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AI Overlords, Battling Covid-19 and Algorithmic Bias: a conversation about the importance of Human Goodness in AI.

Julie Shin Choi, VP & GM of AI Marketing at Intel AI, at Girl Geek X, Elevate 2020

On Friday, March 6th, senior female tech leaders & engineers came together to celebrate International Women’s Day with over a dozen tech talks & panels during the Girl Geek X Elevate 2020 virtual conference. Today’s blog includes takeaways from a talk by Julie Shin Choi, VP & GM of Artificial Intelligence Products & Research Marketing at Intel AI. Prior to joining Intel, Julie led product marketing at HPE, Mozilla, and Yahoo. In addition to the YouTube video replay, a full transcript from Julie’s talk is also available.

One of the reasons that Julie Shin Choi chose to join Intel, she told us, was the opportunity and the scale that Intel’s AI technology platform would provide from a career perspective, but she never anticipating falling in love with the people of Intel.

“It is really this human goodness at Intel that keeps me here.”

One of the things that we’ve learned in recent years is that AI is a powerful agent for helping people around the world. Intel CEO Bob Swan shared an example from the Red Cross earlier this year at CES. As we all know, the Red Cross is an amazing relief organization dedicated to helping people in times of disaster.

Julie explains that Intel, the Red Cross, Mila (an AI think tank in Montreal), and other organizations recently formed a data science partnership alliance — their objective was to map unmapped parts of Uganda and to identify, through deep learning, different bridges that the Red Cross could take to deliver aid in times of disaster.

In addition to viral outbreaks (a case of Ebola emerged last June), Uganda is also prone to severe flooding.

“Bridges are often washed out or impassable,” said Red Cross CEO Dale Kunce. That “can mean that your 20-minute drive all of a sudden becomes several hours.”

Ultimately, Intel and their data partners were able to examine huge satellite images and come up with algorithms that could automatically identify bridges that could be utilized by disaster relief workers — they labelled and identified over 70 previously unmapped bridges in southern Uganda.

This is just one example of why human goodness matters when we think about AI application development. There are endless applications, some of which are especially current and relevant right now.

AI is playing a huge role in fighting the spread of Covid-19.

Everyone has heard about and is taking precautions against the global Covid-19 pandemic, but are we talking about the important role AI is playing in fighting the spread of this deadly virus?

“Globally,” Julie informs us, “We’re using big data — we’re analyzing different databases of where people have gone and the different symptoms that they may present.”

State, federal and local governments are turning to big data to make policy decisions and measure the impact and effectiveness of their policies in near real-time.

“One novel use case that we [at Intel AI] identified in Singapore is of a company that’s using IoT [Internet of Things] technology to help scan people and identify thermal readings — so basically fevers — without human contact.

Intel AI’s technology is powering thermal screening that’s helping keep people safe by catching more Covid-19 cases earlier, and with less manual input from healthcare professionals.

This AI-aided screening method is proving to be about three to four times more efficient, so they can scan 7 to 10 people with this AI device, as compared to using human healthcare practitioners. They’re able to free up limited resources and keep more healthcare workers on the front lines where they’re most needed right now.”

The utilization of AI is really helping manage a lot of the issues related to coronavirus in Singapore.

We’re seeing other innovations like this cropping up all around the world as technologists team up with big data partners, healthcare providers and policy makers to help track and slow the spread of Covid-19.

AI is new to us, so folks sometimes fear the capabilities… but our kids understand it. And they’re the ones who will be programming them.

“I have two children, 8 and 12. A couple of months ago, we were talking about the world, and the one in junior high, he said, ‘Well, I think that my generation is going to be spending most of its time solving the problems that your generation created.'”

Julie continued, “And then my little one, who’s still in elementary, chimed in right away, and he said, ‘With the help of our AI overlords, right?’

These kids already, they’re so aware, and I think the advice to our children would be to really read books, play with one another, learn how to have friends from many different backgrounds, become the best humans they can be, because it’s not going to be robot overlords. We’re going to need good humans to program those AIs.“

Good humans are the key.

“In AI, good humans are needed because it’s such a powerful technology and it’s such an accelerant that really depends on algorithms at the heart, and these algorithms are coded based on assumptions that we make about data.

AI starts with data but ends with humans. It’s technology that’s being built for humans. I think it’s very important that we partner with people who really understand the human problems that we’re trying to solve. We need to partner with domain experts.”

AI is going to take a diversity of talents and tools.

There’s really no one size fits all, Julie explains: “We’re going to need CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, these are all different kinds of hardware. Tiny edge processors. We’re going to need a host of different software tools. We’re going to need data scientists and social scientists, psychologists and physicists, marketers and coders to all work together to come up with solutions that are creative. It’s really going to take a village. Be open-minded.”

“And let us always be thoughtful,” she added.

“I know that in Silicon Valley, people often say it’s important to go fast and to fail fast, but in AI, I don’t think so. I think we need to take time. We should be thoughtful and really, really careful and considerate about the assumptions we make as we create the tools that create the algorithms that feed the AIs.”

Good humans will be needed every step of the way.

A lot of people worry that AI is going to take our jobs and replace humans.

Julie Shin Choi, Vice President & General Manager, AI Marketing at Intel AI

“I’m a firm believer that AI will not be replacing humans, it will be augmenting humans. So it’s helping us, not replacing us.

For example, radiology is a major transformation area that’s being transformed by AI faster than most because of the applicability of computer vision for x-ray imaging. “But what we’re seeing is that physicians actually are welcoming the help of AI. It’s a great double check.

When you have a 97% accurate algorithm that’s going to ensure that your patient gets the right diagnosis — even though the algorithm is sometimes even more accurate than you, especially if you’re tired — it’s an absolutely phenomenal double check. The end goal for the human in that case, in medicine, is to go and help that patient with the most accurate information that the human doctor has.

What we’re seeing is that AI is helpful to humanity. It’s truly an augmenting type of technology and not a replacement.”

We talk a lot about the impact of bias in AI and how to limit it.

“Bias is certainly a problem and it’s something that we, as a community of technologists, policy makers and social scientists — all different backgrounds — we need to attack this together.

A lot of it just comes down to being intentional. There are audits of algorithms. There are ethics checklists, actually. There are best practices that have been set up, and I can actually introduce [the Girl Geek X community] to Intel’s AI for Good leader, Anna Bethke, who is an expert in this domain and a wealth of knowledge.

We need to address bias with intentional and very purposeful conversations, because again, the algorithms are based on assumptions that humans code. So the only way that we can eradicate and deal with the bias issue is by talking to one another. The right experts in the room ensuring and asking, ‘have we checked that bias off the list?’

Don’t just assume that coders know how to create a fair algorithm. I don’t think we can assume that. This is a very intentional action that we need to build into our AI development life cycles. The bias check.”

For more from Julie Shin Choi, watch the full video on YouTube, read the transcript of Julie’s talk during Girl Geek X Elevate, or follow her on Twitter.

To be notified of future Girl Geek X events and receive our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the Girl Geek X mailing list.

Interested in partnering with Girl Geek X to feature your female leaders or promote your current job openings to our community of 20,000+ mid-to-senior level women in technology? Email sponsors@girlgeek.io

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“Intel AI Coffee Break: Making Connections at Work”: Banu Nagasundaram with Intel AI (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Angie Chang: We are back. In this Intel AI coffee Break, we will hear from Banu about optimizing connections to win at work. Take it away.

Banu Nagasundaram: Hey everybody, thank you for having me here and I’m very excited to be sharing what I have. Today, I just wanted to share with you a little bit of who I am, my background, and how do I use connections in order to provide value, and add value to those in my network. So, with that a little bit about me. So I started off in 2006 in STMicroelectronics, and moved through different semiconductor companies.

Banu Nagasundaram: So, I’ve always been a semiconductor girl moving through these different roles that I have had in manufacturing, in design, in engineering roles. And from within Intel, in the last four years, I transitioned from an engineering to a product marketing role, and I’ll go through a little bit more of that, as well. So currently I work in the Intel AI group, where we focus on multiple technologies across the company, be it like evangelizing our products, hardware, software, having the ecosystem work with us, and then also focus on the software products for AI, where we are putting our customer needs first, and building the industry standard open platforms.

Banu Nagasundaram: And then of course, the hardware where we have a focus on AI products from the edge, which is user touch devices, hardware for those, up to the data centers, either in the enterprise or in the cloud segment. So this is the landscape, within which I fit in. So, to give you some background about my role in this landscape, I work, like I mentioned, in a product marketing role, and the best way that I have realized to explain my role to people, is that I’m like a Netflix within the organization. On one side, where you have content generators, and content producers, and Netflix connects them to consumers. In the same way I connect with engineers, and product managers on one end, who are closer to the hardware and software products we build.

Banu Nagasundaram: I learn from them, I work with them in order to aggregate content. I create content myself and then evangelize it on the other end, to the customers across different segments, and different modes and channels to reach those customers, evangelize our products, our use case to our ecosystem of software developers. And then I also work closely with the sales team, where I translate the value prop of our products to sales in our organization.

Banu Nagasundaram: In this background and landscape, one of the things that I’ve taken upon myself is that I’m also a student at Berkeley Haas. I’m currently doing my MBA program. And on a typical day, this is how I look, trying to juggle the school, work, and life. And I know many of you may relate to this graphic here, but this is me trying to balance the different opportunities, and the different learnings that I have across the board. And as I go through this, one of the things that I’ve realized that has helped me be successful in building this balance, has been the power of the connections.

Banu Nagasundaram: And the best way to explain that, I felt was through a Candy Crush analogy. So most of you know this game, it’s on the phone where you connect candies of the same color, so that you get points. So this is how I interpret my role, is I help make connections between people across the board, that is relevant. They may have needs which are mapped to, maybe the colors on the board at a given point. And when I make these connections or try to bring people together, then there are associated network effects that happen on the side because of the connection that I enabled. One thing that is different from that of a Candy Crush environment to what happens in real life at work is that I’ve had to build this board for myself.

Banu Nagasundaram: Who are these people who I can rely on, who I know have… And what are the qualities that they have to offer, and connecting whom with whom makes most sense, is something I have had to figure out throughout my career in terms of building that board, and making those connections. One of the examples when I’m asked is, how to think out of the box in order to make connections. Let’s say you are looking for your next role or an opportunity, and you come across an executive VP in that process, who says they’re hiring for a VP. Hey, maybe you can connect your current manager to that executive VP to make that network happen. Even if there is nothing in it for you, but you are acting as an agent in order making that connections that makes you a better networker.

Banu Nagasundaram: And that is what has helped me throughout my career to achieve the best out of the network that I’ve built. But through this, it’s not been of course, a smooth ride. All of us face challenges every day in terms of pushing forward or trying to get to the solution or facing failures and trying to bounce back from it. That portion is what I define as resilience. They are able to push the ceiling and take control of the situation, and then find the solution in that situation, and bounce back. That has been the resilience part. But what I’ve learned through my years of working in large corporations has been that resilience is one part of it. But when you are faced with opportunities that try and test you, what are the opportunities you can find to grow in those is key.

Banu Nagasundaram: So what I mean by that is, as an example, in 2015-2016 time frame, the organization that I was in went through a lot of changes in terms of organizational movement. I used that as an opportunity to explore, how I can switch from an engineering role to a marketing role. What are the skills that are needed? I took public speaking classes, I did a technical course in AI, and I built my profile and used that tumultuous situation as an opportunity to grow. 

Banu Nagasundaram: That is how the analogy of starfish plays into the picture, where you are finding that opportunity or the challenge that is posed to you as a way to regenerate and move forward. So, that is most of what I had to share today. And in this process, a lot of people have been super supportive in helping me grow, and as I make these connections, there’s more people who offered to help, and you just build that network in a Candy Crush environment and think of yourself as the starfish and you’re able to grow.

Banu Nagasundaram: And that’s been my experience. So with that, I’m open to answering any questions you may have and you may also reach out to me on LinkedIn. Feel free to ping me, and we can connect through that. And quickly, for the lift as you climb theme, I also have my VP who has helped me climb and who has lifted me through this process and she’s talking later today, Julie Choi, and I’m excited to hear from her.

Angie Chang: Awesome. Wonderful. We are out of time. In fact, we’re running a little over into Julie’s time. So, I just wanted to say thank you so much to Intel AI for being a sponsor of Girl Geek X Elevate and to check out their job opportunities at girlgeek.io/opportunities. And now we will be going to our next speaker. So thank you so much, Banu-

Banu Nagasundaram: Thank you.

Angie Chang: … For your talk and we’ll be back soon. Thank you.

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“In AI, Human Goodness Matters”: Julie Shin Choi with Intel AI (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Rachel Jones: Doing our afternoon keynote is Julie Shin Choi. Julie is the Vice President and General Manager of artificial intelligence products and research marketing at Intel Corporation. Prior to Intel, she led product marketing at HP, Mozilla, and Yahoo. So we are so excited to have Julie’s expertise this afternoon. She will be talking about how, in AI, human goodness matters. So welcome Julie.

Julie Shin Choi: Thanks so much. So let me just… I do have some slides. All right everyone. It is really good to be here with you today. Thank you so much for the intro. I am so glad to be here. It is Women’s History Month and in two days we’ll be celebrating International Women’s Day and what better way than to be together here at Girl Geek X Elevate Virtual Conference. Thank you so much to the Girl Geek X team and everyone behind the scenes for giving us this platform and this opportunity to connect. So let me share a little bit about myself. I am a VP at Intel, responsible for AI marketing, but really it’s been a long journey to get to this point. I absolutely love the job that I’m in and I thought it would be good to just share a little bit about that journey.

Julie Shin Choi: It’s been a 20 year career in tech, so far, mostly in Silicon Valley. I started my career in Boston and moved to the Valley in 2003, I think, so I’ve been here for about 17 years. When I thought about how my career has unfolded, I created this two by two, basically dividing the way I’ve been focusing my energy over the past 21 years. And as you can see, it’s an interesting graph that shows roughly 50% of the energy has been around life and 50% has been around career, and there’s different peaks and dips in how much I spend on each of these portions. But what’s been fascinating is that life and career converge in the same space time continuum, and it’s been an incredible journey. What I’ve learned about career and life is that it really is a series of choices that lead to opportunities and that these opportunities ultimately have led me to personal and career learning and growth.

Julie Shin Choi: So a very important choice that I made in 2016 was to join Intel, and joining Intel really did… It was a rocket ship moment for me. By that point, I joined Intel, I was a director at HPE prior to Intel. That was an amazing time as well. In between HPE and Intel, I met a startup called Nirvana and the CEO and the founding team of that startup and they got acquired into Intel and asked me to help do this AI thing at Intel. I did not know much about Intel other than it was the giant of computer processors and a hardware company and it was just too much of an opportunity to pass up. And so that choice was really profound because it led me to begin the AI journey with Intel. And we’ve come such a long way in the past nearly four years and we have evolved to really understand our place in the AI universe.

Julie Shin Choi: This is just a small slide. I want to thank Banu for the excellent talk she just gave. I had a chance to listen in and I’m just going to say a little bit because she did such a great explanation, but Intel AI, you can think of it as all the parts that you would need as a technologist, from hardware to enabling software to the memory, storage, and fabric. So many components go into building AI, and Intel is massively passionate and committed to building those components so that we can power this AI evolution and transformation across virtually every industry. But one of the reasons that I chose Intel was the opportunity and the scale that this technology platform would provide from a career perspective, but I did not anticipate that I would also fall in love with the people of Intel.

Julie Shin Choi: It is really this human goodness at Intel that keeps me here. At Intel we are really building technology to enrich the lives of every person on earth, that’s what Bob says, and I really believe that and I think it’s for the team that I remain, and it’s an incredible team. So let’s talk about some of the work that the team is doing. The title of this talk was “AI and the Importance of Human Goodness,” and one of the things that we’ve learned over the past three years is that AI is a powerful agent for helping people around the world, and this example comes to us from the Red Cross. We shared this example earlier this year at CES. Bob actually talked about it and there’s a video and I will tweet the video out after this talk, but basically this partnership is between Red Cross. Everyone knows Red Cross, it’s just an amazing relief organization dedicated to helping people in times of disaster.

Julie Shin Choi: And this partnership between Intel and Red Cross, as well as Mila, which is an AI think tank in Montreal, and other organizations, basically it was a data science partnership alliance, and the end result and objective was to map unmapped parts of Uganda and to identify, through deep learning, different bridges that relief agency Red Cross could take in times of disaster. At the end of the day, we were able to examine huge satellite images and come up with algorithms that could automatically identify the bridges, over 70 bridges in Uganda. So this is our first example of why human goodness matters when we think about AI application development. The second example is a little bit more current and relevant. I’m sure everyone has heard about and is taking precaution against the coronavirus epidemic that’s going on globally. And basically, what’s important is to use AI right now. Globally, we’re using big data, we’re analyzing different databases of where people have gone and the different symptoms that they may present.

Julie Shin Choi: But one novel use case that we identified in Singapore is of a company that’s using IoT technology to help scan people and identify thermal readings, so basically fevers, without human contact. And this is proving to be about three to four times more efficient, so we can scan 7 to 10 people with this AI device, as compared to using human healthcare practitioners. So in this way AI is really helping manage a lot of the issues related to coronavirus in Singapore. And we see other innovations like this cropping up all around the world. Another example of the intersection of AI and human goodness can be found in a collaboration between a company named Hoobox and Intel. Hoobox is a really fascinating company based in Latin America with North American operations as well, and they are dedicated to robotics for helping people with mobility issues and other novel uses of computer vision to aid humans, and this use case is a fascinating one where we collaborated with Hoobox. Intel provided the hardware, so you can see a camera here, it’s a RealSense camera, as well as a micro controller, so Intel NUC, and the Intel camera and the microcontroller were used to help detect up to 11 facial expressions.

Julie Shin Choi: So now the wheelchair user can operate and move using his own facial expressions. This is a whole new range of mobility that was unlocked because of AI. Such a powerful and memorable use case, and it’s just another example of the intersection of AI and human goodness. One more example from the field of healthcare, and I’m really passionate about healthcare and the AI applications that we’re seeing. This application that we see here is found… Again, it’s a collaboration between Intel and GE Healthcare, and in this case, what we see are deep learning algorithms that are inferenced at the edge in this powerful x-ray scanning machine. And the purpose here is to use AI and deep learning to identify cases of pneumothorax, or lung collapse, in record time. And the objective here is to augment physicians and to help prioritize cases so that doctors can get to people who are at higher risk faster than before. And this is really also helpful for parts of the world where doctors are scarce. So places like Asia and Africa, where the percentage of doctors is so low, and this type of AI can really help physicians get to patients much more quickly.

Julie Shin Choi: And one last example I want to bring up is the power and role that AI can have an accelerating diversity and inclusion. Last week, I had the privilege to go to North Carolina and attend an inclusion leadership summit that was organized by Lenovo and Intel’s chief diversity officers. And as we met, we brainstormed ways that AI could be used to eradicate bias in hiring practices, to accelerate ensuring that we have diverse and qualified candidates joining us and our organizations. We had a host of different chief diversity and inclusion officers in the room, as well as experts from law and policy and just AI research. So again, proving that when we bring disciplines together, we can really learn from one another to accelerate the kind of change that we all want to see at our companies.

Julie Shin Choi: So I want to kind of close with a summary slide on key takeaways and then we can have a conversation. In AI, good humans are needed because it’s such a powerful technology and it’s such an accelerant that really depends on algorithms at the heart, and these algorithms are coded based on assumptions that we make about data. So number one, we have to keep in mind, AI starts with data but ends with humans. It’s technology that’s being built for humans. So let us keep the end in mind as we design our AI products and solutions and keep the humans in the loop. Number two, I think it’s very important that we partner with people who really understand the human problems that we’re trying to solve. The Red Cross example, it couldn’t have been possible without the wealth of information that the Red Cross had, and it was truly a cross disciplinary effort. So we need to partner with domain experts.

Julie Shin Choi: Number three, be open-minded. AI is going to take a diversity of talents and tools. There’s really no one size fits all. We’re going to need CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, these are all different kinds of hardware. Tiny edge processors. We’re going to need a host of different software tools. We’re going to need data scientists and social scientists, psychologists and physicists, marketers and coders to all work together to come up with solutions that are creative. It’s really going to take a village. And finally, let us be thoughtful. I know that in Silicon Valley people often say it’s important to go fast and to fail fast, but in AI, I don’t think so. I think we need to take time. We should be thoughtful and really, really careful and considerate about the assumptions we make as we create the tools that create the algorithms that feed the AIs. And certainly good humans will be needed every step of the way. So that is my last slide and I’m going to just now thank you all for listening and open up for questions.

