(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE." We've got great two remote guests coming into our Palo Alto Studios, some tech athletes, as we say, people that've been in the trenches, years of experience, Lena Smart, CISO at MongoDB, Cube alumni, and Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB as well. Thanks for coming in to this program and supporting our efforts today. Thanks so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, everyone talk about the journey in tech, where it all started. Before we get there, talk about what you guys are doing at MongoDB specifically. MongoDB is kind of gone the next level as a platform. You have your own ecosystem, lot of developers, very technical crowd, but it's changing the business transformation. What do you guys do at Mongo? We'll start with you, Lena. >> So I'm the CISO, so all security goes through me. I like to say, well, I don't like to say, I'm described as the ones throat to choke. So anything to do with security basically starts and ends with me. We do have a fantastic Cloud engineering security team and a product security team, and they don't report directly to me, but obviously we have very close relationships. I like to keep that kind of church and state separate and I know I've spoken about that before. And we just recently set up a physical security team with an amazing gentleman who left the FBI and he came to join us after 26 years for the agency. So, really starting to look at the physical aspects of what we offer as well. >> I interviewed a CISO the other day and she said, "Every day is day zero for me." Kind of goofing on the Amazon Day one thing, but Tara, go ahead. Tara, go ahead. What's your role there, developer productivity? What are you focusing on? >> Sure. Developer productivity is kind of the latest description for things that we've described over the years as, you know, DevOps oriented engineering or platform engineering or build and release engineering development infrastructure. It's all part and parcel, which is how do we actually get our code from developer to customer, you know, and all the mechanics that go into that. It's been something I discovered from my first job way back in the early '90s at Borland. And the art has just evolved enormously ever since, so. >> Yeah, this is a very great conversation both of you guys, right in the middle of all the action and data infrastructures changing, exploding, and involving big time AI and data tsunami and security never stops. Well, let's get into, we'll talk about that later, but let's get into what motivated you guys to pursue a career in tech and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way? >> I'll go first. The fact of the matter was I intended to be a double major in history and literature when I went off to university, but I was informed that I had to do a math or a science degree or else the university would not be paid for. At the time, UC Santa Cruz had a policy that called Open Access Computing. This is, you know, the late '80s, early '90s. And anybody at the university could get an email account and that was unusual at the time if you were, those of us who remember, you used to have to pay for that CompuServe or AOL or, there's another one, I forget what it was called, but if a student at Santa Cruz could have an email account. And because of that email account, I met people who were computer science majors and I'm like, "Okay, I'll try that." That seems good. And it was a little bit of a struggle for me, a lot I won't lie, but I can't complain with how it ended up. And certainly once I found my niche, which was development infrastructure, I found my true love and I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. >> Awesome. Great story. Can't wait to ask a few questions on that. We'll go back to that late '80s, early '90s. Lena, your journey, how you got into it. >> So slightly different start. I did not go to university. I had to leave school when I was 16, got a job, had to help support my family. Worked a bunch of various jobs till I was about 21 and then computers became more, I think, I wouldn't say they were ubiquitous, but they were certainly out there. And I'd also been saving up every penny I could earn to buy my own computer and bought an Amstrad 1640, 20 meg hard drive. It rocked. And kind of took that apart, put it back together again, and thought that could be money in this. And so basically just teaching myself about computers any job that I got. 'Cause most of my jobs were like clerical work and secretary at that point. But any job that had a computer in front of that, I would make it my business to go find the guy who did computing 'cause it was always a guy. And I would say, you know, I want to learn how these work. Let, you know, show me. And, you know, I would take my lunch hour and after work and anytime I could with these people and they were very kind with their time and I just kept learning, so yep. >> Yeah, those early days remind me of the inflection point we're going through now. This major C change coming. Back then, if you had a computer, you had to kind of be your own internal engineer to fix things. Remember back on the systems revolution, late '80s, Tara, when, you know, your career started, those were major inflection points. Now we're seeing a similar wave right now, security, infrastructure. It feels like it's going to a whole nother level. At Mongo, you guys certainly see this as well, with this AI surge coming in. A lot more action is coming in. And so there's a lot of parallels between these inflection points. How do you guys see this next wave of change? Obviously, the AI stuff's blowing everyone away. Oh, new user interface. It's been called the browser moment, the mobile iPhone moment, kind of for this generation. There's a lot of people out there who are watching that are young in their careers, what's your take on this? How would you talk to those folks around how important this wave is? >> It, you know, it's funny, I've been having this conversation quite a bit recently in part because, you know, to me AI in a lot of ways is very similar to, you know, back in the '90s when we were talking about bringing in the worldwide web to the forefront of the world, right. And we tended to think in terms of all the optimistic benefits that would come of it. You know, free passing of information, availability to anyone, anywhere. You just needed an internet connection, which back then of course meant a modem. >> John: Not everyone had though. >> Exactly. But what we found in the subsequent years is that human beings are what they are and we bring ourselves to whatever platforms that are there, right. And so, you know, as much as it was amazing to have this freely available HTML based internet experience, it also meant that the negatives came to the forefront quite quickly. And there were ramifications of that. And so to me, when I look at AI, we're already seeing the ramifications to that. Yes, are there these amazing, optimistic, wonderful things that can be done? Yes. >> Yeah. >> But we're also human and the bad stuff's going to come out too. And how do we- >> Yeah. >> How do we as an industry, as a community, you know, understand and mitigate those ramifications so that we can benefit more from the positive than the negative. So it is interesting that it comes kind of full circle in really interesting ways. >> Yeah. The underbelly takes place first, gets it in the early adopter mode. Normally industries with, you know, money involved arbitrage, no standards. But we've seen this movie before. Is there hope, Lena, that we can have a more secure environment? >> I would hope so. (Lena laughs) Although depressingly, we've been in this well for 30 years now and we're, at the end of the day, still telling people not to click links on emails. So yeah, that kind of still keeps me awake at night a wee bit. The whole thing about AI, I mean, it's, obviously I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in AI. I did read (indistinct) book recently about AI and that was kind of interesting. And I'm just trying to teach myself as much as I can about it to the extent of even buying the "Dummies Guide to AI." Just because, it's actually not a dummies guide. It's actually fairly interesting, but I'm always thinking about it from a security standpoint. So it's kind of my worst nightmare and the best thing that could ever happen in the same dream. You know, you've got this technology where I can ask it a question and you know, it spits out generally a reasonable answer. And my team are working on with Mark Porter our CTO and his team on almost like an incubation of AI link. What would it look like from MongoDB? What's the legal ramifications? 