah, bigger impact because they think well, Wow, The technology is reflecting these biases. It really must be true. Never mind that people might have been raising the issues in other ways before. But I think one of the most powerful ways we can use data and technology is as a mirror onto existing forms of inequality That then can motivate us to try to address those things. The caution is that we cannot just address those once we come to grips with the problem, the solution is not simply going to be a technical solution. And so we have to understand both the promise of data and the limits of data. So when it comes to, let's say, a software program, let's say Ah, hiring algorithm that now is trained toe look for diversity as opposed to homogeneity and say I get hired through one of those algorithms in a new workplace. I can get through the door and be hired. But if nothing else about that workplace has changed and on a day to day basis I'm still experiencing microaggressions. I'm still experiencing all kinds of issues. Then that technology just gave me access to ah harmful environment, you see, and so this is the idea that we can't simply expect the technology to solve all of our problems. We have to do the hard work. And so I would encourage everyone listening to both except the promise of these tools, but really crucially, um, Thio, understand that the rial kinds of changes that we need to make are gonna be messy. They're not gonna be quick fixes. If you think about how long it took our society to create the kinds of inequities that that we now it lived with, we should expect to do our part, do the work and pass the baton. We're not going to magically like Fairy does create a wonderful algorithm that's gonna help us bypass these issues. It can expose them. But then it's up to us to actually do the hard work of changing our social relations are changing the culture of not just our workplaces but our schools. Our healthcare systems are neighborhoods so that they reflect our better values. >>Yeah. Ha. So beautifully said I think all of us are willing to do the hard work. And I like your point about using it is a mirror and thought spot. We like to say a fact driven world is a better world. It can give us that transparency. So on behalf of everyone, thank you so much for your passion for your hard work and for talking to us. >>Thank you, Cindy. Thank you so much for inviting me. Hey, I live back to you. >>Thank you, Cindy and rou ha. For this fascinating exploration of our society and technology, we're just about ready to move on to our final session of the day. So make sure to tune in for this customer case study session with executives from Sienna and Accenture on driving digital transformation with certain AI.

>>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be in conversation with you today. And I thought I would just kick things off with some opening reflections on this really important session theme, and then we can jump into discussion. So I'd like us to, as a starting point, um, wrestle with these buzz words, empowerment and inclusion so that we can, um, have them be more than kind of big platitudes and really have them reflected in our workplace cultures and the things that we design and the technologies that we put out into the world. And so to do that, I think we have to move beyond techno determinism and I'll explain what that means in just a minute. And techno determinism comes in two forms. The first on your left is the idea that technology automate. Um, all of these emerging trends are going to harm us are going to necessarily, um, harm humanity. >>They're going to take all the jobs they're going to remove human agency. This is what we might call the techno dystopian version of the story. And this is what Hollywood loves to sell us in the form of movies like the matrix or Terminator. The other version on your right is the techno utopian story that technologies automation, the robots, as a shorthand are going to save humanity. They're going to make everything more efficient, more equitable. And in this case, on the surface, they seem like opposing narratives, right? They're telling us different stories. At least they have different endpoints, but when you pull back the screen and look a little bit more closely, you see that they share an underlying logic, that technology is in the driver's seat and that human beings, that social society can just respond to what's happening. But we don't, I really have a say in what technologies are designed. >>And so to move beyond techno determinism, the notion that technology is in the driver's seat, we have to put the human agents and agencies back into the story protagonists and think carefully about what the human desires, worldviews values assumptions are that animate the production of technology. We have to put the humans behind the screen back into view. And so that's a very first step in when we do that. We see as was already mentioned that it's a very homogenous group right now in terms of who gets the power and the resources to produce the digital and physical infrastructure that everyone else has to live with. And so, as a first step, we need to think about how to, to create more participation of those who are working behind the scenes to design technology. Now, to dig a little more deeper into this, I want to offer a kind of low tech example before we get to the more high tech ones. >>So what you see in front of you here is a simple park bench public it's located in Berkeley, California, which is where I went to graduate school. And on this one particular visit, I was living in Boston. And so I was back in California, it was February, it was freezing where I was coming from. And so I wanted to take a few minutes in between meetings to just lay out in the sun and soak in some vitamin D. And I quickly realized actually I couldn't lay down on the bench because of the way it had been designed with these arm rests at intermittent intervals. And so here I thought, okay, th th the armrests have a functional reason why they're there. I mean, you could literally rest your elbows there, or, um, you know, it can create a little bit of privacy of someone sitting there that you don't know. >>Um, when I was nine months pregnant, it could help me get up and down or for the elderly the same thing. So it has a lot of functional reasons, but I also thought about the fact that it prevents people who are, are homeless from sleeping on the bench. And this is the Bay area that we're talking about, where in fact, the tech boom has gone hand in hand with a housing crisis. Those things have grown in tandem. So innovation has grown with inequity because we have, I haven't thought carefully about how to address the social context in which technology grows and blossoms. And so I thought, okay, this crisis is growing in this area. And so perhaps this is a deliberate attempt to make sure that people don't sleep on the benches by the way that they're designed and where the, where they're implemented. And so this is what we might call structural inequity, by the way something is designed. >>It has certain yeah. Affects that exclude or harm different people. And so it may not necessarily be the intent, but that's