“Redefining Failure”: Tiffany To, VP of Product at Atlassian (Video + Transcript)

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: So we are moving on to Tiffany. Tiffany’s the VP of Product at Atlassian. She leads the product team for Jira software, Jira Align and Bitbucket. Tiffany joined Atlassian in 2019 and moved from the [San Francisco] bay area to Sydney, Australia, where she resides today.

rutha Bhadouria: She brings her operator experience to support enterprise startups as an advisor and as an angel investor. By the way, we’re going to have to play her prerecorded talk today because Sydney is experiencing weather issues that is affecting the connection for Tiffany.

Tiffany To: When you are introducing yourself, you are inclined to highlight your biggest successes. But given my talk is about how we can redefine and normalize failure, I’m going to set the tone by starting with some of my career low lights.

Tiffany To: So let’s start by rural winding to my second job out of university. When I joined what I thought was my dream company, Silicon Graphics. For those of you too young to have heard of it, SGI was famous in the late 90s for bringing to life the CGI dinosaurs from Jurassic Park.

Tiffany To: At Stanford, I programmed on SGI boxes we named after raptors and I was so excited to be a PM for a company responsible for so much innovation in graphics and super computing. I was building software being used by NASA. So, a girl geek dream come true, right?

Tiffany To: Well, SGI was my biggest lesson in tech and business. This was when x86 boxes from HP and Dell were blowing into the market and SGI’s final move to switch from their proprietary MIPS to Intel’s titanium processor architecture was simply too late.

Tiffany To: While numerous classmates went to this new company called Google, here I was seeing my stock plummet below a dollar. From this brutal failure, I learned a lesson that would stay with me for the rest of my career.

Tiffany To: In tech, disruption happens fast – for even the biggest predators in the food chain and understanding the interplay between technology, innovation and the business landscape is critical to survive and thrive.

Tiffany To: My second failure hit me psychologically more than others because it was the first and only time I’ve been fired. Ever the overachiever, being fired was not a failure that had ever fathomed, but at my first startup 10 years into my career, I put in 110%, thrilled with the startup excitement of working all hours to make impact.

Tiffany To: My job was building a go to market strategy for a new cloud storage technology, launching the product and convincing analysts, we’d created a new product category every CIO needed to buy. Now, my strategy was ultimately successful. The company reached IPO. The market category today is over 10 billion dollars.

Tiffany To: However, the CEO and I had not seen eye to eye on numerous issues, and this experience taught me how important culture fit is. Most startups are under high pressure to succeed and do it quickly. So not all leaders are going to invest in creating a sustainable culture.

Tiffany To: You need to do your diligence to get the real story and understand if it’s an environment you can personally thrive in. I had not, and jumped in without doing my homework. So market success, but personal failure.

Tiffany To: I went on to launch three more startups, including a spectacular failure that purred through 50 million dollars before I came to my current role at Atlassian as VP of product. But I’m the leader I am today because of the lessons learned from all of these failures. And I’m so excited to be here with all of you today, to talk about why I believe embracing failure has the potential to change the trajectory of women in leadership.

Tiffany To: Now, recognition of the value of having female leaders is thankfully becoming much more widespread as study after study proves out the bottom line benefits of diversity. But organizations and women themselves are still struggling to find ways to correct the leadership in balance.

Tiffany To: There’s been a lot of focus on how important the role of advocates play in this ecosystem in supporting women and creating opportunities.

Tiffany To: However, now as a mother with both a son and a daughter, I started to recognize the differences in how society and I, myself perceive success and failure differently based on gender, because of this unconscious bias, I believe there’s an opportunity for a mindset shift around risk and failure for women without deeply examining our personal and collective expectations of perfection in our careers as women, we won’t be able to increase our risk tolerance to seek out the opportunities that I believe will truly challenge us.

Tiffany To: First, do women even want these leadership roles? The answer is yes, BCG and Hendrick And Struggles, an executive recruiting firm, surveyed more than 750 female and male senior tech leaders last year on a range of career topics. They confirmed what I believe we all collectively feel, which is there’s no ambition gap.

Tiffany To: Women in tech want to seat at every table all the way to the top. So what are the steps along the way where men and women deviate in their career paths that results in this leadership divide?

Tiffany To: Well, one of the most interesting stats from this study is around career pivot points, both men and women agreed that changing employers was critical to career advancement.

Tiffany To: But interestingly, while 80% of the male leaders surveyed had been at more than three companies, only 53% of these female leaders had. Why are men making the moves necessary to advance their careers?

Tiffany To: While most female leaders are staying put and trying to earn those opportunities over longer tenures with the same employers. Maybe the answer is in risk tolerance differences. That study also found that there was a 15% gap in risk tolerance between gender, for leaders in R&D functions but interestingly, no difference in the business leaders.

Tiffany To: Maybe this is because women in tech are often fighting this perception that they have lower technical skills. I know I felt that throughout my career, I had to triple check that I was right on anything technical before I shared my opinion.

Tiffany To: But the insidious power of this pattern of upholding perfection then translates into how often we aim for promotions in or inside our company. This same study confirmed that 41% of women’s surveyed went for multiple promotions where they didn’t meet all the qualifications compared to 51% of men.

Tiffany To: So you start to see where that gap opens up. After looking at these stats, are you wondering if I’m telling you to start job hopping, doing a whole stringing of failed startups? Absolutely not.

Tiffany To: Please do not let the takeaway be that more jobs automatically equals more success. You need to take a path that’s true to you, but I’m hoping with this talk that by having more awareness about our views on failure, we can all more consciously consider the opportunities we choose or don’t choose to go for.

Tiffany To: In the last few years, there’s been a lot of discussion about how the most valuable employees will increasingly need to be T-shaped to adapt to quickly changing opportunities and environments.

Tiffany To: Companies need to be more agile as every company becomes a software company, and that means they need their teams and leaders to be as well. T-shaped knowledge means you have this deep level of knowledge in one area and a wider array of knowledge across other areas to support that deep core competency.

Tiffany To: Essentially, you’re a generalist with a specialization. And I think I unknowingly built my career this way because I had a couple key things I understood that I did well early on. And those were areas that I honed with each opportunity I took on.

Tiffany To: And I had a lot of curiosity about technologies and business that I’ve had through the different companies I joined over the two decades of my career. In high school I was torn between my love of journalism and programming, but I went down the CS path. University, I couldn’t decide between software and hardware. So I studied both CS and EE and I realized, I love learning about all kinds of tech and my knowledge.

Tiffany To: As I started working, I realized I was good at communicating complex concepts to many audiences, for example, new technologies to analysts or customers through various roles that started in software development, but then spanned across product marketing, product management, and a bit of everything in startup land.

Tiffany To: I honed my ability to create new categories of B2B products and consider that my specialty or the vertical part of my T. The horizontal part of my T spans technologies that include everything from wireless networking to supercomputers, cloud infrastructure, security and now DevTools.

Tiffany To: I’ve also spanned business models and company types, from huge tech companies like Intel to 10 person startups and rocket ships like VMware and now Atlassian. My startup rollercoaster was tumultuous, four companies in 10 years. And my resume could be read in very different ways.

Tiffany To: Having worked at so many companies can be a flag that someone has failed a lot and a negative factor for recruiters. On the other hand, two of the four startups I launched have reached IPO or multi billion dollar valuations, which is a much higher hit rate than the average of 90% failure.

Tiffany To: I chose to trust my own definition of success based on lesson learned, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t out myself a lot, but ultimately that scrappy startup drive is why the best manager I’ve had in my career recruited me to join him at Atlassian to help scale the company’s growth.

Tiffany To: At Atlassian, I lead a really awesome team of PMs that drive our agile DevOps portfolio of products to help all companies build great software.

Tiffany To: My personal challenge though, in coming in as a senior leader, is that I felt like I was expected to know all the answers to help my team perform at their best. In a startup, managing with ambiguity was necessary for everyday survival.

Tiffany To: My last startup as COO, I handled everything from our product strategy to sales calls and leading our fundraising. I was perfect at zero of these things, but I had to move it all forward to give us a fighting chance. So I just did the best I could.

Tiffany To: In Atlassian, as with any multi thousand person tech company, roles become more specialized and there’s overwhelming amounts of data. As a company, Atlassian is ranked one of the best places to work year after year.

Tiffany To: And what I found is a large part of that is a strong philosophy based on empowered autonomy, built around our core values you see here, that I can attest people live to, every day.

Tiffany To: Teams work as triads, product management, design and engineering. And are expected to build their own strategies, goals, and plans. That means leaders above these layers aren’t directing work or micromanaging their plans. So what’s their job? I asked myself this a lot the first year.

Tiffany To: Wasn’t I supposed to come up with brilliant strategies for them to test and execute? What I found was that empowered autonomy isn’t magic.

Tiffany To: Teams needed to feel aligned to larger goals and understand the bigger picture of where we were going and why. In an agile organization that’s moving fast, coordinating work across all these teams created complex challenges.

Tiffany To: Working with an executive coach and with a lot of support for my team, I’m proud to say I’ve been pushed to grow a lot as a leader at Atlassian and embrace failure in different ways.

Tiffany To: I’ve learned that easy problems don’t make it up the chain.

Tiffany To: I learned I needed to feel comfortable putting out ideas that may be wrong and not measure my worth as a leader by their success.

Tiffany To: Earlier in your career, you’re rewarded for great execution, but as a senior leader, my job is to push for thinking and likely fail a lot as I help my team solve more and more complex challenges.

Tiffany To: I share my experience candidly, because embracing failure is hard I think at every stage of your career.

Tiffany To: When I started working with that coach I mentioned, who has a background in neuroscience and psychology, she helped me better understand the struggle was shared any other female leaders and how much gender can actually play a role.

Tiffany To: Women look at failure sometimes in a different way. We’re the first or the few oftentimes in our company or team, so we feel more pressure to nail it.

Tiffany To: We owe it to the women who pave the way or we’re paving the way, or we think there are others around us expecting us to fail who we need to prove wrong.

Tiffany To: If we choose to have children, we’re often the ones taking more time off during prime career years. So we need to plan our moves out more carefully for an abundant set of reasons.

Tiffany To: My own viewpoints on failure and success were formed at an early age with my front seat view of my parents’ immigrant experience. I picked this Darwin quote because my parents were the ultimate role models for using failure to adapt.

Tiffany To: They were forced to leave their home country Vietnam in 1979, due to a situation sadly not too unlike current events unfolding in the world. And they eventually escaped to America after near death experiences on the open ocean.

Tiffany To: I was born soon after they made it to wintry Minnesota with all their hopes and dreams in a new country. And I saw them start over again and again, every time they saw a chance to do better. Without high school diplomas, they did everything from hourly tailoring work in Minnesota to working at a textile plant in North Carolina, and then relocating to California for the new opportunities springing up in Silicon valley in the 80s.

Tiffany To: They leapt at the chance just to escape East Coast winters. You can’t tell from this happy photo, but my parents hated the cold and it was just the one thing they just couldn’t adapt to.

Tiffany To: My parents found jobs eventually assembling hardware for the first generation of Silicon valley companies, including Amdahl, a big IBM mainframe company. They would sometimes bring home discarded parts for my sister and I to play with.

Tiffany To: And this early presence of computer hardware in our home started my interest in tech, which led to high school programming classes. They lectured me very little though on what classes to take, but encouraged me in every activity or sport I wanted to try, whether it was guitar or math club. I saw in how they built their careers, that mistake failures weren’t things to be ashamed of, but an opportunity to learn and build from.

Tiffany To: They’ve actually became successful, small business owners and funded my pricey university education. But the priceless lesson they taught me was the necessity of failure in that messy path to your full potential.

Tiffany To: One memory that has always stayed with me was a time when one of my uncles asked my dad, why not have another kid? So he might have a son.

Tiffany To: My dad’s reply was that girls and boys are the same in America. From the experiences I know we all share, we know things are not equal yet. And there are many challenges for all underrepresented groups.

Tiffany To: Though progress has been made, there’s still a long road ahead for my dad’s dream to be true and even bigger challenges around the world. But we do need to celebrate the progress we, and all the women before us have made, so that we can keep inspiring each other to push for better.

Tiffany To: So maybe my dad’s granddaughter will experience this equality.

Tiffany To: In this spirit, I ask several women leaders in tech that I’ve had the privilege of working with throughout my career to share their stories.

Tiffany To: The first woman I’m sharing about is Betty Junod, an amazing product marketer I’ve known now for over 16 years, since our day sharing an office at VMware. She’s now to senior director of product marketing there, and her second stint. Similar to me, she had some rocky starts early in her career.

Tiffany To: Betty entered the job market in the initial rise of dot-com boom, but witnessed first hand the graveyard that followed with the crash. She shared that she and her teams were being asked to apply winning playbooks from brick and mortar go to market. They simply didn’t work. Several of her companies went under and the key lesson she learned was that playbooks and tech have to be updated constantly as the markets change.

Tiffany To: Being part of those failures though helped her shape how she built business strategies the rest of her career.

Tiffany To: Her second big failure came much later in her career in the guise of one of the first open source unicorns, Docker. She started there as the VP of Marketing. They tried to do too many things too early from having a developer business, open source community, enterprise business.

Tiffany To: She and her teams were stretch way too thin and didn’t deliver enough on any of those fronts, burning out the team and damaging ecosystem relationships.

Tiffany To: Her lesson learned was that as a startup focus on one thing at a time, test for success or fail fast and then pick a milestone for when to figure out the next business strategy. Wise words.

Tiffany To: The second woman I’m honored to share about is Cathie Metcalfe. She’s a Program Director at Atlassian and my right hand woman. In 2010, she’d already had an extensive career in the banking industry in Australia,

Tiffany To: Cathie then took on an ambitious project to make it frictionless to move between the four main banking institutions that dominate Australia. The idea was to give consumers a lifetime unique address that could move with you, but what started out well then fell apart when one and then all the four banks backed out.

Tiffany To: She showed us a huge learning on how two sided network markets operate and the power of an oligopoly. Cathie needed that lesson for the next time her team took a run at this with a real time payments product, eight years later, with more wisdom and determination from that initial painful failure experience, she and her team were much more successful.

Tiffany To: Sometimes you need multiple attempts at big changes, was her takeaway. So look at that failure as a necessary stepping stone. Then a few years later recognizing the passion she had for tech businesses, she sought to join the biggest tech company in Australian ecosystem, Atlassian. She did her due diligence and even networked with the VPs and execs before applying.

Tiffany To: Unfortunately, there wasn’t a fit with the PM roles open at that time, but she was offered a program manager role. She initially wasn’t sure if it would be right for her, but she ultimately decided that the learning she would do in Atlassian was more important than the job role or title and she took that job.

Tiffany To: Cathie ended up tripling her team over the next two years and is an amazing chief of staff to me and our business unit of over 600 people at Atlassian. I also couldn’t live without her. So I’m so thankful she didn’t stop at her initial job application failure.

Tiffany To: What a privilege for me to be able to share Betty and Cathie’s stories and what great examples of how failure can actually drive success throughout your career. I can only imagine how many more stories we have in this audience today.

Tiffany To: So I want to end my talk by encouraging all of you to help me in redefining and destigmatizing failure by telling your stories.

Tiffany To: We must crush these expectations of perfection we put on ourselves as women in tech by showing the full picture of how we’ve arrived, where we are through the scrapes and bumps.

Tiffany To: I’m not talking about citing every little failure you’ve made and being hyper critical of yourself, but share when you’ve learned something from a failure and normalize these critical parts of our career growth.

Tiffany To: During job interviews, highlight what you’ve learned from failures, not just the successes.

Tiffany To: Second, I want all of us to be more aware of how fear of failure plays into our risk tolerance, ask yourself how you can play it less safe, whether it’s small things or big things, take a small but habit forming risk.

Tiffany To: Make it a point to share your ideas in a forum at work that scares you.

Tiffany To: If you love your current company or role, ask for more responsibility or more visibility, for example, a one-on-one with a leader in your company, other than your manager.

Tiffany To: If you suspect you may be approaching a plateau where you are, start mapping that T for yourself and actively network to build relationships that you can tap into for future adventure.

Tiffany To: As women in tech, we all know innovation requires failure. Your career is about innovating the best of you. So embrace and welcome failure into it. Thank you so much for having me and I look forward to connecting with many of you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much to Tiffany for sending us this video over so that we could like make sure that we didn’t have problems despite all the weather issues that she was dealing with. 

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“Afternoon Keynote: Break the Bias, From Work to Mission”: Leyla Seka, Chief Operating Officer at Ironclad, and Jiahan Ericsson, Senior Director of Engineering at Ironclad (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: It’s time for our next session. Now that we have grabbed our refreshing second or third cup of coffee, tea, or chai, and we’re refueled for the day, let’s welcome our afternoon keynote speakers. Please join me in welcoming Jiahan Ericsson, Senior Director of Engineering at Ironclad, who will be interviewing Leyla Seka for the keynote this afternoon. So, welcome Jiahan and Leyla!

Jiahan Ericsson: Hi, thank you so much, Angie. Jiahan here calling from Berkeley, California. I’m super happy to be here celebrating International Women’s Day with all of you and just hearing from so many inspiring speakers and panelists.

Jiahan Ericsson: I’m a Senior Director of Engineering at Ironclad. We are the leader in digital contracting, which helps companies execute smart agreements faster.

Jiahan Ericsson: I lead a few areas in engineering that support both the contract lifecycle management product, as well as our embedded click to sign product. As part of the engineering product and design leadership team, I also help lead and support the strategic and operational needs of the organization, especially as we continue to scale.

Jiahan Ericsson: Before Ironclad, I spent over a decade at Salesforce where I worked in both IC and leadership positions in core infrastructure, platform, mobile and Trailhead.

Jiahan Ericsson: I am super happy to be moderating this fireside chat with Leyla Seka, who is a familiar face to many of us here, I think. And also someone I really tracked in my career, both at Salesforce and Ironclad. So Leyla, come introduce yourself.

Leyla Seka: Hi, Jiahan. [inaudible] just too amazing. She’s very understated. She’s really amazing. We sound very similar, so here we go. I’m Leyla. I’m calling in from Berkeley too, which happens to be my hometown.

Leyla Seka: I am the COO of Ironclad. So I’m the chief operating officer there. And you now know what Ironclad does because Jiahan already told you. Before Ironclad, I was a venture capitalist for two and a half years. I also started a nonprofit, which we’re going to talk about a bit. Sort of started.

Leyla Seka: And before that, I was at Salesforce for 11 and a half years. And at Salesforce, I ran the AppExchange. So I was on that team sort of from its inception all the way through to it becoming the powerhouse that it is. I then ran a couple other things I think we’ll get into so I can chat about that. But I spent a long time there.

