>> from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering the M Wear Radio twenty nineteen brought to you by the M where >> welcome to Special Cube conversation here in San Francisco for PM wears radio event there. Top engineers air here for once a year Get together and show in the best stuff road map to get to great guests. Here we got Mike Petrillo is the senior director of Blockchain of'em were here where their journey is, where they come from and gone to today where they are up to and for Team A Gluckman Engineering leader Blockchain engine both with GM Where great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate spending the time My favorite topic block Jane our favorite topic to thanks for joining me. So, Mike, let's start with you. Take a street where you guys are now Because we talked about a year ago. Just getting the putting the team together. You were here last year radio kind of getting some core mo mentum. Where have you guys come from? And where are you now? Yeah, >> it's been quite a journey. You know, over the past five years, we've been doing a lot of research that research culminated in an open source project called Project Concorde that we announced last year. Then we wrapped some commercial offerings around it around really the operational side. How do you operate a blockchain at scale in an enterprise setting we introduced? That is Veum wear Blockchain. It's a very descriptive on the naming, and it really focuses on three core things. Enterprise grade, decentralized trust, not distributed trust but really decentralized trust. So being able to deploy it across multiple different cloud environments as well as on prim, it concentrates on robust Day two operations. How do you operate it at scale in an enterprise setting? How do you deal with stuff like GDP are the right to be forgotten? You know, data sovereignty issues, things like that, which is much different than other block Janes. And then the third thing is really being developer friendly. Last year we were fully Ethereum compatible. We had the Ethereum language sitting on top of our block chain. Since then, we've added support for Djamel from digital asset. So another language and we're adding more and more languages so the developers can develop in the framework that they're used to on the best scaleable. You know, Enterprise Supporter >> brings him Dev Ops Mojo Concepts to blockchain. Absolutely, absolutely somewhat. The demo you guys did you get on stage? I want to get too, because it's a really use case. So again, rnd concept jewel years of research started putting together making some progress on developer. So the solutions that you guys presented, we really take us through that. >> So the ocean plastics demo that we talked about a radio basically solves this problem or, you know, just the plastics polluted, polluting our oceans today. So if you look at the numbers are staggering and the BP that you actually a consume, you know, in fish it's pretty scary. The other thing is, you know, it's been predicted that we'll have mohr plastic in our oceans than fish by twenty fifty. And one of the things Dell is trying to do is clean up the environment, and they're building these reusable trays or packaging material for their Dell laptops. And so this use case was providing them that functionality. And if you look at del they you know, they have a massive supply chain. They've got hundreds and thousands of renders that you know, they use despite systems that don't actually talk to each other, they've got complicated work flows. There's also a lot off corruption in their supply chain. And one of the things that can really solve a lot of those problems is bmr blockchain. And they have an instance running on our service, which runs on VM CNW s and I walked through the devil of just going through an aggregator to getting to a manufacturer and then assembling these laptops with the trays and shipping them off to >> think this was something we covered. A del technology world. I just wanna point out for the folks watching Dell's taking recycled material from the ocean, using it as materials into their laptops as a part of sustainability. Great business. You know, Malcolm for del the supply chain pieces. Interesting. So you guys are using blockchain and track the acquisition of the plastic out of the ocean? >> Yes. To manufacturing and to end >> Yes. In tow? Yes. >> Using of'em were blocking. >> Yes. So who coded >> this up? It was actually >> del Del developers coded it up. So they quoted up. They took two weeks to code it. We had absolutely no support issues that came away, which really talks about these. A fuse of our platform. And, you know, just the applications that running. >> How does someone get involved real quick at the plug for they have someone joins the bm where? Blockchain initiative? Yes, Via more block >> change. That's ah, manage service offering from us. So it's a license, you know, product. If they're interested, they can go to the inn where dot com slash blockchain or emails? The blockchain dash info beyond where dotcom get it signed up on the beta. We have an active beta. We have lots of enterprise customers all around the planet using it today. You know, at scale >> is a free servicers are licensed paid license. >> There will >> be a paid license for it. You know, we're invader right now, so it is free, right? >> I get it. But we're gonna get you in the snow. So it is. It is a licence service. Yeah, It's Amanda's >> service offering on. That's you know, the beauty of it is that you don't have to worry about updating it, you know, keeping the nose live anything like that. We don't see the transactional data. We don't manage the nodes or anything like that. But we deploy and keep him updated. Keeping refresh. >> You know, one of the benefits Ray Farrell's on. Just how about the ape revolution? How I change the world with the Internet and the web that blockchain has that same kind of inflection point impact you mentioned GDP are that implies, Reed. You know, changing the the values on the block chain will dwell in the Ganges is immutable. How do you handle that? Because if it's already immutable on encrypted, how does Tootie pr work? >> Yeah, just doesn't take >> care of you. Why wait? If it's encrypted, no one can see it. >> Yeah, well, you know, block chains, not about encrypting the data, right? There are some block change that do encrypted data. People get confused because they associated the cryptography with it, which links the blocks together. But the data in there is still visible. Right? We're working on privacy solutions to make privacy per transaction. We're working on GDP our issues right now, because that is an issue. When you get into a regulated environment, which there isn't really a non regulated environment these days. You have to worry about these things. You know, Blockchain gives you a mutability and that gives you to trust. But really, Blockchain is about trust. It's about this decentralized trust. And when you think about it in that context, you say, Well, if I trust that I want to be able to delete that data and we reach consensus on it and we still maintain the order, right, the proper order of the bits, which is really what Blockchain is doing, is giving you trust on that order. Bits and I agree, is a consensus to delete one of those pieces out of the order bit, and we can still maintain trust of the order bits. And that's fine. Now I can't get into details on this engineering secret sauce. >> I. So one of the things I want to ask >> you guys just engineers, because I think this is one of the things that I see is that Blockchain is attractive. There's a lot of unknowns that coming down the pike, but we do know one thing. It's a distributed, decentralized kind of concept that people like it. I see a new generation of attracted the blockchain new generation of entrepreneurs, a new generation of young people, engineers who see use cases that others from old school industry might not. So you start to see. I won't say it's the hipster or cutting edge. It's just that it's attracting this kind of new generation developer for engineer. >> Why do you >> think that's the case? Why, and and is that right assumption to look at? Because, you