the effect. And I did a little digging and I found, in fact, it's a global phenomenon, this thing that architect next call, hostile architecture around single occupancy, benches and Helsinki. So only one booty at a time, no Nolan down there. I've found caged benches in France. Yeah. And in this particular town, what's interesting here is that the mayor put these benches out in this little shopping Plaza and within 24 hours, the people in the town rally together and have them removed. So we see here that just because we, we have a discriminatory design in our public space, doesn't mean we have to live with it. We can actually work together to ensure that our public space reflects our better values. But I think my favorite example of all is the metered bench. >>And then this case, this bench is designed with spikes in them and to get the spikes to retreat into the bench, you have to feed the meter. You have to put some coins in, and I think it buys you about 15, 20 minutes, then the spikes come back up. And so you will be happy to know that in this case, uh, this was designed by a German artist to get people to think critically about issues of design, not the design of physical space, but the design of all kinds of things, public policies. And so we can think about how our public life in general is metered, that it serves those that can pay the price and others are excluded or harmed. Whether we're talking about education or healthcare. And the meter bench also presents something interesting for those of us who care about technology, it creates a technical fix for a social problem. >>In fact, it started out as art, but some municipalities in different parts of the world have actually adopted this in their public spaces, in their parks in order to deter so-called loiters from using that space. And so by a technical fix, we mean something that creates a short-term effect, right? It gets people who may want to sleep on it out of sight. They're unable to use it, but it doesn't address the underlying problems that create that need to sleep outside of the first place. And so, in addition to techno determinism, we have to think critically about technical fixes, that don't address the underlying issues that the tech tech technology is meant to solve. And so this is part of a broader issue of discriminatory design, and we can apply the bench metaphor to all kinds of things that we work with, or that we create. >>And the question we really have to continuously ask ourselves is what values are we building in to the physical and digital infrastructures around us? What are the spikes that we may unwittingly put into place? Or perhaps we didn't create the spikes. Perhaps we started a new job or a new position, and someone hands us something, this is the way things have always been done. So we inherit the spiked bench. What is our responsibility? When we notice that it's creating these kinds of harms or exclusions or technical fixes that are bypassing the underlying problem, what is our responsibility? All of this came to a head in the context of financial technologies. I don't know how many of you remember these high profile cases of tech insiders and CEOs who applied for apples, >>The Apple card. And in one case, a husband and wife applied, and the husband, the husband received a much higher limit, almost 20 times the limit as his, >>His wife, even though they shared bank accounts, they lived in common law state. Yeah. >>And so the question there was not only the fact that >>The husband was receiving a much better rate and a high and a better >>The interest rate and the limit, but also that there was no mechanism for the individuals involved to dispute what was happening. They didn't even know how, what the factors were that they were being judged that was creating this form of discrimination. So >>In terms of financial technologies, it's not simply the outcome, that's the issue, or that can be discriminatory, >>But the process that black box is all of the decision-making that makes it so that consumers and the general public have no way to question it, no way to understand how they're being judged adversely. And so it's the process, not only the product that we have to care a lot about. And so the case of the Apple card is part of a much broader phenomenon >>Of, um, races >>And sexist robots. This is how the headlines framed it a few years ago. And I was so interested in this framing because there was a first wave of stories that seemed to be shocked at the prospect, that technology is not neutral. Then there was a second wave of stories that seemed less surprised. Well, of course, technology inherits its creators biases. And now I think we've entered a phase of attempts to override and address the default settings of so-called racist and sexist robots for better or worse than here. Robots is just a kind of shorthand that the way that people are talking about automation and emerging technologies more broadly. And so, as I was encountering these headlines, I was thinking about how these are not problems simply brought on by machine learning or AI. They're not all brand new. And so I wanted to contribute to the conversation, a kind of larger context and a longer history for us to think carefully about the social dimensions of technology. And so I developed a concept called the new Jim code, >>Which plays on the phrase, >>Jim Crow, which is the way that the regime of white supremacy and inequality in this country was defined in a previous era. And I wanted us to think about how that legacy continues to haunt the present, how we might be coding bias into emerging technologies and the danger being that we imagine those technologies to be objective. And so this gives us a language to be able to name this phenomenon so that we can address it and change it under this larger umbrella of the new Jim code are four distinct ways that this phenomenon takes shape from the more obvious engineered inequity. Those are the kinds of inequalities tech mediated in the qualities that we can generally see coming. They're kind of obvious, but then we go down the line and we see it becomes harder to detect it's happening in our own backyards, it's happening around us. And we don't really have a view into the black box. And so it becomes more insidious. And so in the remaining couple of minutes, I'm just, just going to give you a taste of the last three of these, and then a move towards conclusion. Then we can start chatting. So when it comes to default discrimination, this is the way that social inequalities >>Become embedded in emerging technologies because designers of these technologies, aren't thinking carefully about history and sociology. A great example of this, uh, came to, um, uh, the headlines last fall when it was found that widely used healthcare algorithm, effecting millions of patients, um, was discriminating against black patients. And so what's especially important to note here is that this algorithm, healthcare algorithm does not explicitly take note of race. That is to say it is race neutral by using cost to predict healthcare needs this digital triaging system unwittingly reproduces health disparities, because on average, black people have incurred fewer costs