Leyla Seka: And before that I spent my whole career in product management. So I can’t code. But when I grew up and when I came into tech, product management meant he spent half your time with engineering, right?

Leyla Seka: Trying to figure out what you’re going to build. And a [inaudible] we released once a year. It was a different world, right? On a gold CD. Yeah. All of you’re like, what? But that used to be how we did it. But the role then was half the year with engineering and half the year with sales and marketing. So I liked it. That’s sort of the way my brain works.

Jiahan Ericsson: Cool. Awesome. I know we’re in the middle of this conference, lots of hours of Zoom already, but very excited for this Leyla energy, so let’s get to it. Actually, a lot of things you mentioned there, I think we’re going to unpack a lot of your professional journey in this conversation too.

Jiahan Ericsson: So this year’s International Women’s Day campaign theme is break the bias. And I think, Leyla, you are someone who’s really broken the bias throughout your life wherever you are, both as an individual, you never acted like anyone else and very authentically Leyla. Right?

Jiahan Ericsson: But I think more importantly, you also are really successful at effecting change through your advocacy that broke the bias for many others. During your time at Salesforce, you were the executive sponsor of BoldForce, which is Salesforce’s equality group for black leadership and development.

Jiahan Ericsson: You co-launched the annual Trailblazing Women’s Summit, which I’ve been attending since year one. So super exciting.

Jiahan Ericsson: But most memorably, of course, you pushed for equal pay to close the gender pay gap at Salesforce and really started the conversation to transform the industry. So for today’s theme, I think that’s a really great place to start. Tell us about your journey pushing for equal pay at Salesforce.

Leyla Seka: Sure. So, I told you all, I grew up in product management, right? And the same was true at Salesforce. For the lion share of my time there, I was one of two or the only woman sort of leading product line or doing something like that. Things got better, obviously, through time, but initially it was a lot like that.

Leyla Seka: And for me, it always came down to fairness. I just didn’t like it when it wasn’t fair. I’m fine to lose. Okay? If we’re both running the same race and starting from the same line.

Leyla Seka: But I don’t like losing when you get a head start and that makes me mad. It should be fair. That’s what my parents told me America was. My parents are from different countries. They’re not from here. That was the whole reason they came here. That was the promise.

Leyla Seka: So that’s always been deep in me and who I am. So look, I’m working at Salesforce. I’m doing really well. I started as a senior director, I get promoted to VP. I go from VP. I go to SVP. I’m cruising up. And they talk right before this, I loved everything she said AND totally related to it.

Leyla Seka: I was very ambitious. I still am. I love to run it. I like it. I like being in charge. I like telling people what to do. My kids always laugh about that. But so, there were a lot of things that happened. A couple, I’ll tell you specifically.

Leyla Seka: I was in the product all team room, and this was all male executives And me. Right? And we were waiting for the boss come, and I came running in from BART and I’d throw my bag on the table.

Leyla Seka: And I sit down and I realize they’re all talking about how they had just bought Teslas. Okay, so this is back when a Tesla cost like 250K a pop. And that was the only kind you could buy. And the wait list was super long, right? And you had to play around to get them or whatever.

Leyla Seka: And so they were all talking about it. And I was sitting there at my computer, ticking away at a deck or something. And I started thinking, “Okay, I could buy a Tesla.” But that would be so stupid with how much money I make. Like not to mention that I’m a terrible driver, and I don’t really want to spend that much money in a car.

Leyla Seka: But outside of that. So that got something in my craw. Why are they also flippantly talking about it? And some of them I was performing better than because we ran revenue, so we knew what numbers, it wasn’t just engineering. We had numbers, we hit numbers.

Leyla Seka: So I put that in my back pocket. At this point, I was running a division called Desk, which was customer support for SMBs and low-end mid-market. And I had four direct reports: two men in two women. All super senior people worked at the company for a really long time. Five years, had done very well. Two men, two women. Okay?

Leyla Seka: We had a banner year. We did very, very well. We outperformed like crazy. So when the time came, which is like, okay, promotions and money and stock and all that stuff that you do as a manager, I went back to the corporate and said, we really outperformed. I really want a lot. I want to give them all a lot. I want it to be really great.

Leyla Seka: Salesforce was awesome. Here’s a ton, go do your thing, Leyla. So then I got this chunk, and I was like, “Okay, what do I do with the chunk?” And I thought about it for a second. There was one person I thought, maybe this one person should get a little more, because they were my COO. They were really running the business with me all the time. But I didn’t.

Leyla Seka: I said, “No, it is really, it is a team effort. I’m giving everyone the exact same amount.” My assistant sets up the performance meetings, just happens that the two women went first, right? Just how schedules worked out and whatnot.

Leyla Seka: First woman comes in, great job, banner year. Here’s this giant amount of everything more than you’ve ever gotten before. And she was like, “Oh my gosh. Leyla, thank you so much. I love my job. I’m so happy.” I was like, “Me too, this is so amazing. I can’t believe how lucky we all are that we love each other.” Just all this great stuff.

Leyla Seka: Second woman walks, in same thing. “Oh, I love it. It’s so fun.” The first man walks in, and I tell him more money than anyone’s ever gotten by a bit, right? And he leans across table, and he looks at me and he says, “I want more.” And in my mind I’m like, “Ooh, I need a new head of product. I need some help. This is not working.”

Jiahan Ericsson: Yeah, I got to start [inaudible].

Leyla Seka: Right, I’m running that. But I’m also trying to like keep a boss face on. Well, what do you think you deserve? Whatever, totally in my head, like, [inaudible]. And then I sit down with the one that was running the business with me, which happened to be a man. Right? And I sit, again more money than any of them had ever gotten, more stock, a big, nice, yummy chit, right? And I sit down with him as my COO, and I give him know the talk and he leans in and he looks at me and says, “I want more.”

Leyla Seka: And luckily, I was so close with him. We really were really close business partners and also good friends that I sort of said, “Oh, okay, stop. Stop the performance review meeting. We’re not having that meeting anymore.We’re moving into a dialogue right now.” I was like, “Why are you asking for more money? Why, what?”

Leyla Seka: And he looked at me and he said, “I always ask for more money. What are you talking about? Don’t you?” and it was literally, Jiahan.

Leyla Seka: It was like someone was punching me in the face. Because I remembered every promotion, every additional opportunity, everything that had come down and keep in mind, this is seven years ago.

Leyla Seka: Things have gotten better, so everything I’m saying, I’m old, this was a while ago. But I do think people are trying to do better at this, but so context. Because it has been a while since this happened.

Leyla Seka:All I ever said was, “Thank you.” But that’s how my mother raised me. Right? I mean, if I had anything but thank you. Even a gift I don’t want, my mother would’ve pinched me or something. It was just not the way I was taught to perform.

Leyla Seka: And I also had a really interesting perception, was they were giving me something, versus it being something I earned. Right? And that took me a while to sort of unpack.

Leyla Seka: So anyways, all of this happens, and my good friend, Cindy, becomes the head of HR at the same time. And I go to her and I’m like, “We got to do this. I got something going on. Spidery sense, tickle, tickle, crazy. Something’s happening.” Something’s happening.

Leyla Seka: And so what basically ended up happening is for a year we did research. As much as you can do research around this topic, because at that point, no one talked about equal pay. This wasn’t going on. Right? So we talked to a lot of people.

Leyla Seka: We got a lot of advice from lots of people. Some people were worried that we shouldn’t do this because we were a public company, and it put the company at risk, and we were seeing your executives. And so there was just lots of dialogue.

Leyla Seka: And ultimately she and I put together a plan, and she had a one-on-one with our boss, Marc Benioff. And so I came. We went to his house because he worked out of his house and he had a work house, so we went to the work house. And I’ll never forget this day for the rest of my life because we went there and he was in a step off with Michael Dell for the American Heart Association.

Leyla Seka: So he was supposed to walk a whole bunch that day. And I was like, “No, no, no, you can’t walk for this meeting.” We’ve been talking about this for a year. This is not a walking meeting.

Leyla Seka: So Cindy and I donated money or something and he sat down, but we had this conversation with him, and we basically were like, we don’t think the women are paid the same as the men, and we want to look into it.

Leyla Seka: And then Cindy said this thing, which was, if we pop the hood and we find a problem, we have to fix it. You can’t slam the hood down walk and be like… (sings) At that point, you can’t just pull millions of dollars out of a public company operating budget. It’s not how that works.

Leyla Seka: So we talked about all that and then the other two things we wanted were we wanted a mentor program for women in product and engineering because we felt like sales had a lot of female leaders and they seemed relatively well mentored and so did some of the other departments, but we wanted to do a bit more in engineering and product.

Leyla Seka: And the third thing was the women’s conference, which was actually Molly Ford’s idea. She worked on this with us, but she brought it to me, and then I brought it in there and that was the first time a software company had ever done a women’s conference. Okay.

Leyla Seka: There was Fortune, Most Powerful Women, but that had never happened before, that we’re taking a whole day of programming in the middle of our user conference and only focusing on women. It sounds super normal now, which I’m so happy about. But at the time we were cutting. Right?

Leyla Seka: People were like, a day devoted to women? This is a software conference and there’s lots of dialoguing. I will say we had a real sisterhood, me and Cindy and Molly Ford, and we linked arms and we just pushed. And we got some great stuff done. So yeah. That’s that story.

Jiahan Ericsson: Yeah. I think there’s so much goodness there too. Just, it’s easier to do these things when there are other women, part of the sisterhood doing it with you. Because all of this is really scary, right?

Leyla Seka: Listen, I mean, here’s the other thing. Cindy and I, I don’t think we knew what was happening. I mean, you guys will appreciate this because you’re sort of technical. I was doing product management.

Leyla Seka: I was like, what’s the next best action? Right? Because what actually ended up happening was Marc realized at one point that everyone in his executive room was male. And so he started this thing called the women’s surge. So he looked for high profile females inside there.

Leyla Seka: No one liked the name, whatever he looked for high profile. We all talked about [inaudible]. In the org and he really raised them up. And that’s how I got the job at Desk – is I was in the room and heard that job was open. And I was like, “I’ll take that job.” That’s running a whole division, full P&L. Not quite like that.

Leyla Seka: I was sort of intimidated at the time, but eventually that came across. So after that and getting promoted, I went into product management mode and was like, what’s the next best action? And that was when I heard the guys talking about the Teslas. And then when those two guys asked for money, and I was like next best action. So I see it like product.

Jiahan Ericsson: Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s incredible too. I think in a way, even though for you, it’s this personal journey, right? A lot of times this is how it starts, where it’s like we are doing a thing in the place where we are. But then it becomes a catalyst for transforming, introducing these conversations in the industry and that is really powerful.

Leyla Seka: But I never knew I was doing that. Right? I wasn’t like, “I want to go…” Actually, I did have a coach at the time who told me that I should stop just thinking about changing Salesforce. I should try to think about changing tech. And that was an interesting framing for him to give me because I did then all of a sudden, just…

Leyla Seka: And I did say to Marc at one point when we were pitching him, I think I told [inaudible]… Actually this is funny. I told him he’d be on the cover of Time magazine. And he was like, “I don’t want to be on the cover of Time magazine.” Now he owns it, which is sort of funny.

Leyla Seka: But I was like, we can change something much bigger than ourselves here. And by the end of that year of work with Cindy, I saw, and then a month later, Patricia Arquette got up at the Academy Awards and started screaming about equal pay and then everything. And then things went really crazy for us too. But, yeah.`

Jiahan Ericsson: That’s awesome. Cool. There’s definitely more to talk about during your Salesforce stage, but I want to move on. So three years ago, you left Salesforce and became a venture capitalist, a slightly different journey than the one you’ve been on.

Jiahan Ericsson: Tell us a little bit about your motivation for joining Operator Collective and also co-founding Black Venture Institute in 2020 in this pandemic.

Leyla Seka: Yeah. So back to fairness, I helped Salesforce acquire a lot of companies because I ran the AppExchange. So every time we acquired a company, I had to be involved because it normally had some impact on the channel. Right? And the ecosystem.

Leyla Seka: So I watched a lot of people get acquired and come into Salesforce and stay for a couple years and then spin out and be a venture capitalist. And then they start calling all the same male execs who were buying those Teslas to join their BLPs and invest in this or advise that and get shares of this or give me money for that.

Leyla Seka: And no one was calling me. And so for me, all of a sudden I started sort of hearing the money those guys were making. And I was like, “Oh this is some more income inequality just shoving up here organically that no one’s noticing.”

Leyla Seka: So one of the founders of Desk left and when he left to go become a VC, I was like, “You will call me, and I want in.” And so he did, and I went into his fund and he went early into Robinhood and we made a lot of money. Right?

Leyla Seka: So all of a sudden, venture became this thing that I got in interested in. Then my friend, April Underwood, and her friend started this thing called Hashtag Angels out of Twitter, where they basically wrote a Medium post and were like, “We’re angel investors,” to see if people would allow them to start angel investing. And they did.

Leyla Seka: And they sort of started this wave. But venture is very white and very male. I mean, we think sometimes that way about tech and then venture, you go there and you realize just how much that is prevalent.

Leyla Seka: I do think things are changing. And I think that’s what Operator Collective was. My partner, Mallun, came up with that. And the fund was, we raised $50 million to deploy into enterprise B2B. Obviously, that’s what we do. That’s what I know.

Leyla Seka: But we raised it from operating executives. 90% women, 40% people of color, 20% people that didn’t originate in the United States. That was just a way to really bring investing home to people as an option for how they can think about their money. Right?

Leyla Seka: Because money makes money, if you feel comfortable doing that. Now, the whole gambling, be careful. All that stuff, safe harbor aside, but there is a lot of interesting stuff, and you can meet founders, and you advise, and it’s fun. Right?

Leyla Seka: So I joined Operator Collective with Mallun and we launched it, and we invested in like 35 companies in the two years through the pandemic.

Leyla Seka: And so look, when George Floyd was murdered, it happened to be right around the time in the Bay Area when the fires were so bad that the sun didn’t come out one day. It was really spooky.

Leyla Seka: I was working and I came out at 11 o’clock and it was like it was 11 o’clock at night. And I just was feeling very hopeless and pandemic, locked in the house. My kid hates… I had a 10-year-old. My 14-year-old’s fine. A 10-year-old didn’t do well on Zoom. He was like, “This sucks.”

Leyla Seka: So it was just hard. And I had said to my husband, when I first started Operating Collective, “I wish I could just go to a class and learn about venture capital.” What is all this? Why do I care about information rights? What’s pro rata? What does this mean? What does that mean?

Leyla Seka: So I sit on the board of the Engineering School at Cal, and I called the dean. I said, “I know we have a class in venture,” and we put together what became Black Venture Institute. So we essentially built a program with Cal, Salesforce and Black VC that brings 50 black executives through a two week intensive course on venture capital twice a year.

Leyla Seka: When we started, there were less than 95 black check-writers in venture. We’ve already graduated 150 and a good number of them have started doing all kinds of really awesome stuff, which is amazing.

Leyla Seka: I mean, again, next best action, ladies. I just saw a problem and had had the problem myself of how do I break into venture and figure out this language and these people and how they talk and connect with each other because it’s different than operating. And so, yeah.

Leyla Seka: And I’m super proud of it. It’s probably one of the things I’m most proud of. Outside of my family and equal pay, Black Venture Institute is super high up there.

Jiahan Ericsson: Yeah. Yeah. It’s so interesting, I think diversity and representation in venture is such a less frequent explore space. And I remember you said this once, right?

Jiahan Ericsson: Money is math and math is easy. And I think going back to your points about fairness, it’s a very practical and easy way to see what is fair and, who gets the opportunity to be in. So yeah.

Leyla Seka: I mean, I think that’s why I landed on equal pay. Because trust me, there were a lot of other issues I was pissed off about it. But math, really hard to argue with math.

Jiahan Ericsson: Yeah. Yeah. I really hope you have other talks and just go into your VC journey way more because there’s so much interesting things there. For the sake of time, I do want to talk about what you’re doing right now.

Jiahan Ericsson: So last year you went back to your operator roots and joined Ironclad as COO also during the pandemic. I know the two of us joined actually around the same time.

Jiahan Ericsson: And so what was special about Ironclad that lured you out of your VC life? Why Ironclad, how has that been so far?

Leyla Seka: Sure. So look, I loved being a VC, and I learned a ton. I found it a bit lonely. What I realized about myself is that I love the community of work. Right? I really love operating with other people. I get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Leyla Seka: So Ironclad was a company that I invested in. It was one of my first investments out of Operator Collective. Mallun and I had both met the CEO separately and then agreed that we were both going…

Leyla Seka: I was going to go in as an angel, and then we just came in as the fund. Very special company. And I firmly believe that contract life cycle management is probably… Here’s the thing.

Leyla Seka: In building the AppExchange, I had an interesting purview, and I watched a lot of these companies be built. And my fundamental problem with most CLM vendors is that they initially relied on some other experience, like the sales experience or the procurement experience.

Leyla Seka: They never thought of the contract as the core object. But yet all of those other experiences, the core objects change constantly. So the data is hard to keep track of, as all of you know better than me, probably.

Leyla Seka: So what I love about Ironclad is the data is rooted in the contract, which is by its very nature, not a document that changes very often. So the power we can bring to business insights and the way people run their company, run their sales team, run their engineering team, run procurement, run marketing, allows for a different level of visibility.

Leyla Seka: I also was very interested in building a different kind of company. I think that’s what you and I talked about even before we went. I see the potential with this company to do something really special and build something really special.

Leyla Seka: And I missed building stuff with smart people.

Jiahan Ericsson: Yeah. Awesome.

Leyla Seka: Why did you join Ironclad?

Jiahan Ericsson: Why did I join? Well, first of all, I echo everything you said, and I’m going to say we had a couple phone calls before I decided, and that made a difference too. For me, last year I was very clear.

Jiahan Ericsson: I was ready for a new opportunity, and I really took my time for the majority of the year to explore options. And partly because I am who I am, that’s how I do. I want to prepare, be really prepared for everything.

Jiahan Ericsson: But also because I was at Salesforce for over a decade, right? So I don’t know what I don’t know. And I wanted to take my time, not only to land at a really good job that I love at the end, but also learn from that journey and figuring out, “Well, how do you interview? How do you evaluate companies?”

Jiahan Ericsson: So what it ended up for me was really around opportunity and community. I think opportunity was fairly straightforward. Ironclad is a rocket ship startup that found great product market fit and is building a successful business around it. It’s in the legal tech space, which is something I’m personally really interested in. So there’s a lot of purpose in what I would be doing for me personally.

