from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat hi I'm Stu min a man and this is the cubes coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 of course this year the event is happening all online and that gives us an opportunity to meet with red hat executives customers partners and practitioners where they are around the globe in this segment one of our favorites ever years we're talking to the women in open source and joining me for this segment first of all we have Elissa and Alexander who is the executive vice president and chief people officer of Red Hat this award fit thunder her domain dallisa it is great to see you again thanks so much for joining us thank you so much for having us all right and we have two of the Award winners so first if you see right next bit Elissa we have an epic Sain who's a doctor and PhD candidate in clinical neuroscience at the University of Gothenburg coming to us from Sweden method great to see you thank you very much all right we also have Megan Burge Sinicki who is a manager of research and operations at the open source program office at Google Megan thank you so much for joining us off though thanks for having me all right so dallisa let me hand it off to you is give our audience a little bit if they're not familiar with whipping an open source what the initiative is the community and you know what might have changed from previous years when we've talked about this sure so we realized that the tech industry is a great industry for diverse populations but a lot of diverse populations don't realize that and so as the open source leader we wanted to shine a light on the contributions that some of our underrepresented populations are making an open source that trying to inspire more people to join communities to participate to contribute we know that more diverse populations help us to innovate more rapidly they help us to solve more problems and so it's really important especially today with what's happening in the world lots of important problems to solve that we really invite more of our other upper sort of populations to join in the communities awesome so absolutely there there are lots of people that volunteer there are lots of people that do it as their day job Megan why don't we fuck you have a roll open source first Google as a strong legacy and open source in general so tell us a little bit about you know what you were working on and what you're being recognized for here yeah well a lot of the recognition comes from my work with the Drupal Association I had been with Drupal for 8 years hoping to build that foundation in supporting that community and lots of different ways from fundraising to community events running sprints and helping with their developer tools and so that was a lot what the award was based on and now I'm at Google and I've been here for about a year and a half and I run their research and operations and so Google is an expression of open source and we have thousands of people using thousands of projects and we want to make sure they do it well they feel supported that we are good citizens in the projects that we participate in and so my group provides the operational support to make sure that happens you know you know what one of the things that's always fascinating when I go to Red Hat there's so many projects there's so many participants from various walks of life last year at the show there was a lot of discussion of you know it was a survey really and said that you know the majority of people that tribute now it's actually part of their job as opposed to when I think back you know you go back a couple of decades ago and it was like oh well in my spare time or down in my basement I'm contributing here so maybe talk a little bit about the communities and you know what what Megan is embodying CSUN she worked on project now she's working for obviously a good partner of Red Hat's that does a lot of open source yeah I love the way she described what her role is at Google and that it's fascinating and Google has been really a huge contributor in the community for in communities for years and years so I think that what we're seeing with the communities and people saying yeah now it's part of my day job is that you know 20 years ago the idea that open-source development would be kind of on par with proprietary development and on par in terms of being used in the enterprise and the data center was something that I think many people questioned proprietary software was the way that most people felt comfortable making sure that their intellectual property is protected and that users could feel comfortable using it within the parameters required so that was the way it was 20 years ago and then now you think about you know most companies there is some form of open source that is part of their infrastructure so now open source is no longer you know that disrupter but it's really a viable alternative and organizations really want to use both they want to have some propriety or they want to have some open sources so that means like every company is going to need to have some need to understand how to participate in communities how to influence communities and Red Hat's a great partner in helping enterprise customers to be able to understand what those red Nets might look like and then helping to kind of harden it make sure things that they need to have application city to have certified or certified and make it really usable in a way they're comfortable with in the enterprise that's kind of special Red Hat place but it's just a tribute to where we come in a world in terms of open source being really accepted and thriving and it helps us to innovate much more rapidly yeah and there's there's no better way to look at not only where we are but where we're going then talk about what's happening in the academic world so that gives it brings us Aneta so you are the academic award winner you're a PhD candidate so tell us a little bit about your participation and open source what it means to be part of this community my PhD project involves using virtual reality to measure the arm movements of people with stroke so we have participants coming in into our lab so they we're these 3d glasses and then they start seeing virtual objects in the 3d space and they use their hands to touch at these targets and make them disappear and we have all these movements data specially interpreters and then we write code and analyze the data and find out how much they have recovered within one year after stroke this is my PhD project but my involvement with open source happens they before like in starting from 2010 I have been editing Wikipedia and I have been writing several articles related to medicine and healthcare so that is where I started with open open knowledge and then I moved on words and after my medical studies I moved to research and worked on this awesome project and so there are multiple ways by which I have engaged with open source that's far that's awesome my understanding is also some of the roots that you had and some of the medical things that you're doing have an impact on what's happening today so obviously we're all dealing with the global pandemic in Koba 19 so I'd like to hear you know what your involvement there you know your data obviously is politically important that we have the right data getting to the right people as fast as possible definitely yes right now I'm working on writing creating content for Wikipedia writing on articles related to Kobe 19 so I mostly work on writing about its socio-economic impact writing about Kobe 19 testing and also about the disease in general mental health issues surrounding that social stigma associated began with it and so forth so I use all these high-quality references from the World Health Organization the United Nations and also from several journals and synthesize them and write articles on Wikipedia so we have a very cool project called wiki project code 19 on Wikipedia where people who are interested in writing articles creating data uploading images related to poet 19 come together and create some good content out of it so I am a very active participant there alright and making my understanding is you you also have some initiatives related to kovat 19 maybe you can tell us a little bit about those yeah well one I'm loosely affiliated with this kovat act now and that is a combination of developers data scientists epidemiologists and US state government officials and it's looking at how was the curve look like and how does that curve get flattened if governor's made decisions faster or differently than what they're making today and how does it impact the availability of ICU beds and ventilators and so that is a tool that's being used today by many decision-makers here in the US and my contribution to that was they needed some resources I reached into Google and found some smart generous volunteers that are contributing to the dataset and actually I just connected with Neda do this award program and now she's connected and is gonna start working on this as well yes oh that's fantastic yeah I mean dallisa you know we've known for a long time you want to move fast if you want to connect you know lots of diverse groups you know open sources is an important driver there what what else are you seeing in your group you know with your hat is the the people officer you know obviously this is a big impact not only on all of your customers partners but on fun Red Hatters themselves well it is a huge impact we're so fortunate that we have some experience working remotely we have about 25 percent of our population that historically works remotely so we have that as a foundation but certainly the quick move the rapid move to really thinking about our people first and having them work from home across the globe that is unprecedented and at this point we have some individuals who have been working from home for many many many week and others that are really in entering their fourth week so we're starting to have this huge appreciation for what it's like to work remotely and what we can learn about more effective inclusion so I think you know back to the idea of women and open source and diversity inclusion one of the things you may always prided ourself in is we focus on inclusion and we think about things like okay if the person is not in the room with their remote let's make sure for including them let's make sure they get to speak first etcetera well now we're learning what it's really like to be remote and for everyone to be remote and so we're creating this muscle as an organization I think most organizations are doing this right getting a muscle you didn't have before we really really having to think about inclusion in a different way and you're building a capability as an organization that you didn't have to appreciate those that are not in the room and to make sure they are included because no one's in the room you know we're really important pieces and dallisa you know one of the things that that's always great about Red Hat summit is you you bring together all these people as we just heard you know that your two Award winners here you know got connected through the awards so maybe give us a little bit of a peek as to what sort of things the community can still look forward to how they can continue to connect even though we're all going to be remote for this event yeah this event is is it going to be great event and I hope everyone joins us along our journey we are fortunate that Red Hat you know as the open source leader really wants to take a leadership position in thinking about how we can shine a light on opportunities for us to highlight the value of diversity and inclusion and so we've got a number of events not throughout the summit that we'd love people to join in and we're going to be celebrating our women and open-source again at our women's leadership community lunch is now not a lunch it is now a discussion unless you're having your lunch that you can check your desk but we're having a great conversation at that event I mean by people to join in and have a deeper conversation and also another look at our women in open source Award winners but these Award winners are just so amazing every year that applications that are submitted are just more and more inspiring and all the finalists were people that are so impressive so I love the fact that our community continues to grow and that they're more and more impressive people that are joining the community and that they're making those connections so that together we can you know really shine a light on the value that women bring to the communities and continue to inspire other underrepresented groups to join in and participate then a you know research obviously is an area where open-source is pretty well used but just give us a little bit of viewpoint from your standpoint yourself and your peers you know I would think from the outside that you know open sourced is just kind of part of the fabric of the tools that you're using is it something that people think specifically about a course or does it just come naturally that people are you know leveraging using and even contributing what what's available the tool I'm using is called cuteness it's an open source tool written in Python and so that gives me the possibility to have a look in deeper into the code and see what's actually inside for example I would like to know how what is the size of the target that is shown in the virtual space and I can fit know that correctly to the millimeters because it's available to me in open source so I think these are the advantages which researchers see when they have tools open-source tools and at the same time there's also a movement in Sweden and in most of Europe where they want the researchers are asking for publishing their articles in open access journals so they want most of their research be published as transparent as possible and there is also this movement where people want researchers want to have their data put in some open data city so that everybody can have a look at it and do analysis on the data and build up on that data if other people want to so there's a lot going from the open access side and knowledge side and also the open source side in the research community and I'm looking forward to what probably 19 will do to this movement in future and I am sure people will start using more more and more open-source tools because after the Manderly yeah making I'm curious from your standpoint when I think about a lot of these communities you know meetups are just kind of some of the regular fabric of how I get things done as well as you know just lots of events tie into things so when you're talking to your colleagues when you're talking to your peers out there how much is kind of the state of reality today having an impact in any any learnings that you can share with gaudí yeah that is definitely a challenge that we're going to figure out together and I am part of a group called Foss responders we are reaching out to projects and listening to their needs and amplifying their needs and helping to get them connected with resources and one of the top three areas of need include how do I run an online community event how do I replace these meetups and what is wonderful is that groups have been moving in this direction already and so who would release a guide of how they run online events and they provide some tooling as well but so has WordPress put out a guide and other projects that have gone down this path and so in the spirit of open source everyone is sharing their knowledge and Foss responders is trying to aggregate that so that you can go to their site find it and take advantage of it yeah definitely something I've seen one of the silver linings is you know these communities typically have been a lot of sharing but even more so everybody's responding everybody's kind of rallying to the cause don't want to give you the final word obviously you know this is a nice segment piece that we usually expect to see at Red Hat summit so what else do you want to help share where the community is final closing thoughts well I think that you know we're not done yet we have been so fortunate to be able to highlight you know the contributions that women make to open source and that is a honor that we get to take that role but we need to continue to go down this path we are not we're not done we have not made the improvement in terms of the the representative in our communities that will actually foster all of the improvements and all the solutions that need to happen in the world though we're going to keep down this pathway and really encourage everyone to think through how you can have a more inclusive team how you can make someone feel included if you're participating in a community or in an organization so that we really continue to bring in more diversity and have more innovation well excellent thank you so much Alisa for sharing it thank you too - both of you Award winners and really look forward to reading more online definitely checking out some of the initiatives that you've shared valuable pieces that hopefully everybody can leverage all right lots more coverage from Red Hat summit 2020 I'm Stu minimun and as always thank you for watching the cube [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science 2023 live from Stanford University. This is Lisa Martin. My co-host is Tracy Yuan. We're excited to be having great conversations all day but you know, 'cause you've been watching. We've been interviewing some very inspiring women and some men as well, talking about all of the amazing applications of data science. You're not going to want to miss this next conversation. Our guest is Gabriela de Queiroz, Principal Cloud Advocate Manager of Microsoft. Welcome, Gabriela. We're excited to have you. >> Thank you very much. I'm so excited to be talking to you. >> Yeah, you're on theCUBE. >> Yeah, finally. (Lisa laughing) Like a dream come true. (laughs) >> I know and we love that. We're so thrilled to have you. So you have a ton of experience in the data space. I was doing some research on you. You've worked in software, financial advertisement, health. Talk to us a little bit about you. What's your background in? >> So I was trained in statistics. So I'm a statistician and then I worked in epidemiology. I worked with air pollution and public health. So I was a researcher before moving into the industry. So as I was talking today, the weekly paths, it's exactly who I am. I went back and forth and back and forth and stopped and tried something else until I figured out that I want to do data science and that I want to do different things because with data science we can... The beauty of data science is that you can move across domains. So I worked in healthcare, financial, and then different technology companies. >> Well the nice thing, one of the exciting things that data science, that I geek out about and Tracy knows 'cause we've been talking about this all day, it's just all the different, to your point, diverse, pun intended, applications of data science. You know, this morning we were talking about, we had the VP of data science from Meta as a keynote. She came to theCUBE talking and really kind of explaining from a content perspective, from a monetization perspective, and of course so many people in the world are users of Facebook. It makes it tangible. But we also heard today conversations about the applications of data science in police violence, in climate change. We're in California, we're expecting a massive rainstorm and we don't know what to do when it rains or snows. But climate change is real. Everyone's talking about it, and there's data science at its foundation. That's one of the things that I love. But you also have a lot of experience building diverse teams. Talk a little bit about that. You've created some very sophisticated data science solutions. Talk about your recommendation to others to build diverse teams. What's in it for them? And maybe share some data science project or two that you really found inspirational. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I do love building teams. Every time I'm given the task of building teams, I feel the luckiest person in the world because you have the option to pick like different backgrounds and all the diverse set of like people that you can find. I don't think it's easy, like people say, yeah, it's very hard. You have to be intentional. You have to go from the very first part when you are writing the job description through the interview process. So you have to be very intentional in every step. And you have to think through when you are doing that. And I love, like my last team, we had like 10 people and we were so diverse. Like just talking about languages. We had like 15 languages inside a team. So how beautiful it is. Like all different backgrounds, like myself as a statistician, but we had people from engineering background, biology, languages, and so on. So it's, yeah, like every time thinking about building a team, if you wanted your team to be diverse, you need to be intentional. >> I'm so glad you brought up that intention point because that is the fundamental requirement really is to build it with intention. >> Exactly, and I love to hear like how there's different languages. So like I'm assuming, or like different backgrounds, I'm assuming everybody just zig zags their way into the team and now you're all women in data science and I think that's so precious. >> Exactly. And not only woman, right. >> Tracy: Not only woman, you're right. >> The team was diverse not only in terms of like gender, but like background, ethnicity, and spoken languages, and language that they use to program and backgrounds. Like as I mentioned, not everybody did the statistics in school or computer science. And it was like one of my best teams was when we had this combination also like things that I'm good at the other person is not as good and we have this knowledge sharing all the time. Every day I would feel like I'm learning something. In a small talk or if I was reviewing something, there was always something new because of like the richness of the diverse set of people that were in your team. >> Well what you've done is so impressive, because not only have you been intentional with it, but you sound like the hallmark of a great leader of someone who hires and builds teams to fill gaps. They don't have to know less than I do for me to be the leader. They have to have different skills, different areas of expertise. That is really, honestly Gabriela, that's the hallmark of a great leader. And that's not easy to come by. So tell me, who were some of your mentors and sponsors along the way that maybe influenced you in that direction? Or is that just who you are? >> That's a great question. And I joke that I want to be the role model that I never had, right. So growing up, I didn't have anyone that I could see other than my mom probably or my sister. But there was no one that I could see, I want to become that person one day. And once I was tracing my path, I started to see people looking at me and like, you inspire me so much, and I'm like, oh wow, this is amazing and I want to do do this over and over and over again. So I want to be that person to inspire others. And no matter, like I'll be like a VP, CEO, whoever, you know, I want to be, I want to keep inspiring people because that's so valuable. >> Lisa: Oh, that's huge. >> And I feel like when we grow professionally and then go to the next level, we sometimes we lose that, you know, thing that's essential. And I think also like, it's part of who I am as I was building and all my experiences as I was going through, I became what I mentioned is unique person that I think we all are unique somehow. >> You're a rockstar. Isn't she a rockstar? >> You dropping quotes out. >> I'm loving this. I'm like, I've inspired Gabriela. (Gabriela laughing) >> Oh my God. But yeah, 'cause we were asking our other guests about the same question, like, who are your role models? And then we're talking about how like it's very important for women to see that there is a representation, that there is someone they look up to and they want to be. And so that like, it motivates them to stay in this field and to start in this field to begin with. So yeah, I think like you are definitely filling a void and for all these women who dream to be in data science. And I think that's just amazing. >> And you're a founder too. In 2012, you founded R Ladies. Talk a little bit about that. This is present in more than 200 cities in 55 plus countries. Talk about R Ladies and maybe the catalyst to launch it. >> Yes, so you always start, so I'm from Brazil, I always talk about this because it's such, again, I grew up over there. So I was there my whole life and then I moved to here, Silicon Valley. And when I moved to San Francisco, like the doors opened. So many things happening in the city. That was back in 2012. Data science was exploding. And I found out something about Meetup.com, it's a website that you can join and go in all these events. And I was going to this event and I joke that it was kind of like going to the Disneyland, where you don't know if I should go that direction or the other direction. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And I was like, should I go and learn about data visualization? Should I go and learn about SQL or should I go and learn about Hadoop, right? So I would go every day to those meetups. And I was a student back then, so you know, the budget was very restricted as a student. So we don't have much to spend. And then they would serve dinner and you would learn for free. And then I got to a point where I was like, hey, they are doing all of this as a volunteer. Like they are running this meetup and events for free. And I felt like it's a cycle. I need to do something, right. I'm taking all this in. I'm having this huge opportunity to be here. I want to give back. So that's what how everything started. I was like, no, I have to think about something. I need to think about something that I can give back. And I was using R back then and I'm like how about I do something with R. I love R, I'm so passionate about R, what about if I create a community around R but not a regular community, because by going to this events, I felt that as a Latina and as a woman, I was always in the corner and I was not being able to participate and to, you know, be myself and to network and ask questions. I would be in the corner. So I said to myself, what about if I do something where everybody feel included, where everybody can participate, can share, can ask questions without judgment? So that's how R ladies all came together. >> That's awesome. >> Talk about intentions, like you have to, you had that go in mind, but yeah, I wanted to dive a little bit into R. So could you please talk more about where did the passion for R come from, and like how did the special connection between you and R the language, like born, how did that come from? >> It was not a love at first sight. >> No. >> Not at all. Not at all. Because that was back in Brazil. So all the documentation were in English, all the tutorials, only two. We had like very few tutorials. It was not like nowadays that we have so many tutorials and courses. There were like two tutorials, other documentation in English. So it's was hard for me like as someone that didn't know much English to go through the language and then to learn to program was not easy task. But then as I was going through the language and learning and reading books and finding the people behind the language, I don't know how I felt in love. And then when I came to to San Francisco, I saw some of like the main contributors who are speaking in person and I'm like, wow, they are like humans. I don't know, it was like, I have no idea why I had this love. But I think the the people and then the community was the thing that kept me with the R language. >> Yeah, the community factors is so important. And it's so, at WIDS it's so palpable. I mean I literally walk in the door, every WIDS I've done, I think I've been doing them for theCUBE since 2017. theCUBE has been here since the beginning in 2015 with our co-founders. But you walk in, you get this sense of belonging. And this sense of I can do anything, why not? Why not me? Look at her up there, and now look at you speaking in the technical talk today on theCUBE. So inspiring. One of the things that I always think is you can't be what you can't see. We need to be able to see more people that look like you and sound like you and like me and like you as well. And WIDS gives us that opportunity, which is fantastic, but it's also helping to move the needle, really. And I was looking at some of the Anitab.org stats just yesterday about 2022. And they're showing, you know, the percentage of females in technical roles has been hovering around 25% for a while. It's a little higher now. I think it's 27.6 according to any to Anitab. We're seeing more women hired in roles. But what are the challenges, and I would love to get your advice on this, for those that might be in this situation is attrition, women who are leaving roles. What would your advice be to a woman who might be trying to navigate family and work and career ladder to stay in that role and keep pushing forward? >> I'll go back to the community. If you don't have a community around you, it's so hard to navigate. >> That's a great point. >> You are lonely. There is no one that you can bounce ideas off, that you can share what you are feeling or like that you can learn as well. So sometimes you feel like you are the only person that is going through that problem or like, you maybe have a family or you are planning to have a family and you have to make a decision. But you've never seen anyone going through this. So when you have a community, you see people like you, right. So that's where we were saying about having different people and people like you so they can share as well. And you feel like, oh yeah, so they went through this, they succeed. I can also go through this and succeed. So I think the attrition problem is still big problem. And I'm sure will be worse now with everything that is happening in Tech with layoffs. >> Yes and the great resignation. >> Yeah. >> We are going back, you know, a few steps, like a lot of like advancements that we did. I feel like we are going back unfortunately, but I always tell this, make sure that you have a community. Make sure that you have a mentor. Make sure that you have someone or some people, not only one mentor, different mentors, that can support you through this trajectory. Because it's not easy. But there are a lot of us out there. >> There really are. And that's a great point. I love everything about the community. It's all about that network effect and feeling like you belong- >> That's all WIDS is about. >> Yeah. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Like coming over here, it's like seeing the old friends again. It's like I'm so glad that I'm coming because I'm all my old friends that I only see like maybe once a year. >> Tracy: Reunion. >> Yeah, exactly. And I feel like that our tank get, you know- >> Lisa: Replenished. >> Exactly. For the rest of the year. >> Yes. >> Oh, that's precious. >> I love that. >> I agree with that. I think one of the things that when I say, you know, you can't see, I think, well, how many females in technology would I be able to recognize? And of course you can be female technology working in the healthcare sector or working in finance or manufacturing, but, you know, we need to be able to have more that we can see and identify. And one of the things that I recently found out, I was telling Tracy this earlier that I geeked out about was finding out that the CTO of Open AI, ChatGPT, is a female. I'm like, (gasps) why aren't we talking about this more? She was profiled on Fast Company. I've seen a few pieces on her, Mira Murati. But we're hearing so much about ChatJTP being... ChatGPT, I always get that wrong, about being like, likening it to the launch of the iPhone, which revolutionized mobile and connectivity. And here we have a female in the technical role. Let's put her on a pedestal because that is hugely inspiring. >> Exactly, like let's bring everybody to the front. >> Yes. >> Right. >> And let's have them talk to us because like, you didn't know. I didn't know probably about this, right. You didn't know. Like, we don't know about this. It's kind of like we are hidden. We need to give them the spotlight. Every woman to give the spotlight, so they can keep aspiring the new generation. >> Or Susan Wojcicki who ran, how long does she run YouTube? All the YouTube influencers that probably have no idea who are influential for whatever they're doing on YouTube in different social platforms that don't realize, do you realize there was a female behind the helm that for a long time that turned it into what it is today? That's outstanding. Why aren't we talking about this more? >> How about Megan Smith, was the first CTO on the Obama administration. >> That's right. I knew it had to do with Obama. Couldn't remember. Yes. Let's let's find more pedestals. But organizations like WIDS, your involvement as a speaker, showing more people you can be this because you can see it, >> Yeah, exactly. is the right direction that will help hopefully bring us back to some of the pre-pandemic levels, and keep moving forward because there's so much potential with data science that can impact everyone's lives. I always think, you know, we have this expectation that we have our mobile phone and we can get whatever we want wherever we are in the world and whatever time of day it is. And that's all data driven. The regular average person that's not in tech thinks about data as a, well I'm paying for it. What's all these data charges? But it's powering the world. It's powering those experiences that we all want as consumers or in our business lives or we expect to be able to do a transaction, whether it's something in a CRM system or an Uber transaction like that, and have the app respond, maybe even know me a little bit better than I know myself. And that's all data. So I think we're just at the precipice of the massive impact that data science will make in our lives. And luckily we have leaders like you who can help navigate us along this path. >> Thank you. >> What advice for, last question for you is advice for those in the audience who might be nervous or maybe lack a little bit of confidence to go I really like data science, or I really like engineering, but I don't see a lot of me out there. What would you say to them? >> Especially for people who are from like a non-linear track where like going onto that track. >> Yeah, I would say keep going. Keep going. I don't think it's easy. It's not easy. But keep going because the more you go the more, again, you advance and there are opportunities out there. Sometimes it takes a little bit, but just keep going. Keep going and following your dreams, that you get there, right. So again, data science, such a broad field that doesn't require you to come from a specific background. And I think the beauty of data science exactly is this is like the combination, the most successful data science teams are the teams that have all these different backgrounds. So if you think that we as data scientists, we started programming when we were nine, that's not true, right. You can be 30, 40, shifting careers, starting to program right now. It doesn't matter. Like you get there no matter how old you are. And no matter what's your background. >> There's no limit. >> There was no limits. >> I love that, Gabriela, >> Thank so much. for inspiring. I know you inspired me. I'm pretty sure you probably inspired Tracy with your story. And sometimes like what you just said, you have to be your own mentor and that's okay. Because eventually you're going to turn into a mentor for many, many others and sounds like you're already paving that path and we so appreciate it. You are now officially a CUBE alumni. >> Yes. Thank you. >> Yay. We've loved having you. Thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> For our guest and for Tracy's Yuan, this is Lisa Martin. We are live at WIDS 23, the eighth annual Women in Data Science Conference at Stanford. Stick around. Our next guest joins us in just a few minutes. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the Cube's special program series Women of the Cloud brought to you by AWS. I'm your host Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome Megan Hayes to the program now. Megan is the COO of Blackstone's Technology Group. Megan, great to have you on the program. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks for having me. >> Tell me a little bit about your background, a little bit about your role as COO. >> Yeah, definitely, so I joined Blackstone about six months ago. And, I serve as our chief operating officer of Blackstone Tech and Innovations. And, really what that means is I look at all of our aspects of operational excellence. I run our agile practice. I look at our labor strategies, what we do with workforce, our finance function and what we do with our communications strategy, training and really just everything that centers around continuous improvement and how we really drive culture across technology. So, it's pretty dynamic role. It really looks to serve across how we enable our entire tech organization, and it's just a lot of fun. >> That's good. Fun is good. Sounds like it's a very comprehensive role as well. I was looking at you on LinkedIn. You've got background in physics and engineering. Talk to me a little bit about your path to getting to the COO level. >> Yeah. I mean, it has been a non-linear path for sure. I think a big part of it has been just jumping at opportunities that have had lots of different aspects of technology, product, data, anything that I've had a passion in has, you know, revolved around technology. And so, I think being a good COO is about asking really good questions, being thoughtful and looking for opportunities where organizations can keep driving excellence, keep getting better. One of the things that I think is really important about being a good COO is just thinking innovatively about, you know, what's next and what's on the horizon in terms of, you know, the future of technology and how you can enable that within an organization. And, you know, one like ours, we're always kind of looking for what's next. So, you know, I think for me it's been about taking those next opportunities, about really continuing to drive that across finance. So, I've had positions across various industries within the financial services sector. And, have really had a great opportunity to be here at Blackstone, so I'm very excited. >> Sounds like you have a really diverse background. And, I always think those non-linear paths, mine wasn't linear either. And, I talk to very few people whose career paths are linear, but then, you get so much thought diversity, because you bring in different perspectives. I can imagine that's a huge advantage to the COO role at Blackstone. I'd love to get your advice on how would you advise the audience watching this who may be looking to grow their careers in tech? What are some of the key recommendations that you would deliver to them? >> Yeah, I think about it in two ways. I mean, the first thing for me is about asking for feedback. One of the things that has really come to me throughout my career has been people that are willing to give those tough messages to really push you to grow. So, one of the things that I have been challenged with is exploring, you know, what do I need to get better at? Where do I really need to lean in to growing those skills? And, part of that is it comes in messages from others where they're willing to, you know, reach out to you and give you that feedback proactively. But, sometimes you have to seek it out. And, you have to really, you know, ask peers, mentors, people that you have seen grow in their own careers, people that you admire and you wonder how they got there themselves. And, just really seeking out feedback, asking what you can do to grow yourself. And, not being scared of hearing those tough messages and leaning into it. So, you know, I think that is the first part of it. And, really fostering and cultivating a sense of not being fearful of hearing those messages of feedback. So, thing one for me is go after that. It's never a bad time in your career to really listen for feedback and to think about what you can do to keep getting better. And so, I would encourage anybody to really think about ways that they can continue to grow and continue to cultivate new skills and new competencies and look at those opportunities to get better. And then, the second thing is, you know, don't be scared of taking on opportunities or roles where you don't have, you know, every last skill. I think, predominantly, along with women, we try to see ourselves as being perfect in every aspect of a job opportunity. We really want to know that we're going to be great. And, oftentimes, where you see the most growth is when you don't have some of those skills where maybe you have, you know, 40 or 50% of what's on that job spec and the rest of it is well, you know, I'll learn as I go. And, that is where the growth is. So, don't be scared of being really interested in a job opportunity where you have part of what's on that job rec, and you don't have all the rest of it. And, lean into that, and let a little bit of that fear, a little bit of the anxiety drive you to keep getting better and cultivating those skills in that new opportunity. I've been fortunate to have senior leaders and other mentors in my career see things in me that I couldn't see and encouraged me to take opportunities that I didn't think I could be successful at, and I've gone after those things and then seen the growth, you know, in hindsight. So, I would really encourage people to look at those opportunities where it's a little bit scary and then go for it, because that really cultivates a whole new set of skills. And, when you look back on those, you know, challenges and those opportunities that you jump at, you're like, wow, you know, I would do that again. And, you keep doing that, and you find yourself going. You know, now I know so many more things than when I started, so the combination of feedback and taking risks, I think, really helps elevate someone's career over, you know, the course of decades. So, those are two things that I think could be just incredibly powerful throughout a person's career. >> Absolutely. I couldn't agree with your advice more. You know, I think it's open your ears, open your mind, open your heart, but also to your point, I was doing some research a few months ago for a Women in Tech segment, and I saw that women will apply, and you talked about this, for a job say on LinkedIn if they meet, they won't apply unless they meet 100% of the job requirements, whereas men will apply if they meet only 40. And, your point is you don't have to meet all the job requirements. Very few people do. Take the risk, and to your point, there's so many new skills and new growth areas that you can unlock for yourself by just, you know, taking the risk, maybe it's a little bit scary, but I always think a goal isn't worth having if it doesn't give you some butterflies in your stomach. >> Exactly. Exactly. And, I think so many of those butterflies, it's the adrenaline. It's the motivator. And, it is the thing that will push you to take the training course, to