for a variety of reasons, including structural inequality. So in my review of this study, by Obermeyer and colleagues, I want to draw attention to how indifference to social reality can be even more harmful than malicious intent. It doesn't have to be the intent of the designers to create this effect. >>And so we have to look carefully at how indifference is operating and how race neutrality can be a deadly force. When we move on to the next iteration of the new Jim code, coded exposure, there's a tension because on the one hand, you see this image where the darker skin individual is not being detected by the facial recognition system, right on the camera, on the computer. And so coded exposure names, this tension between wanting to be seen and included and recognized whether it's in facial recognition or in recommendation systems or in tailored advertising. But the opposite of that, the tension is with when you're over, it >>Included when you're surveilled, when you're >>Too centered. And so we should note that it's not simply in being left out, that's the problem, but it's in being included in harmful ways. And so I want us to think carefully about the rhetoric of inclusion and understand that inclusion is not simply an end point, it's a process, and it is possible to include people in harmful processes. And so we want to ensure that the process is not harmful for it to really be effective. The last iteration of the new Jim code. That means the, the most insidious let's say is technologies that are touted as helping us address bias. So they're not simply including people, but they're actively working to address bias. And so in this case, there are a lot of different companies that are using AI to hire, uh, create hiring, um, software and hiring algorithms, including this one higher view. >>And the idea is that there there's a lot that, um, AI can keep track of that human beings might miss. And so, so the software can make data-driven talent decisions after all the problem of employment discrimination is widespread and well-documented, so the logic goes, wouldn't this be even more reason to outsource decisions to AI? Well, let's think about this carefully. And this is the idea of techno benevolence, trying to do good without fully reckoning with what, how technology can reproduce inequalities. So some colleagues of mine at Princeton, um, tested a natural learning processing algorithm and was looking to see whether it exhibited the same, um, tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. And what they found was that in fact, the algorithm associated black names with negative words and white names with pleasant sounding words. And so this particular audit builds on a classic study done around 2003 before all of the emerging technologies were on the scene where two university of Chicago economists sent out thousands of resumes to employers in Boston and Chicago. >>And all they did was change the names on those resumes. All of the other work history education were the same. And then they waited to see who would get called back and the applicants, the fictional applicants with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks than the, the black applicants. So if you're presented with that study, you might be tempted to say, well, let's let technology handle it since humans are so biased. But my colleagues here in computer science found that this natural language processing algorithm actually reproduced those same associations with black and white names. So two with gender coded words and names as Amazon learned a couple years ago, when its own hiring algorithm was found discriminating against women, nevertheless, it should be clear by now why technical fixes that claim to bypass human biases are so desirable. If only there was a way to slay centuries of racist and sexist demons with a social justice bot beyond desirable, more like magical, magical for employers, perhaps looking to streamline the grueling work of recruitment, but a curse from any job seekers as this headline puts it. >>Your next interview could be with a racist bot, bringing us back to that problem space. We started with just a few minutes ago. So it's worth noting that job seekers are already developing ways to subvert the system by trading answers to employers tests and creating fake applications as informal audits of their own. In terms of a more collective response. There's a Federation of European trade unions call you and I global that's developed a charter of digital rights for workers that touches on automated and AI based decisions to be included in bargaining agreements. And so this is one of many efforts to change the ecosystem, to change the context in which technology is being deployed to ensure more protections and more rights for everyday people in the U S there's the algorithmic accountability bill that's been presented. And it's one effort to create some more protections around this ubiquity of automated decisions. >>And I think we should all be calling for more public accountability when it comes to the widespread use of automated decisions. Another development that keeps me somewhat hopeful is that tech workers themselves are increasingly speaking out against the most egregious forms of corporate collusion with state sanctioned racism. And to get a taste of that, I encourage you to check out the hashtag tech, won't build it among other statements that they've made and walking out and petitioning their companies. One group said as the, at Google at Microsoft wrote as the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit in terms of education, which is my own ground zero. Um, it's a place where we can, we can grow a more historically and socially literate approach to tech design. And this is just one resource that you all can download, um, by developed by some wonderful colleagues at the data and society research Institute in New York. >>And the, the goal of this intervention is threefold to develop an intellectual understanding of how structural racism operates and algorithms, social media platforms and technologies not yet developed and emotional intelligence concerning how to resolve racially stressful situations within organizations and a commitment to take action, to reduce harms to communities of color. And so as a final way to think about why these things are so important, I want to offer, uh, a couple last provocations. The first is pressed to think a new about what actually is deep learning when it comes to computation. I want to suggest that computational depth when it comes to AI systems without historical or social depth is actually superficial learning. And so we need to have a much more interdisciplinary, integrated approach to knowledge production and to observing and understanding patterns that don't simply rely on one discipline in order to map reality. >>The last provocation is this. If as I suggested at the start in the inequity is woven into the very fabric of our society. It's built into the design of our, our policies, our physical infrastructures, and now even our digital infrastructures. That means that each twist coil and code is a chance for us to weave new patterns, practices, and politics. The vastness of the problems that we're up against will be their undoing. Once we, that we are pattern makers. So what does that look like? It looks like refusing colorblindness as an anecdote to tech media discrimination, rather than refusing to see difference. Let's take stock of how the training data and the models that we're creating. Have these built in decisions from the past that have often been discriminatory. It means actually thinking about the underside of inclusion, which can be targeting and how do we create a more participatory rather than predatory form of inclusion. And ultimately it also means owning our own power in these systems so that we can change the patterns of the past. If we're, if we inherit a spiked bench, that doesn't mean that we need to continue using it. We can work together to design more, just an equitable technologies. So with that, I look forward to our conversation.