know, when asked his blockchain, certainly state of the art. Yeah, it's not as fast as a database of I wanted to do something. Technically, that's like saying the Internet dial up was bad. But what happened after? So you know, a lot of people making these arguments, But I see it definitely resonating with young people. Yes, look at Facebook who tried looking blockchain and moving their entire a broken system. Teo blocked, Jammed. Try to fix that so you can feel these indicators. What's your thoughts? >> I think >> part of it. And I definitely saw this, you know, last Friday and Saturday, I was eighty three up in New York City, right, and it was very much that hipster crowd, and I was really attached to the crypto currency phase. Cryptocurrency allowed individuals to make investments. You know, the kind of millennials to make investments. They didn't have to go to a e trade or they didn't have to go to some broker. It wasn't caught up in anything. They could, you know, make these bets. And now they can build applications that are directly attached to that currency. They can make up their own currency. They can make up their own value system. You know, you've done some of that with a cube, right? We've launched an application that provides value around the content and token eyes. Is that value? And now it can transfer that value So it opens up the transfer of that value, the trust of that value. And I think, you know, we're in a generation of trust and transparency. That's what's powering the world right now is about trust and transparency, and that's what Blockchain gives you, gives you trust in the system that no one person or no one government owns, and >> I really like that. >> But one thing important is I mean, we just have to demystify this like we just have to say, This is not about Cryptocurrency. That's one thing, and what I am is doing is enterprise blockchain and, you know, and Mike, you've talked about this. You always say, you know, black jeans, not going toe, you know, save the world or, you know it's not going to get rid of poverty. But there's four use cases that we've drilled down to in the supply chain realm, and there's the financial services. And so those are some of the things we're tackling, and I think it's important to like talk about that. And, you know, there's these hipsters every time we go and talk anything with regarding the blockchain, we know a big chunk of people, therefore Cryptocurrency and apparently at consensus in New York, they reduce their audience from I can't remember the numbers. When >> I was >> in the two thousand >> last year were about House kicked out all the crypto >> currency people, and so it's important to make that distinction. >> I think the crypto winter probably hurt them more than taking up, because last year there was a lot of hype there, but I think the bubble was already burst around February last year. But this piece of the good point is something that we've been kind of covering on silicon angle. The Cube is there's infrastructure dynamic. The engineering goodness. I think that certainly is intoxicating to think about Blockchain as an impact. Engineering wise, the token conversation brings up utility, the decentralized crypto currency, the icy, his initial coin offerings. The fraud part or regulated part has caused a lot of problems. So to me, well, I tell people was looking the CEO kind of scams and fraud kind of put a shadow on token economics. And Blockchain is a technology so supply chain no doubt is great. Blockchain. That's where you guys are focused. That's what the enterprise want. Way start getting into tokens. Tokens is a form of measurement. Uh huh. And that's where I think the regulators to do your point earlier is it's caused a lot of problems. So you know, the says if you got a utility token and you're selling >> it, it's Zane exchanges, not kill each other. So that's you're >> called. A lot of it would call those app developers. >> Yeah, but the up developers were still out there, right? And what's nice is these app developers that are on the side building these unique little applications. They still end up working for these larger companies and driving interesting solutions through like we're doing with supply chain like we're doing financial services like what we're doing in Telco and Media. You look at the people that we're dealing with in these companies. They came from building those applications. Heck, some of our own product managers came from building unique things mining rigs and mining companies. So you still have that background. They still have that entrepreneurial, you know, asset. And that's what's changing these cos they're driving change these companies saying, Hey, look, we can use the blockchain for this really unique thing that opens up a brand new business line, you know, for this large corporation, >> you know, I showed you our check preview. We did a quick preview of'Em World last year with our block changing me with a cube coin token, kind of total experimental thing. And it was interesting time because I think you hit the nail on the head. We as entrepreneurial developers. I had this great application we want to do for the Cube community, but we were stalled by the you know, the crypto winter, and you know, we're Apple developers, so there's many use cases of such scenarios like that. That's kind of people are kind of halfway between a Z A B. What's your advice toe to us, or folks like us who were out there who want to get the project back on track? What what what should we and application will do? They should they free focus on the infrastructure peace? What's your advice for the marketplace? >> It's so early, it's It's so early to actually really comment on that. I mean, I would say Just keep at it because you never know. It's I feel like we're so early in the game that though we can solve world hunger, there's so many use cases and applications that come out of it and we just have to keep going. And I think the developer community is what's going to make this successful, you know, and even emerging standards. I think that's one thing is standards across, You know, these block chains like we don't have that right now, and that's something we really need to need to do. And >> I don't know we program in Ethereum. >> So the question is, is that a bad choice is a lot of cognitive dissonance around with the right to. >> That's what I was just going to bring up is that >> you know, you brought up the point of your an app developer and you become stalled, you know, in your project. And we see that exactly same thing happening in the enterprise. We go into account after account where they've chosen some block change solution that's out there and to become what I call a stalled pioneer. They've gone through. They develop that application. But they either hit a scale, ability issue and then, you know, throughput or the number of nodes. They hit an operations thing. You know, operations comes in and says, Whoa, how are you going to do an audit on that thing? What about data Sovereign? What about GPR? What about this one? How are we? My God, you're gonna operate it inside of my environment? You know, what's the security side? So it's really round scale ability. It's around operations. It's around security. Those are three things we hit on over and over and over again with the stalled pioneers. So those of the accounts that we go into and rescue them essentially right, we say we can provide you the scale. We can provide you the through, but we can provide you the operations. For twenty years, the Empire has been taking large, complex distributed systems and making you operate them at scale in an enterprise setting. Where the experts at it So we're doing that would block chain now and allowing your blockchain projects to succeed and >> really find that term. Yep. Yeah. Okay, So, radio. What's the feedback here? Obviously got. Got the demo. What's been some of the peer review Give us the the four one one on peer review here. People liking what's going on? >> I think the demo really talk to people. It was relatable. You're a There was a social good a demo. I think it really impacted them. Um, but some of the cool stuff we're doing is also like in the financial