Jiahan Ericsson: From an engineering leadership point of view, it’s really interesting that join the company at this phase of our growth, because we’ve had a system in place where it served the team well so far, right? We’re also not fully mature.

Jiahan Ericsson: So there’s a lot of need for transformation to support that continued growth of both the product and people. So Arquay’s keynote this morning, she talks about decision-making gets really, really hard at scale.

Jiahan Ericsson: And that’s my jam. That’s where I want to learn more. That’s why I want to excel at, so this is a really sweet spot to come into Ironclad at this time.

Jiahan Ericsson: And lastly, personally, I was at a phase in my career where I was really looking to stretch myself and just learn different aspects of not just engineering leadership, but also business success.

Jiahan Ericsson: To your point, I think as we continue to grow, we really need to understand the business better. Kind of like, is there a class to go learn about these things? Right?

Jiahan Ericsson: So I wanted to learn some of that through work and needed to be in a place where all the functions fit really close together and collaborate constantly.

Jiahan Ericsson: And at Ironclad, I felt like that was not only possible, but pretty crucial. So I think that was really good fit.

Jiahan Ericsson: But take a step back. I think all the best opportunities on paper kind of mean nothing if you don’t have the right conditions and support to help you to succeed. Right?

Jiahan Ericsson: So for me, the work community is everything. I’m a very connections-driven person. And I experienced a lot of like people magic sauce when I was talking to Ironclad, both at the company level and just through connecting with individuals.

Jiahan Ericsson: For companies, I always want to know what the company values are. And Ironclad’s values are intent, empathy, drive, and integrity, which matched really well with my personal values, so that was really good.

Jiahan Ericsson: And also making sure that there is a mature exec leadership team, so there’s some level confidence – that I trust the leadership team to not only realize the company vision, but also can operationalize these values beyond just saying they’re important, and we have them, right?

Jiahan Ericsson: Practically, it was really important to see other women leaders like myself across all the functions. Again, I think talking to you made a really big difference.

Jiahan Ericsson: I was invited to listen in on the women leader panel at the biennial company kickoff. And that made a really big difference. I think, again, we’re by no means perfect. Right? And these are just glimpses, but it gave me a level of confidence that I’m not going to be alone in my experiences here.

Jiahan Ericsson: Then lastly, this is something really important to me. And I think actually Kristen touched on this in the previous session for Career Growth for Humans, which is, it’s very important for me to be in a working environment where we recognize that there are many definitions of what success can look like.

Jiahan Ericsson: For example, for me, I’m a parent of two young children. And while I still feel really confident in my ability to perform, I also need a lot of flexibility in my day to support my family and deal with emergencies.

Jiahan Ericsson: And for me, the pandemic really highlighted that what we bring to this camera is such a small sliver of the life that we live. Right? I would literally be like trying to keep my cool here when a blowout situation is happening right before my eyes.

Jiahan Ericsson: It really highlighted the importance to have a work environment where you feel safe to bring as much of your life to it, so that work can support you back. And make work work for the rest of your life.

Jiahan Ericsson: So I think that’s where I saw really a lot of good signals. Just people being generous and patient and make space for each other, so that even though we work differently, we can still work well together.

Jiahan Ericsson: In fact, the two of us are really different people, but we figure out how to work well together. Right? Even just preparing for this conversation. And another example, both of us know Jason, the head of engineering, who’s my manager. He is a dad of three children under five. Don’t know how he deals with it, but just seeing him being an equal partner at home. Right?

Jiahan Ericsson: Having a baby’s butt occupy 70% of Zoom screen all the time, but also say, “Hey, you know what? I need to step away because there’s a situation.” I think that kind of modeling in the leadership is really important and also tells me, it’s also important for me to bring myself like that to the workplace and create a safe place for other people.

Jiahan Ericsson: Yeah. So I think those are kind of how I landed on finding a good work home for myself. So, yeah. We are almost out of time. So I’m going to ask you one last question.

Jiahan Ericsson: There’s a lot here, but I remember years ago when hearing you talk about equal pay at Salesforce, you said at some point your work stopped being just a job, it became a mission.

Jiahan Ericsson: I really love that, not only because it was fancy and I was like, I got to write it down, work it into conversation sometime. But also I saw you really lean into that statement and showing up differently.

Jiahan Ericsson: So now you’re COO at Ironclad, how do you think about that mission? And what do you achieve?

Leyla Seka: Listen, I really want to build a workplace and a workforce where every type of person that has some value to add feels welcome. I really enjoyed the lady before, too talking about you don’t have to go to college to be good at building a tech company.

Leyla Seka: Look, how many of these guys never went to college? Dell, Zuckerberg? I mean, not that these are everyone’s everyone, but there are lots of ways to build talent. There are lots of ways to educate yourself.

Leyla Seka: My word, if you pay enough attention, you can find out what’s going on in Silicon Valley by just following the right people on Twitter. I mean, they’re not that complicated. It’s all junior high playground.

Leyla Seka: I mean, we know how to play this. We’ve all been there. My honest point on this is I will never stop working on this. This is who I am. This is what’s going to go on when I die, whatever they write, it’s going to say something about equal pay and making it fair because that’s what I care the most about, for all of us.

Leyla Seka: For all of us, we should all get an equal shot. Like it’s going to say something about equal pay and making it.

Jiahan Ericsson: Very cool. Thank you so much. Sukrutha, I thought you came on. Thanks Leyla. Thanks everybody.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Leyla and Jiahan, for this wonderful, interesting and insightful session. This was an amazing keynote, and I know everybody’s really energized just looking at the chat.

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“Career Growth for Humans”: Kristen Warms, R&D Learning Enablement at Atlassian (Video + Transcript)

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right over to our next bit, which is our coffee break. We love Atlassian for being our platinum sponsor and hosting a coffee session. This means it’s time for you and I to grab another cup of coffee or chai and join us in welcoming Kristen Warms from Atlassian. She’s here to emphasize how we can support human first experiences at work, redefine what it means to be successful and open the door to tech careers that celebrate and affirm our humanity. Welcome Kristen.

Kristen Warms: Thank you. And thank you so much for having me today. I’m really excited to be here with all of you. We only have 15 minutes together today, but we may have some time at the end for sharing or Q&A.

Kristen Warms: So, please feel free to pop your ahas, ideas or questions in the chat along the way and I will collect those towards the end. I don’t have any slides.

Kristen Warms: So, please feel free if you’ve been looking at the Zoom screen for a while today, to just look away and listen in and rest, give your eyes a break, if you need to, or of course you can keep your eyes on the screen, whatever works for you.

Kristen Warms: My hope is that you’ll leave today’s session feeling a little bit more grounded and hopefully a lot more connected to yourself. So, let’s talk about work and more importantly, how we maximize the meaning we create through it.

Kristen Warms: Our work lives provide some of the most formative experiences and relationships that we have. At work on our best days, we feel fulfilled, productive, on fire, but it’s also where we can get triggered and our insecurities pop up and we have to deal with toxic social conditioning and all sorts of things.

Kristen Warms: Because we spend so much of our time at work, I think it’s really critical that we look at it and it’s placed in our lives differently because there really isn’t a work self and a home self, there’s just you, a whole person.

Kristen Warms: Work is, but one part of the tapestry of our lives and we get to decide what and how we find meaning in it, how we use the lessons that we learn there to better ourselves.

Kristen Warms: And then critical to this, is to allow yourself to be a whole human, complex, messy, lovely, unique, feisty, whatever you are and just remember that having complex emotions at work is both normal and totally okay.

Kristen Warms: I spent a lot of years stifling myself because I was trying so hard to be put together all the time. And as you can imagine, that’s a straight shot to burnout city because, half of my days were spent pretending not to be something I am, a complex person with feelings.

Kristen Warms: So, after reading lots of books, therapy and talking with far wiser friends, I began to understand that my emotions are really guideposts and they provide information that I get to use to learn more about myself.

Kristen Warms: Ultimately our feelings and our emotions and responses at work, shine a light on where we need to go, what is important to us and what we really need to thrive.

Kristen Warms: I was just talking to my husband this morning about that old adage, maybe you’d heard it of bloom where you’re planted and I just, I don’t think that’s true. Some plants just don’t do well in the desert. Some plants don’t do well in the rainforest.

Kristen Warms: We’re all unique, we need different things to be our best selves. So, put another way, when we think about what happens at work, we can use, [inaudible], as tools to help cultivate our own self-awareness.

Kristen Warms: I think the more we acknowledge and honestly celebrate the fullness of who we are, the more we can not only show up to work with more energy and vitality, but make work, work for us.

Kristen Warms: The other part of changing the way that we think and talk about career growth is, I’m sorry. The other way about changing the way we think is to how we talk about career growth, there we go.

Kristen Warms: When I started my career, I really thought there was only one way to do work. And that was to achieve, achieve, achieve. That way of thinking resulted in me, putting a lot of my self-worth in other people’s hands. “Did my boss think I measured up? Did my department give me the best grading? Did my peers give me good feedback at year end?”

Kristen Warms: And I quickly forgot what was important to me. I ended up taking roles that of course, got me that promotion or did that thing for my resume, but ended up making me completely miserable.

Kristen Warms: I had lost my sense of agency. And if you remember nothing else from what I say today, I hope that you remember this.

Kristen Warms: You always have a say. You always have a choice in how you react, how you respond, how you design your life, because at the end of the day, it is your life.

Kristen Warms: But that’s really easy to forget, especially because when we talk about our careers, it’s usually in very goal oriented terms.

Kristen Warms: How many of you talked about smart goals? How many of you have to do long winded performance review processes? Where it’s very much, what did you do? Who are you at work? What did you produce accomplish, achieve?

Kristen Warms: And obviously inherent in those conversations, we’re really talking about ourselves on these as if we exist on these linear planes. And that our worth is completely tied to exactly how quickly you got from point A to point B on that path.

Kristen Warms: And I really want to challenge all of us today to stop thinking like that, because that’s not really how it works.

Kristen Warms: I like to think about my career like a buffet and, stick with me on this one. But, there are going to be years where maybe you just need to eat all the wings. You just need something that feels good and comforts you.

Kristen Warms: That project that you can do in your sleep, because it just, is easy and you need the win and it fills you up, but maybe doesn’t challenge you. But maybe the next year you eat all the veggies because you’re ready to flex. And that promotion is in reach and you can taste it. And you know that it’s there and you know you want to run for it.

Kristen Warms: At the end of the day, these choices, both the slow down and the periods of flex are completely valid. Both nourish you just in different ways because we’re humans and we need different things from work and life, at different times.

Kristen Warms: Once we start to view our career growth with less rigidity, it allows us to see them myriad ways in which our talents and skills show up. And then, we can have careers that unfold more naturally with more fulfillment.

Kristen Warms: And really, I think that serve us better. That really speak to who we are uniquely as people, what we’re good at, what we like to do, what inspires us. And frankly, we can be far more self-compassionate as a result.

Kristen Warms: When we let ourselves off the hook, we make decisions based on what we love to do, not what we think we should do. In turn, at least from my experience, when I changed the way that I thought about work, it changed the way that I interacted with my coworkers, because I was giving myself more grace.

Kristen Warms: I was then able to give it to others. And how many of you have had those moments where you’re feeling really uptight and every little slip feels like the worst and you see every other person’s little slip. And that feels like the worst.

Kristen Warms: It’s really kind of moving past that. So, we can all just be a little bit less perfect. A lot of my work right now, I feel really lucky about my job, to be honest with you, because it’s work that I love to do, but it’s focused on helping build people up, particularly those who are new in their careers.

Kristen Warms: So, I spend a lot of time helping young people enter their working lives, feeling like the best fullest versions of themselves. And I get to remind them of the grace and self-compassion that’s required to navigate something new. And I think inherent in that, I get to remind myself of that a little bit too.

Kristen Warms: Most of the folks who are coming through the program that I run at Atlassian are Gen Z now. And honestly they have a really different view on work and working. I think they bring more openness about their needs and ways of working and in working with them, I’ve learned a lot about how people can approach the same skill from a totally different angle and still be really good at it.

Kristen Warms: I was recently talking with a colleague of mine and they identify as neuro divergent and they were mentioning to me that it’s really hard for them to do that, this Zoom face-to-face thing, it makes them uncomfortable.

Kristen Warms: But when they are given the opportunity to put their communication in writing, their words just take flight. It’s really amazing and powerful for them to express themselves in a way that makes sense for them.

Kristen Warms: So, while we have an expectation that folks at their level are effective communicators, we are giving them this space to figure out how to demonstrate that skill in a way that really makes the most sense to them. And then they crush it.

Kristen Warms: I suspect that a lot of us on this call are probably in management or leadership roles, even if informally. And so what I’ve learned over the years, especially in working so closely with this newest generation entering the workforce, is this.

Kristen Warms: First, when we let people at a problem from their best place, we get a far more creative and imaginative solution. I think we get a fuller picture of the possibilities that could be, not just kind a one narrow definition.

Kristen Warms: And then secondly, we can learn a lot from them. I think, well, I’ll say speak for myself. Sometimes my ego gets in the way, right? I allow my drive to succeed, and it keeps me from that vulnerability that’s required from learning something new, especially when it’s from learning from someone who’s younger than me.

Kristen Warms: But really, the more I open myself up to and allow room for different ideas and ways of working, the better my team does, the better our products are, the better that the solutions we create serve the people they’re created for.

Kristen Warms: So really I think it’s about changing the lens, especially when we change the way that we define success, right? And making that definition broader. So it works for more people.

Kristen Warms: I think this is particularly critical in tech. My team actually talks a lot about how we are going to go about more opportunities for folks that don’t follow what would be potentially considered a traditional path.

Kristen Warms: So go to college, get an internship, get a job, right? There’s tons of talent out there that doesn’t follow that structure, that linear path, as I mentioned before.

Kristen Warms: When we stop putting these false parameters out there and realizing that talent shows up in many forms, we actually can create more inclusive companies, and we can make tech a more inclusive industry.

Kristen Warms: Ultimately though, it’s about giving ourselves permission. Permission to experience work from our full humanity. Permission for others to do the same.

Kristen Warms: When we change the way that we think about work, we change the way we make decisions, and we change the way we set the bar. And at the end of the day, we get to change our lives.

Kristen Warms: So thank you for hanging in there with me and listening. I’d love to pop over to the chat now and just see what you guys are sharing and saying. I saw so many things coming through. I was trying to focus and not get distracted, so. Awesome. Awesome. I’m so glad. I’m so glad.

Kristen Warms: It sounds like lots of folks are really jiving with what I’m saying. So I appreciate that. Yeah. Picking up the phone and calling each other. Angie, I love that too. Right?

Kristen Warms: Shannon, you mentioned taking cameras off days. I love that. That is such a good idea. Especially when you’re feeling exhausted. It’s hard. It’s hard to be on Zoom and feel like you have to be on all the time. So, excellent, Shannon. I love that idea.

Kristen Warms: Yep, Tracy. Yes. Appreciate people who, who are open about their needs at work. It takes a lot of courage to do that. So we got to give people props when they do it and give ourselves props when we do it too. Hey, Angie, I see that you’re on, is that my curtain call?

Angie Chang: I just want to say thank you so much for that reinvigorating talk that you just gave us!

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“AWS, GraphQL, with Apollo, Vue.JS: Delivering Enterprise-Grade Applications”: Maria Lucena and Divya Mahajan, Directors of Architecture at Fidelity (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: Next up, we have two architects from Fidelity Investments with the tech talk on simple technologies that can help deliver enterprise grade applications. So please join me in welcoming Divya Mahajan and Maria Lucena from Fidelity.

Maria Lucena: Thank you for having us.

Divya Mahajan: Thank you, Angie. We’re really excited to be here. I have to say, all of the talks today have been awesome. The last one was certainly a very fun and relatable conversation. So, thank you, Reeny and Susanna. Hello, everyone. And a happy International Women’s Day!

Divya Mahajan: I’m Divya Mahajan, working as a Director of Architecture at Fidelity Investments, responsible for setting architectural direction and strategy for some of Fidelity’s high net customer products in the alternative investment space among other things.

Divya Mahajan: Previously, I worked as a Director of Architecture in the cognitive computing space, building out Fidelity’s virtual assistant platform to create conversational experiences for our customers. A developer at heart, I love to see how my work makes a customer’s lives better.

Divya Mahajan: I graduated from WPI with a Masters in Information Systems. I live with my husband in Southern New Hampshire and when not building software, I’m an avid hiker and can be found on the mountain of New Hampshire to Africa, to South America. I also taught myself to play the guitar during the pandemic and love drumming away in my free time. Take it away. Maria,

Maria Lucena: Thank you, Divya. My name is Maria Lucena. Thank you for having me and happy International Women’s Day. I’m a Director of Architecture at Fidelity Investments. I’ve been doing software development for 13 years.

Maria Lucena: I have two beautiful boys. I have been blessed with an 18 year marriage, a beautiful puppy who just turned one this weekend and I enjoy traveling and trying new food. I am originally from Venezuela. I have a big family, nine sibling, so that means tons of nieces and nephews.

Maria Lucena: And, I’ve had a pretty an orthodox professional development because I chose to be a mom first and take care of my children before going to work. It wasn’t until 2007 that I actually got a Diploma in Web Development.

Maria Lucena: And then I went back to work and it was in 2018 when I completed my Associates in Information Technology. And then, this past year, I completed my Bachelor’s in Computer Science for which I received, [inaudible], in my Cum Laude Honors.

Maria Lucena: And that brings us to today, the capstone project for my bachelor’s degree. Now, when I was asked to solve for a community pro problem for that project, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

Maria Lucena: Given my background as a working mother and because I have done my professional development in a gradual manner, I wanted to do something to help women improve their lives. I also have always had an interest for women in the workplace and the issues they faced and the fact that women earn 82 cents for every dollar a man earns.

Maria Lucena: So, my way of giving back was by building a portal to help women who needed to work and develop professionally, remotely. So, this is the main goal of Remote Brilliance – it is to help women help themselves find a better quality of life by finding online jobs and creating a community where they could learn and sharing their knowledge with others.

Maria Lucena: As I was getting ready to start developing the project, there were a few things I needed to keep in mind. I needed to follow the software development life cycle, which for designing, planning and executing the project. It also needed to be appealing, secure, and resilient.

Maria Lucena: When I went online, though, I found a ton of available tools and some of them at a cost, some of them for free and all of them promising to do what I needed. It was then, I realized I needed to draw from my experience at Fidelity to help me find the right tech stack.