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering DockerCon '18. Brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in San Francisco at DockerCon 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer on a stunning day here in San Francisco. This event draws between 5,000 and 6,000 people in only its fifth year. They did a very good job during the general session this morning, John, of having some great female leaders on stage and we're very pleased to welcome another female leader to theCUBE for the first time. Alex Qin, you are the Director of Technology at Gakko. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. It's great to be here. >> So, you're speaking here at DockerCon 2018, I want to get to that in a second, but tell us a little bit about Gakko. What do you guys do? >> Um, yeah. So we're a global education design studio based in Tokyo and New York and what we do is we put on experimental education programs and build experimental education technology that aim to reclaim the magic of learning. So, we put on summer camps, we have coding classes, music classes and we build software for early learners. >> And by early learners what age group are you talking about? >> So ages three to five. What we build is beautiful story and art driven apps for kids ages three to five to be able to spend time more thoughtfully on tablets 'cause nowadays kids are always on tablets no matter what we do and so what we want to do is create a world that they can be in, in which parents feel like, this is a good place for my child to spend time. They're learning, it's artful, it's thoughtfully built. >> Great, well Alex you are also the founder of The Code Collective. >> The Code Cooperative, yes. >> The Code Cooperative, I'm sorry. How did you get started with that and can you tell us a little bit about that as well? >> Yes, so The Code Cooperative is my passion project and I started it in 2016, the day after the presidential elections actually, and it's an organization that teaches formerly incarcerated individuals computer literacy and coding, so that they can build websites and technical solutions to the problems they've identified in the criminal justice system. >> Some examples of that might be? >> A story I love to tell is from the pilot class. I had one student who was a 65 year old man and he'd been in prison for over 20 years and so at 65, he took our class and he learned HTML, CSS and JavaScript and built a website that aims to educate visitors about the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the criminal justice system today. Just like an interactive quiz. Yeah, that was really cool. It was called The Criminal Injustice System. >> Nice, nice. >> What were some of the drivers that really led you to go, you know what? We've got a huge opportunity here to take some of these people who have had made some different choices and really, sort of, rehabilitate them in a way that's gonna enable tech for good. What were some of those things that you just went, we've got to do this? >> That's a good question. Well, I read the book, The New Jim Crow, which you may have heard of. It's an incredible book that really details a lot of the problems that exist today within the U.S. criminal justice system and I thought to myself, I want to learn more about the justice system and contribute positively to justice system reform, but I don't know anything about it. So what I should do is work with people who have been through the system, learn from them and empower them to highlight the issues that they see within the justice system and that's something that I think is really important. When it comes to building technology, right now the gatekeepers of tech are kind of a homogenous group and we tend to build tech solutions for the entire world, but actually the people who are best equipped to solve problems are those who have experienced them and so that's why I decided to start The Code Cooperative. >> Nice. Alex, you're talking here, you've got an interesting titled session, I'll make sure I get it right, Shaving My Head Made Me a Better Programmer. If I can connect that to the rest of the DockerCon, maybe, I mean, Docker has been very good at their whole history about developer experience, making things easier for people and I think sometimes people don't realize not only when you make things easier, you actually can bring in new audiences. Kids, prisoners, right, are able to use today's technology where 30, 40 years ago they wouldn't have had access to it because it's easier, it's more powerful, it's more ubiquitous. But sometimes we get stuck in old tropes and so I'd love for you to kind of talk a little about your talk and kind of, what you're going to be talking about here at the show. >> Sure, yes. So, my talk is called Shaving My Head Made Me a Better Programmer and it's a little bit of a misleading title, but basically it's the story of my journey though the tech industry as a minority woman. So I studied computer science and I've been a software engineer for my entire career and yet, I've encountered a lot of challenges because of my gender, because of how I present to the world and when I shaved my head, a lot of those challenges kind of disappeared because I wasn't perceived as feminine anymore and so when I realized that tech isn't the meritocracy that I thought it was, I kind of started on this new quest to make tech as diverse and inclusive as possible so that people from all backgrounds, all genders can learn to code and write code happily and safely and it's just the story of how that happened and the lessons I've learned and some tips on how to make organizations more inclusive because that's the bulk of my work now. >> So you were a C.S. major in New York? >> Yes. >> So were you always interested in STEM as a kid or was it something that you got into when you were in college? What was that sort of age that you found it really exciting and said, no matter what, even if there's very few women here, I love this, I want to do this? >> That's a great question. So I am originally from France, actually. And when I was growing up there was really little computer science education in schools, but I really wanted to be an astronaut when I got to college so I joined the engineering program at my school and I'd never coded at that point, but one of the