>> From the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube Covering CloudNow 7th Annual Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. >> Lisa Martin on the ground with the Cube at Facebook Headquarters. We are here for the 7th Annual CloudNow Top Women Entrepreneurs in Cloud Innovation Awards. Welcoming to the Cube for the first time, one of tonight's winners, we have Charu Sharma, the Founder and CEO of Nextplay.ai. Charu, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thanks Lisa, I'm really excited to be talking to you. >> And congratulations on your award. Your pedigree, when I looked you up on LinkedIn, I thought wow, where do I even start, the things you've accomplished in such a short time period are pretty impressive. I want to share a few with our guests. You've built, in college, in your spare time, two award-winning start-up companies out of your dorm room before you got napped up by LinkedIn to grow their talent solutions revenue. You've won awards by Grace Hopper. We mention tonight you're here with CloudNow, one of the top women entrepreneurs in cloud innovation. Tell us about, I'd love to get your story of what inspired you to go off and found Nextplay.ai, the inspiration, also the chutzpah to say, "You know what I want to do this, "and I need to go get funding" which is really challenging for women in technical roles to do. Tell us about that. >> Yeah, so tonight I'll be giving a talk next to Sheryl Sandberg and that's nothing short of a miracle for me because I grew up in a family in India where women were not allowed to work, and so growing up it was important for me to have access to economic opportunities and that's how I came to the US for a scholarship, and I'm here today because a lot of mentors serendipitously came in my life and opened doors for me. So, to pay it forward, when I worked at LinkedIn before, I built a mentoring program for women at LinkedIn specifically cuz I think in the workplace especially women, minorities, and introverts suffer in finding a sponsor in helping open doors for you and mentors at your company can specially help you navigate the political landscape and help you grow your career at the company which helps the companies with retention as well. Exactly two years ago I started Nextplay.ai to be able to do this at scale, so today we work with companies from Coca Cola to Lyft to Splunk, and we not only connect their employees internally for mentorship, we also have robust analytics to show the ROI on retention. >> I was looking at some of your stats, I was telling you before we went live, I geek out on stats, that really show that your technology can make significant business impact for, you mention Coca Cola, Lyft, Splunk, etcetera but you obviously saw a gap a few years ago when you got into tech yourself saying not only do we know the numbers and the stats of women in technical roles as being quite low, but one of the things that you saw is one of the things we need to do to help increase those numbers is start internally and mentoring these women. To your point, of not just helping them establish confidence to stay but navigate that political landscape. I think that's a really unique opportunity, when you pitched this idea to these Cs, what was their response? >> Yeah, so mentorship is not an established product category, and on top of that, I inserted gender, race, accent, age, etcetera, and so frankly I got mixed opinions, but I chose to focus on the people who saw the big vision and who cared about the story and the impact something like this could have, so LinkedIn's executives, 500 Start-ups, TechCrunch's former CEO, who's a woman, they're some of the earliest investors who put their bets on us. Today we have shown success stories at every scale, so after six months of working with us employees are 25% more likely to recommend working at their company which actually when you do the math, it's huge. It saves millions of dollars for companies. There was a woman at a company who became the first woman at her company to get promoted while away on mat leave, that's huge. >> Wow, that is huge. >> A new product manager was able to, because of us, connect with somebody who they otherwise wouldn't know, and they were able to help identify a multi-million dollar market opportunity for the company, so there are definitely these case studies which is now creating a movement and now we have over 300 companies who want to work with us. They're on a waiting list. >> A waiting list? >> Mmhhm So we're definitely creating this momentum. >> And we talk about groundswell and momentum, especially at an event like tonight where there's over 300 attendees, 1o winners, one of them being yourself, and there was no advertising to buy tickets because the groundswell is growing so much. The trajectory that Nextplay.ai is on, in two years is pretty steep, you got some exciting things coming up in March, tell us about that. >> Yes, thank you, so when ai play and we sell to enterprise companies to do their mentoring and sponsorship programs internally for talent retention, that said, we started the company to help level the playing field so now that we're relatively stable and are a strong robust team with decent traction, this March we want to give a give back, so we're launching a social impact campaign where around the world we're going to help 100,000 women get mentored. So, if you want to host events at your company, if you want to get involved as a mentor or a mentee, please e-mail me at charu@nextplay.ai. >> And people can also go to the website to find out more information about that? >> Not about that campaign specifically yet, but they'll find my contact information, so it's nextplay.ai. >> And even at your Twitter handle which is probably in the lower third here. >> Yes >> Excellent, so congratulations on the award. The amount of work that you have done in such a short period of time is incredible. I can see it in your attitude and your smile and your energy, congratulations on getting to present to Sheryl Sandberg tonight and for seeing this opportunity in the market to help with that retention from within. What a great opportunity and thanks again. >> Thank you Lisa. >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube. I am Lisa Martin on the ground at Facebook headquarters, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)