Maria Lucena: Now, given my experience with GraphQL at the firm, and recently having used AppSync in a project. I chose to center my strategy around defining the entities and using a tool that would help me get a backend up and running. Defining the server structure can be complex and time consuming.

Maria Lucena: So, I knew if I solved this first, I could spend more time in the UI, which for me was more challenging. Let’s understand some fundamentals of GraphQL. At its simplest, GraphQL is a language for your API, because GraphQL has been designed with a focus on client applications. It makes the connection of the backend and the frontend more coherent.

Maria Lucena: Now, at the core of GraphQL, we have Schema, the Schema defines the capabilities of your APIs through the type system. And if we think of types as objects in object oriented programming, we can think of the properties of an object as the fields defined in the Schema and the behaviors as the resolvers implementing the business rules and the GraphQL server.

Maria Lucena: Now, going back to that point of understanding the type system, I had to observe my business model and define its entity so that I could start building my API. I was recently involved in a project using GraphQL with apps, AWS AppSync, in which I learned that AppSync and the AppSync console, there is a co-generator tool, which is scaffolds all the operations for an entity to a Schema.

Maria Lucena: So, I could get my backend scaffold pretty quickly if I use that tool. Once I saw for what I wanted to deploy, for how I wanted to deploy the backend, I moved my attention to the client and how to wrap the traffic. A few years back, Divya and I worked on a, [inaudible], site for a nonprofit organization through Fidelity, change is simple.

Maria Lucena: What I learned about the pattern of using S3 for host static sites, at Fidelity, we use AWS and I know and trusted well enough to use its services on any project so you can see the entire application is hosted and run by AWS services.

Maria Lucena: Fronting the app, we have Cloud Front, which is a CDN and then there is some S3 in the middle and with AppSync at the back. So, here you have a high level look of what the end to end architecture is. I will dive a little bit into what the frontend is made off and then Divya will cover the backend.

Maria Lucena: As I mentioned earlier, there are many tools available for creating web and mobile applications. There is much promise of one size fits all for applying styles, but the reality is flexible designs are difficult to achieve.

Maria Lucena: So, using the right libraries can help you get closer to what you need.

Maria Lucena: I was part of a larger platform CCP with Divya, a Cognitive Computer Platform, where the client solutions team was using, [inaudible], a team made off of UI experts for building the platform’s portal. So, this led me to settle on using that framework for my UI.

Maria Lucena: Now, Vuetify compliments Vue. With a UI Library that uses material components, these are not only beautiful or design components, but also meet accessibility guidelines and other UX concerns. So, you get some professionalism within that library. Now, Cognito provides to [inaudible] layer for users and also for the APIs.

Maria Lucena: As I was implementing this, it became really time consuming to create all of the resources needed manually and that is when I came across AWS Amplify. And this is a set out of tools and features created by AWS to help developers build full stack applications. It’s a CLI and an SDK, so you can use it to build things and then at run time. With this in place, I was ready to connect to the backend. I needed a library to talk to GraphQL and Apollo was the obvious choice.

Maria Lucena: It doesn’t need an orchestration to talk to the GraphQL server and have some added configurable feature for caching out of the box. Finally, I needed to route the traffic to a secure endpoint. And I found a tutorial using Cloud Front, Route 53 with S3, which was created by a Daniel Galati, the author of, Be a Better Dev series. Let’s take a look at that one time.

Maria Lucena: So, this is what it looked like. It looks like when that request comes in, when the user, Remote Brilliance, that link Route 53, a DNS service, checks it, that there is a valid certificate and then routes the traffic to Cloud Front, a CDN, which then points to the public bucket. And that eventually routes to the private S3 bucket, where the static assets of the application are hosted.

Maria Lucena: With that, we’re going to look at a quick demo and I’m going to start from the authorization component, which is done by Amplify. And one thing I want to show here is that none of this is really done by me. All I had to do was copy a template and drop it in my application and all of the actions that are needed resetting a password, creating a, [inaudible], account.

Maria Lucena: All of those things are managed by AWS Amplify SDK. So, there is very little that you have to do if you use that SDK. And now, I’m going to move on to showing this, if is done with, as I said, Vuetify JS. If you go to their documentation and choose any UI component you want to use, you can quickly add your styles and your customized, the colors.

Maria Lucena: And one neat thing that I really enjoy about this, it’s that if you set a palette, a color palette for dark and light modes on that plugin, you can just expose a flag to your UI and you can quickly get through your application, this dark and light, which is, I think I find it pretty amusing.

Maria Lucena: Now I’m going to point to the network console here. And we want to show at this point how with a single endpoint calling GraphQL, you can get all of your operations. So, this is the job, [inaudible], listing a single job. I’m going to do and add here, and then I’m just going to save it. And I want to demonstrate how… This is done by Apollo, the Apollo client.

Maria Lucena: And if you pay close attention here to the headers, you’ll notice is the same end point. But as I look, as I show through the payload, you’ll see the operation changes. So that’s get a list, get a job and list the jobs and so on. So that’s really, that’s one of the benefits of GraphQL. And with that, I’m going to pass it off to Divya. Thank you.

Divya Mahajan: Thanks Maria. So, we just saw how the web client so seamlessly communicated with the backing system GraphQL in this case, over a single end point to interact with various different entities and resources to display all of the data, to render that beautiful website.

Divya Mahajan: The backend in this app is predominantly made up of GraphQL APIs, implemented using a managed AWS solution called AppSync. But before we talk a bit more about these technologies, I just quickly wanted to point out that given that we have less than 10 minutes together at this point, this is definitely not an in-depth GraphQL class.

Divya Mahajan: We will probably need a couple days if not more to do that. But Maria and I have extensively implemented GraphQL APIs using various different platforms, such as AWS AppSync, Apollo, among others at Fidelity, in building enterprise grade applications. So, today is more of an opportunity for us to give you enough information to get you excited in building solutions of your own using these technologies.

Divya Mahajan: All right. So, what exactly is GraphQL? Well, it’s basically a syntax that allows you to define what data you exactly need. No more, no less. It’s a query language like Maria pointed out in a run time for executing those queries to retrieve existing data.

Divya Mahajan: A GraphQL service is created by defining types and fields on those types, not end points. And I want to make this point abundantly clear as that’s one of the major differences between using a REST specification versus using a GraphQL specification.

Divya Mahajan: Also, GraphQL also uses types to ensure apps only ask for what’s possible from a particular GraphQL runtime, and provides clear and helpful errors in the event that the apps ask for more than what’s in scope for a particular GraphQL instance. Now HDDB, as we all know, is the most common choice for client server protocol because of its tube equity.

Divya Mahajan: And that’s exactly what GraphQL APIs also use to communicate between a client and a server. GraphQL strongly type system uses SDL short for Schema Definition Language to define an API Schema, basically its types and its fields. SDL is a shorthand notation for succinctly expressing the shape of a data graph that a client expects to see. Next slide, please Maria. Thank you.

Divya Mahajan: Here’s a quick example of what a sample Schema looks like now. Maria also mentioned how Schema is at the core of GraphQL. Here, we can see a sample query as well, based on SDL and a sample response to execution of that, [inaudible], mentioned query.

Divya Mahajan: As you can see the job entity here supports many fields, but the client query in this example only, [inaudible], to resolve specific fields like category, company description, company name, et cetera, which is only made possible by GraphQL and would not have been possible by using REST.

Divya Mahajan: All right, now that we understand a little bit about GraphQL, let’s talk about why we should consider using GraphQL and what its advantages are over REST, which currently happens to be one of the most commonly used API specifications. Next slide, please. Thank you.

Divya Mahajan: Now I love this quote from Edsger Dijkstra and personally for me, GraphQL sort of embodies the notion of brevity without jargon, quite wonderfully. It’s a clear language, that’s simple and a fruitless.

Divya Mahajan: A client can just ask for what they need without having to provide too much unnecessary syntax, [inaudible]. So, GraphQL sort of really sums it up. As far as this quote is concerned, some of the other advantages of using GraphQL and if you go to the next slide, Maria, thank you.

Divya Mahajan: So, why typical REST APIs require, [inaudible ], from multiple APIs and multiple different URLs? GraphQL APIs get all of the data and app needs from a single endpoint. This obviously helps avoid making multiple API calls for a particular operation. Also, there’s no over fetching or under fetching of data.

Divya Mahajan: Now, one of the major issues with REST is that, it can contain too much data or sometimes not enough data at all. Which creates the need for additional requests, while GraphQL solves this problem by fetching only the exact and specified data in a single endpoint and a single request from all of the resources that need to be queried by a particular client. Lastly, it can evolve without versioning.

Divya Mahajan: Now, why do most APS version anyway? One might ask. Well, when there’s limited control over the data, that’s returned from an API endpoint, any change can be considered a breaking change and breaking changes require new versions.

Divya Mahajan: In contrast, GraphQL only returns to the data that’s explicitly requested. So, new capabilities can be added via types, via fields and operations without creating a breaking change by using single evolving versions or version, GraphQL APIs, give apps continuous access to new features and encourage a more cleaner and a more maintainable backend code.

Divya Mahajan: Now hold on, Maria and I are talking about replacing all of the, or proposing replacing all of the systems that REST today with using GraphQL. And like we all know, nothing in software is one size fits all, and there will always be used cases where REST is more preferable over GraphQL. But what we’re pointing out is that these are just some of the reasons we chose GraphQL over REST in building scalable apps in no time at Fidelity.

Divya Mahajan: And so, are merely pointing out that if you are looking for an alternative to some of the pitfalls of REST, then look no further. Next slide please. But how does it all work?

Divya Mahajan: GraphQL has three major components. I think we’ve already touched upon them first being the Schema, which is basically a definition of all operations, including the types, fields and the functions that are defined on those types. Data sources, this is where the data comes from and the data goes in various different operations that can be done on the data. And lastly, resolvers, which act as connecting blocks between the Schema operations and the data sources, basically the business logic that executes the requested operation in a particular client query.

Divya Mahajan: Now an app designed to use GraphQL in the realm of a serverless technology makes it a very powerful combination. Why? You ask. It’s because in building cloud native applications, the infrastructure is already managed by a cloud service provider and the app teams only need to worry about business logic. And this is where AWS’s AppSync shines.

Divya Mahajan: To get an API app and running in no time, AppSync provides automatic code generation like Maria alluded to, aided by its Schema first design approach. The end result is, and automatically generated API with all the client side operations already present and ready for us to use. This truly, as you can imagine, is a, [inaudible] for developers that want faster code development and a more structured approach to building data driven applications. Now in the interest of time, next slide please, Maria.

Divya Mahajan: I quickly want to about just a couple ways in which any AWS resources can be deployed to create and deploy scalable cloud apps, Infrastructure as a Code, as you can imagine is an absolute must.

Divya Mahajan: And the two ways that we want to talk about today is the ubiquitous Cloudformation template introduced back in 2011 is probably the most universally used technique to deploy an infrastructure stack within AWS.

Divya Mahajan: The second, a more newer kit on the block called CDK or Cloud Development Kit has been catching steam. And I think we’re on time, but, you get the idea.

Divya Mahajan: Now, Maria and I understand that this is a lot of information in a very short amount of time, but we really hope you enjoy the conversation, took away some excitement and shared some excitement like we have, in creating cognitive applications using GraphQL, [inaudible], AppSync.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, [crosstalk]. Thank you so much both Divya and Maria for all the insights and information, as well as the slide linked with all the resources. Quick note to everybody, all of this is going to be recorded and accessibility to you all later. Look out for your emails. So, don’t fret if you missed a few details or you want to catch up on it, even the slides you’ll have access to. All right over to our next bit, which is our coffee break. 

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“Become the Role Model You Wish You Had”: Reeny Sondhi, Chief Security Officer at Autodesk, and Susanna Holt, VP of Strategic Technologies at Autodesk (Video + Transcript)

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Next we are hosting execs from Autodesk for an inspiring chat about becoming the role models you wish you had. Please join me in welcoming Reeny Sondhi the Chief Security Officer at Autodesk with over 25 years of experience in technology, she is joined by Susanna Holt, VP of Strategic Technologies at Autodesk with over 20 years of experience. We’re so happy to have you both here. Welcome Reeny and Susanna!

Reeny Sondhi: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here with all of you.

Susanna Holt: Thank you for me too. So let’s get started first of all, happy international women’s day, everyone. So Reeny and I have been preparing for this for while and we had a great time. The trouble was, we couldn’t really select what is it we’re going to talk about? There was so much we wanted to share.

Susanna Holt: We will talk about becoming role models and our struggles along the way, finding our voices. And we’ll talk about allies and I’m not sure we’re going to have enough time to answer questions that come up in the chat, but at the end we’ll tell you where to find us if you’d like to follow up on anything.

Susanna Holt: So with that, let me reintroduce Reeny. So we already know she’s the Chief Security Officer at Autodesk where we both work. She’s been here for over five years before that, she was leading a security engineering team at EMC, now part of Dell.

Susanna Holt: She’s also on the board of a cybersecurity company called Rapid7. And in distant past, she did product management, but what Reeny is passionate about, and what I see when I interact with her is building teams that solve complicated and complex problems, but that do so in a pragmatic way. And that’s what we need from security. Isn’t it?

Reeny Sondhi: Thank you so much, Susanna. And again, let me also wish everyone a super awesome international women’s day. Great to be here. It’s a tough act to follow, Susanna, from the last talk to this. So we better bring our game on here, but it was very inspiring to hear Mina and Claire talk.

Reeny Sondhi: And before we begin, I would love to introduce Susanna to all of you. She is, as we heard, she’s the Vice President of Strategic Technologies at Autodesk. She’s been with Autodesk for, I think over 10 years now, has led multiple engineering and product teams in different roles, working in Europe in the past and now in the United States.

Reeny Sondhi: One interesting fact about Susanna is she has a background in mathematics and even more interesting fact, I’m sorry, I’m picking this one over the background in mathematics, Susanna is the fact that she was an international rowing champion, which means that she’s not only competitive, but knows how to win and sometimes uses awesome sports analogies at work, which I completely totally love, I appreciate.

Reeny Sondhi: So Susanna, let’s get the ball rolling. And I’m going to throw the first question over to you. So this is a chat, so this is going to be back and forth between us. There’s no moderator. So it’s you and I here, but I’m going to start with your experience of meeting me for the first time, as I think there is a story in there which will help people understand our working relationship a little bit better. Why does it matter in the context of today’s conversation? So I would love to hear from you first.

Susanna Holt: Thank you Reeny, and you’re right. There is a story. Then it’s a story that formed me as a person, as a leader and our relationship, I’m going to say it.

Susanna Holt: So here’s what happened. I joined a new team, new role, new responsibility, all very exciting, a little bit intimidating too.

Susanna Holt: And Reeny was on that team and we had a staff meeting and we were talking about my first all hands and my boss.

Susanna: Well, our boss, both of our boss said, how about if I go along to support Susanna, that will show Susanna that I’m behind her, that I believe in her and all of that stuff. And I was thinking that might be nice because I was a little bit scared. It was a new thing for me, but I didn’t say anything.

Susanna Holt: And before I got to say anything, Reeny came in a way, and this is a style she has, she’ll say, “well, let’s think about this. Let me challenge this. Does Susan really need your support? Don’t we all know that she can talk don’t we know that she can run this. And by going there, wouldn’t you be saying, I don’t believe she can do it herself?”

Susanna: Holt: And she was right. And we changed our minds. I did it on my own. It was all fine. But I was just amazed. Who was this woman who I barely met, who had absolutely no reason to look out for me or to care for what happened to me to speak up on my behalf, to have that belief in me?

Susanna: Holt: So that was awesome and I’ve admired and aspired to be like Reeny in that respect ever since. But there’s more, it also told me this is the kind of team I want to be on.

Susanna: Holt: It’s the team where everyone works together and looks out for one another as opposed to thinking, well, the only thing that matters here is me and my work and the people who report to me.

Susanna: Holt: Thank you, Reeny it was awesome that you did that and I’ll forever be grateful to you for that.

Reeny Sondhi: You don’t have to be grateful. I’ll tell you that I was in those shoes myself, I think a couple of years before you joined the staff. And I had an ally on that team who welcomed me, enabled me to find my voice and the same staff I learned from her, what it meant to be an ally, to be perfectly honest.

Reeny Sondhi: I mean, she was my ally. She was a little bit of a role model for me. And it just felt natural to carry that forward to when you joined the team. And in fact, I think since then there have been a few reorgs in the company where we have together gone on to join completely new staff together. And I think we felt that our allyship can continue to push us forward together, at least that’s how I feel about where we are today.

Susanna Holt: And not just us together we then have the confidence to maybe challenge things rather than accept, okay, on this team, it’s different. We would say, well, I liked what we did on the other team. What do you think Reeny? And then make proposals based on that. So it’s been great.

Reeny Sondhi: Awesome.

Susanna Holt: And the whole thing has continued as Reeny and I have been lucky enough to continue to work together. We’ve continued to look out for one another and to push. Back to you Reeny.

Reeny Sondhi: Absolutely. We have, we’ve continued to do that. I think I have a very, I call it a trusted relationship with you. We call each other out when we are not at our best.

Reeny Sondhi: So for me that definitely comes in into being an ally. You have for everyone here who’s attending today, the last couple of years has been all about, attending meetings over zoom.

Reeny Sondhi: And Susanna has this thing about looking at me over zoom and understanding very clearly if I’m paying attention, am I checked out of a conversation and she will send me a little slack, little paying, zoom chat and ask me for my point of view, if she sees that I’m missing in action. And that definitely drives accountability in me. And I really appreciate that about you Susan.

Susanna Holt: But it goes further than that Reeny. And you must all know this. Sometimes you get asked for feedback on someone, maybe part of the annual review or coaching opportunities, and that feedback gets escalated and then anonymized, and then fed back to the person. And at some point I’d had enough of that. I

Susanna Holt: It felt to me, if I was going to make the trouble to think about what’s awesome about Reeny and where I would love to see her develop, why bother with someone else and going through someone else’s going to anonymize it.

Susanna Holt: So I tried to first, I tiptoed into it very carefully and gave Reeny a little bit of feedback and she embraced it. And now that’s become part of our relationship that we look out for one another and the growth that I get out of that it really exceeds other forms of growth because it has this trusted relationship and the honest, and I know, and I knew from day one, Reeny is looking out for me, she has my best interests at heart.

Reeny Sondhi: And I totally, truly completely appreciate you providing feedback to me. So let’s package this up. I think we have given examples of our working relationship, examples of how we look at each other as an ally. And so let’s package it up on what does being an ally really mean. And I can start, you can definitely add your own understanding your definition of what an ally is.