'Cause there will be legal ramifications even though it's the wild, wild west just now, I think. Regulation's going to catch up to us pretty quickly, I would think. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so I think, you know, as long as companies have a seat at the table and governments perhaps don't become too dictatorial over this, then hopefully we'll be in a good place. But we'll see. I think it's a really interest, there's that curse, we're living in interesting times. I think that's where we are. >> It's interesting just to stay on this tech trend for a minute. The standards bodies are different now. Back in the old days there were, you know, IEEE standards, ITF standards. >> Tara: TPC. >> The developers are the new standard. I mean, now you're seeing open source completely different where it was in the '90s to here beginning, that was gen one, some say gen two, but I say gen one, now we're exploding with open source. You have kind of developers setting the standards. If developers like it in droves, it becomes defacto, which then kind of rolls into implementation. >> Yeah, I mean I think if you don't have developer input, and this is why I love working with Tara and her team so much is 'cause they get it. If we don't have input from developers, it's not going to get used. There's going to be ways of of working around it, especially when it comes to security. If they don't, you know, if you're a developer and you're sat at your screen and you don't want to do that particular thing, you're going to find a way around it. You're a smart person. >> Yeah. >> So. >> Developers on the front lines now versus, even back in the '90s, they're like, "Okay, consider the dev's, got a QA team." Everything was Waterfall, now it's Cloud, and developers are on the front lines of everything. Tara, I mean, this is where the standards are being met. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, I think it's outstanding. I mean, you know, like I was at Netscape and part of the crowd that released the browser as open source and we founded mozilla.org, right. And that was, you know, in many ways kind of the birth of the modern open source movement beyond what we used to have, what was basically free software foundation was sort of the only game in town. And I think it is so incredibly valuable. I want to emphasize, you know, and pile onto what Lena was saying, it's not just that the developers are having input on a sort of company by company basis. Open source to me is like a checks and balance, where it allows us as a broader community to be able to agree on and enforce certain standards in order to try and keep the technology platforms as accessible as possible. I think Kubernetes is a great example of that, right. If we didn't have Kubernetes, that would've really changed the nature of how we think about container orchestration. But even before that, Linux, right. Linux allowed us as an industry to end the Unix Wars and as someone who was on the front lines of that as well and having to support 42 different operating systems with our product, you know, that was a huge win. And it allowed us to stop arguing about operating systems and start arguing about software or not arguing, but developing it in positive ways. So with, you know, with Kubernetes, with container orchestration, we all agree, okay, that's just how we're going to orchestrate. Now we can build up this huge ecosystem, everybody gets taken along, right. And now it changes the game for what we're defining as business differentials, right. And so when we talk about crypto, that's a little bit harder, but certainly with AI, right, you know, what are the checks and balances that as an industry and as the developers around this, that we can in, you know, enforce to make sure that no one company or no one body is able to overly control how these things are managed, how it's defined. And I think that is only for the benefit in the industry as a whole, particularly when we think about the only other option is it gets regulated in ways that do not involve the people who actually know the details of what they're talking about. >> Regulated and or thrown away or bankrupt or- >> Driven underground. >> Yeah. >> Which would be even worse actually. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, the checks and balances. I love that call out. And I was just talking with another interview part of the series around women being represented in the 51% ratio. Software is for everybody. So that we believe that open source movement around the collective intelligence of the participants in the industry and independent of gender, this is going to be the next wave. You're starting to see these videos really have impact because there are a lot more leaders now at the table in companies developing software systems and with AI, the aperture increases for applications. And this is the new dynamic. What's your guys view on this dynamic? How does this go forward in a positive way? Is there a certain trajectory you see? For women in the industry? >> I mean, I think some of the states are trying to, again, from the government angle, some of the states are trying to force women into the boardroom, for example, California, which can be no bad thing, but I don't know, sometimes I feel a bit iffy about all this kind of forced- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, making, I don't even know how to say it properly so you can cut this part of the interview. (John laughs) >> Tara: Well, and I think that they're >> I'll say it's not organic. >> No, and I think they're already pulling it out, right. It's already been challenged so they're in the process- >> Well, this is the open source angle, Tara, you are getting at it. The change agent is open, right? So to me, the history of the proven model is openness drives transparency drives progress. >> No, it's- >> If you believe that to be true, this could have another impact. >> Yeah, it's so interesting, right. Because if you look at McKinsey Consulting or Boston Consulting or some of the other, I'm blocking on all of the names. There has been a decade or more of research that shows that a non homogeneous employee base, be it gender or ethnicity or whatever, generates more revenue, right? There's dollar signs that can be attached to this, but it's not enough for all companies to want to invest in that way. And it's not enough for all, you know, venture firms or investment firms to grant that seed money or do those seed rounds. I think it's getting better very slowly, but socialization is a much harder thing to overcome over time. Particularly, when you're not just talking about one country like the United