read the book, to reach out to a friend, to seek out help. And, that is how we continue to get better. It's, you know, education at its finest. It's upscaling at its finest. And, I don't think that, you know, being perfect at something is necessarily the best thing. It is the imperfect, you know, nature of learning and education that actually makes us, you know, better at what we do and more introspective about where the failures are that we can continue to grow. So, you know, I think that we should be a bit fearless when it comes to our own growth in our careers. >> Yes. I love that, becoming more fearless. There's so many positive things that can come from it as a result. Talk to me now about some of the successes you've had where you've really helped solve problems for customers or even for Blackstone related to the cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things for us has been, you know, the journey of migration. So, when you go from going off of your data centers and migrating to the cloud, that is a tremendous effort for any company and a, you know, especially one as we look to do it here at Blackstone. So, we've migrated over 240 applications to the cloud. We've shut down our four data centers. That's a tremendous effort that the team went through. And, you know, a huge success story, I think, across all of the teams that had to come together to do that. The biggest benefit truly was the cultural one though. The ways that the teams collaborated. The ways that they came together, how they had to work across the different leaders, across the different teams and figure out how to get things done. And so, that culture of collaboration that was really instilled across the day to day teams that were so used to working together. And then, all of a sudden so many teams across different executives had to come together and figure out how to get the work done. That has been instilled now, I think in the ways that we work to date. And then, the upscaling and the leverage and the opportunities where they could focus on things that created business opportunities for our, you know, consumers and our businesses across the company. And, working on those higher leverage opportunities has been phenomenal. And so, those are the things, those carry forward lessons that we've been able to take with us and are here today. And so, as we've been, you know, planning for the years ahead, what the tech strategy and how do we look at things? You know, those cultural benefits have been massive successes, I think, for our team. And, you know, something that have really been instilled now in the culture of our, you know, our tech work force. >> It sounds like you've really positively impacted the ethos of the company. And, I think, you know, projects like what you talked about migrating 240 apps, being able to shut down four data centers, I don't think you can do that without cultural change at the same time, and that cultural transformation is really the fuel that has to be there for digital transformation to be successful. I kind of see them like this, like they're linked. And, it sounds like you guys have done a great job at Blackstone about really, really driving that cultural change for the better for permanent, but also for the better across all lines of business. >> Yeah, and I think it opens up, you know, for people what they can do. They start to see the momentum build. They start to collaborate together. They start to share their expertise with one another. And, I think they see those linkages getting created and they realize, okay, I've been doing this day to day, you know, before the migration took place. And now that there's this forcing function and the teams come, you know, they come together in a big room. They're trying to figure out large scale plans. They're trying to understand how to get things done, how to leverage the latest and greatest technologies, how to make things more modern and reach those huge milestones. All of sudden it enables this creativity and this uplift that they haven't seen from, you know, prior ways of working, and I think that just creates a huge amount of ways of thinking about how we're going to work going forward. And, the creativity just starts to flow for the future. And, it creates a lot of leverage and uplift going forward. And so, you know, that culture that just starts to get instilled and ingrained also then becomes a huge recruiting, you know, lever for us. And then, also a retention lever for us, because people start to work in a more, you know, modern stack and a more modern way of being. >> It's momentum, right. I mean, absolutely it's momentum that's driving that flywheel. I want to switch topics a little bit and get your perspectives on diversity. We talk about it so often in technology, in every industry, but there are still some challenges there. I'd love to get your perspectives on some of the things that you've seen. And, what are some of the improvements that you think can be made where diversity is concerned? >> Yeah, I mean, diversity is still a huge challenge in so many facets of the pipeline as I, you know, think about it. And, as I've experienced it and the recruiting aspects, the retention aspects and even the elevation of great talent. So, in technology, specifically, it's still a challenge to really ensure that we can get into, you know, minority and lower income communities to ensure that there's great access to training and to folks that really want to participate in this kind of a field. It's expensive. It has a high barrier to entry, and to really get out there and teach people these great and innovative technologies is difficult. And, you know, from my perspective, the essence of technology is diversity, because it's about how you look at the future. It's about how you innovate. It's about how you see things with a different perspective. And so, it's vital that we have people from all different walks of life, from all different experiences, you know, having these skills, and can see the world through, you know, blends that they experience the world from. And so, it's not just the beginning of the pipeline ensuring the people have access, but also when they have a passion for it, and when we recruit them, and when we give them opportunities to have a career and flourish that we can also make sure that it's a place where they can flourish, be promoted and then be retained but also elevate and feel a sense of community that is inclusive and that represents them and that they have, you know, the encouragement to continue to like have amazing, amazing careers where their perspectives are valued, and their experiences are valued. And so, you know, I think the entire pipeline is something where there is still so much work to do. I think for my own experience, you know, it can be challenging. It can be challenging to be unique with your own perspective and with your own experience kind of walking through a tech world whether it's as a woman or whether it's as, you know, a person of color, or whether it's as a person with a different sexual orientation and any person that has any intersectionality. And so, there's all these different ways that we look at the world and our experiences. And, technology, again, is this essence of diversity and development. So, I think that we still have a lot of challenges in how we build the pipeline and retain the pipeline. And, for me, I always try to think of like how do you use your own experiences to cultivate that in others, to mentor and to build programming that allows your organization to bring in the best and the brightest and to really give back? Because, that is- >> Yeah. >> Really the best way to do that. >> It really is. And, I like you you talk about, you know, the diversity pipeline, and we think of filling the front end, but to your point, it's really got to be across the life cycle of that, from a retention perspective, attraction talent, retaining them, making sure people feel that they're included, that their voice matters, that their thought diversity impact matters. Last question for you as we wrap up here. Just what are some of the things that are next on the horizon that you see in terms of cloud? How do you see your role evolving? >> Yeah, I mean, I think really the biggest thing from a cloud perspective really is the talent and the diversity. I think that the more that we cultivate skills, upscale our engineering population and continue to look for ways to modernize our applications that inherently will attract new talent, new ways of thinking, new skills that are coming out of all sorts of organizations, all sorts of colleges, all sorts of institutions that will attract the right kind of talent that we want here at Blackstone. It's really exciting to think about what we can do for our companies that we invest in, for our businesses here at Blackstone, for our engineers and the value that we can bring, you know, across the communities that we work within. And so, I think that we really just want to continue to track that talent and drive that value, really, across the organization. >> Awesome. Megan, it's been such a pleasure having you on the program talking about your role as COO of Blackstone's Technology Group, the great successes that you've had where cloud is concerned, your thoughts and recommendations on diversity and what you see as next. We really appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you for having me. It's been great. >> Oh, our pleasure. For Megan Hayes, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube special program series, Women at the Cloud brought to you by AWS. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello everyone. I'm John furry with the cube. We're here, live on the ground in Seattle, Washington at the Bellevue Hilton for thes marketplace seller conference. It's kind of like the one and a half inaugural event. They have their first event in 2019, and now with the pandemic, they're re rebooting it, but it's really all about AWS's marketplace and partner network coming together, creating an experience for how people will be buying software and how people will be selling through with their ecosystem. I'm Jennifer, the cube we're here with Megan. Fontain, who's the VP of cloud seek. Who's a seller and partner of AWS making great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thank you so much. It's, it's nice to be back in person and it's great to be with you. >>So watching the progression of how Amazon web services is evolving the marketplace and the partner network, you're starting to see some patterns. One is, I'll say they have their own stuff, and they're addressing that in the room, but they're really letting the thousand flowers bloom in the ecosystem. You hear that every year reinvent, even when Andy Jesse who's now the CEO of Amazon would say, no, we want the best of breed. Best product wins. Adam. Celeste's the same view, new leadership here, the combination of APN partner network with the marketplace now partner organization, APO is the big news. They're open. They're building an API service layer between their old marketplace to create this new model here. What's your, what's your, what's your take? What's your seller view? >>Yeah, so our marketplace and APN journey started with AWS about three years ago. And I think something that was the most profound to me out of the keynote this morning was that Chris Gus, who runs the API organization for ISVs talked about marketplace as the automation layer for how AWS will partner going forward. So an independent software vendor likes, we see that as opening up the door for two things. One, we get to leverage the great global scale and platform of AWS, but then secondly, it really brings together this idea that we will sell together to the end customer through the marketplace. And we will also sell as partners through co-sell and APM. >>You know, I love these kind of new, new development models around channel partners, ISVs at the end of the day, buyers are buying software. Yes. And they're cloud they're on a cloud journey. You're the VP of cloud at the company, your company seek take a minute to explain what your company's known for, what you guys do, your relationship with the market. You're an ISV. Yeah. Where are you guys? Cuz you guys ha have a good thing going on here. What do you guys do? What are you known for >>Sure. So seek is market leading software for advanced analytics for the manufacturing industry. So we're squarely in that industry. ISV, we sell SAS solutions to business buyers who want two things. One is they want technology that they can deploy quickly in their organizations drive that great business value ROI that drives the next level of investment in technology seeks unique offering in marketplace is that we've solved a lot of the challenges around that operational data in manufacturing. So manufacturing the industry, it's going through massive transformation, supply chain, disruption, or coming out of that, the globalization of manufacturing. And yet they have data that they've stored for 20, 30 years, that they're still in the first generation of trying to gain insights from. So that's why seek exists. It's really to bring the insights outta that data and then help the manufacturing customers we work with. Get to the cloud. >>What's interesting. I like your perspective and I want to follow up on that because data analytics used to be this thing. Well, I got a database. Yeah. You hosted on some storage and you got structured data, unstructured data. Okay. You got scale. But now you've got data platforms. You've got data mesh. I think Gardner actually has a different term, but gets a whole nother conversation. Data platforms are diverse. Yeah. They're pervasive. They're part of core infrastructure in cloud. It's not like a point solution anymore. It's gotta be integrated and customers are trying to work on, this is one of the hardest problems today. Yeah. In cloud transformation is the data layer, the relationship to other services. Yeah. >>So the Dataverse common data models. How APIs will interact with data. The trend there though is something that it is the ecosystem that will bring value to customers because no database is gonna serve every need. Right. And you think about the data layer. It really has to solve the problems whereby any application, any user, any insight can be generated almost seamlessly. And we're really on the first wave of that journey. But I think a, an element for seek that we certainly understand with our customers is that data alone is not an end objective, right? If it doesn't lead to a decision and an action and a workflow that humans can take to go drive and improvement in their business process, then you haven't tapped into the, you know, value of that technology >>When a buyer comes to the marketplace. Yeah. And they see your listing and solutions. Yes. What are they getting? What are they, what, what are they buying? >>So for seek, we've radically simplified that we, we really embrace this idea of simplification. We just sell, seek. So we have one seat listing in the AWS marketplace, all applications of seek they're all available there. We really leaned into the enterprise procurement models. So private offers are how we do the most of our business on marketplace. And it really went from a stage of experimentation where couple of customers, you know, what is this marketplace? Maybe we'll buy a few of our business applications there all the way through to now we're starting to see the demand side come through for customers where it's not just their security software or their DevOps or infrastructure software. They wanna buy solutions like seek including line of business buyers through a common catalog in the marketplace. >>Great. So I wanna ask you, cuz I want to give you the opportunity to give the pitch, the customer watching right now. Yeah. What's the pitch. Why seek, why this listing? Why should they hit the purchase button? I wish it was that easy. Why should they, why should they what's the pitch? Sure. >>So the first thing is seek through marketplace is a five clicks on three screens procurement experience. So compare that to months and months of back and forth with contracts and purchase orders and vendor set up, this is five less than five minutes, few screens, couple of clicks. And you can buy a multi-year subscription of seek to cover your entire enterprise. The second pitch is that it's a SaaS application that now can be deployed within hours. And then your users, your insights, your value is starting within the first couple hours. This is not a heavy lift it project. That's gonna take months. And then lastly seek specifically. So seek, because we're validated in the marketplace has been well architected for AWS cloud. We have that, you know, stamp of credibility. And we are leading in this space for manufacturing organizations who want cloud native secure software for analytics on their operational data. >>That's awesome. And customers have the challenge when they think about data, the use case security, yes governance, there's a variety of different use cases. What are you seeing as the top three use cases for C? >>So on the there's two lines of that question. The first is really the line of business use cases. And those are all about what outcome are we gonna drive? Are we gonna approve efficiency in your factory? Are we gonna reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Those are the kinds of use cases on the business side that that seek works with our customers on, on the it side. They wanna know that we can access data securely, that we can be part of an ecosystem where they can bring in aerations and algorithms and machine learning and new applications. And they also wanna know that we are sustainable. So meaning that we're driving constant innovation that is easy for them to consume and to gain access, to, to drive the next level of >>Improvement. My final AWS marketplace seller question is, yeah. How does the procurement process through marketplace help you and your customers what's in it for them? What value do the, does the customer get going through AWS procuring? >>So there's really really three. The first is you get a validated set of a catalog of solutions, right? That AWS says, you know, we undergo a rigorous process technically and commercially to be in the marketplace. The second thing for procurement effect of for procurement professionals is that they can leverage their cloud committed spend with AWS. So as they commit more expense and spend with AWS, now these marketplace purchases can be credited to that committed expense. We found that brings it and the business together with procurement to really work more collectively on that. And then the third piece is, imagine buying software where you don't need legal, you know, back and forth, back and forth because we're using a standard doula that thousands of other software companies are using in the marketplace today. >>I thought the keynote had a great line. We are not just a website of a catalog. We are a API service layer. Yes. With automation, more like a C I C D pipe lining. Yes. Of software. Yeah. And we are hearing more and more about software supply chain, more about scaling. This is kind of the future of procurement. Why wouldn't you buy direct, pick a few buttons and assemble your solutions at scale. >>There's some amount of tenant consequences that we've really learned as well. It brings it and the business closer together. So the it person wants to know, well, what is this seek, you know, piece of my AWS invoice. And so they get more engaged earlier in the process with procurement, with the business. And we've actually found that it brings internally for our customers, more people to the seat at the table around what are the applications and how will they govern them across the enterprise. >>Megan, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me here at the, at the conference, the seller S marketplace. I have to ask you, we were talking before we came on camera, you made a comment. I'd like you to share this comment with some commentary. You said I'm the VP of cloud transformation. And in the future that might title might not exist. Explain what you mean there, cuz I think this is kind of a telling moment about where we are at this point in the industry. >>Sure. So maybe it's, maybe it's funny to sort of envision a future where your role doesn't exist. But I think, you know, it's a to innovators do that, right? And for us we're a software company. That's going through the transition on-prem to SAS, you know, cloud native sets of applications, but in the pretty near term fore, really the next two years, all of our business will be SaaS and cloud. And so we won't need a separate VP or a separate team or separate function. It will just be how the business operates. >>Megan, thanks for running cue, Meghan bine, who is SI, she's a cloud VP of cloud transformation, VP of cloud, and she's successful. The title will go away and she'll move on to some other great valuable things like running the business. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. Okay. This is a cube here in Seattle. We're covering the eights marketplace seller conference. Part of APN merging with Amazon marketplace now called the APO Amazon partner organization. I'm John ER, with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Mm. >>Okay. Hello, and welcome to the Cubes Coverage of the International Women in Tech Showcase featuring National Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We have a great guest here of any theory a PJ head of aerospace and satellite for A W S A P J s Asia Pacific in Japan. Great to have you on many thanks for joining us. Talk about Space and International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks, John. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. >>So obviously, aerospace space satellite is an area that's growing. It's changing. AWS has made a lot of strides closure, and I had a conversation last year about this. Remember when Andy Jassy told me about this initiative to 2.5 years or so ago? It was like, Wow, that makes a lot of sense Ground station, etcetera. So it just makes a lot of sense, a lot of heavy lifting, as they say in the satellite aerospace business. So you're leading the charge over there in a p J. And you're leading women in space and beyond. Tell us what's the Storey? How did you get there? What's going on. >>Thanks, John. Uh, yes. So I need the Asia Pacific business for Clint, um, as part of Amazon Web services, you know, that we have in industry business vertical that's dedicated to looking after our space and space customers. Uh, my journey began really? Three or four years ago when I started with a W s. I was based out of Australia. Uh, and Australia had a space agency that was being literally being born. Um, and I had the great privilege of meeting the country's chief scientist. At that point. That was Dr Alan Finkel. Uh, and we're having a conversation. It was really actually an education conference. And it was focused on youth and inspiring the next generation of students. Uh, and we hit upon space. Um, and we had this conversation, and at that stage, we didn't have a dedicated industry business vertical at A W s well supported space customers as much as we did many other customers in the sector, innovative customers. And after the conversation with Dr Finkel, um, he offered to introduce me, uh, to Megan Clark, who was back back then the first CEO of the Australian Space Agency. So that's literally how my journey into space started. We had a conversation. We worked out how we could possibly support the Australian Space Agency's remit and roadmap as they started growing the industry. Uh, and then a whole industry whole vertical was set up, clinic came on board. I have now a global team of experts around me. Um, you know, they've pretty much got experience from everything creating building a satellite, launching a satellite, working out how to down link process all those amazing imagery that we see because, you know, um, contrary to what a lot of people think, Uh, space is not just technology for a galaxy far, far away. It is very much tackling complex issues on earth. Um, and transforming lives with information. Um, you know, arranges for everything from wildfire detection to saving lives. Um, smart, smart agriculture for for farmers. So the time of different things that we're doing, Um, and as part of the Asia Pacific sector, uh, my task here is really just to grow the ecosystem. Women are an important part of that. We've got some stellar women out here in region, both within the AWS team, but also in our customer and partner sectors. So it's a really interesting space to be. There's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of opportunities and there's an incredible amount of growth so specific, exciting space to be >>Well, I gotta say I'm super inspired by that. One of the things that we've been talking about the Cuban I was talking to my co host for many, many years has been the democratisation of digital transformation. Cloud computing and cloud scale has democratised and change and level the playing field for many. And now space, which was it's a very complex area is being I want kind of democratised. It's easier to get access. You can launch a satellite for very low cost compared to what it was before getting access to some of the technology and with open source and with software, you now have more space computing things going on that's not out of reach. So for the people watching, share your thoughts on on that dynamic and also how people can get involved because there are real world problems to solve that can be solved now. That might have been out of reach, but now it's cloud. Can you share your thoughts. >>That's right. So you're right, John. Satellites orbiting There's more and more satellites being launched every day. The sensors are becoming more sophisticated. So we're collecting huge amounts of data. Um, one of our customers to cut lab tell us that we're collecting today three million square kilometres a day. That's gonna increase to about three billion over the next five years. So we're already reaching a point where it's impossible to store, analyse and make sense of such massive amounts of data without cloud computing. So we have services which play a very critical role. You know, technologies like artificial intelligence machine learning. Help us help these customers build up products and solutions, which then allows us to generate intelligence that's serving a lot of other sectors. So it could be agriculture. It could be disaster response and recovery. Um, it could be military intelligence. I'll give you an example of something that's very relevant, and that's happening in the last couple of weeks. So we have some amazing customers. We have Max our technologies. They use a W S to store their 100 petabytes imagery library, and they have daily collection, so they're using our ground station to gather insight about a lot of changing conditions on Earth. Usually Earth observation. That's, you know, tracking water pollution, water levels of air pollution. But they're also just tracking, um, intelligence of things like military build up in certain areas. Capella space is another one of our customers who do that. So over the last couple of weeks, maybe a couple of months, uh, we've been watching, uh, images that have been collected by these commercial satellites, and they've been chronicling the build up, for instance, of Russian forces on Ukraine's borders and the ongoing invasion. They're providing intelligence that was previously only available from government sources. So when you talk about the democratisation of space, high resolution satellite images are becoming more and more ridiculous. Um, I saw the other day there was, uh, Anderson Cooper, CNN and then behind him, a screenshot from Capella, which is satellite imagery, which is very visible, high resolution transparency, which gives, um, respected journalists and media organisations regular contact with intelligence, direct intelligence which can help support media storytelling and help with the general public understanding of the crisis like what's happening in Ukraine. And >>I think on that point is, people can relate to it. And if you think about other things with computer vision, technology is getting so much stronger. Also, there's also metadata involved. So one of the things that's coming out of this Ukraine situation not only is tracking movements with the satellites in real time, but also misinformation and disinformation. Um, that's another big area because you can, uh, it's not just the pictures, it's what they mean. So it's well beyond just satellite >>well, beyond just satellite. Yeah, and you know, not to focus on just a crisis that's happening at the moment. There's 100 other use cases which were helping with customers around the globe. I want to give you a couple of other examples because I really want people to be inspired by what we're doing with space technology. So right here in Singapore, I have a company called Hero Factory. Um, now they use AI based on Earth observation. They have an analytics platform that basically help authorities around the region make key decisions to drive sustainable practises. So change detection for shipping Singapore is, you know, it's lots of traffic. And so if there's oil spills, that can be detected and remedy from space. Um, crop productivity, fruit picking, um, even just crop cover around urban areas. You know, climate change is an increasing and another increasing, uh, challenges global challenge that we need to tackle and space space technology actually makes it possible 15 50% of what they call e CVS. Essential climate variables can only be measured from space. So we have companies like satellite through, uh, one of our UK customers who are measuring, um, uh, carbon emissions. And so the you know, the range of opportunities that are out there, like you said previously untouched. We've just opened up doors for all sorts of innovations to become possible. >>It totally is intoxicating. Some of the fun things you can discuss with not only the future but solving today's problems. So it's definitely next level kind of things happening with space and space talent. So this is where you start to get into the conversation like I know some people in these major technical instance here in the US as sophomore second year is getting job offers. So there's a There's a there's a space race for talent if you will, um and women talent in particular is there on the table to So how How can you share that discussion? Because inspiration is one thing. But then people want to know what to do to get in. So how do you, um how do you handle the recruiting and motivating and or working with organisations to just pipeline interest? Because space is one of the things you get addicted to. >>Yeah. So I'm a huge advocate for science, technology, engineering, math. We you know, we highlights them as a pathway into space into technology. And I truly believe the next generation of talent will contribute to the grand challenges of our time. Whether that climate change or sustainability, Um, it's gonna come from them. I think I think that now we at Amazon Web services. We have several programmes that we're working on to engage kids and especially girls to be equipped with the latest cloud skills. So one of the programmes that we're delivering this year across Singapore Australia uh, we're partnering with an organisation called the Institute for Space Science, Exploration and Technology and we're launching a programme called Mission Discovery. It's basically students get together with an astronaut, NASA researcher, technology experts and they get an opportunity to work with these amazing characters, too. Create and design their own project and then the winning project will be launched will be taken up to the International space station. So it's a combination of technology skills, problem solving, confidence building. It's a it's a whole range and that's you know, we that's for kids from 14 to about 18. But actually it, in fact, because the pipeline build is so important not just for Amazon Web services but for industry sector for the growth of the overall industry sector. Uh, there's several programmes that were involved in and they range from sophomore is like you said all the way to to high school college a number of different programmes. So in Singapore, specifically, we have something called cloud Ready with Amazon Web services. It's a very holistic clouds killing programme that's curated for students from primary school, high school fresh graduates and then even earlier careers. So we're really determined to work together closely and it the lines really well with the Singapore government's economic national agenda, um so that that's one way and and then we have a tonne of other programmes specifically designed for women. So last year we launched a programme called She Does It's a Free online training learning programme, and the idea is really to inspire professional women to consider a career in the technology industry and show them pathways, support them through that learning process, bring them on board, help drive a community spirit. And, you know, we have a lot of affinity groups within Amazon, whether that's women in tech or a lot of affinity groups catering for a very specific niches. And all of those we find, uh, really working well to encourage that pipeline development that you talk about and bring me people that I can work with to develop and build these amazing solutions. >>Well, you've got so much passion. And by the way, if you have, if you're interested in a track on women in space, would be happy to to support that on our site, send us storeys, we'll we'll get We'll get them documented so super important to get the voices out there. Um and we really believe in it. So we love that. I have to ask you as the head of a PJ for a W S uh aerospace and satellite. You've you've seen You've been on a bunch of missions in the space programmes of the technologies. Are you seeing how that's trajectory coming to today and now you mentioned new generation. What problems do you see that need to be solved for this next generation? What opportunities are out there that are new? Because you've got the lens of the past? You're managing a big part of this new growing emerging business for us. But you clearly see the future. And you know, the younger generation is going to solve these problems and take the opportunities. What? What are they? >>Yes, Sometimes I think we're leaving a lot, uh, to solve. And then other times, I think, Well, we started some of those conversations. We started those discussions and it's a combination of policy technology. We do a lot of business coaching, so it's not just it's not just about the technology. We do think about the broader picture. Um, technology is transferring. We know that technology is transforming economies. We know that the future is digital and that diverse backgrounds, perspective, skills and experiences, particularly those of women minority, the youth must be part of the design creation and the management of the future roadmaps. Um, in terms of how do I see this going? Well, it's been sort of we've had under representation of women and perhaps youth. We we just haven't taken that into consideration for for a long time now. Now that gap is slowly becoming. It's getting closer and closer to being closed. Overall, we're still underrepresented. But I take heart from the fact that if we look at an agency like the US Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, that's a relatively young space agency in your A. I think they've got about three or 400 people working for them at this point in time, and the average age of that cohort John, is 28. Some 40% of its engineers and scientists are women. Um, this year, NASA is looking to recruit more female astronauts. Um, they're looking to recruit more people with disabilities. So in terms of changing in terms of solving those problems, whatever those problems are, we started the I guess we started the right representation mix, so it doesn't matter. Bring it on, you know, whether it is climate change or this ongoing crisis, productive. Um, global crisis around the world is going to require a lot more than just a single shot answer. And I think having diversity and having that representation, we know that it makes a difference to innovation outputs. We know that it makes a difference to productivity, growth, profit. But it's also just the right thing to do for so long. We haven't got it right, and I think if we can get this right, we will be able to solve the majority of some of the biggest things that we're looking at today. >>And the diversity of problems in the diversity of talent are two different things. But they come together because you're right. It's not about technology. It's about all fields of study sociology. It could be political science. Obviously you mentioned from the situation we have now. It could be cybersecurity. Space is highly contested. We dated long chat about that on the Last Cube interview with AWS. There's all these new new problems and so problem solving skills. You don't need to have a pedigree from Ivy League school to get into space. This is a great opportunity for anyone who can solve problems because their new No one's seen them before. >>That's exactly right. And you know, every time we go out, we have sessions with students or we're at universities. We tell them, Raise your voices. Don't be afraid to use your voice. It doesn't matter what you're studying. If you think you have something of value to say, say it. You know, by pushing your own limits, you push other people's limits, and you may just introduce something that simply hasn't been part of before. So your voice is important, and we do a lot of lot of coaching encouraging, getting people just to >>talk. >>And that in itself is a great start. I think >>you're in a very complex sector, your senior leader at AWS Amazon Web services in a really fun, exciting area, aerospace and satellite. And for the young people watching out there or who may see this video, what advice would you have for the young people who are trying to navigate through the complexities of now? Third year covid. You know, seeing all the global changes, um, seeing that massive technology acceleration with digital transformation, digitisation it's here, digital world we're in. >>It could >>be confusing. It could be weird. And so how would you talk to that person and say, Hey, it's gonna be okay? And what advice would you give? >>It is absolutely going to be okay. Look, from what I know, the next general are far more fluent in digital than I am. I mean, they speak nerd. They were born speaking nerd, so I don't have any. I can't possibly tell them what to do as far as technology is concerned because they're so gung ho about it. But I would advise them to spend time with people, explore new perspectives, understand what the other is trying to do or achieve, and investing times in a time in new relationships, people with different backgrounds and experience, they almost always have something to teach you. I mean, I am constantly learning Space tech is, um it's so complicated. Um, I can't possibly learn everything I have to buy myself just by researching and studying. I am totally reliant on my community of experts to help me learn. So my advice to the next generation kids is always always in this time in relationships. And the second thing is, don't be disheartened, You know, Um this has happened for millennia. Yes, we go up, then we come down. But there's always hope. You know, there there is always that we shape the future that we want. So there's no failure. We just have to learn to be resilient. Um, yeah, it's all a learning experience. So stay positive and chin up, because we can. We can do it. >>That's awesome. You know, when you mentioned the Ukraine in the Russian situation, you know, one of the things they did they cut the Internet off and all telecommunications and Elon Musk launched a star linked and gives them access, sending them terminals again. Just another illustration. That space can help. Um, and these in any situation, whether it's conflict or peace and so Well, I have you here, I have to ask you, what is the most important? Uh uh, storeys that are being talked about or not being talked about are both that people should pay attention to. And they look at the future of what aerospace satellite these emerging technologies can do for the world. What's your How would you kind of what are the most important things to pay attention to that either known or maybe not being talked about. >>They have been talked about John, but I'd love to see more prominent. I'd love to see more conversations about stirring the amazing work that's being done in our research communities. The research communities, you know, they work in a vast area of areas and using satellite imagery, for instance, to look at climate change across the world is efforts that are going into understanding how we tackle such a global issue. But the commercialisation that comes from the research community that's pretty slow. And and the reason it's loads because one is academics, academics churning out research papers. The linkage back into industry and industry is very, um, I guess we're always looking for how fast can it be done? And what sort of marginal profit am I gonna make for it? So there's not a lot of patients there for research that has to mature, generate outputs that you get that have a meaningful value for both sides. So, um, supporting our research communities to output some of these essential pieces of research that can Dr Impact for society as a whole, Um, maybe for industry to partner even more, I mean, and we and we do that all the time. But even more focus even more. Focus on. And I'll give you a small example last last year and it culminated this earlier this month, we signed an agreement with the ministry of With the Space Office in Singapore. Uh, so it's an MOU between AWS and the Singapore government, and we are determined to help them aligned to their national agenda around space around building an ecosystem. How do we support their space builders? What can we do to create more training pathways? What credits can we give? How do we use open datasets to support Singaporeans issues? And that could be claimed? That could be kind of change. It could be, um, productivity. Farming could be a whole range of things, but there's a lot that's happening that is not highlighted because it's not sexy specific, right? It's not the Mars mission, and it's not the next lunar mission, But these things are just as important. They're just focused more on earth rather than out there. >>Yeah, and I just said everyone speaking nerd these days are born with it, the next generations here, A lot of use cases. A lot of exciting areas. You get the big headlines, you know, the space launches, but also a lot of great research. As you mentioned, that's, uh, that people are doing amazing work, and it's now available open source. Cloud computing. All this is bringing to bear great conversation. Great inspiration. Great chatting with you. Love your enthusiasm for for the opportunity. And thanks for sharing your storey. Appreciate it. >>It's a pleasure to be with you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay. >>Thanks, Manny. The women in tech showcase here, the Cube is presenting International Women's Day celebration. I'm John Ferrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mm mm.