requirements was an intro to programming class in Python. So I took it and I fell in love with it immediately and I was like, I'm majoring in computer science, this is so cool, this is the coolest thing I've ever done and as I entered the computer science world I realized, oh, there's not that many women here and actually, I'm treated very differently. So, I fell in love with it and then because I love it so much I just kind of powered through. >> Your passion is very palpable, so at any point did you feel, sort of, out of place? Going, I'm one of the only females here, or did you say, I don't care, I like this. >> Yeah, it's both. I mean, you feel out of place when there's very few people who look like you in the room. Even if you don't want to feel out of place, even if you try to pretend that's not the case, you can't help but feel that and when I was starting out and throughout my career, people didn't necessarily want to work with me, didn't believe I was a good programmer, even though I was at the top of all my classes and so even though I tried to make the most out of my experience, I couldn't really escape the stigma attached to my gender in this field. >> Alex, we're at an interesting part of our culture now, I suppose, especially online. On one hand, social media has elevated a lot of folks' voices that would not have been heard otherwise because of gatekeepers. On the other hand, we have our current online discourse, which is kind of, not very pleasant sometimes. So I am interested both kind of how you're navigating that online and then maybe as a followup, then as you work with companies, how you're working with them and what you're telling them, but in terms of online, I love Twitter and yet it frustrates me. Facebook as well, et cetera. How do you navigate that online yourself? >> That's a great question. Honestly, I have been kind of retreating from social media. I haven't really experienced too many negative interactions on social media because I'm not really a big presence there. I did kind of have a really bad experience once during a Grace Hopper conference. I tweeted something during the Male Allied panel of like, 2015, or something and that got picked up by some GamerGate writers and then a lot of people started tweeting negative things at me, but that's kind of the extent of my negative experiences online. I do think that, as you say, social media has allowed for uplifting of voices that were previously unheard, has allowed for activism to organize. There's so many positive things that come from social media and also it has a really nefarious affect on people and I think that something needs to change in terms of how these companies build their software. It needs to be safer for all people and also needs to be built more ethically. Less trying to manipulate our psyches. >> That's, I think, super important. Luckily at least that's a conversation now, right Lisa? That at least Facebook, I think eventually as a society we'll, I hope, we'll get through this and figure this out, but I don't feel like we're particularly literate with social at this point. But I did want to ask about your work with companies. You said you do talk with some companies about diversity and things like that, is there any either signs that folks are getting it right or things that you start off with as you're working, if someone asks, how do we become a more diverse workforce? >> Yeah, that's a good question. I can't really point to any companies that, I say, are doing amazing. There are some companies where I know folks are very happy. Slack is one of them, thoughtbot is another one of them. I'll say Gakko, but a few tips I generally give organizations is that you need to work to understand the problem. Why is there a lack of diversity in tech? Why is your team not diverse? Then you need to measure your data. You can't make a positive change if you don't know how much you're changing, right? So gather diversity data on your team, not just in terms of who's there, but who's in a leadership role. Who gets promoted? Who gets fired? Who's a manager? And then you need to commit. That's, I think, the place where a lot of people struggle is there's a lot of candidates who fit this, kind of, homogenous image of what a programmer is and so it can be easy sometimes to be like, well we need to hire someone right now so let's just hire this person. But in order to actually make a change you need to commit and you need to say I'm not going to compromise on the goals that we've set. >> You're absolutely right, that commitment word is exactly what's needed to drive that accountability to hold organizations up to that. I was just at VMware a couple of weeks ago in Palo Alto at the Women Transforming Technology event and we had a whole day of all talking with females in tech, which I always loved to do and theCUBE is very passionate about supporting that. The cultural change is imperative. We talk about digital transformation at every event and there's the CIO that says, hey we have to change the culture here to transform digitally, but also to start moving those numbers from, what, less than 25% of tech roles are held by women. The culture has to change. It seems like you're in a position, potentially, to actually influence the culture at these companies that you talk to about opening their eyes to commit. Does that excite you from within? >> Yes, I do talk to a lot of organizations about this, but I think the work that I do that might actually tip the scale is, basically, the education programs that I run in New York. All of my classrooms reflect the diversity of New York, both in terms of student and teacher bodies. So all of my students learn in an environment that is extremely diverse. They learn from teachers who look like them and I wish I learned to code in that way. Another important thing we teach our students is how to code as an ethical endeavor. So we teach our students to measure the ethical ramifications of their decisions when they build software so that hopefully the technologists of tomorrow, the CTO's of tomorrow they build code in a way that is best for humanity. They build code with empathy. >> Goin' back to your day job. You're working with kids. We talked about getting through social media, cultural change. Its going to depend on the next generation. So Alex, are the kids alright? Are they gonna save us? >> The kids are pretty alright. I mean, so my classroom is basically coding meets social entrepreneurship so all of our kids build an app that solves a problem they've identified in their communities and these kids are just coming up with the most beautiful solutions, like, more brilliant than any adult that I've met. I feel good about the future. >> Well, it's key to get those different perspectives and when you were saying, they're having the opportunity to code and create apps that are relevant to them that's where you can really ignite that passion. >> Exactly, that's so important >> It is important because when you're passionate about something, and we saw that on stage today with a lot of the Docker folks and Microsoft and McKesson, when you're passionate about something and really making a change, you can feel it. So it's good to hear that