States in our case, but around the world. You know, tech centers now exist all over the world, including places that even 10 years ago we might not have expected like Nairobi, right. Which I think is amazing, but you have to factor in the cultural implications of that as well, right. So yes, the openness is important and we have, it's important that we have those voices, but I don't think it's a panacea solution, right. It's just one more piece. I think honestly that one of the most important opportunities has been with Cloud computing and Cloud's been around for a while. So why would I say that? It's because if you think about like everybody holds up the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, back in the '70s, or Sergey and Larry for Google, you know, you had to have access to enough credit card limit to go to Fry's and buy your servers and then access to somebody like Susan Wojcicki to borrow the garage or whatever. But there was still a certain amount of upfrontness that you had to be able to commit to, whereas now, and we've, I think, seen a really good evidence of this being able to lease server resources by the second and have development platforms that you can do on your phone. I mean, for a while I think Africa, that the majority of development happened on mobile devices because there wasn't a sufficient supply chain of laptops yet. And that's no longer true now as far as I know. But like the power that that enables for people who would otherwise be underrepresented in our industry instantly opens it up, right? And so to me that's I think probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen from an industry on how to make more availability in underrepresented representation for entrepreneurship. >> Yeah. >> Something like AI, I think that's actually going to take us backwards if we're not careful. >> Yeah. >> Because of we're reinforcing that socialization. >> Well, also the bias. A lot of people commenting on the biases of the large language inherently built in are also problem. Lena, I want you to weigh on this too, because I think the skills question comes up here and I've been advocating that you don't need the pedigree, college pedigree, to get into a certain jobs, you mentioned Cloud computing. I mean, it's been around for you think a long time, but not really, really think about it. The ability to level up, okay, if you're going to join something new and half the jobs in cybersecurity are created in the past year, right? So, you have this what used to be a barrier, your degree, your pedigree, your certification would take years, would be a blocker. Now that's gone. >> Lena: Yeah, it's the opposite. >> That's, in fact, psychology. >> I think so, but the people who I, by and large, who I interview for jobs, they have, I think security people and also I work with our compliance folks and I can't forget them, but let's talk about security just now. I've always found a particular kind of mindset with security folks. We're very curious, not very good at following rules a lot of the time, and we'd love to teach others. I mean, that's one of the big things stem from the start of my career. People were always interested in teaching and I was interested in learning. So it was perfect. And I think also having, you know, strong women leaders at MongoDB allows other underrepresented groups to actually apply to the company 'cause they see that we're kind of talking the talk. And that's been important. I think it's really important. You know, you've got Tara and I on here today. There's obviously other senior women at MongoDB that you can talk to as well. There's a bunch of us. There's not a whole ton of us, but there's a bunch of us. And it's good. It's definitely growing. I've been there for four years now and I've seen a growth in women in senior leadership positions. And I think having that kind of track record of getting really good quality underrepresented candidates to not just interview, but come and join us, it's seen. And it's seen in the industry and people take notice and they're like, "Oh, okay, well if that person's working, you know, if Tara Hernandez is working there, I'm going to apply for that." And that in itself I think can really, you know, reap the rewards. But it's getting started. It's like how do you get your first strong female into that position or your first strong underrepresented person into that position? It's hard. I get it. If it was easy, we would've sold already. >> It's like anything. I want to see people like me, my friends in there. Am I going to be alone? Am I going to be of a group? It's a group psychology. Why wouldn't? So getting it out there is key. Is there skills that you think that people should pay attention to? One's come up as curiosity, learning. What are some of the best practices for folks trying to get into the tech field or that's in the tech field and advancing through? What advice are you guys- >> I mean, yeah, definitely, what I say to my team is within my budget, we try and give every at least one training course a year. And there's so much free stuff out there as well. But, you know, keep learning. And even if it's not right in your wheelhouse, don't pick about it. Don't, you know, take a look at what else could be out there that could interest you and then go for it. You know, what does it take you few minutes each night to read a book on something that might change your entire career? You know, be enthusiastic about the opportunities out there. And there's so many opportunities in security. Just so many. >> Tara, what's your advice for folks out there? Tons of stuff to taste, taste test, try things. >> Absolutely. I mean, I always say, you know, my primary qualifications for people, I'm looking for them to be smart and motivated, right. Because the industry changes so quickly. What we're doing now versus what we did even last year versus five years ago, you know, is completely different though themes are certainly the same. You know, we still have to code and we still have to compile that code or package the code and ship the code so, you know, how well can we adapt to these new things instead of creating floppy disks, which was my first job. Five and a quarters, even. The big ones. >> That's old school, OG. There it is. Well done. >> And now it's, you know, containers, you know, (indistinct) image containers. And so, you know, I've gotten a lot of really great success hiring boot campers, you know, career transitioners. Because they bring a lot experience in addition to the technical skills. I think the most important thing is to experiment and figuring out what do you like, because, you know, maybe you are really into security or maybe you're really into like deep level coding and you want to go back, you know, try to go to school to get a degree where you would actually want that level of learning. Or maybe you're a front end engineer, you want to be full stacked. Like there's so many different things, data science, right. Maybe you want to go learn R right. You know, I think it's like figure out what you like because once you find that, that in turn is going to energize you 'cause you're going to feel motivated. I think the worst thing you could do is try to force yourself to learn something that you really could not care less about. That's just the worst. You're going in handicapped. >> Yeah and there's choices now versus when we were breaking into the business. It was like, okay, you software engineer. They call it software engineering, that's all it was. You were that or you were in sales. Like, you know, some sort of systems engineer or sales and now it's,- >> I had never heard of my job when I was in school, right. I didn't