Rachel Jones: Thank you so much, Julie. That was really fascinating. So yeah, everyone please send your questions. I’ve seen some people sending questions into the chat, but please make sure you’re putting them into the actual Q&A, that way people can upvote your questions and make sure that they get asked. So now our first question, is there any industry that you see where AI isn’t being used and what can humans do to bring AI into that industry?

Julie Shin Choi: Yeah, I mean that’s a great question. And honestly, we are seeing AI impacting virtually every industry that our customers are engaged in, from healthcare, to life sciences, to transportation, to retail, to finance, robotics, manufacturing. So most of those classic enterprise verticals are being transformed, are going through their AI transformations. What I will say is it’s still early days, even though it’s been about… I mean, I’ve been working in this space for five years. I always kind of mark that beginning… When you talk to researchers, they’ll say the beginning of AI really was deep learning, which really was 2012, but I kind of count from 2015, because that’s when Google really came out loud and proud as a machine learning company. So virtually every industry is being impacted by AI. Still early days. We’re about five years in and it’ll probably take the rest of, certainly my lifetime, the most of our lifetime, to kind of get to the maturity level that this technology is capable of.

Rachel Jones: Wow. So our next question, a concern that a lot of people have when they hear about AI is, “Oh, this is going to take all of our jobs and replace all the humans.” So what are your thoughts on that kind of anxiety?

Julie Shin Choi: I mean it’s very popular to say that, but I’m a firm believer that AI will not be replacing humans, it will be augmenting humans. So it’s helping us, not replacing us, because the whole… What we’re seeing, even in radiology, for example, radiology is a major transformation area that’s being transformed by AI faster than most because of the applicability of computer vision for x-ray imaging. But what we’re seeing is that physicians actually are welcoming the help of AI. It’s a great double check. When you have a 97% accurate algorithm that’s going to ensure that your patient gets the right diagnosis, even though the algorithm is sometimes even more accurate than you, especially if you’re tired, it’s an absolutely phenomenal double check, and so the end goal for the human in that case, in medicine, is to go and help that patient with the most accurate information that the human doctor has. So what we’re seeing is AI is truly helpful. It’s truly an augmenting type of technology and not a replacement.

Rachel Jones: All right. We just got another question. So this person says, “My daughter is still young, and if you had to mentor her so she’s prepared for the new AI world, what would you tell her?”

Julie Shin Choi: Yeah, that’s a great question. I have two children as well. I have 8 and 12. It’s funny, I will share an anecdote from dinner. A couple of months ago we were talking about the world and I have a junior high and an elementary, and the junior high, he said, “Well, I think that my generation is going to be spending most of its time solving the problems that your generation created.” And then my little one, who’s still elementary, chimed in right away, and he said, “With the help of our AI overlords, right?” These kids already, they’re so aware, and I think the advice to our children would be to really read books, play with one another, learn how to have friends from many different backgrounds, become the best humans they can be, because it’s not going to be robot overlords. We’re going to need good humans to program those AIs.

Rachel Jones: What’s the best way to learn AI?

Julie Shin Choi: Okay, so you guys probably have heard of Dr Andrew Ng and Coursera. Everything from on demand digital learning courses like the ones that Dr Andrew Ng pioneered, to tutorials on Intel’s AI website. There is so much knowledge out there right now around machine learning and deep learning that’s friendly for all levels and certainly Intel, we’re very committed to investing in preparing that kind of content and training. But I would encourage folks to check out all of those resources. We have certifications on our Intel developer community resources and we can connect you to those types of classes that take you step by step. Another partner organization that we like to work with on content delivery is O’Reilly Media. They have great courses online. A lot of these resources are free. I would say similar to the mobile revolution, when iOS and Android, all of those tutorials were popping up and hackathons every other day, we’re kind of seeing the same type of resources becoming available for AI and AI developers.

Rachel Jones: How pervasive is AI in the transportation industry?

Julie Shin Choi: Yeah, transportation is another really fascinating domain. Autonomous vehicles are a huge vertical being invested in. A lot of startup investment, a lot of institutional effort as well, so your established car companies and even airplane companies and shipping companies. We have a great use case from Rolls Royce that we’ve shared in the past. I didn’t realize that Rolls Royce also did transatlantic oceanic transportation autonomously, but they do, and it’s running on Intel. So transportation is going through a renaissance. It’s amazing. I think that actually–my husband works for an autonomous transportation startup, but again, early days. I always tell him, “You take that self-driving ride. For me, I think I’ll wait a little bit longer.” It’s still early days. A lot of innovation, a lot of promise and, yes, transportation is getting transformed.

Rachel Jones: So a big part of the AI conversation is about bias and how it can affect it. So what are your thoughts on that and how to limit bias in AI?

Julie Shin Choi: Yes, and bias is certainly a problem and it’s something that we, as a community of technologists and policymakers and social scientists, all different backgrounds, we need to attack this together. This was something that we discussed at the diversity and inclusion conference last week. A lot of it just comes down to let’s… There’s audits of algorithms. There’s ethics checklists, actually.

Julie Shin Choi: There are best practices that have been set up and I can actually introduce this community to our AI for Good leader, Anna Bethke, who is an expert in this domain and a wealth of knowledge. But we need to address bias with intentional and very purposeful conversations, because again, the algorithms are based on assumptions that humans code. So the only way that we can eradicate and deal with the bias issue is by talking to one another. The right experts in the room ensuring that have we checked that bias off the list? Don’t just assume that the coders know how to create a fair algorithm. I don’t think we can assume that. This is a very intentional action that we need to build into our AI development life cycles. The bias check.

Rachel Jones: All right. This is where we’re going to wrap it up. But Julie, thank you so much again. This was really great.

Julie Shin Choi: Okay. Thank you guys so much. Have a great day. Happy International Women’s Day.

Rachel Jones: Thank you. Happy International Women’s Day.

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Best of Elevate 2020 Videos – From Imposter Syndrome to Managing Managers, and the Diversity Imperative!

The 3rd annual Elevate virtual Conference in March 2020 hosted over 3,000 people from 42 countries around the world—the largest gathering yet of mid-to-senior women in tech (48% of attendees have 10+ years of work experience, 28% have 15+ years) celebrating International Women’s Day via Zoom web conferencing. By the numbers, Elevate hosted four keynote speakers, 17 sessions, 32 speakers, seven sponsors. Check out their jobs—they are hiring!

Watch the Top 10 Highest-Rated Sessions on YouTube!

Based on the votes of attendees in the post-event survey, here are the top-rated talks:

  1. What’s Holding You Back Might Be You: Imposter Syndrome – Sara Varni of Twilio
  2. The Link Between the Future of Work, Education and Care – Jomayra Herrera of Cowboy Ventures
  3. Military Transition: Vets in Tech – Claudia Weber of Intel AI, Mellisa Walker of Workday, Molly Laufer of HomeLight, Theresa Piasta of Puppy Mama, and Tiana Clark of Microsoft
  4. Leveling Up: Becoming a Manager of Managers – Arquay Harris of Slack, Bora Chung of Bill.com, Gretchen DeKnikker of Girl Geek X, and Ines Thornburg of Splunk
  5. Jumpstarting Your ML Journey in Cyber Security – Melisa Napoles of Splunk
  6. Investing In Others – Erica Lockheimer and Shalini Agarwal of LinkedIn
  7. Lift As You Climb: Morning Keynote – Carin Taylor of Workday
  8. The Imperative of Diversity in Clinical Trials – Alekhya Pochiraju of Genentech
  9. Every Job is a D&I Job. Every. Job. – Aubrey Blanche of Culture Amp
  10. Girl Geeks Gone Gov – Lisa Koenigsberg and Martha Wilkes of United States Digital Service

The Girl Geek X Team livestreamed 2020 Elevate virtual conference: Gretchen DeKnikker (COO), Rachel Jones (Podcast Producer), Sukrutha Bhadouria (CTO), and Angie Chang (CEO).

Special Thank You To Elevate 2020 Sponsoring Companies

Thank you to the warm folks at Intel AI, Checkr, Workday, United States Digital Service, Intuit, Splunk and The Climate Corporation for supporting Girl Geek X: Elevate 2020 virtual conference!

Don’t forget to check out their jobs—they are hiring!

Sponsor A Virtual Girl Geek Dinner in 2020

We have been excited to bring Girl Geek Dinners virtually to sheltering-at-home girl geeks globally during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Similar to Elevate, we are looking for sponsors for virtual Girl Geek Dinners on Zoom. In the sponsorship prospectus, please note the sponsorship benefits grid on the final page for “REACH Webcast”.

We have hosted three virtual conferences successfully and are excited to partner with companies on virtual Girl Geek Dinners with our community of over 20,000 women in tech.

Email us at sponsors@girlgeek.io to learn more about sponsoring a virtual Girl Geek Dinner in 2020!

Thank you,

Angie Chang

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Support Your Local Women of Color Chefs By Ordering Takeaway Food During The COVID-19 Pandemic

It’s been a few weeks of shelter-in-place and your cooking skills are stretched. Give yourself a break and order some food for takeaway, and support your local female entrepreneur/chef!

Here are 4 women chefs — alumnae of La Cocina — that are still cooking and serving up food for curbside pickup / delivery in the San Francisco Bay Area during COVID-19 shelter-in-place:

Besharam

Gujarati chef Heena Patel is offering several options for pickup — from alooo gobi to chicken makhani, and khara lamb! Check out her menu online and call 415-580-7662 to order for pick-up in San Francisco.

Bini’s Kitchen

Nepalese momos are sold in bags of 50 or 100 for curbside pickup — your choice of lamb, turkey, and vegetarian — comes with a generous side of spicy tomato-cilantro sauce. Text or call Bini Pradhan at 415-361-6911 to order in San Francisco’s SOMA district.

Nyum Bai

The award-winning Nyum Bai hawks delicious Cambodian cuisine from chef Nite Yun. Check out her menu online and call 510-500-3338 to place an order for curbside pickup in East Oakland.

Reem’s California

Arab Muslim Palestinian chef Reem Assil runs several locations of the popular Reem’s California’s — her newest location in San Francisco’s Mission district. Her first storefront is in Oakland’s diverse Fruitvale neighborhood. Check out her menu online and schedule delivery/pickup at both locations.

Snacks for delivery? Some La Cocina alumnae operate…

Don Bugito: Prehispanic Snackeria

Monica Martinez is the mastermind behind planet-friendly protein snacks, featuring delicious edible insects in savory and sweet flavors like Dandelion Chocolate-covered crickets. For the less adventurous, there are granola bites powered by cricket flour. Check out her products online.

Oyna Natural Foods

Iranian immigrant Aisan Hoss runs her family food business Oyna Natural Foods to financially support her passion for dance. There are several kuku options for the Persian herb frittata. Check out her products online.

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Girl Geek X Microsoft Hardware Lightning Talks (Video + Transcript)

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!


We enjoyed dinner and demos of HoloLens at the sold-out Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner in Sunnyvale, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Transcript of Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: Well, thank you so much for coming out tonight to Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner! My name is Angie Chang. I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. I’ve been doing this for about 12 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’m really glad to see all of you out here tonight for this sold out event in San Jose —

Gretchen DeKnikker: Sunnyvale!

Angie Chang: Sunnyvale — sorry, I live in Berkeley! Thank you so much for coming out. Please talk to us. If you’re interested in hosting one of these at your company. The hashtag tonight is girlgeekxmicrosoft. If you want to tweet something really cool tonight, please do, share pictures, and share some of the awesome words that’ll be spoken by girl geeks tonight.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Yay, Angie. Yeah. She’s on tour right now, and she just can’t remember what city she’s in. It’s just like night after night, new city. It’s rough. Right? She’s livin’ that. Okay. How many people, it’s your first event? Cool. Welcome. We do these a lot, like several times a month, so you should definitely keep coming. I’m going to show you something right now. If you have been to four Girl Geek events, raise your hand. Keep them up if it’s five. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Okay. Oh, 12.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, so you get these cards. It’s actually my little pixie on them. You get to carry me around in your pocket. How awkward is that? It’s pretty great. Okay, so we also have a podcast. Check that out. We’re just about to launch the new season where we’re answering your user questions. We sent out a survey. So that one will be really fun. We’re going to try some new things. Rate it, please. Give us feedback. Let us know because we don’t want to make stuff that nobody wants to listen to.

Gretchen DeKnikker: We also have a YouTube channel. Every time you can’t make it to one of these, you should make it because obviously, all of these awesome people come all the time. But if you can’t, they’re always on YouTube, subscribe to that. Then coming up on March 6th to kick off International Women’s weekend, because I’ve just extended it from a day to a weekend, because why not, we’re doing an all day long virtual event. It’s going to be epic. We have the Chief Diversity Officer of Workday. We’ve got the CTO of Intuit, the CMO of Twilio, the VP of Marketing from Intel AI. I can’t even list all of the amazing women that are going to spend the day with you and share all of their information, and also that will be available on YouTube later.

Gretchen DeKnikker: Self-promotion over, but this is all just for you. Please join me in welcoming your emcee for the night, Aaratee.


Microsoft Group Engineering Manager Aaratee Rao gives a talk on diversity and her career at Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner.Microsoft Group Engineering Manager Aaratee Rao welcomes the audience and talks about her career at Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Aaratee Rao: Thank you, Angie and Gretchen. Good evening, everyone. My name is Aaratee Rao. I’m a group engineering manager at Microsoft Silicon Valley. I’m also the executive sponsor of diversity and inclusion for Microsoft’s Bay Area region. As your host for the evening, I would like to welcome you all and thank you for taking the time and joining us tonight. It is amazing to see so many like-minded women in the same room. I hope you all had a chance to mingle and network with each other. If not, don’t worry, we have some more networking time after the talks.

Aaratee Rao: We have a number of interesting talks to share with you this evening. But before that, I would like to take few minutes to introduce Microsoft Bay Area to you all, who we are, what we do, and how we work together to build innovative products at scale for our customers. I’ve been at Microsoft for only 14 months. So I wanted to start with a short story about my journey to Microsoft, and why I decided to join this company.

Aaratee Rao: I’m a recent hire into Microsoft, but not to the tech industry. I’ve been working in the tech industry for over 17 years now in a wide range of companies, from a startup, with less than 50 people, to a hyper growth company like Uber, where I worked for close to four years, and some organization grow from few hundreds to few thousands of employees. I’ve also worked at some large Fortune 500 companies like Visa, Intuit, and walmart.com.

Aaratee Rao: I started my career as an engineer, and then grew into leadership roles. Working at such a diverse set of companies for so many years gave me exposure to different technologies, products, industries, and also different company cultures. This exposure gave me clarity on what is really important to me as I’m exploring a new role, or a new company for my next career move. While I was working at Uber, and Microsoft approached me with a new exciting job opportunity, I applied that same criteria to Microsoft, which can be summarized into three things. Number one is people, number two is product, and number three is growth.

Aaratee Rao: Let me explain these three areas further and my decision to join Microsoft. My number one requirement was people. I believe that the most important driver of any company’s success is its culture, and the people who help build that culture. For many of us, a large portion of our day is spent at work. In fact, there is proven research data that one third of a lifetime is spent at work. So it is safe to say that our job and the people we work with can have a big impact on the quality of a life.

Aaratee Rao: Like many of you in the audience, I personally thrive in a workplace where people are not only passionate about what they’re doing, but they also create a supportive and respectful environment for everyone around them. I found all the Microsoft employees that I met as part of my interview process to be smart, humble, open to new ideas, and inclusive in their thinking, which I really liked. Microsoft employees are encouraged to apply growth mindset to their work every single day, which is a mindset shift from know it all to learn it all. It starts with a fundamental belief that every person can learn and develop.

Aaratee Rao: My number two requirement was product. Now, it is important to me that I’m working on a product that helps create a positive impact in people’s lives. Microsoft creates technology so that others can create more technology. In today’s world, every walk of life in every industry is being shaped by digital technology. Microsoft’s mission becomes even more important. I was also super thrilled to learn that Microsoft Bay Area teams work on a wide range of products, from the intelligent cloud offering Azure, which is using cutting edge technologies like AI and machine learning, to a product like Microsoft Teams, which is reinventing productivity and collaboration, and also Microsoft hardware teams that you will learn more about tonight from our speakers.

Aaratee Rao: My number third requirement was growth. Microsoft has seen tremendous growth over the past few years under Satya’s leadership. This growth has created more opportunities for employees to make an impact. Besides this, the company has also undergone a major culture transformation under the new leadership. Diversity and inclusion is a core priority for the company, and part of employee performance review. Microsoft leaders believe that for a company to be successful, and keep growing for a long period of time, we need more than a good idea and a good strategy. We need a culture that fosters growth and enables employees to build new capabilities. I was super happy to see Microsoft adopting open source technologies, and also giving back to the open source community.

Aaratee Rao: Clearly, Microsoft met all my requirements and exceeded my expectations. Here I am, and it’s been a fun and amazing ride so far. With that, let me introduce our Bay Area teams to you all. Bay Area is popularly known as a hub for innovation all around the world. Microsoft’s presence here, and all the product development that we do here is also rooted in innovation. Our presence here means that Microsoft can participate in conversations with startups. All employees, Bay Area employees embody that startups [inaudible] off the Silicon Valley to drive a company through innovation. We have offices in three locations: San Francisco, Berkeley, and Sunnyvale.

Aaratee Rao: This is our company’s mission. Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. There is no way we can achieve this mission without representing the world. That means diversity. Diversity when it comes to gender, diversity when it comes to ethnicity, and diversity when it comes to skills, all of this is required for innovation. But it does not stop here. We believe that having diversity is not enough innovation, but we must foster a culture where people who are coming from diverse backgrounds can do the best work. That is why inclusion is so important, as it stimulates creativity and innovation.

Aaratee Rao: We also believe that having a deep sense of empathy is extremely important for innovation. As a primary job is to meet the unmet and unarticulated needs of our customers. At Bay Area, we are investing in multiple programs, which are specially designed for a diverse group of individuals. We value and celebrate diversity in a variety of ways. We have multiple employee resource groups that celebrate others, educate our allies, and ensure that all employees continue to learn and grow along the journey at Microsoft.

Aaratee Rao: We also encourage enthusiast, hobbyist, and creative people to enrich the experience of Microsoft. We have multiple community groups for folks interested in cycling, running, music, dance, and community service. We also have a company-sponsored corporate program called The Garage. The Garage offers classes to employees to learn new technologies. They also regularly invite external speakers to come in and share their perspective on a new technology.

Aaratee Rao: This is my last slide, and with this I’m giving you a sneak peek into our new Bay Area campus that we all are very excited about. This campus is being built in Mountain View location and will be ready this summer. This will bring all the South Bay employees under one roof, which will improve the employee interaction and will definitely improve innovation. Also, this the greenest yet building of Microsoft, and has been built with employee-centric design in mind. It has a lot of natural light and movable workspaces.

Aaratee Rao: These days, we talk a lot more about work-life integration more than work-life balance. This site will have multiple recreational facilities on site so that employees can seamlessly move from their work into life. With that, I would like to conclude my talk and invite Safiya for the next talk. Thank you for listening.

Safiya Miller: All right, good evening, everyone.

Audience: Good evening.

Safiya Miller: Oh, you can do better than that. Good evening, everyone.

Audience: Good evening.


Microsoft Strategic Account Executive Safiya Miller gives a talk on the first 90 days of a new job at Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner. Microsoft Strategic Account Executive Safiya Miller gives a talk on what to do in the first 90 days of a new job at Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Safiya Miller: Didn’t you guys have awesome drinks and food outside? Come on. Well, everyone, my name is Safiya Miller. I’m super excited to be here. This is my first Girl Geek experience. I changed out of my Microsoft digs, but I am a Microsoft employee as well. By day I’m at Microsoft as a strategic account executive, Adobe’s my client. By night and by early morning, work-life integration that was just there, I am a fashion designer. Thank you. I’m wearing some of my pieces right now as well. If you have questions about how you can take advantage of pursuing your passions and really making the most out of what’s most important to you, definitely speak to me afterwards.

Safiya Miller: Today, I’m going to speak about the first 90 days. This doesn’t just mean the first 90 days in a new job, it means the first 90 days, particularly maybe at the same company, but in a new team. There’s three things you need to know and to make them count in Silicon Valley. They are managing yourself, managing team and colleagues, and managing the person that probably has the biggest factor of priority on your success at that company, managing your manager. Surprising to anybody, these three things? Make sense? Okay.