Reeny Sondhi: So to me personally, an ally gives me space and a voice. I look at an ally, someone who can help create conditions that give me the courage to go and take on the unknown sometimes. Someone who is an advocate for me, doesn’t support me blindly. And that’s why I keep bringing back the examples I’ve given earlier about when you see me being checked out, you’ll push me, you’ll nudge me, you’ll drive some accountability for me.

Reeny Sondhi: And really an ally for me personally, is someone who brings out the best version of me. And if I’m talking about this, I also want to contrast that a little bit with what does not being an ally look like. Because we are focusing a lot on what does being an ally look like.

Reeny Sondhi: So let’s do that little contrast in compare and I’ll drive home this point with another example. And you’ll realize the audience is going to realize we’ll come up with examples of meetings, we attend way too many meetings. And this was yet another meeting where I remember being part of a heated debate. And I was on the receiving end of the heated debate.

Reeny Sondhi And I think somewhere along the line, there was a moment there where I stopped myself from participating and was collecting my thoughts, trying to figure out, Hey, how best to respond.

Reeny Sondhi And I remember one of my colleagues decided that he needed to step in and protect me. And he actually said that, “Hey, I’m here to defend Reeny.” And I had to politely ask him not to do it because all I was doing was taking some time to reflect on what I wanted to say, and I really didn’t need protection or didn’t need anyone to come and defend me. So that’s the other contrast that I’m going to bring up and would love to hear how you think of what’s an ally.

Susanna Holt: Yeah. That’s such a good point. And I’m going to pick up on this. What is not an ally thing first, before I go to what isn’t an ally because I had a similar but different experience that’s coming that’s on my mind here. Also a staff meeting, heated debate, lots of people talking, nobody really listening.

Susanna Holt: And I wasn’t doing any talking either. And then someone stood up and said, we haven’t heard anything from the women yet. Well, woman, there was only me in the room and I was so angry. I was angry for the same reasons as Reeny, I wasn’t looking for a night in shining armor. I was not talking because there was no point no one was listening. At least that was my take on the whole situation.

Susanna Holt: And the sad thing about it, he was really trying, he was trying to do something good and right by me, but that wasn’t the right thing for me at that time. And it has led me to understand that I’m not looking for an ally to rescue me.

Susanna Holt: In an ally, I’m looking for someone to partner with me, whom I can reach out to, and that doesn’t have to be someone at work. Allies can be anywhere. It’s not like a mentor that it’s a fixed relationship. So an ally is someone who I can reach out to when I need, and then we go on our way again.

Reeny Sondhi: Awesome.

Susanna Holt: Now I want to talk about role models. And I want to talk about role models because I realize you and I, Reeny, we at a stage in our career where we could and should, and maybe are role models to other people.

Susanna Holt: And I struggle to think of myself as a role model and that I haven’t quite come to terms with this yet. What about you Reeny, are you struggling? Are you doing this with ease?

Reeny Sondhi I think I’ve shared with you Susanna about my hesitation. It’s been a journey for me. It hasn’t come naturally or easily for myself as well. And I think I’ve had some hesitation of being a role model and personally, it has been shaped by some of my experiences. And I’ll talk about some of those.

Reeny Sondhi So several years ago I got invited to again another meeting. And this was when I was the director of product management for my past company. And I remember this was with, I think the CEO staff at that point.

Reeny Sondhi I remember someone telling me right before I was going in for the meeting, that one of the reasons I was invited to the meeting was because I was a woman. I want to call this piece out here, one of the reasons, okay. But I immediately gravitated to her the fact that was the reason I was invited in meeting. And I remember being extremely upset about it, and I’ll be honest with you. I just was in the best version of myself at that meeting. I just did not bring my best out. And after that, I’ve had several years of lots of introspection about it.

Reeny Sondhi And I realized that I could have used that platform to prove that I actually deserved a seat at that table, but I decided not to use that opportunity, like my loss.

Reeny Sondhi Now let’s contrast that with just a couple of years back, I was approached by a security company to become part of their board of directors. They came to me because I’m a security practitioner, I’m an expert in my field. I have a product management experience that they could have leveraged at the board level.

Reeny Sondhi And yes, I would help them with adding diversity to the board. Now it’s a pretty diverse board in general, but I would just help them with adding diversity. And I’ll be honest with you. I’ve looked at that as getting an opportunity and making the most of it.

Reeny Sondhi So I think I have with the two contrasts I’m bringing up, I have embraced the role of being a role model much better now than I did several years back. But I hear your stuff. So let’s talk a little bit about that and about your feelings on this topics Susanna.

Susanna Holt: Yeah. Thanks Reeny and I will say I’m probably forever scarred by the times when I was told, you’ve only got this opportunity, because you’re a woman you’ve only got this promotion because you’re a woman.

Susanna Holt: And like you Reeny, for me, it’s an only, regardless of what people say, what lands in my head is the only, and it leads to a form of imposter syndrome, makes me feel I didn’t deserve it. But if I just sit on this imposter syndrome, I’m being lazy and I don’t want to be lazy.

Susanna Holt: And like you, Reeny, for me, it’s an only, I want to manage this activity actively, like you do Reeny, and I’m on the path to it. And I want to do it because we’re kind of out of appreciation for the women who came before us, because they had much more difficult things to deal with than we do.

usanna Holt:And out of a sense of responsibility and care for the women who come after us for whom it will be a little bit easier. And, I have a responsibility to deal with this and to work through it. And I want to and I’m proud of trying and I’ll get there.

Reeny Sondhi: You will. It’s a journey for all of us. My experience and my contrast doesn’t mean that I don’t get self-doubts. So, okay. So we have talked about allyship, we have talked about our experiences and I would love for us to give a couple of messages that we can leave this audience with and I’ll start and you will absolutely, I know, build on top of that.

Reeny Sondhi: So, my two messages, I’ll be honest about, I don’t have one, I have two, but number one for me, is don’t get in your own way. Like I did. Don’t get in your own way, in the past. I’m a woman, I shouldn’t get a, [inaudible], because of my gender, my race, et cetera. All of these are meaningless. Instead, think about the platform that you’re getting and use that to amplify your voice.

Reeny Sondhi: And… it’s a journey, it doesn’t come easy. It doesn’t come, naturally the very first time you try to do this. And the second piece that I would leave the audience with, is embrace your role model-ship.

Reeny Sondhi: Don’t be reluctant, hesitant, when you have self-doubt, I’ll link it back to having allies, go to them, walk through yourself doubts with them. Those all allies, as you mentioned, very clearly, don’t have to be at work, having an allied at home with your partner, spouse, friend, recognize and use those allies to become the best version of yourself. So, that would be the two messages and let’s hear from you, Susannna.

Susanna Holt: The good news is I don’t actually have an additional message. I’m just going to build on what you said, Reeny. And for me, I articulate it differently, like I just said, I’m always going to live with that voice on my shoulder, wondering whether I really should be here or whether I’m only here for reasons that I don’t like, but I’m going to embrace that. That’s part of my growth, it’s part of who I am and I’m going to own it.

Susanna Holt: And one of the ways in which I own it is, I know what situations are going to be difficult for me. I know what gets me down and what makes that voice on my shoulder start shouting at me, but I can preempt that. I can go and find out ally, if I know this is going to be a difficult situation, maybe I line up a one to one with Reeny immediately afterwards and she can talk me off the ledge or my husband, whoever is available to that.

Reeny Sondhi: Awesome. I’m always here for you, Susanna. So when you need, [crosstalk]. I know we’ve come to the end of our conversation. I really sincerely hope that the audience has enjoyed our talk, a little fireside chat, and it was thought provoking for you.

Reeny Sondhi: We have thoroughly enjoyed being here with you. And I know we have not been able to get to questions today, but Susanna, let’s talk about how people can connect with us.

Susanna Holt: Yes. So first of all, thank you for [inaudible], for your interest. Thank you, Reeny for doing this with me. We are both on LinkedIn, reach out to us if you would like to engage and we hope that you will, and then we can start a conversation there.

Reeny Sondhi: Thank you. Have a wonderful rest of your day and rest of the conference.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Reeny and Susanna for joining us, that was so transparent and inspiring to hear you candidly share authentically about overcoming some of your thoughts and being a role model. 

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“Tech is a Team Sport: When Women Lead, Everything is Possible”: Claire Martorana, Federal Chief Information Officer, and Mina Hsiang, Administrator at United States Digital Service (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: We are having our next panel now. We want to welcome Claire Martorana the Federal Chief Information Officer for the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President hailing from Washington, DC.

Angie Chang: And previously, she served on the USDS team at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, working on digital monitorization for veterans and prior to her tour of duty in government tech or gov tech with the USDS she was president at Everyday Health and Senior Vice President at Web MD.

Angie Chang: Also, we want to welcome Mina Hsiang. She is a third Administrator named at the United States Digital Service. She is the first woman and first Asian American to lead the USDS and she brings her experience and expertise to the government. Notably, she was previously a VP at Devoted Health.

Angie Chang: Hi Claire. So get things started. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself and what is the biggest digital initiatives that you’ve been working on and some of the challenges that your teams have been taking on.

Claire Martorana: Thanks Angie. Hey, Mina. Nice to join you all today.

Claire Martorana: I think probably the thing I’m focused on the most these days is cyber security. Cyber security is top of mind for this administration and kind of top of mind at this moment in time, as you can all imagine. And we are working across the federal enterprise.

Claire Martorana: So my job as federal CIO is, I help coordinate across all of the federal agencies, there’s 24 CFO act agencies, which are really big agencies then about 140 small agencies, including the Marine Mammal Council, so gigantic and then very tiny, making sure that our entire federal enterprise is safe and secure.

Claire Martorana: Recently in this administration, we launched a cybersecurity executive order, and then we just published out a zero trust strategy to try and help bring all our agencies up to a different level.

Claire Martorana: So that’s what I’ve been focused on and I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to work with Mina quite a bit on our customer experience executive order. So maybe I’ll turn it over to you Mina.

Mina Hsiang: Awesome. And thank you so much for having us, this is super exciting great to see you Claire. Tons is going on across government, we’ve been very focused on things that improve services for the public, things that make key needs of the public more accessible.

Mina Hsiang: So things that you have seen, launching vaccine [inaudible] and adding testing sites, adding appointment availability, launching COVID test [inaudible] and helping everyone get access to new testing, standing up tools and a site and an engagement model to enable folks to more easily get access to the child tax credit, understand what entitled to at a simple reading level…

Mina Hsiang: Which is not easy for taxes and then to support people in applying for the child tax credit and in filing their taxes which is necessary to get all the credits they deserve working on tools that help us do analysis and evaluation in the interest of climate and economic justice investments and making sure that we can ensure that Federal Dollars are going to things that support those goals.

Mina Hsiang: Working on modernizing WIC, which is Women, Infants and Children, and making sure that this program which is run by the states but has a lot of technology and operations behind it has the tool that make it accessible for people at critical time.

Mina Hsiang: So we’ve been really deeply engaged on a number of programs across government as Claire said, many of them are customer experience focused as well as some things that are a little bit more security or processing focused but really helping improve government services across many areas that touch everyday people.

Angie Chang: That’s really great to hear. Thank you for sharing all those examples of the fine work that you’re doing. So can you tell me about what is the CXEO and why we should care about and how you are working to deliver better services?

Mina Hsiang: Absolutely. And Claire jump in. So the CXEO… Government is like organized in this very bureaucratic way, where we have different agencies that all touch the same stakeholders.

Mina Hsiang: We run different programs that have come out in different laws, but the public doesn’t care about any of that. Like you’re a person, you have a moment in your life. You need services, you deserve access to things that you’re entitled to at that point in your life, for one reason or another, you need to register, you need to retire and register for an array of different things that you’re entitled to at that point.

Mina Hsiang: And so this is really the nexus of a lot of our work and our observations and our understanding of how people really need to interact with services. The best companies think much more about the customer at the center. And so this was us saying let’s orient government in this way.

Mina Hsiang: Let’s not make it an exercise for every individual to go learn about every program and have to navigate the same thing over and over again.

Mina Hsiang: How do we start orienting with a mindset that says, how do we serve the individuals who are entitled to and dependent on and use government programs everyday, some of them are about support, but some of them are just about registering and becoming part of the system.

Mina Hsiang: And so putting that all together has been the nexus and that has required as Clara says. And we talk about a lot, it’s really a team sport, right?

Mina Hsiang: That all of a sudden requires all these parts of government to have a similar customer focus orientation, to hold hands and say, okay, so how are we going to serve people?

Mina Hsiang: And it’s been awesome to work with Claire. We have deployed… USDS deploys, a bunch of teams across agencies to help implement that. And then Claire’s team. And I’ll let you talk about it provides the connective tissue and the super structure that makes sure that this all hangs together. So it’s been great to partner and work really closely together in this, but Claire.

Claire Martorana: Yeah. And I think to build on what Mina said – a person, and I think this was really prevalent during the pandemic, a person’s just trying to get something done, they don’t know the org chart of some federal agency. Half the time you don’t even know the name of the agency that you’re trying to get services from.

Claire Martorana: So what we are trying to do with the customer experience executive order is do what we have done in the private sector, right? Which is try to care for your customer. A, know who your customer is, make sure you’re designing your products and services with your customers, not for them.

Claire Martorana: And recognizing that in many instances, you’re possibly going to have to intersect with multiple agencies to get one thing done. And then maybe an office is closed. So the only way a person knew how to approach the government was to go to this place and talk to a person. And then during the pandemic that wasn’t available.

Claire Martorana: And so we’ve spent a lot of time working with all of the work that the US Digital Service has done. And then with other folks across government saying, how do we not only improve the digital experience for people who can use digital channels, right?

Claire Martorana: Not everybody can, some people still want to get somebody on the phone at a call center or walk into a building and have a person to person interaction. We have to think omnichannel. We have to meet people where they are also based on their skills and abilities, because not everybody speaks English.

Claire Martorana: Not everybody understands the legalese on these forms that sometimes they’re asked to fill out, to even get access, to speak to a person about something.

Claire Martorana: So we tried to step back be the customer and really think about how we can make navigating agencies more efficient and effective based on the tools we all know how to use right. In the private sector, all of our phones and the channels that we know how to use.

Claire Martorana: And I think the pandemic was really interesting because it broke down a lot of bureaucratic silos. People previously were like, we can’t do that statute, A, B, C, G, E, F, won’t allow us and during the pandemic, a lot of those barriers were broken down.

Claire Martorana: So we were able to take advantage of that and really accelerate some of this work that was started in government, but we’ve really had the great opportunity to take it several steps further.

Mina Hsiang: Absolutely.

Angie Chang: So what does this mean in terms of execution when it comes to hiring?

Mina Hsiang: So much hiring! OK. I mean, we talked about this customer experience EO. But even just the EO enumerates 36 life experiences that are specifically going to get improved across 17 agencies, in addition to many programs that are not specifically enumerated, all of the things that I listed that we’re working on, none of those are listed in the customer experience EO, because those are additional things that we’re committing to, all of the cybersecurity work that Claire has laid out, needs to be built into all of this.

Mina Hsiang: And so you all know from where you sit, how much expertise, how much skill and focus it takes to accomplish things in this arena.

Mina Hsiang: And we need to bring in a mix of people who come from experiences like the audience here, private sector, public sector, people who have done this at state and local levels, we’re working to bring all of those people together and actually build these integrated implementation teams to work shoulder to shoulder with the staff at the agents who have been supporting the services and understand the customers to build and enable all of this.

Mina Hsiang: Change requires a lot of work and a lot of new thinking and collaboration. And so Claire and I have been deeply focused on working across the government to say, now is an amazing time, there is so much to do, there’s so much support. Jump in Claire.

Claire Martorana: Yeah. And I would say, if you’ve ever interacted with the government and you went to a website and went, wow, this looks old or, wow, I wish I could do this other thing. It’s because you’re right. And we need to be a to do that. But the only way we’re able to do that is if people like you all come along with us on this journey.

Claire Martorana: We need to hire people that look like the American public, that interact across the nation.

Claire Martorana: We want people from different places. It can’t just be New York, DC, Atlanta, Chicago, and whatever.

Claire Martorana: We need people that come from all different walks of life because we all bring such different perspectives. When I talk to somebody who is coming from Kansas and they’re talking about having to drive an hour and a half to a local hospital, that’s different from where I live.

Claire Martorana: And that’s really important for me to have that understanding and perspective when we’re thinking about developing products and services. So the people we want to come and join us on this journey are all of you. I never thought I would join government.

Claire Martorana: I read a WIRED article about president Obama’s tech team. And it had a little thing at the bottom that says, USDS join. And I clicked on, I went online, I clicked on it and I filled out this application.

Claire Martorana: I never thought anyone would call me, a lot of us have imposter syndrome and parts of our careers. And we go, oh, all those people are really smart. And they know how to do all the things.

Claire Martorana: You are all those people, everybody listening right now, you are the people that actually can come into government, do a tour of duty and have an outsized impact.

Claire Martorana: Millions and millions of people can benefit from the skills you have. And that’s a really sobering thing to think about, but it is really true.

Claire Martorana: I mean, I work with people every single day that thought they’d be here for a year and three years later, they’re still doing outstanding work, because they can have such a gigantic impact and build all of those things that Mina talked about earlier. These COVID websites, getting tests out to the American public through the postal service that was all done because people like you showed up to help us do this work.

Mina Hsiang: Could not agree more. And I think just to get more detailed and specific or Angie, if you have a different question, but just to stay on this for a second, I mean the skills that we are looking for.

Mina Hsiang: We are looking for technologists, experts in design, people who are user researchers, data scientists, data engineers, product managers, all of these are the skills.

Mina Hsiang: And now as a moment to bring those into government, it’s a skillset that is rare in government and experience that we want diverse backgrounds and diverse ages and diverse locations, as Claire said.

Mina Hsiang: And in terms of the amount of work to do and the amount of leadership support that you will have to do that, it’s just the teammates. It’s an incredible moment to do that. If I may, I wanted to read a quote, just a woman at USDS said this to me last week.

Mina Hsiang: And it really, to me is like, why we’re here. My partner told me the other day that I’ve seemed extra of happy to him lately, despite the sometimes long hours and a lot of challenges.

Mina Hsiang: This is a unique job. And I don’t think I could have imagined what it was like ahead of time, but it’s definitely the coolest, most meaningful job that I’ve ever had. And I think to me at this moment where people we’re all looking for meaning and to do something important and to be able to use our skills in the most high impact way I have come back.

Mina Hsiang: This is my fourth time in government. I keep coming back. There is no other place that you can so meaningfully use your skills to impact the lives of others. So if it’s at all appealing, now I will plug. We have a website, the one where Claire went and clicked and we pulled her in, which is usds.gov/apply and really hope to see more of be there.

