>>from Menlo Park, California In the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube covering cloud now. Awards 2020 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now here's Sonia category. >>Hi, and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're on the ground at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California covering Cloud now's top women entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >>Joining us today is Melon Yen, founder and partner of operator Collective Madeleine, Welcome to the Cube. Thank you so much. So tell us a little bit about your background. >>So Operator Collective is actually my fourth organization that been apart of starting, and all of them have had an aspect of it that had a strong community to it. And so that was one of the reasons why, um, as you hear about in a second, I could put together this kind of crazy idea for a fund that looks like no other. >>Um, So what inspired you to start this company? And how did you navigate getting funding? >>Sure. So? So, because that operator collective is my fourth company. The 1st 1 was actually a nonprofit. The 2nd 1 was a venture backed company that we took from 0 to 100 million in public in less than three years, and the 3rd 1 was something called Faster, which is the world's largest B two b B two b community for SAS Softwares of service, the company that was a venture backed startup that we took from 0 to 100 million in public in less than three years. Even though I helped launch it, I didn't actually officially joined as an employee until about 18 months in, and by that time it's employees 65 I noticed a number of things, which is there were largely homogenous group of people who were there before me, all really great people. But you tend to know people like you and the hyper growth stages of startups. You tend to turn around and say, Who can I get? And so you and you turn to the people that you know, And so you end up with companies that look like yourself and so spent a lot of time looking at what was going on in the venture world, which is that in the area that I focus on, which is enterprise and software enterprise software. It is over 90% male in terms of veces as well as founders and the world revolves around in the venture world revolves around veces and founders. And so I looked around and said, Well, where the operators, the people who build and grow and scale up these companies, they're largely not. They're not efficiently and effectively part of this ecosystem and then second, where the women and people of color And so but as I started to dig in more and talk to people, what I realized was that the VCs and founders actually wanted to bring in the operators. They wanted to bring in the people with different backgrounds, but the network's didn't naturally overlap. And so I thought, there's got to be a way to bring them in, because I know the operators and the operators also want to participate. But the system isn't optimized to make it efficient or friendly are comfortable for them to be able to participate. So that's why I decided to put operator collective together. >>Wow, So you are key noting today for cloud. Now, um, what has this experience been like? And what is the main message you want to give to the award winners and to the cloud now community. >>So it's incredibly inspiring to be with all of the women who are being honored tonight as well as, frankly, the organizers. The organization itself Cloud now is incredibly impactful. And so one of the reasons I was so excited to be asked is a number of the women who were being honored. I either know or have heard of. And the recognition is something that is very important because we need to tell the stories and recognize these people who are not. Maybe the usual suspects, the ones who maybe not our everyday names. And so I was super excited to be here. >>So you were talking about how it's about 90% male in the VC and founder community, Um, in one of your articles, which are amazing, by the way you said, Don't let the excuse of cultural fit be a vehicle for perpetuating sameness, and I thought that was so profound. So, um, are you still seeing this notion of cultural fit being a huge issue and if so, what can be done? Teoh mitigate it? Yeah, I think there's >>more awareness now of the fact that if you hire for cultural fit, you'll end up with 65 people who are exactly like you. And that's not optimizing for a successful company because right there studies that show that diverse teams outperform out innovate, homogeneous teams. But what's also interesting is the same study says that, but homogeneous teams are more certain that they've gotten to the right answer, even if they've got into the answer less less often than the diverse teams. And so when you have people who are just like you, then everyone agrees with each other than you don't realize that. Maybe there's another way of looking at something and so cultural fit is is a warning sign. I think to say that. Okay, well, there just like me, I'm very comfortable sometimes. Being uncomfortable is good. >>That's a great message. I think it's really hard to to say like, Oh, I'm okay with being comfortable. Um, so in, in in in one of your other articles, you bring up this idea