we're going in the right direction. Also, we're in this age, you talked about ethics, where it's essential. Because technology, we see a lot of examples where tech is not used for good and there's world leaders getting some of the leaders of tech companies together saying, I'm challenging you, make tech for good because we're seeing too much of the negative right now. How does that influence, whether it's the breaches at Equifax, or, there was a breach recently at MyHeritage, the DNA testing companies, to Cambridge Analytica. How do you see the kids, the young kids respond to that, going, that's a really poor use of tech. Are they aware of that? >> I think some kids are and in our classroom we spend some time talking about, we have discussions about, ethics of software. So that's something that's very important to us. But largely, most classrooms in the United States, no, I mean computer science education is not a standard in most classrooms in the US. In New York state, only 1% of high schoolers actually have access to any kind of computer science education and so most kids, they might hear tid bits from the T.V. or social media or something, but they're not necessarily informed enough to make one, good decisions as consumers and two, good decisions as potential technologists. So that's something that we are trying to spread and I hope other folks are also trying to work on. >> Another thing that I think is shocking is when we were at the Women Transforming Technology event just a few weeks ago at VMware in Palo Alto, they just announced with Stanford, Stanford is investing 15 million dollars into their gender research. VMware and Stanford wanting to look at what are the barriers for women in tech and minorities in tech and starting to dissolve some of those barriers. One of the things they actually had in their press release announcing this big 15 million dollar investment from VMware and Stanford is a Mckinsey report that said 20%, sorry, enterprise organizations that have females in management positions, probably executive management positions, didn't specify positions, are 20% more profitable. You just think, the numbers are saying when you have more thought diversity, you're actually going to be a more profitable organization, but I think to your point earlier, Alex, there has to be a commitment and there has to be a group within an organization that stands accountable. >> Absolutely. >> So we are thankful for you. (Alex laughs) for donating some of your time today to tell us what you're doing, it's good to hear the next generation, John, I think they got our backs. >> Alright, that's good. >> And Alex, have a great time with your very provocative session this afternoon. >> Thank you. >> We thank you so much for your time and it's really cool to hear how you're using your passion for tech for good. >> Thank you so much, it was great to be here. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. From San Francisco at DockerCon 2018. Stick around, John and I will be right back with out next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of theCUBE. We're here at Sundance Film Festival, the Intel Tech Lounge for a one on one conversation with Kane Lee, who's the head of content at Baobab Studios in California. Thanks for joining me here at the Intel Tech Lounge. >> Really excited to be here. >> You know we just had a panel on the new creative here, and Intel is showing some great technology. Things like volumetric, all kinds of really hardcore tech. Really powering some of the VR, AR, mixed reality, all the trends that are happening around user experience. But, a new creative artist is out there. A new storyteller. It could be a 12 year old to a 50 year old. You're in the middle of it. You're an award winning producer. So you're building the stories, you're building the content. What's the biggest thing happening here at Sundance? >> I think it's really interesting, because content has always been my passion. Good storytelling. And growing up, it was always books and films, and all these traditional mediums that inspired me to sort of dream, and right here in Sundance, we're in the middle of a great sea change going on, because technology and art are coming together in such a fast pace, to really usher in the new generation of storytelling, and we're all very fortunate to be in the middle of that. This is a very unique period in our history as humans, and our culture, to challenge what storytelling really means, because VR, for us at Baobab, is the next great medium. And Sundance recognizes that. Technology companies like Intel recognize that. So we're all coming together at the film festival, and working together to define what that will mean. >> Kane, you're an Emmy award winning producer. Baobab's doing some cutting edge work. Take a minute to talk about what Baobab is doing, and why is it so relevant? We know it's cool. We've interviewed the CEO and Founder before. Share with the audience, what is Baobab doing? Why is it so relevant? >> So, we formed a couple years ago, and at the time, VR was, and it still is, in its very nascent stage. One thing that we recognized, was an opportunity to try to create content that would appeal for people from the ages of five to 105. There was a lot of documentaries, there was a lot of experiential art house type of material. And there was a lot of gaming type of content for VR. For us, we're big lovers of animation and how that unites families, kids, grandparents, teenagers, and we saw an opportunity to try to create content that could appeal to all of these different types of people through animation. So that's sort of our mission, is to inspire your childlike sense of wonder, using two mediums that are so meant for each other, which are animation and VR. >> I'd like to talk about some of the work you got going on a little bit later, but I want to talk about that 12 year old in his room, or the 16 year old that's got a full rig, tricked out with the keyboard, they're laying down music, they're building music, they're gaming, they might be creating art. They are a living, breathing creative. And, they're self learning. They're jumping on Youtube. They're jumping into VR meetups and groups. They're self learning. >> Kane: Absolutely. >> How do you connect to them? What do they do? What's the playbook? How do these people go to the next level? What's the industry doing around this? >> I think, one example I'll give is, I was at Annecy Film Festival, and that's one of the biggest animation focused film festivals in the world, and I was showcasing our very first piece, it was called Invasion, starring Ethan Hawke, where you're actually in the body of a bunny rabbit, and you meet another bunny rabbit. You create a bond. And together you thwart an alien invasion on Earth. What was so interesting to me, was I had never seen that sort of, that demo, that teenage demo, where young boys and girls would actually bring their parents back to the experience, and say this is what I want to study in college. This is what I want to do in art school. So, I think that they, growing up with all this new technology, really sort of get the idea of being in realtime, and having storytelling in realtime. And seeing