Claire Martorana: Yeah. And Angie, I’ll just add one more thing to pile on. The thing that is really fascinating about the government is if you care about food safety, if you care about healthcare, if you care about helping children, all of those opportunities are available to you. Y

Claire Martorana: ou can basically think of any constituent group and there is work that needs to happen. Technical work that needs to happen to empower the experience that those people have with the federal government.

Claire Martorana: So it is really an incredibly important time to join because we have so much momentum and candidly, we have money to support the momentum because of the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure. IIJA infrastructure bill. There’s actually a lot of work going on and what we need are the people to come and help us do that work.

Claire Martorana: And I would just add one thing in closing is, don’t self select out.

Claire Martorana: I was really close to self-selecting out. I don’t know, I’ve just done management and product and they probably need SREs and frontend engineers, not me.

Claire Martorana: Don’t self elect out, please go to usds.gov, apply and start on the journey. And if it’s not the channel through USDS, there’s lots of other places, USA jobs, the technology transformation services. There’s lots of other ways that you can get involved.

Angie Chang: Sounds like that’s the last question I have, which is, advice you would give to a person looking to make a change, or make a difference. It sounds like in this great resignation, great reshuffling, a place that people can go to reinvigorate themselves with something that has important, impactful, meaning to many millions of Americans is go have a tour of duty at the USDS.

Angie Chang: So do you have a final piece of advice or someone who wants to make an impact beyond applying for the USDS or many of these other organizations that you mentioned?

Claire Martorana: Yeah. There’s the US digital core for folks early career at the general service administration. There’s a technology transformation service. There’s 18F, there’s a really interesting group called the presidential innovation fellows that do outstanding work.

Claire Martorana: So there are lots of different ways into the government in addition to USDS but it is absolutely, I’d say raise your hand, go on these websites, take a look around and really interrogate that.

Claire Martorana: The one thing I said I was going to add in closing before, but I’m closing again is I had this amazing woman I worked with at the VA and we launched a product that helped veterans get access to healthcare. And when we launched, literally she started crying and she said, I just spent three years kicking ass and optimizing a shopping cart.

Claire Martorana: And today what I did is helping people and I’ve never had the opportunity to do that. And it was that impactful for her and I’ve never forgotten it. So we see that through our colleagues all the time, as you get to really help people that are in need and you get to use your awesome technology skills to drive that impact.

Claire Martorana: And it’s really, it’s something that we mean has been here in government. Numerous times I had thought, I’d be here a year I’m on my sixth year. You get commitment escalation because the work you get to do is so impactful.

Mina Hsiang: A thousand percent agree. I think we hear all those stories. The other thing I would add is this isn’t something that derails your career, this is a high impact job. First of all, there are also state digital services.

Mina Hsiang: There are state government offices of technology that have other names, but they are opportunities to work in your local community if that’s what matters to you. But all of these, every business that I have worked for every other company that I’ve helped start are deeply intertwined and affected by government programs, by regulations.

Mina Hsiang: This is the other piece of the economy and it’s in the extent to which I am competitive because I understand how things work on the other side as well. And that I understand the interplay and how both the table is set and how the game gets played.

Mina Hsiang: It’s really unusual to have people who have both of those skill sets. So this is also just really valuable for your perspective on the world and your career.

Mina Hsiang: So I would say, it’s both not a limitation and not a step back or a pause in your career. It’s a big leap forward.

Mina Hsiang: It has been really helpful to me in understanding how the world overall works and in my professional development.

Mina Hsiang: And then I would also say, there’s so much to do and there is no one else who is coming to do it. And no one else who is better qualified to do it so come.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, ladies, this was just amazing. There’s so many comments on here where people are talking about how greatly inspired they are by you, Claire and you Mina. This has just been wonderful and we really, really are grateful for the time you spent in not just educating us, but in influencing and inspiring us today.

Mina Hsiang: Thank you so much.

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“Unique Paths to Machine Learning Careers”: Julie Choi, Chief Growth Officer at MosaicML, and Laura Florescu, Machine Learning Researcher at MosaicML (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: Next up, we have women from MosaicML sharing their unique journeys to machine learning careers. I want to welcome Julie Choi, MosaicML Chief Growth Officer and Laura Florescu, MosaicML, Machine Learning Researcher.

Angie Chang: And they’ll share about how they worked at several tech companies, eight total, including a few unicorns and blue chips, and their reason for joining forces at a new startup focused on making machine learning training better for everyone and please do ask questions of these ladies in the Q&A section of Zoom. They welcome your questions and welcome, Julie and Laura!

Julie Choi: Hi everyone. Let me just pull up this, great hello, Happy International Women’s Day, Laura!

Laura Florescu: Happy International Women’s Day!

Julie Choi: I’m so happy to be here with you in our San Diego offices together in real life. So really, really happy to be here with everyone. Thank you so much. The Girl Geek X organization and Angie and everybody, I know it takes so much work to put this event together and we’re just thrilled to be here today to share from our own career stories, as well as from our current intersection where we’re working at MosaicML to train machine learning models faster.

Julie Choi: So let’s get started with Laura and we’re going to take Q&A at the end. We’ll reserve some time. So Laura, you are a machine learning researcher at MosaicML, and it’s just been a joy and delight to get to know you. Can you tell us more about your path that got you to this point?

Laura Florescu: Yes. Thank you, Julie, would love to. So my journey starts in Bucharest, Romania, where I grew up and went to school. I went to a math and computer science high school, and I guess I just kind of loved math. My father had a deep appreciation for it. And so that wore off a little bit to me.

Laura Florescu: And afterwards I went to Reed College in Oregon when I moved to the United States to study mathematics. And so that’s where my academic roots began. And afterwards for a year I worked at Los Alamos National Lab, where pretty much I learned programming and that’s how I got kind of interested more in engineering and technology.

Laura Florescu: And afterwards I wanted to do my PhD. So I started at New York University and I had the honor and pleasure to write a book with my PhD advisor. And so I got my degree in math, computer science, and afterwards I moved to Silicon Valley where I got interested in AI in startups, entrepreneurship, and I made the decision to join right after a small, at the time, startup called Grok. So they are working on custom hardware for inference in machine learning.

Laura Florescu: So I worked on compilers on machine learning there. I learned a ton and afterwards I went to SambaNova Systems also kind of following my passion of accelerating neural networks training. So SambaNova is also building custom hardware for training neural networks. So I worked on many different areas there as well.

Laura Florescu: And now for about a year, I joined forces with you at MosaicML, again, with the same kind of goal of accelerating AI now through more algorithmic side and system optimizations.

Julie Choi: Amazing. I have one question. I mean, this is a brilliant journey and so many amazing points along the way. How did you decide to go into industry versus academia after your PhD?

Laura Florescu: Yeah. So I think a lot of people finishing their PhDs have that exact dilemma. I definitely did and I think I realized I wanted to have more impact in the world, kind of work on work on something that basically the whole world can benefit from. And I felt Silicon Valley and startups in particular would give me that opportunity to do so.

Julie Choi: So it was about impact?

Laura Florescu: Right. Yeah.

Julie Choi: Great.

Laura Florescu: Yeah. Thank you, Julie.

Julie Choi: Sure.

Laura Florescu: So you are Chief Growth Officer at MosaicML. Can you tell us a little bit about your path and where you have been to get to here?

Julie Choi: I’d love to thank you so much. Yeah. When I was a kid growing up in LA, I didn’t imagine that at this age I would be a Chief Growth Officer. Those jobs didn’t exist back then.

Julie Choi: But I think when I look back on the journey, it kind of makes sense that I’m doing what I’m doing because my job right now is to connect us, right? To build relationships with engineers in the research community, as well as at large or medium or small companies who are looking to build AI. And so I am a connector and I’m a people person, but I am…

Julie Choi: I identify as a nerd. So I started my journey in LA. I grew up as an immigrant. Actually I immigrated to LA from South Korea. My parents moved us here when I was the age of three, and my sister was 0.2, literally just born. And we moved here with kind of everything we had and settled in first El Segundo and then North Torrance, if anyone knows Southern California geography.

Julie Choi: And my parents worked very, very hard. They owned a 7-11 store in Lawndale, close to Inglewood. And so they were very, very, very busy and they basically left my sister and I to kind of figure out what we wanted to do with our spare time. And as many kids during the 80s did, I watched a lot of TV on my own.

Julie Choi: I played video games and I just gravitated towards robots and transformers and robo tech, Voltron, anything mechanical as well as these stories of good versus evil. And I identified with the few female heroes that were in these cartoons. And I guess that kind of just spurred me on towards my path in education.

Julie Choi: I went to MIT, continued to find my people and find my groove. But when I graduated, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So I went into consulting. And I started, I spent five years working with fortune 1000 types of enterprise companies, helping them solve problems, primarily in the security domain.

Julie Choi: So I was a hacker, I was hired to penetrate systems. And that was probably the first time I realized what it felt to be the only woman in the room, especially at RSA Conference. Wow. I was the only woman in the room usually and I was just like, wow, okay. But actually even then my team was extremely supportive and I had allies around me and it was like, do whatever it took to make that customer successful.

Julie Choi: And so I moved to Silicon Valley and here we are at MosaicML. I mean the Silicon Valley chapter also intersects with personally a lot of things, right? I met my husband, had my children, settled in where I live now. And at the same time growing in an understanding of what I wanted to do. And most recently, before deciding to go to MosaicML, I was at Intel and at Intel, I spent four very impactful years helping establish the AI business and brand for Intel.

Julie Choi: And actually the last time I gave a talk was Intel at a Girl Geek X conference. So it’s kind of amazing to do this again, about two years later.

Julie Choi: So here we are at MosaicML and we are here and so excited on this journey to accelerate AI development. And we’re doing this kind of differently than anyone else because we’re applying algorithmic research as well as system level optimizations to speed the way neural networks are trained.

Julie Choi: And so what I would love is given your research and engineering expertise, Laura, is if you could talk us through why neural network training is so important.

Laura Florescu: Yeah. Thank you, Julie, of course. So just a very briefly, a little bit about neural networks and why they’re so important and basically why we’re focusing on them. So there’s simply a series of algorithms mimicking the human brain to recognize patterns and relationships in vast amounts of data.

Laura Florescu: And so very briefly in the image below, you can see we have been given a number of images containing the number five and a bunch of neurons that are trained then through providing this kind of data in order to recognize features and textures and patterns in the images in order to correctly identify what the image is.

Laura Florescu: So through such iterations, we learn to classify numbers in this specific example.

Julie Choi: Oh, so this is unstructured data going in kind of like images and speech?

Laura Florescu: Yeah, exactly. So it can be applied to many different fields, basically anything that you humans would, would create, right? So a bunch of images, a lot of language. So you can imagine the whole Wikipedia, the whole internet, right? Speech data.

Laura Florescu: So many, many different fields affecting all of us. And I guess the issue is the training costs for building such powerful large models have spiraled. So they can actually get into the million dollars range for a single run. And in order to build a powerful model, you need several iterations of such training. And so you can imagine quickly getting to tens of millions of dollars.

Julie Choi: Wow. That seems extremely difficult and limiting in terms of who has the capability to train neural networks today. So in general, what are the types of companies that have this capability in house?

Laura Florescu: Right, so those companies would be, Google, Meta, Microsoft who have access to such resources.

Julie Choi: I see. But it feels like for AI to really reach its potential, we need these capabilities to be in the hands of far more than these things.

Laura Florescu: Exactly.

Julie Choi: Enter MosaicML. So Laura, can you tell us about how Mosaic is accelerating the training of these neural nets?

Laura Florescu: Yeah. So that’s exactly where we come in and it’s my passion to work on such problems, especially as they apply to, as we have here, a couple of different tasks, different domains in which we have done research and shown significant progress.

Laura Florescu: So in the area of natural language processing, which encompasses everything from machine translation, everybody speaks different languages. So it’s huge question answering, information retrieval, sentiment analysis for Amazon reviews, for example.

Laura Florescu: So in this kind of area, through the research we have done by combining multiple algorithms, we have shown speedups of up to 3.7x on these GPT type models, which is the state of the art in language models.

Laura Florescu: And in computer vision, so such as classification, what I showed earlier here, you can see a couple of examples in detection and image segmentation, which are crucial for autonomous driving. So similarly through our research, by combining multiple algorithms, we can train such models up to 4.5x faster.

Julie Choi: So if I’m interpreting the speed or the impact of speed, does training 4.5 times faster mean that you can potentially train a model that would’ve taken four weeks in maybe one?

Laura Florescu: Exactly. Yeah. So you can iterate faster and your costs go down significantly.

Julie Choi: Awesome.

Laura Florescu: What’s really good about it in my opinion, another thing that we’re doing at Mosaic is we have open source our library of such algorithms. So you can visit it on GitHub, it’s called Composer. So it’s a flexible system to combine efficiently such different algorithms.

Laura Florescu: There are about 20 of them right now, and we’re actively researching and implementing more. And yeah, so we opensource that. We welcome community interaction, community feedback, as well as contributions to our open source library.

Julie Choi: And so is this available today for developer use?

Laura Florescu: Right. And that’s exactly how we got the kind of results that I just described.

Julie Choi: The 4x speed up on vision and four and a half… Okay, perfect.

Laura Florescu: Yeah. So my question to you, Julie, then is we have seen obviously how ML is so important and it’s affecting our lives, but why work in it? What’s in it for us?

Julie Choi: Yeah. So why work in ML? I’ve been working in ML for the past seven years. So I started working in machine learning at HPE, and then I went to Intel and I continued to choose to work in this domain because whether we’re ready to embrace it or not, the era of AI is happening now. I mean, it is not a future thing.

Julie Choi: There is so much data that we’re generating every day on our mobile devices and through our computers that now any company in it, not only the things, but there’s thousands of enterprise companies with legacy data and new data being generated, any organization can create AI systems.

Julie Choi: And so the era of AI is upon us because of the convergence of data, as well as tools that extract meaning from the data. And so I feel like it’s very imperative for me to be a part of developing tools that accelerate this adoption, because at the end of the day, AI systems are acting on my behalf.

Julie Choi: They are identifying who I am, right? And they are trying to make decisions on my behalf. And so I would like to be part of setting up the requirements for AIs, both from the ground up at the tooling level, which is where we’re involved as MosaicML and help educate builders of a AI applications so that we can consider basically people like me, right?

Julie Choi: And today is International Women’s Day. And basically almost 50% of the world identifies as female and that’s about 4 billion people. However, only 15% of the ML space in terms of research and science and development identifies as females. And so this is part of why I choose to work in this domain.

Julie Choi: And so actually, if that resonates and if what Laura, you and I discussed resonates with people that are attending the conference today, I really encourage you to join us here at Mosaic.

Julie Choi: It is an incredibly exciting time to be working on machine learning infrastructure and algorithmic software and to be shaping the space and the opportunity that AI presents. So I would like to just, maybe now we can move into question and answer, we’ll stop sharing, and then let’s go into Q and A. So there are a few.

Laura Florescu: Julie, I have a question for you.

Julie Choi: Yes.

Laura Florescu: Do you have any recommendation to someone who might not have any AI or ML background in order to get into the field?

Julie Choi: Yeah. I mean, I think education, there are so many materials out there, on Coursera, as well as there’s many organizations like Women in ML, Women in Data Science, these types of organizations.

Julie Choi: I would definitely go and look for the coursework, if you’re looking for a technical background and then just talk to people, right? Whether it’s over Zoom or now over coffee, learn from the practitioners who are out there.

Julie Choi: Again, I’ve been in this for seven years and so we’ve kind of come to a state where there are lots of sources of information. Yeah. It looks like, oh, I’m so sorry. There’s a lot of, I think we have a couple more minutes here.

Angie Chang: We’re actually out of time, but if you’ll hop into the chat, we can have you answer questions.

Julie Choi: Okay.

Angie Chang: Thank you Julie And Laura for sharing about machine learning careers and how MosaicML is making machine learning training better for everybody. 

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“Launching and Leading Cross-Functional Initiatives as an Engineer”: Izzy Clemenson, Senior Staff Engineer at Slack, and Tracy Stampfli, Principal Engineer at Slack (Video + Transcript)

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Next up, as you know, we love Slack for being a platinum sponsor and hosting a coffee session with lead engineers, sharing best practices for launching and leading cross-functional initiatives as an engineer.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Speaking today are Izzy Clemenson, Senior Staff Engineer, and Tracy, who we met earlier today, who is a Principal Engineer at Slack. Welcome Izzy and Tracy.

Izzy Clemenson: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having us. Today Tracy and I are going to start talking about some tips that we’ve learned along the way of leading cross-functional, sometimes company-wide projects as engineers and not as managers.

Izzy Clemenson: Tracy and I have both been at Slack for quite a long time. I have been at Slack for over five years and Tracy, I think you’re on your sixth?

Tracy Stampfli: Little over five as well.

Izzy Clemenson: Yeah. So, we’re going to tell you really briefly about some of the projects we’ve led to give you some grounding as to kind of the size of projects that we’re talking about and then dive into our tricks. So Tracy, tell us about Duplo a little bit.

Tracy Stampfli: Yeah. So I actually talked about this project a little bit at last year’s conference here, and it’s a project that was code named Duplo and that we launched at Slack to address tech debt in both our iOS and Android code bases.

Tracy Stampfli: At the time we had a lot of legacy tech debt and a lot of legacy architecture, which was really slowing down development.

Tracy Stampfli: And so we launched this very big project to modernize these code bases. It took 18 months, which it just finished about a month or so ago and was a really big refactor, which kind of involved all of our mobile engineers at one time or another, not for that entire time, but over that period, pretty much every, all of our mobile engineers on product and info were involved in this project.

Izzy Clemenson: And this was an engineering-led effort. You brought the need to this effort, to our leaders, right?

Tracy Stampfli: Yeah. A group of engineers, I don’t want to take all the credit, but it was an engineering-led effort. We came up with the proposal, we sort of got pushed for both like that. We should have this project done and exactly what we should do in order to address this problem.

Izzy Clemenson: Great. And then I’ve worked a lot as Tracy noted, she’s been working more on the infrastructure side and a lot of engineering-led efforts.

Izzy Clemenson: I spent most of my time at Slack working on the product side of things, working on product and executive driven efforts that involved a lot of engineering. And so Slack Connect is my most recent example. It was a multi pillar multiyear project. We were in beta for two years. It took another year and a half to get to GA.

Izzy Clemenson: And the thing about that was even though the vision came from our CEO, the execution was across all of these engineering teams fundamentally changing what we meant by core objects in our infrastructure. What is a team? What is a user, what is a channel?