>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering PagerDuty summit 2019 brought to you by PagerDuty. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Q. We're a PagerDuty summit. It's the fourth year of the show. He's been here for three years. It's amazing to watch it grow. I think it's finally outgrown the Western Saint Francis here in lovely downtown San Francisco and we're really excited to be joined by our next guest. He's Alex Solomon, the co founder, co founder and CTO PagerDuty. Been at this over 10 years. Alex, first off, congratulations. And what a fantastic event. Thank you very much and thank you for having me on your show. So things have changed a lot since we had you on a year ago, this little thing called an IPO. So I'm just curious, you know, we have a lot of entrepreneurs. I watch a show as a founder and kind of go through this whole journey. What was that like? What are some of the things you'd like to share from that whole experience? >>Yeah, it was, it was incredible. I I, the word I like to use is surreal. Like just kind of going through it, not believing that it's real in a way. And adjoining by my, my lovely wife who came, came along for this festivities and just being able to celebrate that moment. I know it is just a moment in time and it's not, it's not the end of the journey certainly, but it is a big milestone for us and uh, being able to celebrate. We invited a lot of our customers, our early customers have been with us for years to join us in that, a celebration. Our investors who have believed in us from back in 2010. Right, right. We were just getting going and we just, we just had a great time. I love it. I love 10 year overnight success. 10 years in the making. >>One of my favorite expressions, and it was actually interesting when Jenn pulled up some of the statistics around kind of what the internet was, what the volume of traffic was, what the complexity in the systems are. And it's really changed a lot since you guys began this journey 10 years ago. Oh, it has. I mean back then, like the most popular monitoring tool is Nagios and new Relic was around but just barely. And now it's like Datadog has kind of taken over the world and the world has changed. We're talking about not just a microservices by containers and serverless and the cloud basically. Right. That's the kind of recurring theme that's changed over the last 10 years. But you guys made some early bets. You made bets on cloud. He made bets on dev ops. He made bets on automation. Yeah, those were pretty good. >>Uh, those, those turn out to be pretty good places to put your chips. Oh yeah. Right place, right time and um, you know, some, some experiential stuff and some just some raw luck. Right. All right, well let's get into it. On top of some of the product announcements that are happening today, what are some of the things you're excited to finally get to showcase to the world? Yeah, so one of the big ones is, uh, related to our event intelligence release. Uh, we launched the product last year, um, a few months before summit and this year we're making a big upgrade and we're announcing a big upgrade to the product where we have, uh, related incidents. So if you're debugging a problem and you have an incident that you're looking at, the question you're gonna ask is, uh, is it just my service or is there a bigger widespread problem happening at the same time? >>So we'll show you that very quickly. We'll show you are there other teams, uh, impacted by the same issue and we'll, we, we actually leveraged machine learning to draw those relationships between ongoing incidents. Right. I want to unpack a little bit kind of how you play with all these other tools. We, you know, we're just at Sumo logic a week or so ago. They're going to be on later their partner and people T I think it's confusing. There's like all these different types of tools. And do you guys partner with them all? I mean, the integration lists that you guys have built. Um, I wrote it down in service now. It's Splunk, it's Zendesk, it goes on and on. And on. Yeah. So explain to folks, how does the PagerDuty piece work within all these other systems? Sure. So, um, I would say we're really strong in terms of integrating with monitoring tools. >>So any sort of tool that's monitoring something and we'll admit an alert, uh, when something goes down or over an event when something's changed, we integrate and we have a very wide set of coverage with all, all of those tools. I think your like Datadog, uh, app dynamics, new Relic, even old school Nagios. Right. Um, and then we've also built a suite of integrations around all the ticketing systems out there. So service now a JIRA, JIRA service desk, um, a remedy as well. Uh, we also now have built a suite of integrations around the customer support side of things. So there'll be Zendesk and Salesforce. That's interesting. Jen. Megan had a good example in the keynote and kind of in this multi system world, you know, where's the system of record? Cause he used to be, you want it, everybody wanted it to be that system of record. >>They wanted to be the single player in the class. But it turns out that's not really the answer. There's different places for different solutions to add value within the journey within those other applications. Yeah, absolutely. I, I think the single pane of glass vision is something that a lot of companies have been chasing, but it's, it's, it's really hard to do because like for example, NewRelic, they started an APM and they got really good at that and that's kind of their specialty. Datadog's really good at metrics and they're all trying to converge and do everything and become the one monitoring solution to the Rooney rule them all right. But they're still the strongest in one area. Like Splunk for logs, new Relic and AppDynamics for APM and Datadog for metrics. And, um, I don't know where the world's going to take us. Like, are they, is there going to be one single monitoring tool or are, are you going to use four or five different tools? >>Right. My best guess is your, we're going to live in a world where you're still gonna use multiple tools. They each can do something really well, but it's about the integration. It's about building, bringing all that data together, right? That's from early days. We've called pager duty, the Switzerland monitoring, cause we're friends with everyone when we're partners with everyone and we sit on top right a work with all of these different roles. I thought her example, she gave him the keynote was pretty, it's kind of illustrative to me. She's talking about, you know, say your cables down and you know, you call Comcast and it's a Zendesk ticket. But >>you know then that integrates potentially with the PagerDuty piece that says, Hey we're, you know, we're working on a problem, you know, a backhoe clipped the cable down your street. And so to take kind of that triage and fix information and still pump that through to the Zen desk person who's engaging with the customer to actually give them a lot more information. So the two are different tracks, but they're really complimentary. >>Absolutely. And that's part of the incident life cycle is, is letting your customers know and helping them through customer support so that the support reps understand what's going on with the systems and can have an intelligent conversation with the customer. So that they're not surprised like a customer calls and says you're down. Oh, good to know. No, you want to know about that urge, which I think most people find out. Oh yeah. Another thing >>that struck me was this, this study that you guys have put together about unplanned work, the human impact of always on world. And you know, we talk a lot in tech about unplanned maintenance and unplanned downtime of machines, whether it's a, a computer or a military jet, you know, unplanned maintenance as a really destructive thing. I don't think I've ever heard anyone frame it for people and really to think about kind of the unplanned work that gets caused by an alert and notification that is so disruptive. And I thought that was a really interesting way to frame the problem and thinking of it from an employee centric point of view to, to reduce the nastiness of unplanned work. >>Absolutely. And that's, that V is very related to that journey of going from being reactive and just reacting to these situations to becoming proactive and being able to predict and, and, uh, address things before they impact the customer. Uh, I would say it's anywhere between 20 to 40 or even higher percent of your time. Maybe looking at software engineers is spent on the some plant work. So what you want to do is you want to minimize that. You want to make sure that, uh, there's a lot of automation in the process that you know what's going on, that you have visibility and that the easy things, the, the repetitive things are easy to automate and the system could just do it for you so that you, you focus on innovating and not on fixing fires. Right? Or if you did to fix the fire, you at least >>to get the fire to the right person who's got the right tone to fix the type. So why don't we just, you know, we see that all the time in incidents, especially at early days for triage. You know, what's happening? Who did it, you know, who's the right people to work on this problem. And you guys are putting a lot of the effort into AI and modeling and your 10 years of data history to get ahead of the curve in assigning that alerted that triage when it comes across the, the, uh, the trans though. >>Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's another issues. Uh, not having the right ownership, get it, getting people, um, notified when they don't own it and there's nothing they can do about it. Like the old ways of, of uh, sending the alert to everyone and having a hundred people on a call bridge that just doesn't work anymore because they're just sitting there and they're not going to be productive the next day I work cause they're sitting there all night just kind of waiting for, for something to happen. And uh, that's kinda the, the old way of lack of ownership just blasted out to everyone and we have to be a lot more target and understand who owns what and what's, what, which systems are being impacted and they only let getting the right people on the auto call as quickly as possible. The other thing that came up, which I thought, you know, probably a lot of people are thinking of, they only think of the fixing guy that has to wear the pager. >>Sure. But there's a whole lot of other people that might need to be informed, be informed. We talked about in the Comcast example that people interacting with the customer, ABC senior executives need to be in for maybe people that are, you know, on the hook for the SLA on some of the softer things. So the assembly that team goes in need, who needs to know what goes well beyond just the two or three people that are the fixing people? Right. And that's, that's actually tied to one of our announcements, uh, at summit a business, our business response product. So it's all about, um, yes, we notify the people who are on call and are responsible for fixing the problem. You know, the hands on keyboard folks, the technical folks. But we've expanded our workflow solution to also Lupin stakeholders. So think like executives, business owners, people who, um, maybe they run a division but they're not going to go on call to fix the problem themselves, but they need to know what's going on. >>They need to know what the impact is. They need to know is there a revenue impact? Is there a customer impact? Is there a reputational brand impact to, to the business they're running. Which is another thing you guys have brought up, which is so important. It's not just about fixing, fixing the stuck server, it's, it is what is the brand impact, what is the business impact is a much broader conversation, which is interesting to pull it out of just the, just the poor guy in the pager waiting for it to buzz versus now the whole company really being engaged to what's going on. Absolutely. Like connecting the technical, what's happening with the technical services and, and uh, infrastructure to what is the, the impact on the business if something goes wrong. And how much, like are you actually losing revenue? There's certain businesses like e-commerce where you could actually measure your revenue loss on a per minute or per five minute basis. >>Right. And pretty important. Yeah. All right Alex. So you talked about the IPO is a milestone. It's, it's fading, it's fading in the rear view mirror. Now you're on the 90 day shot clock. So right. You gotta keep moving forward. So as you look forward now for your CTO role, what are some of your priorities over the next year or so that you kind of want to drive this shit? Absolutely. So, um, I think just focusing on making the system smarter and make it, uh, so that you can get to that predictive Holy grail where we can know that you're going to have a big incident before it impacts our customers. So you can actually prevent it and get ahead of it based on the leading indicators. So if we've seen this pattern before and last time it causes like an hour of downtime, let's try to catch it early this time and so that you can address it before it impacts for customers. >>So that's one big area of investment for us. And the other one I would say is more on the, uh, the realtime work outside of managing software systems. So, uh, security, customer support. There's all of these other use cases where people need to know, like, signals are, are being generated by machines. People need to know what's going on with those signals. And you want to be proactive and preventative around there. Like think a, a factory with lots and lots of sensors. You don't want to be surprised by something breaking. You want to like get proactive about the maintenance of those systems. If they don't have that, uh, you know, like say a multi-day outage in a factory, it can cost maybe millions of dollars. Right. >>All right, well, Alex, thanks a lot. Again, congratulations on the journey. We, uh, we're enjoying watching it and we'll continue to watch it evolve. So thank you for coming on. Alright, he's Alex. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at PagerDuty summit 2019 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation welcome everybody to this cube conversation my name is Dave Volante and we're here in our Palo Alto studios Medusa doc R is here he's an investor and entrepreneur and a friend we're do great to see you again thanks so much for coming in thank you it's a head too long it is you and I sat down and had a conversation on the cube so it's been well yeah yeah well you've been on the cube a bunch and you've a I've seen some great conversations that you had with with with Peter and John so thanks for making the time and coming back in thank you so I want to start with when I go around and talk to executives every CEO is trying to get digital right you know whatever that means you know they know it's important and they're trying to figure it out they know it relates to data they know they have to leverage data they know this buzzword of digital transformation what are you seeing when you talk to executives and companies how real is this digital transformation is it a fad or is it a substantive good question to look from my view point of view digital transformation is the word people use but at the end of the day CIOs have to disrupt their businesses every CEO has to figure out am i cutting the cost I'm a helping companies grow in revenue from a look at from a board perspective and what people are looking at the investor perspective most CEOs are CEOs are looking at somehow looking running their operations on a day-to-day basis to that point I think most CEOs are expecting see I was to do the new innovative things at you probably hearing that people are adding CDO as a title yeah so it's up to see I were to see will it be the innovate to CIO it's like you have two kids like in your case your four kids you have two how do you make sure that all four kids are given the equal responsibility so Ciara has to decide look I have budget X X by two goes to my existing business X by two goes to the new business that decision making is not happening with the see I was today and that's what the distal transformation has to be is going on in a what I call not in a disruptive manner but the CEOs who have figure out how to disrupt it I really taking the next stage the next thing that people are interested there is where do I start right you have all should I start with my CRM supply chain should I start with my IT you got to figure out what all the but start someplace you pick one the area but that has to be disruptive in the sense we are living in the age of where I call it autonomous everything right there's a data there is cloud and there's AI our mission like what are you these three are such a large disruption in our industry see us how to figure out and say what can I do in terms of cost saving in terms of revenue growth but that can't be incremental it has to be revolutionary so I often say we've decades we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law in this industry that's where innovation came from no longer it's as you said it's data now for the last 10 years and you were involved in this we were collecting all this data we lowered the cost of collecting data and and and in running data warehouses with Hadoop but now data's plentiful insights aren't so you have data you have to apply machine intelligence to that data and then cloud gives you scale so that's like the new innovation cocktail so you agree that digital I agree digital transformation is real and the other dynamic mudo is you see companies are because it's data are able to traverse industries used to be you're in an industry if you're in financial services that's it if you're in healthcare that's it now you see Amazon's and content apples into financial services so people are afraid of getting disrupted you've got this new innovation cocktail so your point was really get started so you've got a shift resources you don't have unlimited budget right so how do people do that how are they taking cost out of the business and how are they reapportioning that cost for innovation really good so I'll give you two examples from Megan again thinking of where I see it one is for CIOs has something called IT operations IT operation is a very big piece that people need to figure out how to get the cost out of it the IT operations cannot be developed we've been running IT for last 30 years I mean what are the word they used I know Gartner uses the word called AAA Hobbs I don't care what the word is but the key is you have to run your 18 autonomous manner we are living in the age of your trading is autonomous your my your four on game by four on K is being traded through hedge funds your add technologies autonomous with Facebook Google and Amazon with all data when I saw with with Casper and Splunk we made cybersecurity autonomous to whatever extent threat detection but when it came to IT operations and IT customer support today manual if I may see over right now I'll invest on customer service and support to start as a point of what can I do to make my service agents better or what can I do to make the end users or the users experience better without going to a human can I eliminate the human in the equation here the mileage may vary it's like the driverless consequence you have level 1 to level 5 they may like to have autopilot some people may have a fully autonomous car depending on the organization you got to have a right amount of autonomous City in your organization both for IT operations and IT Service Management that hasn't happened and that will be happen in the next 4 5 years so let's talk about that you were at ServiceNow for a period of time they've obviously disrupted the old-line helpdesk and you know they really did a job on BMC and hewlett-packard etc are they in a position to take that next step in when you go to service now analogy here folks talk about AI and infusing AI obviously there's a lot of data being collected is that the right model I mean if they've automated forms but you think you're talking about something more I help us understand that sure looks abused know is in a great position they'll continue to do well it's a great company right I think what's going to happen next is how can companies like ServiceNow take her to the next stage right either become a partner with ServiceNow or service now itself we'll do it a little bit new companies will be for me one angle is forces enterprises is this game going to be for enterprises same playbook as a playbook for the cloud so imagine an apps that are born on the cloud their IT operations data their ticketing data where will that go to that means we think through enterprise data which is enterprise apps and so as they need to figure out so if I am a company today if I'm daring I need to decide what will I do for my enterprise applications and services what do I do it for my cloud Orion services so that is addition you have to make it at the top once it goes down the next level then able to decide is it for IT support customer support or IT operations what can I do in terms of augmenting there if I do is just to make my agents better you can take the cost out of the equation the cost should be is can I automate to the point I can eliminate 50% of my DevOps 50% of my SR ease my role of the come is in the next four five years this 70 80 % of devops I tell you when I study jobs will be gone that should be automated it should be a driverless IT autonomous IT people should have him that's not even a moonshot goal we all in America let's make great our great again this is our time it's IT if we don't do it some other country will do it Chile is going to eat us for lunch so he basically putting forth the scenario a DevOps was essentially a stepping stone and you see that largely going away it has to be it has been automated I'm not going to hide hundreds of tunas I called Manuel tuners right yes I'll need some DevOps people I need some IT admin things that system cannot do it algorithmically should go to humans at some point but there are enough things like if you want to install something in your laptop why should I talk to somebody else if I want to upgrade to Microsoft Office if I want to buy a CRM license if I want to get a zoom provisioning why do I need to talk to a human being in this equation can I oughta mater complete autonomous can I get to a level five autonomous in IT right that's what I'm looking towards robotic process automation play a role here can our PA we've done some some events with automation anywhere new iPad you're seeing huge valuations uipath as supposedly as another six billion dollar evaluation I mean you know amazing unicorn plus plus plus can those technologies be applied to solve this problem yes or no I think it depends on what the HRP are under star doing IP is a great topic right not be resolved very successful what I'm talking about is our IT operations and IT support and customer support automation can our PA guys take their technology their substrate a platter sure they can try it but these are all have to be grown organically doing this in nit going for customer service and support doing it for the cloud has its own its own skin its own platform like you and me were talking earlier if I'm doing this thing on Amazon why wait and