even know it was a possibility. But there's so many different types of technical roles, you know, absolutely. >> It's so exciting. I wish I was young again. >> One of the- >> Me too. (Lena laughs) >> I don't. I like the age I am. So one of the things that I did to kind of harness that curiosity is we've set up a security champions programs. About 120, I guess, volunteers globally. And these are people from all different backgrounds and all genders, diversity groups, underrepresented groups, we feel are now represented within this champions program. And people basically give up about an hour or two of their time each week, with their supervisors permission, and we basically teach them different things about security. And we've now had seven full-time people move from different areas within MongoDB into my team as a result of that program. So, you know, monetarily and time, yeah, saved us both. But also we're showing people that there is a path, you know, if you start off in Tara's team, for example, doing X, you join the champions program, you're like, "You know, I'd really like to get into red teaming. That would be so cool." If it fits, then we make that happen. And that has been really important for me, especially to give, you know, the women in the underrepresented groups within MongoDB just that window into something they might never have seen otherwise. >> That's a great common fit is fit matters. Also that getting access to what you fit is also access to either mentoring or sponsorship or some sort of, at least some navigation. Like what's out there and not being afraid to like, you know, just ask. >> Yeah, we just actually kicked off our big mentor program last week, so I'm the executive sponsor of that. I know Tara is part of it, which is fantastic. >> We'll put a plug in for it. Go ahead. >> Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's, gosh, I don't even know the numbers anymore, but there's a lot of people involved in this and so much so that we've had to set up mentoring groups rather than one-on-one. And I think it was 45% of the mentors are actually male, which is quite incredible for a program called Mentor Her. And then what we want to do in the future is actually create a program called Mentor Them so that it's not, you know, not just on the female and so that we can live other groups represented and, you know, kind of break down those groups a wee bit more and have some more granularity in the offering. >> Tara, talk about mentoring and sponsorship. Open source has been there for a long time. People help each other. It's community-oriented. What's your view of how to work with mentors and sponsors if someone's moving through ranks? >> You know, one of the things that was really interesting, unfortunately, in some of the earliest open source communities is there was a lot of pervasive misogyny to be perfectly honest. >> Yeah. >> And one of the important adaptations that we made as an open source community was the idea, an introduction of code of conducts. And so when I'm talking to women who are thinking about expanding their skills, I encourage them to join open source communities to have opportunity, even if they're not getting paid for it, you know, to develop their skills to work with people to get those code reviews, right. I'm like, "Whatever you join, make sure they have a code of conduct and a good leadership team. It's very important." And there are plenty, right. And then that idea has come into, you know, conferences now. So now conferences have codes of contact, if there are any good, and maybe not all of them, but most of them, right. And the ideas of expanding that idea of intentional healthy culture. >> John: Yeah. >> As a business goal and business differentiator. I mean, I won't lie, when I was recruited to come to MongoDB, the culture that I was able to discern through talking to people, in addition to seeing that there was actually women in senior leadership roles like Lena, like Kayla Nelson, that was a huge win. And so it just builds on momentum. And so now, you know, those of us who are in that are now representing. And so that kind of reinforces, but it's all ties together, right. As the open source world goes, particularly for a company like MongoDB, which has an open source product, you know, and our community builds. You know, it's a good thing to be mindful of for us, how we interact with the community and you know, because that could also become an opportunity for recruiting. >> John: Yeah. >> Right. So we, in addition to people who might become advocates on Mongo's behalf in their own company as a solution for themselves, so. >> You guys had great successful company and great leadership there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone's told me "MongoDB doesn't scale. It's going to be dead next year." I mean, I was going back 10 years. It's like, just keeps getting better and better. You guys do a great job. So it's so fun to see the success of developers. Really appreciate you guys coming on the program. Final question, what are you guys excited about to end the segment? We'll give you guys the last word. Lena will start with you and Tara, you can wrap us up. What are you excited about? >> I'm excited to see what this year brings. I think with ChatGPT and its copycats, I think it'll be a very interesting year when it comes to AI and always in the lookout for the authentic deep fakes that we see coming out. So just trying to make people aware that this is a real thing. It's not just pretend. And then of course, our old friend ransomware, let's see where that's going to go. >> John: Yeah. >> And let's see where we get to and just genuine hygiene and housekeeping when it comes to security. >> Excellent. Tara. >> Ah, well for us, you know, we're always constantly trying to up our game from a security perspective in the software development life cycle. But also, you know, what can we do? You know, one interesting application of AI that maybe Google doesn't like to talk about is it is really cool as an addendum to search and you know, how we might incorporate that as far as our learning environment and developer productivity, and how can we enable our developers to be more efficient, productive in their day-to-day work. So, I don't know, there's all kinds of opportunities that we're looking at for how we might improve that process here at MongoDB and then maybe be able to share it with the world. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is we get to use our own products, right. And so being able to have this interesting document database in order to put information and then maybe apply some sort of AI to get it out again, is something that we may well be looking at, if not this year, then certainly in the coming year. >> Awesome. Lena Smart, the chief information security officer. Tara Hernandez, vice president developer of productivity from MongoDB. Thank you so much for sharing here on International Women's Day. We're going to do this quarterly every year. We're going to do it and then we're going to do quarterly updates. Thank you so much for being part of this program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, this is theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. (electronic music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the ACGSV, it's a mouthful. Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley Awards, the 14th annual. We've been coming here for about three years. We're really excited to have tonight's keynote speaker on, many time CUBE alum, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. Pat, great to see you. >> Great to be here, Jeff, thank you so much. It's always great to be on theCUBE, and so many good friends from theCUBE and great interviews. I really enjoy you guys, thank you. >> We're excited for VMworld later this year, we've got Dell Technology World coming up next week, so... >> Just working on my keynote this morning, so almost ready to go, so. >> But you're going to keynote tonight, so what's your keynote tonight on? >> Well, tonight, it's about tech as a force for good. And I'm going to talk about what I call the four superpowers today. You know in the past, we thought of superpower, like, USSR and the USA. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Today I believe superpowers are far more powerful, and they're technology superpowers. And the four I talk about are mobile, unlimited reach, cloud, unlimited scale, A.I., unlimited intelligence, an IOT bridging from the digital to the physical world, and how those four superpowers are reinforcing each other today, and literally it's our opportunity to improve the quality of lives for every human on the planet as a result of those superpowers. And really how it's our responsibility as a tech community to shape those superpowers for good. >> It's so good to talk about the "for good" because there's so much bad in the news lately about some of the stuff that's going on, and you know, it's two sides of the same coin always. You can use it for good or you can use it for bad. And unfortunately, the bad has been in the news more than the good, but there's so many exciting things going on in medicine, healthcare, agriculture, energy. The opportunities are almost endless. >> Yeah, it really is, and as I say, technology is neutral. It can be used for good or bad. The Gutenberg Press. The Bible or Playboy, it works for both, and it really is our responsibility as a society, and I'll say even more so today as tech leaders, to be that force shaping those technological superpowers for good. You know, one of the statistics offside of my keynote, is in the last fifty years, we've taken the extreme poverty rate from over forty percent, to less than ten percent on the planet. It's stunning that we've lifted two and a half billion people out of extreme poverty. Healthcare reach, we've increased the length of life by almost twenty years on the planet, over the last fifty years. I mean, these are stunning things, and largely the result of the technological breakthroughs that we're doing, and as I say, today is the fastest day of tech evolution of your life. It's also the slowest day of tech evolution of the rest of your life. >> Of the rest of your life, pretty interesting. And with 5G coming just around the corner, kind of thinking of a world of infinite bandwidth, infinite compute, infinite store. How do you start to design applications and distribution when you can have all that power? And as you said, with cloud really at your disposal. You don't have to build it all yourself, you leverage companies like you guys to put it in place and I as an entrepreneur don't have to build all that stuff anymore. >> That's right, this really is impressive that way, 'cause today we've crossed over half the population of the planet has a persistent connection to the internet over some form of mobile or PC device. Half the population, you can now reach over the internet. I mean, it's just stunning that way. >> Jeff: Yeah. >> You can rent the world's largest super computer for a few thousand bucks. The scale that we're able to now conduct business to be able to develop software to reach customers, and truly to change people's lives. >> Right. You do a lot of work. I follow you on Twitter and you're out in the community, you do a lot of stuff with your faith and outside of work to help people. You see the power that you can bring to this technology. What are some of the inspiring stories that get you up everyday, when you do some of this stuff outside of your day job? >> It really is exciting and one of the charities that my wife and I are very involved in is called Missions of Hope International. They work in the slums of Nairobi primarily, and we help to start schools there that literally today have over fifteen thousand kids in the schools that we helped start. Over the summer, I'm climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, in July, as a fundraise to build the next girls high school for those schools. As the girls get younger, they get pulled back into tribalism. For five camels, they get married off at young ages, and keeping them in school so that they can really advance and become proper members of society versus drug into tribalism, so that's one of my summer projects is doing that. Particularly in Kenya, we've been thrilled, things like M-Pesa, and we work with a company called Node Africa, to deliver farming and agricultural services. You know, the most basic things that give people market access, give people cropped information, and literally are lifting people out of poverty in the country of Kenya today. >> That's great work and like I said, follow Pat on Twitter. You're pretty active on there doing good work. >> Thank you. >> We look forward to your keynote tonight and we'll see you next week in Las Vegas. >> Look forward to it. Thank you so much, Jeff. >> Alright, he's Pat Gelsinger, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from the ACGSV Awards. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

(upbeat happy music) >> Hello, and welcome to a special CUBEConversations here at theCUBE Studio in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier here for a special Women in Tech and Technovation conversation with Tara Chklovski founder and CEO of Iridescent also runs TechNation and Anar Simpson global ambassador of TechNation. Great Women in Tech conversation and you guys have done amazing work, you're both rock stars. Thanks for spending the time. We just had a great chat about your event you had the 2017 World Pitch competition for girls in entrepreneurship in coding and everything else. Congratulations, so tell us about Technovation. What do you guys do and you guys are doing some amazing work. Tara start us off, where are you guys and what's going on? >> So Technovation is the world's largest technology entrepreneurship program for girls and girls aged middle school and high school are challenged that you have to find a problem in your community, to learn how to code a mobile application and learn how to start a startup from scratch all the way to the pitch video business plan. And through that process they are partnered with a woman in tech mentor and they go through a hundred hour learning experience. At the end of it they have to submit their apps and business plans for judging, and we have thousands of judges who are experts in tech from all over the world, review those and then we have a quarter final, semi final and then the big World Pitch competition that was held last week here in Silicon Valley. >> And this sounds so progressive and cutting edge. It sounds like what Palo Alto high school would do with Menlo and Sacred Heart and Castilleja, but this is not just Silicon Valley this is, I mean talk to us a little bit about the scope of the program. How do people get involved? Share some of the data. >> Yeah, totally, and so it is all over the world. We run in a hundred different countries, primarily brought and expanded through our work that our global ambassador Anar has done, and most of it is really trying to bring girls who would have never been exposed to technology entrepreneurship careers. And the way we work is really through partnerships, amazing organizations and visionary leaders who do the hard work of actually supporting these girls, getting these girls interested. So these girls would typically never