Safiya Miller: I know we’re at a Girl Geek hardware session, but these are critical for every portion industry of where you are in Silicon Valley for success, and I’ll tell you a little more about that right now. Managing yourself. The key to success is to start before you are ready. What does that mean? We talked about culture earlier. It’s one thing to read about a culture, to read about what Satya is doing, to hear what growth mindset means, but are you actually seeing it? Have you spoken to the Microsoft employees today and talked to them about what that means for them day to day? Was it a driver in them coming to this company? These are important things that you can figure out before you start, and you certainly should make a priority as soon as you’re on the job.

Safiya Miller: For me, this was important because I studied psychology and Spanish at Harvard undergrad, went into finance, a traditional analyst’s route after undergrad, and this managing yourself piece is important because I knew that working abroad was important to what I wanted to do in my career. As soon as I started, I was able to clearly identify something that was important in my career trajectory, which was an international experience. Managing yourself means you should have a blueprint of what’s important to you and your career, and where you want to see yourself.

Safiya Miller: That’s really important to identify in this first 90 days. You should also be able to identify how can this company, or this role, this team help you achieve those goals? Have you read the 10K? Have you listened to the latest earnings call? Have you spoken to anybody on your team about what the street really cares about for Microsoft, or for the company that you’re interested in, or the team that you’re on? What’s really moving the dollar, the needle? Those are the questions that sometimes get overlooked. But that’s really what’s keeping the lights on.

Safiya Miller: When you ground yourself in those things, this is how managing yourself sets you up for success. [inaudible] have a power outfit. I happen to be wearing one. You know what’s funny, because … and I know there’s a lot of allies in the audience, which is amazing. Can all the women raise their hands, all the women? [inaudible] raise the roof. Okay. All right. I just can make it clear here. I think we get a lot of feedback about what you should wear as a woman, specifically in tech, and how style doesn’t matter, or what you wear doesn’t matter. But if you think about it, can you easily identify what Steve always wore, audience?

Audience: Yes.

Safiya Miller: Okay. What about Scott? Scott Guthrie for our Microsoft employees, what is he known for?

Speaker 1: Red T-shirt.

Safiya Miller: Red T-shirt. Did I just say we were in an industry that said they didn’t care about style? Now, I’m not saying that it has to be glitz and glam, but they have something that’s predictable, something that makes their day to day easy on managing yourself. There’s so many speaking opportunities, there’s so many opportunities for women to thrive. I really feel like your brand, and what you’re wearing and presenting is just as important as what you have to say, and what you bring to the table.

Safiya Miller: This is just an example of a power outfit. I personally developed my fashion brand around statement pieces when I was speaking to women who were struggling with the most revered resource, time. They couldn’t think about what they could just pull out of their closet or travel with, to just have on the road and be ready to go on stage and command a room. So I made these statement pants.

Safiya Miller: But it doesn’t have statement pants for you, right? But I’m just giving you an example because pants for me are easy. I love color, and now I have a statement outfit that is a go to, when people think of Safiya, they know that when she commands a room, she’s going to have on a statement pants, she may have on a blazer, a fun pop of color, and she’s also going to tell you some awesome things about fashion. She might talk to you about what Adobe’s doing. It’s starting to build that story and predictability. Again, think about things that are manageable, that make the stress out of your life removed, because you have some routine that makes sense.

Safiya Miller: Let’s switch to managing your manager. I love these little cartoons. Who read any of these growing up? Yeah. All right, Career 101. This one stands out because there’s such a long list of priorities. But do you know the definition of priorities? Can you have a long list of priorities, and they really be priorities? Probably not. But this is important, because your manager only knows what you’re telling them. Right? There’s a variety of things that motivate each of us in this room to come and do our jobs day to day. It’s important to manage your manager so that they know what’s important to you. What’s the driver to you? Is it the money? Is the project that you work on? Is it creativity? Is it growth? Those kind of things are important for you to take ownership of and share with your manager so that they can be an advocate for you.

Safiya Miller: Force yourself to have those hard, but necessary, conversations with your boss. I know it’s hard, and I know that a lot of us procrastinate. I’ll raise my hand. Sometimes I do too, especially on those harder conversations. But guess what, the longer you wait to happen, the worse it is. Whether it’s a vacation that you already had planned, whether it’s through thinking through growth around the company, and maybe wanting to explore another team, but you need their advocacy, these kind of conversations that are important to you, that may seem challenging for your manager, a good manager is here to be an advocate for you, and really see you grow into an amazing employee, and potentially another manager if you want to be one yourself. But again, they only know that if that is something that you’ve expressed to them. Managing your manager, being clear, speaking up up front, those things work in your benefit.

Safiya Miller: Managing your team and colleagues. I’ll give you guys a second to just take this in. Does this girl talk about hardware? Why are you taking career advice from me? This is a good one because I think sometimes when we talk about mentorship and sponsorship, we get caught up in what that needs to look like. Do I need to be mentored specifically by Satya to make it to the top? There’s probably a short list of people who are going to actually have that opportunity.

Safiya Miller: But if you look around, right, about people that work hard, I’m not saying don’t work hard, you absolutely should, but work smart. Think about the people on your team that are working smart and are being acknowledged for what they’re doing. Right? Those are the people that you might want to take some time to spend with. Doesn’t necessarily have to be someone that’s two skip levels above you. Could be someone that’s right on your team. I think we under-evaluate sometimes our own peer network, and how powerful that is.

Safiya Miller: This comment speaks to it a bit. Networking horizontally. There was a study on LinkedIn where it says 70% of people that get positions in jobs already knew somebody at that company. Could have been a colleague or a classmate. Probably not the CEO. I’m just stating the facts here and the numbers.

Safiya Miller: Can everybody take out their phone if you don’t have it out. Okay. Go to the LinkedIn (mobile) app. Give you guys a minute, as you’re thinking about who you’re reaching out to, and turn on the Bluetooth. Okay? Bluetooth is already on? Great. Some of you may already know this hack, but I’m setting you up for success when I finish. Okay? Go to the bottom screen. There’s the five buttons. Five GUIs here, my network. Click on “My Network” and then on the bottom right, there’s an icon with the figure and a plus. You can either click “Find Nearby”, “OK”, or “QR code”.

Safiya Miller: Click on “Find Nearby”. You’re activating this entire room right now. Okay? I’m helping you save so much time for later. You’re welcome. This is fantastic. Honestly, the reason I’m sharing this is because, again, networking horizontally … No one’s on? These people next to you aren’t on? Just give it a second. Okay. Use this later when you go and connect outside as well. But this is fantastic when you’re in sessions where there’s a lot of people group like this.

Safiya Miller: The other thing you can also do is to find the QR code. Okay? Everybody has a QR code, you just scan it. Those are the two options. But this piece, before you go on and start adding everybody, this is huge. Can we have coffee, because I’m trying to do X, and I’d love to hear your advice on Y? I put this up here because can I pick your brain? Can we catch up, with no indication of time or when? Those are time sucks. You should be really intentional about the people that you want to network with. What specific skill set do they have that you want to learn more about? How are you trying to grow?

Safiya Miller: Be specific, be intentional, do your research. Trust me, the other person, the other side will be appreciative and more likely to take the time to meet with you and have that coffee. Do the homework. Follow up intentionally when someone gives you advice. Keep that connection open and going.

Safiya Miller: I gave you guys the gift early, but because you’re in … because I’m awesome. Thank you. Because we’re in the Bay Area, I’m going to also give you guys another gift, right, because I want to know who’s in the room. East Bay, can I hear East Bay? Okay. Berkeley. North Bay, Marin? Nobody? That’s kind of far. Okay. San Francisco, the city. South Bay. All right. They’re rollin’ deep.

Safiya Miller: Again, I’m trying to help you get these obvious things. Where do you live? Where’d you come from out the way? Most of you guys are in South Bay. Okay, you live in the bay. Get specific. You came here tonight. You have so much potential in the audience. What do you want to grow? Where do you see yourself at the end of the year? I’m certain someone in here can share something with you that will make that impactful and valuable. Make the most of your first 90 days, manage yourself, manage your team and your colleagues, and most certainly, manage your manager. Thank you so much.


Microsoft Senior Director of Silicon & System Architecture Elene Terry gives a talk about how to leverage your silicon expertise to move into a category that lets you do your best work at Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Elene Terry: [inaudible]. Let’s see if this is working. Thank you. I’m going to start by taking you back to 2011. At the time, I was working at a semiconductor company, and it was working on super cool products. I was working on Xbox, I was working on graphics cards, and I was doing the work that I really love. But something was missing. I would go home, I complained to my husband about everything. I was unmotivated by work. I did an Iron Man. If you’ve ever trained for an Iron Man. It’s like a full time job just training for an Iron Man.

Elene Terry: My husband, he would say, “Elene, go fix it, go find another job, go find something that inspires you.” I did. I went out, I got several job offers, but I sat on them. In fact, I sat on one for almost six months. As I was thinking about them, I knew something was missing, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I got my offer from Microsoft. As I contemplated the offer, I probably was thinking about it maybe the same way you’re thinking about it. Why would a hardware engineer go to Microsoft?

Elene Terry: I’m an ASIC design engineer by training, and at my previous company, there were thousands of people just like me. But as I thought about it, I thought, “If I go to Microsoft, I’ll be kind of unusual. I’ll have some opportunities that I didn’t have before.” I got really excited, and so I came to Microsoft. I took this risk and I came to Microsoft. I’m going to start by showing you a video. This was not put together for me, but it really resonates to my message. Let’s see if it start.

Elene Terry: When I came to Microsoft, I started by working on Xbox. This was what I was working on before. Thank you. Strings and cost downs. I worked on bringing 4K content to Xbox, pretty similar to what I was doing before. But then things started to change, and I worked on HoloLens as [inaudible]. The HPU, I’ll talk about a little bit more later. Silicon for the display, and then bringing that same technology to IoT devices. I think there’s an Azure Kinect out in hall, to go explore with. Then silicon for the data center. I think we have an Azure Stack Edge presentation later too. I’ll talk a little bit more about that. We can see it’s taken on a lot of different forms while I’ve been at Microsoft.

Elene Terry: You can see it’s been a totally exciting seven years for me. I’m going to start by showing you some examples. This is the HPU. I love this picture. It’s beautiful. The HPU is the Holographic Processing Unit. This is the main piece of silicon that’s in the HoloLens. When I came to Microsoft, I worked on HoloLens 1, the HPU 1. I used some of my expertise to work on interconnects and memory controllers. As time progressed, we worked on HPU 2. It’s a pretty small team, there were only five of us.

Elene Terry: Now, I had an opportunity to become the SOC architect. What that meant is I was responsible for trying to figure out everything that went in this piece of silicon. I would never have had this opportunity at my previous company. Remember, there were thousands of people like me, but at Microsoft, I had this opportunity. For instance, as I was working on the HPU, I was introduced to new techniques, things like low power, analytical models for low power, power projections, power modeling.

Elene Terry: At my previous company, there were people that did this. It was an entire team that did this. But at Microsoft, there was no one. I had to go and learn it, so there was just a small team of us trying to figure it out. It was super exciting.

Elene Terry: Then I got to work on the entire device. Remember, Microsoft is a vertical company, so meaning we build the entire device in-house. You can see the HPU is demarked by the heart. So I started to get to work on the device. This is what we call the MLB. I call it the crab board. You can see all these little notches cut out from it in order to fit in a thermally constrained environment. It was super cool, right? Because I was at Microsoft, I got to see this vertical integration. I got to work on things that I just didn’t have the exposure to prior in my career.

Elene Terry: As I started working on this, I started working on more and more different types of trade off analysis. At the time, I had no idea what they were called. I now call this work systems engineering. It meant I was working with all kinds of different teams. User experiences team, algorithms team, firmware team, silicon teams, mechanicals, ID, thermal teams, electricals and interconnect, system validation, sensors display, and I was doing trade off analysis between all of them.

Elene Terry: I’m not sure if people are familiar with the other picture of Microsoft on the internet. But this is how it’s like for me. What I found is that people, they wanted to work with me. They had not previously had this exposure to the hardware trade off analysis. So people from all of these disciplines wanted to work with me. They wanted to understand how their part of the system worked together. Then most recently, I’ve been pivoting to work on silicon in the data center. Taking all of those same experiences, trying to figure out how we can build silicon that leverages the experiences we have, and is able to go to scale in the data center.

Elene Terry: When I talked about all of this in the past, people have come up to me and said, “Elene, how did you have the confidence to make all of these transitions? How did you have the confidence–How did you convince your boss that you could do this?” The short answer is I didn’t. I would go home to my husband all the time, almost every night, and I would cry, and I’d tell him, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I am bad at my job. I don’t know what to do next.” But what was important is that I showed up at work with confidence.

Elene Terry: I adhere to fake it till you make it. I’m not sure if people are familiar with Amy Cuddy’s research. She has one of the most watched TED talks of all time, and her research is on power positions, and how power poses change our behavior. Why not? A superwoman pose. But what really resonated with me in her talk was when she talks about having a car accident when she was 19. When she was 19, as she’s recovering, she discovers that her IQ has dropped almost two standard deviations. She talks about how she recovers from that, how every time she goes to a new role, she feels like she has to fake it.

Elene Terry: She says she just kept faking it one step at a time until she becomes a Harvard researcher. She says, “If you feel like you shouldn’t be somewhere, fake it, do it not until you make it, but do it until you become it.” The reason that really resonated with me is because you have to fake it, not just till you make it, not just until you are able to do the job, but you have got to fake it until you become it, in the sense that I had to fake it until I felt comfortable doing the job, that I didn’t go home and cry every evening that I couldn’t do my job.

Elene Terry: What does this mean for you? For me, it meant that I was able to leverage my unique expertise to really step out of my box, out of my comfort zone, and be able to leverage that for new experiences. I’m now running an organization that works on all of the roles that I talked about today. For me, I’ve so much more motivated. I come to work present and excited. I have no more time to run an Iron Man. I’ve just been so lucky to be able to identify where I fit in. What I hope for all of you is that you’re able to leverage that, your own unique talent, to find your own niche, to find something that motivates you and allows you to bring your best self.

Elene Terry: Thank you so much. I’m going to be outside answering questions about silicon, hardware, and I’d love to talk to all of you about anything in Microsoft.


Microsoft Mechanical Engineer Carolyn Lee gives a talk on HoloLens at Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner. Microsoft Mechanical Engineer Carolyn Lee gives a talk on HoloLens at Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Carolyn Lee: Hello, how’s it going? All right. Mics are good to go. Hi, everybody. I’m Carolyn, and I am an engineer on the mechanical team for HoloLens. When Josh asked me to speak at this event, at first, I wasn’t exactly sure. This isn’t something I normally do. I realized I get to stand up here and talk to you guys for 10 minutes about something that I look forward to waking up and working on every day. So let’s just get right to it.

Carolyn Lee: A little bit of background about myself. I started off at Microsoft as an intern during the summer of 2017. They were crazy enough to let me to come back the summer of 2018 to intern again, and I started as a full time engineer here last August during the summer of 2019.

Carolyn Lee: Before we get going, how many of you guys know what HoloLens is? Nice. Awesome. How many of you guys have gotten to try HoloLens 2? Great. For those of you that haven’t, I would highly recommend trying out one of the demos outside before you go. We have Silicon Valley’s finest out there leading all of the demos. For those of you that don’t know what HoloLens is, HoloLens is an augmented reality or mixed reality device that projects laser images onto your eye to allow you to overlay holographic images on your real world.

Carolyn Lee: Unlike virtual reality in which everything that you’re seeing around you is fake, augmented reality actually allows you to see the world around you, put objects onto that world, and it enhances the way that you can interact with your space as well as people, both near and far from you. HoloLens 1 was actually released as a dev kit. It was released for developers to come up with software and create programs that would run on this device, which created a really interesting environment because it was now being used across a wide variety of industries in which developers thought it would be most useful.

Carolyn Lee: One of these industries was the medical field. Doctors can actually wear this device and overlay CAT scans on their patients to know exactly what they’re operating on before they start an operation. I was actually talking to my sister on the phone the other night, and she had mentioned how one of her friends in med school uses HoloLens as their main training device for one of their classes, which I thought was super cool, one, for the use, and also because he just mentioned this in passing because he thought it was so cool, not because he knew that she had a sister that worked on HoloLens.

Carolyn Lee: What does our product design team here actually do for HoloLens? Our product design team creates all the parts that you can actually feel and see in the product. That’s everything from design to manufacturing, to assembly, to troubleshooting later on. We’re working cross-functionally with our sensors team, our optics team, our EE team, human factors to make sure that we’re taking in all the user research into account, to try and create a device that’s going to meet everybody’s needs and requirements, and create the best experience for the user itself.

Carolyn Lee: A little bit about my career here. I started off as an intern back in the summer 2017, like I said before, and my first summer I was working on scaling the fit system prototype. The fit system is how the device actually goes on to your head, and scaling being taking it from one device to say 20 prototypes that we could then use in user studies. This is particularly relevant because one of the main points of feedback that we got from HoloLens 1 was that the device needed to be more comfortable. This is important because when a user puts on the device, we want this to be an immersive experience. We want them to transition from reality to mixed reality without even knowing that they’ve put this device on their head. That’s why comfort was so important.

Carolyn Lee: I got to work with a great manager who had did a bunch of research into what the center of gravity of the device was, what moment was this putting on your neck, how is this affecting the user experience, how heavy was the device, how could this device actually be worn for an extended period of time? I got to work on trying to scale a prototype that was going to be then be used for human factors research. Then with that, I also got to work with a super experienced engineer who was my mentor throughout my two internships, and pick his brain on how he did design, and what was important to him, and what were things that he was looking for.

Carolyn Lee: With that, it was a very hands-on experience, because with prototyping, comes actually creating the prototypes. HoloLens has a great resource here in the Silicon Valley. Brian Golden in the back leads our machine shop, and I got to work with them a lot. Yes, big round of applause for Brian. I got to work with them a lot throughout this process, and really what it did for me in my first internship ever, that summer after sophomore year of college, was take academia and make it real. It made it tangible, and it made me excited to continue on the mechanical engineering track, and made me really excited to come back the next summer.

Carolyn Lee: The next summer I came back, and I actually got to own my own part that summer. It’s a very small part, so I could actually run it through the whole design cycle in that three months. Designing it, working with vendors overseas to get it manufactured, bringing it back here, working in the shop to run it through some lifecycle testing to see how this is actually going to perform over the span of its time, and use this to inform our design later on. I really enjoyed the responsibility of getting to own my own part and work with different teams.

Carolyn Lee: I got to work with the reliability team a lot that summer to understand a broader scope of the design cycle, which became really important when I was working as a full time engineer, because right when I started we hopped into our first, or I hopped into my first full fledged design cycle. There wasn’t really much in the way of bringing up time, but I actually liked that because it made me feel like I was coming in and making an immediate impact that I was going to get to be able to work on meaningful work right away, which I really enjoyed.

Carolyn Lee: My first internship, it made academia real. My second internship gave me a dose of what the design cycle is like, and being here full time, I think I’ve started to realize how much the people are super important. The first two summers, I got to work with a great manager and a great mentor that gave me a little taste of that. But coming back full time, I realize how important it is to be surrounded by people that want to help you learn, want to help you grow, and are all working towards the same goal.

Carolyn Lee: An example of that is Edwin, who was one of the other engineers on our team, had plenty on his plate to keep him busy during this design cycle. But he was working on parts. He had worked on parts in the past that were similar to what I was working on now, and whenever I needed help with anything–I had a lot of questions starting out, and whenever I needed help with anything, he was always right there to help me. “What can I do to help you? What resources can I provide?” If he didn’t know the answer, he knew who to tell me to talk to, to find out that answer.

Carolyn Lee: I think the most impressive part about that was, I never once felt like he was rushing to get back to his own work, even though he had plenty there to keep him busy. He was there to make sure that I could be as successful as possible. On the other side of it, not just in terms of technical support, being early in my career, and not always knowing where to go and what to do, Teresa, who shares the office next to me is in the back, she’ll love the attention, was really great about making sure that I knew what to look for in my career at this point. She said, “I was in your shoes four years ago, and here are the things that you should be looking for, and this is what you might want to look out for in terms of your career, and what do you want to do.”

Carolyn Lee: It was really nice to be able to have resources both on the technical side, and I felt like my peers were looking out for me in terms of making sure that I felt as supported as I needed to, which as a young engineer looking for a job and trying to figure out where exactly I want to take my career early on, I think the thing that was most important to me was that I was going to be somewhere I felt like I could develop, and that I could learn, and I was going to be pushed to grow as an engineer.

