(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)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference, here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Maureen Fan. She is the CEO and co-founder of Baobab Studio, which is the industry's leading VR animation studio, so, welcome Maureen. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> It's excited to talk to you, because you just won an Emmy. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> You just won an Emmy for "Invasion", so, tell us a little bit about invasion. >> It was our first piece ever and it was just an experiment to see if we could even create VR and it's a story about these adorable little bunnies and you are actually a bunny too, you look down, you have a furry, little bunny body and these aliens that come to try to take over the Earth, with their advanced technology and you and your bunny friend end up saving the entire Earth and it's starring Ethan Hawk and it just came out last year. And we're really excited, because it became the number one top downloaded VR experience across all the headsets and it's getting turned into a Hollywood Feature Film. >> Very cool, very cool >> Thank you. >> And you have another film coming out too and this is "Rainbow Crow" >> Yes. >> Tell our viewers a little bit about "Rainbow". >> So, "Rainbow Crow" is based off of a Native American legend about how the crow used to have beautiful rainbow feathers and a beautiful singing voice and it's John Legend, in our piece and how he decides to sacrifice himself, by flying into the sun to bring warmth and fire back to the Earth and in the process, loses all his beautiful feathers, becomes black and burnt and his voice becomes like the crow's voice, but it's about how beauty is within and there's also, huge themes about diversity and how if you learn to accept yourself and your differences, that's when you can accept others and that's why we specifically cast minorities and women, so, we have John Legend, Constance Wu, from "Fresh off the Boat" as a skunk character, Diego Luna, from "Rogue One", for the moth character, as well as Randy Edmunds, as a Native American elder, narrator, and we have a whole bunch of other stars to announce, soon-- >> Well we cannot wait to hear. That's already an amazing line-up. >> Thank you. >> So, when you're thinking about "Rainbow Crow" and particularly, because it's VR, which is relatively new, still experimental, I mean, the messages of diversity, does it lend itself to VR, better than, say, a standard animation film? >> Absolutely, because if you think about stories that you just watch passively, the reason why we need stories and humanity, in general is to experience characters and stories beyond those we can experience in our real lives and we think, "Oh, how would I feel if I was in the "position of that character or what would I do?" but in VR, because you are actually playing a character in a role, you actually have to decide at that point, "what would I do?" so, it's not just a experience that I just see, it's one where I'm actively experiencing it, so, I create a memory and remember afterwards and there's all these research studies at Stanford by Jeremy Bailenson, who is head of the Stanford VR lab, that shows if you are made a homeless person, inside a VR experience and you have to go through a day in the life of a homeless person or you would look in the mirror and see that you are a black woman, that you, when you get out of the headset, you act completely differently. You have so much more empathy for these people than you would normally and so, it gets you to care about these characters, in a way that you don't normally and in VR, because you're doing it in a real-time game engine, these characters can act and react to what you do, so you can turn that empathy into action and actually act upon your caring, which we call compassion, so, it really changes you in a way, that normal, traditional story-telling doesn't, so, I think that having voices and characters that are different, in front of the screen, and also, behind the screen are really important to create role models and different perspectives for all the people out in the world. >> And these are movies that are targeted at kids, children, but do you see a future in which, where there is more targeted at adults, for VR? >> Absolutely. The funny thing is, in the beginning, the VR distributors didn't think that people would want our VR animation, because they're like, "Oh, it's just going to be these hardcore boys "that just love to play games. "Are they going to want this animation?" and VR is targeted towards adults, that's why they were surprised and we were surprised when "Invasion" became the number one downloaded VR experience. It shows that the audience for our content is from little kids to grandmas and everyone in between and that's probably why it became the top downloaded experience, is because it's universally appealing and has themes that are appealing to just, every single generation, so, absolutely, but for VR to become mainstream, there needs to be more universally appealing content. Right now, the content tends to be for games, like parkour games, as well as documentaries, which are two amazing pieces of content for this medium, but for it to become mainstream, we need more universally appealing content and I'm excited about, right now, it's a new industry. This is when minorities and women in particular, can enter the space and help shape the voices