services side. You know, we've got Mohr interesting stuff on the supply chain, so the feedbacks been great. Ah, lot of focuses on VM are blockchain, which is also cool. We didn't quite have that last year. In radio, we had everyone running off in different directions. So now it's via more blockchain And what Mike talked about installed pioneers is you know, we were seeing scalability throughput on numbers. And, you know, we talked about it at the immoral Barcelona A numbers. They're looking really great. And, you know, we're we're optimizing pushing our platform so we could get to, you know, perhaps the papal numbers rave, and someday visa, >> you have high availability. You guys know scale. Yeah. You happy where you are right now? >> Very happy where we >> are right >> now. I mean, we've got great customers. Great feedback, you know, great solution that solving real world problems. You know, engineers like doing two things shipping code and solving stuff that's going to help the world. At least you're of'em where that's our culture, right? And And we're able to do that day in and day out and the entire block chains the cornerstone to that. That's what makes people happy. >> Mike Protein, We following your journey. Great. Teo, check in Great to hear the progress. Congratulations on the great demo reel Use cases in supply chain. We'LL be following you guys and keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the key. Absolutely. Thank you for >> the time >> chauffeur here with Lisa Martin here in San Francisco for work. You coverage of radio, the top engineering event where they all come together internally with GM, where one of a few press outlets here, the Cube bringing exclusive coverage. Thanks for watching.

>> from Palo Alto, California It's the Cube covering the EM Where women Transforming technology twenty nineteen. Brought to You by VM Wear >> Hi Lisa Martin with the Cube on the ground at the end. Where in Palo Alto, California, for the fourth annual Women Transforming Technology, even W. T. Squared on event that is near and dear to my heart. Excited to welcome back to the Cube pretty much. Rog Lachman, engineering leader, blocked in at the end where pretty much It's so great to have you back on the Cube. Thank you, Lisa. It's amazing to be here, and I can't believe it's been a year, a year. And so last year, when Protein was here, she launched her book. Nevertheless, she persistent love the title You just Did a session, which we'LL get to in a second, but I'd love to get your your experiences in the last year about the book launch. What's the feedback? Ben? What are some of the things that have made me feel great and surprised you at the same time? It's been fantastic. I wasn't expecting that when I started to write this book. It was more like I want to impact one woman's life. But what was interesting is I delivered around twenty twenty five talks last year. My calendar's booked for this year, but every time I go give a talk, my Lincoln goes crazy and I'm connecting with all these women and men. And it's just fantastic because they're basically resonating with everything I talk about in the book. I spoke at the Federal Reserve. Wow, I was like, This is a book on tech and they were like, No, this impacts all of us And I spoke to a group of lawyers and actually, law firms have fifty fifty when they get into law, right when they get into whenever I mean live, I'm not that familiar with it. But getting to partner is where they don't have equality or diversity, and it's resonated. So now I'm like, maybe I should just take the word check out What? You It's been impactful. And so last year was all about companies, so I did. You know, I spoke at uber I spoken Veum, where spoken nutanix it's looking a lot of these companies last year. This year is all about schools, fantastic schools of all different type, so I you know, I've done a talk at San Jose State. I went to CMU. They invited me over Carnegie Mellon. I supported the robotics team, which is all girls team. Nice. And it was fantastic because these girls high school kids were designing robots. They were driving these robots. They were coding and programming these robots and was an all girls team. And I asked them, I said, But you're excluding the men and the boys and they said no. When it's a combined boy girls team, the women end up the girls and organizing the men of the boys are actually writing the code. They're doing the drilling there, doing all that. And so the girls don't get to do any of that. And I was looking at just the competition and as watching these teams, the boy girl steams and those were all organizing. And I thought, this is exactly what happens in the workforce. You're right. Yeah. We come into the workforce, were busy organizing, coordinating and all that, and the men are driving the charge. And that's why these kids where this is at high school, Yeah, thirteen to seventeen, where this is becoming part of their cultural upbringing. Exactly. Pretty. In great. Yes, yes. And a very young age. So that was fascinating. I think that surprised me. You know, you were asking me what surprised you that surprised me. And what also surprised me was the confidence. Though these girls were doing all these things. I've never built a robot. I would love to. I haven't built a robot, and they were doing all these amazing things, and I thought, Oh, my God, >> they're like, >> confident women. But they were not. And it was because they felt that there was too much to lose. They don't want to take risks, they don't want to fail. And it was that impostor syndrome coming back so that conditioning happens way more impossible syndrome is something that I didn't even know what it wass until maybe the last five or six years suddenly even just seeing that a very terse description of anyone Oh, my goodness, it's not just me. And that's really a challenge that I think the more the more it's brought to light, the more people like yourself share stories. But also what your book is doing is it's not just like you were surprised to find out It's not just a tech. This is every industry, Yes, but his pulse syndrome is something that maybe people consider it a mental health issue and which is so taboo to talk about. But I just think it's so important to go. You're not alone. Yeah, vast majority men, women, whatever culture probably have that. Let's talk about that. Let's share stories. So that your point saying why I was surprised that these young girls had no confidence. Maybe we can help. Yes, like opening up. You know, I'm sharing it being authentic. Yeah. So I'm looking at my second book, which basically says what the *** happens in middle school? Because what happens is somewhere in middle school, girls drop out, so I don't know what it is. I think it's Instagram or Facebook or boys or sex. I don't know what it is, but something happens there. And so this year of my focus is girls and you know, young girls in schools and colleges. And I'm trying to get as much research as I can in that space to see what is going on there, because that totally surprised me. So are you kind of casting a wide net and terms like as you're. Nevertheless, she persisted. Feedback has shown you it's obviously this is a pervasive, yes issue cross industry. This is a global pandemic, yes, but it's your seeing how it's starting really early. Tell me a little bit about some of the things that we can look forward to in that book. So one thing that's important is bravery, Which reshma So Johnny, who's the CEO off girls code? She has this beautiful quote, she says. We raise our voice to be brave, and we'd raise our girls to be perfect, pretty telling. And so we want to be perfect. We won't have the perfect hair, the perfect bodies. We want a perfect partner. That never happens. But we want all that and because we want to be perfect, we don't want to take risks, and we're afraid to fail. So I want to focus on that. I want to talk to parents. I want to talk to the kids. I want to talk to teachers, even professors, and find out what exactly it is like. What is that conditioning that happens, like, why do we raise our girls to be perfect because that impacts us at every step of our lives. Not even careers. It's our