launch a VM I won't even do it like if a new ticket comes in I should be doing through kinases I should be doing through my lambda functions I shouldn't be my cost of goods with so much that I want it should not cost me anything until the point Dave generates a ticket to me first all why should Dave generate a ticket right look at the very much extreme model of the test laws just like our today tells me when should I service my car why should you do the same thing like I should be coming and telling your SharePoint is going to go down they have today your Kube application you cannot do an interview with me too unless you fix it that is what the world wants to go so back to service management for minutes so in the old days our service manager was too cumbersome we really didn't have a single CMDB it just really didn't work that well it didn't change anything a lot of tickets that's what it did service now obviously solved that that that problem but what I'm inferring from what you're saying is it's still too expensive the entire infrastructure it needs to be more streamlined and automation is the answer absolutely so I think if you take it'll add layers and layers the first is in the support starting women from CMDB most organizers say my CMD that I still all are stale that's never accurate how can I get a dynamic view of Dave's ink right I should know when and that has to be done at the level of services and apps and at kubernetes level 2 container level once I have a blueprint of what my organization is then I need to know how do I handle the tickets against it then I can I do a health monitoring for all my CIS right I should be telling the outage put it at the another what business carries is my business running correctly you do have a downtime what is going to happen even though if I am false positives few times people are expecting saying that tell me proactively what services will impact and who will be impacted so I can take a corrective action and that will happen starting from CMDB automation I actually call it cloud CMDB our dynamic CMDB in the world of cloud and dynamic let's make a good cmdbs dynamic and accurate then take it to the ultimate outage prediction right if I can give your business up time and outage prediction that would be Nirvana are you telling me that IT cannot solve it you and me are saying in Palo Alto a driverless cars are going around we are going to see it in our lifetime IT can be so complex that the car can be autonomous but IT cannot be I don't buy them well I mean you hear about all the systems are down or my systems are slow today that's that's a form of outage that costs Fortune 2000 companies and money I mean it's you know 50 60 thousand dollars a minute in this in some cases so the and I think sometimes people aren't aware as to how much how much revenue is lost to downtime or lost productivity so there's huge huge gains to be made there and it seems that the cloud is the platform on which you're going to you're gonna build these these these natural choice it has to be yeah and it has we want a cloud to you can't say we are in the eight if you are a noose new cloud you're building it I tell people bill it is a multi cloud your same code should work on GCP Amazon and Azure right and on VMware if you want to be a private cloud but should be same the same codebase should be able to compile and run on all multiple processor kubernetes micro services that's really the enabler there right right at once run it anywhere interesting conversation multi-cloud you're hearing a lot of discussion you know certainly in DC the Jedi case Oracle is contesting that when you read the rulings from the General Accounting Office that basically the the DoD determined that multi-cloud is is less secure more expensive more complex now that's the DoD everybody's gonna have multi cloud because multi-cloud is multi vendor sure but it's interesting you don't hear Amazon talking about multi cloud other than you don't want to do it because it's too expensive but everybody else is talking about multi cloud is kubernetes somewhat of a threat to that Amazon posture I don't think I think if you look at Amazon is saying they call it hybrid cloud the word may be different multi cloud or hybrid cloud yeah say they've already partnered like the best public cloud partner with the best pressure of your house is awesome announcement right so vehement software ever talk to Pat gal singer and his team and look they got VMware working with AWS vice-versa so that's it great I mean maybe even call it a two ecosystem but they got that whole thing working there yeah anything with agile is going to do with their public cloud on Azure with as you understand I'll just tack on prom yeah right everybody has 70 mgcp will figure out so then after a while if you and me as a customer I should be able to move things many times it happen is I'm not going to move things dynamically for a nibble but if I want I don't want to vendor lock it I want a code such that if tomorrow something happens I should be able to have an option to move my code base to a different cloud and that's what multi-cloud will happen as a requirement as you build it how much you exercise are not people will design software going for a formal techno so a whole new vector of conversation I would love to get your opinion on that multi-cloud opportunity obviously Cisco's going after VMware's in the strong position there certainly Microsoft is is vying for that you have a ton of startups looking at this IBM with the Red Hat acquisition now is in a in a pretty strong position you know given its open source chops how do you see that whole multi-cloud you know vendor landscape shaking out I think I got really good I have a TD for this at the end when the dust settles you won't have 100 aircraft carriers you will have only four or five yeah so it's like what happened in 90s compact went away Dec went away so same thing is going to happen here there will be four or five vendors will survive there will be Amazon's as yours maybe GCPs VMware's maybe it's Cisco and IBM talks about a I mean there's like maybe alley cloud in China you won't have hundreds of cloud so the number is already decreasing it will let be 10 will it be 5 will it before that still you will see the tall rise but it's already been the whole council isn't happening so if I'm a customer if I'm a vendor if I'm a startup or a public company I'm going to build it only for a few these multi cloud vendors I'm not going to across hundred yeah because the marginal economics of those those hyper clouds we've been saying this for years if there's just so much more compelling and at the end of the day if the economics are 10x less expensive and more attractive that they're gonna win you know and and I think even though you have thousands and thousands of service providers who call themselves cloud we're talking about a different kind of cloud it's got one of those you know it when you see it types of things and I'm going to add something so if you take this back to your earlier question about where the disruption is happening we talked about all the customer service support an IT service management industry but imagine if an app is born on the cloud call it cloud native applications you have millions of new apps that are there on this cloud platforms what is that going to do where is the data going there they want another customer service and support applicant on their platform it currently it's like I'm in your house I'm drinking your wine but when it comes to managing my customers of an operation I will take your log data your even data or take indeed and put in somebody else's house even though John is your partner when you put it there it doesn't make sense it should run it inside yours so all these vendors would want a native application that is running on their platform solving their customer data which hasn't happened yet well this is interesting so obviously Oracle has its own cloud but you're seeing well see work day Salesforce service now all these SAS companies just used to build their own clouds they're building their own data centers Chuck Chuck Philips oven forces I don't friends don't let friends build data centers so maybe he's prescient maybe the trend is that these apps are going to largely predominantly run in the public cloud the Oracle IBM notwithstanding they've got the resources to maybe you know tough it out is that the scenario that you see I have take the consumer companies whether you take V work Airbnb uber all these guys you are already seeing them on to some opinion maybe they have their own datacenter but there are vastly learning and public clouds right and you have already seen that's even the big SAS vendors whether it's Adobe yeah it'll be solid partner with Microsoft Azure workday is partnering with Amazon you saw em Salesforce partnering with Google cloud and AW so you're only seeing these vendors the large SAS when there's already saying in order for me for economics wise it doesn't make sense whether it's for my marketing cloud my service cloud my ecommerce cloud I want this to run on this cloud platform to get scale cost of economics and also I need my services that are built there with a new substrate like we talked about that's lambda functions to kinases I'm not going to do it on my platform but and that trend is going on it's just accelerating so how are you spending your time these days you've had a very successful entrepreneur investor you've been CEO of multiple companies what do you do in these days I'm look I'm very happy with what I'm doing right now so I spend a lot of time with this company called I set up that's right I'm even we talked about it it's a startup company in Palo Alto their vision is to apply like what we got AI ops applying AI for digital transformation for AI customer service I trps oh I like the region look I want to spend time with companies which are taking a big bet right it's like in our IT industry nobody talks about moonshot goals let's take a bigger bet let's take a much vision of for five year ten years what can we disrupt right and I look at those companies I invest with those companies and spending time with them I'm learning a lot in the process I'm contributing back to the those companies well you know sitter I was on Twitter yesterday with with a little group we're having an interesting discussion about you know how things are changing the dynamics of where innovation comes over so we started this conversation with that sort of new innovation cocktail and there just seems to be a whole new fabric of services not only it's not just remote cloud services anymore it's these embedded services that are can think they can act they can sense and it's ubiquitous now even the edge autonomous vehicles we're entering a whole new era it's very exciting right and again one thing that we didn't talk to see Mike and son and my it again it's society has to have regulations and will come if you look at the what's happened in this whole call center customer service industry if autonomous city will happen of any level from level even if I automate 30 percent of your customer service and you don't touch a human being when you are at home for your Comcast to your nest imagine all those services inside your home from field service to if they get automated what's going to happen first of all if Sally's gonna improve your costs are going to reduce if I'm a business I can take that money and invest somewhere else but more importantly those most of those things it's it's a big disruption happening in the outsourced industry right these are your jobs in China India Philippines Vietnam my concern is dart saying that there will be a certain is going to happen people are not paying attention to that and this this strain has already left the station yeah it's going to come to a platform again some next platform but next for five years you'll see a tremendous disruption in this area of digital transformation well I remember a couple decades ago there was a lot of talk about well you people spending a lot of money on IT but that you don't see it in the productivity numbers and all of a sudden because of the PC revolution the productivity went through the roof you're hearing similar sort of discussions now we feel like productivity is about to explode because of what you're saying here absolutely and again the per back to the RP has already shown the value our peers no longer in each category it's what we talked about success renders from you iPad automation anywhere blue prism that just on the back end of the supply chain and RPF cell taking the two front office applying that to customer service facing to your crm facing that your IT hasn't happened yet can I automatically can I ought Americans right from an employee experience to customer experience that productivity if you employ it you'll get more customers doing that yeah it scares people but but it's the future so you better embrace it and lean in voodoo thanks so much oh let's go always measure to see you alright thanks for watching everybody this is David day from our studios in Palo Alto and we'll see you next time thank you [Music]

from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello and welcome to this special cube conversation here in Palo Alto California cube headquarters I'm Jennifer echoes the cube our guest here is Megan Eisenberg CMO of a new hot company called trip actions formerly the CMO at MongoDB before that taki sign we've known each other some advisory boards great to see you yes great to see you as well so exciting new opportunity for you at trip actions just transitioned from MongoDB which by the way had great earnings they did what was the big secret to Mongo DB z earnings tell us well it's fresh and I think they're executing and their growth is amazing they're bringing their costs down I mean they're they've got product market fit their developers love them and so I'm proud and not surprised you're there for four years yeah transformed their go-to market so that fruits coming off the tree yes yeah it's exciting to see the you know process people technology all coming together and seeing them scale and do so well in the markets yes you know being here in 20 years living in California Palo Alto you see the rocket ships the ones that flame out the ones that make it and there's a pattern right when you start to see companies that are attracting talent ones that have pedigree VCS involved yeah raising the kind of rounds in a smart way where there's traction product market fit you kind of take special notice and one of the companies that you're now working for trip actions yes seems to have the parameters so it's off the pad it's going up its orbit or taking off you guys have really growing you got a new round of funding one hundred fifty million dollars yes unique application in a market that is waiting to be disrupted yes travel about company you work for transactions trip actions is a fast growing business travel platform we service customers like we work slack zoom box and we're growing we're adding 200 customers a month and it's amazing just to see these fast-growing companies right when they hit product market fit I think the keys are they've gotten a massive addressable market which we have 800 billion online travel they're solving a pain and they're disrupting a legacy the legacy providers that are out there we're three and a half years old and we are you know really focused on the customer experience giving you the choice that you want when you book making it easy down to six minutes not an hour to book something and we've got 24/7 support which not many can compete with you know it's interesting you know I look at these different ways of innovation especially SAS and mobile apps you know chapter one of this wave great economics yeah and once you get that unit economics visibility say great SAS efficacious happened but now we're kind of in a chapter two I think you guys kind of fit into this chapter to where it's not just SAS cuz you know we've seen travel sites get out there you book travel it's chapter two of SAS is about personalization you see machine learning you got cloud economics new ventures are coming out of the woodwork where you could take a unique idea innovate on it and disrupt a category that seems to be what you guys are doing talk about this new dynamic because this is not just another travel app when you guys are doing gets a unique angle on this applying some tech with the Corpse talked about that this chapter to kind of assess business I think when I think about chapter 2 I think about all the data that's out there I think about the machine learning I think about how we understand the user and personalize everything to them to make it frictionless and these apps that I love on my phone are because they they know what I want before I want it and I just took a trip to Dallas this week and the app knew I needed to check in it was one click told me my flight was delayed gave me options checked me in for my hotel I mean it was just amazing experience that I haven't seen before and it's really if you think about that that business travel trip there's 40 steps you have to do along the way there's got to be a way to make it easier because all we want to do is get to the business meeting and get back we don't want to deal with weather we don't want to deal with Hotel issues or flight changes and our app is specific to when you look at it you've got a chat 24/7 and someone's taking care of you that concierge service and we can do that because the amount of data we're looking at we're learning from it and we make it easier for travel manager half the people go rogue and don't even book through their travel solution it's because it's not tailored to them so this is the thing I want to get it so you guys aren't like a consumer app per se you have a specific unique target audience on this opportunity its travel management I'm I'm gonna date myself but back when I broke into the business they would have comes like Thomas Cook would handle all the travel for youlet Packard when I worked there in the 80s and you had these companies I had these contracts and they would do all the travel for the employees yes today it's hard to find that those solutions out there yes I would say it's hard to find one that you love and trip Actions has designed something that our travelers love and it is it's for business travel it's for your business trips it's taking care of your air your hotel your car your rail whatever you need and making sure that you can focus on the trip focus on getting there and not just the horrible experience we've all had it you travel a lot I traveled certainly back and forth to the East Coast and to take those problems away so I can focus on my business is what it's so just just look at this right so you guys are off to unicorn the funding great valuation growing like crazy got employees so people looking for jobs because they're hiring probably yeah but you're targeting not consumers to download the app it's for businesses that want to have company policies and take all that pressure off yes of the low so as a user can't buy myself can't just use the app or get I know you can Nano that's the the the whole thing is that as a user there's three things we're providing to one inventory and choice so you go and you know all the options you get the flight you want it's very clear and art we have a new storefront where it shows you what's in policy what's not so we've got that its ease of use it's booking quickly nobody wants to waste time dealing with this stuff right you want to go in booked quickly and then when you're on the trip you need 24/7 support because things go wrong airline travel gets cancelled weather happens you need to change something in your trip and so yes the user has the app on their phone can book it can you do it fast and can get support if they need it so stand alone usually can just use it as a consumer app but when you combine with business that's the magic that you guys see is that the opportunity yes I should say as a consumer as a business traveler so you're doing it through your company so I'm getting reimbursed for the companies the company is your customer yes the company's our customer is the traveler yes okay got it so if we want to have a travel desk in our company which we don't have yet yes it would we would sign up as a company and then all your employees would have the ease of use to book travel so what happens what's the sum of the numbers in terms of customers you have said 200 month-over-month yes we're over 1500 customers we're adding 200 a month we've got some significant growth it's amazing to see product market and the cost of the solution tell people $25 a booking and there's no add-on costs after that if you need to make as many changes as you need because of the trip calls on it you do it so basically per transaction yes well Little Feat one of our dollars yes okay so how do you guys see this growing for the company what's the some of the initiatives you guys are doing a new app yes mo what's what's the plan it's a massive market 800 billion right and we've only just started we've got a lot of customers but we've got many more to go after we are international so we have offices around the world we have an Amsterdam office we've got customers travelling all over so we're you know continuing to deliver on that experience and bringing on more customers we just on-boarded we were ten thousand travelers and will continue to onboard more and more so as head of marketing what's the current staff you have openings you mentioned yet some some some open recs yes yes hi are you gonna build out I've got 20 open Rex on the website so I'm hiring in all functions we're growing that fast and what's the marketing strategy what's your plan can you give it a little teaser on yes thinking core positioning go to market what are some of the things you're thinking about building out marketing CloudStack kind of thing what's what's going on all of these things my three top focuses are one marketing sales systems making sure we have that mark tech stack and that partnership with the sales tech stack second thing is marketing sales alignment that closed-loop we're building we're building pipeline making sure when people come in there's a perfect partnership to service what they need and then our our brand and messaging and it's the phase I love in these companies it's really building and it's the people process and technology to do that in the core positioning is what customer service being the most user-friendly what's the core position we're definitely focused on the traveler I would say we're we're balancing customer experience in making sure we get that adoption but also for the travel managers making sure that they can administer the solution and they get the adoption and we align the ascent in the incentives between the traveler and the travel manager and customer profile what small munis I business to large enterprise we have SMB and we're going all the way up to enterprise yes has it been much of a challenge out there in the business travel side I'm just don't know that's why I'm asking is like because we don't have one I can see our r-cube team having travel challenge we always do no centralizing that making that available but it'd have to be easier is it hard to get is there a lot of business travel firms out there is what are some of the challenges that you guys are going after there well I I think what matters is one picking the