go into careers in tech because they never see themselves as being interested and so the hook is that you want to find a problem in your community. You have to go out, talk to people, try to understand what is a big problem that is worth solving, and then we say, "Oh by the way, you know you could solve "this problem using technology." And so you get in a whole another group of people that would not normally access these careers. >> So is it an application process? Is it in the US? >> Anybody can. >> So anyone in the US. >> Anybody. >> So my daughter who wants to get some community hours could actually go take it to a whole other level. >> Totally, so you can just register. We haven't launched the new season yet but it'll be out live in October. Sign up, find a team of girls, and there's actually a documentary, an award-winning documentary done about the program. So the same woman who did Inconvenient Truth wanted to profile Women in Tech and she did a whole documentary about Technovation and it's called CodeGirl and you can get it on any online video platform. >> That's awesome, well congratulations. It's super impressive work, very inspirational. And Anar, you're bringing the global perspective in and we were talking before we came on camera that you had a goal. Share with us your five year goal and an update of where you are in taking this out beyond the United States. >> Sure, so you know five years ago I was a mentor for Technovation. It was my first time and it was an amazing experience, and we won in the local competition and the regional competition and then placed third in the final competition. And after that I had a conversation with Tara about the amazing experience that I had, and we were chatting and she said she'd love to take this globally. And being the type A enthusiast that I am, I said oh, well okay that's fine, you know, I come from Kenya. I've lived in Canada, so we've got three-- >> John: The perfect mix. >> Yeah, three countries already, but I'm sure we can take it global. Well in fact with our work together, I was able to take Technovation to 18 countries in the first year, 34 countries in the second year, 72 countries in the third year and this year we're at over a hundred countries. And it hasn't been an easy road. We keep saying this to each other, we just keep trying. Our focus is on getting this program. We don't get caught into anything politics or any otherwise, and we just want to get to as many girls as we can. And as Tara said, partnerships have played an immense role in getting Technovation all over the world. So initially it was just cold calls, people I knew in Kenya, people I knew in Canada, people I knew in LinkedIn, my little circle. But then my circle got bigger and bigger and then lots and lots of opportunities presented themselves and one of them was the Tech Women program that's run by the State Department. They bring in senior technical women to Silicon Valley for an internship and then I said to them, Oh and when they go back home, what do they do? Shouldn't they do Technovation? And so we've done good partnerships with them, we've done a good partnership with the UN women. We've been profiled in the United Nations high-level panel report, and these things keep happening and the... But it's not just because of the community or the relationships we're building. Our program works. It is credible. Our impact reports show that these girls end up in tech-related fields as they progress, and that's the whole point of our purpose, right? Is to say look, girls everywhere should be entering technology fields and what Technovation does it it's building a pipeline of young girls to enter these careers all over the globe. >> Well it's no secret that the folks that know me and watch theCUBE and know the show know that I'm a huge proponent for computer science and you know it's kind of similar, we kind of fell into that in the '80s. It's now become very interesting in that the surface area for computer science has increased a lot, and it's not just coding heads down and squashing bugs and writing code. There's been a whole nother evolution of soft skills, Agile, Cloud, you're seeing a full transformation with the potential unlimited compute available. With mobile now 10 years plus into the iPhone, you see new infrastructure developing. So it creates the notion that okay, you can bring the science of computers to a whole nother level. That must be attractive as you guys have that capability to bring that to bear in the programs. Can you guys comment on how you guys see just the role of computer science playing out? This is not a gender thing, just more of, as I have a young daughter I try to say it's not just writing code you can certainly whip out a mobile app but it's really bringing design to it or bringing a personal passion that you might have. So what are some of the patterns you're seeing in this surface area of what's now known as computer science? >> I think it's super important because as technology has progressed we've been able to provide this program. If we were still programming with you know, the in front of screens and doing the what you see is what you get kind of thing without, we would not be there. I think the big thing that's happened in the last 10 years is the mobile phone. I mean if you find a girl anywhere today in the world, chances are she'll have a mobile phone on her and she's going to be loathe for you to take that one thing from her. You could take other things from her, but try taking that phone away from her, she will not let you. And so the fact that she's so attached to that mobile phone means that you can then tell her, hey you don't have to be just a consumer of that thing. You can be a producer of that thing. Anything that you see on there, you can actually design. This is power. This is your thing to good and great and better, and if we can shift that in their minds that this is their link to the world that's wide open, we're seeing that. >> Well the world in consumed by it, I mean a lot of women in the world will be consumers of product. Certainly with AI, the conversation over the weekend I was having with folks is the role of women. It's super important not just in AI, but as software becomes cognitive, you have to align with half the audience that's out there. So it'd be hard for a guy to program something that's going to be more oriented towards a woman. But it brings up the question of application, and whether it's self-driving cars or utility from work to play and everything in between. Software, and the role of software's going to be critical and that seems to be pretty clear. The question is how do you inspire young girls? That's the question that a lot of fellow males that I talk to who are fathers of daughters and or are promoting Women in Tech and see that vision, what are some of the inspiration areas? How do you really shake the interest and how do you have someone really kind of dig in and enjoy it and taste it and feel it? >> Right, right. >> So there is some research to back what the formula is that works and to drive change in behavior. And so there is this, one of the biggest sort of names in cognitive psychology is Albert Bandura. He's a professor at Stanford. But basically it's the same principles that drives say the addiction from alcohol or weight loss or any kind of new behavior change. So the first is you need to have exposure to someone who you respect showing that this is something of meaning. So the key words are someone you respect, right? And so media can play a very big role here for scale, right otherwise it's only maybe your teacher or your parent and if they're not exposed to technology, they can't really affect