lives. Exactly. It impacts us because we just can't take that risk. That's so fascinating. So you had a session here about persistent and inclusive leadership at W T squared forth and you will tell me a little bit about that session today. What were some of the things that came up that you just said? Yes, we're on the right track here. So I started off with a very depressing note, which is twenty eighty five. That's how long it's gonna take for us to see equality. But I talked about what we can do to get to twenty twenty five because I'm impatient. I don't want to wait twenty eighty five I'LL be dead by them. We know you're persistent book title. You know, my daughter will be in the seventies. I just don't want that for her. So, through my research, what I found is we need not only women to lean in. You know, we've have cheryl sound. We're talking about how women need to lean in, and it's all about the women. And the onus is on the woman the burdens on the woman. But we actually need society. Selena. We need organizations to lean in, and we need to hold them accountable. And that's where we're going to start seeing that changes doing that. So if you take the m r. I. You know, I've been with him for ten years, and I always ask myself, Why am I still here? One of the things we're trying to do is trying to take the Cirrus early this morning rail Farrell talked about like on the panel. He said, We are now Our bonuses are tied to, you know, domestic confusion, like we're way have to hire, you know, not just gender, right, Like underrepresented communities as well. We need to hire from there, and they're taking this seriously. So they're actually making this kind of mandatory in some sense, which, you know, it kind of sucks in some ways that it has to be about the story that weighing they're putting a stake in the ground and tying it to executive compensation. Yes, it's pretty bold. Yes. So organizations are leaning in, and we need more of that to happen. Yeah. So what are some of the things that you think could, based on the first *** thing you talked about the second one that you think could help some of the women that are intact that are leaving at an alarming rate for various reasons, whether it's family obligations or they just find this is not an environment that's good for me mentally. What are some of the things that you would advise of women in that particular situation? First thing is that it's to be equal partnership at home. A lot of women leave because they don't have that. They don't have that support on having that conversation or picking the right partner. And if you do pick the wrong partner, it's having that conversation. So if you have equal partnership at home, then it's both a careers that's important. So you find that a lot of women leave tech or leave any industry because they go have babies, and that happens. But it's just not even that, like once they get past that, they come backto work. It's not satisfying because they don't get exciting projects to work on that you don't get strategic projects, they don't have sponsors, which is so important toward the success, and they they're you know, people don't take a risk on them, and they don't take a risk. And so these are some of those things that I would really advice women. And, you know, my talk actually talked about that. Talked about how to get mail allies, how to get sponsors. Like what? You need to actually get people to sponsor you. Don't talk to me a little bit more about that. We talk about mentors a lot. But I did talk this morning with one of our guests about the difference between a sponsor and a mentor. I'd love you to give Sarah some of your advice on how women can find those sponsors. And actually, we activate that relationship. So mentors, uh, talk to you and sponsors talk about okay. And the way to get a sponsor is a is. You do great work. You do excellent work. Whatever you do, do it well. And the second thing is B is brag about it. Talk about it. Humble bragging, Yeah. Humble bragging talkabout it showcases demo it and do it with people who matter in organizations, people who can notice your work building that brand exactly. And you find that women are all the men toward and under sponsored. Interesting, Yes. How do you advise that they change that? There was a Harvard study on this. They found that men tend to find mentors are also sponsors. So what they do is, you know, I like you to stick pad girl singer, he says. Andy Grove was his mentor, but Andy Grove was also his sponsor in many ways, in for his career at Intel, he was a sponsor and a mental. What women tend to do is we find out like even me, like I have female spot him. Mentors were not in my organization, and they do not have the authority to advocate for me. They don't They're not sitting in an important meeting and saying, Oh, patina needs that project for team needs to get promoted. And so I'm not finding the right mentors who can also be my sponsors, or I'm not finding this one says right, and that's happens to us all the time. And so the way we have to switch this is, you know, mentors, a great let's have mentors. But let's laser focus on sponsors, and I've always said this all of last year. I'm like the key to your cell. Success is sponsorship, and I see that now. I am in an organization when my boss is my sponsor, which is amazing, because every time I go into a meeting with him, he says, This is about pretty much grew up. This is a pretty mers group. It's not me asking him. He's basically saying It's pretty nose grow, which is amazing to hear because I know he's my mentor in sponsor as well. And it's funny when I gave him a copy of my book and I signed it and I said, And he's been my sponsor to be more for like ten years I said, Thank you for being my sponsor and he looked at me. He said, Oh, I never realized it was your sponsor So that's another thing is men themselves don't know they're in this powerful position to have an impact, and they don't know that they are sponsors as well. And so we need. We need women to Fox and sponsors. I always say find sponsors. Mentorship is great, but focus of sponsors Look, I think it's an important message to get across and something I imagine we might be reading about in your next book to come. I know. Yeah, well, we'LL see. Artie, thank you so much for stopping by the Cube. It's great to talk to you and to hear some of the really interesting things that you've learned from nevertheless you persistent and excited to hear about book number two and that comes out. You got a combined studio. I'd love to thank you and thank you. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue from BM Where? At the fourth Annual Women Transforming Technology event. Thanks for watching.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE! Covering women transforming technology. >> Hi, welcome to theCube. Lisa Martin on the ground at the 3rd Annual Women Transforming Technology event at VMware in Palo Alto, and I'm joined by an author and a senior VMware engineer, Pratima Rao Gluckman. Welcome to the Cube, Pratima. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here >> It's great to have you here. So you have been an engineer here for about ten years. You knew from when you were a kid, love this, engineer, you knew you wanted to be that. You fell in love with your first programming class. It was like a Jerry McGuire, you complete me kind of moment I'm imagining. Tell me a little bit about your career in engineering and specifically as a female. >> Okay, so I was raised, born and raised, in India, and I grew up in an environment where I was gender blind. You know, my oldest sister played cricket for the country. >> Lisa: Wow! >> And it was a man's game! You know and a lot of people kind of talked about that, but it wasn't like she couldn't do it, right? So, I always grew up with this notion that I could do anything, and I could be whoever I wanted to be. And then I came to the United States, and that whole narrative stayed with me, the meritocracy narrative. Like you work hard, you know, society, the world will take care of you, and good things will happen, but it wasn't until 2016 was when I had this aha moment, and that's when I suddenly felt, suddenly I was aware of my gender, and I was like, okay I'm a female in tech, and there's lots of challenges for women in tech. And I didn't quite realize that. It was just that aha moment, and VMware has been a great company. I've been with VMware for nine years, I started as an engineer, and I moved into engineering management. We had Diane Greene who founded the company, the culture was always meritocratic, but I think something in 2016 kind of made me just thinking about my career and thinking about the careers of the women around me, I felt like we were stuck. But at the same time be focused on the women that were successful, for instance Yanbing Li, who's our senior VP and general manager of our storage business. And we were talking about her, and I said, this is what I said, I said, "There are some women who are successful despite everything "that we're dealing with, and I just want "to know their stories, and I'm going to write this book." The moment I said that it just felt right. I felt like this was something I wanted to do, and the stories in this book are inspiring stories of these women, just listening to Laila Ali this morning, her inspirational story, and this book has around 19 stories of these executive women, and they're just not role models, I mean every story offers strategies of how to thrive in the tech world. >> So interesting that first of all I love the title, Pratima, of this book, "Nevertheless She Persisted." So simple, so articulate, and so inspiring. So interesting, though, that you were working as an engineer for quite a few years before you realized, kind of looked around, like, whoa, this is a challenge that I'm actually living in. Yanbing is a CUBE alumni, I love her Twitter handle. So you said all right, I want to talk to some women who have been persistent and successful in their tech careers, as kind of the genesis of the book. Talk to us about, maybe, of those 19 interviews that range from, what, c-levels to VPs to directors. What are some of the stories that you found, what kind of blew your mind of, wow, I didn't know that you came from that kind of background? >> So when I started off I was very ambitious. I said I'd go interview CEO women, and I did a lot of research, and I found some very disturbing facts. You know, Fortune Magazine lists Fortune 500 companies, and they rank them based on their prior year's fiscal revenues, and from that data there were 24 women CEOs in 2014. That number dropped to 21 in 2015, and it dropped again in 2016, but it went up slightly in 2017 to 32 women, which is promising, but back in 2018 we're down to 24. So we have very very few women CEOs, and when I started off I said I'll talk to the CEO women, and I couldn't find any CEO women, my network, my friends' network, And so I dropped one level and I said let me go talk to SVPs and when I looked at VMware and VMware's network, Yanbing was one of them, so she's in the book, and then I reached out to contacts outside of my network. So I have some women from LinkedIn, I have Google, I have Facebook, I have some women from startups. So I have around four CEOs in the book, I've got, and what's great about this book is it's got a diverse set of women. Right? They have different titles; I've got directors, senior directors, VPs, Senior VPs, GMs, and CEOs. And some of them have PhDs, some of them have a Master's Degree, and some actually don't have formal training in computer science. I thought this would be interesting because a woman with any background can relate to it. Right? And so that was helpful. And so that's kind of how I went off and I started to write this book. And when I interviewed these women, there was a common theme that just kept emerging, and that was persistence. And they persisted against gender bias, stereotype threat, just the negative messages from media and society. I mean like Laila Ali was talking about just even the messages she got from her dad. >> Right. >> Right? Someone who was so close to her who basically said "Women can't box." And that didn't stop her; I mean she persisted. When I was listening to her, she didn't use the word, but, you know, she said she was believing in herself and all that, but she persisted through all those negative messages, right? And she said no one can tell her what to do. (laughs) >> Yeah her confidence is very loud and clear, and I think that you do find women, and I imagine some of them are some of the interviewees in your book, who have that natural confidence, and as you were saying when Muhammad Ali was trying to talk her out of it, and trying to, as she said, "He tried to get me think it was my idea," but she just knew, well no, this is what I want to do. And she had that confidence. Did you find that a lot of the women leaders in this book had that natural confidence? Like you grew up in an environment where you just believed "I can do this, my sister's playing cricket." Did you find that was a common thread, or did you find some great examples of women who wanted to do something, but just thought "Can I do this?" And "How do I do that?" What was the kind of confidence level that you saw? >> I was surprised because I had a question on imposter syndrome, and I asked these women, Telle Whiteney, who's the CEO, she was the CEO, ex-CEO >> Lisa: Grace Hopper >> Yes. The founder of Grace Hopper. I asked her about imposter syndrome and this is what she told me, she said "I feel like I'm not good enough" and that actually gave me goosebumps. I remember I was sitting in front of greatness and this is what she was telling me. And then I asked her "How do you overcome it?" and she said "I just show up the next day." And that actually helped me with this book because I am not an author. >> That's persistence. >> I mean I am an author now but 2 years ago when I started to write this, writing is not my forte. I'm a technologist, I build teams, I manage teams, I ship products, I ship technical products, but everyday I woke up and I said, "I'm feeling like an imposter." It was just her voice right? Yanbing also feels the same way, I mean she does feel times where she feels like, "I'm lacking confidence here." Majority of the people actually, pretty much all the women, this one woman, Patty Hatter, didn't feel like she had imposter syndrome but the rest of them face it everyday. Talia Malachi who's a principal engineer at VMWare, it's very hard to be a PE, she said that she fights it every day, and that was surprising to me, right? Because I was sitting in front of all these women, they were confident, they've achieved so much, but they struggle with that every day. But all they do is they persist, they show up the next day. They take those little steps and they have these goals and they're very intentional and purposeful, I mean just like what Layla said, right? She said, "Everything that I've done in the last 20 years "has been intentional and purposeful." And that's what these women did. And I learned so much from them because 20 years ago I was a drifter (laughs) you know I just kind drifted and I didn't realize that I could set a goal and I could reach it and I could do all these amazing things, and I didn't think any of this was possible for me. But I'm hoping that some girl somewhere can read this book and say "You know what this is possible", right? This is possible and you know role models, I think we need lots of these role models. >> We do I think, you know imposter syndrome I've suffered for it for so long before I even knew what it was and I'll be honest with you even finding out that it was a legitimate issue was (exhales) okay I'm not the only one. So I think it's important that you, that these women and youth are your voice, in your book, identified it. This is something I face everyday even though you may look at me on the outside and think, "She's so successful, she's got everything." And we're human. And Laila Ali talked about of having to revisit that inner lawyer, that sometimes she goes silent, sometimes the pilot light goes out and needs to be reignited or turned back up. I think that is just giving people permission, especially women, and I've felt that in the keynote, giving us permission to go, "Ah, you're not going to feel that everyday, "you're not going to feel it everyday." Get