Izzy Clemenson: And so, although I didn’t bring Slack Connect to Stewart, Stewart brought it to our engineering team, there was a lot of cross-functional engineering efforts that needed to get done in order to get this feature out the door.

Tracy Stampfli: Great. So we’re going to talk about kind of three different things down to the beginning of a project like this, running it, and then kind of finishing it up successfully and to start with launching a project, a really big cross-functional project that maybe involves a whole bunch of different groups at your company.

Tracy Stampfli: How do you know that it’s actually time to do something that big? How do you know, oh, we really need to do something larger than our normal kind of project to address this. And it’s really about the size of the issue that you’re addressing.

Tracy Stampfli: I mean, in a lot of cases, like the ones that Izzy and I are both talking about, these were issues that our normal processes were not able to handle as part of our kind of normal processes or normal feature development.

Tracy Stampfli: It was something where we really needed a larger effort to address it. And it’s kind of about the downside of not doing something like that.

Tracy Stampfli: We were in kind of an unsustainable path with mobile development at Slack where it was just so much slower to do mobile development because of the tech debt that we knew we had to do something big to address it.

Tracy Stampfli: And that kind of ties into the second point of scoping problems like this. You have to scope them large. You’re trying address a really major issue, a major product need, major developer pain. You have to scope something really large to address that, but that can be really scary as well because it’s risky. It’s big, it’s risky.

Tracy Stampfli: How do you know how long it’s going to take or how many people it’s going to involve?

Tracy Stampfli: So one trick that we used or technique that we used for Duplo was to start off to sort of break it down into milestones and start off with something smaller in order to start off with the sort of the easy ones or the things that are much more well defined. So we said, okay, in this first milestone, we’re going to do this stuff that we know how to do it.

Tracy Stampfli: We know how many people it’s going to take, we know we can achieve it. And that sort of gave us momentum for the rest of the project. And also give us more time to define the rest of the project.

Tracy Stampfli: And in order to figure out like some of the unanswered questions that we had about what we were going to do later on. Izzy do you want to talk a little bit about getting stakeholder buy-in for these big projects?

Izzy Clemenson: Yeah. So like I said, the projects I’ve worked on, the main stakeholder which would be our CEO, kind of came up with it, but there’s a lot of other stakeholders that you need to talk about.

Izzy Clemenson: Tracy needed essentially to get to a point where we’re saying we’re going to stop feature development for a good chunk of people on mobile and make this investment, or in the case of more product focused areas, no one else’s roadmap is going to move forward because this product takes priority.

Izzy Clemenson: And so a lot of the stakeholder buy-in is to make sure that the leadership that you are working with, whether it’s PMs, EMs, customer success, whoever it may be, understand why you’re doing this, what will the benefits be, and how do we know we are making progress? Success we’ll talk about at the very end, but towards the project, we need to know that we’re making progress.

Izzy Clemenson: So that kind of gets into running the project. And when you’re talking about something as large as what we’re talking about here, it’s not a matter of brute force. You, no matter how dedicated you are, cannot do this alone. It is impossible. There are not enough hours in the day or hands on keyboards to do this alone.

Izzy Clemenson: So you need to be a part of driving alignment. Does everyone who is participating in this work, know why you’re doing it? Are you all focused on the end goal and why you’re doing it?

Izzy Clemenson: Once people understand the why and deeply understand it, they are empowered and empowered is a very important word for me here, to make smaller decisions along the way so that you don’t always have to be checking upon things. And you don’t feel like you’re having to micromanage that project progress.

Izzy Clemenson: And that helps keep projects on track. You basically pick different people across organization who are helping drive this project towards the end to you break down smaller projects along the way of this team over here is going to handle whatever case. And this team over here is going to handle this piece.

Izzy Clemenson: And what you need to do is at periodic points, bring in representatives of those projects, smaller projects to make sure you’re working together. If someone’s getting far ahead and other people are behind, does that mean you need to shift focus, go back to your stakeholders and kind of reassess how you’re making progress along the way?

Izzy Clemenson: And once you break down into smaller projects, that’s where the leadership of other ICs is really important. ICs here meaning individual contributors.

Izzy Clemenson: It is really important if you are leading a project to pay attention to the smaller, or smaller is a terrible word, to pay attention to the leaders who are leading the smaller projects, because if your project is this big, this is an opportunity for people to be seen, to be heard, to practice their leadership skills and to get promoted.

Izzy Clemenson: So when I work across multiple teams, I pay attention to who ends up in these leadership positions. You want to, this is a point where you can have a voice in the representation and diversity of the new, the upcoming leaders at your company.

Izzy Clemenson: Because if you’re on the line for the larger project, you can be a representative and invest in representation across the rest of the company or across the rest of your team. As people are working on smaller projects and they can use that as their own skills or to invest in their own skills.

Tracy Stampfli: Yeah. And I really think it’s important to call out the successes of those leaders or just of people working on the project in general. That’s something I always try and stay aware of as with these really big projects.

Tracy Stampfli: It’s part of my job as a leader to make sure other people are recognized. And so calling them out in public channels or to their managers to make sure again like that, the great work that they’re doing is seen super important.

Izzy Clemenson: And even too, back to those stakeholders, people who may not interact with some of the more senior executive leadership, if they have made an impact on this project, their names should be heard and you get to be a part of elevating their work.

Tracy Stampfli: Very true. So moving on to completing a big project like this, this can be actually pretty complicated, figuring out how to measure success of a really big project.

Tracy Stampfli: A lot of times when you get to something that’s this big you kind of have to come up with your own metrics for measuring it. A lot of times, it’s not as simple as, okay, we’re we know this is what we’re trying to do, and then we’re done.

Tracy Stampfli: And that’s not usually the case, especially I think with something like an infrastructure project where maybe it’s a refactor or a migration, you’re not just shipping a product, you’re trying to measure health of the code base maybe.

Tracy Stampfli: And that can be a tricky thing. And so when we did Dupla, we tried to come up with a lot of different kind of quantitative measures, like migrating lines of code or removing deprecated instances, deprecated patterns, adoption of new technologies.

Tracy Stampfli: We’re trying to improve build times or development speed so we tracked local build times and remote build times. So we came up with a whole suite of quantitative metrics, but we also looked at more qualitative metrics.

Tracy Stampfli: We wanted to talk to developers and say, “How do you feel about the impact of this project? Is this actually making your development process easier and faster?” Maybe talking in the case of development, a big product change, talking to customers and getting customer sentiment, developer sentiment.

Tracy Stampfli: These can be really important measures. And being able to see how that changes over the course of the project can really give you a sense of its impact, sort of similar to being it’s hard to measure success.

Tracy Stampfli: It’s also kind of hard to know when you’re done with big projects like this, because again, you’re never really completely done. You’re not going to completely finish getting rid of all the tech debt in your code base. You’re not going to get to the point where everything is perfectly modernized.

Tracy Stampfli: There’s always going to be more work, there’s always more work to do. And so you have to just kind of define a stopping point where you say, “Hey, maybe we’re not completely done this entirely, but we can maybe transition at this point back from, instead of having this big project umbrella that we’re working under, maybe we sort of transition back at that point to addressing, say tech debt as part of our ongoing product work as part of our normal process.”

Tracy Stampfli: And then just setting again a clear goal so that you know when you’ve hit that point and you can show that you’ve delivered the impact that you have said you’re going to deliver before you kind of transition out of this project.

Izzy Clemenson: And that kind of hard to measure done-ness isn’t just for infrastructure or code refactor projects. It’s also something that I’ve experienced with product because a complete product is never done.

Izzy Clemenson: The project I’ve been talking about was something that Stewart envisioned at the very beginning of Slack. Clearly we shipped Slack before this was done and lots of people use our product and it met many, many people’s needs.

Izzy Clemenson: And so one thing along the way is to work particularly with product managers and that part of the executive leadership to say, “How much of what we’ve built solves a current customer need that we can ship today and how much can we build incrementally on top of that?”

Izzy Clemenson: Sometimes the answer is if we shipped what we have today, it still wouldn’t do anyone any good because it’s not finished enough, but other times you can find ways to incrementally shift.

Izzy Clemenson: So you need to have that balance and that conversation with the stakeholders that you have of how can you know when to ship what you have?

Izzy Clemenson: So I just want to say, thank you everyone for coming. I know that not everyone is going to work on a project that is company wide, but I hope some of these tips will allow you to go into your next leadership opportunity with a little bit more confidence.

Angie Chang: Thank you, Izzy and Tracy for your talk. It’s really exceptional. I loved hearing about how to launch a large project as a lead engineer. 

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“Riding the Highs and Lows: Navigating Bad Mental Health Days in the Workspace”: Ashu Ravichander, Principal Product Manager at Workday (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang: It’s time for our next session. Up next is Ashu Ravichander. She is an engineer and product manager, currently Principal Product Manager at Workday. And outside of her day job, she leads product for the Human Health Project, which is a nonprofit, connecting patients with mental health and other chronic diseases [inaudible] advocates that help them navigate the healthcare system. Welcome, Ashu.

Ashu Ravichander: Thank you, Angie. Let me start screen share. Okay. Hi, everyone. And thank you so much for joining this talk, writing the highs and lows where I’ll go over some of my techniques to navigating bad mental health days in the workplace. But first introductions.

Ashu Ravichander: Hi, I’m Ashu Ravichander and I’m currently a Principal Product Manager at Workday. I started out my career as an engineer in the healthcare space almost a decade ago now, and since then have built consumer and enterprise products for a wide variety of personas. On a personal note, I have two beautiful dogs and Boo, my cat, with my husband. Outside of work, I live in California now, so I love to kayak in the summers and ride bikes through the year.

Ashu Workday Product Manager Dogs Cat Husband California Bipolar

Ashu Ravichander: I also have bipolar disorder, type two to be specific. Most of my friends and coworkers know the first seven things about me but not the last, because that is not something I ever speak about since it’s not really well understood and is unfortunately so often conflated with your character and capabilities.

Ashu Ravichander: Now I have attended conferences and other events for past decade now, and I have heard some amazing speakers, but I wish 23-year-old me could have heard more people talking about mental health in a tech or professional setting so that it felt more normalized, and that I understood that it was just a difference and should never have been a reason to hold back.

Ashu Ravichander: That’s why I’m here today to kind of do this for 23-year-old me and for anyone else that may need to hear it because statistically, I know I’m not alone and you may not have a diagnosed mental health condition, but honestly, it’s a spectrum and we all have mental health. And some days, it just does not fare as well, whether it’s due to biochemical reactions, external stressors, thanks pandemic, or just being human.

Ashu Ravichander: I think this is important for everyone to hear and learn, to build resiliency. Now earlier, I used to compartmentalize my professional and personal self and never let it seep into the other, but this wasn’t sustainable. And if I wanted to bring my full self to work, I had to positively integrate my condition in because I also have ambitious career goals. And I knew I’m going to build amazing teams working on amazing products.

Ashu Ravichander: I started taking on a more mindful approach to work and making sure I had defenses up against any bad days. And that’s what I want to talk to you all about today. I’m going to walk through my personal experience about how I build resiliency around bad mental health days at work.

Ashu Ravichander: I go through five of the most basic and important things I have in my tool kit that help me be consistent and bring my best whenever I need to. And how I, and hopefully you, can use this to bring your whole self to work. I do want to also call out what the talk is not. None of these techniques are substitute for care, whether it’s self-care, meditation, medication, therapies. There are a lot of great resources out there and I do recommend you seek this out.

Ashu Ravichander: I have put years of work for myself into therapy and medication that has let me come to this point, to be here and talk you all. And I’d be more than happy to connect on this offline. Along with seeking out care, I want to stress that you need to treat your physical and mental health the same and take the time off, take the mental health days off if you really need to.

Ashu Ravichander: And finally, it is not a formula. I’ve had to develop what works for me over years of trial and error and I’m sharing what has stuck. This could look very different for you. And I hope you take this as a starting point to build the tools that will work for you. With that, let’s jump into five simple tools I use to bring my best work.

Ashu Ravichander: Now, my first technique is to build a playbook of templates, frameworks to help give me a leg up on really low energy days. I’m a Product Manager and we are the go to people about our products, right? Quite often, I find that I have to turn around and create something like white papers or business cases for really different audiences in a very short timeframe.

playbook to have a leg up - like meal prep - understand what you need - templates - frameworks - collect and save samples - generate a playbook that you can take with you

Ashu Ravichander: But what do I do if this falls on a really low day for me, where my energy is not where it would normally be? I don’t want to do a bad job just because the timing wasn’t right. I knew I had to do something different to accommodate for this.

Ashu Ravichander: I looked at the most common things I might need on a daily or weekly basis and figure that if I had a template or a framework for these things, then I would always have create starting points for my most common deliverables.

Ashu Ravichander: Think about it kind of like meal prep on a weekday after you’ve had this hard time at work, you finished all your chores, you know you need to have a nutritious balanced meal, but you just don’t have the mental of physical energy to cook up anything elaborate.

Ashu Ravichander: If you do meal prep on the weekend and have some pre-prepared proteins and chopped and season vegetables, then all you really have to do is heat it up, maybe add a really simple salad to it, and wow, you’ve got a great nutritious meal ready.

Ashu Ravichander: The templates that I collect are kind of the same thing. If I get asked to put a business case template together, I already have a starting point with my business case template and you and I know that formatting is 50% of the work. I already have a leg up.

Ashu Ravichander: I also have notes, prompts and question of these to make filling it out easier, almost Mad Libs style. For example, in my business case deck, I have a section on the success metrics and I have a little prompt there that reminds me to detail out the product metrics and how that could tie into the organization’s metrics or OKRs that they’re tracking.

Ashu Ravichander: Now when I need to fill it out, even if I’m having an off day, I’m making sure I cover the right points and details.

Ashu Ravichander: Over the years, I have collected and continue to add what I need in my day-to-day work to my playbook. So far, I have a roadmap deck, feature requirement templates, business case decks, prioritization frameworks, and a few more things that I can lean on.

Ashu Ravichander: I also have the privilege of working with some amazing coworkers and teams in various organizations. Every time I see an impactful presentation or document, including some that we saw in the conference earlier today, I constantly think about my playbook and either ask for a copy or adapt a template from it.

Ashu Ravichander: I have a folder for my work computer with these samples and templates labeled with all the organization teams and branding, but I also make a generic and non-branded templates for myself to use with links to publicly available themes and icon collections, and have it on my private Google Drive, so I know I can port this playbook with me.

Ashu Ravichander: Next, I have what I like to call, spacers. One thing I have learned from cycling through highs and lows is that everything passes. So it really helps me to buy some time or create spaces between me and the critical event or task till I can get back in that right state and have appropriate and reliable responses.

build pauses to give yourself space - everything passes - record and replay - maintain a To-Do list - re-prioritize tasks - create ways to pause and resume

Ashu Ravichander: A few weeks ago, my dog Arby, he had surgery and I think it was on a Wednesday. And I remember I was like a complete wreck that day, but I was still in a few meetings where I needed to make sure I had a handle on the project we’re working on.

Ashu Ravichander: I tried to be as present at the meetings, but since I knew it was going to be a high stress day, I asked for all meetings that day to be recorded.

Ashu Ravichander: For meetings that I couldn’t record, I had my transcription app open, so I had the whole meeting transcribed and had notes for myself. I spent the rest of the day doing less intense tasks, like I think I just sorted through some old detail that I needed and replied to older emails.

Ashu Ravichander: Then at around 6:00 PM, the vet calls me and he tells me, “Arby has made it through surgery. Just fine. It was awake.” I finally felt like I could breathe and got back into that right state of mind.

Ashu Ravichander: Now I know there was some questions asked of me in the meetings and some follow-ups. To make sure I didn’t miss anything, I just replayed my meetings from the day at 2X speed, of course, and looked at the transcription so that I could catch up.

Ashu Ravichander: Now, recording and transcriptions are a good way to build spacers, but there are other ways I do this too, depending on the situation, like shuffling around some of my tasks, so working on more routine or repetitive tasks when I’m stressed and then the more important tasks later, or responding to infuriating emails only after I spent some time out watering my garden and having to think about it, either way a very well-watered garden in case you were wondering.

Ashu Ravichander: But it is a slippery slope between building a spacer and procrastination. I have seen this and experienced it. So I have had to make a sacred rule about maintaining a to-do list in a single spot, which I have to regularly review before starting another task.

Ashu Ravichander: The bottom line here is find out what works for you. Pause, prioritize, and come back to situations or tasks when you are ready.

Ashu Ravichander: Now, the third technique I use is to ask for feedback early and often to almost have a reality check. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s hard to ask for feedback and I am still putting this into practice, but I know it has a big payout.

get feedback for a reality check - ask for feedback early - choose the right people - prepare the questions - wait for the right time - accept positive feedback

Ashu Ravichander: Almost all the time when I’m in a depressive phase, I find that I’m putting myself down almost relentlessly. For example, recently I forgot an edge case while writing product requirements, and someone pointed that out during the review.

Ashu Ravichander: Now my inner voice starts telling me that I’m a terrible product manager, because I couldn’t think of that edge case scenario upfront, and that I’m probably not qualified for this job. Even though rationally, I know it’s not possible to think of all edge cases that could possibly occur.

Ashu Ravichander: And in fact, product requirements are a collaborative effort that grows and improves with feedback and maybe my multiple engineering degrees and a decade of releasing successful enterprise scale products may say otherwise.

Ashu Ravichander: However, this constant cycle of thoughts really magnifies the imposter syndrome. And what I’ve found breaks the cycle is having factual evidence or conversations to overcome it.

Ashu Ravichander: For me, especially at the start of new jobs on new projects when I am still working on getting up to speed or where in storming phase of the project, I find that I’m a lot harder on myself about not being further along and the imposter syndrome is on high gear, and almost always.

Ashu Ravichander: The people around me recognize that the reality is that we are in the storming phase of the project and that it’s normal and we’ll get better with collaboration or that it’s only been two months since I joined, so it’s actually okay to not know as much.

Ashu Ravichander: I ask for feedback early in these cases so that I’m being grounded and have a better pulse on reality versus what the imposter syndrome’s telling me.

Ashu Ravichander: Now it is important to get feedback from the right people. Just because someone is on the same project as you, doesn’t automatically make them a great person to get feedback from.

Ashu Ravichander: For me, these have to be people have a great professional relationship with. I know that they know me and I feel comfortable asking and really discussing their opinions.

Ashu Ravichander: I also prepare what I want to get feedback on because it is important to know why you want feedback and what you’re going to do with it. Is it a specific action on a project or your working style with a team or something else?