Carolyn Lee: I think that one of the most exciting things about working on HoloLens is that it’s challenging. This is something that I remember from my very first interview back in the winter of 2016, when I was sitting in the room with Roy, who leads our mechanical team. He had said, “When you’re designing a product, you start off by looking at what’s been done before. You work on there and see which parts of this do we want to keep, which parts of this are we going to move away from?” He said that when they were creating HoloLens as an AR device, and they looked for examples, there were no examples. AR hadn’t been done before.

Carolyn Lee: That was exciting. It was challenging, there was no example to look at, but it was exciting because we get to be the people that create that example, that later on one day, a company is going to look at how they’re going to do this, and they’re going to look at HoloLens. We get to design the track that AR is going to take in the future. HoloLens, I felt was a place where I was going to be pushed as an engineer, I was going to be surrounded by bright and hardworking individuals, and it’s an opportunity to work on cutting edge technology, cutting edge technology that’s expanding industries and paving the path for what AR can do and will do to change our future. Thank you.


Microsoft Product Manager Shivani Pradhan gives a talk on Edge Computing at Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner.

Microsoft Product Manager Shivani Pradhan gives a talk on Edge Computing at Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Shivani Pradhan: [inaudible]. Oh, it gets better. We start with a very nice ad that they made. (music)

Shivani Pradhan: That’s the Azure Stack Edge device, and I’m a PM Azure Stack Edge team. I’ve been around for almost 19 years with a lot of engineering and business side experience at this point. I’m pretty new to Microsoft. I’ve been here, actually, just like Carolyn, I joined full time in August 2019, so almost six months now. The best thing I feel about Microsoft today is people. It feels like home.

Shivani Pradhan: My team was building these two products, and so they’ve been working really long, really, very hard. Being new in the team, when you approach somebody, you’re being mindful of not wasting their time. Also being conscious that you don’t want to take any dumb question to them. But everyone has been so embracing, so welcoming, not a frown on anybody’s face that you’re wasting their time. That’s very, very supporting. That is really encouraging at the same time. I’ve really enjoyed my ride last seven months, and I would encourage all of you to apply to Microsoft.

Shivani Pradhan: What is Edge Computing? Think of cloud computing and the cloud capabilities. Capabilities like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and pushing them from a public cloud to all these physical devices that are connected. Cloud ability on the Edge is basically Edge computing. You may ask, “Why bother, because a lot of these physical devices do not have great connectivity? In fact, a lot of them don’t have any connectivity at all.” In those circumstances, you want the compute power on the Edge, very close to the data because data has gravity.

Shivani Pradhan: That’s where Edge computing comes in. Microsoft over here has a wide range of devices that they bring to you for the intelligent Edge, literally from hyperscale cloud, where they have availability in 56 regions and over 140 countries to small integrated chips that they’ve put in every coffee machine with extremely high security, mindful of all the capabilities that they can bring to a coffee machine that is connected to the cloud, bringing the cloud capabilities to that machine, but the same time, making sure it’s super secure.

Shivani Pradhan: Right in the middle is the Edge device. That’s the team that I work for, and that’s one of the Azure-managed AI-enabled compute appliances that we build. It comes with hardware accelerated FPGAs. Those are integrated circuits, or Nvidia, supported Nvidia’s GPUs that you can put in there to really put high amount of boost power behind whatever compute you’re doing. You can run VMs on it, you can run Kubernetes on it. The best part is it’s completely Azure-managed, which means you go to Azure portal, you deploy your device, you can completely manage it without worrying about your IT. You can create a custom app and just push it to all your physical devices.

Shivani Pradhan: In addition to that, it is a storage gateway, which means in your disconnected mode, you have petabytes of storage to store data locally, and then you can push it to the cloud at your own pace, at your own schedule. Edge devices cover a variety of use cases. Some of the most popular ones are machine learning on the Edge. One of the most common cases that we are seeing is running intelligent AI and machine learning inferencing on the Edge.

Shivani Pradhan: For example, let me give you an example of Kroger, which is trying to look for shelf spaces which are empty. They run an AI model to detect those empty spaces. But what they found was that if they are last couple of boxes remaining, those shelves do not detect as empty. Interestingly, there’s a psychology behind when we go to pick a box, and that’s the last box, we don’t pick it. We’re like, “There must be something wrong. Why didn’t anyone else pick it?” There’s the last box of Cheerios. You look at it, and you’ll put it back, and you will not walk away with it. That shelf is not empty because it has one box sitting there.

Shivani Pradhan: They developed an intelligent AI model to actually detect that now there’s only one or two last boxes left. So instead of a customer walking and saying, “Hey, you’re out Cheerios,” or somebody walking up and down the aisle, and saying, “Okay, Cheerios out, this out, that out.” The model detects and right away informs, and so suddenly, your supply chain is working better. You’re keeping it stocked.

Shivani Pradhan: The second popular use case is Edge compute and IoT solutions. I have a full slide on that one, and the network transfer where you can actually decide your own pace of transferring your data to the cloud. Machine learning on the Edge is another very popular use case with drone footage. But I have an even better example. We all have seen or got messages on our phones when cops are looking for a specific car, where we see say, “Okay, this car, if you see it, please text.”

Shivani Pradhan: Think about it. We have tons of traffic police cameras all over the city. They all are collecting that feed. That feed gets collected, sent to the cloud. Six hours later, it tells the police saying, “That car passed over there, over there, over there.” Six hours later. Come on. In 2020, you want it to be instant. It should have said, “The car is passing this now, now,” so you can track it. Now, instead of blasting millions of people on their phone saying, “Did you see this car?” Right? That’s the immediate results of Edge processing, right, that camera could have directly, just on that quick processing on the Edge. It didn’t need to collect 20 petabytes of data, it just needed to do that quick inferencing and react to that. That reactivity, that quick response comes with reacting on the Edge, being closer to the data.

Shivani Pradhan: Similarly, filter with AI analysis. That’s near collisions. That’s actually something that state of Washington, couple of cities in state of Washington are already doing, where they’re collecting only one minute of data. They have AI models to figure out that a collision happened, or almost a near collision happened. They try to cut off the video feed 30 seconds before and after, and just that one minute is sent for further analysis, and figuring out, and influencing the traffic engineering. That is pretty cool.

Shivani Pradhan: Then lately, a lot of influence around privacy. We could actually do a lot of identification and blur it, blur the license plates, blur people’s faces. As your private data is anyways being shared, you at least feel a little at peace that it was not my face, that all the Google cars are collecting all over Mountain View. The last of the three cases that had [inaudible], the Edge compute and IoT solutions. You have, if you look at your phone today, you have tons of apps. But if you go and turn your WiFi off right now, 90% of the apps stop working. That’s because they are all cloud-based applications, and that’s where the world is headed.

Shivani Pradhan: Sure, we all have cloud-based apps. But that said, you want your cloud-based apps to work when you are in the basement, or when you are going through a tunnel, or in a deep forest. That’s what the Edge does for you. You actually continue running all your business cloud applications on the Edge, even in a disconnected mode. But at the same time, there’s certain legacy business apps, which were always made for the native applications, which do not run on the cloud. Your entire 90% of the portfolio has already migrated to the cloud. But now, you have these native apps that won’t run. Edge comes perfectly in the middle to connect the two places over there.

Shivani Pradhan: Then you have the perfect scenario where you actually want to take your applications down into the field. Like you were seeing in that very nice, fancy ad, things have broken down. Everything is not there, and you still need your maps, and you go to your online maps, they won’t work because the wires are down. But your Edge would work, and you can still do the overlays, you can still run your AI models, your drones can still fly around, take pictures, create overlays on top of that model. You update your model live on the Edge, and then you distribute at least to the disaster recovery teams, and they can keep working. So that’s taking applications into the field.

Shivani Pradhan: Then the most popular case, that’s how most of the Edge solutions started, was to do with transferring your data to the cloud. As more and more companies were trying to migrate, a lot of them constantly make a lot of data, and they want to keep pushing. But then there are some that want one large migration to go all of a sudden, and then those who know the Big O notation comes in over here saying, “Don’t send it over a pipe for 300 years. Right? Just put it on a plane and ship it, and that would be faster and cheaper.” That same way, you can decide your different models that works the best for you, and you could manage first because you only have a 10 millimeter pipeline, versus a big migration, versus constantly sending. You have all your options. It’s up to you. It’s your custom solution.

Shivani Pradhan: Esri is a company that actually works on providing maps, specifically in map-based technology for disaster situations. One of the previous examples I was giving was actually, that’s what Esri does. They, in a disaster situation, they load up a typical truck with sensors, cameras, drones, and an Edge, and they drive into the disaster zone. These drones fly around and take all kinds of pictures. Those pictures come back. Now, you have all kinds of junk as well in that picture. You run AI models on it and find the points of interest. Then you create overlays on the fly, and then you merge those overlays with your existing maps. Then you have a new map, which says, “Okay, two kilometers from here, you have a bridge broken. From here, there’s a fire, which is literally 0.5 miles away.” You can convert it on the fly of what data is important to that team, what are they looking for? Then you update the maps, and you’re able to actually do really effective work. This is something Esri is using Edge for today.

Shivani Pradhan: Let me tell you the story about this. This was a last minute slide. I’m so sorry. Doesn’t have a title. A few years back, there was a huge Ebola outbreak in Liberia, and USAID response team was put together and deployed to go work on a response for this. The team, when they landed on the ground in Liberia, their first task was to just find information and categorize information. That was not easy because they needed to go find out the state of healthcare centers, hospitals, find out the state of WiFi, find out the population density centers in that area. It was a very challenging task.

Shivani Pradhan: As they started piecemealing all that information together, this is a real whiteboard of that team that they put together. If you look at this, this is such a horribly complex and convoluted map to figure out how they’re going to provide support to healthcare centers in that environment with Ebola all around you. This was their index file. This was their index file to figure out things. The Edge team took on this mission saying, “Okay, how could we have helped them?” We did exactly that. We created an app in Azure on the cloud to actually just go and find information, and categorize information. But then, just what Edge is supposed to do, we decided to use cloud capabilities and enable all the cloud capabilities to it.

Shivani Pradhan: This is an Edge, which is actually running in a disconnected mode, and we uploaded a bunch of maps to it. Once you uploaded all the maps, it processed all those maps, and so you have some default information, PDFs, pictures, JPEGs, documents that have already been uploaded. Now, when you start enabling all the cloud cognitive services, so first thing that we would do is search for, it’s Ebola, healthcare centers. We could just search for the word hospital, for example. When you search for hospital, a healthcare facility comes up, various PDFs come up, and everything. But you look at that, that’s a JPEG. Okay. When you look at the JPEG, and you look specifically, enable the OCR on it, it can now convert the JPEG into readable doc. It can find text in it, and it has been able to detect all the hospital words in it.

Shivani Pradhan: Not only that, it actually found a French document, which also had a translation of the word hospital. I can’t see any word hospital over here. But when you go into translation, you actually see that it found the word hospital in the French translation of that. Like, “Okay, that was cool. I didn’t know French, but I did find that there is some hospital, which French organization found over there.” Now, when I go and look up the word Lofa, now, Lofa is where the Ebola had originated. It was the ground zero for that. When I looked at that, at that time, this map comes back. Why did it come back? Because the OCR technology in the cognitive services has a feature where it can actually read handwriting.

Shivani Pradhan: Not only that, it changed the JPEG into a readable format. It detected handwriting, and was able to read the word Lofa on that picture of the whiteboard. That was pretty enabling, and that was pretty helping. That’s all. Thank you so much.

Aaratee Rao: [inaudible] you hear me? All right. What an amazing set of talks. Can hear one more round of applause [inaudible].


Thank you for joining us at the sold-out Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner with HoloLens and Garage demos, great talks and even better company!
Thank you for joining us at the sold-out Microsoft Hardware Girl Geek Dinner with HoloLens and Garage demos, great talks and even better company!  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

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Girl Geek X Bloomberg Engineering Panel Discussion, Fireside Chat, and Lightning Talk (Video + Transcript)

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Girl Geek X Team (Gretchen DeKnikker, Rachel Jones, and Angie Chang) and Bloomberg Engineering (Mario Cadette and Bailey Frady) welcoming the crowd at Bloomberg Engineering Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Transcript of Bloomberg Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Bailey Frady: All right. Hello everyone. How are you all doing? Good.

Audience member: Good.

Bailey Frady: Good. How was the food?

Audience member: Delicious.

Bailey Frady: Great, glad to hear it. Well, my name is Bailey and I just want to officially welcome you to Bloomberg Engineering. We are so glad to have you here. I know there’s a lot of places where you could spend your Thursday evening, so we’re really thankful you chose to invest your time here. Like I said, my name is Bailey. I’m a project manager here and I have been working with the phenomenal Girl Geek team to put this event on for you. So without further ado, please help me welcome Angie, Gretchen, and Rachel.

Angie Chang: Thank you. Hi, my name is Angie Chang, founder of Girl Geek X. I wanted to say thank you for coming out to check out Bloomberg Engineering tonight in San Francisco. If you haven’t seen the sting rays, you’re adorable. And I’m so glad that we’re here to hear from some really amazing Girl Geeks tonight.

Rachel Jones: Hi, I’m Rachel. I’m the producer of our podcast and if you haven’t listened to it before, I would encourage you to check it out. We have a lot of really great episodes. My favorites, we have one on branding, one on self-advocacy. They’re really great. Season two is starting really soon. We’re going to be trying some new stuff. Our first episode of season two, we’re actually answering your questions that you sent in through our survey. So yeah, give it a listen.

Gretchen DeKnikker: I’m Gretchen, thank you guys. Who’s, this is their first Girl Geek event? so we have a lot of returning. Welcome back. Thank you for keep coming. Most of you know that we do these almost every week. The little known secret is you can do one at your company also. So if you want to find out what it’s like, find Bailey who’s been working so hard on this has been our interface and yes.

Gretchen DeKnikker: And Noor is around somewhere also. And then I’m sure there are a ton of other people that have been working on this, but ask them what it’s like and what it’s taken to put it together and think about doing one of your own. And then if you guys have seen our emails lately, I’m trying to stop saying you guys and I did it.

Gretchen DeKnikker: If y’all have seen our–Be a proper feminist when you’re on camera! Okay. So if you’ve seen emails lately, we just launched registration two days ago for our annual virtual conference, which is called Elevate. And we have amazing lineup. We have Carin Taylor, who’s the chief diversity officer of Workday. We have the CTO of Intuit, Marianna Tessel, just an amazing, amazing lineup.

Gretchen DeKnikker: It’ll all be targeted for like mid-career women. So not just as much early stage content, but like for everybody else too. So register, it’s free. If you’d like to get involved, tell your company. It’s a really great sponsorship opportunity too. And without further ado, let’s kick this off tonight. Okay, cool.

Narrator: Go. Two letters. One syllable, a revolution, a world of potential in a single keystroke. The central nervous system of global finance was imagined and engineered more than 30 years ago. In 1981, Mike Bloomberg and his partners saw an opportunity to bring digital innovation to an industry where information was transmitted slowly and inefficiently.

Narrator: They built the Bloomberg Terminal, one computer system that allowed investors the same real time access to financial information at the same time, no matter their location. It was a product of the future willed into existence, a continuously evolving system built upon pioneering technology that transformed global capital markets forever.

Narrator: We empower people to make critical, transparent, and informed investment decisions while reducing risk and creating the tools of tomorrow. At Bloomberg, we are constantly thinking about and investing in the future. Always going where others aren’t, can’t, or won’t. We’re rolling out hundreds of new products and enhancements every day with our ears to the ground and an eye towards the future. We connect people in ways and at speeds no one else can. We process 100 billion market data messages daily, peaking at more than 10 million per second.

Narrator: Our 15 million distinct streams of financial data transmit in 13 milliseconds, 27 times faster than the blink of an eye.

Narrator: Our reporters break news from locations other news organizations have yet to visit. We have the largest business new staff producing more stories from more places than anyone else in the world, 120 countries and counting. We work around the clock in every time zone, never shutting off, never powering down because that’s what our customers require, access from wherever they are, whenever they want, however they choose to connect.

Narrator: We have over 5,000 technologists and computer engineers, a full 25% of our workforce, designing new functions and products before customers even know they need them. Innovation and collaboration are the reasons for our continued success. It’s how we’ve always worked and it’s what will guide us forward, with over 175 locations we are investing in our employees by building the workplace of the future.

Narrator: We go further. Stretch our impact farther. We use our power to connect people to create positive change for the entire planet, not just our bottom line. Through Bloomberg Philanthropies, we invest almost all of our company profits to address the most urgent public challenges generating the greatest good for the most people. It’s our purpose.

Narrator: We are vigilant in organizing and interpreting information in a complex, ever changing world. Looking decades into the future and engineering what our clients will someday need has been our mission from day one. We’ll never stop building, growing, and staying true to our original innovation. Go deeper. Go where others aren’t.

Mario Cadete: Hello. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the video of our company. Thank you, Girl Geek, for making tonight possible. Thank you all for coming. Thanks, Bailey, for putting this together. My name is Mario Cadete. I head up our Bloomberg San Francisco engineering office. A little fun fact about our office. It was custom designed for software engineers. So we really like that and we were all engineers and we like to have it as our little-

Audience Member: Sting Rays.

Mario Cadete: Engineers like Sting Rays, I’m told. We have this floor, the floor above us. It’s a little smaller, cozier than our other offices. But we like it that way. We’re due to get another floor later this year and we’re really excited. That’s going to allow us to add another 50 engineers to our workforce here in San Francisco. Personally, just a little bit about myself. I’m fairly new to the Bay Area, so I’m looking forward to meeting many of you after the program.

Mario Cadete: I started my career in Bloomberg engineering in 2000, and I’ve seen some of the 20 years. I get that facial expression a lot, especially when you interview candidates that come in. Yeah, it’s a long time. During that time, I had great opportunities to work on many challenging projects in New York, in London, and now in San Francisco.

Mario Cadete: What kept me at the company over these years are really three main areas. And they’re should… they’ll come out tonight in our agenda. First I love tech, and you’ll hear more about that in our first panel on how to thrive in open source. So that’s going to be really exciting. Secondly, I care deeply about our commitment to D&I. I know I’m in a role that I can be a key ally to women in technology and I don’t take that lightly.

Mario Cadete: I think about it often and I hope it shows in my leading of this office. And you’ll hear more ideas to make your workplace more inclusive in our fireside chat, taking an employee resource community from idea to impact. And lastly, I love as a company how we give back. It’s in our DNA.

Mario Cadete: As a company we donated almost a billion dollars to charity in 2018, $1 billion. So a lot of money. Also in that year myself and almost 20,000 of my colleagues donated over 150,000 hours to charity and communities where we live and where we work. But most importantly to me is how we invested in our employees. I take great pride in seeing our people develop both professionally and personally.

Mario Cadete: So as an office, in addition to the project work that we do, we hosted over 100 events that range from professional development to clubs like Bloomberg Women in Technology to tech community events like this.

Mario Cadete: Our culture is one of the main reasons that my colleague Dobs decided to join us a couple of years ago. You’ll hear more about that during her lightning talk and how to find a dream job in tech. So enough about Bloomberg for now, if you have any questions, please ask me or somebody in one of these stylish blue t-shirts, ‘cuz there are a couple of them around, after the program.

Mario Cadete: So let’s move on to what you came here for. Valuable insights to advancing your career and meeting other incredible women working in Silicon Valley. Without further ado, I’m proud to introduce my colleague, Danica Fine, who will lead a panel discussion on how to thrive at open source. I hope you enjoy. Thank you.


Bloomberg Engineering Software Engineer Danica Fine moderates Stephanie Stattel and Paul Ivanov in a panel conversation on how to thrive in open source communities at Bloomberg Engineering Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Danica Fine: Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. I said it earlier today, I was really excited about the director chair. This is great. Thank you so much for giving me a director chair. Well, hey everyone. Welcome to our panel on how to thrive in open source software communities. We have a great program for you tonight, but before we get started, I really want to see a show of hands, how many of you are familiar with or already involved in using open source technologies?

Danica Fine: All right. Good. That’s good. You’re on the panel.

Paul Ivanov: Please.

Danica Fine: Who are you? How many of you are participating in these open source communities already? Or maybe even actively contributing code back to these open source projects? All right, quite a few. So I think we have a good mix in the audience tonight. I know that some of you didn’t even raise your hands, so I hope like by the end of this you’ll know what we’re talking about. So hopefully, our panelists can shed some light on the subject.

Danica Fine: So as Mario, mentioned we have with us tonight three of our star engineers. We have Stephanie Stattel, Paul Ivanov, and Kaia Young. Before we dive into questions, why don’t we introduce ourselves. Paul, let’s start.