up the next day to your point, keep persisting and pursuing your purpose is in and of itself so incredibly empowering. >> Right but also imposter syndrome is good for you and I talk about that a little bit in the book. And you know why it's good for you? It's you getting out of your comfort zone, you're trying something different, and it's natural to feel that way, but once you get over it, you've mastered that, and Laila talked about it too today she said, "You get uncomfortable to the point "where you get comfortable." >> Lisa: Yes. >> So every time that you find that you have this imposter syndrome, just remember that greatness is right around the corner. >> Yep. I always say "Get uncomfortably uncomfortable". >> Pratima: Yes. >> And I loved how she said that today. So one of the big news of the day is VMWare with Stanford announcing that they are investing $15,000,000 in a new Women's Leadership Innovation Lab at Stanford. Phenomenal. >> Pratima: Yes. >> And they're really going to start studying diversity and there's so many different gaps that we face, wage gap, age gap, gender gap, you know mothers vs motherless gap, and one of the things that was really interesting that, I've heard this before, that the press release actually cited a McKinsey report that says, "Companies with diversity "on their executive staff are 21% more profitable." >> Yes. >> And that just seems like a, no duh, Kind of thing to me for organizations like VMWare and your other partners in this consortium of Wt Squared to get on board to say, "Well of course." Thought diversity is so important and it actually is demonstrated to impact a companies' profitability. >> Right, yeah. And that's true, I just hope that more people listen to it and internalize it, and organizations internalize that, and what VMWare's doing is fantastic. I mean I'm so proud to be part of this company that's doing this. And you Shelly talked about change right? She said, "I think, right now the way I feel "about this whole thing, is we need to stop talking about "diversity and inclusion, we just need to say "enough is enough, this is important, let's just do it." >> Lisa: We should make this a part of our DNA. >> Exactly. Just make it, why do we have to fight for all this, right? It's just pointless and you know, men have wives and daughters and mothers and you know, It impacts societies as a whole and organizations, and we have so much research on this and what I like about what the Stanford Research Lab is doing is, they're actually working with woman all the way from middle-school to high-school to the executive suite, and that's amazing because research has now shown, there was a report in March 2014 by a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, for Judith Warner, and so she documented, just with the rate of change, like I talked with all the percentages and the number of women CEOs, just with that rate of change, the equality of men and women at the top will not occur until 2085. >> Lisa: Oh my goodness. >> That's 63 years from now. That means all our daughters would be retired by then. My daughters was born on 2013 and so she won't live in a world of female leaders that's representative of the population. And so that realization actually really, really, really broke my heart and that made me want to write this book, to create these role models. And what Stanford is doing, is they're going to work on this and I'm hoping that they can make that transition sooner. Like we don't have to wait 'till 2085. I want this for my daughter. >> It has to be accelerated, yes. >> It has to be accelerated and I think all of us need to do that, our daughters should be in the 20s, 30s when this happens, not when they're in their 70s. >> Lisa: And retired. >> And retired, I mean we don't want that. And we don't know how that number's going to get pushed further, right? Like if we don't do anything now... It. (exhales) >> Lisa: Right. 2085 becomes, what? >> I know! It's insane. >> In the spirit of being persistent, with the theme of this 3rd annual Wt Squared being Inclusion in Action, you're a manager and in a people or hiring role, tell me about the culture on your team and how your awareness and your passion for creating change here, lasting change. How are you actually creating that inclusion through action in your role at VMWare? >> So what I do is when I have to hire engineers on my team, I talk to my recruiter, have a conversation, I'm like, "I need more diversity." It's just not women, I want diversity with the men too. I want different races, different cultures because I believe that if I have a diverse team I'm going to be successful. So it's almost like I'm being selfish but that is very important. So I have that conversation with my recruiters, so I kind have an expectation set. And then we go through their hiring process and I'm very aware of just the hiring panel, like who I put on the panel, I make sure to have at least a women on the panel and have some diversity. My team right now is not really that diverse and I'm working hard to make that because it is hard, you know the pipeline has to get built at a certain point, and then start getting those resumes, but I try to have at least one female on the panel, and during the selection process the first thing I'll tell them is, let's get the elephant out of the room, age, gender, whatever, like let's take that out, let's just talk about skills and how well this person has done in an interview. And that's how I conducted and you know I've had fairly good success of hiring women on the team. But I've also seen that it's hard to retain women because they tend to drop-out faster than the men and so it's constant, it's just constant work to make that happen. >> Yeah. I wish we had more time to talk about retention because it is a huge issue. So the book is Nevertheless, She Persisted. Where can people get a copy of the book? >> So you can get it on Amazon, that's, I think, the best place to get it. You can also get it from my publisher's site which is FriesenPress. >> Excellent well Pratima thank you so much for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> And sharing your passion, how your persisting, and how you're also helping more of us learn how to find that voice and pursue our passions, thank you. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching. We are TheCUBE on the ground at VMWare for the Third Annual Women Transforming Technology Event. I'm Lisa Martin thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DockerCon 18, brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of DockerCon 2018. We are in San Francisco at Moscone, US. It's a spectacular day in San Francisco. It's a day to play hooky frankly, or play hooky and watch theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer, and we're excited to welcome to theCUBE Abby Fuller, Developer Relations from AWS. Abby, great to have you here. >> Happy to be here. >> So you were a speaker at DockerCon 2018. Tell us a little bit about that and your role in Developer Relations. >> So I work in Developer Relations for AWS. So I used to be a devops engineer, and now I go around talking to customers and developers and other software engineers, and teaching them how to use things with AWS, or this morning it was teaching everyone how to build effective Docker images. >> So I read in your bio on the DockerCon website of the speakers that you're a container fan. We know you're a music fan, but you're also a container fan. What is it about that technology that you just go, "Oh, this is awesome, "and I can't wait to teach people "about the benefits of this"? >> So I switched over to container as a customer before I started working at AWS, and the biggest reasons for me, the first one was portability, so that I could do everything that I needed to run my application all in one place. So I think a big problem for a lot of developers is the whole what works on my machine? So being able to package everything together so that it worked on my machine, but also on a staging environment, a QA environment, and on your machine, that was the biggest thing for me. And that it removed some of the spaghetti code that came before, and it just made everything, it was all packaged