>>Hi, welcome to the cube. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. And we are on the ground at Google with cloud now, which is a nonprofit organization for and with leading women in cloud technologies and converging technologies. We're here tonight with cloud now to celebrate their fifth annual top women in cloud innovations award. In fact, this year they had so many submissions for outstanding females. So it's actually expanded the winners circle, which is fantastic. And we're very excited to be joined by one of those winners, Madeira Makoski. You are the co-founder of VP of product at platform nine systems. Welcome back to the cube. You've been on the cube before. That's right. Thank you. Congratulations on your award. >>Thank you. Talk >>To us a little bit about the project that you're leading as VP of product at platform nine. What are some of the, the cloud innovations that your team is helping to deliver? >>Yeah, definitely. So I'm a co-founder and re VP of product at platform nine systems. And what platform nine does simply put is we take best of breed, open source frameworks, such as OpenStack and Kubernetes, and we deliver them as a SA service. So what we did is we pioneered this really unique deployment model for these really complex, but popular and powerful open source frameworks where they're delivered as a SA service. So you can zoom them just like you can zoom Gmail or you can zoom Salesforce. Okay. And so that delivers a very differentiated experience to the end users where there's very little complexity in consuming these frameworks and going through the process of updates or upgrades through the frameworks, et >>Cetera. Excellent. How long, how old is platform nine? >>So platform nine was founded in 2013, so we just became three years old, about few months ago. Okay. >>Congratulations. Happy birthday. Tell us a little bit about the founding of that. What was it from a career perspective that was, was a driver or some of the drivers that led you to with your, co-founders say, let's do this. >>Yeah. So I remember reaching a point in my career. I think it was around maybe 20 10, 20 11 or so where I felt that I have completely stagnated. Right. And, and it was an interesting point for me because prior to that, I had never thought that I'm gonna start a company. In fact, my, my father is an entrepreneur. My brother is an entrepreneur and I had seen them go through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. And so I had realized for myself early on, or I thought I'd realized that it's not for me, but when I reached that point in my career where none of the other options really seemed interesting enough, right. I, I tried interviewing, I tried going for large companies or small companies, different roles, but nothing sounded challenging enough. And then I was fortunate enough to realize that my, my current co-founders who were then my coworkers at VMware, they were independently going through very similar journey. Right. They were, they were trying to figure out what is it that they wanna do next. And that's really where a lot of our brainstorming over lunch sessions started. And that's kind of where platform line also got started. >>Wow, fantastic. So let's take a little bit of a look at your, your career path, how you got to be where you are. Were you always like naturally inclined towards engineering, computer science from the time you were small? Or was it something that you discovered a little bit later? >>Yeah, so I remember when I picked computer science for my bachelor's major, right. I, I pretty much picked it because it was the most popular stream or specialization to choose. And most of majority of students were doing that, or majority of top students were doing that. I didn't quite pick it because I, I had a particular inclination towards it. I didn't even have a computer in my house at that time. Wow. And so it really started for me, it started because after starting my bachelor's program, I started taking these, these off school C plus plus classes. And those classes were taught by this X professor who had in stopped teaching, but he, he would run this little workshop in, in his house garage at nighttime, remember nine 30 or 10. My mom would almost, she almost didn't want me to go out at that time, but right. We went out anyways and went to these classes and the, just the way he encouraged us to be almost little competitive in terms of edging each other a little bit in understanding really the core principles of C plus plus I just absolutely loved his teaching style. And, and I realized I'm, this is something I'm really good at. So that's where my, my interest in programming really, I think, was awakened for me. And then that's where my kind of my journey in computer science started. Wow, >>Fantastic. So I love that the, the old garage inspiration, you know, I think as a women in tech myself, we get inspiration from a, a lot of different sources, whether it's people that we know or not. And gender really doesn't matter in that. But talk to us a little bit more. You said that that sort of the, the catalyst for you and your co-founders getting together to start platform nine was you were at a, a position or a point in your career where you felt kind of stagnant. What were you doing then? And what was it that sort of gave you that boost to go? We're gonna do this. >>Yeah. So we were, I was a senior engineer at VMware. At that time. I was part of the tech lead or the architect team as part of various products in VMware's management portfolio, suite of products. During that time specifically, we were working on this project within VMware called we cloud vCloud director. And what that project really gave us was the opportunity to interface with a lot of VMware's mid to large size enterprise customers. So we got to observe a lot of their pain points, and we could clearly see that the traditional model of building infrastructure software, which is the shrink wrap way of building software, where someone deploys it, downloads it and then babysits it, maintains it over the life cycle of that software. Right. We realize that that model really cannot stand compared to the very high bar that public cloud was setting. And it's, it was really from that experience that we realized that there is an opportunity, there's a pain point demand >>Is there. >>Yes. And we, we realized it was big enough that we could form a company out of it. >>So in terms of your company, you're, you're relatively new from a, and you are obviously a senior female leader. Is that part of the corporate culture at platform nine? How important is helping other women to get into technology to you as personally and to your company? >>Yeah. I mean, platform nine is 100% supportive of talent regardless of gender. Right? So we are, I would say we are a very, what I think a very typical next gen tech startup in the bay area in that sense where my experience just in the tech industry in the bay area has been that the community is extremely encouraging and opening, open and welcoming. Right. I have myself personally never experienced any kind of bias and I've not seen my other coworkers, et cetera, experiencing that neither a platform line nor at VMware as well. So I am a big believer that the tech community in the bay area does a really fantastic job of, of not introducing a gender bias. >>Fantastic. Well, Madeira, thank you so much for joining us again on the cube. Congratulations again, on your award and being a very inspiring female tech leader. If you know, other female tech leaders that you think should be featured on our show, please tweet us at the cube, hashtag women in tech. Thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time. Thanks.