Paul Ivanov: Hello. I’m Paul. I’ve been at Bloomberg for three and a half years. I work largely in open source on the Jupyter Project. So I’m one of the steering council members and was fortunate enough for the project. If you don’t know Jupyter Notebooks are a way to do data analysis in different languages and to communicate your results with colleagues so that you can rerun it and so that they can rerun it. And so I’ve been working on that since before the project existed as Jupyter, as IPython, and we were fortunate enough to win the ACM Software System Award in 2017. So it’s great to be able to contribute to this tool and give back to the community and continue to do that here.

Danica Fine: Stephanie?

Stephanie Stattel: Hi. Yeah, my name’s Stephanie Stattel. I’ve been at Bloomberg going on nine years now. I moved out to San Francisco two years ago to work on the team build- working with Jupyter, building a data science platform on top of Jupyter. And right now for the past year, I’ve been working on an infrastructure team, so I’m sure many of you saw the terminal demo. The team that I’m on works really closely with Chrome and the windowing stack that supports the terminal. So happy to chat with anybody about that after the panelists and talks.

Kaia Young: And my name’s Kaia Young, I’ve been with Bloomberg also about two years, here in the San Francisco office. and I’m an engineering manager here for a new team that’s focused on data visualization and tooling for a new data science platform that we offer. So my team develops data visualizations and some of the platform related to that, largely built on a lot of open source technologies like D3, Vega, pandas, NumPy, a lot of the kind of general Python data science stack that you all may be aware of.

Kaia Young: So we do develop tools for internal use as well as contribute to those libraries that we do use.

Danica Fine: Thanks. All right, let’s get started. Stephanie. So you mentioned your involvement with project Jupyter. Can you tell us more about how you got started in the Jupyter community and like what was that journey like for you?

Stephanie Stattel: Yeah, sure. So I can say that when I started on the Jupyter team, that was my first exposure to the open source world and communities. So needless to say it was a little bit intimidating. When you go to a github page and you see a list of issues and a lot of activity in terms of pull requests, it’s really hard to know where to get started. And so something that I really appreciated about the Jupyter community in particular, there’s so many in person events, conferences, workshops, hackathons, and studio days. And so for me, that was my real entry point, getting to know the people behind the community.

Stephanie Stattel: And it was a really great way to find the projects that I was interested in working on and what lined up with what the community was developing. So in something like a full studio day event, you find people of all levels of expertise. People like Paul who have been with the project for over 10 years. People who like me had never used Jupyter, made an open source pull request before and we’re all working together. So I think for me it was a great mentoring opportunity.

Stephanie Stattel: And I think when you’re looking for open source communities to engage with, it’s really important to find ones that have a really welcoming environment where it’s okay to ask questions and be new at things. And I think it really speaks to the growth we’ve seen in a project like Jupyter where it really takes into people with a lot of different viewpoints and is open to kind of pursuing different avenues. And I think that’s why I’ve stayed active in the community for as long as I have. Yeah.

Danica Fine: I really appreciate hearing your perspective on that. ‘Cause like, I’m sure a lot of us didn’t realize how simple it could be to get involved. And, as someone who’s kind of outside of the community like you’ve actually made it sound a little less daunting, a little more welcoming. So thanks.

Danica Fine: So Kaia, your Bloomberg product is built on top of open source technology. Could you give everyone an idea how you’re able to leverage this technology and your team? And as part of that, how are you interacting with that community?


Bloomberg Engineering Team Lead Kaia Young (right) talks about open source communities at Bloomberg Engineering Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Kaia Young: Yeah. I mean working with the open source community in the context of business product is a little bit different than doing it as an individual contributor or just as anything else. So there are kind of some interesting challenges there as well. But even besides that, I think there’s a lot of advantages to working with open source software even in the context of business. Like for example, you can get to market a lot quicker. Why spend a lot of time making something that other people probably already made better definitely than me.

Kaia Young: So also with that it kind of gives company this ability to focus more on our core competencies. Like for example, Bloomberg, we’re very, very interested in the financial side of things. So leveraging a lot of good open source technology gives us a way of kind of getting those products out there a little bit faster so that we can focus on the particular value that we add.

Kaia Young: I think interacting with the community is a very, very kind of interesting thing. Mainly because I think one of the areas that we’ve been able to be successful in is having good relationships with those communities. So some of the strategies we do there is we try to really build an understanding of who’s using the open source software. I think sometimes it can be really, really easy to kind of be focused on the particular thing that you want to do.

Kaia Young: Whereas some of the technology we’re using are used for all kinds of, of things. Like Jupyter itself is used for academics, for research, all over the place. So really spending the time with the community and the stakeholders in that community to really kind of gain an understanding of who’s at the table? What are people using it for? So that then we can position ourselves to understand what the roadmap is, and then how we can actually be a part of that.

Kaia Young: One of the things we do want to avoid is obviously saying that, this is something that we want to contribute to. How can it help us? I mean, that’s not what we want to do at all. So from our perspective it’s really important to kind of understand where the community is so we can see where we can act.

Kaia Young: Essentially it’s kind of a forced multiplier. So by understanding that we can identify expertise that we have that may be valuable to the community and then work together to make a product that everyone can be used and used for. I think it’s really interesting to hear kind of Paul’s perspective on it. Jupyter in particular, having gone for so long and being used by so many people. I’m not saying you’re old-

Paul Ivanov: Thanks.

Kaia Young: … but it’s like, [inaudible]. But some of the Jupyter events that I’ve been at, it’s like really, really amazing to see how some of the software that’s being used. So like for seeing some of the stuff that I’ve developed being used, I think at the last event there was being used to predict weather, there was a government demo on fluid dynamics. They’re using it to find new planets. And then like, I just made a thing that puts some stuff on the screen, but it’s like really, really cool to be able to see that we can also contribute back.

Kaia Young: So rather than just being focused on the needs of our consumers and our clients that we can actually kind of give something back to the community that’s used for research and all these other things.

Danica Fine: That’s awesome. I think it’s like really interesting to see how does that go back and forth rather than your team just taking this product and utilizing, but like it seems that there’s like a lot of effort on both sides to make this build and maintain this sort of partnership. So, Paul, as someone who is a leader in the Jupyter community, as so many people have alluded to. You’re great. Could you speak to how you maintain the community space that both fosters inclusiveness and mentorship, and then also supports these external partnerships such as the one that Kaia had mentioned?

Paul Ivanov: Right. Yeah. I think it’s useful to sort of take a step back and make the point that like, even though we’re talking about open source, like it’s one thing, it’s no monolith. So there’s different scales. And so maybe I’ll just go through some of the history of like how Jupyter came to be here and how I’ve participated in it. And that’ll help sort of shed light with how I think about this.

Paul Ivanov: And so I think the, the best way to get involved with open source to scratch your own itch. So if you have something that is bothering you, whether or not it’s making your own project around that, or finding a project that’s already helping you somewhat and then changing it for your needs, I think is a very good way. And that is the way that I started with IPython, which then led to IPython Notebooks.

Paul Ivanov: So when I was in graduate school, we were using these tools for ourselves to do our data analysis. Okay? And we knew that we wanted to share that with other scientists and with the world at large, but we didn’t have resources for that all we… it was entirely volunteer run.

Paul Ivanov: And so then in 2013, I think we got the first grant from the Sloan foundation, where for the first time, we had seven paid positions to work on this tool, IPython notebook, which already existed but was rough around the edges, full time. So we were able to continue that work, but now we sort of started to shift away from being users of the tool. We were still using it, but now we… like our jobs were to make the tool and not necessarily just use a tool.

Paul Ivanov: So it’s sort of another iteration of that. And so we were still very close to our users and we were still users ourselves. But as more people and companies started to come on board, so it’s not just funded in academia anymore. We have companies that are joining the efforts and resources and more engineers that are joining the efforts. We needed to come up with a governance model and that’s always a struggle.

Paul Ivanov: At our level, that’s one of the big issues is like which way do… which direction do we go? How do we go? And how do we keep the stream of people coming in? And so one of the ways in which… and so to me it was like going from, “Oh, this is the thing I do for fun and nobody pays me to do it because this is awesome,” to, “Somebody is paying me to work on this fun thing that I am doing,” to like, “Oh man, lots of people are actually using this thing.”

Paul Ivanov: I need to make sure that we keep people coming in and thinking that this is fun, and so that it’s not just the job. Because we now we have contributors and leaders that for their entire involvement in the system, they were paid to do that work. That’s just like weird for me. Because for me it was like… it was all of our friends that were just, “Yeah, anybody can contribute. Like we’re clearly going to use this.”

Paul Ivanov: And then there’s some people that have always been paid now to work on Jupyter and that’s great. It’s like it’s weird. It’s like a family that grows and then that also is its own employer. Like it’s a family business. I don’t know.

Paul Ivanov: All right. But what’s happened is as we grew, and this happens to large open source projects, is that there kind of isn’t necessarily room for people to be able to plug in and explore new ideas.

Paul Ivanov: Like, we’re, lots of open source projects have this notion of sprints where there’s work to be done and you can show up and we can hand you out tickets and it’s a bite-size ticket that you will be able to do either on your own or with a little bit of handholding. And I thought that, well, when we were just using these tools on our own, we used to just be very close to it and we used to explore stuff. We did stuff that nobody… we didn’t have to justify. We didn’t have to have a business justification for doing things.

Paul Ivanov: And so that’s why for about a year and a half now, I’ve been helping with my colleagues at Bloomberg running these Jupyter open studio days. So it’s a two day event where anybody of all levels, experience with tech or not, can come to our office here. And it’s kind of like a house party. It’s kind of like a hackathon, but it’s unstructured. It’s deliberately unstructured so that we can plug you in wherever it is that you want to plug in and we can have a conversation about things and to sort of have more of this incubation period. And so that’s sort of… I’m very fortunate to be involved in this.

Danica Fine: This has borderline become the Paul… Paul Ivanov show. Anyway…

Paul Ivanov: Sorry. I did not want to do this-

Danica Fine: I’m really glad that there are leaders in the community though, that are like you, who are making these opportunities more accessible to people. So I really do appreciate that. That’s the end of our deep, heavy questions, lightning rounds. I’m so excited. One to two sentence answers, please.

Danica Fine: You go over and I will come after you later. Stephanie, what advice would you give to someone looking to get involved with the community?

Stephanie Stattel: I’m going to do longer sentences and [crosstalk] junctions.

Paul Ivanov: [inaudible] on this.

Stephanie Stattel: I think for me, something I would say is don’t be afraid to dip your toe into the pond of open source and really look for a community. And I think I’ve definitely found that in places like Jupyter and Electron that really thrive on bringing new people and fresh ideas into their ecosystem.

Stephanie Stattel: I think that’s really important when you’re deciding where to spend your energy. You really want to work with people that are open to new thoughts and kind of like you’re saying, exploring where a platform can go. I think it sort of, for me sort of red danger zone if there’s sort of a timeline that’s mapped out because in reality I think projects evolve in really creative and surprising ways, and so I think you want to find sort of a tribe of open source communities that are open to where a project is going to go. Because I think I even Kaia mentioned this, you really have no idea what you’re building, who’s going to end up using it.

Stephanie Stattel: And I think being open to the possibilities really broadens the horizons for where what your work can do can have an impact. And so that would be my advice kind of…

Danica Fine: You have one more sentence.

Stephanie Stattel: Two sentences. I do?

Danica Fine: Oh that was [inaudible]. Okay, we’ll end it there. Kaia, what do you wish you had known when you started working with open source software?

Kaia Young: What do I wish I would’ve known? It’s kind of interesting to go back to something Paul said earlier, what’s really interesting about open source software is that there are so many different flavors of it. Like some is just companies open sourcing their own software. You have like academics making things and then sometimes just one person wanted something and then put it out there.

Kaia Young: Previous to my career as an engineer, I was a musician and one of my least favorite things in the world was like the unsolicited email of someone saying like, “Hi Kaia, here’s everything that’s wrong with your entire body of work.” And so I find this really… it’s one thing that is really important to bring to open source is kind of a mindset of respect, humility. These things go a long way because it’s really, really easy to look at an open source project, get on there and say like, “Hey, why don’t you have this feature? This should be designed this way instead,” when you don’t know the story about how that project got there.

Kaia Young: It could have been just one person working on it constantly and sacrifice quite a bit for it. So little respect and humility goes a long way. It’s a lesson for me.

Danica Fine: I have learned tonight that our engineers can’t count to two. Okay.

Paul Ivanov: It’s two in some base.

Danica Fine: Paul?

Paul Ivanov: [inaudible]

Danica Fine: Okay. Last question for you Paul, and it’s a doozy. Are you ready? When is the next Jupyter open studio? Is it true that anyone can get involved?

Paul Ivanov: Yes and yes.

Audience Member: Yay.

Danica Fine: Great. We’re done. It’s fine. It’s fine.

Paul Ivanov: It’ll be probably early Spring and so we’ll probably not make the February… late February cutoff, but it’ll probably be early March, somewhere around there.

Danica Fine: We’re good.

Stephanie Stattel: Will people go to see the announcement? Sorry.

Paul Ivanov: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Danica Fine: You can ask questions. This is my official job. It’s fine.

Stephanie Stattel: Sorry.

Paul Ivanov: Tech at Bloomberg will definitely retweets me whenever I tweet about it.

Danica Fine: Oh, do they?

Paul Ivanov: So yeah.

Danica Fine: I didn’t know that. Cool.

Paul Ivanov: Because I know a few people that work at Bloomberg, so it’s really great.

Danica Fine: You’re working? Okay. Great. Yeah. Awesome. Those are all the questions that we had planned for tonight. I’m sure you have more questions for our panelists. So afterwards at the networking session, please reach out to them, pick their brains, clearly they have nothing else to do, so that’d be great. Have fun with the rest of the program. It’ll be wonderful.

Paul Ivanov: Thank you.


Bloomberg Engineering Team Lead Cheryl Quah speaks with Software Engineer Rebecca Ely about taking an employee resource group (or community) from idea to impact at Bloomberg Engineering Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Cheryl Quah: Hello. Good evening.

Rebecca Ely: Hi, everyone.

Cheryl Quah: Hello.

Paul Ivanov: Hello.

Cheryl Quah: Good. Danica. This is my first time sitting on this chair. Feels pretty great. You’re lucky. No, I actually I kind of prefer standing up, but we’ll see. Anyway, welcome everyone to Bloomberg to our little corner of San Francisco with our little stingrays. My name is Cheryl. I’m an engineering team lead at Bloomberg. I’ve been here I think coming to eight years now, so not quite as stretch as Mario, but still getting there. I started out in New York and moved over to San Francisco about three and a half years ago.

Cheryl Quah: And I’m very privileged to introduce Ely. Ely started out as a peace and justice studies major. Thank you. And had a career in government contracting before joining the Hackbright Developer Bootcamp and then leaping… Yeah. Wait, where are the woos coming from? Anyone in the audience? There we go. And then we’ve been so lucky to have Ely with us for the past three to four years at Bloomberg. More specifically to the topic at hand tonight. Ely has been active in essentially all of the communities, or what we call Employee Resource Groups, that we have at Bloomberg in the San Francisco office.

Cheryl Quah: I don’t know where you find the time for that. I’m not going to ask. But and in particular she’s been part of the steering committee for the Bloomberg Women in Technology Allyship Group. And so also a little bit about me is that I’ve been very fortunate when I was in New York to be part of the exciting journey of helping to start the Bloomberg Women in Technology Community that is now being taken over and led by many wonderful other people here like Ely, like Stephanie, and all the other wonderful folk here.

Rebecca Ely: Sorry. Cheryl is downplaying it. She’s basically a celebrity at Bloomberg.

Cheryl Quah: That’s not true. But so why are we here today? We’re here today because clearly, creating and sustaining an employee resource group or community is something that’s very close to both of our hearts. And I guess just to take a step back, how many of you here are involved in an employee resource group at your organization? A good number. Not as many as I thought, but that’s interesting. How many of you who are involved or have found that your community, your employee resource group has been impactful to you personally, either you’re in your career or just in your overall happiness? All right.

Cheryl Quah: All right. How many of you are interested in getting more involved with starting an ERG at your company or figuring out how to increase the impact of the ERG at your company?

Cheryl Quah: Good. All right. So that gives us a few people to talk to tonight. So I think the reason why I’m here and, why we wanted to chat tonight as well was because if you have been actively involved in a community or an ERG then you probably are aware of how much work it takes. Yeah, I see a few nods there. It got you. You’re aware of how much work it takes, how much effort goes into running the community just to organizing a single event, shout out to Bailey, again, shout out to all the organizers of this event, shout out to the Girl Geek organizers.

Cheryl Quah: It’s just… it’s a massive amount of effort. And I think for me personally over the years as I’ve gained experience, sort of what I’ve come to realize and what one of the driving questions for me nowadays is, I always ask nowadays, “How can I be sure, sure that the effort and the work that I’m putting in is paying off? What are the specific outcomes that I actually want to achieve? And is the effort that I’m putting in going… actually moving the needle in some way on those specific outcomes that I’m interested in achieving?”

Cheryl Quah: And so for tonight, we wanted to share some stories from our personal experiences regarding that. And I think in your abstract it says something about launching, growing, and sustaining an ERG. Nobody else remembers what the abstract says, but in this spirit of saying what we advertised, we’re going to start with those questions. So in terms of launching an initiative. Bear with me and the Hamlet moment that Ely and I came up with a short while ago.

Cheryl Quah: So when we are launching an initiative, the three questions that I sort of encourage everybody to ask themselves and that we ask ourselves nowadays is, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this?

Rebecca Ely: Yeah, so the answers to those questions from an allyship perspective, at least for me, there’s an entire steering committee, in terms of why are we doing this? I think that there are endless reasons to care about diversity and for allyship more specifically, a lot of the work that happens in companies to improve the environment that folks come into and to improve statistics and to improve outcomes, that falls on the communities that are experiencing the gaps themselves much of the time.

Rebecca Ely: And so allyship very… people have a lot of opinions about the word ally, but it is… we were kind of seizing this swell of support that we have within the women in tech community that is not people who identify as women in tech to really try to shift some of the burden of the work to be done to move towards equity onto people who are already benefiting from the system.

Rebecca Ely: In terms of why are we doing this? I would say so, there’s a lot that companies can do to bring in sensitivity training or stuff like that from outside. You can do surveys and try to take the temperature of the company. But at the end of the day whereas on the ground initiative that was just started by individual contributors who cared. We have access to a lot of information that we’re sort of uniquely positioned for. And so we do a lot of workshops and trainings that are a content we designed based on… What did I call them? Based on like sessions we hold with employees to find out what gaps they’re personally experiencing and what would matter most to them to cover in these trainings.

Rebecca Ely: So we are sort of synthesizing what we’re learning from the people that we really care about supporting and then disseminating that across the company. And we also have a lot of really great access to senior leadership. If I get in a room with a senior leader, I’m not just saying, “Can you do this, this, and this for me?” I’m also saying, “I know what people are thinking. I know what people are talking about. What would you like to know from me? How can we work together to fill gaps? What are you already working on? Where, what are we already working on? What still needs to be done?” That sort of thing.

Cheryl Quah: Thank Ely for talking a little bit about the allyship initiative and I guess… Sorry, go ahead.

Rebecca Ely: Just one more thing on the why are we doing this, which I kind of already addressed, but just there’s also… on the topic of who gets involved in this kind of work most of the time. Mostly it’s not people who are benefiting from the way the systems already are. And so doing trainings on gender equity in the workplace that are attended all by people who already believe is definitely worthwhile in its case. But I think we can have a really solid impact by focusing on people who aren’t necessarily already bought in, who haven’t thought about this stuff much, who are learning for the first time from our workshops, what they could be doing better.

Cheryl Quah: So thank you, Mario.

Rebecca Ely: Thank you.

Cheryl Quah: I got a clap there. I thank you. And so just putting on my… in a former life maybe I would have been a professor, so I get a chance to do that occasionally but nobody else wants to hear that. But anyway, so just to sort of rehash what we were trying to say, it’s that if you’re thinking about getting involved in effort you know is going to take energy and time on your part, think very clearly about your objectives. Think, why are we doing this? Think, why are we doing this? Meaning what is your specific value add here?

Cheryl Quah: And then why are we doing this? Meaning that for the specific outcome that you want to achieve, there are many different paths that you can take to get there. What are the paths that maybe have the highest return on investment? Because all of us have a finite amount of time. All of us have a finite amount of energy. What are the options that you can pick that would really move the needle for what you want to achieve.

