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

(upbeat music) >> From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicone Valley, it's theCube, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCube. We are here in Sand Hill Road at Mayfield office here talking about entrepreneurship, People First, this is our co-created program with Mayfield. I'm John Furrier, your host, we're with Mitchell Hashimoto, who's the co-founder and co-CEO at HashiCorp. Great to see you, good to keep alumni, you're back on theCube . Thanks for joining me today. >> Yeah, thanks so much, I was here so long ago. (John laughs) >> Like five or six years ago. >> So, we've been really psyched about the program that Mayfield's put together called People First. They're celebrating their 50th anniversary as a venture capital firm, which is historic in the sense that it's kind of still a young industry. Think about it. And love to have entrepreneurs come on because you've been very successful. We talked years ago. I think, the first year you were formed and Cloud certainly has happened. Open Source continues to pump more value. I mean, you get things out there coming out of Google, some ridiculously amazing... The goodness in Open Source is certainly driving a lot of great software development. You've been a part of that so thanks for joining us. So I got to ask you, you guys are growing right now, you're Venture backed, you got a unique culture. Explain HashiCorp, 'cause you guys have a unique business. You're in Open Source, you're in Cloud, you're a distributed workforce. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. >> Yeah, so we are trying to build or have been building, sort of infrastructure software of the future. We've been saying that since we were founded and what's been interesting is the future has changed quite a bit in the past six years so there's been Cloud, that was the big thing when we were founded and then containers and now schedulers and Kubernetes and things like that. And while we're doing that, we're also sort of building what I think is sort of the company of the future, which is over 90% of our workfoce is fully distributed. Basically, unless there's legal reasons not to be distributed, we are distributed and we're in multiple countries, we're in over 40 states. All of our process is built remote first so everything happens, Slack, all our meetings are Zoom. Even our all hands, we present behind a camera, and things like that so I think that's all very unique, but only for now, I think that-- >> How do you do the all hands? That's interesting. Do you have a camera to a zoom or is it a camera live streaming? How do you do the all hands? >> Yeah, so we set up sort of an AV setup in our office because we have a few of the executives in the office that often are presenting on the all hands and we set up a camera feed so that whether you actually decide to go into the office or whether you're at home, we want that experience to be authentic to both sides. We don't want a great in-room experience and then one corner camera that makes it really hard to hear and stuff like that so yeah, you have to walk up to the camera and be part of the zoom to really be part of the all hands. >> So that people feel present and connected? >> Right, exactly, and we force questions to come through Slack. There's no in-person questions. You have to ask on Slack so everyone can see them and things like that, so-- >> That's awesome. Talk about the journey as you started. You have a co-founder. You guys have an interesting relationship. How did this all get started? What was the beginning genesis of HashiCorp like and take us through some of the early days. >> Sure, so I'm very lucky, I have a co-founder who before the company, we were best friends and after the company or during the company, we're still best friends so (laughs) which it isn't always the case, but in terms of HashiCorp itself, we're super lucky 'cause we went to the University of Washington, up in Seattle, and this was in sort of the mid-2000s and this is a good time to be up there, 'cause Cloud was starting to emerge and we were sort of equidistant geographically, across the lake, if you will, to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft and so, we were getting early access to what they thought was sort of the Cloud at the time and it was rapidly changing. We were getting access to the servers, with the APIs, and all this stuff and being a university without a lot of funding, my job there was sort of to help us utilize all these resources and so in the mid 2000s, Armand and I were already realizing, we're on the same team, Armand and I were already realizing that this is not a solved problem by any means, I mean this is a new problem and that eventually, years later, became the genesis-- >> and what was that problem that you saw immediately? >> It was sort of like multi-Cloud, resource management, deployment, security, it's funny 'cause it's... Over 10 years later and it's... It is the problem that Enterprise are hitting right now. >> Think about the early days of Amazon. I still have these memory flashbacks of EC2, long URLs, it's like, okay, now how to I redirect