your, and so media can play a huge role there. Second is the experience itself, right. Like how do you make it easy to get started, and then it's like learning from video games, right. So you make it very very easy, like the first step is just come over here it'll be fun, there's pizza, come right, like your friends are coming. But then the feedback has to be very fast, so the first step and that's where a good curriculum matters, right. So that's where also working on a mobile phone is very appealing even though many apps is-- >> John: It's relatable. >> It's relatable but the feedback is instantaneous, and so the programming language that the girls use is block based so even though you don't have any prior programming background you can still build a working app so that's critical. Then human beings get tired very easily and so the feedback needs to keep changing. It has to be unpredictable. The third piece is that of expectations, and so you have to have very high expectations, and so that's why this current discussion around cognitive differences in gender I feel is missing the point because it's not what you're born with, what are you capable of? And so if we looked at our genetics we would never go to space, we would never go to the deepest parts of the ocean because we are not meant for that, right? But we had really high visions and expectations and so human beings rose to that. And then the last piece is less relevant in developed countries but it's still important so, it's sort of the human energy. We are not a brain dissociated from the body. We are connected, right, and so if you're hungry and tired and sleepy, not the right time to sort of make a dramatic change in your interests. So this is relevant, if for us, we try to figure out which countries are we going to work in, so post conflict, war torn areas are not the best areas to start a new program in. You need the right partners. >> So you're saying the biological argument of, of course they're different, men and women. >> Yes. >> But it's the capability, that's where people are missing the boat. >> And the support system, right? So have high expectations, provide them with the right support, but the most important thing is your own beliefs in that. >> Let's get your thoughts on that because I think you guys have a great program with Technovation. You mentioned mentors, key part of the formula most likely. What we hear in the conversations I've had with women peers has been you know, there's a real call to arms at the executive level now, folks my age in their fifties who made it who are there succeeding. They really want to give back and they really have recognized the value of having that peer mentorship and then inspiring the young generation. Whether it's part of the things we cover like Grace Hopper or Technovation things that you do. Or even just mentoring in their own communities. What does that mentorship look like that you guys see, that you'd like to see doubled down on or areas you'd like to see tweaked or perceptions that need to change. What's your thoughts on mentorship and the role of inspiring young girls? >> Mentorship from men? >> John: Men and women, I mean. >> From both. >> John: Well I see the mentoring with women, that's the first step. >> Right. >> I have a whole nother conversation in my opinion that the men need training. Not just like go to class and learn how to talk but how to empathize. >> Well my big thing has been that you know when you wanted to encourage women up the ladder in your companies or you want to encourage women to actually get in to technical roles. That intent should not be placed in the CSR department of your organization 'cause that speaks volumes, right. To say oh, well that's in the social responsibility department or the HR, that just says okay, so you're not really, you don't think we're capable of helping you with your product or service. We're sort of part of this and it's like, no, you know. So I think you want to mainstream it, which is what a lot of I and D things are trying to do now. >> John: Inclusion and diversity. >> Inclusion and diversity techs. >> To make it part of the fabric not a department checkbox. >> Exactly, and-- >> That's what you're getting at right? >> Exactly, and you know the evolvement of these departments to include everybody and to make it more diverse is going to be not frictionless, it will be friction until a time where it won't even be necessary. I and D departments should have one goal, which is to work themselves out of a job. If they can work themselves out of a job, then the company would have done what it needs to be done. But I think-- >> John: Meaning it's self sufficient, it's self governing. People are humans, there's respect for individuals. >> Yes. >> I mean this is basically comes down to if you look at it as humans it takes, every conversation could be tabled as, what? There's a person on the other side, it's a human being. Not a woman or a white male or whatever. >> And you know-- >> There's not there yet, but I mean certainly that would be the end game, so in that scenario that department's out of business the I and R, the inclusion and diversity department has done it's job. >> You don't need one, because exactly. You don't need one because you know, you're okay, and I think capabilities is really important. In corporations, and this isn't anybody's fault. This is just how it's been done. This has just been the culture of it, right? Who gets invited to which meetings? Who gets invited to which conferences, right? And so we heard the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki saying you know, she had to sort of elbow a little bit to say why am I not allowed at a certain conference? And it's like, maybe just wake up to that and say, well why aren't you involving more people at conferences and think tanks because you know, I come from a oil and gas background, and people used to do a lot of deals on the golf course because oil and gas people play golf a lot and a lot of deals used to happen. Well in the Valley we don't play golf a lot but we do do other things, conferences or get togethers and if you don't include the people in your team as groups or representationally well then they're not going to be there when you make these decisions. So maybe just be a little bit-- >> Exclusionary is a problem and Kleiner Perkins was taken to task. They had ski trips apparently planned and they didn't, well mostly guys and they didn't invite the woman partner. It was a big scandal. This is where they kind of make that, it's a normative thing they've got to change the norms. >> It's change the norms and if you actually want your company which is made of all kinds of people, to move really far ahead, don't be like that. Include everybody because the only goodness about that is you'll go forward. You don't include somebody, well you're going to hurt them and then they won't be able to contribute because they just can't and then your product or your service is going to fail. It's really simple. >> You mentioned the Susan Wojcicki post, was an article in Fortune magazine where she wrote a guest article and she mentioned her daughter. >> Yes. >> Was feeling the narrative which by the way changed from the original Google memo to have a different meaning, but that's what she heard. So the question to you guys that I have on that is with Technovation and the work that you're doing, you're exposed to a lot of the ecosystem, across the world not just in the US from young girls. >> Yes. >> They see what's coming down from the top or the media, so certainly it's the game of telephone as things translate down to the level of the girls. Is there a pattern that you see emerging