Cheryl Quah: I got a five-minute signal over there. You might be going a little bit over. But the second part of the abstract said, growing an initiative. If you think about the word growing, there are two ways to think about it. One is sort of the more intuitive thing, which is just thinking purely about numbers. For instance, my employee resource group had 200 members last year and now has 400 members this year, or my community hosted six events last year and hosted 12 events this year.

Cheryl Quah: So that’s one way to think about it. But the way that I like to think about it, is how are we growing our impact? Ely, can you tell us a little bit more about how you think about that with regard to the allyship initiative?

Rebecca Ely: For sure. So I think that they’re both are important, if you’re having a really phenomenal impact and changing hearts and minds, but you’re changing two hearts and minds, that may not be worth as much as having less impact, but changing lots of hearts and minds. On the other hand, you’ve got to find a balance. I spend a lot of time thinking about if I’ve got possibly too much time, possibly hours, if I’ve got one hour to work on this upcoming workshop, am I publicizing the workshop? Am I making sure we get as many people in the room as possible? Or am I improving the content of the workshop?

Rebecca Ely: Am I making sure that the people who are in the room are walking away with the growth that we’re looking for?

Cheryl Quah: And so the last part is how do we sustain the impact of a community? Or an employee resource group? Or really any initiative that you want to get involved in? And for me, this is pretty personal because when you think about sustaining the impact of any initiative or organization, really, it’s all about the people that are involved in helping to run the organization, helping to run any sort of initiative that the organization sponsors.

Cheryl Quah: And so for me, sustaining the impact of any community over many years means for any individual who’s an active member there, are they doing this in a sustainable manner. So if I’m asking you… I heard the lady in red, who nodded early on, if you’re actively involved in an ERG, are you doing this in a sustainable manner for yourself? Because it takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of energy.

Cheryl Quah: So, thinking about for any given individual, are you maximizing your impact if you had multiple different options to choose from, which option are you going to pick to invest your energy in? And also, how do you start acting as a force multiplier. Somebody used that term early on as well today. But how do you get new blood into the organization? How do you grow new leadership? So that over time it’s not all resting on the shoulders of a few core people in the organization.

Cheryl Quah: So, Ely, tell us a little bit more about… you’ve been involved in this for a couple of years now, tell us a little bit more about that.

Rebecca Ely: Cheryl is intimately familiar, I would say, with how this played out for me last year. I, as Cheryl mentioned, have been involved in lots of ERGs. And little over a year ago was asked to join the allyship initiative as a steering committee member, which is a pretty big commitment, and was really having a great time with that and also was working to like give away some of the other responsibilities that I’d taken on over the years that were sort of causing me to split my time.

Rebecca Ely: And then I was asked in the middle of last year to become a co-lead for the San Francisco Sustainability… I’m sorry, I was already doing that, for the San Francisco…

Cheryl Quah: Too many communities.

Rebecca Ely: Be Proud chapter and Be Proud is Bloomberg’s queer employee resource group. And so that was something that was a really exciting opportunity. And it was really, really hard to decide what to do. Cheryl and I had many conversations. Did you mention that you’re my team lead? But also you have a lot of experience in this world.

Rebecca Ely: And it was so hard because Be Proud was an organization that… it was the first one that I joined at Bloomberg and it really was where I felt like I sort of found my home. I was going to all these great events through Be Proud. I met people across the company, across the globe, who I just really connected with, still some of my best friends at the company.

Rebecca Ely: And so it was hard to say no to this organization that meant so much and had done so much for me personally, but after a lot of reflection with Cheryl, I came to the conclusion that my background and my sort of positioning with the allyship initiative and the connections that I already had there, and sort of the potential I saw for that community to make a big difference in the things that mattered to me was the most valuable use of my limited time.

Rebecca Ely: Because I still have to be an engineer by day, and I have a life and I like to sleep and a lot of responsibilities. And so yeah, I did ultimately say no, and I have no regrets about that. But it is really hard. And some advice that Cheryl gave me that was really valuable at that point was to turn the times when you feel like you need to say no, or you should say no into opportunities for other people. So suggesting people who you know have been really involved and or have been really interested and would like to get more involved in making it a chance for them to get that networking and show that leadership and stuff like that. So thanks, Cheryl.

Cheryl Quah: Sure. Thank you, Ely. So hopefully everyone has taken the opportunity tonight to meet new people. And thank you again for taking your night to spend it with us. If you don’t remember anything else, remember our little Hamlet moment, which is why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? And why are we doing this? So on that note, thank you, everyone.

Alexandra Dobkin: Hey guys? Is my mic on? No. okay. Oh, now my mic is on. Yeah, that did it, asking the crowd. Okay. Yeah, I like that. Second round of applause.

Audience: Yay.


Bloomberg Engineering Software Engineer Alexandra (“Dobs”) Dobkin gives a talk on how to find your dream job at Bloomberg Engineering Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


Alexandra Dobkin: Yeah. Yeah. I love this crowd. You guys are great. I’m going to take you guys with me everywhere. I’ll be like yeah, follow the sequins. Yeah. All right. So as you can see, it says Alexandra Dobkin. That is my real name. As many of you might know, I go by Dobs, I will respond to Alexandra, I promise. But feel free to call me Dobs. So today I’ll be talking about finding your dream company.

Alexandra Dobkin: So what I want to do is go over the 10 questions to ask every future employer so you can figure out is this going to be the right company for me? So let’s go through a little history lesson. So for those of you that haven’t met me, I’m…?

Audience: Dobs.

Alexandra Dobkin: There we go. Yeah. I’m a software engineer working on Python API and the BQuant team. And if you’d like to know more about what that means, come talk to me after I’ll be the one in the sequins. So in case you can’t tell or can’t guess, I’ve been having an awesome experience here at Bloomberg. So quick show of hands or shout outs if you’re really excited, who’s been having an awesome time at their jobs?

Audience: Yay.

Alexandra Dobkin: Okay, so a lot of people. So seems like you guys have kind of figured out the secret sauce as have I, that… how to figure out what’s going on? I feel like a lot of people at Bloomberg just raised their hands. Yeah, okay. Yeah. So what’s it that’s giving me such an awesome experience? Part of it is the work that I’m paid to do that I find exciting.

Alexandra Dobkin: But that’s not everything. It’s how I’m treated, the attitudes that my coworkers have, the capacity for me to grow and progress in my career. I learned to appreciate my time here because, well, frankly, my previous work experiences were not the right fit for me. I used to work in management consulting, as well as finance, which had a vastly different culture to tech and especially a different culture from that at Bloomberg.

Alexandra Dobkin: So while programming is definitely cooler than these jobs, Bloomberg has definitely been a much better employer for me, as well. And an example of how Bloomberg has been better is this is what I wore to work today. I could get away with that in my previous careers. Obviously, that’s a problem. So I’ve been thinking about this, what’s been the difference between my previous employment that wasn’t the right fit, and my current employment, which is awesome? Aside from the sequins? So I’ve distilled my experience down to 10 facets that I realized I care about.

Alexandra Dobkin: I’ve talked to others about my findings, and they seem to agree. Let’s start talking about what are my 10 questions? So the first question I’d want to talk about is customer service. And the question is that you can ask is, how does the company treat its customers? So what is the customer? Who are Bloomberg customers? Can you take a guess?

Alexandra Dobkin: Yeah, okay, okay. So who’s a customer of our IT department? Yeah. Or of our HR department?

Audience member: Everyone.

Alexandra Dobkin: Yeah. So click, click. So how a company treats its customers is as important because it’s an indicator of how you will likely be treated at the company too. the ingrained attitude towards customer service translates into how you’re treated by much of the company. I know that Bloomberg prides itself in a first in class customer service experience. While that sounds great as an actual customer, paying customer, that’s really meaningful to me. I’m not a paying customer. I’m getting paid by Bloomberg sort of it.

Alexandra Dobkin: So often, and especially in larger companies, many team’s clients are actually internal. So the attitudes surrounding customer service will directly affect your interactions with your colleagues. So if a company does not treat its paying customers well, how can you expect them to treat their employees well?

Alexandra Dobkin: Yeah. So now let’s talk about philanthropy. So this begs the question, what is the company’s commitment to its community? How a company serves its community and the world at large is important because it is an indicator of its commitment to being kind. So moreover, people like to work for companies with similar values to their own. So if a person, say me cares about philanthropy will be more excited to apply to a company that promotes philanthropy. Pretty simple, right? Yeah.

Alexandra Dobkin: You guys are all smart here. So it’s pretty simple. But let’s take it one step further. There’s another reason why I care about working for a company that prioritizes philanthropy. It also draws other people to work that share those same altruistic values. And what I found is that people with altruistic values tend to be really nice, kind people. So in my professional opinion, it’s really nice to work with nice people. You can quote me on that.

Alexandra Dobkin: So a company that cares about philanthropy can lead to really kind coworkers. Love you guys. Okay, all right, health. What is the company’s commitment to health and wellness? An employee is an asset to a company and should be treated as such. How a company demonstrates its care for you beyond how it compensates you affects your quality of life. Because life happens.

Alexandra Dobkin: If you want a company that cares not only about your health care policy, but your overall health too. And it’s really important to know the difference between what perks are listed in your benefits package versus the culture around taking advantage of these perks. So raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a story of someone taking a three week vacation at a company that offered unlimited vacation, they come back and they’re canned. Oh, yeah, we got a few hands. Yeah, yeah, that kind of happens.

Alexandra Dobkin: While what is on paper can look attractive, it is not uncommon for there to be retaliation at companies for enjoying benefits, such as unlimited paid time off or taking a much needed unlimited sick days. Companies that talk the talk need to also walk the walk. It is crucial to know the benefits package is not only great but what you’re being offered on paper you’re actually truly entitled to in your experiences. So make sure you talk to employees, get anecdotes about people using benefits consequence free.

Alexandra Dobkin: I don’t have time for it, but oh boy, do I have an anecdote about how I have really, really appreciated having unlimited sick days and having a company that really cares about my wellness, calling to make sure that I’m feeling better and saying do not come back until you do. Diversity and inclusion. What would this talk be if I didn’t talk about diversity and inclusion, right? So hopefully this is an easy one that we can all agree on.

Alexandra Dobkin: Clap if diversity is important to you. Yeah. Okay. Love that sound. So good. So, I will blow throough this one quickly, because I’m pretty sure we’re all on the same page. How a company treats its under represented employees matters for all, not only for members of that community. There are definitely challenges that underrepresented groups face, microaggressions, biases, marginalization, exclusion, disrespect, inequality. I’m sure you guys can name a lot more. But a company that supports hiring diverse employees invariably supports diversity of thought. And this is a benefit for everyone, from minorities, non-minorities, to the company as a whole, is it allows for a more inclusive culture that welcomes different ideas.

Alexandra Dobkin: Diversity and inclusion makes… supports making workplaces a safe space to be yourself, whether you’re identify as minority group or not. Freedom from conformity allows you to bring your best self to work. In my case of sequins. All right, moving on. So let’s talk about culture. So when we think about culture, how many of you have heard the phrase, “work hard play hard”? Yeah. What’s your company like? Oh, yes. Some useless…

Alexandra Dobkin: So that’s the absolute worst way to define company culture. Because it really tells you nothing. Let’s put up a better quote. Okay, that’s better. So how do you define a company’s culture? Because culture is hard to talk about. It’s really big. Its leadership, it’s the seasoned employees. It’s the new hires, it’s the initiatives, it’s the goals, it’s attitude, it’s the customer service, it’s the attitudes towards philanthropy, the investment in health, the promotion of diversity. So everything that we just went over goes into it.

Alexandra Dobkin: Work should not be your life, but how you’re treated daily will affect your life. So take care to find a place that shares your values, will treat you how you want to be treated and have realistic expectations of how you should balance life and work. And I find this question, what are some examples that illustrate company culture really important? Because if you ask someone to give anecdotes, to give stories about, the brown bag lunches on Tuesdays, and how someone found their mentor, it’s a lot more telling than someone just listing the mission statement of the company or the values that the company subscribes to.

Alexandra Dobkin: All right, so this is something that we heard mentioned before, impact. So what’s impact? What’s an impactful role? And that means something different for everyone. So it’s important to figure out what does it mean to the company and what does it mean to you and where are those two relating. So, for example, when I was in finance, I was managing a billion-dollar portfolio that I was in charge of. I executed trades against it, made all investment decisions. Now does managing a billion-dollar portfolio sound impactful to you?

Audience member: Yeah.

Alexandra Dobkin: It wasn’t impactful at all to me. I was extremely bored. It wasn’t analytical. I was done with my job like the first 10 minutes… the first hour of the day and then I spent the rest of the day just, on BuzzFeed, I did not feel like I was making an impact at all. So, the impact that your job makes emanates from the challenges you face that becomes learning opportunities. Just because the company’s making waves in an industry, it does not necessarily mean that your job will be exciting.

Alexandra Dobkin: However, the converse is also true. You can be at a company making a splash and have a super thrilling job. So figure out how you define impact, what you want to achieve on a job. Does it mean working with large sums of money, like a billion dollars, affecting thousands of customers, maybe. Working with cutting edge technologies. Whatever you need on the job to feel like you are making an impact should be aligned with how the company representatives answer this question.

Alexandra Dobkin: All right. Let’s move along. Okay, feedback. So you definitely want to ask about feedback because the only way to know how you are performing and how you can improve is if it’s communicated to you via feedback. So most companies have a formal annual review process, pretty standard to find that. While that’s good, it’s not the most effective feedback sessions because frequency is a key part of an effective feedback loop. In order to have full transparency into your performance, it is the informal feedback you accrue throughout your day to day performance that will ultimately help you grow the most in the year.

Alexandra Dobkin: It’s important that how your work is perceived by your team and your management because that will become your performance review, affect your pay, I like to get paid, and ultimately your future opportunities. You and you alone are responsible for your professional development. Part of that responsibility means knowing how you are doing and having a plan for where you’re headed. You should have full insight into both. The way to get that is through quality and timely feedback.

Alexandra Dobkin: So just a recommendation, I like to have bi weekly check ins with my manager to make sure I know how I’m doing. All right, let’s talk about tools and technologies. So the tools offered to help you perform your job will directly impact your quality of life at work, especially if you’re in tech. Efficient tools and automated processes allow you to spend more time doing your work and less time doing manual processes, which I personally find very boring. Moreover, staying up to date with industry leading and current technologies gives you more transferable skills and will make you more competitive as an applicant for your next role.

Alexandra Dobkin: It is important that where you work positions you for success by maximizing your time spent doing the work and minimizes the time spent doing manual processes. Especially as a software engineer, where automating things is our passion and manual stuff is just the worst. I’m preaching to the choir here though, right? Yeah. So optimal work environments are a moving target. So companies need to prove to you that they’re aware of this and constantly striving for a best in class work experience.

Alexandra Dobkin: All right. Trainings. How a company trains its workforce demonstrates its investment in people. Quality trainings improves workplace learning and workforce effectiveness. It also builds your repertoire of skills, which make you more of an asset to the company and sets you up for success beyond the current role. A company’s investment in your professional growth and development makes you a more valuable employee. I value learning and growing my career, don’t you? Yeah. Then a great hallmark of your learning potential is measured by the number and quality of trainings a company offers.

Alexandra Dobkin: All right. Number 10, career potential. When evaluating a position it is important to assess the job as a building block to your career. A job should open doors for you and give you access to more opportunities at your own company, as well as externally. If a company is offering you a job but you but cannot see how your career will progress there, you’re looking at a dead end. To have a career at a company, you need to see other opportunities for professional development now, as well as in the future. So just to be clear, you don’t need to have a whole 10-year-plan mapped out. You don’t need to go like overboard with that.

Alexandra Dobkin: You just need to be able to have evidence that you’ll be progressing in your career. Even if you have no clue what your next step is. If you’re not going to retire anytime soon, then you want to make sure that the job will open doors for your career. So just to recap, 10 questions. One, oh the animation’s still working. There we go. That’s what’s up.

Alexandra Dobkin: So in everything that we covered, so one through six, we talked about customers, community, health and wellness, diversity and inclusion, culture, impact. Seven feedback, tools and technologies, trainings, and career path options. And then just as an aside, talking about the 11th question or the 12th, and 13th, and 14th, and how you’re going to carry on the rest of your conversations. When I was reflecting on my own experiences, and coming up with these own questions, a friend actually recommended a site to me. I don’t know if you guys have heard of keyvalues.com?

Alexandra Dobkin: Yes, no, maybe so, okay. Really cool site. And if you go /culturequeries, they actually have a lot of really great questions and kind of ask you questions to help you figure out the questions you should be asking. I personally feel it’s a really valuable experience to come up with your own questions based on analyzing what you value, but definitely check out the site for some inspiration. So with that, thank you. Yeah. All right. And one last note.

Alexandra Dobkin: So just as a final note, I just wanted to say, I’m so excited that Bloomberg is hosting a Girl Geek Dinner, not to take all the credit, but I totally came up with the idea and proposed it.

Audience Member: It’s true.

Alexandra Dobkin: It’s true, it’s true. But only because I personally attended a number of Girl Geek Dinners and I really thought the experience was so awesome and so amazing. For me, I’ll share that at the height I was going to have my early dinners… The height of my Girl Geek Dinners attendance was when I was job searching. I don’t know if you guys are job searching? For me, my whole tactic was I’ll go, I’ll network, obviously, eat the good food. I’ll network and I wanted to make sure I had a really solid conversation with at least one person, it didn’t have to be more than one, but a really good solid conversation.

Alexandra Dobkin: Got that business card and I got a first round interview, if not further, with every single Girl Geek dinner company that I attended. So I just want to say make the most out of tonight. Eat the food, it’s really awesome, and feel free to come talk to anyone, blue shirt, sparkles, whatever it is. So thank you.

Audience Member: Yay.

Narrator: What impact does extreme weather have on oil production in the North Sea? How is the one peso tax helping save an entire generation of children? If 70% of everything we buy is delivered by truck, what happens to your grocery bill when there’s a severe driver shortage? How can bread scarcity spark a global political revolution? Our planet is alive and interconnected, continually shifting, adapting, and growing. Every event bigger or small results in other events.

Narrator: At Bloomberg, you’ll investigate, examine, and interpret these unique and seemingly unrelated connection points in real time. The success of our business relies on people just like you… Who can look into the future and create groundbreaking technology… Research… And expert insight to answer the world’s most complex questions. When we solve problems with a greater sense of purpose… Change begins… Dots connect… Society excels…

Narrator: The world transforms when work has meaning. Your career thrives when you feel a deep connection to it. That’s why at Bloomberg, we work on purpose. Ready to find yours?

Mario Cadete: Great. Thank you everybody. Thanks speakers. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Not even close. Thanks to my team. Thanks to Girl Geek. Again, thanks to Bailey. Please come talk to us. I think we’re here till 8:30. Have some more food, drink and so on. It really has been a pleasure. Hopefully, you come and speak to me. I’d love to meet as many of you as possible. Thanks again.


Thank you for coming out to Bloomberg Engineering Girl Geek Dinner with VR and Terminal demos, talks and networking!  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

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Host an Elevate viewing party at your office to celebrate International Women’s Day with Girl Geek X this March!

Here is a quick guide to help you host your own viewing party of Elevate virtual conference celebrating International Women’s Day on March 6th, 2020!

Elevate viewing parties are an excellent opportunity to bring folks together to celebrate women in tech within your organization! Taking the initiative to organize an event to celebrate International Women’s Day is a great way to raise your own visibility and meet more women in your company.

Get started with your Girl Geek X: Elevate “Lift As You Climb” Viewing Party:

  1. Get the word out. Tell your friends and co-workers about Elevate conference livestreaming on March 6th. In addition to emailing the colleagues you work with directly, consider creating a calendar invite, posting on Slack and to your internal bulletin boards, ERG groups, Chatter, LinkedIn, etc. We welcome all genders and allies – this event is relevant to everyone! Please help us spread the word about Girl Geek X: Elevate virtual conference on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and on Facebook.
  2. Order your Girl Geek X Elevate party swag ASAP because it’ll take a little time to ship to your office! You can pick up a banner and stickers, party plates and party napkins, table confetti and balloons, shirts and bum bags, pint glasses and our favorite mugs and water bottles at the Girl Geek X Zazzle Store!
  3. Download the official promo image for use in your posts and emails here.
  4. Familiarize yourself with the Zoom webinar attendee guide. You’ll be joining the virtual event as a Zoom webinar attendee, so you can mute/unmute your audio, virtually raise your hand, and send messages to others.
  5. Put it on the big screen. Connect your laptop to a projector or HD television. You’ll need a VGA Cable to connect to a projector. Use an HDMI Cable to connect to your HD Television. Crank up the sound. Connect speakers to your computer so your audience can hear the broadcast clearly. You’ll want to test this in advance to be sure everything works as expected.
  6. Share the conference link (elevate.girlgeek.io) with those who aren’t able to attend your viewing party IRL can still tune in from their home or office and soak up the learnings!
  7. Take notes during the conference. Start a discussion about topics relevant to your team and your company, and make a note of any that aren’t addressed during the webinar. You might decide to host an internal event to dive deeper into those topics at a later date.
  8. Have fun and make sure everyone feels welcome.