my web servers to this, like, so it was easy to stand up on EC2 instance, put a little S3 to it, then it's like, okay now what? >> Yeah, we're at the-- >> Little red scale, I put this in there, what's kind of there. So again, a little early, kind of build your own kind of a junkyard. You build a car out of some spare parts. But then it had to mature really fast. >> Yeah, we're are the Day Zero state then and now we're firmly in like Day Two. >> And so what was the next step. Can you peg the journey for us, because obviously, they grew up really fast and then they really kind of hit a tipping point around 2010, 11, 12, 13, and kind of grew like a weed >> Yup, yeah, so around that time frame you just painted to 2012 is when Enterprise was sort of adopting it. And I think a lot of that was single Cloud focus. There was very much like, this is our first Cloud so we're going to land purely on Amazon or something and focus on that and we're at the point now, about six years later, 2018, where the maturity around operating the Cloud is sort of well understood and companies are now starting to sort of use what's best for the job and also realized that there's multiple Clouds and we're keeping our private data centers and also, there's new things coming on the scene above Cloud sort of higher level, like Kubernetes, and how we're going to manage all this and so, we like to describe it as sort of the mindset is like the Cloud operating model. It's like you can't operate your resources in the Cloud the same way you do on Prim and people are starting to get that. That's like automation, very people-focused workflows, things like that, and companies are getting that and so now the challenge is these heterogeneous environments. >> So, the top conversation in our office and everyone loves when I bring this up, I want to get your definition and opinion, >> Okay. >> Is Kubernetes. >> Sure. >> Kubernetes, just, a lot of people love it. I've been having Kubernetes dreams these days 'cause there's so much Kubernetes conversation. (Mitchell laughs) you got Kubernetes, you got the notion of Service Mesh is right around the corner, StateFul applications with net problems really hard to work on. Stateless has been around for awhile. What's the importance of Kubernetes? What's the impact, in your opinion, expert opinion, why is Kubernetes important and what's the impact of Kubernetes? >> Yeah, I think the more abstract answer is the scheduler idea and Kubernetes are built on that and really, it's the idea of like, let's move away from looking at the individual machine and let's start moving higher level to just assuming resources are there. It's sort of like when you write, the transition of when you were writing software from having to know how much memory you had to just, let's just assume it's infinite and put whatever in there and it's someone else's problem and we're sort of moving into that data center, it's like, let's just assume we always have compute and storage and network and let's just deploy and what freedom does that give you and I think that's really what Schedulers give you and also, when you sort of take away huge operability challenges of placing the application and giving that to a computer to put in the right spot, you can now deploy so many more applications because-- >> so you're freed up? >> You're freed up in a lot of ways. It introduces a lot of new challenges, but that's a good problem. You want new challenges, you want to solve the old ones. >> What are some of the new challenges that you see emerging that kind of keep the evolution going? >> I think Service Mesh is a great example we could jump into, which is that the challenge of, we like to describe Service Mesh as three fundamental problems, which is discoverability, configurability, and secure connectivity. If you have two services, that is not a problem because you could hard-code the IPs, you could hard-code the configuration, and you could just hard-code TLS certificates, make it work. When you have thousands of services that are coming and going and people are trying new services all the time, that has to all be automated so the idea of Service Mesh is automating that and making it invisible, automatic, free, and that's new, that's a new problem. >> And that's a huge concept. This is a scalable, scale out, huge concept, and super important. >> Yes, yeah. >> This changes the game at many levels. What would you see that changing? What would some of the, for folks who are just now understanding, what does it change downstream or down the road for enterprises and for businesses? >> I think the biggest change is a mind shift change from sort of perimeter or host-based security to identity and service-based security. So, traditional sort of networking and security is very IP Space focused, it's like does this rack talk to this rack or no and things like that. And that has to all go away because that's restricting the placement, that's not allowing apps to go anywhere. We have to move towards this service can or can't talk to this service, don't care where it is or anything and sort of move from a perimeter to just the perimeter being the app itself so we have to sort of firewall