nicely, I could deploy it a little bit more easily, a little bit faster, and I eliminated a lot of the why doesn't it work now when it worked before? >> Abby, one of the paradoxes of where we are in 2018 is AWS has been around for a decade, but yet here at the show, about half the folks raised their hand to the question, this is your first DockerCon? Are you just getting started with Docker and containers? So as an evangelist, Evangelist Developer Relations, you're the front line of talking with people at the grassroots. So can you talk a little bit about some of the different personas you encounter? Are you meeting people who are just getting started with their container journey? Or are you spending a lot of time kind of finessing the details about that API, APIs and changes and things like that at AWS? >> I think my favorite part about talking to AWS customers is that you get the whole range, right? So you get people that are just starting and they wanna know how do I build a container? How do I run it? How do I start from zero? And then you get the people that have been doing it for maybe a year or maybe two years, and they're looking for like advanced black belt tips, and then you get the other group which is not everyone is building a greenfield application, so then you get a really interesting subset where they're trying to move over from the whole monolith to micro services story. So they're trying to containerize and kind of adopt agile containerize approaches as they're moving over, and I think the best part is being able to talk to the whole range 'cause then it's never boring. >> What are some of the big barriers that you see for organizations that are maybe on the very very beginning of the journey or maybe before it, when you're talking with customers or developers, what are some of the things that you're hearing them say, "Ah, but what about these? "How can you help me eliminate these challenges?" >> Two big ones for me. The first one is the organizational changes that go around the infrastructure change. So it doesn't always work to just containerize what you already had, and then call it a day. So a lot of people are decomposing, they're going with micro services at the same time as they're going with containers. And I think wrapping your head around that kind of decomposition is the first kind of big challenge. And I think that we really just had to educate better. So show people, so here are some ways that you can break your service up, here are some things to think about when you're figuring out service boundaries. And I think the other one is that they often want a little bit of help when they're getting started. So either educational resources or how can AWS manage part of their infrastructure? Will they focus on the container part? So it's really interesting and it runs a whole gamut. >> Abby, you in Developer Relations, I love the trend, the community orient and trend, they're great, of peers helping peers, you're out there, you're wearing a Bruce Springsteen shirt right now, you made a Wu Tang joke in your talk today which is something that one did not do a few years back, right? You had to kinda dress up, and you were usually a man, and you wore a tie. >> Got my blazer on today. >> You look very sharp. Don't get me wrong. But as you talk to people, one, what's your day like or week like? How many miles do you have this year? That's private. But also as people come up to you, what do they ask you? Are you a role model for folks? Do people come up and say, "How can I do this too?" >> Yeah, so miles for this year. I think like 175,000. >> Already just in June? >> Already this year. So, this is a lot of what I do. I talk to all kinds of customers. I do bigger events like this, I do meet-ups, I do user groups, I go to AWS summits, and dev days and builders days, and things like that. I meet with customers. So day-to-day changes everyday. I'm obviously big on Twitter, spend a lot of time tweeting on planes. It really depends. This is a lot of what I do and I think people, I don't think you can ever really call yourself a role model, right? I love showing people that there's pass into tech that didn't start off with a computer science degree, that there's tons of ways to participate and be part of the tech community, 'cause it's a great community. >> You're not just a talker, you're a coder too. >> Yeah, yeah, so every job before this one with the exception of my very first job which was in sales. I was a dev ops engineer right up until I took the job at AWS, and I like to think that I never left, I'm just no longer on call. But I build my own demos, I write my own blog posts, I do all my own slides and workshops, so still super active, just not on call, so it's the best of all the worlds. >> So you went to Tufts, you didn't major in computer science. >> No. >> You are, I would say, a role model. You might not consider yourself one-- >> Well you can say it, yeah. >> I can say it exactly. It's PC if I say it. But, one of the things that's exciting to have females on the show, and I geek out on this is, we don't have a lot of females in tech. I mean, I think the last stat that I saw recently was less than 25% of technical roles are held by women. What was your career path if we can kinda pivot on that for a second, 'cause I think that's quite interesting. And what are some of the things that you've said, "You know what, I don't care. "I enjoy this, I wanna do this,"? 'Cause in all circumstances you are a role model, but I'd love to understand some of the things you encountered, and maybe some of your advice to those that'll be following in your footsteps. >> Yeah, so I went to school for politics. Programming was a little bit of a side hobby before that, mostly of the how can I do this thing, do this thing that it's not supposed to be doing? So I did that, I went to school. I took a computer science class my very last semester in school. I did not know that it was a thing before then, so I'm I guess a little slow in the comp sci uptake. And I was like, oh wow cool, this is an awesome, this could be an awesome career, but I don't know how to get into it. So I was like okay, I'm gonna go to a startup, and I'm gonna do whatever. So I take a sales job. I did that for maybe nine or 10 months. And I started taking on side projects. So how to write email templates in HTML that I could use that directly showed an impact to my sales job. Then the startup, as startups do, got acquired. And as part of the acquisition I moved my little CRM engineering job to the product team. And then, I'm gonna be honest, I bothered the CTO a lot. And I learned side projects. I was like I've learned Python now, what can you have for me? So I basically bothered him a lot until he helped me do some projects, and totally old enough now to admit that he was very kind to take a chance on me. And then I worked hard. I did a lot of online classes. I read a lot of books. I read a lot of blogs. I'm a big proponent in learning by doing. So I still learn things the same way. I read about it, I decide that I wanna use it, I try it out, and then at the point where I get where I don't quite know what's happening, I go back to documentation. And that got me through a couple of devops jobs until I got to evangelism. And I think the biggest advice I have for people is it's okay to not know what you want right away which is how I have a politics degree. But you can work at it. And don't be afraid to have mentors and communities and peers that can help you 'cause it's the best way to participate, and it's actually whether you have a comp sci job or not, it's still the best way to participate, and that you can have, there are so many nontraditional paths to tech, and I think everyone is equally valuable, because I think I write better coming from a liberal arts degree than I would have otherwise. So I think every skill that you bring in is valuable. So once you figure out what you want, don't be afraid to ask for it. >> The thing I'm hearing here is persistence. And it just reminded me, a quick pivot, of I hosted theCUBE at Women Transforming Technology just a couple weeks ago at VMWare, and they just made a massive investment, 15 million into a lab, a research lab at Stanford, to