and the direction of the industry. >> That is exactly where I wanted to go next. So, let's talk a little bit about Baobab Studio. It's not that old and VR is not that old and so, why are there more opportunities, would you say, for women, and minorities? >> Well, if you look at traditional animation in the traditional entertainment fields that's a very mature industry and to break into that industry, you have to either have lots and lots of money or unfair distribution advantage, but VR, there's technological disruption, which means nobody has an advantage at all, means it's a level playing field and everybody can come in and start something, so, this is a perfect opportunity, when there's low barriers to entry of coming in, for women and minorities, anyone who wants their voice heard, to start companies or to make experiences and we can set the groundwork, because there's no one telling us what we can and can't do, because no one actually knows what we can and can't do yet. >> Right, right, but yet you are still of a female, asian figurehead of a studio, that will hopefully, someday be a major studio. You're working on it, but do you find that people take you as seriously in Hollywood? I mean, what are you coming up against? >> Well, it's really interesting, because I heard for even fundraising is one of the hardest parts of starting a company and there was a Stanford Research Study that showed that if you took a deck, a pitch deck for a company and you had a male voice-over versus a female voice-over the male voice-over was, I don't remember what, it was like 50% more likely to get funded than the woman with the same exact pitch deck, so I knew from that and they also show that if you are married and wear a ring you're taken more seriously, or if you're less attractive, also, you're taken more seriously and my hypothesis and some of the hypotheses out there, is it takes away the whole entire female attraction thing, like what does it mean to be an attractive female, so, I had to go into the meetings, knowing this. I even considered wearing a ring. I considered wearing a paper bag over my head. >> A bag over you head. Exactly, exactly. >> But at the same time I felt that I need to be myself and the best thing to, there's a correlation between the perceived leadership and confidence, that I needed to just go in there and be confident in myself so, I knew that, that could work against me, but I just needed to be myself, but I had to make sure that I was really confident and really believed in what I said and honestly, besides being confident and aggressive, I also, felt comfortable, because a lot of the people I talked to, I knew from my network and I had many of my male friends and female friends who knew these VC's, do the initial introduction, so I felt more comfortable going in, for them already knowing that I had somebody else saying that I was awesome. >> Yeah, and you've had many mentors and sponsors along the way too. >> Absolutely, I would say it's one of the most important things, for my career from the very beginning. When I graduated from business school, I actually emailed my mentors and said, "Here are the things I care about for finding a job." I didn't have to go find any jobs. They actually found all these jobs. for me, set up informational interviews, for me and I just went in and did it, all the informational interviews, got the offers and just choose one of them that I wanted to be in but, even for starting my company, my co-founder, Eric Darnell was a write and director of all four "Madagascar" films and I got introduced to him, through my mentor, Glen Entis who is the co-founder of PDI Dreamworks Animation and he was my mentor through Zynga and then, Gen Entis introduced me to Alvy Ray Smith, who is the co-founder of Pixar, who also became our advisor, Alvy Ray Smith, then introduced us to Glen Keane, who is the animator for "Little Mermaid", "Alaadin". >> The power of networks. >> It was all through the network and through my mentors that I found, a lot of the opportunities that I have and they also helped my through my personal life and how to navigate being entrepreneur and I rely on them so much. >> So, beyond finding the right mentor and sponsor what else would you give, your parting words to the young Maureen fans out there? >> I think there's a tendency for society to pressure you to conform, to money, fame, beauty and you don't need to listen to that and you don't need to be bucketed. I designed my own major at Stanford and with an eBay, I took four different roles. I just kept on creating my own roles and refusing to be bucketed as a creative or a suit and you can be who you are and create a category onto yourself and so, don't feel pressured to listen to what society is telling you. The other thing, is if you are faced with pushed back for being promoted and you feel like it's maybe because you're a woman, we have a tendency as women to start blaming ourselves and thinking there's something wrong with us, versus research shows men are most likely to blame the system, don't let it affect you and bring you down, because you need to actually be confident and believe in yourself in order to rise above. >> Great. Great advice. Maureen, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> And best of luck to you. >> Thank you, so much. >> Hope you win another Emmy. >> Thank you. >> Come back and talk to us again. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from Grace Hopper, just after this. (techno music)