and protect right at the app layer and that's hard to transition, that's tooling change, that's education change, that's team change. >> I want to ask you, I could talk about this forever, Cloud Automation is, I think, one of the most important things. That's only going to make AI more powerful and the data behind it, and as new data emerges, but I got to ask you about some of the new blood coming into the market place because traditionally, if you think about Service Mesh, oh it's a software problem, we'll just solve the software, but you actually got to have networking shops, you got to have to have a computer science or computer engineering. A new skill sets developing really fast in this new, I don't want to, maybe call it under the hood, I don't know what to call it, but maybe, it's an engineering mindset, where people, there's a huge demand for skills in automating. It's not your classic application developers, there's great role for that and there's tons of apps being built, but, I'm talking about a new kind of operator. >> Yes. >> What's your take on this new skill, this new opportunity for people to learn and develop a career? >> Yeah, I think the real way to look at it, I like to look at it, is sort of the difference between creating, sort of doing something once and creating a process to do something. And there's sort of two different tasks, righ. It's like when you get promoted for the first time from you know, to manager. It's like the big challenge is learning how to teach others process and enforcing consistent process, versus actually, you know, doing it yourself. And I think that's the difference between someone who is used to the slinging, let's go back to like the server automation, someone who's used to just manually clicking or slinging bass scripts to do one off task, you could be a wizard at that, but then, try to do that repeatably, safely, 9000 times out of 9000 times and now, that's a resiliency challenge. That's sort of understanding failure modes. It's very different and I think that's the biggest skill set to adopt is, I always sort of push anybody in their job to just what, how do you not do your job? Like, how do you move on to the next problem? >> How do you eliminate your job? >> Yeah, basically/ >> That's almost, like the way I think about it. >> Yeah, what's the process. Is it possible right now? And if it's not possible, what's sort of blocking it? >> So I want to ask you a question and I love this one, going to move on just from the business side in a second, but I want to get your thoughts because I've been having conversations lately with Cloud folks and engineers and developers around two words, replicating and reproducing. >> Okay. >> They're kind of two different concepts. Reproducing is doing the same thing over again. Make that spaghetti sauce, do it again, but did I write it down? Is there a recipe? Or I could just hand you the recipe and say, you make it yourself or automating it. So I think, replicating, I'll say has scale, reproducing requires the same components. Do you see dev ops evolving to a point where, do it once and it's replicated? Or is there some reproduction involved, reproducing things? Where is that, where do you see the tech happening? >> I think inevitably, you're sort of doing both, but my sort of dream world, where I think it'll be still, but I think it's sooner than we expect, but I think sort of like 10 years from now is a safe, sort of stage, it's sort of like every, it doesn't matter if you're Fortune 500 or a new company, sort of the way it infrastructure server management goes is you just start with one server. I like to call it the stem cell server. You just start with one server, you say what you want and just let it go and it's going to either replicate or reproduce, it's either creating something new or it's like creating more copies of itself, but it'll turn into any sort of scale face, book level scale that you would want in theory and I think that, that's sort of my long, you know, fence post, guiding fence post, that I always think about the problem. >> Talk about the culture of your company, you guys have a new CEO, you have a partner you've been best friends with so-- >> I don't think he's that new? >> Yes he is. (both laugh) Okay, he's been around for awhile? >> Couple years, yeah. >> Couple years, so you've had a co-founder dynamic. Did you guys look at each other and say hey, we got to bring a CEO in . Some people like to have one of the founders be the CEO. Talk about that dynamic 'cause that's a struggle for a lot of entrepreneurs to have the self awareness and or the need to do that. >> Yeah so Armand and I made the decision to look for a CEO, if possible, I think three and a half or four years ago, it took us almost two years to find Dave and our motivation is really, it's a few things, one was something our investors told us, which is, long term, you want to do for the company you want to give the company the biggest value you can and like, what do you bring to the company? For us, as founders, our skill set was product vision, engineering, sort of industry strategy, things like that and it wasn't the executive management, financing, building