in their eyes as they look at this nonsense of narratives that are moving around. It's kind of a moving train the narrative of gender, Women in Tech but ultimately they have to internalize it and what patterns do you see and what do you guys do to either nullify that misperception and how do you amplify the real perceptions? >> Can I take that one? I was in Nairobi at the Safaricom headquarters. I don't know if you know Safaricom but these are the people who came up with M-PESA, and this is the currency that you can do on your mobile phone and Kenya uses M-PESA, like almost everybody in Kenya uses M-PESA. So Safaricom is a big tel-co and it's a big deal in Kenya, and Safaricom has taken Technovation, it has embraced Technovation in a big way. And the people who embraced Technovation at Safaricom in a big way are both male. So Josephine who is a tech woman fellow who came here and then went back and started Technovation. Her director, Clibeau Royal, he's male and the CEO of Techno, CEO of Safaricom is Bob Collymore and he's also male and these men, if I could clone these men in every country with every company you would see this sort of moving away and shifting away that women aren't good engineers or can't be good engineers. They are embracing it in such a way, not because they like Technovation because they know for their business having more women and equal women and a diverse company is making their product and their goods better. >> John: Yeah, their arbitraging the labor pool, why would you ignore talent? >> Exactly. >> Whether they're over 50 or they're women, it doesn't matter. >> I want to add to that, so there's quite a bit of data, so the pattern's are not anything different from what the message girls get from school and parents, right. So if you look at the data, there are a hundred countries that legally discriminate against women. And so what industry, what message industry is telling is really firstly doesn't filter through to the larger population. Silicon Valley is a completely different bubble. But overall the message is girls are given is like, this is not for you, right, and so especially in some of the more sort of populous dense countries in the world. And so we have to fight a lot of these kinds of perceptions from the ground up, and the number one sort of gatekeeper is the father and so a key part of what we have now done to date is to provide sort of education and training to the parents because... There's a very moving story that, we work in a remote town in South India and a mentor who's very dedicated has been trying to get these girls to participate in Technovation. He did that and then there were, one girl was actually offered a job but the father kept sort of saying no, not needed, no girl in my family ever needs to work, but he fought it. And then so then the girl actually gets a job, and then a year later the father calls the mentor and said, "You know what, I'm so grateful that you did it "because a day after she got the job I got hit in "an accident and I lost my job." But it's these kind of perceptions that have to be changed one person at a time, which is what makes this very hard. Unless you actually are able to get the media to change sort of the messaging. And I think in the US which is, there is some very interesting studies on that question, right. If you were to think, would there be more women in STEM in poorer developing countries versus richer highly developed countries, where would you see more women in STEM? The answer is actually the women in poorer countries like Iran, Malaysia. The reason is because in an individualistic society like in the US where there's a lot of emphasis on materialistic but it's also about are you happy? The conversation has changed to, from parents telling children do what makes you happy, and then you're very prone to advertising, and advertising works when it's highly targeted and highly gendered. And so in the '60s there was no such thing as pink and blue, now there is pink and blue, right? And so now we have just made our entire society entirely susceptible to advertising, and girls are passive and compliant and boys are aggressive. And so then when you are looking at the board structures, there's no, it's very very hard to fix the problem right there, right? You have to go down deeper because you don't get leaders who are compliant, maybe secretaries are compliant. But you have to fix the message that teachers give girls, that parents give their baby girls when they're born. And so industry is just sort of in the spotlight right now, but the issue is not that of industry it's also that of society. >> Industry (mumbles) are supporting you guys is interesting that this industry seems to be chipping, and certainly Silicon Valley's a little bit different as you said, but in general it is a cultural parent thing. Any plans there with Technovation to have a parent track? (laughing) >> Yes totally, I mean I think right now 10% of parents actually volunteer to be mentors, kind of like say Girl Scout troop leaders and so we are trying to figure out okay what is a way to involve parents and to make them part of the discussion. >> Well we'll keep the conversations going with Technovation you guys do incredible work. I'll just end the segment here by just telling a little bit about what you're working on right now? What are your goals? What are you passionate about? What are some of the things you'd like to do in the next half of the year, next year? What are some of the things going, Tara, you start. >> I think for us is to go deeper, so we are just launching a partnership with MIT to increase sort of the rigor of the curriculum, the rigor of the training and also provide more personalized learning and so this is the power of technology so we don't want to have girls drop out of the program because it's a hard program. So really trying to bring the best from industry to support that. >> Right and so you know my goal is to get Technovation to all the countries in the world, but keeping in mind we're making sure that it's delivered in a really good way and so girls complete the program et cetera, and the model that I hope to replicate in many other countries is the model that we're trying within Canada. So the new Canadian government is very interested in making sure that all of its citizens are you know, innovative, ready for the technology change that's coming there, and they launched a new fund called CanCode and so we have been part of that application process and we hope to have Technovation in almost every city in Canada, across Canada, and to really get this going and we, right now Canada is, everybody's like, you know, favorite country. And we hope that if we can do this in Canada, then other countries will follow and so that this program will get to as many girls as it can. >> Well you know how I feel. I feel computer science training in general should be standard in curriculums, because of all the conversation around automation. Automation is the fear is that jobs will go away. The data we have from our research over at Wikibon shows that the billions being automated away is non-differentiated labor. >> Right. >> Which implies that a working knowledge of those machines will shift to the value side. So you know I'm on the pro side of AI and automation personally. Especially I think it's great for-- >> But there's an education side too. >> There's the education side and I think this is a real fun area. You guys are at the cutting edge of it, both doing great work. I appreciate you taking the time and we'll have you back in for an update. Tara, Inar thanks so much. This is theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat happy music)