Ashu Ravichander: Vague questions give you vague answers. So take the time to prepare the questions to make this meaningful. I also know I need to wait for the right time when I know I’m in a good place mentally to accept the feedback and not be defensive about it.

Ashu Ravichander: And the last thing I’ll leave you with on this topic is a reminder to accept positive feedback. Earlier, I used to spend most of my time reviewing my feedback and focusing only on the negative, because these are areas I could take action on to improve.

Ashu Ravichander: And I would completely gloss over anything positive since my reviewer probably didn’t mean it or they were just saying it to be nice that there was really nothing actionable for me there.

Ashu Ravichander: But now I know it is so important to focus on the positive so that you know what’s working and what strengths you have that you can lean into more. Seek and accept positive feedback.

Ashu Ravichander: Now this next technique is a more recent discovery for me. And I can tell you, it has absolutely been redeeming already. You may have heard this before.

bring positivity to work toward goals - assume positive intent - understand common goals - it's not personal

Ashu Ravichander: Assume positive intent. Practicing this a few times has already helped me so much that I know this one will stick in my tool kit for a long time. So uncertain days with interpersonal interactions, I’m sensitive and sometimes read too much into things, like why does my coworker hate me?

Ashu Ravichander: Just because they said something contradictory or spoke over me in a meeting. There was a time this would have upset me so much that I’d be crying in a bathroom stall over it.

Ashu Ravichander: Now as a bottom line, I just assume everyone I interact with at work has positive intent. It helps me not be angry or annoyed over it, but look at it situationally.

Ashu Ravichander: In the case where someone interrupts me in a meeting, I’m now thinking that you just interrupted me to say something, not because you wanted to cut me off, but because you had something to say that felt unheard.

Ashu Ravichander: Okay. With this context in my mind, I’m going to repeat what he said so you know that I hear you and then go on to the point I was making. In an organization, especially one with great culture, you very rarely meet actual bad players. Instead, if in a conversation or project, if we have that common goal understood, it’s easier to assume that everyone has positive intentions to work that’s that common goal, albeit in different ways.

Ashu Ravichander: It’s usually not personal or malicious attacks, so remember your common goals, and assume everyone works towards it with positive intentions.

Ashu Ravichander: Now I saved this one for the last, because for me, one of the bigger challenges I’ve faced in the workplace with my disorder is the disproportionate reaction to certain situations on certain days. It could be as simple as someone pointing out a mistake I made or getting some not so positive feedback.

Ashu Ravichander: Either of these simple reactions or interactions could have resulted with breaking down into tears when I got home or sinking into depression. This kind of extreme reaction is hard to deal with when you now have to get on with the rest of your day and go into a three-hour grooming session with your engineering team.

Ashu Ravichander: What has really helped me here is finding a few key people who are my anchors and help ground me and rationalize my thought process. A simple conversation or text with my anchors, where I describe a certain situation, helps me understand what a rational response would look like from their perspective versus how my brain might be exaggerating it, and this really helps center me.

Ashu Ravichander: One thing I must caution you about here is the fact that this can be extremely exhausting for the people you reach out to. Be mindful of that and make sure you have a few different trusted people that you can talk to, so you can load balance it without bringing any one single person, but don’t hold back on reaching out to people.

hold steady with anchors - trusted circle of co-workers and friends - rationalize situations - be mindful of how draining it can get

Ashu Ravichander: And if you don’t get a response, move on to someone else if it’s important for you to talk to someone at that time for that scenario. For me, if all else fails, I still text my mom and she replies back, so that’s a great thing. Put in effort into these relationships, and I always look to find ways to give back to the wonderful anchors that hold me steady.

Ashu Ravichander: Well, that’s my tool kit. To quickly recap what I have: Firstly, playbooks that I have built over time to give me great starting points. Second, spacers that help me pause and come back to a task when I’m ready. Third, is feedback, to cut the imposter syndrome in the bud and help me reinforce what I’m good at and what I can work on. Fourth, is assuming positive intent that can help move us all towards a common goal. And finally, fifth, my trusted circle of anchors that I can rely on.

Ashu Ravichander: Those were five of the more important tools I have in my tool kit. And even though I use these tools almost daily, I knew it still needs very intentional practice for it to be useful. And please know that you are not alone.

Ashu Ravichander: Ever since I posted that I was going to talk about this, I was worried whether being this open and vulnerable would impact my career, but it’s had the opposite effect. I’ve had so many people reach out to share their stories.

Ashu Ravichander: These are women who’ve founding companies, and someone else I met who’s had a really hard time with her mental health but is still so very successfully leading a large channel from one of the biggest companies in the world.

Ashu Ravichander: There are many people with these invisible struggles who are flourishing and building beautiful products. We just need to work differently. I’d love to hear your thoughts more about your tools, or maybe just connect on LinkedIn.

Ashu Ravichander: Thank you. And happy Women’s Day.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Wow. Ashu, that was amazing. I felt like you were talking about me. Thank you so much for your amazing talk on managing mental health at work. I know from the comments, a lot of people really resonated with your tips and tricks specifically, because you gave so much context into what the actual problem was that you were looking to solve.

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“From Culture to Products: Why Diversity in Technology Matters”: Intel Executive Panel (Video + Transcript)

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Sukrutha Bhadouria: Next up, we want to welcome a panel of Intel execs who will talk about why diversity and technology matters, from culture to products. Hema is the Director of Technical Advocacy with Ai4Good at Intel. Hema is going to kick things off. Welcome Hema.

Hema Chamraj: Thank you. Thank you, Sukrutha. Hi Sukrutha and Angie. Thanks for having us here. And I’m really glad to be here with my colleagues, Huma and Caroline. And let me hand it to Huma, so she can introduce herself, and then to Caroline, before we get talking.

Hema Chamraj: And also Huma, if you can say, I liked a panel in the past, the previous one where they said, “How did you come into being a technologist?” Is it like accident, or is this your lifelong dream of yours? Caroline, you can do the same.

Huma Abidi: Absolutely. So happy International Women’s Day for everybody. I love the theme this year break. The, so I am Huma Abidi Senior Director of AI Software Products at Intel. And in my role, I’ll talk about what I do now, and then I’ll talk about how I got into this.

Huma Abidi: So in my role, I lead a globally diverse team of engineers technologists, and they are responsible for delivering AI products, which help our customers to create the solutions. So pretty much my entire career, I would say, I have been a advocate for women’s advancement education and I founded Women in Machine Learning at Intel. And I’m involved in various solutions that Intel to do that. How did I come about?

Huma Abidi: I was studying to be a doctor, and I met my husband and all his friends, including Caroline here. So I met these people, bunch of engineers, who were awesome. And I took one computer science course, and then I ended up doing masters in computer science, and I basically let go my pre-med and chemistry and I came into technology. And I have been at Intel since.

Huma Abidi: I was a RCG, Recent College Graduate, and I spent my entire career at Intel doing all kinds of different technologies, binary translations, compilers. And right now I’m super excited to be working on AI, which is AI is everywhere. And I will pause now let Caroline talk, because I can go on forever.

Hema Chamraj: Yeah.

Caroline Chan: Hi, I’m Caroline Chan. I’m Vice President and General Manager of Network Business Incubation Division inside Intel’s Network and Edge group. So my focus is on 5G and Edge, especially around taking 5G into different enterprises, different verticals. So how did I come about doing this?

Caroline Chan: I think I was born into this. My mother was one of the first women in China that graduated in a engineering degree, and not just any engineering, but she was actually working on communication side. So I never had an option, I guess. Both my parents were in this field. They were professors back in China. So when I came here at 18 years old, I went to University of Texas in Austin, and I started engineering school and never looked back.

Caroline Chan: And not just engineering, but I’ve been in wireless and telco my entire career. I had the fortune to meet Huma when she first got married to her husband. Her husband and I were actually classmates and good friends, so I trap her into doing this, the engineering field, but it has been great. I’m doing a lot of this, similar to Huma is, it’s pay it forward.

Caroline Chan: We went through this journey, there’s challenges, the learnings we would like to share that with the ladies coming after us, and hopefully we benefit everyone.

Hema Chamraj: Thank you. Thank you, Caroline. And the same with me, right? And you said you had no choice but to be an engineer. I had two choices, right? Like the one in the previous panel, either be a doctor, or an engineer. And so I was like you, who I just realized, I wanted to be a doctor just like my sister, and it just happened just like…

Hema Chamraj: It was a very, very conservative family. I couldn’t travel to the place where I had to go to college, and so I ended up taking engineering and I love it. I went to school here and I did my masters, came to engineer to Intel, the greatest company that built technology. And I’ve been here. I love it.

Hema Chamraj: And I started really hands-on, trying to build tools, and then move on to saying, “You know what? I want to really understand how technology impacts people.” Right? And that’s where I’ve been really, really focused on trying to understand how technology can be used for good.

Hema Chamraj: And I want to get your perspective as we think about this, right. It’s like we think about… We get all excited about technologies, about the superpowers, like AI, 5G, Edge, Cloud. And it’s a great, exciting time right now, because companies realize that it’s great.

Hema Chamraj: In order to build this powerful, rich technology products and platforms, we had to put people in the center of it. Right? And they’re walking the talk, trying to put things into place to make sure people are at the center of it. Right? But then again, if you hear people, right, it’s like, there’s little bit of overload of everything DEI, and there like there’s little bit of an overload of everything DEI, and there is like people are like, what is this big hoopla about DEI?

Hema Chamraj: And I thought, as women we kind of internalize that we have been through so many challenges, we understand why it is needed, but in a day-to-day work, I thought it would be good to share our perspective on why DEI is important.

Hema Chamraj: And I can kind of kick it off quickly when I think about tech and AI for good, like technology has been like pervasive, like AI especially has been pervasive in terms of how it has kind of touched so many industry sectors, how much it has impacted our lives in many areas.

Hema Chamraj: And then, because I have a health and life sciences kind of focus, I can really appreciate how much AI has compressed the time and money and kind of made things possible that was not possible before.

Hema Chamraj: And yet we have seen in many ways, AI also has kind of shown how things can go wrong when it comes to your healthcare or hiring or justice, you’ve seen so many examples where it has gone wrong and it really comes down to the thing that one of the key problems is the lack of representation.

Hema Chamraj: The lack of representation, the diverse thoughts, the diverse experiences that need to be there to kind of really make sure we have representation at the data level. Because when you think of what healthcare, there’s very much lacking…

Hema Chamraj: Women’s data is lacking in healthcare. So if you think of data or even the representation of people who are building tools or people who are making the decisions, there’s the lack of representation.

Hema Chamraj: And so without that, I really feel we will never be able to realize the superpowers that we talk about. For me, tech or AI for good, it’s really critical to have representation because without which it really… We’ll not see tech being used for good. So that’s my perspective. Let me bring in AI, Huma, because you and your team are building the AI tools, so what is your perspective on why DEI?

Huma Abidi: Yeah. As you said, Hema, that AI is everywhere. Absolutely. And this is from helping determine who is hired or fired or granting a loan, or how much time [inaudible] or how long a person should spend time in prison, or should they be back in prison or whatever. All kinds of decisions that were traditionally performed by humans are now being made by algorithms.

Huma Abidi: So it is no surprise that AI is learning gender and other biases from humans and it’s a huge societal issue, whether I’m building products or whatever… Let’s just talk about that first and then I’ll talk about specifics or what I’m doing about it. So over and over again, we hear about examples, especially that are highlighting these biases towards women and minority, and as you said, we can have data bias.

Huma Abidi: Data is coming from society, and so lack of representation there in the data and then algorithms also. People who are building these algorithms, if they are not representing underrepresented minority or women, then that leaks into the algorithm as well. So this is not only first technical problem because, as I just said, there is innate or unconscious bias that will show up in the decisions making.

Huma Abidi: So if people who are building or creating technology is homogenous, then it’ll work for that particular work thing. So that is true for any technology but especially in AI because it is making those kind of [inaudible] decisions.

Huma Abidi: In my opinion, if women and other minorities from community are part of the teams developing these tools, they will be more aware of what can go wrong. So first let’s talk about that.

Huma Abidi: And working in AI projects, we need to make sure our current and future algorithms are not just powerful, but they’re also ethical and fair, and that’s what my focus is. That’s something that I actually initiated on my own to make sure that let’s focus on how much explainability is there in our software that we’re building.

Huma Abidi: So besides that, I obviously as I mentioned in the beginning, I’m advocate for women and I founded women in machine learning and encouraging women to be a part of that and, Hema, to your point, I’ve found out that women are very interested in AI for social good projects. Whenever I talk about, they’re like, “Can I be part of it?” I feel like women want to be in a world where they want to see their children and others have a fair-

Hema Chamraj: Future generations, yeah.

Huma Abidi: Yeah. So coming back to explainable AI, AI decisions especially in deep neural networks. Machine learning still has decision trees and all where you can see how decisions are made, classic machine learning. But deep neural networks, it’s like a black box. We don’t know how these decisions are made. What is… Am I taking too much time?

Hema Chamraj: [crosstalk] Yeah. Go head.

Huma Abidi: I will just wrap up and say that explainable AI, data sheets for dataset where the data came from, model cards for model explainability, all of that and those things are being put in and that’s going to help with that. [crosstalk]

Hema Chamraj: Yeah, yeah. I think what you’re saying is basically AI is like reinforces and amplifies what we do, so the more good we put in with the right representation, good comes out of it. Otherwise, it can go the negative way. S

Hema Chamraj: o Caroline, you are really driving this exciting place of 5G Edge right and broadband access has kind of shown how critical it is, especially in these times of the pandemic crisis or the conflicts that we are watching. Can you please share with us? Why do you think DEI is important for enabling this innovative?

Caroline Chan: Yeah. Wireless and telco industry long had issues with DEI because it has been always selling to a very finite set of customers taken by AT&T or Verizon and so on. But with 5G, the pervasive connectivity, much like the pervasive AI, you have to reach into every different enterprises and verticals.

Caroline Chan: What that means is your audience, your end customers rapidly becomes everybody in a society, so 50% of our women. And you have to have that different mindset. I’ll give you example.

Caroline Chan: We launched a project in Sacramento School District during the crisis that we are facing because children were not able to learn. In some neighborhoods, they do not have a rich communication. So the folks that work on this, as mother, we immediately recognized how critical that is.

Caroline Chan: Intel Foundation came in, the network group alongside with AWS and other companies that went in, immediately put in a rich communication based on 5G and based on wifi to enable our children to learn.

Caroline Chan: Right now, we are working on a critical project to put in containers with communications with satellite up-links on the border with Poland, so that when the mothers with their children arriving from Ukraine were able to at least let their family back home know that they arrived safely, is that kind of empathy that I think some of us women probably have a little bit more because our experience as daughters and mothers and sisters and wives, we emphasize more.

Caroline Chan: To me, it’s not just selling something. It’s really a project or passion. It’s about technology for good. You talk about AI for good. I always have [inaudible] philosophy 5G needs to be for good as well. It’s not just for selling. It’s really for enriching our lives, make our lives better than before.

Hema Chamraj: Like you said, we have that built-in kind of empathy, but at the same time we feel like this is not something that women are like we can do it alone, right? We need the broader community, but there’s been a little bit of discomfort if you maybe have seen, how should we kind of address that?

Hema Chamraj: We know it’s important. We know how it’s impacting the technologies. It is needed for building rich products and better results. But how do we kind of help them help us to kind of make this become a reality where we have equal representation, the diverse representation? Any thoughts?

Caroline Chan: If I just thought when in a telco side, majority of the decision makers are still men. We need them. We need them to be part of the game. We simply are saying is that women has been so underrepresented all those years and we simply wanted to have gain more visibility, but in reality, 80% of the time we are working with other men, we ask for more understanding and we should also make us all more visible, a little bit more vulnerable sharing when we are feeling that we need help or we need them to help us.

Caroline Chan: I think we should be more vocal. I do find most people, most men are open to work with us, but vast majority are.

Hema Chamraj: How would you, Huma, [crosstalk]

Huma Abidi: Yeah, yeah. I 100% agree with Caroline, but I feel that we have to first level the playing field. That’s what I tell people that of course, if you are referring to that, there was somebody was commenting why do they have Women’s International Day? And why do we, you know, whatever, diversity and this.

Huma Abidi: And this is a fact. We have the data to prove that we don’t have… So at Intel, we are doing so many different things. For example, in 2019, I believe we reached gender pay equity. It took so many years and finally, we reached that goal. And this is global. Then we are taking goals. There is a reason why we are taking goals because this is a problem.

Huma Abidi: For our 2030 goals, one is for women and underrepresented minorities to double the number of them in senior leadership position. There was a problem because [inaudible] there. The other one is by 2030, 40% of women will be in the technical field working in technology. So these are the things.

Huma Abidi: So first we level the playing field. Of course, there would be diversity for everyone, there won’t be women, but right now we have an issue, and as Caroline said, a lot of men means they have been so supportive and so it’s been awesome that we have support, but if there are these questions asked, this is my response always.

Hema Chamraj: Very correct. Right. I mean, you’re talking about the need, what is the need. I mean, the fact that there is less than 25% of role of women representation in AI. When there is 75% of jobs out there, I mean, the disparity needs to be fixed.

Hema Chamraj: And then we have to kind of create this environment of I’m part of women in AI group where we call zero exclusion, nobody’s excluded. We want everybody to come in and help us, but there is a disparity, help us really fix that one.

Hema Chamraj: I have mentors who are men, who are really being really supportive and I would encourage more of them to kind of step out and help us get to a place where we really create this reality where we are all in there.

Hema Chamraj: There are no holes in any of the data, there’s no holes in representation, and we can really create some amazing things. And again, I’m glad that Intel is actually walking the talk. They have this [inaudible] goals like the ones that you talked about, Huma, in that how to double the number of women in the leadership roles. And also the fact that we should start a lead. I mean, it’s not just hiring and retaining, it also [crosstalk]. Yeah. So anything on that one, and what we could do better on the pipeline?

Huma Abidi: Yeah. So again, I’ll come back to the work that Intel is doing. Obviously, I’m very involved in various things, but there is a million girls moonshot project that Intel has, and it has joined forces with some fantastic foundations. A

Huma Abidi: nd this is aimed at equipping one million girls from under-resourced communities with engineering mindset. Once we have that, that is the building the pipeline and once we have enough in the pipeline, then we can just change. So foundation has to be changed. We cannot just [inaudible].

Hema Chamraj: I see Angie’s kind of doing [crosstalk]

Angie Chang: Thank you so much.

Hema Chamraj: [crosstalk] But thank you.

Angie Chang: It’s a fast full conference day. Thank you so much for joining us.

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