various teams like sales marketing, building out the corporate structure, that wasn't us and so we looked at it and thought, we could learn it, probably, but we would make mistakes and it would be hard, it's just not our passion, it's not what we want to do, or we could try to find someone who aligns with our culture and gets our vision, gets open source, things like that, bring them in and sort of scale to a way where we're giving our startup the best chance it has, which means we give it the value we do, which is engineering and product vision and the new person coming in gives it that sort of corporate maturity and that's exactly what Dave did. >> That's awesome and it's always hard to do that because you got to have real maturity to make that happen so congratulations. >> Thanks, yeah. >> You know, a lot of us have that problem. (chuckles) and then one of my startups like, I need a new CEO, the venture guys were pushing it on you, but it's a challenge, you know, you got to think about, you know... That we didn't have a business model back then, but it's different stories, but that's always a tough one. Now let's talk about the culture around where you started from and where you are now because a lot of the stories around entrepreneurship is team, culture, and how you're going to set up your future of work, which you guys have a good structure. Iterating and figuring out where the tail wind is. Are you at the spot where you thought you'd be at a few years ago when we first met? How has it evolved, where there a little bit of zigs and zags you had to make. What was that like and share some of the journey color commentary with us. >> Sure, I mean, as a company sizes, we're nowhere near where I thought we'd be. I think Armand and I came into it expecting failure most likely and so anything beyond that was just surprise. So that's great. I think the place we are where we thought we'd be is sort of the company culture and stuff and that's something we've been very fiercely protective of and we define our culture sort of as we published them, we call the principal of HashiCorp, which sort of revolve around kindness, honesty, humility, things like that, so it's who would we want to work with and let's put words to it because we don't want to be this nebulous thing and so we've held to that really strongly. We're over 300 people now and every... Something Armand says, which I totally agree with, is I come into work, come into work, I go to my remote office, but I come into work and I'm excited to work with everyone at HashiCorp, which is, in past jobs we've had, we'd come into work and we're excited to work with like two out of 10 people, you know, and that's not a good ratio to have and I think that's what I'm most proud of from the culture side, that the ways we've done that is like we have the principles. We also have something called The Tal, which has been incredibly successful for us, both internally and externally, which is how we view product development and design and that helps sort of align the type of engineer who could get behind our vision and put some words to our vision so it's not again nebulous, whatever the founders think. >> So they have expectations of what's going to be like? >> Mhmm. >> From a coding standpoint, contribution? >> Yeah, from how do you, I like to describe it as how do you build product and how do you... How do you handle people? We have the two sides totally published and we're pretty explicit about it. >> That's awesome. Talk about the role of open source and lots of changing and you're seeing a lot of things like the Linux Foundation, CNCF, massively commercialized, there's tons of money coming in there, but Linux Foundation has done a good job of keeping that pretty pure. Success in entrepreneurship and open source go hand in hand now, it's almost... It's really the perfect storm for creators. >> Yeah. >> But, there's a playbook, there's a way that's changed. Share your vision of how you think open source is today and where it needs to maintain and what could be changed for the better? >> Yeah, I think, so open source today is pretty much a default, expected, accepted, sort of a pattern, which is really nice. It gives you community so you could, you know, Groundswell, anyone could adopt your software, without having to go through a sales person or something like that, which is really important, anyone can contribute and make their mark on the software. It's a great way to sort of get careers started. I think it brings a level of transparency to software that is, you know, you could hide behind closed source. It's like we like to tell our customers, it's like if you don't believe us, not only try it, but go look at how it works. We're telling you the truth. And I think that's really important. I think there's still a lot of challenges around how do companies sort of build successful businesses around it? I think we're doing alright and things like that, but there's still low number of data points. >> Always the challenge is, from looking at your reaction on this, is that as companies get involved, the classic reaction was, oh we got the big companies now in this open source project, it's going to be