Tips to make your viewing party an even bigger hit:

  • Provide snacks and drinks in a convenient location so people won’t miss any of the content!
  • Invite women on your company’s leadership team to kick off the viewing party.
  • Host an internal Q&A, roundtable, or lightning tech talk after Elevate ends onscreen.
  • Make it fun! Encourage attendees to mingle and discuss the sessions or ask each other questions.
  • Have name tags and markers available if you’re hosting an event in a larger organization where attendees may not have interacted previously.
  • Play networking bingo to help attendees meet each other! Printable cards are available here. Attendees mark off words/phrases as spoken onscreen. The game will restart with a fresh bingo card every time we get a winner. The first person to tweet a picture of their winning bingo card to @girlgeekx using hashtag #girlgeekx during each round will get a gift bag of Girl Geek X swag!
  • Take group pictures and get retweeted! Show us your viewing party so we can share in the excitement! Tweet @girlgeekx using hashtag #girlgeekx and we’ll retweet your team! On Instagram, tag girlgeekx in your photo and we’ll share in our Instagram Stories!

    We hope to see you and your team online with us on March 6th!

    If your organization is interested in sponsoring the conference, featuring your viewing party’s webcam during the break, and putting your job listings in front of thousands of mid-senior level women in tech, email us at sponsors@girlgeek.io to get involved.

    Special THANK YOU to our Elevate Sponsors – they are HIRING!

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    Girl Geek X Equinix Lightning Talks (Video + Transcript)

    Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!


    Full house at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner in Sunnyvale, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

    Transcript from Equinix Girl Geek Dinner:

    Gretchen DeKnikker: Okay, perfect. Hello, everybody. I’m Gretchen from Girl Geek. Thank you so much for coming tonight to this gorgeous space. It’s amazing here. This is our last Girl Geek event of the decade. And Angie started this organization almost 12 years ago. So let’s give her a big round of applause for doing that. We’ve done 250-ish of these events now, so please keep coming.

    Gretchen DeKnikker: We have a little swag store and I have something from it, this adorable notebook. So we’re going to play a little game. Raise your hand if you’ve been to three or more Girl Geek dinners. Keep it up if it’s four. Five. Six. Avi, I feel like you’ve not even qualified to win. Okay. Seven? He comes every single week. This is seven. Okay. Eight? Nine? 10? 11? Anybody? In the back?


    Geekiest girl

    The “geekiest girl” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner and winner of the Girl Geek X swag notebook.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


    Audience Member: I’m the geekiest girl.

    Gretchen DeKnikker: That is–? All right. I have the cutest, cutest notebook for you. You’re going to love this and thank you for coming back over, and over, and over again. And I hope to see all of you guys at ones in the future.

    Angie Chang: Thank you, Gretchen. Hi, I’m Angie. I think what I have left to say is we do podcasts. We have 20 podcasts that we’ve recorded this year and you can check them out on our website. We also have videos from talks like these. So if you want to spend your Christmas holidays or New Years watching Girl Geeks speak on YouTube, you can find us at youtube.com/girlgeekx, including these talks, probably. And also, one last thing, we’re going to be at the AngelLaunch holiday party this Friday and there’s a VIP15 code for you to get your ticket to join us. And we’ll be in Palo Alto–

    Gretchen DeKnikker: Mountain View.

    Angie Chang: Mountain View!

    Gretchen DeKnikker: Yes. AngelLaunch is hosting.

    Angie Chang: Thank you. Free tickets with promo code VIP15. Thank you.

    Gretchen DeKnikker: All right.

    Dipti Srivastava: Thank you so much. Hi. How are you all doing today? Are you all feeling the magic? The magic of Equinix, because we all feel that here every day. So thank you all for coming here today and spending your precious evening with us. Without further ado, I would like to invite our very first speaker, our chief product officer, Sara Baack. Today, Sara will share about her journey from the Wall Street to the C-suites. She will share some key takeaways from her experiences and share her philosophies that she sticks with as a leader. Welcome, Sara.


    Chief Product Officer Sara Baack gives talk on “From Wall Street to C-Suite” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner 2019.

    Chief Product Officer Sara Baack gives talk on “From Wall Street to C-Suite” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


    Sara Baack: Thank you, Dipti. I think you’ve overbilled me. I feel like I might … Hopefully I won’t disappoint anybody here who’s probably commuted, who knows how long down 101 to arrive here this evening. First of all, it’s so energizing. I don’t know how many people would agree with me, but when you come into a room that looks like this, and you have some wine, and you have some sushi, who doesn’t feel excited to be here? So I’m really, myself, excited to be here.

    Sara Baack: So when we organized this event and Equinix agreed to participate and sponsor this space and I was asked to speak for seven minutes. I thought, I can’t do anything in just seven minutes. So I’m going to be very brief, but first of all, give a great shout out and thank you to the Girl Geek organization for organizing something as momentous and important as these type of venues. And I also want to certainly welcome everybody who’s here and thank in advance the other colleagues and leaders here at Equinix who will be sharing the podium with me today and probably giving you more words of wisdom from a technology perspective than I’m qualified to do.

    Sara Baack: And I’ll explain that in a minute. But I’m first told that I need to give you an Equinix commercial. And because I used to be the chief marketing officer of the company, I take that to heart. So for those of you who don’t know who Equinix is, we’re the best known secret in tech, I liked to tell people when I was a marketing leader for the organization. And essentially, what we do is we provide data center and interconnection infrastructure around the world that makes your technology work. And so the biggest of the big cloud providers, E-commerce providers, telecom companies come and put their infrastructure into our facilities around the world.

    Sara Baack: And then we interconnect that all together. So the experience that you have when you’re on your iPhone, using AT&T to go to the App Store to download the Amazon app, to shop for a Christmas gift for your daughter or son. That whole digital transaction chain is actually fueled and powered by Equinix as the plumbing behind all of that. So that’s in a nutshell what we do. I could probably explain that in a deeper technology way, but that’s the way I like to explain it to people like my mother or friends at parties who don’t work in tech and don’t necessarily understand the ins and outs of all the layers of IT infrastructure.

    Sara Baack: So that’s essentially the power that we supply to the world, but chances are 80% or 90% of the time, when you have a digital transaction happening, it’s touching Equinix in some way. You just don’t know it. So that’s a little bit about Equinix. I was asked to share a little bit about my personal journey in technology. And so I’ll give you that in a two minute snippet, if that’s possible. I’m an accidental girl geek from a technology point of view. I started out as a geek, for sure, but a technology geek was something I came into later in my career.

    Sara Baack: So I was the child of two public school teachers who were very, very interested in education and obviously saw education as the way to rise up and to continue to progress as people and as humans. And so they always impressed on me learning is one of the most important things in life. It’s the thing to relish, it’s the thing to put a lot of hard effort into. And so I did that growing up and they were also very empowering to me in terms of making me feel like anything was possible in terms of what I wanted to do from a career point of view.

    Sara Baack: They definitely wanted me to become an engineer, but instead of that, I rebelled and I became a history major. And I majored in history and economics in college. And then because I had a lot of student loans to pay off, I did what any person with a lot of loans does and says, “What’s the job that can pay me the most, that can help me get out of this debt?” And I went to work for an investment bank. And I did a two year investment banking program, which turned out to help me with loans, but also helped me with life, in the sense that it gave me a great exposure to all different kinds of companies, all different types of industries.

    Sara Baack: And it also introduced me to just how hard and how many hours one can work because it’s a bit of a sweatshop when you’re working for an investment bank as a junior person. And so I learned a lot about what my mettle was as a worker and how much effort I could put in to get a result. And while I was doing that job, I ended up getting approached to be offered to work in the private equity arm of my company. So the part of the company that invests in other companies. And so I said, “Sure, that sounds great.” And so I did this job where my job was to interview all these management teams and decide if my company wanted to invest in them.

    Sara Baack: And I thought that was really an enjoyable job, but I was totally unqualified to do it. And so I thought I need to go to business school and actually figure out how businesses run. So I went to business school and out of business school I thought I’m going to go work in an operating company and actually learn how people create value in a real enterprise. And then I’ll go back to investing some day. And for me, I just got hooked on what it’s like to be part of creating value in the real world versus on a spreadsheet.

    Sara Baack: And so I never went back to investing, but I used that financial background to begin to leverage my way into other operating roles in companies that I worked for. And so that gets to how I become an accidental technologist because the first time that I really learned something about network engineering by accident was when I was asked to model the cost structure of a network. And so I had to go and interview every single engineer and say, “Okay, there’s this piece of architecture. What does that do, and how much does that cost, and how do you break it down on a per customer basis?”

    Sara Baack: And then after that, what happens next? Where does that bit go? It goes into this box? And what does that do? And how much does that cost? And so I accidentally learned my way into aspects of IT infrastructure and networking engineering as a result of my finance background. And so one of the key lessons that I would impart to folks here is the opportunity that you have to mold yourself. And the assumptions that we sometimes make about so-and-so’s an engineer and so-and-so’s a history major. I think I’m evidence that you don’t necessarily have to live by the label in terms of what you can aspire to do and what you can learn from.

    Sara Baack: So that’s maybe lesson one. Am I at seven minutes yet? Probably. I have three or four more minutes to go. So that was lesson one that I had in a career that I think is maybe relevant. Another thing that I’ve learned in being someone who’s bridged from maybe a business finance background into a technology background is being a good listener, a really applicable skill to everything that we all do, is being a good listener. The way that someone asks a question to you might not be actually the answer that they’re seeking. So really trying to understand the spirit of what people are asking and being a good listener, to try to uncover the problem that’s being posed or the opportunity that you have to add value, I think has made a real difference in my ability to make impact in my jobs in life.

    Sara Baack: The other thing I’d say about my lessons learned is that nothing comes easy. I mean, I learned that in my first life as a Wall Street investment banker in as much as you have to work your butt off. And I did work my butt off. And so I think there’s an honest reality for all of us, that a certain part of success is sweat and effort. And at least for me, there has been no getting around that fact. But the other thing that I would like to acknowledge is that for folks that have been lucky enough to be in a position that I now enjoy at Equinix, being a senior leader at an S&P 500 company, is luck is just that point, luck.

    Sara Baack: Being lucky is part of the equation. And so it would be wrong of me not to acknowledge that part of the reason I get to enjoy the opportunity to work at this company and the role that I have is being in the right place at the right time, along the path of life, and having the good fortune to have good mentors, or talk to the right person at the right time. And I do think that’s something that’s important to acknowledge because all of us, I think, are generally wired to work hard and succeed. And if you don’t acknowledge that luck is part of the success you have in life, I think you’re selling you’re maybe selling yourself a little bit of a tale.

    Sara Baack: And so I think luck really matters, but, as they say, luck favors those prepared. Right? Luck favors people who are willing to put themselves out there and willing to take risks. And that gets to my other life lesson, which is that vulnerability is a strength. Which is something that I think many of us women, that’s a scary proposition, right? We can tend to be, and I don’t want to generalize, we can tend to be folks who feel like almost as a need to fit in to a world that’s more male oriented, that we have to act a certain way. We have to be strong in a certain way.

    Sara Baack: And for me, one of the things that is probably the message I like to tell a lot of other women colleagues, is that it was the time that I was courageous and confident enough in myself to be vulnerable, to cry in front of my all hands, which I have done regularly in my life, to display that kind of emotion, to be able to be willing to say, “I don’t know the answer to that, but I can find out.” To be willing to say, “I really screwed that up. Wow. How can I fix it?” Having those kinds of moments have actually been probably some of the most leadership credibility building moments of my career.

    Sara Baack: And so I think getting to a place in your career growth where you have the confidence to display that vulnerability, it can yield remarkable outcomes. Outcomes that you don’t predict because you’re spending a lot of your time figuring out how do I make sure I show up like I know what I’m talking about all the time. And in some weird way, being yourself, giving yourself permission to be yourself is actually your most empowering asset, I think, as a leader and as a person who’s growing in their career.

    Sara Baack: And then maybe the last thing that I’ll talk about, which is a value that we have at Equinix. Equinix is a company that just has an amazing culture. And so I feel lucky to be part of it, but one of the values that we espouse is something we call speak up and step up. And that’s another way of saying don’t be afraid to share your views, to put the elephant on the table in a meeting. I mean, obviously you have to do those things in a polite way and in a constructive way, but I think being a person who has the courage to ask the stupid question.

    Sara Baack: One of the blogs I write is you’re only stupid if you don’t ask the stupid question. Fear of asking stupid questions makes you stupid because I can count on … I need more than the appendages I have to count the number of times that I have asked a question in a meeting and someone after the meeting comes up to me and says, “I’m so glad you asked that question.” And so I really encourage people to use their voice, whether you’re male or female, and you’re working to show your mettle, and grow in organizations is people want your contribution, right? We’re all earning a paycheck and we’re all sitting in our chair because people want to know our thoughts.

    Sara Baack: And so overcoming your fear of thinking your thought is maybe not the right thought is something you really need to focus on, in my opinion, to be successful in the workplace. I can tell you for every one or two good ideas that comes out of my mind, there are certainly eight stupid ideas that come out of my mind. But you’re playing the volume game, right? So as long as you’re willing to voice all of those ideas, and use your peers and your colleagues to help you test those ideas, I think that’s been a key to success for me, is overcoming that fear of just putting my thoughts out there and being willing to share those. And so I know I’m over my seven minutes now.

    Sara Baack: So hopefully some of these tiny tidbits have been a smidge of value and slightly worth the commute down here to join us this evening. And so I’m going to now pass the mic to much more august technologists than myself to hear more about what we see happening in the world of technology and to share ideas about that. So I’ll pass it back to Dipti. Thank you.

    Dipti Srivastava: Hi. Thank you, Sara. Those were very, very informative tidbits. Our next speaker is someone who was a winner of the Woman of Influence award from the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Dr. Yun Freund. She’s the senior vice president of product engineering. She will share how to thrive in a male dominated tech world and the best practices to be a better leader. Welcome, Yun.


    VP of Engineering Dr Yun Freund gives talk on “How To Thrive In The Male-Dominated Tech World” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner 2019

    VP of Engineering Dr. Yun Freund gives talk on “how to thrive in the male-dominated tech world” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


    Dr. Yun Freund: Thank you, Dipti. Thank you, welcome. This is the first time we sponsored Girl Geek and we’re so excited to have all of you joining us. And I was sharing with some of the girls during dinner, some of you said, “Why do you join? What makes you want to come to the Geek Girl dinner?” One of them says, “Wow, you always have great food.” Always sushi, it’s great food. The second one says, “Well, we would like to explore this business, the company who sponsored this event,” because certainly business is doing well and they can have the budget to sponsor it.

    Dr. Yun Freund: We’re hiring, of course. And third and the most important, I think, is we care. We care about diversity, we care about inclusion, we care about women. So with that, let me give a quick introduction about myself. Right, so my leadership journey. So, Sara, shared about her leadership journey. I’m, I could say, the first generation immigrant. 30 years ago I came here from China. I grew up in a very small village in China, don’t speak any English. And I came here 30 years ago to pursue my PhD in computer science. After five years of working in a university, I did receive my PhD in computer science.

    Dr. Yun Freund: And I started my journey as just regular engineers. And over the time, I climbed up the career ladders through hard working, collaborating with the teams, and have a lot of great mentors and sponsor along my career. I’ll share some of the tips later. And now, I’m working in various different companies. And I have taught classes at San Jose State. It’s almost three years teaching in San Jose State. Computer science as an adjunct professor. I care very much about women in tech and diversity. And I’m an advocate and passionate about STEM girls. I have a 16 year old girl, so obviously it’s a very important topic for me, too.

    Dr. Yun Freund: So talking a little bit, I think Sarah shared a little bit about what Equinix is about. I was sharing with some of the ladies in the audience what do we do. So a lot of you know we are data center, but we are also best secret in high tech. We’re building a software platform that can enable you to go to cloud. So whether you are doing cloud on ramping, whether you’re doing a hybrid [inaudible] cloud. And we have a software platform to help you to have a single button, easy journey to onboard to the cloud. So we will work with all the various cloud service provider. So building the software platform using the latest technology and ReactJS, Java, and any big data, Kubernetes, and even UX designers, and product management, we’re hiring.

    Dr. Yun Freund: So if you’re interested, talk to some of our Equinix talent acquisition team. So talking about a little bit about how to thrive in the male dominated tech world. So one of my base tip I can share, being an immigrant, don’t speak the language in a male dominated world. When you go into the conference room, all [inaudible] 20 men sitting in a conference room with me, English not so good. How do I express my opinion? I think first and foremost is about confidence. But how do you build up your confidence?

    Dr. Yun Freund: I, actually earlier this year, spoke at the LGBT conference in San Francisco. My tip is know your shit, right? So know your stuff. You got to work twice as hard. Know your stuff in depth so you know every single bits of the details. You can conquer. So no matter how they ask you a question, you know it. So over time, you will build up your confidence because statistics says men speak up early only 50% of the time know about will speak up early. Women has to wait until they’re 100% confident about the material, then they speak up. Don’t do that.

    Dr. Yun Freund: When you know 60%, speak up and speak early. And always sit at the front of the table, first line on the seats. So everybody can see you, everyone can hear you. Right? When you apply a job, don’t wait until 100% match of your skill. Apply. Men, only when they’re 50% of the time a match, they apply. So that’s my tip, right? So over time, you build up your confidence, right? That’s the most important thing. I see a lot of women, you are so talented. You work so hard. And sometimes, you say a women has to work twice as hard.

    Dr. Yun Freund: But I would say you need to work hard, but you have to share your work. Otherwise, your work is buried in your cubicle. Nobody knows about it. So that’s, I think, the most important tip, over time I see this is one of the great way for you to build up your confidence, to share your work with others, and to bring it to visibility of all the other team members. So I think that’s one thing that’s most important. I went through that journey myself, right? When I was young, I don’t have a lot of confidence.

    Dr. Yun Freund: Over years, as you achieve your career and with a lot of supporting sponsors, you can build up that confidence over years. So the second items I want to share is about the mentorship and sponsorship. So I do see that over years you do need a lot of mentorship and sponsors. Sometimes, it’s not easy to find, but I think you will with your perseverance of finding the person who’s willing to invest in you and care about you is so important, right? So sometimes people say, “Well, I don’t need a mentor,” but sometimes you need a sponsor, right? Somebody truly believing you, think you can do the work. And then you have to share your work and outline an impact that you’re driving, the outcome you’re driving.

    Dr. Yun Freund: And those sponsor will speak for you when there’s opportunity arrive. And they will help you. So that’s, I think, the most important thing. And then sometimes we do think that men maybe they don’t believe in us, they have unconscious bias, but I would say, I was reading this book, it’s really about bringing men as part of your allies. They want to know you and they want to be able to help you, but sometimes we don’t approach them, or we have a fear approaching them. And I think that’s something that is a mystery. So along my career, actually there were a lot of male leader helped me over my career path, and really believed in me, and moved me to the next level. So with that, that’s all my tips for today. And thanks so much.

    Dipti Srivastava: Thank you, Yun. So remember, one takeaway from Yun’s speech, if I would remember, is speak up when you know about 60% of what you’re talking about. That’s still 10% more than the 50% men are supposed to talk about when they know something about. I’m happy to introduce our next speaker, Dr. Danjue Li, who is the director of product engineering. She will talk about how driving innovation is never easy. In this lightning talk, Danjue will share how it connects us turning customer inspired innovation into winning products. Welcome, Danjue.


    Director of Product Engineering Dr. Danjue Li gives talk on “turning customer-inspired innovation into new product offerings” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner 2019

    Director of Product Engineering Dr. Danjue Li gives talk on “turning customer-inspired innovation into new products” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner. Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


    Dr. Danjue Li: Wow. I really love the crowd and the energy in the rooms. We have some really good leadership tips from Sara and [inaudible] since this is Girl Geek, we have to be a little bit geeky, right? So I am going to take the opportunity just talk to innovations and at Equinix how we turn the customer inspired innovations into products that we can offer to our customers through the platforms. And I actually got that question when I was talking to one of the attendees. And she was asking, so hold your question. We’re going to share.