look at the barriers that women in tech are facing. And one of our guests, Pratima Rao Gluckman, just wrote a book called Nevertheless, She Persisted. It reminded me of you because that's one of the things that I'm hearing from you is that persistence that I think is a really unique thing there. Sorry, I just had to take a little side. >> I saw you looked that up. And actually I saw the title and I have not read it yet, but I have a flight back to New York after this so I'll have to find that. >> You've got time. >> Yeah. >> Over and over again as I talk with folks about IT and tech careers, right? It's that thinking expansively about your job, trying things, being a continuous learner, that is the thing that actually works. Maybe pivoting back to the tech for a sec then, obviously here container central, DockerCon 2018, Kubernetes actually was a big news this morning at the keynote, a big announcement, how Docker EE is gonna connect to Amazon EKS among others, kind of being able to manage the Kubernetes clusters up there in the cloud. And EKS actually just had, it just had its general availability I believe, right? In the last week or so? >> Yeah, so, excited to see EKS in the keynote this morning. We're always happy to deepen our partnerships. Yeah, and we've been in preview since re:Invent, and then we announced the general though of EKS, so Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, long acronym. So EKS, we announced the GA last Tuesday. >> The interesting thing about AWS is somebody just compared it, I saw a tweet today to an industrial supply store and it's a huge warehouse full of tools that you can use, and that includes containers. But for containers, the three pieces that are the largest are EKS, ECS, and Fargate. Can you kinda tease those out for us really briefly? >> Yeah so envision if you would a flow chart. So if you wanna run a managed container on AWS, first you pick your orchestration tool, so EKS or ECS. ECS is the one that we've been working on for quite a few years now, so Elastic Container Service. Once you've chosen your orchestration tool, for ECS you have another set of choices which is either to run your containers in the EC2 mode which is manager, cluster, infrastructure as well, so the underlying EC2 hosts. And Fargate mode, where you only manage everything at the container level and task definition level, so no cluster management. >> And that's all taken care of for you. >> That's all taken care of for you. So Fargate I think is not actually a service in the traditional way that we would say that ECS is a service, and more of like an underlying technology, so that's what enables you to manage everything at just the container level and not at the cluster level. But I think the best way of describing it is actually is, there's a really nice quote floating around that said, "When I ask someone for a sandwich, "they don't wanna know the whole sandwich logistics chain, "so how do I get turkey, how do I get cheese, "how do I get mayo on the bread, "they just want the sandwich." So Fargate for, I think, a lot of people, is the sandwich. So I just want the sandwich, just give me your container, don't worry about the rest. >> So we've already established Abby has a lot of miles already in half a year, so I'm thinking two things. One, we should travel with her 'cause we're probably gonna get free upgrades. And two, you speak with a lot of customers. So tell us about that customer feedback loop. >> Something that I really love about working at Amazon is that so much of our roadmap is driven by customer feedback. So actually something that was really cool is that this morning, so ECS announced a daemon-scheduler, so run tasks one per host on every host in the cluster, so for things like metrics, containers, and log containers. And something that is so cool for me is that I asked for that as a customer, and I just watched us announced it this morning. It's incredible to see every single time that the feedback loop is closed, that people ask for it and then we build it. The same thing with EKS, right? We want you to have a great experience running your infrastructure on AWS, full stop. >> Can you give us an example of a customer that's really been impactful in terms of that feedback loop? One that really sticks out to you as a great hallmark of what you guys are enabling. >> I think that all of our customers are impactful in the feedback loop, right? Anyone from a really small startup to a really large enterprise. I think one that was really exciting to me was a very small Israeli startup. They went all in on managing no EC2 instances very quickly. They're called The Tree. So they were my customer speaker at the Tel Aviv summit, and they managed zero EC2 instances. So they have Fargate, they have Lambda, they managed no infrastructure themselves. And I just think it's so cool to watch people want things, and then adopt them so quickly. And the response on Twitter after the daemon-scheduler this morning is like, my favorite tweet was, "This is customer feedback done right." And I love seeing how happy people are when they ask for something or are saying, "Now that you've added that, "I can delete three Lambda functions "because you made it easy." And I love seeing feedback like that. So I think everyone is impactful, but that one stuck out to me as someone that adopted something incredibly quickly and have been so, they're just so happy to have a need solved for them. >> Well that's the best validation that you can get is through the voice of the customer. So to hear that must feel good that not only are we listening, but we're doing things right in a way that our customers are feeling how valuable they are to us. >> Happy customers are the best customers. >> They definitely are. >> Yeah. >> We learn a lot from the ones that aren't happy, and there's a lot of learnings there, but hearing that validation is icing on the cake. >> Always. >> Last question for you. With some of the announcements that came out today, and as this conference and its figure has grown tremendously, when I was walking out of the general session this morning, I took a photo because I don't think I've seen a general session room that big in a long time, and that was just at the Sapphire last week which has 20,000 attendees. I was impressed with how captivated the audience was. So last question, what excites you about some of the things that Docker announced today? >> So I think that's interesting. Something that's excited me in general is watching the community itself flourished. So there's many, there's Kubernetes CGroups, and there's user groups, the discussion online is always incredibly rich and vibrant, and there are so many people that are just so excited for anything. It's all companies building what they're looking for. And I love seeing things like the Docker Enterprise Edition announcement this morning where the demo is EKS, but I just love seeing customers get the choice to do whatever they want. They have all the options out there, and that you can see how much more rich and vibrant everything is. From even a couple years ago, there's more people every year, there's more sessions every year, the sessions are bigger every year. And I just love that. And I love seeing when people get so excited, and then seeing people that came to your talk two years ago, come back and give their own talk I think is amazing. >> Oh, talk about feedback. That must have felt really good. >> I think it's not a reflection on me, it's a reflection on the community. And it's a very supportive community, and it's a very excited and curious audience. So if you see their reception to other people that talk a lot being like, oh we're really happy to have you, then the next year you're like, well I have a story and I wanna tell it, so I'm gonna sit in my own session, and I think that's the best. >> Well Abby, it's been such a pleasure to have you on theCUBE, thank you. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you for stopping by. And your energy is infectious so you'll have to come back. >> Anytime. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer, live from San Francisco at DockerCon 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat music)