land grabbed, they're going to put their fingers in there, need better governance. >> Yup. >> Things fracture. Where ideally, it's an upstream project, where everyone contributes for the better good and then people pull it downstream. I mean, that's the basic ethos of open source. That's the main, that's the playbook that we want and that's what you believe, that's the ideal scenario? >> I think that yeah, I think shared ownership is really important, but I also think that sort of unified vision is equally important. So, that's a healthy tension to me, which is that you have a huge community that wants to pull the project in different directions and I think if you don't, if you have a governance that's totally fair, what ends up happening, in my opinion, is you end up getting camels instead of horses, right, like you'd start pulling in all these different directions. You sort of need a slightly unfair governance model so there is somebody that says, this is the direction we're going. And that person needs to be someone that's trusted by the community. >> And Linux was very successful with that too, I mean, you know. >> Right, and I think Linux is an example of a project that like reaches a point where that's, the vision is obvious and clear and it reaches a point where, you know, Linux could step down for a bit and take a break and it still runs fine, but it's a-- >> in the early days, you need a benevolent dictator to say, look, we got to do this. >> Yeah, right, Linux is a 25, 30 year old project versus, you know, some of these CNCF projects are two or three years old and I think that's where you absolutely need strong leadership versus-- >> But we'll see. We'll look at the contribution. We look at that, we obviously follow that pretty heavily and learn to appreciate the Kubernetes commentaries. We think that's super important too. Obviously containers, it's pretty much voted, it's open now so. >> Yes, yeah, yeah. >> (laughs) We know that. Okay, so I got to ask you the final question. As an entrepreneur, access to capital is super important. How did you guys go about it? How did you raise money? How should people raise money today? I'll say your an entrepreneur in the ecosystem, you're out in the front lines building a company. >> Mhmm. >> How did you guys access the capital? How should people figure this out? >> Yeah, I mean you just, you got to tell people why, you know it's a marketing problem, in away, but you got to tell people why what you're working on matters because it's so obvious to you as the founder, that's easy, it's about how do you articulate that and tell people how and why it's important and not just to you, but to the market and how it's going to help people and we did that and I think our biggest challenge was we had to do that across six or seven products, which is, we had a lot of pressure to like, why don't you just do one thing, but it was because for us, what was important was not just what the product did, but the greater vision behind why are we doing six things. And we just, you'd say that and you'd find people who believe it and they help you. >> And as you guys, a great example of you're on a big wave with Cloud and Open Source. How should entrepreneurs and what do you guys do to do this, maybe it's more of advice or anecdotal observation, as you have the dynamics with investors, advisors, service providers, how do you get the most out of them and how do you manage that board dynamic, because when you have an emerging market, there's a danger of saying, we got to lock in a business model. >> Yeah. >> So in Open Source, I'll see a little bit more freedom there 'cause you're open source, but that's always a danger and it's that much more you got to balance that, okay, we got to move the needle, but let's not overdrive too hard. How should entrepreneurs handle the... Taking advantage of their investors and board and how should they manage them or work with them? >> Yeah, I think on one side you need sort of, it's like multiple pillars and on one pillar you need a strong vision, so you need, what won't you sacrifice on, sort of? What's the fence post in the distance and maybe the journey there is slightly different, but you know where you're sort of heading towards so that always grounds you. I think the second thing is sort of a level of pragmatism, like you need to have that vision, but you need to meet your customers where they are and so, you need to figure out what you need to give them today, but still head towards that vision. And when you have those two things, you have a board that is on board with both of those things, you have founders that are dedicated, and you have employees, as well, and everything sort of moves in the right direction. >> But you got to lay that out. >> You have to be pretty explicit about it, yeah. >> Alright, well, congratulations on all your success and looking forward to following up and seeing how you guys are doing. Thanks for coming in and sharing your thoughts today. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. I'm John Furrier here at Mayfield for the 50th anniversary, part of our People First network coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)