    Dr. Danjue Li: I’m going to start with one of my favorite questions, is what is innovation? If I walk around and ask you to answer, very likely, depends on who you talk to, you get very different answers. So innovation sometimes is considered probably one of the most about terms in business. What it really means, sometimes it can be very nebulous. And even sometimes it can be constant and becomes a buzz word, right? So what is really innovation and how do we look at innovation at Equinix?

    Dr. Danjue Li: I’m borrowing some of the graph. Probably sometime you might recognize this from the idea book. So this graph is called the three lenses of innovation, desirability, feasibility, and viabilities. So this is the model that usually startup company founders leverage to build their business models. And nowadays, it’s also being adopted by [inaudible] companies who apply design thinking process to their product creation. So this is how we’re looking at this, is in order to create a successful product, we need to build something which someone wants, right?

    Dr. Danjue Li: And then also something which we call desirable. And then also something that is feasible, means from organization and technology perspective it’s totally doable. We can do it. And then, also, it needs to be something which is viable to make business sense. If we build it, we can bring it to the market. And then it would not be broke if we push it to the market, right? So if you look at the middle part, what we call the sweet spot for innovation, and then when we build upon it, we want to target at that sweet spot. So at Equinix, basically that’s the target that we’re looking at.

    Dr. Danjue Li: By working with our customers to find that customer inspired innovations that are desirable, feasible, and viable. And then in order to do it, the approach that we take, we’re summarizing three phases. Dreaming it together with our customers, deciding it together, and then developing it together. What does that really mean? So we, as Yun was mentioning earlier, we’re in that perfect spot of intersection of multiple different coats, the intersection of network providers. So we get the opportunity to work with a wide range of customers. Service providers, call providers, enterprises, common providers.

    Dr. Danjue Li: So we work very closely with them and dream with them to find out what are the innovative ways for us to help them to build their digital infrastructure globally. And some of the great ideas came up because of that what we call co-ideation process. One of the examples that we’re … A list of the few logos there, those are the things that just came out. And then we also have a pipeline of new stuff that we’re incubating right now. So Equinix smart key, that’s a perfect example of the great results we’re seeing when we dream it together with our customers.

    Dr. Danjue Li: So the idea actually was a result when we’re talking to our customers to help them to solve the data encryption issues in a multi cloud environment. So for folks who are in that cloud computing industries, one or more customers are moving, for enterprises specifically, their infrastructure into the cloud, right? And then they start with the one cloud and end up, like, “I don’t want to be locked into one cloud. It’s better to have multiple clouds.” And guess what? Your data moves there, as well.

    Dr. Danjue Li: Then you start to have very sensitive information distributed everywhere. And then how to secure them, right? You don’t want to trust the person who keep your stuff and then keep the box of your values at the same time give the key back to them, as well. So this is where Equinix can basically come up with a solution, joining with the customers to help them to encrypt the data, secure that data while they can safely build their digital infrastructure. This is actually one of the product that give me a bragging power whenever I was talking to my daughter.

    Dr. Danjue Li: So I believe almost everyone who tried Taco Bell, tried KFC, right? Nowadays, if you go there, swipe your credit card, guess what? Equinix smart key is actually being used to help to secure the transactions. So then the other very good example is Equinix Cloud Exchange. Again, it’s the results from the collaboration or the co-ideation process with one of the largest cloud providers out there, is they asked us to build some private interconnections to connect them with our joined customers. So we work together and we build a product called Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric. And nowadays, [inaudible] Fabric is serving over 1,000 enterprise and service provider customers.

    Dr. Danjue Li: And then the same story goes to Network Edge. So once we start dreaming it together, and I think the second step that we took is how we prioritize stuff, right? How you decide it together because there are so many great things out there. And then when you look at it, I want to build this, I want to build that, I want to build that, but you only have limited time. You have limited resource, how to prioritize? And, actually, that’s the dilemma that only innovators are actually facing. So this is where we take the approach to decide it with our customers. And IBX SmartView is the product which actually result from the prioritization with some of our customers. And IBX’s Smart View is a data center infrastructure management product that leverage AI and the machine learnings to help us better manage our data centers.

    Dr. Danjue Li: And it also will automatically alert our customers and us if there is any issues detected. So the last part, I want to point it out here, is once we dream it together, we decide it together, you have to build it. Okay? So most of the times, we join forces with our customers to build those products together, the different vehicles that we’re leveraging or the channels that we’re leveraging to handle that code development process. For instance, we have something called customer advisory board and also a technical advisory board that allow us to build that direct communication channels with our customers.

    Dr. Danjue Li: So they will be able to come in and then tell us this should show up in the road map, this is great, this is added value. And to help us to decide and also take their input and build tha product together. And then the other one that we introduced is called Minimum Viable Traction, MVT. Probably lots of you have heard of something called MVP, Minimum Viable Products. Actually, that’s an often used term in startup companies, as well. So MVT is the process to help us to bring products to the market, to our customers in a very early stage.

    Dr. Danjue Li: So that as we discuss in the very beginning, we build a product. We want to make sure that it’s desirable, feasible, and viable. So MVT basically allowed us to do that early market testing. And they make sure that we are building something which is sitting in that sweet intersection spot. Well, if you are a product company nowadays, how can you do that without a developer platform or developer forums? So we provide developer forums to help us to connect directly with developers out there. So it’s a great vehicle for developers to provide feedback. So we will be able to take that input and improve our products together.

    Dr. Danjue Li: And then, also, I was very excited to announce that now we are a proud gold member of CNCF and that we’re also actively contributing back to the open source communities because we believe that’s the new way of building products. It’s not just by yourself, it’s to build with the communities out there. Last, but not least, we host meet up sessions. And we recently did one in [inaudible] computing domains. And then we are going to host more in a coming month, as well. And this event is also a great channel for us to reach out to tell you more about our products, to get your feedbacks, and then to basically collect all the inputs.

    Dr. Danjue Li: And to make sure that we’re building something that customer wants. So if you’re interested in knowing more about how we’re turning those innovations into products, if you happen to be very excited about incubating your products, come to talk to us. We actually have a table over there set up to tell you more about the things that we’re doing. And by the way, we’re hiring. Okay? So that’s one thing that I was talking to our HR partners, is as a hiring manager I feel like I’m a kid in a candy store, right? There’s so many talented women here. And you know that in Silicon Valley it is really hard, okay?

    Dr. Danjue Li: So please take a few minutes to talk to us if you are interested. Thank you.

    Dipti Srivastava: Thank you, DJ. That was so impressive. I’m sure you inspired a lot of folks here for thinking about innovation and remembering how to reach that sweet spot. Our next speaker is Rozanne Stoman. She’s the director of IT for sales and marketing applications. Rozanne will share her journey in career and technology. She will talk about an alchemic blend of science, art, and language that helps her teams deliver exceptional solutions. Welcome, Rozanne.


    Director of Applications Rozanne Stoman gives talk on “finding tech: delivering innovative solutions” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner 2019

    Director of Applications Rozanne Stoman gives talk on “finding tech: delivering innovative solutions” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


    Rozanne Stoman: So good evening, everyone, and thanks so much for this opportunity to coming to share some thoughts with you. So here at Equinix, my team and I take care of a portfolio of enterprise applications that are used primarily by our sales and our marketing legal teams. And so in a given day, my team that primarily business systems analysts. Any business systems analysts in the room? Analysts of any type? I bet there are a lot of analysts who just don’t know that’s what they are. So in any given day, such an analyst may troubleshoot an issue, they may propose a data model, they may give input to a user interface design, they might evaluate a new tool if there’s a gap for us that we haven’t built ourselves.

    Rozanne Stoman: Some things we build from scratch and some things we stitch together from existing tool sets or applications. And so with that, what I wanted to talk about, this unique blend of characteristics that we found often makes for a really good systems analysts. And I’m a proud mama hen on my team. Boys and girls, we’ve got really just such a strong team. And often I sit around and go, “How did I get so lucky?” And when I started my career, I must confess, I had this slightly linear view of what may predict success later.

    Rozanne Stoman: I remember I was maybe around 25, I was working for a small company and we were expanding our team. And I was given a recruiting assignment. And so I got a whole lot of university resumes, and I looked through them, and I selected … I think I was playing it safe, so I selected the highest grades, and all the subjects that seemed the smartest. So that was my short list and then they put me on a plane and I could meet some of the faces behind these resumes, had some really interesting conversations. And I walked away thinking, “Well, these are really smart people that I’ve just spoken to, but what am I missing? I’m not sure I’m looking for the right stuff yet.”

    Rozanne Stoman: And my mentor at the time, he gave me all sorts of interesting advice. One piece of advice was, “Rozanne, you got to grow some teeth. You’ve got to sharpen your teeth.” I don’t know if I ever did that, but he also told me you got to look for the sparkle in their eye. And so there I was, trying to now reconcile math grades with eye sparkles. And over the years now, as I’ve been watching my teams, who as I said, they rock, I do think that there’s this special combination of science, and I think that’ll echo some of what DJ shared with us, as well, and Yun, language, and then art, or maybe I would just call it an eye. And those things together, I think, can make a great predictor for success.

    Rozanne Stoman: As we’ve heard, and I’m really happy that this has come up tonight, the science part is table stakes. You got to know your stuff, right? So that analytical mind always wants to improve stuff, who isn’t daunted by team dynamics, or process complexity, or perceived obstacles, but who can patiently unpick process complexity and then forge this path to success. That’s invaluable. And we often joke on our team and we’re like, “If you’re an analyst, you have one job. You have to take complicated things and make them simple.” And sometimes, very smart people like to take simple things and show you how complicated they can be.

    Rozanne Stoman: And part of an analyst is, yes, you want to see all the angles, but a good analyst gets great joy from presenting solution options and not just problems. I’m also learning that technical adeptness can take many shapes. It manifests in different ways. We have non-IT counterparts who are deep technologists. And I think with all the new technologies that we now have available to us, we’re learning that you can sometimes forge really good solutions without necessarily understanding recursion, or be able to tweak database indices, or program in R. So there’s just these new solutions standing up so fast that you have to be comfortable with transferring whatever knowledge you have to this domain or tool sets.

    Rozanne Stoman: I still believe you have to understand enough to anticipate the consequences or the impacts of what you’re designing, but it’s a dance. Which gets me to number two. I think there’s enough anecdotal references to the links between music and math, et cetera. So I’m not really that surprised at the number of photographers, and designers, and dreamers in our midst here at Equinix. We make space for everyone. We have art galleries up in some of our buildings, we have different forums where people can share all the talents that they have. And I think the desire to explore every problem, whether that’s the composition of a photograph, or how we will navigate our GDPR legislation, or how we will help our marketing team to score leads, or how we will put apps governance in place and they navigate all the teams there.

    Rozanne Stoman: For the right personality, any of these are just exciting puzzles to solve. And it’s just as natural as choreography or gaming a tournament. So for us, it doesn’t really matter what the passion is, but what matters is that you see that here is an active analytical mind that’s always looking to optimize whatever gets put in front of it. And then finally, the last piece in that toolkit that I really appreciate is language, that ability to craft a sentence, or distill, or read between the lines, or hear a problem empathetically. The natural teachers in the team who tend to educate their peers, to raise the bar for the whole group, or educate their customers so that they get can better requirements and better results from them.

    Rozanne Stoman: That combination is often the last bit in an analyst superpower. So in short, science or tech, knowing your stuff, some kind of art, or expression, or eye for that. And then language combined, for us, are a powerful combination that help our teams to create very innovative solutions. So the takeaway for me, whether you’re a Girl Geek or whether you’re mentoring and inspiring Girl Geeks is, one is don’t underestimate your superpowers. I also came to tech in a roundabout way. I thought I loved writing, then I studied accounting because I thought that’s how I would find my way into a career, and then accidentally on the way I fell in love with programming, which is how I started my career.

    Rozanne Stoman: And here in the US, I’m really inspired by the number of paths that there are to become part of exciting tech projects and to contribute. So in closing, you keep your analytical mind brewing and you keep the sparkle in your eye. Thank you.


    Senior Manager of Product Software Architecture & Engineering Dipti Srivastava gives talk on “leveraging IoT and big data to level the playing field for remote populations” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner 2019.

    Senior Manager of Product Software Architecture and Engineering Dipti Srivastava gives talk on “leveraging IoT and big data to level the playing field for remote populations” at Equinix Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


    Dipti Srivastava: Hi. So the next speaker is yours truly. My name is Dipti Srivastava and I’m a senior manager product engineering at Equinix. Today, I’ll be talking to you about how to leverage IoT and big data to monitor data centers. So a little bit of trivia about me, when you get introduced to somebody, what’s the next thing you might ask? Well, you might ask where are you from? I get this question all the time, especially from people of Indian origin because they are always interested to know where you are from because I’m an Indian or I used to be an Indian.

    Dipti Srivastava: Well, my answer is I’m from Jhanse and immediately 100% of the time the response is you are a Jhanse Ki Rani. Well, Jhanse Ki Rani. Rani means queen and I am privileged to belong or being brought up in a city or a town where she lived. She was a freedom fighter and I can only dream to compare the valor, her courage, her determination. So we are surrounded by role models and she’s been one of mine. As a little girl, I was interested in science and one of my role models was Madam Curie.

    Dipti Srivastava: The reason I bring this up, and it was a recent incident, that I was at Warsaw, right, where we have one of our product development centers for Equinix. And I was visiting the downtown Warsaw and there was somebody who just showed me, that’s where Madam Curie lived. I was grounded, I was floored because I was seeing the place where one of my role models lived. Thank you to Equinix. I got this opportunity to travel to Warsaw and see where she lived. Fast forward, I was a science student. And, really, I loved science. So I got into computer science and then into software development. And the same story of a lot of people here in Silicon Valley, right?

    Dipti Srivastava: I had the good fortune of starting my career in a platform company. I got introduced to platform thinking, where you think about that you cannot solve all the problems out there in your domain, in your space. You need a helping hand. You build an ecosystem of integration points, APIs, other things with which you can leverage developers, partners who will help build solutions on top of your platform, right? To enhance and solve the problems out there in the world. Fast forward in the digital age, in the IoT age. Welcome to digital platforms. And I have been working on digital platforms for a few years now, working on smart cities, intelligent building, and most recently here at Equinix, data center monitoring.

    Dipti Srivastava: Thinking about monitoring, I was introduced to monitoring a long, long time back at school. I keep going back to my school where I had all my education. So I was a class monitor. And what did I do as a class monitor? Well, if there is something happening, you report to your teacher. If there’s something happening, report to the other students, or students of the other class keep an eye for somebody doing mischief. So there are a lot of things happening which I had to monitor all the time, right?

    Dipti Srivastava: Well, here I am, building data center infrastructure monitoring platforms, right? So why do we need monitoring and data centers, right? Well, on any given day, a lot of things could be happening in any data center around the world. Equinix has 200 plus data centers around the world. In these geographically distributed data centers, we have heterogeneous devices, assets which power our data centers. There could be a number of things happening, like equipment failures, extreme weather conditions where temperature and humidity could be of abnormal values, impacting our operational efficiencies.

    Dipti Srivastava: There could be significant changes in power draws. And by the way, who all is not familiar with the PG&E outages over the last few months. Right? So utility power interruptions can impact data centers, right? So some or all of these things and many more is something that we need to monitor and make sure are working everyday in order to ensure that our customers are really driving value from Equinix. They are stress free, they do not need to worry about their work loads running in our data center. So what do our users want? Our users want visibility to work their core infrastructure, which is running their workloads, right? They might have critical business applications running on our data centers.

    Dipti Srivastava: They would like to have actionable insights, which give them realtime information about any issue that happens, which might impact their workloads. And as such, their customers, right? And they want to have access to this information any time, anywhere. And we are able to provide that to them through our web interfaces. They also want integration points in the form of REST APIs and realtime channels so they can integrate with any of the solutions that they have in house. So what is the approach to solve these problems, right? We defined it as an IoT problem and that was the key, right?

    Dipti Srivastava: All the data centers that we have around the world, they are the Edge, right? And as soon as we define what Edge we have, we had an IoT solution. We also planned to design a solution which could scale as you grow, as our customer needs grow. And we also made sure that for our data center we could handle 500 terabyte plus of data, 2.5 million plus stream of events across 60,000 industrial IoT devices. So this is a 10,000 feet view of our data center infrastructure monitoring platform. There are three key things to observe here. One is the Edge, right? The Edge is all the 200 IBXs plus IBXs that we have.

    Dipti Srivastava: Then there is the data processing and storage. And finally, all the applications, tools, integration points, and partner ecosystems. I’ll just talk about two things here. The Edge. The Edge is our data center, like I said. And the Edge is complicated, right? It is comprised of heterogeneous assets. They could be your power supplies, they could be generators of different make and models and different manufacturers. The key thing to do here is to make sure that we normalize them. That way, our machines can understand them. Right? The second thing is to collect this data. All of these devices may talk any language or not and talk different languages, too.

    Dipti Srivastava: So we need to make sure that we understand that language and collect all this data, process it, analyze it, and then feed it to all our applications. Which can then be leveraged by our customers and by ourselves in order to provide operational efficiency for Equinix and Equinix customers. This is a 5,000 level view of the application platform. So drilling down a little bit. The key thing I just wanted to highlight here was, if you see, this is the applications platform concept, where we provide integration points via REST APIs and realtime feeds on Google, AWS, Azure, and through private channels, right? And through REST APIs for all of the things that you’re hearing about in the data center which are relevant, like power, electrical, mechanical assets, and environmental assets which can measure temperature and humidity.

    Dipti Srivastava: Our tech stack. In order to build these world class solutions, we need to make sure that we have a tech stack which can support this, right? So we have chosen, I’ll just name a few, Kafka, Cassandra, Redis, Storm for our realtime processing, and many more. Fire Applications, Spring, Play, Java, right? And for the tooling, we have Kubernetes, Jenkins, and so on. So we have a variety of tools, applications, and platforms which power our data center monitoring platform. Now, how do we all do this, right? That’s what we do, but how do we all do this? A day in the life. A day in the life of a product development, you could be doing anything here. We follow Agile and Scrum, and you could be doing requirements, design, development, CI/CD, quality, availability, monitoring.

    Dipti Srivastava: The key thing here, what differentiates us is that we measure each of these things. We measure how we do things and ensure that with every time we keep improving. That way, we can keep getting better and better at what we do. So what’s different in our solution from what it was before? Before, the way the data centers were getting monitored were through heterogeneous localized building management systems, right? Today, with our monitoring platform, we get globally consistent data across all the footprint, across all of Equinix for about everything you would like to know about your infrastructure.

    Dipti Srivastava: So that’s the key thing. And the other thing is about our API first approach, which allows customer and partner to integrate with their own applications, if they would like to do so. Why I love Equinix. Do I have to say that? So we had two Hackathons this year, which were a great success. So I work with a lot of innovative people, they’re full of creativity. And the other thing, as you already heard from Yun’s talk and other speakers here, really believe in diversity and innovation, and inclusion of how it enables us to build better products and create value for our customers. Thank you, everyone.

    Dipti Srivastava: So finally, I think we are hiring, right? And you heard from Yun, Danjue, and others that we are hiring. This is a list of some of the positions that we have open. And there is many more on our careers website. We have a TA team back there with a lot of giveaways. So please say hi to them. They are waving at you. And so you are welcome to go talk to them if you are interested in any of these open positions. We have people who are in these black shirts who are Equinix ambassadors. So, please, if you would like to chat with them to know more about Equinix, Equinix product, or anything you would like to talk about, you are welcome to talk to them.

    Dipti Srivastava: Finally, I would like to thank you all for being here at Equinix spending your precious evening with us here today and listening to all the awesome speakers that we have had here before me. And I would like to thank all the speakers, as well, for being here and sharing your precious thoughts. Thank you all.


    Thanks to the Equinix team for hosting a Girl Geek Dinner at your beautiful Sunnyvale headquarters!  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

    Thanks to the Equinix team for hosting a Girl Geek Dinner at your beautiful Sunnyvale headquarters!  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


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    Best of 2019 – Elevate Videos

    By Angie Chang (Girl Geek X Founder)

    Elevate showcased 22 amazing speakers and 7 mission-aligned sponsors at our virtual conference in celebration of International Women’s Day for the past two years. We received rave reviews for the content and accessibility of the online program, and are looking forward to another in 2020!

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