solution and being able to implement it quickly we have customers implementing in a week right it's understanding how we load your policies get you on board get your cut you're you're really your employees traveling and so it's pretty fast onboarding and we're able to tailor solutions to what people need what are some of the policies that are typical that might be out there that people like yeah so maybe for hotels you may have New York and your your policy is $500 a night what the I would say a normal typical behavior would someone would book it at $4.99 they go all the way up to the limit we've actually aligned our incentives with the travel managers and the employees and that if you save your company money you save and get rewards back so let's say you book it for 400 that $100 savings $30 goes back to the employee and rewards they can get an Amazon card donate to Cherry charity whatever they'd like to kind of act like an owner cuz they get a kickback yes that's the dot so that's how you an interest adoption yes what other adoption concerns you guys building around with the software and or programs to make it easy to use and we're constantly thinking about the experience we want to make sure just I mean I think about what I used to drive somewhere I'd pull out a map and map it out and then I got lucky and you could do MapQuest and now you have ways we are that ways experience when you're traveling we're thinking about everything you need to do that customer when they leave their front door all the way to the trip all the things that can hang them up along the way we're trying to remove that friction that's a very example I mean Waze is a great service yes these Google Maps or even Apple Maps ways everyone goes to backed away yes yeah I don't I mean ways did cause a lot of Street congestion the back streets of Palo Alto we're gonna expedite our travelers well it's a great utility new company what what attracted you to the opportunity when was some of the because you had a kid going over there MongoDB what it was the yeah motivation to come over to the hot startup yeah you know I love disruptive companies I love massive addressable markets good investors and a awesome mission that I can get behind you know I'm a mom of three kids and I did a lot of travel I'm your typical road warrior and I wanted to get rid of the pain of travel and the booking systems that existed before trip actions and so I was drawn to the team the market and the product that's awesome well you've been a great CMO your career has been phenomenal of great success as a CPM mother of three you know the challenges of juggling all this life is short you got to be using these apps to make sure you get on the right plane I mean I know I'm always getting back for my son's lacrosse game or yes event at school this is these are like it's like ways it's not necessary in the travel portfolio but it's a dynamic that the users care about this is the kind of thing that you guys are thinking about is that right yeah definitely I mean I always think about my mom when she worked in having three daughters and I work and have three daughters I feel like I can do so much more I've got door - I've got urban sitter I've got ways I've got Google Calendar I've got trip actions right I've got all these technologies that allow me to do more and not focus on things that are not that productive and I have no value add on it just makes me more efficient and productive how about some of the tech before we get in some of the industry questions I want to talk about some of the advantages on the tech side is there any machine learning involved what's some what's not what's some of the secret sauce and the app yeah definitely we're constantly learning our users preferences so when you go in we start to learn what you what hotels you're gonna select what where do you like to be near the office do you like to be near downtown we're looking at your flights do aisle window nobody wants middle yes but we're we're learning about your behaviors and we can predict pretty closely one if you're gonna book and two what you're gonna book and as we continue learning you that's why we make you more efficient that's why we can do it in six minutes instead of an hour that's awesome so Megan a lot of things going on you've been a progressive marker you love Terry's tech savvy you've done a lot of implementations but we're in a sea change now where you know people that think differently they gonna think okay I need to be on an app for your case with with business travel it's real policies there so you want to also make it good for the user experience again people centric this personalization has been kind of a cutting edge concept now in this chapter to a lot of CMOS are either they're they're not are trying to get there what are you finding in the industry these days that's a best practice to help people cross that bridge as they think they cracked the code on one side then realize wow it's a whole another chapter to go you know I think traditionally a lot of times we think we need we're aligning very much with sales and that matters that go to market marketing sales aligned but when it comes to products and a customer experience it's that alignment with marketing and the product and engineering team and really understanding the customer and what they want and listening and hearing and testing and and making sure we're partnering in those functions in terms of distribution getting the earned concept what's your thoughts on her and media yeah I mean I definitely think it's the direction right there's a ton of noise out there so you've got to be on topic you've got to understand what people care about you've got to hit them in the channel that they care about and very quick right is you don't have time nobody's gonna watch something that's 30 minutes long you get seconds and so part of the earned is making sure you're relevant you what they care about and they can find you and content big part of that for you guys huge part of it yes and understanding the influencers in the market who's talking about travel who's who is out there leading ahead you know leading in these areas that travel managers go and look to you know making sure we're in front of them and they get to see what we're delivering I like how you got the incentives of the employees to get kind of a line with the business I mean having that kind of the perks yes if you align with the company policies the reward could be a Starbucks card or vacation one more time oh whatever they the company want this is kind of the idea right yeah they kind of align the incentives and make the user experience both during travel and post travel successful that's right yes making sure that they are incented to go but they have a great experience okay if you explain the culture of the company to someone watching then maybe interested in using the app or buying you guys as a team what's the trip actions culture like if you had to describe it yeah I would say one we love travel too we are fast growing scaling and we're always raising the bar and so it's learning and it's moving fast but learning from it and continually to improve it's certainly about the user all of the users so not just the travel manager but our travelers themselves we love dogs if you ever come to the Palo Alto office we've got a lot of dogs we love our pups and just you know building something amazing and it's hard to be the employees gonna know that's a rocket ship so it's great get a hold on you got a run hard yes that's the right personality to handle the pace because you're hiring a lot of people and I think that's a part of the learning we need continual learning because we are scaling so fast you have to reinvent what we need to do next and not a lot of people have seen that type of scale and in order to do it you have to learn and help others learn and move fast well great to see you thanks for coming in and sharing the opportunity to give you the final plug for the company share what who you what positions you're hiring for what's your key hires what are you guys trying to do give a quick plug to the company yeah so I mean we've grown 5x and employees so we're hiring across the board from a marketing standpoint I'm hiring in content and product marketing I'm hiring designers I'm hiring technical I you know I love my marketing technology so we're building out our tech stack our website pretty much any function all right you heard it here trip actions so when you get the product visibility those unit economics as they say in the VC world they've got a rocket ship so congratulations keep it up yeah now you're in palo alto you can come visit us here anytime yes love to Meagen Eisenberg CMO trip access here inside the cube I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching you [Music]

[Music] [Applause] I'm Peter verse and welcome to the queue we're having a quick conversation with Megan Eisenberg CMO of MongoDB a leader in the next-generation database market and you're gathering the community in a couple weeks yeah the people who are trying to build these next-generation applications what's going on yes so it's our largest annual user conference it's in New York June 27th and it will be at the Hilton Midtown and we're going to do some major product announcements we talked earlier in the year February about MongoDB 4.0 transactions are coming so we'll have that huge announcement as well as several other products so would love to invite developers in the area to come and learn more so it's a great opportunity for the developer and other communities associated with advanced data management to come together share ideas share stories make progress advance the cause yes yes Megan Eisenberg CMO MongoDB thanks very much for being on the cube thank you [Music] you

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage, we are wrapping up day one of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Jeff Frick. Jeff, it's been a great day. What's been your highlight? >> The highlight was Megan Smith. We were really excited to get her on. We tried to get her on last year. She's a really hard get. She's a super high energy, super smart lady. >> So she's the third CTO of the US. >> She's fantastic. We got to go back and read the tape, but there's probably an hours worth of material there that we could've followed up on her. I think she was definitely terrific. Also of course Brenda, the new president of Anita Borg. Doing the research on her and understanding what she accomplished at the Chicago Public School System is just phenomenal, something we've talked about time and time again. Are we turning a corner? Do people understand that computer science is a basic thing you need to learn in 2017, like biology, like math, like reading and writing and arithmetic. I think those were two terrific points of the day. >> I completely agree. We've had those veteran women of the technology industry, but then we also have had two young up-and-comers on the show, Jasmine Mustafa, who is the head of Roar for Good, which is a B Corp that makes a wearable self-defense tool, and then just now, we had Morgan Burman of Milkcrate, which does a platform that helps companies and non-profits measure and grow social and environmental impact. It's really exciting to sort of see the baton being passed, you can almost witness it being passed. >> Right, right, and it physically is. From Kelly, who we will have on Friday, to Brenda. So we're absolutely seeing it. >> Rebecca: Right. >> The other piece I'm taking away... You're hearing from Boston, and I hate to do the sports analogy, but I am anyway. Most great quarterbacks, Tom Brady, jumping out having a huge chip on their shoulder. They were passed up, they were told they couldn't do it, and they continued to excel, way more than the fair-haired people that have an easy path. So many times today, we heard about being told I can't do it and using that, internalizing that, as a force to do it. Debra, the physicist, being told by her mom overtly don't be a physicist a number of times, the Roar story again you can't do this. Even Erin Yang from Work Day said specifically I want to surprise people, I don't want them to know what I'm going to be able to do. Really, this concept of having a chip on your shoulder and taking negative feedback and turning it into a positive spin that you can feed off of, really important attribute that I don't think enough people have, they take the hit and absorb the hit instead of taking the hit and saying I'm going to prove you wrong. This does not apply to me. I think that's another thing that I did not expect to hear today but came up over and over again. >> No, I agree. We also heard, and this is really the Silicon Valley mantra right now, is Fail Fast. We've been hearing about redefining failure and one of our guests said don't even use that word, make up some sort of safe word for yourself. It's not that I failed in that endeavor, it didn't work out. But no matter what, you cannot be deterred from that. >> Right, and you got to learn and you got to move on. I tell people a lot of times, it's kind of like the old sales analogy. If your hit rate is one out of 10, that eighth call you should be excited about because that means you're almost to number 10. Don't be depressed that number eight doesn't go well, change your attitude. Eight is just one step closer to 10. Grind through one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. It is a real resilience, and that was another thing that came up is the people that win are not the smartest, they're not the fastest, they're not the most intelligent, but often they're just the most persistent. They just keep getting up. The age old saying. Give me the wisdom to worry about the things I can control and not to worry about the things I can't. It's not what happens to you, it's what you do about it. That's what you can control. You can't control what happens to you. But do you get up, do you take your hit, do you use it as motivation, do you move to the next step? Again, another great theme. Move to the next step. Take the next step and that will get you. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. >> That's right. That's right. Those are >> I'm cliche-ing, it's been a long week. >> This is the largest Grace Hopper ever. 18,000 attendees, 700 speakers, three days. We've got another big lineup tomorrow. We start right after the keynotes. We go through to the end of the day. Is there anything you want to highlight to our viewers that you are especially looking forward to tomorrow? >> What am I especially looking forward to tomorrow? Just another good day. The great thing about this show is you don't really know what you're going to get. >> It's true! >> A lot of the names, you don't know who they are. You don't necessarily know the companies. I think we will have a number of the Women of Vision award winners, which is always good. It's such an atypical tech show, which is why I love it. >> Rebecca: Which is why it's so fun! >> And we've got to get you warmed up, >> I know, it's freezing in here! >> Out into the heat. >> It's so true, it's so true. >> Alright well let's wrap it up. Great day, Rebecca. >> Great day it's always so much fun to cohost alongside you. >> Thanks for coming down. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, we will have more from Grace Hopper tomorrow! >> Jeff: Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper conference here in Orlando, Florida I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Jeff Frick. We're joined by Megan Smith. We're very excited to have you on the show. >> It's good to be here >> She is the third US CTO and also the CEO of a new company, Shift7.co, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, it's great to be here. It's so fun to be at Hopper, >> Rebecca: It is, it is! >> It's cool, it's the Grace Hopper celebration, because we're trying to celebrate women in computing, and we're what, at 18 thousand people now, >> The biggest ever, >> Plus I think, 6 thousand people joining on the livestream, which is great. >> Before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about your role as the 3rd US CTO, and just talking about getting more technology into government to help leaders work together, and move faster. Tell us a little about this initiative. >> What's so great, is it's not partisan, fixing the government and making it work better, so all the work that we were doing continues. What we were able to put in place, during the Obama administration, and continues to Trump, were things like, the CT office. Having technical people, so I worked at Google, people work at Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, these companies who have that background, to join in on policy conversations, one, to join in on capacity building the government, so data sciences and tech and, let's have our services be as great as Amazon, or as Twitter, or Oracle, and not be sort of retro, really serve the American people. And then also, helping the American people in general, with capacity building, things like computer science for all. So that was an initiative that continues to get all of our children to have coding at school. That all children, you couldn't graduate from high school without having had some experience on learning of coding Coding is a 21st century fluency, it's a skill we all need, Like freshman biology. You want to know some biology, you want to know some coding, you want to know how to write, so making sure they have is tech-up, which was a program we started to help train Americans, there's six hundred thousand jobs open, in the United States, and they pay 50% more than the average American salary. The companies are starving. How do we rapidly get more Americans into these jobs? It turns out that people have, of course, created these fabulous code boot camps, you can train in three months for these jobs, some of them are paid, some times they pay you, all different kinds, some are online, some are offline, they're all over the country. So we're able to get more people to consider, a job like that, culturally they think, Well I don't, why would I, I don't know how to do that. Well you can, this is a fun and interesting and exciting career, you can do digital marketing, you can do user interface design. You can get involved in front end or back end coding, product management, all those things, sales. And so, how do you pull lots more Americans in, get our companies fueled so we have really the economic opportunity, and they're all over the country. Location wise, and topic wise. So we did tech hour now, and a tech jobs tour, which is not what we did in government, but we continue some of that work. >> This weird dichotomy, because on one end, people are worried about tech taking jobs, on the other hand, there's a ton of open tech jobs. And there's this transition period, that's difficult, obviously for people that didn't grow up, but one of the keynote speakers today, told a really heartening story, that she didn't get into it until the day she had to leave her abusive husband, and now she is a coder >> That's Doctor Sue Black, who was just given the Order of the British Empire, I mean, she is an incredible computer scientist. Yes, she escaped an abusive marriage with three small children, in her early 20s, I think. Ended up moving into public housing, and dealing with three children only being the school from 9 until 3, and eventually getting her PhD in computer science, and really, she started Techmoms now, she continues to do research in other things, but she's really trying to use her story, and her organizing capacity, to have more people realize this isn't hard like figuring out gravity waves that won the Nobel prize. This is hard like writing a hard essay, so we all can learn to write an essay. It takes some mastery work, you don't learn it in kindergarten but by the time you're in 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th grade, you can do it. >> It's not rocket science. >> Right, so coding is like that. >> The other piece you said that's very interesting, is the consumerization of IT. We've seen it at enterprise, a huge trend. But, now I expect everything that's on my phone, when I interact with Facebook or Amazon, or whatever, to be in all the applications, so, as you said, that's influencing government, and the way they have to deliver services, and I would imagine, too, with kind of the next wave of kids coming in, graduating, going into public service, they certainly have that expectation, right? They've been working on their phone forever of course it should be on the phone. >> And so we want everybody in our country fluent in computer science and coding at a basic level, like again, like freshman biology or takin' chemistry in high school, or taking writing. So that everyone could realize this is not rocket science we could have these kinds of capabilities as part of our services, from Housing and Urban Development, from the Department of Education. You know, a lot of us use our phones to get places, you know, on our maps, and so that's actually data coming from the US Geological survey, if you're looking at the weather, you're looking at NOAA's satellites, this is open government data. We were able to open over two hundred thousand data sets, from all over government, not private data, but public data, that you could make an entire app store, or Google play set of products on top of that. Government wouldn't have to pay for that, it just packages up the API as well. A really good example of that, is the US census team. There's nothing more big data than census, they have all of our information from a data perspective, and so they did opportunity.census.gov, and they said to various agencies, let us help you bridge these data sets into something that someone could build on top of, like we're seeing from the courses sector, we saw wonderful things like, Housing and Urban Development said, okay, our challenges are housing affordability, mobility, these are the challenges instead of having HUD make an app for Americans to come to, they just can explain what their problem is, what data sets, and then engage extraordinary companies, like airbnb, Redfins, Zillow, these fabulous tech companies, who can make instead a product for 100% of the Americans, rather than only wealthy or middle class Americans, and so they did things like, opportunity score, and airbnb helping you figuring out, if I rent a room in my house I can make my rent more affordable, very creative apps, that we can see, same thing for the Department of Ed or Department of Labor, and as the data gets out there, and as apps come, also the opportunity for data science and machine learning. What if, as much as we serve ads to ourselves, in these algorithms, what if we use the algorithms to help Americans find a job that they would love? You know, job matching, and these kinds of opportunities. of the problems in the world, and helping government get more fluent at that. And the way to do that is not so much, jam the government You have to do this, but find terrific talent like we see at Hopper, and have them cycle into the government, to be co-leaders just like a surgeon general would come. >> Are you facing recruitment challenges in that same way though? In the sense that technology is having a hard enough time recruiting and retaining women, but the government, too, is that seen as enough of an employer of choice for young talented, bright ambitious, young women? >> I'm not in government