that level of interest from that age group was very sort of affirming to us that we're on the right track, in terms of the next generation of storytelling. >> Well you guys are definitely on the right track, I can say that. But I think what your point confirms, and connects the dots for people that might not be in the industry is that the old tech world was, the geeks did it, software was an art and you had to be in that CS club. The democratization is a big trend here, and what you're talking about is, people are humanizing, they can see real emotional, practical examples. So the young guns, the young kids, they don't have baggage. They look at it with a clean slate and going, I want that. I can see myself using this. I can self actualize with this. So really kind of tips the scales, and proves the point. >> Absolutely. We world premiered Asteroids, our second VR experience, starring Elizabeth Banks, and one of the biggest millennial stars, Ingrid Nilson, last year at Sundance. Even had the first red carpet VR premiere in Sundance history. And watching the younger generation, it was our first piece where we actually used the controllers that had just come out in that past year. And watching them go in with no preconceived notions on what using controllers could be, to be a character in the experience, it was just fascinating, because they picked it up faster than anyone, and learned the language of being a character, and having hand controllers as a robot, so you could play fetch with an alien dog, or you could mirror their actions, or they might mirror yours, and creating these bonds and these experiences. So, that sort of fresh perspective is really exciting. >> Talk about the role of these experiences, and how they connect people, because one of the big trends also online today, in today's, I would say, yeah the peg the evolution is, you're really getting into the immersive experience, I believe that. But, content creates bonds between people, and good experiences creates glue between relationships, and forges new ones, maybe enhances existing ones. This is a big part of the media. >> Absolutely. For us, emotional connection is the key to getting people to put on headsets, and to come back to our experiences. And that emotional connection for us, is what we've witnessed, in terms of people forming bonds with our characters. So, everyone knows that VR can bring you to brand new worlds, and exciting places, and immerse you in places that you can never go. But, the one thing that I think we learned in our experience with VR, is that if you can create a bond between the user and other characters in the experience that they believe is real, and we use psychology, technology, and storytelling to do that, then they want to come back again and again. So, one of the trickiest parts of VR is trying to get people to have repeat views. And the feedback we've gotten from a lot of the technology platforms is people come back time and time again, and it seems to be because they actually believe these characters are real, and that they're friends. >> So talk about your journey, because you're at the front end of this wave, and you're participating, you're creating art, you're creating work product. You're building technology with the Baobab Studios. What would you do if you were 16? If you were a sophomore in high school, knowing what you know, and you could go back in time, or you could be today what you know at 16, what would you do? >> When I was 16, I had no idea what I was going to do. When I graduated from college, I had no idea what I was going to do. But what I will say is, VR is really unique because it's so interdisciplinary. So, it actually invites people from all different fabrics of society, and different types of education. The most, I would encourage 16 year olds to just be who they are, and to play. And if I talked to my 16 year old self, I would have just encouraged myself to follow my interest and pursuits more, because many years later, actually VR has brought me back to a lot of my roots, and different things that I studied growing up, and was fascinated by. >> So it ignited your passion. >> Absolutely. >> Or things that you were really into, that you might have forgotten. Is that- >> Yeah, I studied something called symbolic systems at Stanford University, and I had no idea what I was doing. It combined computer science, psychology, linguistics, and philosophy. And the first thing I did after college was pursue potentially a career as a lawyer. But now it all makes sense. VR makes, brings everything together. >> What could have been, you know? >> Absolutely. >> Well, a lot of neural network, symbolic systems, this is the underpinnings of this complex fabric that is powering this content market. So I'd love to get your thoughts. Is there a success formula that you're seeing emerging, I know there's no silver bullet yet. A lot of experimentation. A lot of new things happening. But as this technology, and the scaffolding around it is being built, while also original content is being built, it's still evolving. What's the success formula, and what's the pitfall? What to stay away from? >> I think it's about, it's really about good storytelling. And I think it's a time to be courageous and brave, and put forward stories that wouldn't have otherwise been told in the more traditional mediums. Our latest project in production that I'm so personally excited about, is called Legend of Crow. It stars John Legend as a beautiful bird with the most beautiful feathers, and the most gorgeous voice, who during dark and cold times, must go on a heroes journey to bring light back to the world. Something I feel like in this day and age, a lot of people can relate to. But, on top of this story being based upon a beautiful Native American legend that hasn't really been exposed to the world, we've taken the opportunity to take the themes of diversity and self sacrifice, and self acceptance, to create an all star cast of minorities and women, and that's something I feel the younger generations can really relate to, because having worked a lot in Hollywood as a producer in traditional TV and film, things take a while, and there's a certain way of casting and doing things that follow an older model, and I think younger audiences are excited to have a character like Moth in our experience who speaks both Spanish and English, because that's the way the world is today. >> So I got to ask you a quick, you brought up diversity and inclusion kind of in your comment. I got to bring this up, because you guys do hit a nice demographic that I think is super relevant and important, the younger generation. So I talk to a lot of young people all the time. I say things like, you don't need to be a computer scientist to get into this game. You can be super smart. You don't need to learn how to code hardcore coding to get into this. And they respond to that. And that's one kind of, I would say, narrative that conventional wisdom might not be right. And the other one is the diversity. So my son, 16 year old, says, "Dad, your generation is so politically correct. All this nonsense." So, the younger generation is not living what we're living in, in these dark times, I would