of, um, don't check all the boxes, but rather fill in the gaps. So can you explain more about that? >>Yeah. So the idea behind that is, if you look for only the typical candidates. The ones who maybe think of a startup founder went to Stanford. Where's the hoodie? Right? Did computer science then that's fine. There are plenty of those people who have been successful, but you're ignoring all the people who didn't. And so, in fact, I'm the beneficiary of people who were willing to not just check all the boxes because I >>didn't >>check any of the boxes. If you look at, if you look at my background, I should not have been able to raise. Is the first time fund and a first time fund manager to be able to raise a $50 million fund because I'm a um Ah, let's see, I'm a solo GP, right? So, General partner who hasn't been a VC before with the first time fund, I don't have the traditional venture background. My previous background was I was an intellectual property attorney. Um, then help start a company as a result of that and then and then also when you check the boxes, 40% of the seas went to Stanford or Harvard, and when you look at the numbers, I didn't check all the boxes, but precisely because I didn't check all the boxes, I was able to actually look at this differently and say, Hey, that's not the model that that I want to build. And frankly, if I tried to build the same model that everyone else did, my background so doesn't look like anything. I wouldn't have been successful. And by taking it and saying, Look, I'm gonna build a model that's totally different from the ground up that allowed me to build a platform in a community that looked like no one else is as a result of that was able to raise money from institutional investors, for instance, which very rarely back first time funds. And so, by not checking all the boxes, um, I was able to build a model, but by other people also saying, Look, she doesn't check any of our typical boxes. But we >>would like this >>idea because it's so different than everyone else is. We will. We are now, you know, part of the fund >>and sometimes different is good, and it's what's what's needed? Absolutely. Um, so speaking of that, um, in terms of operator collective, what workplace environment are you trying to strive for. >>So what we say is we seek to back founders from all backgrounds who believe you share are believed that culture, diversity and operational excellence are a key part of building truly great companies. So we strive to be inclusive way. We strive to have a variety of backgrounds. We use a lot of the tools that of the companies, because we focus only on enterprise and B two B software and technology and infrastructure. And so we also try to use a lot of those tools. So we are mostly women team and we are distributed team. We largely work out of our homes and we work a lot on Zoom and we all a lot of us have kids too, and so what we do is we adjust the schedule so we can do drop off in the morning. We work like crazy, right? We work long hours, but we also do it so that people can can take their kids to doctor's appointments or pick up their kids at the end of the day. But we what was important to me was that we created environment that worked with our busy lives, and it wasn't that we were trying to take, take take these incredibly talented women and make it fit into just the corporate norm. Because you can have an incredibly successful work relationship. I mean, you can have an incredibly successful, um career if you don't have to sacrifice everything else in your life for it, >>right? Right. And that balance is so important. Um, so what advice would you give to aspiring female entrepreneurs who maybe have, ah, not so technical background or who are struggling to navigate in this male dominated industry. >>So one of the things >>I talked about in my keynote today was was that you never get this right. You're never going to raise a fund. If if you do this, you're never gonna raise a fund. And so when you're starting a company, you will go when you talk to a lot of people as you should, because you will get lots of great information. Ah, lot of people are going to say, Well, you're never gonna have a You're never going to start a company if you don't have a technical co founder never going to start a company. If you're gonna try to do X and So while you some might say, Well, you should just ignore those people actually say, Don't ignore those people because they are saying that other people are going to think that too. But think of a way to counter that. And that actually help make the operator collective business model stronger. Because we said Okay, we know that's gonna be the mindset. Let's turn it around and actually make this a strength. And so, for female founders or any founders, what I would say is listen to a lot of people talk to a lot of people here what they have to say. Ultimately, trust your instinct. Trust your gut. And because you know what's best for the company that you're trying to build. >>Great words of advice. Melon. Thank you so much for being on the Cube. Thank you >>so much for having me. Absolutely. >>I'm Sonita Gari. Thanks for watching the Cube. Stay tuned for more. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.