now, but when we were in there, we found a very interesting thing. Alex Mcgovern, who had been the general counsel of Twitter who was Stephanie's CTO with me and led a lot of our tech quals we called TQ like tech IQ in policy, together with economists and lawyers and others have if we're going to decide net neutrality, let's include everyone, including computer scientists, and we're going to sue bridge and open source, So we talked about that, and on the way going in Mcgovern, he said, wouldn't it be cool if, just like when you look at a lawyer's resume, you might see that they clerk and they served their county through clerking and through the judicial system, as well as being a private lawyer, they were a public defender, that's a pretty normal thing to see on a legal resume. If you looked at medical, you might see them going into NIH or doing some research, if you looked at a scientist, they might have gone to, done some NSF work or others. But for the tech crew, there is of course amazing technical people in NASA, NAH and the Department of Energy, and there's great IT teams, but there's not this thing that the Silicon Valley crew resume would say, oh, yeah, I served my country. So that's why, under President Obama, we were able to create these incredible programs. The Presidential Innovation Fellows, which was a one year term of service, The United States Digital Service, which is a three months to a two year term of service in the VA. What's more amazing if you build Amazon, than to go as a second act and help our veterans? It's an incredible honor, to the point of, will they come? Yes, that's what we were hoping, could we have that be a normal thing, and yes it's become a normal thing. And the Trump administration continues it. The 18F team is in the general services administration, they're on 18th and F so they have a code name. But that particular team is located around the country, not only in DC but in San Francisco, in Chicago, and others. So you see this tech sector flowing now into the government on a regular basis, and we welcome more peoples. The government is who shows up to help, so we need the tech sector to show up cause we've got a lot of money as a country, but if we're not effectively using it we're not serving the American people and foster children, veterans, elders, others need the services that they deserve and we have the money, so let's make it happen the way the tech sector is delivering Amazon packages or searches. >> What is your feeling, this is not your first Grace Hopper obviously, but what is your feeling about this conference, and advice that you would give to young women who are here, maybe for their first or second time, in terms of getting the most their time here? >> You know, I think the main thing is, it's a celebration, that's fun and you can walk up to anyone, so just talk to everyone. I've been talking to a million people on the floor, fabulous. Students are here, more senior technical leaders are here. We've been running speed mentoring, we're running a program called the Tech Jobs Tour, it's at Techjobstour.com, it's a #Americanshiring, and we've been going to 50 different cities and so we're running a version of that, and we do speed mentoring, so come to the speed mentoring sessions, it's a five minute pop, talk to someone about what you're tryin' to do. Lot's of programs like that, get into the sessions, come to the keynotes which are so inspiring, and Melinda Gates was amazing today, Dr. Fefe Lee was incredible, just across aboard, Dr Sue Black was here, I thought it was great today, actually, just to reflect on Melinda's keynote, I think this might have been the first time, I was talking to her, that she's really talked about her own technical experience >> That struck me, too! As a coder, starting in computer science. I didn't really understand that she had really started very early, with Apple 3 and the story of her dad >> And her love of her Apple 3, right! and really high school coding, which is so important for young people in high school and middle school, even younger. The Muscogee Creek Tribe, in Oklahoma, is teaching robotics in head start, so we can start in preschool. Just make it fun, and interesting. They're funny, they don't do battle bots, because you don't really want to teach 3 and 4 year olds to fight, so instead they have collaborative robots. >> Robots who work together Age appropriate. >> Well Megan Smith, this has been so fun talking to you, thanks so much for coming on our show. >> Thanks for having me. >> We will have more from the Grace Hopper Conference just after this, I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick (music)

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

[Techno Music] >> Narrator: Live, from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing 2017, 18,000 women and men here at the Orlando Convention Center it gets bigger and bigger every year and we're really excited to have our next guest, the soon-to-be looking for a new job, and former CEO but still employed by AnitaB.org, Telle Whitney, the founder of this fantastic organization and really, the force behind turning it from, as you said, an okay non-profit to really a force. >> Yes So Telle, as always, fantastic to see you. >> Oh it's great to see you, glad to welcome you back and glad to have you here. >> Yes, thank you. So, interesting times, so you're going to be stepping down at the end of the year, you've passed the baton to Brenda. So as you kind of look back, get a moment to reflect, which I guess you can't do until January, they're still working you, what an unbelievable legacy, what an unbelievable baton that you are passing on for Brenda's stewardship for the next chapter. >> Yes, I mean, I've been CEO for the last 15 years and under that time period, we've grown into a global force with impact, well over 700,000 people. We have well over 100,000 people who participated with the Grace Hopper or the Grace Hopper India. It's grown, and what's been really exciting the last few days, is hearing the stories. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Of how, the impact that this, the AnitaB.org has had on the lives of young women but also mid-career and senior executives. It's very inspiring to me. >> It is, it's fantastic, and I think the mid-career and more senior executive part of the story isn't as well-known, and we've talked to, Work Day was here, I think they said they had 140 people I think I talked to Google, I think they had like 180. And I asked them, I said, is there any other show, besides your own, that you bring that many people to from the company for their own professional development, and growth. And there's nothing like it. >> That's true. The reason why the Grace Hopper celebration has grown as significantly as it has is because more and more organizations, companies, bring a large part of their workforce. I mean, there are some companies that have brought up to 800 people, and sometimes even 1,000. >> Jeff: Wow >> And there's a reason why, because they see the impact that the conference has on retention and advancement of the women who work for them. >> And that's really a growing and increasing important part of the conversation, >> It is. >> Is retention, and two, getting the women who maybe left to have a baby, or talk about military veterans getting back in, so there's a whole group of people kind of outside of the traditional took my four years of college, I got a CS degree, now I need a job, that are also leveraging the benefits of this conference to make that way back in to tech. So important now as autonomous vehicles are coming on board and all these other things that are going to displace a bunch of traditional jobs. The message here is, you can actually get into CS later in life and find a successful career. >> Yes, we have a real diversity of attendees. So about a third of them are students, and that's really, they're brought here by their universities because that makes a difference. We have a great group from the government. So there's this real effort to bring state-of-the-art technology into our government, initially spearheaded by Megan Smith but really has grown. And the government brought quite a few women. And yes, we do have re-entry people. The companies are looking for women who are very interested in getting back in the workforce. The wonder about our profession, is that they're in desperate need of talented computer scientists. And so, because of that, more and more organizations are being innovative in how they reach out to different audiences. >> And outside of you, I don't know that anyone is more enthusiastic about this conference than Megan Smith. >> Yeah (laughs) >> She is a force of nature. We saw her last year, we were fortunate to get her on the Cube this year, which was really exciting. And she just brings so much energy. We're seeing so much activity on the government side, regardless of your partisanship, of using cloud, using new technology, and that's really driving, again, more innovation, more computing, and demand for more great people. >> Yes, we're very blessed that Megan has continued to come here every year. She came back this year, she sat on the main stage, and she has really been, her message to so many of the young women is that, consider government technology as something you do, at least for a while. And I think that that's a very important message if you think about how that impacts our lives. >> Right, for the good. >> Telle: Yes. >> And that was a big part of her message, she went through a classic legal resume, and some other classic resumes where you have that chapter in your career where you do go into government and you do make a contribution to something a little bit bigger than potentially your regular job. It does strike me though, how technology and software engineering specifically is such an unbelievable vehicle in which to change the world. The traditional barriers of distribution, access to capital, the amount of funding that you used to have to have to build a company, all those things are gone now through cloud, and the internet, and now you can write software and change the world pretty easily. >> Yes. Technology has the possibility of being equal access for anybody. Open-source, anybody can start to code through open-source. There are many ways for anybody, but particularly women to get back in. But I also like to think about many of the companies here who bring their diversity, they bring their senior executives, they bring this large number of women and they create this view across the entire company of how to create a company that's impactful as well as, you know, developing the products that they are invested in. >> Jeff: Right. >> I mean you can have impact in many different ways, through companies, through non-profits, through government, through many different ways. >> Right, and not only the diversity of the people, but one of the other things we love about this show is the diversity of the companies that are here. Like you said, as government, as I look out there's industrial equipment companies, there's entertainment companies, MLB is right across from us and has been there the three days. So it's really a fantastic display of this kind of horizontal impact of technology, and then of course, as we know, it does make better business to have diversity in teams. It's not about doing just the right thing, it's actually about having better bottom-line impact and better bottom-line results. And that's been proven time and time again. >> Well yes, and, so what I know is that every company is a technology company. If you think about the entire banking industry, they have this huge technology workforce. Certainly classic technology companies have a lot of engineers, but insurance, and banking, and almost anything. I mean, we have a lot increasing amount of retail, Target, Best Buy, places like that. >> Right. Okay so I tried to order in a horse so you could ride off into the sunset at the end of this interview, but they wouldn't let me get it through security. >> Okay >> But before I let you go, I'd just love to get your thoughts on Brenda, and the passing of the baton. How did you find her, what are some of the things that you feel comfortable, feel good about, beyond comfortable, to give her the mantle, the baton, if you will, for the next chapter of AnitaB.org? >> I've been very blessed to lead this organization for 15 years, and this is my baby. But there is nothing more heart-warming than to be able to talk to a visionary leader like Brenda. Brenda is extraordinary. She really believes in computer science for all. She believes that all women should be at the table creating technologies. She has a vision of where she wants to take it and yes, she just started last Sunday, so we have to give her a little time. (laughs) >> You were right into the deep end right? Swim! (laughs) >> But she is just, I mean, I just feel very blessed to have Brenda in my life and I will be there in any way that she needs for me to be there to work with her. But she is going to be a great leader. >> Oh absolutely. Well Telle as always, great, and as you said, you're more busy than maybe you expected to be here, so to find a few minutes to stop by the Cube again, thank you for inviting us to be here. It is really one of our favorite places to be every year. Finally my youngest daughter turns 18 next year, so I can bring her too. And congratulations for everything you've accomplished. >> I love to be here, thank you for coming. Glad we could talk. >> Alright, she's Telle Whitney, I'm Jeff Frick, if you're looking for a highly-qualified woman in tech, she might be on the market in 2018. (Telle laughs) Give me a call, I'll set you up. Alright, you're watching the Cube, from the Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hi, welcome back to The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin, we are at the fourth annual Food IT: Fork to Farm Event at the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm very excited to be joined by my next two guests, we have Curtis Garner, Senior Farm Analyst from Bowles Farming Company, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you, and we have Megan Nunes, CEO of Vinsight. Welcome! >> Thank you! >> Great to have you guys here. So this event is so interesting for us. We cover a lot of technology innovation, a lot on the infrastructure side, this is more on the application side, but Curtis, I wanted to start with you being a farmer, your farm has been, a six-generation farm, Bowles Farming Company based in Los Banos, California. One of the things I found really interesting, when I was doing some research on Bowles Farm, is that you have a big solar project, and one of the things that's really interesting, it's been reported that the US food system uses 15% of the total energy of the US, to produce food. Tell us about the solar project, that Bowles Farms has done, and what you've been saving on energy. >> So, with Bowles Farming and agriculture in general, there's been kind of a stagnation of innovation, and through technology with drip irrigation, we've seen a difference in technology from doing gravity-fed irrigation, which is basically free energy, right, gravity doesn't cost anything, to pressurized drip irrigation systems, and so we've used pressurized pumps that use diesel energy, and we've been switching them over to electricity, and that's been an efficiency for Bowles Farming, but we've, we've offset our costs by two solar plants and so we have two solar plants, two 500-kilowatt energy to generate one megawatt of energy, we've displaced about 80% of our energy use on the farm. >> 80%, that's dramatic. And was that a multi-year project that you initiated? >> It was supposed to happen about a year, but through regulation and difficulties with permitting and PG&E, it took about a year and a half to complete. We'll see the benefits of it this year. >> And your primary crops are cotton, tomatoes, nuts, almonds ... >> So, yeah. We're diverse, diversified row crops, so we have 12 different crops, but our primary crops are Pima cotton, and processing tomatoes. >> So, question for you from a technology perspective, this event is so interesting because, when I first read the title like I thought, fork-to-farm, we're so used to the trendiness of farm-to-table, right, farm-to-fork. But, the fact that the tech-enabled consumer has really influenced, or wants to influence, organic, must be cage-free if it's eggs, you know, it must be, non-genetic, et cetera. What are some of the influences that you're seeing on the farming side that the consumer is driving, and how has Bowles Farm made some changes to accommodate that? >> So our crop choice, so the consumer is actually voting with their fork, is actually a real thing. So like, the most posted food picture on Instagram and Pinterest is actually a purple vegetable. So a thought on the farm is, should we be growing a bunch of purple vegetables? And so, it's actually very real that the consumers are driving production. >> Yeah, interesting! So Megan, as the CEO of Vinsight, talk to us about the genesis of Vinsight. You yourself come from a farming background. What was the origination of your company? >> Yeah, so, I grew up in the Central Valley of California, I'm originally from a small town called Gustine, and I left Gustine, went to college in San Louis Obispo at Cal Poly, and then after that I worked for an aerospace company in the remote sensing space for about seven years. And while I was there, one of the things that we were looking at doing was providing satellite imagery to farmers, and different growers, and quickly I realized that the traditional imagery that the satellite imagery business was providing through um, it's called NBDI, which basically is a health map of red, green, and yellow. Wasn't necessarily helpful or terribly actionable, and that really bothered me, and so through lots of conversations and investigation that I took on my own, I decided, you know what, it's time to start something on my own, through utilizing different data techniques to better understand food production. And so Vinsight was basically initially born out of the idea of utilizing satellite imagery, in a more meaningful way to benefit growers and then the entire supply chain as a whole. And that later turned into crop forecasting for grapes and almonds here in California. >> And, and, especially, you know, grapes being huge, I mean, Napa, Edna Valley, Pasa Robles, we're very fortunate to have a, a tremendous amount of grapes and wine opportunities, but you mentioned almonds. 90% of the world's almonds come from California. Talk to us about how maybe an example of how a farm is using your technologies, like, are you putting sensors in their farms or is it really they're utilizing satellite imagery and data acquisition through your product and API, to improve their yields? >> So it's more of the latter. At Vinsight, our objective is to be data agnostic, and so what that means is we take in data from any source that allows us to better understand production as a whole. And so what happens is we collect data from four major categories, which include remote sensing data or satellite imagery, climate and weather, historical yield, and then geographical information, so primarily that'll be like soil type, elevation angling, and so on. And what we do, is we built out this 20-year historical archive, and we've utilized machine learning techniques to train on that data and understand what matters to the plant at this specific point in time, and how does that correlate and trend against what we've seen in the past. And so in real time, during the growing season, we pull in like the top ten features that matter, to that plant at that specific time, and then we give you a crop forecast of, hey, you're going to produce so many pounds or tons, depending on the industry, of x product, and we're assuming a 10% or better error rate typically on understanding your total production. And so our goal is, through starting with understanding your total supply, how can that also start to relate into how we handle pricing and how that ultimately will benefit both the grower and consumer at the end of the day. >> Interesting, so, about the production yields, I wanted to kind of talk, Curtis, to you about, if you look at the food chain from planting, through monitoring soil conditions, fertilizers, water, we've just gotten out of a massive drought here in California, one other thing that it's, that I find interesting is the post-harvest arena, and you know, supply chain logistics traceability. Talking about almonds, I was reading, and this is very surprising, to me, that in the last three years, over 35 truckloads of almonds have vanished, and that's tantamount to ten million dollars. So on the traceability side, I know that's going to be one of the themes at the event today, how are you using technology, Curtis, at Bowles Farms, on the traceability? Can you give us some examples there? >> Yeah, so traceability is a very big deal for the farm and the consumer and the producer. Bowles Farming has actually a pretty unique story about this in that, our cotton that we grow is a Pima cotton. Costco sold bedsheets that were Pima cotton, and they had the olive oil scandal, the same guy that did that, did a market sweep of all the Pima cotton sheets that represented that they were 100% Pima, found that over half the supply was actually adulterated, is actually not Pima cotton, is Upland or primarily a blend. And so with that, he applied the same technology that he did with olive oil to the cotton industry, and we are the first farm and the first gin to sign up with him, to do traceability, from basically from farm all the way to sheets. Yeah, and so ... >> Wow, farm to sheets. >> Farm to sheets, yeah >> Didn't expect to hear that today. >> Yeah, I guess so. They're now, it's, the brand is Wamsutta, the Pima cotton brand, and they're available at the Bed Bath & Beyond. >> Wow, so, looking at what Megan has done with Vinsight, being a six-generational, six-generation farm, what's the, um, what are your thoughts, as a senior farm analyst, on the adoption of technology? Was it something that was slow to be adopted, or do you really feel, we've been so successful for six generations, we want to understand how we can look at data types that are aggregated as Megan, you said over 20 years of historical information, what's been that adoption at your farm? >> So Bowles has a legacy of innovation, and we're an innovative farm, we have a lot of innovative people and so, for us, it's a matter of survival. So with the regulatory pressures, with the increasing costs of California, farming in California, innovation's going to be key, and that's going to come in the role of technology, and so, we're pretty quick to adopt. If you look at farmers as a whole, people think that they're overall-wearing, individuals that aren't very intelligent, but it's actually quite the opposite, and if a new technology comes that has a great ROI, just like the drip irrigation, they'll implement that, though, pretty quickly. >> Oh, fantastic. Well, Curtis, we wish you the best of luck at Bowles Farms, Megan, same, congratulations on Vinsight, we wish you the very best of luck and we thank you both for joining us on The Cube. >> Thank you! >> Thank you! >> We want to thank you for watching again. We are at the Food IT: Fork to Farm Summit in the heart of Silicon Valley. I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music sting)