say, certainly with diversity, but how does VR really equalize? And will the storm pass? Diversity, inclusion, all that great stuff that are core issues, certainly are being worked on. But, do we see hope here? >> Absolutely. I think disruption in the form of a new technology and a new medium is, while scary to some people, is actually the most exciting and fertile time to equalize. Our CEO, Maureen Fan, who is a college classmate of mine, always wanted to work in animation. And she finally saw the right opportunity when VR came, and we put on headsets for the first time, and saw how there could be a new wave of exciting animators, through this disruptive technology. Because everyone else in more traditional animation is so focused on the old model, and the old ways of doing things, of getting things off the ground, of financing, of creating certain kinds of content that have been proven over time, in the old sort of studio model. >> What were some of those things that were instrumental in this breakout, to forge this new ground? >> I think a lot of it is the technology finally being ready. Our CTO, Larry Cutler, actually studied virtual reality at Stanford a decade before Maureen and I were there, and he had always been waiting for the right time to go into VR. >> Does he preach down, hey kids, I used to walk in the snow with bare feet to you guys, or has he, what's his role, how's he doing? >> He's amazing. He was the head of global character tech for all of Dreamworks animation, and like I said, I think one thing that distinguishes us from some of the other people in VR is that we're so focused on characters, so focused on them making eye contact with you, or with their facial features reacting in realtime, and being very believable, and forging that bond between you and that character. So, for us, that character technology, and having the top people in that space work with us, is the long term thing that is going to differentiate us from the crowd. >> I'd like to get your reaction to my comment about the computer science, and that's mainly, mostly a Silicon Valley thing, living in Palo Alto, so, but people are struggling when they go to college. What should I major in? And there's a narrative right now, oh you got to learn how to code, you got to be a computer science major. You don't. You don't have to be a CS major. Some of the most creative and technical brilliance can also come from other disciplines. What's your reaction to that, and what's your advice? >> I think people should just follow their effort. Because, if you follow what naturally comes to you, what you're good at, and that also has meaning and interest to you, and something that you can get feedback along the way, which is the great thing about being in a growing space, you are going to just spend your, you're going to spend a lot of late nights doing that stuff, and you can always bring it into your career path when that happens. And I think, we're in a very DIY time in VR. No one knows anything. We're constantly making mistakes, but then learning from them. And that's the most exciting process of being where we are. So, to people who are of college age, I would just tell them follow your effort. If you're interested in VR, it's an exciting time to just do it yourself. Learn from your mistakes. And then, and try to create something new. >> What does the new creative mean to you. When you hear that, new creative, what does that mean to you? >> You know, it's interesting being at these talks and panels, and at all these festivals, because I feel like a lot of people are looking for that new innovator who comes out of nowhere, and sort of just redefines the industry. And that could very well happen. But I actually think what's really exciting about right now is, it's more about having, understanding the bridge between all the different mediums and disciplines. I think new things are created when you combine areas that have not been traditionally aligned. So for example, Orson Welles arguably created one of the first great cinematic masterpieces in Citizen Kane, but he was able to do so by bringing values from theater, and from radio, and areas where he sort of learned the art of storytelling. And he was able to combine them in new and interesting ways that people hadn't seen before. So, for me it's less about looking for that silver bullet of a creative person who comes out of nowhere, but these younger generations who understand these different mediums, combining them and creating connections with them in an exciting way. >> Brooks Brown from Starbury Studios said on the panel, the next breakout star is going to be the kid in the basement that no one's ever heard of. >> Very possibly, but that kid in the basement, he needs to be passionate about a lot of different disciplines. So, what we've tried to emulate in doing so, is bringing the best people in gaming, bringing the best people from traditional film, bringing people who had interests in a lot of different areas, different art forms, and letting them kind of play together and learn from each other. Argue with each other, you know? And then come up with something that no one's seen before. >> We're going to have to come up with a camera, so that could be like an experiment. Like it's just a reality show in and of itself. All that talent, multi discipline together. >> Absolutely. >> John: It's like dynamite ready to explode. >> It's the challenge, it's the blessing, it's the curse and the blessing of our medium right now, because there's so much more to discover, but if people come in and have an open mind, and are willing ... If the people from Hollywood are willing to learn from the people who do gaming in Silicon Valley, who are open to learning from the people in New York who grew up on live theater, I feel those, finding that intersection, finding those beautiful intersections are where we're going to thrive. >> Well you guys highlight that multi disciplinary thing, but also highlights why diversity is so important. Diversity brings the most perspectives to the table, the most data, most contribution. It might be a little bit longer to work through the arguments, right? You got to be patient. >> Absolutely you have to be patient. We're really lucky to be working with John Legend on our VR piece. He had actually been looking for several years to find, wanting to play in this space, but not wanting to do it with the wrong partner at the wrong time. So, it's, there's an art to timing in everything that we do right now, and when we presented to him the story we're doing with the Legend of Crow, it felt like the perfect sort of match. >> Legend of Crow coming out. Head of Content, Kane Lee here, Baobab Studios. Thanks for spending the time here on the Cube Conversation. What's the timing of the release of the program? >> Probably late spring, but we're going to be announcing some news around that soon, and we have some more exciting updates about it that I can't wait to share. >> Alright, we are here at the Intel Tech Lounge as the Cube's Conversation at Sundance Film Festival, part of our coverage of Sundance 2018. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

>> 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)